Japanese Minds

The presentation of Japan by Prof. Jason Michael Morgan and Mr. Kenji Yoshida in the March Chronicles (“A Client State Turns Eighty: Japan in Washington’s World Order”) as a “psychologically damaged” victim of America’s “occupation” is shocking in a magazine generally free of the psychoanalytic mindset. America was not alone in seeing Japan as “too dangerous to entrust with weapons.” To force the emperor “to disavow his connection to divinity” and to rob the Japanese people “of their spiritual foundation” should be seen as not only reasonable but necessary and good for all concerned.

Anthony Daniels (also known by his pen name, Theodore Dalrymple) writes in March 2024 issue of The New Criterion of the writer Gómez Carrillo visiting Japan in 1905 (“A Forgotten Writer of Père Lachaise”). He saw that nation as “so impressed by their military victories over China and Russia that they fell victim to the illusion … that they were special … destined to be the center of the world.” He goes on to describe that desire for glory as proving dangerous to themselves as well as to their neighbors.

It is ironic that we have the realistic view from the retired psychiatrist, Daniels, while the standard psychotherapeutic view is presented by Prof. Morgan and Mr. Yoshida. Chronicles should apologize.

—Carol Tharp

Winnetka, Ill.

Prof. Morgan and Mr. Yoshida reply:

Neither Theodore Dalrymple nor Enrique Gómez Carrillo is or was more than passably acquainted with Japan. To our knowledge, neither reads or read Japanese. And yet, it is good that Ms. Tharp brings them up, because they fairly represent the standard understanding of Japanese history in the West. To wit: the Japanese were worshipping their emperor and terrorizing Asia until the Americans put a stop to that superstition and violence and ushered Japan into the modern world. In this view, Japan is now mostly cured of its samurai predilections, but still must be watched carefully, under the thumb of the U.S.-Japan alliance, lest she run amok in Asia again.

The view from inside Japan is considerably more nuanced. Japan’s “emperor worship” was hardly, as the Japanese saying goes, “a single sheet of stone,” that is to say, monolithically worshipped. Many among the prewar and wartime Japanese right were fixated on the Imperial Household as a bulwark against communism and liberalism, but it is questionable whether many Japanese actually worshipped the mikado (“the emperor”).

Even early 20th-century Japanese philosopher Kita Ikki, who placed the emperor at the center of an envisioned organic Japanese society,  did not call for blind emperor worship. Katayama Morihide, a contemporary professor and public intellectual, has analyzed Kita and others of his bent in Mikan no fashizumu (Unfinished Fascism, 2012) and Sonno joi; Mitogaku no yonhyakunen (Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians: 400 Years of the Mito Historical School, 2021). Kita  viewed the emperor and the Imperial Household as part of a diachronic social and political landscape that comes under criticism.

Unfortunately, English-only readers cannot access Katayama or others who treat Japanese history without a Western conversionary bias. Nor can English-only readers learn much about Yamamoto Shinjiro, an admiral in the Imperial Japanese Navy and the emperor’s personal tutor. Admiral Yamamoto adored his sovereign—and was also a devout Catholic. 

We know that Joseph Grew, the American ambassador to Japan, advocated keeping the emperor in place to preserve the unity of the Japanese polity.  MacArthur wisely took the same position. We might also recall that the president who took a hardline with Japanese expansion in 1940 surrounded himself with Soviet agents and was allied to Joseph Stalin. It was this American ally  who declared war on a prostrate Japan after the dropping of two atomic bomb and who seized Japanese possessions.

Regarding the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War, Japanese public opinion was in reality the opposite of Gómez Carrillo’s impression. Apart from the Imperial Japanese Navy’s decisive victory over the Russian Second Pacific Squadron in the Battle of Tsushima, the Russo-Japanese War was nearly a draw. It had cost a staggering number of Japanese lives and extracted a steep financial price—in both international loans and subsequent inflation—from the Japanese government and people. The war was  chastening for Japan and  left the Japanese political class with few illusions of superiority. 

After so much sacrifice in blood and treasure, the Japanese public was in fact incensed at the paltry peace deal brokered by President Theodore Roosevelt. In September 1905 an anti-government, anti-newspaper riot broke out over the treaty in Hibiya in downtown Tokyo .

The Russo-Japanese War was therefore not a resounding success for Japan militarily or politically. It’s also puzzling to learn that the Russo-Japanese War set Japan on a course of empire and a “desire for glory,” when the historical record  shows that it did no such thing.

In a 1936 correspondence with Navy officials in Hawaii, FDR  started laying the groundwork for hostilities with Japan—five years before Pearl Harbor. Washington, an imperial power since 1898 and the master of the Hawaiian territory that its marines had seized at gunpoint, had one Pacific rival as FDR pointed out: Japan. The American president in his note underscored the two powers were on a collision course. Since 1945, Japan was no longer an obstacle to Washington’s military power, but a host to it.

John Van Antwerp MacMurray, an American diplomat, understood Asia better than most. MacMurray wrote a long memorandum in 1935 in which he emphasized the role that Western powers had played in forcing Japan’s hand in China and advised his government to steer clear of further antagonizing Japan. Interestingly, MacMurray’s analysis of the struggle for control of the detritus of the Qing Dynasty tracks nicely with the work of Ito Shichiji, a journalist whose 1944 book-length reading of the causes of the war between Japan and the United States finds much irony in the fact that the country of the Monroe Doctrine advocated an open door in China. 

We believe the psyop against Japan explains her continued dependence, in the year 2024, on her erstwhile enemy for national defense. This psychological dismantling was the intended the mechanism that created postwar Japan and its client status in relation to Washington. That relationship—if one can call induced dependence a relationship—is nearly 80 years old. 

