Address at the Annual Banquet Celebrating the 90th Anniversary of the Illinois Education Association, Chicago, Illinois, at 8:00 p.m., December 29, 1943.
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Among the many invitations to speak which come to me from all over the country, I know of none that I accepted more promptly and gladly than the invitation to meet tonight the members of the Illinois Education Association, even though it meant coming from Washington for this single engagement. For in fighting the war and in approaching the eventual problems of the peace tables, we need - as perhaps never before so urgently - the development of an enlightened public opinion, especially among the youth of our country - the younger generation in whose hands will largely lie the shaping of our future world. To whom therefore shall we turn rather than to the teachers of our young men and women to guide their thinking broadly and wisely so that the coming generation may be fitted effectively to influence or to deal directly with the solution of the tremendous problems that will face them on emerging from their scholastic years and crossing the threshold into life? The duties, the responsibilities and the opportunities that you yourselves face in inculcating that training, my friends of the Illinois Education Association, are of immense importance, and I therefore heartily welcome this occasion which
permits me to speak to you tonight. As for the opportunities, it may do no harm to remember the difference between a pessimist and an optimist: a pessimist is one who sees a difficulty in every opportunity, while an optimist is one who sees an opportunity in every difficulty.
Some six weeks ago we passed an anniversary of solemn and significant memory - the Armistice of 1918. How well I remember that day in Paris! Guns booming, bells pealing, the people of Paris in the streets singing and dancing, laughing and weeping. The war to end wars was over. Thenceforth we were to emerge from battle to a bright new world, a world of peace on earth, good will toward men. And then, what happened? We in America and people elsewhere quite simply got into bed and pulled the covers over our heads, unwilling to see what was going on about us, asleep to actualities. And now, once again the world is drenched in blood.
Shall we make that grim mistake again? I do not believe so. Human nature may not change much through the ages, but at least mankind learns something from experience, and I believe that we in our country have learned that in this modern world of ours - in which the nations, through developments in communications and transit, have bean
drawn into inevitable intimacy - isolation has become an anachronism. We cannot kill the seeds of war, for they are buried deep in human nature. But what we can do and I am convinced we shall do is precisely what we did in permanently stamping out yellow fever from our country - remove the conditions under which those seeds of war can germinate anywhere in the world. It can be done and it must be done.
The guilty leaders among our enemies and those individuals responsible for the barbarous acts of crime and senseless cruelties that have been committed under the cloak of war must and shall be punished and just retribution must and shall be meted out to the enemy countries so that the people of those countries shall be forever cured of the illusion that aggression pays. Their false philosophy can never be discredited until the results are brought home to them in defeat, humiliation and bitter loss. Measures must and shall be taken to prevent that cancer of aggressive militarism from digging in underground, once again to rear itself in malignant evil and once again to over-run the world, calling upon our sons and grandsons to fight this dreadful war over again in the next generation. Let us assure our defenders on the
battle fronts that this time their heroism shall forever finish the job begun in l914.
But those self-evident measures will not be enough. In approaching the eventual peace tables, we shall need the highest qualities of far-sighted statesmanship. We must abandon all promptings of vindictiveness or of pride and prejudice.
First we must clear away the poisonous growth in order to lay the foundations for the erection of an invulnerable and enduring world edifice. Two great cornerstones for that foundation have already been swung into place. One was the Atlantic Charter; the second was the Moscow agreement supplemented and strengthened by the declarations of Cairo and Teheran. Others will follow.
And then we must build. Re-education in certain areas will become essential. I visualize a helpful, cooperative, common sense spirit in conducting that system of re-education, devoid of browbeating or vindictiveness, with emphasis upon what our enemies will have to gain by playing the game with the rest of the world, and what they would lose by recalcitrance. The healthy growth must ultimately come from within. When our enemies find that in cooperation lies their only hope of salvation, they will cooperate. Weariness of the sufferings of war will work
in our favor. We do not want festering sores anywhere in our future world for the building of which we and our allies are fighting and striving today. We do not want the nursing of grudges, rebelliousness and bitterness. We want the people of the world, including our present enemies, to look forward, not back, and to look forward not to the day when they can achieve revenge but forward to a peaceful, lawful, cooperative, solvent, productive and prosperous national and international life, purged forever of the poison of aggressive militarism. That should be our aim. That should be the ultimate goal of far-sighted statesmanship, and that should be the guiding spirit at the peace tables. We shall need the wisdom of Solomon in approaching those eventual problems. Pray God that we may find it.
