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13：敗戦後の日本人

池田光穂

13


                       The Japanese Since VJ-Day

Americans have good reason to be proud of their part in the
administration of Japan since VJ-Day. The policy of the United States
was laid down in the State-War-Navy directive which was transmitted by
radio on August 29, and it has been administered with skill by General
MacArthur. The excellent grounds for such pride have often been obscured
by partisan praise and criticism in the American press and on the radio,
and few people have known enough about Japanese culture to be sure
whether a given policy was desirable or undesirable.

The great issue at the time of Japan’s surrender was the nature of the
occupation. Were the victors to use the existing government, even the
Emperor, or was it to be liquidated? Was there to be a town-by-town,
province-by-province administration, with Military Government officers
of the United States in command? The pattern in Italy and Germany had
been to set up local A.M.G. headquarters as integral parts of the combat
forces, and to place authority for local domestic matters in the hands
of the Allied administrators. On VJ-Day, those in charge of A.M.G. in
the Pacific still expected to institute such a rule in Japan. The
Japanese also did not know what responsibility for their own affairs
they would be allowed to retain. The Potsdam Proclamation had stated
only that ‘points in Japanese territory to be designated by the Allies
shall be occupied to secure the basic objectives we are here setting
forth,’ and that there must be eliminated for all time ‘the authority
and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan
into embarking on world conquest.’

The State-War-Navy directive to General MacArthur embodied a great
decision on these matters, a decision which General MacArthur’s
Headquarters fully supported. The Japanese were to be responsible for
the administration and reconstruction of their country. ‘The Supreme
Commander will exercise his authority through Japanese governmental
machinery and agencies, including the Emperor, to the extent that this
satisfactorily furthers United States objectives. The Japanese
government will be permitted, under his instructions (General
MacArthur’s), to exercise the normal powers of government in matters of
domestic administration.’ General MacArthur’s administration of Japan
is, therefore, quite unlike that of Germany or Italy. It is exclusively
a headquarters organization, utilizing Japanese officialdom from top to
bottom. It addresses its communications to the Imperial Japanese
Government, not to the Japanese people or to the residents of some town
or province. Its business is to state goals for the Japanese government
to work toward. If a Japanese Minister believes them impossible, he can
offer to resign, but, if his case is good, he may get the directive
modified.

This kind of administration was a bold move. The advantages of this
policy from the point of view of the United States are clear enough. As
General Hilldring said at the time:

    The advantages which are gained through the utilization of the
    national government are enormous. If there were no Japanese
    Government available for our use, we would have to operate
    directly the whole complicated machine required for the
    administration of a country of seventy million people. These
    people differ from us in language, customs, and attitudes. By
    cleaning up and using the Japanese Government machinery as a
    tool we are saving our time and our manpower and our resources.
    In other words, we are requiring the Japanese to do their own
    house-cleaning, but we are providing the specifications.

When this directive was being drawn up in Washington, however, there
were still many Americans who feared that the Japanese would be sullen
and hostile, a nation of watchful avengers who might sabotage any
peaceful program. These fears did not prove to be justified. And the
reasons lay in the curious culture of Japan more than in any universal
truths about defeated nations or politics or economics. Probably among
no other peoples would a policy of good faith have paid off as well as
it did in Japan. In Japanese eyes it removed from the stark fact of
defeat the symbols of humiliation and challenged them to put into effect
a new national policy, acceptance of which was possible precisely
because of the culturally conditioned character of the Japanese.

In the United States we have argued endlessly about hard and soft peace
terms. The real issue is not between hard and soft. The problem is to
use that amount of hardness, no more and no less, which will break up
old and dangerous patterns of aggressiveness and set new goals. The
means to be chosen depend on the character of the people and upon the
traditional social order of the nation in question. Prussian
authoritarianism, embedded as it is in the family and in the daily civic
life, makes necessary certain kinds of peace terms for Germany. Wise
peace directives would differ from those for Japan. Germans do not
regard themselves, like the Japanese, as debtors to the world and to the
ages. They strive, not to repay an incalculable debt, but to avoid being
victims. The father is an authoritarian figure, and, like any other
person who has superior status, it is he who, as the phrase is,
‘enforces respect.’ It is he who feels himself threatened if he does not
get it. In German life each generation of sons revolt in adolescence
against their authoritarian fathers and then regard themselves as
surrendering finally at adulthood to a drab and unexciting life which
they identify as that of their parents. The high point of existence
remains, for life, those years of the _Sturm und Drang_ of adolescent
rebellion.

