Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival Page 12
Now in his eighties and retired from the Bank of Japan, where he spent most of his professional life, Ogata has a kindly face and a ready wit. It was he who had introduced me to the proverb about ‘bending adversity’ and who had professed his faith that Japan could recover again, both from the devastation of the tsunami and from its current economic and political malaise. In ordinary people’s dignified response to adversity, he had seen something of the post-1945 spirit that had enabled the Japanese to confront adversity and build something positive from the wreckage of war. Ogata loves a political discussion and to venture opinions that many would consider a little risqué, especially those on the right of Japan’s political spectrum. Much of his time is spent in the Japan Press Club and the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan where he attends lectures and press conferences and talks about issues of the day. He has his stock of little sayings, rarely delivered without a twinkle in his eye. ‘Japan is a country of good soldiers but poor commanders’ is one of his favourites. It is a lesson perhaps learned from Japan’s wartime experience, but one that he finds applicable to modern Japan too, particularly in its current phase of drift. For him, the aphorism captures the diligence and decency of common people – exhibited again in the aftermath of the tsunami – but the disappointment he feels in the nation’s leaders. Although he was a senior figure at the Bank of Japan, he likes to introduce himself with a self-deprecatory, ‘I am Sadako’s husband,’ acknowledging the greater renown of his wife, former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and one of Japan’s most famous citizens.2
Ogata’s grandfather and great-grandfather on his father’s side, both born well before the Meiji Restoration, had been students of Dutch learning. His father, Taketora, was editor-in-chief of the liberal Asahi newspaper and a proponent of greater democracy in the late 1920s. Despite this liberal upbringing, Ogata remembers celebrating the fall of Nanking as a primary school student. As the rape and slaughter of civilians unfolded, archive photographs show innocent-faced ranks of Japanese schoolchildren like Ogata waving Rising Sun flags outside the Imperial Palace. Four years later, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor had shocked the teenage Ogata, but he confessed that news of the distant hostilities brought a certain thrill. ‘The initial victories excited most of us, including those who had been opposed to the war,’ he writes in his memoirs.3
Because of his father’s connections to the newspaper business Ogata was better informed about what was going on than most Japanese, for whom censored news media spewing imperial propaganda was the only source of information. He guessed before most that Japan would lose the war. By 9 August, less than two months after he had attended the Beethoven concert, he learned from navy officers that Hiroshima had been destroyed by a fearful new weapon and that the Soviet Union had torn up its non-aggression pact with Japan. Though Ogata did not yet know that a second nuclear bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki, he realized the end of the war was close. The entry in his diary, six days before Japan’s unconditional surrender on 15 August, reads, ‘The arrival of a very tragic day of history seems imminent.’ It is hard to imagine now the psychological devastation. Japan’s dreams – if that’s what its fantasies of Asian domination can be called – were over. The emperor, previously distant, divine and unerring, came on the radio to announce the surrender. Villagers and city dwellers alike gathered around crackly radios, their heads bowed in disbelief. No one had heard the emperor’s voice before, let alone speaking such unimaginable words. Shintaro Ishihara, who grew up to become Tokyo governor, was twelve years old. ‘I thought his voice was high and sounded very feminine,’ he told me. ‘Like the shriek of a cat.’4
Japan lay in ruins, its ideology as well as its buildings reduced to rubble. Aerial photographs of Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the days following surrender look strangely like those of the towns along the northeast coast after the 2011 tsunami. The street grid is visible, but most of the buildings have vanished. Only the odd industrial chimney or brick building sticks up from the rubble. Japan’s defeat was absolute. Four-fifths of its ships, a third of its industrial machinery, and nearly a quarter of its rolling stock, cars and trucks had been destroyed.5 Documentary footage from just after the surrender shows ragged children in wooden clogs picking through the debris.