Thus may our defenders on the battle lines know that they are not fighting or dying in vain. Thus may they know that we on the home front are not only with joyful determination supporting them through the war until total victory is achieved, but that we pledge to them our inexorable determination to carry that support into the post-war world where the final monument to their heroism shall be the creation of a permanent international structure based on the principles of law, truth, liberty, justice, and peace.
Now, having always in mind those landmarks which I feel should guide our general course in the postwar world, I should like to turn to our war with Japan, and its eventual aftermath. In moving around the country, as I have done more or less continually since returning to the United States from Japan some sixteen months ago, I have found among our people a great deal of muddled thinking on those problems which arises largely from an inadequate grasp of facts.
First, with regard to the war itself, there seems to me to be a general tendency to under-estimate the difficulties, the length of time and the potential losses that we face in bringing Japan to eventual unconditional surrender. Over-optimism is not likely to further our steadily-strengthening war effort, and I have conceived it as my own best contribution to our war effort to try to overcome in some small degree that dangerously complacent if not wishful thinking among our people. I have already spoken so often on this subject that I shall not try your patience by harping upon it tonight, but I think we all ought to bear in mind certain palpable facts, namely, that the Japanese are fanatical, do-or-die fighters and no mean fighters while still alive; that they control today tremendous areas with all the raw
materials and all the native labor for processing those materials that any country could desire; that they are hardworking, pertinacious, foresighted, thorough and scientific in their methods and will let no grass grow under their feet in rendering those farflung areas - through the building of industries, war plants and stock piles - so far as possible economically and militarily self-sustaining, against the day when by crippling their maritime transport system we shall have partially or wholly cut them off from their homeland. At a given moment, with defeat staring them in the face, their leaders are more than likely to try to get us into an inconclusive peace, but that is something that we must never under any circumstances be lured into accepting. The showdown must be complete and irrevocable if we are to avoid another war in the Pacific in the next generation. Surveying that war problem from the most pessimistic angle, I can therefore conceive of a situation where even after we had crippled or destroyed their cities, their navy, their transport shipping and their air power, even after we had invaded the Japanese homeland, the Japanese forces in those vast occupied areas might continue to fight to the last cartridge and the last
soldier. I do not believe that this will happen but I do believe that our people had better visualize what
might happen and that we had better foresee the possible worst so that we shall not for a moment relax our maximum war effort. We shall have to fight, I fear, for a long time to come.
Now let us turn to some of the postwar problems that we shall inevitably have to face when once the Japanese
have been brought to unconditional surrender or, at least to a situation when they can fight no further. Here again there is much obscure thinking in our country arising from an inadequate grasp of facts which has brought about a deep-rooted prejudice against the Japanese people as a whole. In the light of Pearl Harbor, the Attilalike aggressions and the senseless cruelties of the Japanese military, that prejudice is perfectly natural. I remember that in the last war a similar prejudice and suspicion extended even to Americans with German names, and many people with German names changed them. That blind prejudice against the German race fortunately does not exist today. Although this subject is controversial, most of our people feel that we are chiefly fighting the Nazis and the militaristic caste and cult and doctrine in Germany and not the Germans as a whole. But today
comparatively few of our people are able or willing to admit that there can be anything good in Japan or any good elements in the Japanese race. The prejudice is all-embracing.
Not long ago after one of my talks somewhere in the South, after I had tried to paint a fair and carefully balanced picture of the Japanese people as I know them, a prominent business man with whom I had discussed the subject at dinner, came up to me and said: "That was a very interesting talk you gave tonight." I said, "Thank you." "But," he added, "you haven't changed my opinion in the slightest. The only good Jap is a dead Jap." I asked: "Have you ever lived in Japan?" "No," he replied, "but I know that they are all a barbarous, tricky, brutal mass that we can have no truck with, ever again." That sort of attitude I have frequently encountered. It is widespread in our country and through the force of public opinion it can have a serious influence against an intelligent and practical solution of some of the complicated problems we shall have to face in the Far East when the war is over through the destruction of Japan's military machine.
You can't live among a people for ten years without coming to know them - all classes of them - fairly well.
Heaven knows that I should be the last person in our country to hold a brief for any Japanese, for not only have I closely watched that cancer of Japanese aggressive militarism chauvinism, truculence, vaingloriousness and over-weening ambition grow throughout those ten years, but I have known by first-hand intimate reports of the mediaeval barbarity of those militarists - the rape of Nanking, which will forever and ineradicably stain Japan's escutcheon in the records of history, the utterly ruthless destruction by bombing of innocent and undefended cities, towns and villages in China and of our own religious missions throughout China - for the purpose of stamping out American interests and Christianity from all of East Asia - and finally of the indescribable treatment inflicted alike upon helpless Chinese, British and Canadian prisoners of war and upon many of our own American citizens subsequent to Pearl Harbor. Those things one can never forget or ever forgive. The guilty will in due course be brought to the bar of justice and duly punished, but no punishment under our civilized code can ever repay what has been wrought or wipe out the memory of those utterly barbarous crimes. It would be very easy for me, with my background of many days of bitter experience and many sleepless nights of bitter
memory, to assimilate my own thinking with that of the mass of our compatriots who can see no good among the Japanese.
