War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War

"In everyday words, his first kind of stereotyping could be summed up in the statement: you are the opposite of what you say you are and the opposite of us, not peaceful but warlike, not good but bad. […] In the second form of stereotyping, the formula ran more like this: you are what you say you are, but that itself is reprehensible."

In removing the emotional and political façade, this quote explains the core of racial stereotypes. Stereotyping is just a way of pointing out how another group is different, and how that difference is “bad.”

In the wake of Pearl Harbor, the single word favored above all others by Americans as best characterizing the Japanese people was 'treacherous,' and for the duration of the war the surprise attack on the US Pacific Fleet remained the preeminent symbol of the enemy's inherent treachery. The attack also inspired a thirst for revenge among Americans that the Japanese, with their own racial blinders, had failed to anticipate." 

What this quote points out, without getting into the complicated events surrounding the attack on Pearl Harbor, is how the Americans felt after the attack: They were attacked without provocation (there is plenty of discussion about just what happened between the US and the Empire of Japan that led to the attack), and the desire for revenge was strong. It can be argued that one leading factor of the surprise involved in the attack was a result of American belief that the Japanese were incapable of such a monumental strategy (see Page 37, Footnote 10). Furthermore, the quote illustrates that the Americans were not the only side to underestimate the enemy: The Japanese equally underestimated the American response to the attack (see Colonel Tsuji Masanobu's quote on Page 36).

"Even skeptics who recalled the unsubstantiated atrocity stories which had been circulated to stir up anti-German passions among the Allies during World War One conceded that most of the wartime reports about atrocious Japanese behavior were essentially true." 

One of Dower's argument is that race played a greater role in the Pacific war than the European one, and this points out that the Anglo-Americans held the Germans to a different standard, racially speaking, than the Japanese.

"Carthage, sacked and razed by the Romans in 146 BC, struck the more historically minded as an apt model for Japan. Admiral William Leahy, Roosevelt's chief of staff, described Japan as 'our Carthage' to Henry Wallace in September 1942, meaning 'we should go ahead and destroy her utterly.'" 

This is another example of history being used as propaganda, likening the US to Rome and the Japanese to the Carthaginians (the Romans and Carthaginians were dire enemies in the earlier, republican history of Rome). One of the most feared enemies in Roman history was Hannibal, a Carthaginian. When Rome conquered the city of Carthage, the Romans utterly destroyed the city and sowed salt around the area so that nothing would ever grow there again—the evocation of utter destruction.

"Sledge, deeply religious and patriotic, watched his comrades go over the edge: severing the hand of a dead Japanese as a battlefield trophy, 'harvesting gold teeth' from the enemy dead, urinating in a corpse's upturned mouth, shooting a terrified old Okinawan woman and casually dismissing her as 'just and old gook woman who wanted me to put her out of her misery." […] 'Time had no meaning, life had no meaning,' he [Professor Sledge] writes at one point. 'The fierce struggle for survival…eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all.'" 

These are examples of American atrocities; these actions illustrate the destructiveness of believing that another human being is not actually a human being like oneself. Subsequently, the examples highlight how the racial rhetoric of the times influenced the violence of the war.

"Early in 1943, for example, Leatherneck, the Marine monthly, ran a photograph of Japanese corpses on Guadalcanal with an uppercase headline reading 'GOOD JAPS' and a caption emphasizing that 'GOOD JAPS are dead Japs.'" 

To further illustrate the discrepancy between the American hatred for the Japanese and that toward the Germans is explained with the help of this feature in the magazine, Leatherneck. As Dower points out in a few sentences prior, the Allies did recognize that not all Germans were evil Nazis, that there was, indeed, the possibility of the "good German." However, there was no idea of a "good" or "bad" Japanese because they were all bad.

"He [Admiral Halsey] also told a news conference early in 1945 that he believed the 'Chinese proverb' about the origin of the Japanese race, according to which 'the Japanese were a product of mating between female apes and the worst Chinese criminals who had been banished from China by a benevolent emperor.'" 

It is hard to imagine an important military figure these days using such blatant racial language, even against an enemy, and the fact that a highly-ranked, admired admiral could say something like this further validates the extreme racial hatred involved in the Pacific war.

"The response of the Japanese to the modern world had been to hustle around the globe, 'borrowing this and copying that, never inventing, but always adapting western machines, western arms, and western techniques to their own uses.'" 