The world is a different place than it was in 1945. In our essay, we suggest that it is time to rethink received narratives. First, though, a bevy of ahistorical untruths will have to be discarded, and nuance finally allowed into the history of Japanese-American relations.

Not-So-Pure-Hearted

After reading the “Polemics & Exchanges” in the March issue regarding “pure-hearted” Union army veterans (“Pure-Hearted Ancestors,” page 4), I would like to note that apologists for the North’s war against the seceding Southern states are more than happy to ascribe moral superiority to the effort. It is easy to assert that the war was waged to “free the slaves” and thereby imply that it was motivated by concern for the slave’s well-being.

The reality is more complex. As Joanne Pope Melish noted in her history of emancipation in New England, Disowning Slavery, “because it was easy to conflate the elimination of slaves as a category with the elimination of the humans occupying that category, the prospect of an end to slavery undoubtedly had meant to many whites the end of a troubling black presence.”

Although there isn’t polling available to demonstrate how widespread that viewpoint was, Oregon’s plebiscite at the outset of statehood is informative. Its proposed constitution was put to a popular vote in the state in 1857 and included two separate questions: whether slavery should be prohibited, and whether free African Americans should be excluded from the state. The voters approved both, with the slavery prohibition proposal receiving 75 percent of the vote and the exclusion of African Americans receiving 89 percent of the vote. Consequently, up until 1926 the Oregon state constitution provided that:

No free negro, or mulatto, not residing in this State at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall come, reside, or be within this State, or hold any real estate, or make any contracts, or maintain any suit therein; and the Legislative Assembly shall provide by penal laws, for the removal, by public officers, of all such negroes, and mulattoes, and for their effectual exclusion from the State, and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state, or employ, or harbor them.

Abraham Lincoln carried Oregon in the 1860 election.

—S. C. Price

Philomont, Va.

Pull That Plug!

In “Pulling the Plug on NATO” (March 2024 Chronicles), Prof. Trifkovic writes “NATO went rogue after the collapse of the USSR, and its shaky military alliance.” As an Orthodox Greek, I would argue that NATO went rogue long before the 1990s. Long before NATO proceeded to become an offensive alliance by bombing Serbia and gradually expanding with new members, NATO indulged and supported external acts of aggression such as the Turkish invasions of Cyprus in 1974. 

Even before, NATO indulged the ethnic cleansing of the Greek Orthodox population of Constantinople and the islands of Imbros and Tenedos through terror campaigns including pogroms and forcible mass expulsions. Most recently, NATO refused to intervene when Turkish leaders claiming the islands of Greece threatened to invade. NATO member Turkey recently assisted its ally in Azerbaijan to commit genocide against Christian Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh.

These are in fact additional reasons why NATO should be abolished. When NATO itself is not committing itself to offensive wars as in Serbia, Turkey is gradually carrying out acts of aggression and crimes against humanity. Exactly the same thing that NATO pretends to oppose elsewhere. 

—Theodore Karakostas

Boston, Mass.

Prof. Trifkovic replies:

While I agree entirely with Mr. Karakostas about the culpability of NATO—the United States government, really—in effectively facilitating and condoning Turkey’s crimes against the Greek remnant in Constantinople and against the Cypriot Greeks, I believe that some distinction should be made between the crimes of commission and the crimes of omission. 

A boneheaded Pentagon planner or CIA operative could claim more or less persuasively, in 1955 or in 1974, that Turkey was too important to alienate in the broader context of then-ongoing Cold War and the country’s huge geopolitical significance to the Western alliance. 

That position would be both morally bankrupt and operationally flawed, of course, but at least it could make some sense in the context of the time. 

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, on the other hand, NATO has been engaged in outright criminality, aggression and subterfuge, well documented by Chronicles authors including yours truly.

NATO’s passivity over the final solution of the Greek question in Turkey 70 years ago and NATO’s proactive role in fomenting the war in Ukraine are indicative of a similar mindset, but the magnitude of the crime and its global implications are “objectively” different (hat tip to V. I. Lenin). 

Diverse Nations

Prof. Riley’s article in the April 2024 issue, “The Expanding Civil Rights Bureaucracy,” brought back to me some previous thoughts I had on the subject of woke politics and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.” He believed in diversity of nations, not diversity within nations. Is not the very term “diverse nation” an oxymoron?

Solzhenitsyn later implied that Jews in Russia should make the decision whether they were Jewish Russians or Russian Jews, with the second part of the descriptions suggesting primary identity. He believe that the former group should be welcomed, but that the latter group should consider emigrating to Israel, a state that he supported.

Back many decades ago, I heard a black jazz commentator on a late night radio program relate an incident he witnessed during World War II. Brigadier General Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., the first black general officer in the U.S. military, was dispatched to a training base in Virginia where black recruits were complaining that it was a white man’s war, and generally getting loud and unruly. After trying in vain to reason with them, an exasperated Davis finally said, “I believe in excellence, and if you don’t believe in that, then you are just my color, not my kind.”

Davis’s son followed his father’s path of excellence. He was the commander of the Tuskegee Airmen and became the first black lieutenant general within the Air Force. After retiring, he became the first head of the Air Marshals. I knew people who had served under him, and he was highly respected.

I was a contract manager of a department within a large company in the early 1990s. This was before email, but there was an intercompany communication system. The company’s new chief executive sent a message saying he would ensure “diversity” in hiring and promotions so that the company would become the “employer of choice” in the area and industry. 

I replied that “You cannot simultaneously pursue diversity and excellence.” Shortly after, I was terminated. Oh well!

—Rick Johnson

Kellogg, Idaho