Yet we Americans are generally fair-minded. We are not prone to condemn the innocent because they are helplessly associated with the guilty. I have said that you can't live for ten years in a country without coming to know all classes of the people of that country, their problems, their predilections, and, in some measure, their trends of thought. Even in our own country we have our Dillingers and our reputable citizens residing in the same street. The main difference is that in our country, it is the reputable citizens who control. In Japan it is the military gangsters who control. Only a few years before Pearl Harbor a prominent Japanese said to me: "If our military leaders continue to follow their present course, they will wreck the country."
Throughout those ten years I was in touch with people in Japan from the highest to the lowest, from the Emperor and his statesmen to the servants in our house, the academic world, the business men, the professionals, the tradespeople and the gardeners on our place. I was never taken in by the often expressed opinion that a great mass of liberal thought in Japan was just beneath the surface,
ready, with a little encouragement from the United States, to emerge and to take control. I knew the power of the stranglehold of the militarists, only awaiting the day when they should find the moment ripe to put into operation their dreams of world conquest. But I also knew that many of the highest statesmen of Japan, including the Emperor himself, were laboring earnestly but futilely to control the military in order to avoid war with the United States and Great Britain, and I did know that many of the rank and file of the Japanese people were simply like sheep, helplessly following where they were led.
There is no extenuation implied in that statement. It is simply a statement of fact. There of course arises the question as to what effect the impact of the war and the inculcation by the military leaders of the doctrine of hatred against the democracies may have altered the attitude and thinking of the rank and file of the people of Japan since Pearl Harbor. That question cannot with certainty be answered, especially in view of the activities of the "Thought Control" section of the Japanese police who are always searching out what they call "dangerous thoughts". Those in Japan who deplore the war and who cherish no inherent hatred against the white man
must be and are inarticulate. Besides, all Japanese are fundamentally loyal to the Emperor at least in spirit, and since the Emperor after the militarist fait accompli of Pearl Harbor was obliged, willy nilly, to sign an Imperial Rescript declaring war and calling for the destruction of the United States and Great Britain, very few Japanese would allow their thoughts to run counter to that edict. The Japanese people, under the Emperor, are unquestionably more united in thought and spirit than are the Germans under Hitler.
Yet I repeat that the Japanese rank and file are somewhat like sheep and malleable under the impact of new circumstances and new conditions. I will tell you two short stories - true stories in my own experience - which I think tend to illustrate what I have just said.
On December 12, 1937, the United States Ship PANAY was bombed and sunk in the Yangtze River near Nanking by Japanese planes. From the facts there could be no question but that the act was deliberate, carried out by Japanese fliers for the very same purpose that had led them to bomb and destroy many of our American religious missions - churches, hospitals, schools, residences - in various parts of China. That purpose was to drive all
American interests out of East Asia. After sinking our naval ship, the planes returned and machine-gunned the officers and men who had taken refuge in the high reeds on the shore, in an endeavor to wipe them out. You no doubt remember what happened after that incident. The Japanese Government did not want war with the United States; perhaps the Japanese army and navy did not yet feel prepared for war with us at that time. At any rate, the Government abjectly apologized for what they alleged was an accident - as they had apologized in so many previous cases - met all of our demands and promptly paid the full indemnity we asked. The incident was closed.
But then the Japanese people had their say. They were ashamed. From all over Japan, from people in high places down to school boys, from professors in the Universities to taxi drivers and the corner grocer, I received letters of profound apology and regret for the incident. Gifts of money poured into the Embassy - for that is the Japanese way of expressing sympathy; considerable sums from those who were well off, a few cents from groups of school boys. Suggestions were received from home that I return the money, but the money could not be returned, first because it would have been an insult to refuse to accept the gifts in the spirit in
which they were given, and second because many of the donations were received anonymously. The money was placed in a "Panay Fund" and invested, and the income was to be used for the upkeep of the graves of American sailors who had died in Japan.
But the most touching incident of that wholly spontaneous expression of friendship for the American people by many elements of the people of Japan was when a young Japanese woman came into my office and asked my secretary for a pair of scissors. The scissors were handed to her; she let down her beautiful long hair, cut it off to the neck, wrapped her hair in a parcel and taking a carnation from her head placed it on the parcel and handed the parcel to my secretary with the words: "Please give this to the Ambassador. It is my apology for the sinking of the PANAY".
