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36 pages 1 hour read

John W. Dower

War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1986

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Part 2, Chapters 4-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2: “The War in Western Eyes”

Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary: “Apes and Others”

Ernie Pyle, a popular war correspondent, reported that even though the German foes were deadly in their own right, they were still viewed as human, unlike the Japanese: "[O]ut here I soon gathered that the Japanese were looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive; the way some people feel about cockroaches or mice" (78). The Marine magazine Leatherneck featured a photograph indicating that the only good Japanese “is a dead one” (79).

In 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which forcefully removed Japanese-Americans from the Pacific-coast states and had them interned in ten camps within the interior of the country. Reasons for doing this were racially motivated. The Japanese were viewed by many as being unassimilable in US society. The Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, went on so far as to record in his journal that the "second-generation Japanese-Americans were even more dangerous that their immigrant parents" (80). The fear was that "once a Jap, always a Jap" (81), as John Rankin, the Senator from Mississippi, once opined. Racial epithets were routinely used in the press and by government officials, and very often the Japanese were given subhuman representation in art and film, often portrayed as monkeys, apes, insects, or various vermin. The Japanese were also portrayed as having a herd mentality.

Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “Lesser Men and Supermen”

The Western powers predominantly viewed the Japanese as inferior to Europeans in every way: physically, culturally, industrially, scientifically, etc. These beliefs predated Pearl Harbor. A military commentator, Fletcher Pratt, for example, specified "four weaknesses" (102) inherent to the Japanese: the first was a lack of iron and steel that forced them to produce inferior ships. The second weakness was that the Japanese also could only produce inferior airplanes and that the pilots themselves were incompetent based on racial defects inherent in the race. The third and fourth weaknesses were both psychological: "The Japanese were short-tempered on both a small and large scale, and in battle were inclined to waste men unnecessarily when operations did not go well" (103). It was believed that "the Germans must be leading the sorties" (105), even after the attack on Pearl Harbor and during the attack on the Philippines and Hong Kong.

On the other side of the coin were the beliefs and rumors about the Japanese being something superhuman, especially during the early years of the war when the Japanese Empire was at its zenith and defeating the Anglo-American forces. However, the superhuman qualities were never seen in a positive light: The Japanese were still not human, rather something else, something dangerous. The former ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, expressed many of these sentiments when he said of the Japanese foe, "He was 'sturdy,' 'Spartan,' 'clever and dangerous.' His will to conquer was 'utterly ruthless, utterly cruel and utterly blind to any of the values which make up our civilization'" (113).

Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “Primitives, Children, Madmen”

During the war years, the sciences (namely anthropology, psychology, and sociology) searched for a way to understand the Japanese psyche and its culture. One of these was known as the studies of national character, and Margaret Mead best expressed an important premise of this idea when she said, "All human beings share in a basic humanity" (119). Many of the scholars engaged in national character studies heavily emphasized that recent work in the field of anthropology lent no support at all to the idea that any ethnicity was biologically superior or inferior to any other. However, these scholars were in the minority, and some scholars treating on the idea of national character reinforced many negative beliefs held about the Japanese, who were likened to primitive and tribal peoples.

In 1943, Geoffrey Gorer published an article entitled Themes in Japanese Culture that became the most influential academic analysis of Japanese society during the war years. Gorer stated, among other examples, that the Japanese culture was the most paradoxical and contradictory culture on record, and even though they were fully modernized, the Japanese still retained a worldview that was "more consonant with an isolated and primitive tribe than with a major industrial nation" (125). Furthermore, Gorer supported the argument about toilet training being at the core of why Japanese culture valued cleanliness and purity, which further led to a contradictory value system that did not possess a true notion of right or wrong, rather about doing what's right at the specific moment. Japanese aggression was characterized thusly: "Japanese aggression and barbaric behavior abroad derived from the value system and national character, which in turn were profoundly influenced by forced control of the sphincter muscle in early childhood" (126).

Aside from being considered either primitives or “childlike” (142) in behavior, the Japanese were also simply regarded as being collectively neurotic. Many anthropologists and psychologists argued that the Japanese not only suffered from "an inferiority complex, or emotional repression, or neurosis, but from the whole gamut of mental and emotional disorders found among maladjusted individuals in the West" (135).

All of these approaches to understanding the Japanese, often with governmental support, hardly brought about any change in public perception or government policy toward Japan; they simply reinforced prejudices against the Japanese that contained the quintessential characteristics of incipient racism.

Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary: “Yellow, Red, and Black Men”

Unlike many countries in Asia, the Japanese were never conquered or colonized by a European power prior to WWII. Instead, they modernized and became imperialists themselves. Their first conquest was Formosa in 1895, quickly followed by Korea in 1910. While these conquests initiated discussion, and even a little admiration, in the West, it never brought the Japanese respect from Europeans.

