Journal sielwolf's Journal: Hands in the Air, the Children go on Parade... 3

At 9:00 pm EST I finished watching a second episode of Days that Shook History on the History Channel. The concept of the show is simple: dramatize a single 24 hour period during which a single important event occured. Of course the 8 pm episode was of interest to me due to its subject: Hiroshima... Enola Gay... the Atomic Age.

What makes this show so interesting is the personification it attempts. The actions of individuals are played out and at times edited in interesting fashion (here: the crew preparing on Tinian. Truman waiting for the signal). Likewise they select four Japanese: a school girl, a boy who just turned 4, a newspaper photographer, a retired and aged man.

The whole effect is gripping television. Drawing a dozen storylines of unrelated persons; a single unseen event that bisects them. The time scales hyperbolically from hours, minutes. Last the 42 seconds of Little Boy's drop. Each ticked off.

An impressive feat. 'Impressive' as something that leaves an impression. The episode ends with those same tickertape NYC jubilation scenes overdubbed with the recount of what happened to our four Japanese. Girl: evaporated. Boy: flesh stripped from his bones. The old man's watch now hangs in the Hiroshima Peace museum. The photographer took the only five pictures from ground zero that day. Otherworldly.

Of course the effect is something that we of the, oh, last 50 years with a modicum of intelligence all seem to grasp: war's bad, yes? Atomic war is that exponential function that zips off the top of the graph paper and out of the domain of reason.

But as I was watching this (even after sitting through the faux heroism of Chuck Norris & Lee Marvin's Delta Force, a movie which could best be described as masturbatory) I remembered the Smithsonian Air and Space Dulles Annex. Also a track from DJ Krush's last album.

"Alephevo (Truthspeaking)"

A whole lot of anxiety over this one. You see, down around the Beltway and off at Dulles sits the Enola Gay. And the Annex which just opened was set on by protests about the focus of the display.

"What, that war's bad?"

No. More than that. It is the belief that the only act of Nuclear Aggression in recorded history was a vile and barbaric act. More to the point, that Truman and the Department of War unleashed this weapon on an enemy that had already pleaded for peace. Unjustified. Unparalleled. Or so they say.

I guess it should be expected. Now it's just under 59 years from that date. And time has the way of skewing things. Fuck what they say about hindsight and 20/20 vision. History now is an exercise in Monday morning quarterbacking of the worst sort.

And so let's look at the rationale given at the time for using an atomic device en force on the Japanese:

• The Japanese had proven to be an unrelenting enemy. A hierarchical society that frowned upon surrender. The 'cowardice' of Western soldiers who surrendered was greeted with such things at the Bataan Death March. Japanese women and children too flung themselves off of cliffs at Okinawa (rather than face the American horde).
• For this reason, the number of 1 million dead Americans for the defeat of the Japanese home islands sprung up. I think this was an exterpolation of the losses sustained on Okinawa versus the native population of that island. Just factor that over the sum Japanese population, and there you go.

At that point too not many folks would've minded. The Japanese really hadn't made friends with that whole Pearl Harbor thing. And to be fair there was a racial dynamic involved: the shrewd, vile, yellow Nip flailing about with his giant snapping yap, even as his limbs are cut from his body (an aside: there's an interesing book out, Race War: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire , dealing with the social darwinist paradigm Europeans applied in Asia and how the Japanese were able to turn it against them during their stroll over SE Asia. Appears to be interesting reading). Needless to say, war doesn't have a congenial atmosphere.

Regardless, two bombs dropped, some more people died, the war ended, and the world went on as more people died. But looking back, several facts have come to light. And these facts have become the foundation of this new thought: that the nuclear attacks were unnecessary, cruel, and vile criminal acts.

The first is that the Japanese government had begun, through back channels in Moscow, a negotiation for surrender with the United States. Multiply that by the modern Japanese population, passive in extremity, democratic, open, that has its WW2 surviving population speaking of how they too wished the war would've ended long before 1945.

The conclusion: that the Japanese wished for nothing more than to surrender. And that the above image of tireless, mindless, servile automotons was and is unjustified and a fallacy.

This is the sort of fact, like any other fact proposed in vacuum without any support, is to be taken as the whole unbroken truth. Of course what goes unmentioned is that this diplomacy was being conducted by a small generally civilian element of

the dominantly military Japanese government. Remember that this was a government that had been forged by a cadre from the noble military class that had assassinated any Prime Minister or other civilian official to get into power. The negotiations were known at the highest levels of the government, sure. But Hirohito himself had shown little interest.

And although nothing more than a figurehead, such an action from the Emperor damned any diplomatic effort. Don't forget that these militarists were just the same samurai class that had defined pre-Meiji Japanese culture. Likewise, the rigid class heirarchy they represented too never left. And at the top of that hierarchy: Hirohito. Through his inaction he had given his blessing for the militarists bloody shadow coup. And at this moment of the war, his disinterest in diplomacy killed any action taken on that front.

Sure, the Emperor is just a man. And like any man he is willing to change his mind. But to ask if a man will change his mind is to ask Turing when my program is going to halt. One does not make strategic decisions based upon hypothetical changes of heart.

The criminal part of the American atomic accusation comes from the chosen cities: both without strategic, political or military value. This attack, like those on Dresden, were a vengeance attack on a defenseless civilian population. One unprotected by the destroyed Japanese Navy and Air Forces.

Simple, right? And it just goes to prove, 'simple' is usually just coded word for anecdotal.

Ok, really. It would be foolish to think the Japanese were anything other than human (duh) and thus beholden to the same sort of foibles the rest of us posses: fear, uncertainty, compassion, reason.

But as Nietzsche said "In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule."