During the war, these arguments were used to disparage the Japanese. However, very similar language and descriptions of Japan are also used to praise Japan's ability to industrialize and modernize so quickly and to keep from falling victim to European colonialism prior to WWII.

"They 'firmly believed,' as the official British history of the war in Asia put it, 'that the German must be leading the sorties.' (In the Soviet Union, Stalin joined this early chorus that placed Germans in Japan's cockpits)." 

This quote illustrates the Allied underestimation of Japanese skill and ability prior to, and in the early days of, the war. Furthermore, it reinforces the argument that, even though the Germans were the enemies as well, the Japanese were seen and handled entirely differently from them.

"After the war, Admiral Halsey went so far as to suggest that his unrestrained abuse of the 'monkeymen,' which he really let loose in full force at the beginning of 1943 and kept up until the war ended, had been partly motivated by a conscious concern to discredit 'the new myth of Japanese invincibility' and boost the confidence of his men." 

This quote highlights how it was unexpected for an admiral to openly admit, even after hostilities had ended, that a lot of his racial language was a direct result of fear of the enemy. 

“A fundamental premise of the national-character approach was 'the psychic unity of humankind'—the assumption, as Margaret Mead later expressed it, that 'all human beings share in a basic humanity.' This reflected the antiracist influence of Franz Boas […] Boas played a leading role in repudiating the theories of biological determinism, or 'scientific racism,' which dominated the mainstream of European and American anthropological teaching throughout the nineteenth century." 

During this time, racism was argued by many as scientific fact, but here Dower provides examples of anthropologists, among others, who argued with the use of science the exact opposite that any race was superior to any other.

"Although the focus on cleanliness and ritual purity was intimately associated with Shinto, Japan's indigenous religion, Gorer argued that in actual practice such preoccupations derived from 'learning associated with the control of the gastro-intestinal tract,' that is, 'drastic toilet training.'" 

Science, what we would call pseudo-science these days, was also used to try and explain why the Japanese behaved and believed the things they did. This quote provides an example of one of the more ludicrous, that the Japanese child was given tougher, more degrading, and overall harsher toilet training than the average white American.

"The most conspicuous new insight which developed was the comparison between Japanese character structure and behavior which is characteristic of the adolescent in our society. This comparison makes it possible to invoke our knowledge of individual adolescent psychology and of the behavior of adolescents in gangs in our society, as a systematic approach to better understanding of the Japanese." 

In December of 1944, 40 psychiatrists, social scientists, and experts on Japan met to discuss the nature of the Japanese. The meeting was officially called the Institute of Pacific Relations, and the above quote comes directly from the minutes wherein the discussion was summarized. That an official body of scientists across many fields could come up with a resolution depicting Japanese society as a whole—that the people of Japan were nothing but adults in the arrested developmental throes of adolescence and could be viewed as nothing more than a group of angry teenager—is a striking example of how condescending the views of the Japanese were at that time period.

"From the time of the earliest Spaniards who addressed the nature of the Indians of the New World, nonwhites were treated as polar opposites of their conquerors: as savages, children, madmen, and beasts; and, of course, as pagan and evil as opposed to Christian and good."

The history of racism and the idea of white supremacy predates WWII by many centuries, and it is interesting to note how little the rhetoric has changed since the Spaniards first made contact with outside peoples. This sentiment permeated the WWII rhetoric directed against all Asians, not just the Japanese.

"The Yellow Peril was naturally the stuff of fantasy and cheap thrills, a fit subject for pulp literature, comics, B-movies, and sensational journalism. But fantasy and sensationalism shape the mind in ways beyond measure, undoubtedly a great deal more than most scholarship does; and there were many who addressed the alleged threat from the East in a manner that made a significant impact." 

The Yellow Peril was, essentially, a fear similar to pre-Civil War sentiments that southern Americans felt toward their slaves, which was that the slaves would realize their sheer numerical superiority and rise up and defeat the smaller number of their white overlords. Thus, it was the fear that so many Asians, united together, would push the Anglo-Americans and other European colonial powers out of the region. Furthermore, Dower addresses the tremendous power of the media in spreading such fear mongering and its potential to shape the beliefs of a culture.

"Better than any other single individual, Sax Rohmer succeeded, through the figure of Fu Manchu, in drawing together in a flamboyant but concrete way the three main strands of an otherwise inchoate fear: Asian mastery of Western knowledge and technique; access to mysterious powers and 'obscure and dreadful things;' and mobilization of the yellow horde ('shadowy,' in one episode, 'looking like great apes'). Whether led by China or Japan, this was the essence of the Yellow Peril." 