My own father-in-law, Gene Aaroe, a member of the US coastguard in 1945, remembers landing at the northern port of Aomori shortly after the surrender. He had half expected to fight. After all, he had witnessed the planes of kamikaze pilots explode in flames as they attempted to sink the ships around him in the Battle of Okinawa. Like other Americans, he had heard stories of a fanatical race of emperor-worshippers who would never surrender and were prepared to fight to the last man, woman and child.6 Instead, he found a submissive and devastated nation. People in Aomori lined the streets with their pots, pans, kimonos and other possessions at their feet, items for sale to the conquering Americans. He bought a harakiri ritual suicide knife, which he still keeps in a cupboard in Seattle. Doubtless the few dollars he paid for it were exchanged for desperately needed food.
Two weeks after the emperor’s message, General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan, landed at Atsugi aerodrome near Tokyo. Dressed in khaki army fatigues, he struck an imposing figure. His apparent nonchalance at becoming Japan’s potentate was emphasized by the enormous corncob pipe stuck jauntily between his teeth. A subsequent picture taken with the emperor shows a relaxed American towering over a slight and nervous Japanese man. Not long after, the emperor himself endured the unendurable: he told his people that stories of his divinity were misplaced.
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For the first time in its history Japan was to be occupied by a foreign power. The Americans stayed less than seven years. It was to be one of the most extraordinary encounters of the twentieth century, a ‘sensual embrace’ of victor and vanquished in John Dower’s memorable phrase. Though MacArthur was a conservative, many of the officials around him were Roosevelt New Dealers, idealists who wanted to fashion a peaceful and democratic society from the broken shards of Japan’s failed modernization. Acting through the existing bureaucracy, they began to implement a series of far-reaching policies, including land and labour reform, the breakup of oligopolies, equal rights for women, an amnesty for leftwing political prisoners and the drafting of a new pacifist constitution. They also set about purging the government and armed forces of those associated with militarism, though MacArthur took the controversial decision to shield the emperor from prosecution and preserve him as a figure of national unity.
Among many thousands who came under initial suspicion was Ogata’s father, Taketora. Despite his liberal background, he had overseen the Asahi’s shift towards a more pro-government line and in 1944 was drafted into the cabinet to head the information bureau. After the war, he was briefly designated a war criminal and placed under house arrest. In March 1946 he was summoned by the prosecutors to give evidence to the Tokyo War Tribunal about the pre-war political situation. At the trial, seven men, including former prime minister Hideki Tojo, were sentenced to death. Sixteen more were given life sentences. Outside this show trial, Asia’s equivalent of Nuremberg, hundreds of lower-ranking officers were executed for atrocities. Ogata’s father was purged from public activities but subsequently cleared of war crimes. Still, Ogata remembers a shrine festival when a drunken man repeatedly pounded on the wooden wall of their house, calling out, ‘Taketora Ogata, you are a war criminal.’ It was, Ogata recalls, a miserable evening.
At the time, millions of Japanese were engaged in an urgent attempt to understand how their society could have gone so badly wrong. In the years immediately following the war, support for the socialist and communist parties surged, so much so that the American occupiers were frightened into clamping down on the forces they had let loose. In the so-called ‘reverse course’, which took hold in around 1948 as the contours of the Cold War began to freeze into shape, t
here was a crackdown on organized labour and on leftwing political leaders. As early as 1947, MacArthur had personally intervened to head off a threatened national strike. Eleanor Hadley, who had been given the job of breaking up the powerful zaibatsu business conglomerates, noted the hypocrisy. ‘They had been told to organize, that there was a right to strike,’ she said. ‘Then at the moment of their power they were cut off.’7 By 1949, the idea of a Red Purge against ‘troublemakers’ in the labour unions, media and private sector had become so prevalent that the phrase had migrated into Japanese where it was rendered reddo pa-ji.
Such was the intellectual turmoil, everything came under discussion. Ogata remembers a conference at his high-school campus to discuss the pros and cons of dropping Chinese characters and, instead, Romanizing written Japanese. One theory claimed that Japan had been held back because it took so long for children to master thousands of complex characters, leaving insufficient time to study modern science. Even in its defeat and humiliation, the impulse to escape its Asian inheritance and join the ranks of ‘civilized’ western nations had not been extinguished.
