4. Some Lessons in Political Correctness

Let us return to the public commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the infamous date, carefully sanitized and insulated from improper thoughts. Americans are much annoyed by the unwillingness of the Japanese to face their guilt for the Pearl Harbor crime, Urban Lehner reports in a lengthy Wall Street Journal article on Japanese "revisionism." He quotes the Pearl Harbor memorial park historian on "the complete absence of a sense in Japan of their own history." To illustrate "Japan's ambivalence toward remembering history," Lehner describes a visit to the home of a "courtly" Japanese military historian, who "can't understand why the U.S. won't forget it. `If the U.S. and Japan are partners, why talk about Pearl Harbor forever? That's what Japanese people are thinking,' he says. `Why do you keep reminding us?'"¹⁵

So the article ends, no comment being necessary on the unique sins of the Japanese exhibited with such clarity.

The New York Times Magazine devoted a cover story to this peculiarly Japanese malady by Tokyo Bureau Chief Weisman, entitled "Pearl Harbor in the Mind of Japan." There is "little sound of remorse," the subtitle reads, and "no commemorative ceremonies of the bombing in Japan." The US will approach the event "from a completely different perspective," Weisman writes, reflexively taking that perspective to be right and proper, no questions asked. His study of this topic exemplifies the general style and provides useful instruction in the techniques of Political Correctness, encapsulating many of the standard gambits.¹⁶

Americans were not always so clear as they are today about the simple verities, Weisman observes. In the late '60s, "guilt-ridden over the Vietnam conflict...American historians were more willing to question American motives in Asia. Today, their tone is much less apologetic" -- the last word, an interesting choice. With the Persian Gulf war and the collapse of communism, "Times have changed," and "Roosevelt's drawing a line in the sand is no longer seen as improper."

Weisman's claims about the late '60s contain a particle of truth: younger historians associated with the antiwar movement did indeed begin to raise previously forbidden questions. They were compelled to form their own professional association (the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars), with very few senior faculty involved, to discuss subversive thoughts about possible flaws in "American motives." Though they were the cream of the graduate student crop at the time, not many survived the authoritarian structure of the ideological disciplines; some were eliminated from the academic world in straight political firings, some marginalized in other familiar ways. The young scholars did receive some support in the mainstream, notably from John King Fairbank, the dean of Asian scholarship and a figure at the dissident extreme, often accused of crossing the line to Communist apologetics. He outlined his own position on the Vietnam war in his presidential address to the American Historical Association in December 1968, well after the corporate sector had called for terminating the enterprise. The war was an "error," Fairbank explained, based on misunderstanding and naiveté, yet another example of "our excess of righteousness and disinterested benevolence."¹⁷

One will find very little questioning of American motives in respectable circles then, or since.

Conventional falsehoods commonly retain their appeal because they are functional, serving the interests of established authority. Weisman's tales about the late '60s are a case in point: they buttress the view that the academy, the media, and intellectual life generally have been taken over by a left-wing onslaught, leaving only a few last brave defenders of simple truths and intellectual values, who therefore must be given every bit of support that can be mustered for their lonely cause, a project well-suited to current doctrinal needs (see chapter 2.4).

Like all right-thinking people, Weisman takes it as axiomatic that the US stance in the Persian Gulf and the Cold War is subject to no imaginable qualification, surely no questioning of "American motives." Also following convention, he evades entirely the issue of shared responsibility for the Pacific war. The issue is not "Roosevelt's drawing a line in the sand," but rather the decision of the traditional imperial powers (Britain, France, Holland, US) to close the doors of their domains to Japan after it had followed the rules of "free trade" with too much success; and the US position, maintained to the end, that the US-Japan conflict might be resolved if Japan would permit the US to share in exploiting all of Asia, while not demanding comparable rights in US-dominated regions. Weisman indeed recognizes that such issues have been raised, making sure to frame them in a proper way. He does not refer to the discussion of the actions of the imperial powers in Western scholarship as events unfolded, or since. Rather, these are the "startling" words of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, hanged in 1948 as a Class A war criminal, who "defiantly defended the attack on Pearl Harbor as forced by `inhuman' economic sanctions imposed by Washington," which "would have meant the destruction of the nation," had Japan not reacted. Could there be a particle of truth lurking behind the thought? The question need not be answered, since it cannot rise to consciousness.

Weisman writes that "of course, most American historians would have little trouble rendering a judgment on Japan's singular responsibility, if not guilt," noting Japan's "annex[ation] of Manchuria in 1931," and its "bloody sweep through China" in 1937 and later into Indochina, driving out the French colonial regime. No words here on the US attitude towards all of this at the time, except for an oblique hint: "Beginning with the decision to move naval vessels in 1940, the United States responded to Japanese military aggression with warnings and protests" -- nine years after the invasion of Manchuria, three years after the murderous escalation in China. Why the delay? Weisman also puts aside other questions: Why were Western claims to their colonial domains stronger than those of Japan, and why did indigenous nationalists often welcome the Japanese conquest, driving out the traditional oppressors? Nor is he troubled by a simple fact of logic: If these were Japan's crimes, then why do we commemorate a much later event as the "date which will live in infamy"? Why is it "the tragedy of 50 years ago" that evokes Weisman's inquiry into Japan's flawed psyche?

¹⁵ Lehner, WSJ, Dec. 6, 1991.

¹⁶ Weisman, NYT magazine, Nov. 3, 1991.

¹⁷ On Fairbank's views, see TNCW, 400-1.