The problem in Japanese culture is not crass authoritarianism. The
father is a person who treats his young children with a respect and
fondness which has seemed to almost all Western observers to be
exceptional in Occidental experience. Because the Japanese child takes
for granted certain kinds of real comradeship with his father and is
overtly proud of him, the father’s simple change of voice can make the
child carry out his wishes. But the father is no martinet to his young
children, and adolescence is not a period of revolt against parental
authority. Rather it is a period when children become the responsible
and obedient representatives of their family before the judging eyes of
the world. They show respect to their fathers, as the Japanese say, ‘for
the practice,’ ‘for the training,’ that is, as a respect-object he is a
depersonalized symbol of hierarchy and of the proper conduct of life.

This attitude which is learned by the child in his earliest experiences
with his father becomes a pattern throughout Japanese society. Men who
are accorded the highest marks of respect because of their hierarchal
position do not characteristically themselves wield arbitrary power. The
officials who head the hierarchy do not typically exercise the actual
authority. From the Emperor down, advisors and hidden forces work in the
background. One of the most accurate descriptions of this aspect of
Japanese society was given by the leader of one of the super-patriotic
societies of the type of the Black Dragon to a Tokyo English-newspaper
reporter in the early 1930s. ‘Society,’ he said, meaning of course
Japan, ‘is a triangle controlled by a pin in one corner.’[1] The
triangle, in other words, lies on the table for all to see. The pin is
invisible. Sometimes the triangle lies to the right, sometimes to the
left. It swings on a pivot which never avows itself. Everything is done,
as Westerners so often say, ‘with mirrors.’ Every effort is made to
minimize the appearance of arbitrary authority, and to make every act
appear to be a gesture of loyalty to the status-symbol who is so
constantly divorced from real exercise of power. When the Japanese do
identify a source of unmasked power, they regard it, as they have always
regarded the moneylender and the _narikin_, as exploitive and as
unworthy of their system.

The Japanese, viewing their world in this way, can stage revolts against
exploitation and injustice without ever becoming revolutionists. They do
not offer to tear the fabric of their world in pieces. They can
institute the most thoroughgoing changes, as they did in the Meiji era,
without casting any aspersion upon the system. They called it a
Restoration, a ‘dipping back’ into the past. They are not
revolutionists, and Western writers who have based their hopes upon
ideological mass movements in Japan, who during the war magnified the
Japanese underground and looked to it for leadership in capitulation,
and who since VJ-Day have prophesied the triumph of radical policies at
the polls, have gravely misunderstood the situation. They have been
wrong in the prophecies they have made. The conservative Premier, Baron
Shidehara, spoke more accurately for the Japanese when he formed his
cabinet in October, 1945:

    The Government of the new Japan has a democratic form which
    respects the will of the people. . . . In our country from olden
    days the Emperor made his will the will of the people. This is
    the spirit of Emperor Meiji’s Constitution, and the democratic
    government I am speaking of can be considered truly a
    manifestation of this spirit.

Such a phrasing of democracy seems less than nothing to American
readers, but there is no doubt that Japan can more readily extend the
area of civil liberties and build up the welfare of her people on the
basis of such an identification than on the basis of Occidental
ideology.

Japan will, of course, experiment with Western political mechanics of
democracy, but the Western arrangements will not be trusted tools with
which to fashion a better world, as they are in the United States.
Popular elections and the legislative authority of elected persons will
create as many difficulties as they solve. When such difficulties
develop, Japan will modify the methods upon which we rely to achieve
democracy. Then American voices will be raised to say that the war has
been fought in vain. We believe in the rightness of our tools. At best,
however, popular elections will be peripheral to Japanese reconstruction
as a peaceful nation for a long time to come. Japan has not changed so
fundamentally since the 1890s, when she first experimented with
elections, that some of the old difficulties Lafcadio Hearn described
then will not be likely to recur:

    There was really no personal animosity in those furious election
    contests which cost so many lives; there was scarcely any
    personal antagonism in those parliamentary debates of which the
    violence astonished strangers. The political struggles were not
    really between individuals but between clan interests or party
    interests; and the devoted followers of each clan or party
    understood the new politics only as a new kind of war—a war of
    loyalty to be fought for the leader’s sake.[2]

In more recent elections in the nineteen-twenties, villagers used to say
before they cast their ballots, ‘My neck is washed clean for the sword,’
a phrase which identified the contest with the old attacks of the
privileged samurai upon the common people. All the connotations of
elections in Japan will differ even today from those in the United
States, and this will be true quite apart from whether Japan is or is
not pursuing dangerous aggressive policies.