The means of achieving this had clearly changed. Japan was occupied and, from November 1946, had a constitution that renounced its right to wage war or to maintain a standing army, navy or air force. The colonial route to international status was blocked. That left the economic path. Ogata says that, even then, amid the ruins of war, he did not despair. ‘We were quite optimistic really,’ he recalls cheerfully, speaking more than sixty-five years after his tram ride through a flattened Tokyo. ‘Because, you see, there was no way to go down. The only way to survive meant going up.’
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The world now takes Japan’s economic rise for granted. Its startling achievements from 1950 to 1973, when the economy was torpedoing along at an average growth rate of 10 per cent a year, loom much less large today than its more recent economic failures. The past two ‘lost decades’ – though they have not been quite as lost as some believe – have convinced many detractors that the nation’s supposed economic strengths were a chimera and that the true, hidebound Japan now stands before us. The country that some in the 1980s predicted would surpass the US as the world’s most powerful economy has instead fallen flat on its face. As a result, the once supposedly essential components of Japan’s economic rise – its particular corporate culture and its managed industrial policy – are sometimes derided as the very reasons for its twenty years in the wilderness. ‘The state of Japan is a scandal, an outrage, a reproach,’ wrote Paul Krugman, a Nobel prize winner in economics, in a series of papers about Japan’s post-bubble disease. Subsequently, when economic crisis and paralysis hit the US and Europe, Krugman changed his tune, citing Japan instead as a model of how to weather an economic storm.8 Even after twenty years of malaise, Japan still stands as the world’s most successful example of a catch-up economy. No other non-western nation, save city-states such as Singapore and Qatar, has achieved the standard of living the Japanese now take for granted.9
It is all too easy to forget just how unpromising Japan’s economic prospects looked in 1945. We forget too that Japan, understandably vilified in Asia for its wartime aggression, nevertheless became an inspiration for much of the region in the latter half of the twentieth century. Japan may not have been loved, but it had proved what should always have been obvious: non-whites were every bit as capable of achieving economic and technological success as Caucasians. That simple truth was not self-evident even in 1958 when Kenneth Galbraith began his book The Affluent Society by defining wealthy nations as those ‘in the comparatively small corner of the world populated by Europeans’.10 Japan’s implicit message proved an inspiration for technocrats and political leaders alike in Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia and Hong Kong, all of whom emulated its export-led development model. The image of flying geese, first dreamed up in the Japan of the 1930s, took hold, this time with an economic, rather than military, meaning. Japan was the lead goose and the nations of Southeast Asia its followers. Japan had proved to arrogant westerners and to self-doubting Asians alike that colour was no bar to development.
None of this was foreseeable in 1945, at least not to outsiders. Japan’s economy, built up since Meiji, was a smoking wreck. Its industrial misery was compounded by the failure of the harvest in the year of its defeat. Bad weather combined with lack of fertilizer and labour to produce a food shortfall of some 40 per cent. Grave of the Fireflies, an animated feature film produced four decades later, started gruesomely with the child protagonist dying of starvation in Ueno station, a fate that befell countless people in those early desperate months.11 Hungry Tokyoites clambered aboard trains leaving Ueno for the countryside, loaded with kimonos and other family heirlooms to swap for food. So crowded were the trains that people hung onto the outside of the carriages and railway staff put wooden slats across the windows to stop them cracking. Kazue Matsumaru, a farmer’s wife in a village near Tokyo, described the ravenous crowds that descended from the trains. ‘They’d buy anything. Even the leaves off the potato plants.’12 There was a good deal of stealing too. Much food made its way onto the swelling black market. In the cities, some young women earned money or received scarce items such as nylon stockings or canned food by sleeping with American GIs. ‘In the dark corners of certain downtown areas, prostitutes, called “panpan girls” in those days, emerged every evening to wait for American soldiers,’ Ogata recalls.