Those people did not want war with the United States.
Another little story, not important, perhaps, but still significant. During the early stages of the war, while we in the Embassy were still interned in Tokyo, the Japanese military police occasionally arranged demonstrations in front of our Embassy, and on the day of the fall of Singapore, while Tokyo was celebrating with processions and brass bands, the police gathered several
hundred Japanese - from the streets, the shops and the homes - and brought them down to the square in front of our office to demonstrate. They pressed close to the bars of the Embassy fence behind which we were caged, waving Japanese flags and howling like a pack of angry wolves. "Down with the United States," they shouted. It was a really terrifying sight and for a moment I almost feared that they might get over the wall and run amuck in the Embassy compound.
At the height of this demonstration, a member of my staff, who was standing on a balcony overlooking that howling pack of wolves, pulled out his pocket handkerchief and cheerfully waved it at the demonstrators. The Japanese were of course astonished at this unexpected gesture. Their jaws fell open in surprise and for a moment they ceased their howling. But the member of my staff kept right on, blithely waving his handkerchief. And then wonder of wonders, those Japanese laughed and pulled out
their handkerchiefs and waved back in most friendly spirit. The police of course were furious; they dashed around trying to stop the unexpected form their carefully regimented hostile demonstration had taken, but nothing could be done, and that whole pack of
erstwhile snarling wolves went off up the street, still heartily laughing.
I submit that little anecdote merely by way of concrete evidence to support my belief, indeed my knowledge, that the Japanese people as a whole are somewhat like sheep, easily led and malleable under the impact of new circumstances and new direction. They have followed false gods. They have been and are helpless and in-articulate under their gangster leadership. And when once the false philosophy of those leaders comes back to the Japanese people in defeat, humiliation and bitter loss, they themselves, I confidently believe, will be their own liberators from the illusion that military gangsterism pays.
It is my belief - a belief not subject to proof but based on my long experience among the Japanese people - that when once the Japanese military machine - that machine which the Japanese people have been told is undefeatable, having never yet lost a war and being allegedly protected by their sun goddess and by the "august virtues" of the Emperor - has been defeated, largely destroyed and rendered impotent to fight further, it will lose one of the most important of oriental
assets - namely "face" - and will become discredited throughout the length and breadth of the land. It is furthermore my belief that if at the time of the eventual armistice or at the eventual peace table, while putting into effect every measure necessary effectively to prevent that cancer of militarism from digging underground with the intention of secretly building itself up again as it did in Germany, we offer the Japanese people hope for the future, many elements of the rank and file of the Japanese will give a sigh of relief that the war is over and will - perhaps sullenly at first but not the less effectively - cooperate with us in building a new and healthy edifice. This concept also is not subject to proof, but from my knowledge of the Japanese it seems to me to be a fair postulate.
The Japanese people have suffered acutely; they are going to suffer a great deal more acutely for a long time to come. They will see their shipping destroyed and their cities bombed; they will lack adequate food and fuel and clothing; their standard of living will steadily deteriorate; their military police will outdo the Gestapo in cruelties, and when the reckoning comes, the Japanese people will learn of the preposterous lies and of the baseless claims of continual victories over
their enemies with which they are daily fed by their military leaders. Even their hardened fanaticism - even their last ditch, do-or-die philosophy - can hardly withstand such an impact. I saw obvious signs of weariness of war among the Japanese people even during the unsuccessful campaign against heroic China between 1937 and 1941. How much greater will that weariness of war become in the years ahead!
That leads us to the problems of the eventual peace settlement with Japan. In approaching this subject I must make perfectly clear the fact that I am speaking solely for myself and that although an officer of the Government I am presuming in no respect to reflect the official views of the Government. Those official views, so far as I am aware, have not yet crystallized. With so many still imponderable factors in the situation I do not see how they could yet crystallize. Studies, of course, are constantly being pursued with regard to postwar problems and I do not doubt that those studies will lead to a variety of opinions as to the treatment that should eventually be accorded to the enemy nations. In any group of men, in official or unofficial life, it is inconceivable that views and opinions should be unanimous.
