Japan seeks new identity in Asian resurgence

Janaka Perera

September 2 marks the day on which Imperial Japan formally surrendered to the Western Allies 65 years ago. The ceremony was held aboard the United States Battleship Missouri at which Japanese government representatives signed the instrument of surrender officially ending World War II.

It marked the end of an era and the dawn of a new age where Japan would have no independent clout in global politics, although she would rise from the ashes of war to become an economic giant.

In our young days Western Allied propaganda claimed that Japan’s defeat - like the capitulation of Nazi Germany on May 5, 1945 - was the triumph of good over evil, of freedom’s victory over tyranny. But was not the truth far more complicated than that? No doubt tyranny there was. Japan’s wartime role in China and Korea - more than in any other Japanese occupied territory - remains a very emotional and explosive issue to this day.

What really pushed Japan into war?

Since Japan’s process of modernization to face the Western colonialist challenge, began in the mid 19th Century - pushing her out of isolation - her attitude towards Asia had been ambivalent. She wanted to give leadership to Asians and yet simultaneously desired to become member of the European ‘club’ engaged in exploiting and colonizing Asia. Japan modeled herself on the European colonial empires (It was Britain that helped to build the Japanese Navy). Evidently the Japanese assumed that this was the best way of self-preservation and boosting her status in a Western-dominated world. The Meiji reformists copied European institutions and international practices to protect Japan from the fate of China which the white Imperialists had carved up.

Japan’s military victory over Russia in 1904-05 strengthened this perception. Some Western colonialists however saw in this an emergence of a ‘yellow peril.’ But an Asian nation inflicting a humiliating defeat on a European power for the first time in history greatly inspired South Asia’s nationalists in their struggle against Western imperialism. Pre-war Japan also proved to the world that her non-secular constitution centred on Emperor Worship was no obstacle to compete with the West.

In 1913 Sri Lanka’s Anagarika Dharmapala wrote an article on Japans Duty to the World in which he stated, “It is a political trick of the Europeans to keep harping about the yellow peril... It is the white peril that Asiatic races have to guard against.”

He was echoing the sentiments later expressed by Japanese politician Nagai Ryutaro (1905-1944) who identified Japans national mission as a crusade against “white imperialism” because he found the British and the Americans did not honour in practice the ideals they preached to others - a Western double standard seen to this day in Asia. Nagai saw ‘White Imperialism’ stifling the emergence of a world in which independent and self-governing nationalities could pursue their needs and aspirations.

Rightwing Japanese political theoreticians like Dr Shumei Okawa saw the world dominated by ‘Anglo Saxons’ and predicted that an East-West war was inevitable. A Pali and Sanskrit scholar he was the author of History of Anglo-American Aggression in East Asia (1941) among other publications.

Childhood experience

Japan’s Ambassador to Sri Lanka in the early 1980s Kazuo Chiba in an interview with the now-defunct newspaper Weekend (dated November 7, 1982) recalled a childhood experience of a visit in 1931 to what was then the British colony of Ceylon. He was one of a little group of six-year-olds on board a luxury liner that had docked at the Colombo Harbour to fill the fresh water tanks on board. All the children were Europeans except Kazuo. But his nationality did not make any difference.

He like the rest of the boys was equally mischievous. Thus it was the same gusto that little Kazuo hurled abuse at the Sri Lankan stevedores who were unloading the ship. Every time they passed through the steel gates the little boys would shut them out and inconvenience them.

It was just innocent fun. And then little Kazuo looked into the face of the perspiring stevedore and stopped short in his game. In that silent moment when his eyes met the unperturbed ones of the stevedore he identified himself with the tired man. It was a strange revelation for a young child - but Kazuo felt oneness with the man. A feeling he had never experienced before.

“This man and I are one. We are both Asian.” The thought flashed through his mind. Immediately he abandoned his game of abuse and even called his friends off it. The white boys were dumbfounded and directed their abuse at him.

They would not understand his change of attitude. But for Kazuo Chiba the incident was the dawning of a whole new awareness, a quality that helped him through World War II to his career in the diplomatic service which brought him back to Sri Lanka. Strangely it was his first ambassadorship in an Asian country.

“The feeling of being Asian rather than just Japanese, influenced my feelings and feelings of a lot of others during the war,” he told the Weekend.

But the blunder Japan made was that her ideal of liberating Asia from Western colonialism went in two diametrically opposite directions according to Matsumoto Sannosuke (The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. XXXI, Number 1, November 1971) In one direction was support for the struggle of the oppressed ‘coloured’ people against a predatory ‘white imperialism.’

In the other was Japan’s imperialistic move to annex her Asia neighbours (Korea) and militarily intervene in countries like China in order to maintain and expand her own sphere of influence (the so-called Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere) - causing untold misery in the process, The idea of Japanese cultural superiority over other Asian races further complicated the situation.

To be continued