Japan’s real strength which she can use in remaking herself into a
peaceful nation lies in her ability to say of a course of action, ‘That
failed,’ and then to throw her energies into other channels. The
Japanese have an ethic of alternatives. They tried to achieve their
‘proper place’ in war, and they lost. That course, now, they can
discard, because their whole training has conditioned them to possible
changes of direction. Nations with a more absolutist ethic must convince
themselves that they are fighting for principles. When they surrender to
the victors, they say, ‘Right was lost when we were defeated,’ and their
self-respect demands that they work to make this ‘right’ win next time.
Or they can beat their breasts and confess their guilt. The Japanese
need do neither. Five days after VJ-Day, before an American had landed
on Japan, the great Tokyo paper, the _Mainichi Shimbun_, could speak of
defeat and of the political changes it would bring, and say, ‘But it was
all to the good for the ultimate salvation of Japan.’ The editorial
stressed that no one should forget for a moment that they had been
completely defeated. Because their effort to build up a Japan based on
sheer might had met with utter failure, they must henceforth tread the
path of a peaceful nation. The _Asahi_, another great Tokyo newspaper,
that same week characterized Japan’s late ‘excessive faith in military
force’ as ‘a serious error’ in its national and international policy.
‘The old attitude, from which we could gain so little and suffered so
much, should be discarded for a new one which is rooted in international
co-operation and love of peace.’

The Westerner observes this shift in what he regards as principles and
suspects it. It is, however, an integral part of the conduct of life in
Japan, whether in personal or in international relations. The Japanese
sees that he has made an ‘error’ in embarking on a course of action
which does not achieve its goal. When it fails, he discards it as a lost
cause, for he is not conditioned to pursue lost causes. ‘It is no use,’
he says, ‘biting one’s navel.’ Militarism was in the nineteen-thirties
the accepted means by which they thought to gain the admiration of the
world—an admiration to be based on their armed might—and they accepted
all the sacrifices such a program required. On August 14, 1945, the
Emperor, the sanctioned voice of Japan, told them that they had lost.
They accepted all that such a fact implied. It meant the presence of
American troops, so they welcomed them. It meant the failure of their
dynastic enterprise, so they were willing to consider a Constitution
which outlawed war. Ten days after VJ-Day, their newspaper, the
_Yomiuri-Hochi_, could write about the ‘Beginning of a New Art and New
Culture,’ and could say, ‘There must be a firm conviction in our hearts
that military defeat has nothing to do with the value of a nation’s
culture. Military defeat should serve as an impetus . . . (for) it has
taken no less than national defeat for the Japanese people to lift their
minds truly to the world, to see things objectively as they really are.
Every irrationality that has warped Japanese thinking must be eliminated
by frank analysis. . . . It takes courage to look this defeat in the
face as a stark fact, (but we must) put our faith in Nippon’s culture of
tomorrow.’ They had tried one course of action and been defeated. Today
they would try the peaceful arts of life. ‘Japan,’ their editorials
repeated, ‘must be respected among the nations of the world,’ and it was
the duty of the Japanese to deserve this respect on a new basis.

These newspaper editorials were not just the voice of a few
intellectuals; the common people on a Tokyo street and in a remote
village make the same right-about-face. It has been incredible to
American occupying troops that these friendly people are the ones who
had vowed to fight to the death with bamboo spears. The Japanese ethic
contains much which Americans repudiate, but American experiences during
the occupation of Japan have been an excellent demonstration of how many
favorable aspects a strange ethic can have.

American administration of Japan under General MacArthur has accepted
this Japanese ability to sail a new course. It has not impeded that
course by insisting on using techniques of humiliation. It would have
been culturally acceptable according to Western ethics if we had done
so. For it is a tenet of Occidental ethics that humiliation and
punishment are socially effective means to bring about a wrongdoer’s
conviction of sin. Such admission of sin is then a first step in his
rehabilitation. The Japanese, as we have seen, state the issue in
another way. Their ethic makes a man responsible for all the
implications of his acts, and the natural consequences of an error
should convince him of its undesirability. These natural consequences
may even be defeat in an all-out war. But these are not situations which
the Japanese must resent as humiliating. In the Japanese lexicon, a
person or a nation humiliates another by detraction, ridicule, contempt,
belittling, and insisting on symbols of dishonor. When the Japanese
believe themselves humiliated, revenge is a virtue. No matter how
strongly Western ethics condemn such a tenet, the effectiveness of
American occupation of Japan depends on American self-restraint on this
point. For the Japanese separate ridicule, which they terribly resent,
from ‘natural consequences,’ which according to the terms of their
surrender include such things as demilitarization and even Spartan
imposition of indemnities.