In the last analysis it is of course the President and the Secretary of State, in conference with the leaders of other members of the United Nations, and with due regard to the views of the American people as expressed by the Congress, who will determine and formulate our own course. With regard to Japan it is therefore of the highest importance that the American people - woefully uninformed as most of them are with regard to Japan and the Japanese - should be enlightened in their thinking not by armchair theorists but by those who know the subject by firsthand experience, by those who have lived long in Japan. The approach to the peace table should be guided by those who intimately know the Japanese people and should be formulated on a basis of plain, practical common sense, without pride or prejudice, or the vindictiveness which is inherent in human nature, - formulated with the paramount objective of ensuring the future peace and security of the Pacific area and of all the countries contiguous thereto. Seldom if ever will the United States be called upon, in conjunction with allied nations, to face and to deal with a problem of more momentous import to the future welfare of our country and of the world.
I spoke a moment ago of armchair theorists, and this reminds me of a story told by an American businessman who had lived in Japan, representing a prominent American firm, for some forty years. During my stay in Tokyo he was called home by his company for consultation. The president and vice presidents of the firm were gathered around the table. "Now, Mr. So-and-so," said the President, "Please tell us what Japan is going to do." "I don't know," replied the agent. "What?" thundered the President; "After we have paid your salary for forty years to represent us in Japan, you have the face to tell us you don't know?" "No," said the agent, "I don't know. But ask any of the tourists; they'll tell you." That anecdote, which was confirmed to me a few days ago by the business man under reference as substantially correct, is more significant than it may seem. Many Americans visit Japan for a few days or weeks or months and come home and write articles or books about the Japanese. But they haven't got to first base in understanding Japanese mentality. The Japanese dress like us and in many respects they live and act like us, especially in their modern business and industrial life. But they don't think as we do, and nothing can be more misleading than to try to measure by
western yardsticks the thinking processes and sense of rationality and logic of the average Japanese and his reaction to any given set of circumstances. We have armchair statesmen galore; we have volumes galore written by Americans who have spent a few weeks or months, or even a year or two, in Japan, yet whose diagnoses and assessments of Japanese mentality and psychology are dangerously misleading. Many of them have observed Japan and the Japanese solely from the vantage point of that international hostelry, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. We who have lived in Japan for ten or twenty or even forty years know at least how comparatively little we really do know of the thinking processes of the Japanese. But we are at least in a better position to gauge those processes and their results than are the "armchair statesmen".
First of all, I know that there are among us today those who advocate building a fence about Japan and leaving her - I have heard the phrase used in that connection - "to stew in her own juice." The thought has been expressed that during the period of her existence as a world power Japan, through the competition of her export trade and her military aggressiveness, has proved to be more of a nuisance and a handicap in world affairs than
an asset. Control of Japanese imports, it is said, could be relied upon to prevent rearmament in future.
With regard to the competition of her export trade having been a nuisance, I might merely inquire whether our cotton exporters and our silk importers would share that opinion. In any case, it is open to question whether we should use our military victory to destroy the legitimate and peace commerce of a commercial competitor and thus betray the principles of the Atlantic Charter. As for the nuisance of Japan's military aggressiveness, it is my assumption that our primary and fundamental objective in the eventual postwar settlement with Japan will be the total and permanent elimination of that military cancer from the body politic of Japan.
I myself do not doubt that this major operation can and will be successfully performed and that effective measures can and will be taken to prevent the re-growth of that cancer in future. Otherwise we shall have fought Japan in vain. In any future system of re-education in Japan I visualize, as I have said, a helpful, cooperative, common sense spirit, devoid of browbeating or vindictiveness, with emphasis laid upon what the Japanese would have to gain by playing the game with the rest of the world, and what they would have to lose by recalcitrance.
It was always my regret that these things were not more forcibly brought before the Japanese people in the years before Pearl Harbor. I myself did everything in my power in that direction, but I was a voice crying in the wilderness. The Japanese people were told by the propaganda of their leaders that the United States and Great Britain were crowding them to the wall, intent upon grabbing control of East Asia and cutting Japan off from the raw materials which she needed for her very existence. At times some of the highest Japanese liberal statesmen did everything in their power, even at the constant risk of assassination by the fire-eaters, to bring their country back to a reputable international life, but they failed. That is all water over the dam now. Now we must look to the future.
The question of determining what kind and how much of Japan's industrial equipment should be left to her after the war will require systematic study. The United Nations must be in a position to determine the factories and machinery necessary for the maintenance of a peace economy, and to dispose of the balance as they think wise - through the dismantling of arsenals and dockyards and of heavy industries designed for or capable of the manufacture of implements of war.
President Roosevelt, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek and Prime Minister Churchill conferring at Cairo in November of this year declared that "all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China," adding: "Japan will also be expelled from all other territories which she has taken by violence and greed." The three Chiefs of State also declared that the "Three Great Powers, mindful of the enslavement of the people of Korea, are determined that in due course Korea shall become free and independent." And along with these measures, I visualize a grim determination that the Japanese shall make some sort of amends to China and to other countries for the unspeakable acts of brigandage and the barbarous cruelties inflicted upon the innocent people of those countries.