Such hardship notwithstanding, America’s first concern was not to boost Japan’s economy but to dismantle its wartime industrial complex.13 Japan had been one of the fastest-growing economies in the world since the 1880s when the Meiji leaders set out to modernize their country. From the 1930s, its industries had been marshalled for a war economy. The Americans were determined this would never happen again. Shipyards that had turned out warships were banned from building anything other than wooden fishing boats. The US originally planned to dismantle most of the factories left standing and pack the machinery off to Japan’s former enemies as war reparations. Those plans were gradually scaled back. The softening was initially out of sympathy for Japan’s desperate economic plight and concerns about social unrest. But, as the Cold War set in, Washington’s ideas shifted. It decided that its strategic needs were not best served by a Japan on its knees. Rather, it wanted a bulwark against communism. Yet, even when America started to think about how to build up Japan economically, the ‘image always remained of a fundamentally second-rate economy at best’. Only days before the outbreak of the Korean War, John Foster Dulles, special envoy of President Harry Truman, said Japan should concentrate on exporting items such as cocktail napkins.14
If the US saw Japan as a maker of trinkets, the nation’s bureaucrats had other ideas. Even before the war had ended, government officials had secretly planned for life after defeat. Saburo Okita, a post-war economic planner, sent out a notice at the start of August 1945 to arrange a meeting. ‘The idea was to discuss the future of the Japanese economy after the war,’ Okita said of his surreptitious plans. ‘But if we’d advertised a meeting with a title like that we would have been arrested by the military police.’ The gathering of experts took place in a burnt-out building on 16 August, the day after Japan surrendered. Okita remembered how desperate the situation seemed. ‘If you looked out of the windows, it looked like a scorched plain. Everybody was starving. But the committee discussing the future worked really hard. They thought, It’s bad now. But with a big effort, Japan will get back on her feet again, not by military means, but with new technology and economic power.’15
These early planners discussed various models for rebuilding Japan, with some arguing that it should concentrate on agriculture. The consensus that eventually emerged, however, was to employ the same methods that had been marshalled for all-out war to create powerful peacetime industries. From the early 1930s, Japan had shifted from light to heavy industrialization, emphasizing warships, bombs and chemicals over textile
s and handicrafts. Fukoku kyohei – ‘rich country, strong army’ – had been the centrepiece of the Meiji project, an objective that slipped into militarism. Now that Japan was forbidden from fighting, it could concentrate solely on building a strong economy.
Washington was soon to regret writing the pacifist clause into Japan’s constitution. But in what became known as the Yoshida Doctrine – after Shigeru Yoshida, prime minister for much of the decade after the war – Japan used its lack of international obligations to its own advantage. Released from the burden of defence and protected by the US military, it was able to throw all its energies into economic development. Wealth creation was seen as an alternative way of generating national prestige. The link between pre- and post-war ambitions, and the means of achieving them, was sometimes explicit. Kiyoshi Tomizuka, a professor of engineering at Tokyo Imperial University, wrote in his diary in April 1945, ‘An army in uniform is not the only sort of army. Scientific technology and fighting spirit under a business suit will be our underground army.’16
For all these aspirations, by 1948, the economy had reached crisis point. Prices had risen a cumulative 1,200 per cent in the three years since the war. Labour conflict was rife. The Americans called for Joseph Dodge, a Detroit banker, who as ‘economic tsar’ oversaw a drastic plan to rein in government spending and fire public workers. Inflation was gradually contained, and the exchange rate massaged lower to stimulate exports. The Red Purge started and policies intended to break up conglomerates were quietly abandoned. Unemployment rose, consumption dropped and many companies went bankrupt. Depression beckoned. Then, in 1950, the Korean War came to the rescue. What remained of Japan’s industrial base cranked into action to supply the Americans with military equipment. Yoshida called it ‘a gift from the gods’. Long-idle factories hummed as the US, setting aside its scruples about Japan’s military complex, put in orders for barbed wire and munitions. Some factories went the other way, from pre-war military production to the manufacture of civilian goods. An aircraft factory in Osaka started making nails for houses. Makers of radio parts turned their thoughts to light bulbs. In due course, companies such as Nikon, which had ground lenses for gunsights, started producing cameras and binoculars.