Japan, in her one great victory over a major power, showed that even as
a victor she could carefully avoid humiliating a defeated enemy when it
finally capitulated and when she did not consider that that nation had
sneered at her. There is a famous photograph of the surrender of the
Russian Army at Port Arthur in 1905 which is known to every Japanese. It
shows the Russians wearing their swords. The victors and the vanquished
can be distinguished only by their uniforms for the Russians were not
stripped of their arms. The well-known Japanese account of that
surrender tells that when General Stoessel, the Russian commander,
signified his willingness to receive Japanese propositions of surrender,
a Japanese captain and interpreter went to his headquarters taking food.
‘All the horses except General Stoessel’s own had been killed and eaten
so that the present of fifty chickens and a hundred fresh eggs which the
Japanese brought with them was welcome indeed.’ The meeting of General
Stoessel and General Nogi was arranged for the following day. ‘The two
generals clasped hands. Stoessel expressed his admiration for the
courage of the Japanese and . . . General Nogi praised the long and
brave defense of the Russians. Stoessel expressed his sympathy with Nogi
for the loss of his two sons in the campaign. . . . Stoessel presented
his fine white Arab horse to General Nogi, but Nogi said that, much as
he would like to receive it as his own from the General’s hands, it must
first be presented to the Emperor. He promised, however, that if it came
back to him, as he had every reason to believe it would, he would take
care of it as if it had always been his.’[3] Everyone in Japan knew the
stable which General Nogi built for General Stoessel’s horse in his
front yard—a stable often described as more pretentious than Nogi’s own
house, and after General Nogi’s death a part of the Nogi national
shrine.

It has been said that the Japanese have changed between that day of the
Russian surrender and the years of their occupation of the Philippines,
for instance, when their wanton destructiveness and cruelty were known
to all the world. To a people with the extreme situational ethics of the
Japanese, however, this is not the necessary conclusion. In the first
place, the enemy did not capitulate after Bataan; there was only a local
surrender. Even when the Japanese, in their turn, surrendered in the
Philippines, Japan was still fighting. In the second place, the Japanese
never considered that the Russians had ‘insulted’ them in the early
years of this century, whereas every Japanese was reared in the
nineteen-twenties and -thirties to regard United States policy as
‘taking Japan cheap,’ or in their phrase, ‘making her as faeces.’ This
had been Japan’s reaction to the Exclusion Act, to the part the United
States played in the Treaty of Portsmouth and in the Naval Parity
agreements. The Japanese had been encouraged to regard in the same way
the growing economic rôle of the United States in the Far East and our
racial attitudes toward the non-white peoples of the world. The victory
over Russia and the victory over the United States in the Philippines,
therefore, illustrate Japanese behavior in its two most opposed aspects:
when insults are involved and when they are not.

The final victory of the United States again changed the situation for
the Japanese. Their ultimate defeat brought about, as is usual in
Japanese life, the abandonment of the course they had been pursuing. The
peculiar ethic of the Japanese allowed them to wipe the slate clean.
United States policy and General MacArthur’s administration have avoided
writing fresh symbols of humiliation upon that washed slate, and have
held simply to insisting on those things which in Japanese eyes are
‘natural consequences’ of defeat. It has worked.

The retention of the Emperor has been of great importance. It has been
handled well. It was the Emperor who called first upon General
MacArthur, not MacArthur upon him, and this was an object lesson to the
Japanese the force of which it is hard for Westerners to appreciate. It
is said that when it was suggested to the Emperor that he disavow his
divinity, he protested that it would be a personal embarrassment to
strip himself of something he did not have. The Japanese, he said
truthfully, did not consider him a god in the Western sense. MacArthur’s
Headquarters, however, urged upon him that the Occidental idea of his
claim to divinity was bad for Japan’s international repute, and the
Emperor agreed to accept the embarrassment the disavowal would cost him.
He spoke on New Year’s Day, and asked to have all comments on his
message translated for him from the world press. When he had read them,
he sent a message to General MacArthur’s Headquarters saying that he was
satisfied. Foreigners had obviously not understood before, and he was
glad he had spoken.