Now to return to the theory that a fence should be built around Japan and that the Japanese should be left "to stew in their own juice". I cannot see any signs of high statesmanship in such a tenet. Any careful student of international affairs and of history must see at a glance to what such a measure would lead. It would lead to the creation of a festering sore with permanent explosive tendencies - and, as I have said, we do not want
festering sores anywhere in the future world for the building of which we and our allies are fighting and striving today.
But there is another reason why that proposed monastic wall around Japan could lead only to disaster. Up to the restoration in l868 Japan was exclusively an agricultural country with a population of approximately twenty-five million people, living chiefly on their rice and vegetables and fish. After the opening of Japan to the world, the Japanese, imitating the West, industrialized the country, importing raw materials, manufacturing goods and selling the produce in foreign markets. As a direct result of that industrialization the population of Japan grew to some seventy-five million. If once again Japan is to become a hermit nation, what is to become of that excess population of fifty million souls? They could not possibly support themselves on the meager land subject to cultivation, for in the mountainous terrain and volcanic soil of the Japanese isles, such land is even now worked to the last square foot, and even now the Japanese depend on fertilizer from Manchuria, sugar from Formosa and supplementary rice supplies from Korea among other basic commodities. That excess population of
fifty million souls - or such part of it as survived the war - would quite simply starve. I doubt if even the most bloodthirsty of our fellow citizens could with equanimity countenance such a situation.
I now refer to the subject of Shintoism. There are really two forms of Shintoism.
One is the indigenous
religion of the Japanese, a primitive animism which conceives of all nature - mountains, rivers, trees, etc. as manifestations of or the dwelling places of deities. It has only slight ethical content.
The other form of Shintoism is a
cult. It has but little religious content, and has ethical content to the extent that it is designed to support the idea of the divine origin of the Emperor and ancestor-veneration, and to instill in the subject habits of obedience and subservience to the state. The military leaders of Japan have for long used this aspect of Shintoism to further their own ends and to inculcate in the Japanese a blind following of their doctrines as allegedly representing the will of the Emperor.
But fundamentally Shintoism is the worship of ancestors. The other day I was talking to a well know American who visited us in Tokyo a few years before Pearl Harbor. He said that before sailing for Japan he had visited his
family tomb up in New England where his forebears for several generations back - one of them having been a member of George Washington's Cabinet - were buried. Later he stood before the Japanese national shrine at Ise. He said that he was deeply moved by the scene. He told a Japanese friend of his own feeling when standing before his own family shrine in America and said that that feeling helped him to understand the reverence of those who came to pray at Ise. The Japanese, his face radiant, grasped the American's hand in both of his and said: "You understand."
There are those in our country who believe that Shintoism is the root of all evil in Japan. I do not agree. Just so long as militarism is rampant in that land, Shintoism will be used by the military leaders, by appealing to the emotionalism and the superstition of the people, to stress the virtues of militarism and of war through emphasis on the worship of the spirits of former military heroes. When militarism goes, that emphasis will likewise disappear. Shintoism involves Emperor-homage too, and when once Japan is under the aegis of a peace-seeking ruler not controlled by the military, that phase of Shintoism can become an asset, not a liability, in a reconstructed nation. In his book "Government by Assassination"
Hugh Byas writes: "The Japanese people must be their own liberators from a faked religion."
I think we should bear in mind an important historical fact. The attempt in Japan to erect a free parliamentary system was a grim failure. That attempt was bound to fail because Japan's archaic policy ruled out any possibility of parties dividing over basic political problems which are elsewhere resolved by parliamentary processes. So long as the constitution fixed sovereignty in the Emperor, it was impossible for any party to come forward with the doctrine that sovereignty resided in the people or for another party - in the absence of any such issue - to deny that doctrine. The promulgation of archaic ideas as the fundamental doctrine of the state made impossible any such struggle as that which took place in England between the Whigs and the Tories. Thus, lacking anything important over which party lines could be drawn, Japanese political parties developed into factions grouped around influential political personages, such as Prince Ito and Count Okuma, and when these men died, second rate politicians tried to take their place but without success.
When certain constitutional changes are made and the Japanese are given adequate time to build up a parliamentary
tradition, Japan will then, for the first time, have an opportunity to make the party system work.