The character Fu Manchu re-enforces the above quote and provides proof of the latent fear of the so-called Yellow Peril and the desire for Westerners to remain the dominant culture (Asians using Western technology against them).

"It was revealed, for example, that the Chinese had been singled out by name as undesirable immigrants in no less than fifteen federal laws, or parts of laws, passed between 1882-1913—a dishonor done to no other nationality." 

The Chinese were never welcome, truly, in the United States, and the fact that laws existed for a time period in American history that specifically excluded them from the country shows better than anything else just how inferior the Chinese were viewed by Americans. Furthermore, it illustrates the flexibility of racism and hatred since, during the war, the Chinese were seen in a better light, were allies even, in the struggle against the Japanese, who now bore the full brunt of Western antagonism against Asians.

"For the Japanese were as racist as their Anglo-America adversaries, and their slogans of Asian liberation, coexistence, and coprosperity were as propagandistic (and as sincere, to some) as the rhetoric of 'four freedoms' and 'fighting for democracy' was to the Anglo-American powers." 

This reiterates that the Japanese were no less racist than anyone else during the war. Euphemistic phrases were used to confirm to the average person of any culture that what they were fighting for was grander than simple self-aggrandizement or self-interest.

"After the war, a former officer in the Japanese Imperial Army recalled how moved he and others had been when the government introduced this phrase [gyokusai] to describe their fallen comrades. No one thought of the dead as having suffered defeat, he said; rather, it simply seemed 'as if their spirits had been further purified.'"

One aspect of Japanese propaganda was the belief of the purity of the Japanese race, which stated that the Japanese were, due to demographic and biological isolation, and through their morality, the purest race. The word gyokusai—literally translated mean “jewel smashed” (231)—became a word that embodied the Japanese sense of purity as well as the need and desire for spiritual purification. Purity was not a constant state: There was a need to purify regularly in order to maintain it. Spiritual purification was said to best be achieved through death on the battlefield.

"To give one striking example, Japanese naval strategists assumed that Americans were too soft to endure the mental and physical strains of extended submarine duty—a failure of monumental significance given the decisive role submarines later played in the war of attrition against Japan."

Much like quote #11 illustrated the Allied underestimation of the Japanese, this quote provides an example of how the Japanese underestimated the Americans. Erroneous beliefs in the inferiority of another "race" and their abilities and disabilities led to many such mistakes by military planners on both sides of the war.

"The study as a whole, however, supports an entirely different conclusion: the subordination of other Asians in the Co-Prosperity Sphere was not the unfortunate consequence of wartime exigencies, but the very essence of official policy. It was the intention of the Japanese to establish permanent domination over all other races and people in Asia—in accordance with their needs, and as befitted their destiny as a superior race." 

The study, to which this quote refers, is the monumental study conducted by the Japanese and titled "An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus," which provides an over-abundance of material and proof of Japanese racism. This includes their views about being the superior race, especially in Asia, Japanese designs for conquering territory, and their motivation behind that action.

"It did not rest on the force and oppression that the old imperialist powers relied on, nor on the outmoded and only superficially 'rational' legalistic premises of equality, but rather on the moral principle of 'enabling all nations and races to assume their proper place in the world.'" 

The Japanese found the idea of "proper place," whether that was for an individual in society or societies as a whole, to be very important and fundamental. The above quote illustrates the euphemistic language the Japanese used to cover up the fact that their main goal was to subjugate the other peoples of Asia under their domain, placing themselves at the top of the international hierarchy. Much like the Anglo-American rhetoric of "fighting for freedom," which meant for many nations in Asia maintaining the colonial status-quo, the Japanese used similar Eleutherian language.

"There are many answers, the simplest of the being that the dominant wartime stereotypes on both sides were wrong. The Americans were not demons, as the Japanese discovered when they were not raped, tortured, and murdered as wartime propaganda and rumors had forecast. And the Japanese were more diversified and far more war-weary than their enemies had been led to believe." 

With the vast abundance of hatred on both sides and the rhetoric of superiority and inferiority, Dower points out that a lot of the reconciliation that transpired after the war between the Americans and Japanese was a result of learning that the other side actually wasn't all that different. What was once thought of as negative took on a new, more positive perspective. The fact that peace could be made and even an alliance formed after so much hatred and violence, regardless of Cold War contingencies, supports the argument that racism is not only nothing more than hate and ethnocentrism.