The policy of the United States has also allowed the Japanese certain
gratifications. The State-Army-Navy directive specifies that
‘encouragement shall be given and favor shown to the development of
organizations in labor, industry and agriculture, organized on a
democratic basis.’ Japanese labor has organized in many industries, and
the old farmers’ unions which were active in the 1920s and 1930s are
asserting themselves again. To many Japanese this initiative which they
can now take to better their condition is a proof that Japan has won
something as a consequence of this war. One American correspondent tells
of a striker in Tokyo who looked up at a G.I. and said, beaming broadly,
‘Japan _win_, no?’ Strikes in Japan today have many parallels to the old
Peasants’ Revolts where the farmers’ plea was always that the taxes and
corvées to which they were subject interfered with adequate production.
They were not class warfare in the Western sense, and they were not an
attempt to change the system itself. Throughout Japan today strikes do
not slow up production. The favorite form is for the workers ‘to occupy
the plant, continue work and make management lose face by increasing
production. Strikers at a Mitsui-owned coal mine barred all management
personnel from the pits and stepped daily output up from 250 tons to
620. Workers at Ashio copper mines operated during a “strike,” increased
production, and doubled their own wages.’[4]

The administration of any defeated country is, of course, difficult, no
matter how much good sense the accepted policy shows. In Japan the
problems of food and shelter and reconversion are inevitably acute. They
would be at least equally acute under an administration which did not
make use of Japanese governmental personnel. The problem of demobilized
soldiers, which was so much dreaded by American administrators before
the war ended, is certainly less threatening than it would have been if
Japanese officials had not been retained. But it is not easily solved.
The Japanese are aware of the difficulty and their newspapers spoke
feelingly last fall about how bitter the brew of defeat was to the
soldiers who had suffered and lost, and it begged them not to let this
interfere with their ‘judgment.’ The repatriated army has in general
shown remarkable ‘judgment,’ but unemployment and defeat throw some
soldiers into the old pattern of secret societies for nationalistic
goals. They can easily resent their present status. The Japanese no
longer accord them their old privileged position. The wounded soldier
used to be clothed all in white and people bowed to him on the street.
Even a peacetime Army recruit was given a send-off party and a
welcome-home party by his hamlet. There were drinks and refreshments and
dancing and costumes, and he sat in the place of honor. Now the
repatriated soldier gets no such attentions. His family makes a place
for him, but that is all. In many cities and towns he is
cold-shouldered. It is easy, knowing how bitterly the Japanese take such
a change of behavior, to imagine his satisfaction in joining up with his
old comrades to bring back the old days when the glory of Japan was
entrusted to soldiers’ hands. Some of his war comrades will tell him,
too, how luckier Japanese soldiers are already fighting with the Allies
in Java and in Shansi and in Manchuria; why should he despair? He too
will fight again, they will tell him. Nationalistic secret societies are
old, old institutions in Japan; they ‘cleared the name’ of Japan. Men
conditioned to feel that ‘the world tips’ so long as anything is left
undone to even scores were always possible candidates for such
undercover societies. The violence which these societies, such as the
Black Dragon and the Black Ocean, espoused is the violence which
Japanese ethics allows as giri-to-one’s-name, and the long effort of the
Japanese Government to emphasize gimu at the expense of
giri-to-one’s-name will have to be continued in the coming years if this
violence is to be eliminated.

It will require more than an appeal to ‘judgment.’ It will require a
reconstruction of Japanese economy which will give a livelihood and
‘proper place’ to men who are now in their twenties and thirties. It
will require improvement in the lot of the farmer. The Japanese return,
whenever there is economic distress, to their old farm villages, and the
tiny farms, encumbered with debts and in many places with rents, cannot
feed many more mouths. Industry too must be set going, for the strong
feeling against dividing the inheritance with younger sons eventually
sends all but the eldest out to seek their fortune in the city.

