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Defending Japan's Pacific War: The Kyoto School Philosophers and Post-White Power

Defending Japan's Pacific War: The Kyoto School Philosophers and Post-White Power

Defending Japan's Pacific War: The Kyoto School Philosophers and Post-White Power
By David Williams
Routledge, London, 2004
ISBN 0-203-38715-5

Review by Ben-Ami Shillony

David Williams may be right. We should reexamine, as some of us have already done, the image of Japan in the Second World War. The conventional picture of a fascist and aggressive state is only partially correct. The other side of the coin is the idealistic streak that accompanied Japanese conquests, according to which Japan was liberating Asia from western imperialism. This alleged goal was dismissed by postwar historians as propaganda, but many Japanese at the time believed in it. Moreover, that propaganda, which camouflaged aggressive intentions, was not different from the wartime declarations of the allied powers, which asserted that they were liberating Asia while they were trying to regain their prewar colonial possessions.

The book focuses on the Kyoto-school philosophers, who were disciples of the "father of Japanese philosophy" Nishida Kitaro at Kyoto University. They included Tanabe Hajime, Koyama Iwao, Suzuki Shigetaka, Kosaka Masaaki, and Nishitani Keiji. In a series of symposia in the monthly magazine Chuo Koron in the years 1941-1942, they hailed the Great East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere as a historical achievement, in which Asia had been transformed from an object of western greed into a subject of its own will. After the war, these philosophers were condemned and discredited. Ienaga Saburo called them shallow opportunists. Tetsuo Najita and H.D. Harootunian described them as definers of the philosophic contours of Japanese fascism.

Williams admits that the Kyoto-school philosophers were nationalists, but claims that they were neither fascists nor ultra-nationalists. Like their counterparts in the west, they were patriots who defended their country's cause. They were honest intellectuals and their defense of the war was "coherent, rational and credible." (p. 17). They wanted Japan to expand, in order to "exercise a prudent and progressive leadership role in East Asia." (p. 153). They believed that Japan would respect the sovereignty of the peoples that it had liberated. The author quotes Tanabe's essay in which he wrote that the Co-Prosperity Sphere should be based on the equality of its member states. The Kyoto-school philosophers did not limit themselves to the political sphere. They believed that the war would produce a spiritual revolution, which they called "the overcoming of modernity" (kindai no chokoku). By this term, which was the title of their symposia, they meant the replacement of modern materialistic civilization, based on individualism and avarice, by a spiritual culture based on the moral values of the east and the scientific achievements of the west.

There was a similarity between the Kyoto school philosophers who supported the war and Martin Heidegger in Germany who supported the Nazi regime. Williams defends both cases and rejects the accusations that Heidegger and the Kyoto school philosophers were fascists. He describes Heidegger, who assumed the rectorship of a German university when Jewish professors were being dismissed, as "the greatest philosopher of our time" (p. 129). He quotes Heidegger's claim that the murder of the Jews by the Nazis was not basically different from the murder of East German civilians by Soviet troops at the end of the war (p. 123). According to Williams, no one has the right to condemn these scholars: "… who would play God here? Who has the right to judge Heidegger, or, for that matter, to censure Nishida, Tanabe and Nishitani? Who wears the white gloves?" (p. 163).

Had Williams stopped here, advising us to listen carefully to the philosophic voices in Japan which defended the Pacific War, the book might have contributed to a more balanced understanding of that period. But he goes much further, destroying what he himself has constructed. Having convinced us to discard the orthodox black and white view of the war, in which the United States was right and Japan was wrong, he produces his own black and white picture, in which Japan was right and the United States was wrong. The objective historian, who wanted to understand both sides, reverts to the extreme opposite of justifying one party, Japan, and condemning the other one, the United States. This fantastic phenomenon, of a left-wing American historian justifying Japan's position in the Pacific War, derives from the new left ideology which centers today on anti-Americanism. According to that ideology, the United States has been the permanent villain of modern history. Taking that dialectic one step further, all those who fought America, from imperial Japan to fundamentalist al-Qaeda, were right.

The front page of the book describes Williams as "one of Europe's leading thinkers on modern Japan." He received his doctorate from Oxford, taught at Sheffield and Cardiff, and worked for twelve years as an editorial writer for the Japan Times. In the Acknowledgments, the author presents his ideological credentials, defining himself as "an American tenko-ka", who has made the "unanticipated journey from right to left", finding himself "within shouting distance" from Noam Chomsky (p.xx). As befitting a neophyte, he embraces his new convictions with enthusiasm and carries them to extremes.

Williams loathes the United States. He asserts that America "butchered its way across an entire continent in an orgy of ethnic cleansing" (p. 139). Having accomplished that, it embarked on the subjugation of the rest of the world. He sees a direct connection between the attack on Pearl Harbor and the attack of '9/11'. In the introduction ("The book in brief")," he explains: "The reaction of the administration of George W. Bush to the events of 11 September 2001 destroyed the last of my childhood illusions about the use and abuse of American power in the modern world. One insight seems irresistible: "The road to '9/11' began with the Pacific War" (p. xvi). Both cases were right forms of "resistance to American imperial hegemony" (p. 10). In Pearl Harbor, "one billion colored people struck back" at America (p. 80). In '9/11,' Asia responded once again to American aggression against the non-European world. The wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, were stages in "America's blood-dimmed crusade for global mastery" (pp. 3-6).