To summarize my thoughts on this general subject of postwar Japan I would put it this way. First of all we must of course by force of arms reduce the Japanese army and navy and air force to impotence so that they can fight no further. That, I fear, is going to be a far longer and tougher job than most of our people conceive for we are, as I have said, dealing with a fanatical enemy. As one American officer put it: "The Japanese soldier fights to die; the American soldier fights to live." To try to predict even an approximate date for the total defeat of that enemy seems to me to be senseless. I would not hazard a guess within a period even of years. Time means nothing to the Japanese except as a much-needed asset. They blithely think and talk of a ten or fifty or hundred-year war. What they need is time to consolidate their gains. But when their leaders know beyond peradventure that they are going to be beaten, then I shall confidently look for efforts on their part to get us into an inconclusive peace. Let us be constantly on guard against such a move, for any premature peace would simply mean that the militaristic cancer would dig in underground
as it did in Germany, and our sons and grandsons would have to fight this whole dreadful war over again in the next generation. The Japanese would be clever. They would certainly present the pill in a form to appeal to the American people. But whatever terms they might suggest for any premature peace, it is certain that they will never, until reduced to military impotence, abandon their determination to exert control in East Asia. We must be constantly ready for such a move. We must go through with our war with Japan to the bitter end, regardless of time or losses.
In approaching a peace settlement with Japan we must remember that during the second half of the 19th Century and the first three decades of the 20th Century Japan developed a productive power comparable to that of many Western powers; that the rewards of this increased production were not distributed to the Japanese masses but were diverted to the building up of armaments; and that thus the failure of the Japanese people to obtain a more abundant life was not due to lack of economic opportunity but to the aggressive aims of their leaders. The Japanese, notwithstanding the advantages of propinquity to the nations of Asia, did not want to trade on a basis of open
competition with other powers, but wanted to create exclusive spheres in which their military would be in charge. No wonder that Japanese penetration and development abroad were viewed with suspicion and efforts made to resist them. In the light of our past experience, in the postwar world Japan can only be taken back as a respectable member of the family of nations after an adequate period of probation. When and as Japan gives practical evidence of peaceful intentions and shows to our complete satisfaction that she has renounced any intention of resuming what Japanese leaders refer to as a hundred years' war will we be safe in relaxing our guard. When and as Japan takes concrete steps along the paths of peace then there will be found opportunities for extending to Japan helpful cooperation. All this, however, is so far in the future that we cannot undertake now the laying down of a definite policy.
One more point I should like to make and that is this: in victory we must be prepared to implement the principles for which we are fighting. To allow our attitude as victors to be dominated by a desire to wreak vengeance on entire populations would certainly not eliminate focal points of future rebelliousness and disorder. And perhaps even more important would be the effect which such an
attitude would generate in time, among the people of the victor nation, possibly in our own children, namely, a profound cynicism with regard to the avowed principles for which we are now fighting.
Before terminating this soliloquy I would like to quote passages from three well known authorities, first Hillis Lory whose book "Japan's Military Masters" I consider one of the soundest works that has been written on that subject; second Sir George Sansom, long a member of the British Embassy in Tokyo and one of the world's most eminent writers and experts on Japan, and third, Hugh Byas, a resident in Japan for many years and long correspondent of the
New York Times in Tokyo. With both Sansom and Byas I maintained close relations during my own stay in Japan and on most issues in the Far East we saw eye to eye.
Lory writes:
"An appalling blunder in our thinking is the widespread belief that time is with us. On the contrary time is with Japan. It may seem almost inconceivable to many that Japan could possibly compete seriously with us in our war production. But what is there to prevent this? The Japanese have the raw materials. They have the manpower that can be trained. We have no monopoly on mass production.
Japan, even in conquered areas, is adapting it to her needs. Japan's most urgent need is time. That we must not give her.
"The longer she has to entrench herself in her conquered territories, the more formidable will be the military task of dislodging her. The longer she has to utilize her rich booty of war - the tin, the copper, the iron, her vast supplies of oil and rubber; the longer she has to lash the whip over the masses of China, the Dutch East Indies, Malaya, Burma, and the Philippines - labour that transforms these raw materials into guns and planes and tanks and ships, the longer must be the years of terrible fighting with its cost of American dead to defeat Japan.
"Every Japanese knows that now they are in to win all or lose all. This war is literally a life-and-death struggle. If Japan wins, no nation on earth can successfully challenge her."