The Japanese have a long hard road before them, no doubt, but if
rearmament is not provided for in the State budget they have an
opportunity to raise their national standard of living. A nation like
Japan which spent half its national income on armament and the armed
forces for a decade before Pearl Harbor can lay the foundation of a
healthy economy if it outlaws such expenditures and progressively
reduces its requisitions from the farmers. As we have seen, the Japanese
formula for division of farm products was 60 per cent for the
cultivator; 40 per cent he paid out in taxes and rents. This is in great
contrast to rice countries like Burma and Siam where 90 per cent was the
traditional proportion left to the cultivator. This huge requisition
upon the cultivator in Japan was what ultimately made possible the
financing of the national war machine.

Any European or Asiatic country which is not arming during the next
decade will have a potential advantage over the countries which are
arming, for its wealth can be used to build a healthy and prosperous
economy. In the United States we hardly take this situation into account
in our Asiatic and European policies, for we know that we would not be
impoverished in this country by expensive programs of national defense.
Our country was not devastated. We are not primarily an agricultural
country. Our crucial problem is industrial overproduction. We have
perfected mass production and mechanical equipment until our population
cannot find employment unless we set in motion great programs of
armament or of luxury production or of welfare and research services.
The need for profitable investment of capital is also acute. This
situation is quite different outside the United States. It is different
even in Western Europe. In spite of all demands for reparations, a
Germany which is not allowed to rearm could in a decade or so have laid
the foundations of a sound and prosperous economy which would be
impossible in France if her policy is to build up great military power.
Japan could make the most of a similar advantage over China.
Militarization is a current goal in China and her ambitions are
supported by the United States. Japan, if she does not include
militarization in her budget, can, if she will, provide for her own
prosperity before many years, and she could make herself indispensable
in the commerce of the East. She could base her economy on the profits
of peace and raise the standard of living of her people. Such a peaceful
Japan could attain a place of honor among the nations of the world, and
the United States could be of great assistance if it continued to use
its influence in support of such a program.

What the United States cannot do—what no outside nation could do—is to
create by fiat a free, democratic Japan. It has never worked in any
dominated country. No foreigner can decree, for a people who have not
his habits and assumptions, a manner of life after his own image. The
Japanese cannot be legislated into accepting the authority of elected
persons and ignoring ‘proper station’ as it is set up in their
hierarchal system. They cannot be legislated into adopting the free and
easy human contacts to which we are accustomed in the United States, the
imperative demand to be independent, the passion each individual has to
choose his own mate, his own job, the house he will live in and the
obligations he will assume. The Japanese themselves, however, are quite
articulate about changes in this direction which they regard as
necessary. Their public men have said since VJ-Day that Japan must
encourage its men and women to live their own lives and to trust their
own consciences. They do not say so, of course, but any Japanese
understands that they are questioning the rôle of ‘shame’ (haji) in
Japan, and that they hope for a new growth of freedom among their
countrymen: freedom from fear of the criticism and ostracism of ‘the
world.’

For social pressures in Japan, no matter how voluntarily embraced, ask
too much of the individual. They require him to conceal his emotions, to
give up his desires, and to stand as the exposed representative of a
family, an organization or a nation. The Japanese have shown that they
can take all the self-discipline such a course requires. But the weight
upon them is extremely heavy. They have to repress too much for their
own good. Fearing to venture upon a life which is less costly to their
psyches, they have been led by militarists upon a course where the costs
pile up interminably. Having paid so high a price, they became
self-righteous and have been contemptuous of people with a less
demanding ethic.

The Japanese have taken the first great step toward social change by
identifying aggressive warfare as an ‘error’ and a lost cause. They hope
to buy their passage back to a respected place among peaceful nations.
It will have to be a peaceful world. If Russia and the United States
spend the coming years in arming for attack, Japan will use her know-how
to fight in that war. But to admit that certainty does not call in
question the inherent possibility of a peaceful Japan. Japan’s
motivations are situational. She will seek her place within a world at
peace if circumstances permit. If not, within a world organized as an
armed camp.

At present the Japanese know militarism as a light that failed. They
will watch to see whether it has also failed in other nations of the
world. If it has not, Japan can relight her own warlike ardor and show
how well she can contribute. If it has failed elsewhere, Japan can set
herself to prove how well she has learned the lesson that imperialistic
dynastic enterprises are no road to honor.

-----

[1] Quoted by Upton Close, _Behind the Face of Japan_, 1942, p. 136.

[2] _Japan: An Interpretation_, 1904, p. 453.

[3] Quoted from a Japanese account, by Upton Close, _Behind the Face of
Japan_, 1942, p. 294. This version of the Russian surrender does not
have to be literally true to have cultural importance.

[4] _Time_, February 18, 1946.


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