Europeans had a history of seeing others as something bellow themselves, and no other group was as equal to any other. The philosophy can be traced back to the 16th-century discussion between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda about the nature of the Native Americans, in which the foundation was based on the theory of the Great Chain of Being: “A fixed hierarchy of existence extending from God down to the basest of creatures” (150), which itself dated back at the latest to Aristotle. Aristotle himself argued that some men are by nature free and some slave. These thoughts fulminated over the centuries and help explain the perceptions of indigenous populations like in the Americas and extend to Africans and Asians.

Americans used a lot of the negative rhetoric to describe the Native Americans. For example, as author Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote about his fellow passengers on a train: “[They] treated the Native Americans and Chinese almost identically as ‘despised races.’ They never really looked at the Chinese, listened to them, or thought about them, ‘but hated them a priori’” (154). The depiction of the Chinese extended as far as to be “denied suffrage to all ‘natives of China, idiots, and insane persons’” (154) in the 1879 constitution of California. The basic descriptions of Asians, which can be likened to the vocabulary used for Native and African Americans, was that they were savage, barbarous, primitive, childlike, and, especially in the case of the Japanese, ape-like.

One aspect of racism toward Asiatic peoples, especially the Chinese and Japanese, was a fear of the so-called Yellow Peril. This was the fear that “white supremacy was in peril” (156) should the vast population of China unify and overwhelm the inferior number of Europeans. The greatest personification of Yellow Peril can be found in the novels about “The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, the Evil Genius” (157), whose greatest treachery was the mastery of European technology and innovation and then using it against them. This fear was easily transferred to the Japanese as they began their conquests.

Some people in the West felt that the blatant racism of white supremacism could become a self-fulfilling prophecy, that it would help unite the peoples of Asia, because, as Pearl Buck stated, “It is white peoples who have the deepest race prejudices” (160). Intellectuals like Pearl Buck warned of a possible race war if whites did not do away with such racial thinking. Some took notice of this. There had been laws erected in the United States that strictly forbade and limited Chinese from immigrating and even rights to citizenship. Because China was seen as an important ally against the Japanese, these laws became not only an embarrassment for a nation purportedly on the side of the Chinese, but also a liability. Some feared that blatant racism against the Chinese would push them into the Japanese camp. Thus, some of the laws were later relaxed, though never fully lifted until much later. Not only did the West want to keep the Chinese on their side for militaristic purposes, it was also believed by some, like Congressman Noah Mason, that “China offered ‘the only real post-war market for American manufactured goods'” (171).

African Americans in America saw too many similarities between racism toward Asians and themselves, which naturally angered them. One man was quoted as saying, “I want you to know I ain’t afraid. I don’t mind fighting. I’ll fight Hitler, Mussolini and the Japs […] but I’m telling you I’ll give those crackers down South the same damn medicine” (177).

Racism existed on the Japanese side as well, just that its focus was different from the Anglo-Americans focus. The Japanese tended to focus on their cultural purity in the sense of both blood and morality.

Part 2, Chapters 4-7 Analysis

Racism from the standpoint of the West has a long and tragic tradition. It has always been that Europeans have looked down upon other ethnicities like the Native Americans, Africans, and Asians as something subhuman or bestial, an evolutionary creature less developed than the Caucasian. This, in reference to the Asians, is best exemplified by the forced internment of much of the Japanese-American population from the West Coast of the US to states in the interior (Wyoming, for example). The Los Angeles Times duly expressed the sentiments among many Americans that led to an almost unprotested incarceration of over 110,000 Japanese-Americans: "A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched—so a Japanese-American, born of Japanese parents, grows up to be a Japanese and not an American" (80). Another inarguable example of American dislike for Asians is exemplified in the prohibitory and racist laws against Chinese immigration and nationalization that existed in America many years before the outbreak of open hostilities with Japan. In fact, while Americans praised the Chinese as defenders of freedom against Japanese savagery and imperialism, these laws continued to exist and were an embarrassment for the US. Eventually the laws were relaxed, but they would not be completely nullified until well after the war.

Some of this racism appears to simply be a reaction to underlying fears of inferiority, predominantly in numbers, to other peoples. The idea of Yellow Peril is a good example of this, and it parallels fears that many slaveholders in the antebellum South held toward the black population, which also outnumbered them much of the time.

Looking back, it is nigh impossible to argue that racism and colonialism did not play a major role in the development of war in Asia in the early 20th century. As the book points out, the Japanese, albeit with their own flare, were doing exactly what they had seen the European powers do over the past several centuries in East and Southeast Asia.

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