In a paper read to the Eighth Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations in Canada in December, l942, Sansom, speaking personally and not officially, summed up his thesis in the following words:
"I believe that the past social and political history of the Japanese have produced in them as a
nation a remarkable incapacity to grasp the essentials of cultures other than their own, which accounts for their failure to take over, with the physical apparatus of Western Civilization, anything beyond the most superficial aspects of its moral elements. I do not see how this is to be broken down except by increased association between Japanese and people of other nations, and I have to admit that the facts of geography and international politics are unfavourable to that process. Yet, unless this difficulty is somehow overcome, the prospects of a useful contribution by Japan to postwar reconstruction and reform are poor indeed. An outlawed Japan, even weakened to the point of despair, cannot be other than a danger, a kind of septic focus.
"I therefore see no escape from the conclusion that, in their own interests, the United Nations must after the war endeavour to enlist the collaboration of Japan in their projects for security and welfare in the Pacific area. I cannot suggest specific and positive methods, because it is too early to envisage the state of affairs at the end of the war, the relative military and economic strengths of the
combatants and the state of mind of their peoples. But I do believe that an attempt by the victors to prescribe the form or the content of Japanese domestic policy would make their task, already difficult enough, impossible of execution.
"Similar difficulties are likely to arise out of plans to dictate to Japan reforms in her system of domestic government. They are likely to engender more antagonism than agreement. The important thing is not so much that the Japanese should be told to abolish distasteful features of their system as that they should have some positive notions of what to put in their place.
"The liberal democracies now fighting Japan have reason to be proud of their past political history and of the freedoms which they have gained; but we are most of us now agreed that our political philosophies are due for some drastic revision. It is only under the strain of war that we begin to realize that the liberty of the individual citizen has its essential counterpart in his obligations. We find that our enemies, who are not by our standards - or by any standards, for that matter - free men, are able to gain victories which, making all allowance for their material
strength, depend in no small measure upon a militant faith. It is, we believe firmly, a mistaken, heretical faith, and its tenets are propounded by its leaders in the language of lunacy. But beneath all the mystical rubbish, the mumbo-jumbo of the master race, the special position in the universe, the divine mission and suchlike foolishness, there is a core of genuine sentiment, a strong feeling of national unity and national purpose in a society where men's duties are felt to be more important than their rights.
"Unless at the end of the war the Japanese are in a state of helpless despair, and ready to follow any strong lead, they are not likely to adopt a ready-made 'way of life' of Western pattern which does not offer better prospect of reconciling rights and duties throughout the community than does our own peace-time system of liberal democracy. They will, I feel sure, for better or worse work out their own system by trial and error upon the basis of their own traditions.
"I do not venture to hazard a prediction, but I should not be surprised if, in favourable conditions, they developed a more modern and democratic type of constitutional monarchy; and I am interested to find
that Dr. Hu Shih, for whose judgment I have great respect, thinks that this is not unlikely."
Byas, in his admirable book "Government by Assassination" writes:
"Japan's spiritual malady is the same as Germany's a false philosophy. It is a belief that the Japanese race and state are one and the same and that it has unique qualities that make it superior to its neighbors and give it a special mission to perform......
"This false philosophy has been so sedulously inculcated and so eagerly swallowed that at last a policy of live and let live, a position of equality, and a willingness to compromise seem intolerable humiliations. The only position Japan will consider is that of overlord and protector of East Asia.....
"For our own future and not for that of Japan we must continue the war until the Japanese forces have been driven from the regions they have invaded. Yet in saving ourselves we are saving the Japanese people. The false philosophy they have taken to their heart will never be discredited until it comes back to them in defeat, humiliation, and loss. Peace without victory, if we accepted it, would be to them a mere
cloak to save our face. They would readily join in the fraud for the benefits it would bring them, but the whole false morality which underlies their policy would be reinforced, and their gains would be the jumping-off place for fresh wars.....
"The Japanese people must be their own liberators from a faked religion and a fraudulent Constitution. But our victory will start the process and help it along. It will cure them of the illusion that aggression pays and it will open wide a better way to their renascent national energies.....
"We want the Japanese people to recognise the war for what it was - a bloody and useless sacrifice to false gods.....
"We are laying the foundations of a new order which we conceive to be suited to the modern world in which we live. The riches of the earth will be freely and fairly open to all nations, and the primitive or backward or simply weak peoples will have the protection of an authority representing civilized humanity instead of being left to the chance that may give them a mild or a harsh taskmaster.
"If we consider fifty years of modern Japan and not the gangster decade alone, we are entitled to believe that Japan has qualities that will again fit it to be a member of this new order. Japan is now possessed by the evil genius that it loves, but there is another Japan and it has a contribution to make to the world.....
"We want to live in peace and devote our energies to our own well-being. We want to start on the tremendous task of adjusting our lives to a civilization of abundance. We want to raise the level of subsistence and to create economic security for all and on that foundation to erect a free universal culture such as the world has not seen.
"In that order there can be a place for Japan."