The evil White Republic, as Williams calls the United States, instead of understanding the message of Pearl Harbor, reverted to its cruel practices: "from the fall of Saipan in July 1944 to the atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki… [it] descended into democratic barbarism by sustaining a one-sided racial massacre on a huge scale" (p. 138). Williams admits that Japan too committed war crimes, but asserts that "nothing the Japanese did to America justified this one-sided massacre of hundreds of thousands of civilians" (pp. 16-17). Defending Japan in the war makes him regard favorably Japan's occupation practices. He condemns the massacre in Nanjing, but puts it in the same category as the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima (p. 15). He praises the Japanese colonial administration in Taiwan and the Pacific islands (pp. 174-175), and says that even in China "it was in the interest of the Chinese government to provoke Japan into further aggression" (p. 39).

Williams has a problem with Tojo. As a left-wing historian, he cannot extol him too much, but as a supporter of the war he has to regard him as a hero. The result is a strange ambivalence. He condemns the "militarist clique that surrounded Tojo" and praises the Kyoto-school philosophers as "enlightened heroes of the Japanese wartime resistance" (pp. 20-21, 69-70), because they supported the navy's machinations against Tojo. But, he admits that Tojo "prepared the way, on more than one front, for the decline and fall of Roosevelt's White Republic" (p. 173). Moreover, he regards Tojo as the avenger of the American Indians: "After three centuries of almost unbroken aggression against the non-White world, White Americans had finally met a non-European foe capable of serious resistance. In the Japanese, the American Indian had found their [sic] unlikely avengers. Sitting Bull would have saluted Tojo's boldness" (p. 174). So, out of an ideological hatred of the United States, this left-wing American historian sounds exactly like the militarist leaders of wartime Japan. He is justifying the war in terms that even a right-wing Japanese historian would not dare to use today.

Williams rebukes the Asia specialists in the west, who provide the "scholarly servicing of America's global hegemony" (p. 33). Contrary to the claims of revisionist historians, that scholarly writings have been too lenient towards Japan, he accuses the Japanologists of being too critical. He complains: "Japan studies displays [sic] a rooted hostility to Japan… with the exception of Middle East Studies, no branch of area research displays more resentment towards its object than does Japanology" (p. 168). Unlike the other revisionists, he views present-day Japan favorably, as "a restraint on the arbitrary exercise of American power" and as a "building block… in the new post-White order that is the planet's destiny" (p. 171). According to Williams, the threat to peace in Asia does not come from Japanese nationalism and "the symbolic visits by Japanese prime ministers to Yasukuni Shrine", but from the American doctrine of pre-emptive strikes (p. 35).

The author is engaged in a dual battle. On the one hand, he blasts the liberal historians, followers of Edwin O. Reischauer, who represent "the Pacific War orthodoxy" and "allied war propaganda". On the other hand, he attacks the "neo-Marxists", followers of E.H. Norman, who ignore the centrality of race. Not surprisingly, the historian whom he admires is Ernest Nolte, who has taught him how to become a "deep revisionist". That is how he writes about Nolte: "We have talked only once… but it was one of the most stimulating encounters of my entire life as a writer and a thinker… He encouraged me to become my own kind of revisionist, and I salute him" (pp. xix-xx).

Williams is obsessed with race. Like the Nazis, he regards modern history as a struggle between races, but contrary to them he sees the white race as the villain and the colored races as the heroes. He denies that the Kyoto school philosophers were racists on the German model, but he hails them as warriors in the racial struggle of the non-white peoples against white hegemony. They appear, like the author, as racists in the good (i.e. anti-white) sense of the word. Williams is optimistic about the outcome of the racial struggle. Pearl Harbor and '9/11' have inflicted enormous blows on the white race, from which it will not recover. Within the United States as well as in the world at large, white people are becoming a minority and the colored races are taking over. "White West hegemony, the racial imbalance that has defined our global society for half a millennium, seems almost certain to pass away" (p. 91).

The presentation of the Pacific War as a race war is not convincing. As John Dower has pointed out, there were racist elements in the wartime propaganda on both sides, but the war was not about race. Unlike the Nazis, the militarist leaders of Japan did not justify the war in racial terms. Williams admits (p. 159-160) that the Kyoto-school philosophers did not use the term race (jinshu), and preferred instead the term nation (minzoku). But he makes the strange claim that when they spoke about overcoming modernity, they "really" meant the overcoming of whiteness (p. 18). In his diatribe against Harootunian and the neo-marxists, Williams accuses them of seeing "fascists under every futon" (p. 55). However, he himself sees American racists under every bed.

Contrary to the author's claim, none of the major wars of modern times was a race war. The Russo-Japanese War, in spite of the author's assertion, was not a racial struggle. Japan was then an ally of Great Britain and its aim was to join the western colonial powers and not to liberate its Asian brethren. The First World War, the Second World War, and the Cold War had all white and non-white nations on both sides. To call the Korean, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq wars race wars is to overlook their ideological and geopolitical significance. One can oppose the foreign policy of the United States, or for that matter of any other country, without regarding it as racist. The coming racial revolution, which Williams predicts and hails, may not occur, as race seems to be losing its significance. We may continue to befriend and fight each other for a long time without doing it on racial lines.