You take a man and he can tell you his hopes and dreams. You give him a uniform different from mine, stick him with a lot of likely garbbed countrymen and watch as he butchers me with glee.

I always turn to Akira Kurosawa on this for he lived through this whole turbulent period in Japanese culture. He was a child of the Meiji revolution. He and his brother lived through the decedence of 30's. He walked through the ruins of the Great Tokyo Earthquake. He saw the militarists come to power.

On that day in August 1945 when the Emperor spoke of Japanese surrender for the first time, Kurosawa honestly revealed that he would've committed suicide if so ordered. This even though he in his heart of hearts was a humanist. So engrained is culture.

And I think we can trust his honesty, for it takes a certain individual to state that if given the choice, they be swept up in the mob's madness. Interestingly Kurosawa watched as these same Japanese then heartedly embraced Democracy (and Socialism). And those words they spoke in those occupation years, rang hollow to him. As he put it, spoken as one who has no idea what it means.

Of course Kurosawa explored these very themes in his art. Watch the villagers in The Seven Samurai sometime. How all their actions are as a hive mind. Their thought, dialogue, and even action coordinated and slung through the collective. How they cower and dissolve in the face of overwhelming odds. And how, once presented with a stricken lone bandit, they pounce hordewise, tearing him apart with many spears.

Any attempt to seer the fighting will of the X million Japanese in 1945 is foolish. But what we can do is present other historical fact, and from that draw our conclusions.

Things such as, say practicing "Sherman Carpets". The idea being that a Japanese child would be strapped with explosives, roll under an American tank, and detonating themselves. Or then there were the fellows given a hole to hid in, a landmine, a mallet and an order to wait. When Joe and Rick walk by, give that mine a lovetap.

Again, just more of that propaganda, right? Not everyone threw themselves from the cliffs of Okinawa. So we can assume that only, what, 0.0001% of the population would've gone threw with it? Of course 0.0001% of 75 million Japanese is still quite a few.

And even such talk of that is like stoneage SWOTL (you Lucasarts freaks know what I'm talking about). No, we can math this out using real military data that everyone seems to forget: the gigantic Japanese army in China.

The continental Asian campaign is always something that I think gets short schriff on a lot of WW2 documentaries. Watching the UK produced World at War superdocumentary give some insight into the SE Asian campaign (albeit at a skewed Commonwealth perspective. The Battle of the Bulge goes unmentioned in the series and the American Pacific campaign, all 3 years of it, is condensed to two of 22 episodes. Of course I recommend it for the insightful interviews with Albert Speer, Adolf Galland, Jimmy Stewart, etc.).

Shit, people forget how many troops the Japanese had to roll over the Chinese domains. Hell, they were still running offensives in the Chinese/SE Asia hinterland (against Mao, Ho Chi Min, et al) when the war ended!

Plus, people do not realize that the actual start of WW2 proper was in late 1938 around the eastern Soviet port of Vladivostok. See, the Japanese had already taken the bulk of Manchuria and still had a bone to pick with the Russians ever since that little unpleasantness decades before. Well over the course of several offensives beginning in 1938 and June 1939 the Japanese entered the USSR only to be repulsed by none other than Geogry Zhukov (defense of Moscow, taker of Berlin, etc). Zhukov didn't just repulse the Japanese, he massacred them. To the point that he was able to later withdraw battlehardened troops to the defense of Moscow while the Japanese build up this Kwantung army, fearful of another Soviet assault.

Now fast forward to 1945 and put yourself in the place of the Japanese high command. Now, the Americans are on your doorstep and ready to attack looking for unconditional surrender. No reason to defend the Mongolian frontier right? So you'd begin the withdrawal of your battlehardened Manchurian armies (who are just about to get a taste of Soviet tank as the USSR makes a rush for the Korean penninsula) to the homeland, right?

Now, wouldn't the arrival of several thousand crack troops, weary they may be, make you a little more bolder in your negotiations for peace?

Yes, no, maybe. Again we are getting into exponential hypotheticals. To predict the fall of a single raindrop from a cloud is impossible. Fuck this alterno-history shit.

The problem is that, in peace, the war condition seems a queer and irrational one. A strange Catch-22. How is it that the Department of Defense and national security is basically codespeak for warmaking? And how that the best way to save lives of combat troops (an oxymoron in and of itself) is to wage brutality upon your enemy without conscious or quarter.

War is obviously Attrition: the grinding of two forces against each other until one relents. But in a more subtle way, attrition occurs between both in a race to the bottom. A game of "top this" where acts of coldheartedness are displayed with the hopes of redrawing the very rules of the game. You bomb the Ruhr, we bomb Liverpool. So you firebomb Dresden, and we drop countless vengeance ballistic missiles on you.

The Japanese had shown something; a military drive unmatched by any Western thinker. Kurtz in Apocolypse Now

would've lauded the "genius of it".

I've talked before on the Kamakazi. Most say it is a divine wind to keep the foreign invaders from the home isle. I think they have it inverted. I think its to keep the Japanese ideal in. It was a self-sustaining pressure, where the worldview is one and only Japanese. You take these few islands and draw around them a parameter. At this you build an unscalable wall through which no foreign idea penetrates. And once cut off like any other cult, conditioning can finally begin in ernest.

You see, the militarists were smart, much smarter than Emperor Meiji. When he began the modernization of Japan, he allowed that which was Traditional and Japanese to remain. Not only remain but remain nigh-intact! You strip the samurai of his sword and status...

but the caste and the Emperor they serve remain at the top, and the rest irrevocibly at the bottom.

You bring in Western ideas such as egalitarianism and democracy... while it is still house, home, family, honor, and duty.

You modernize Japan. And Japan is as it always was.

These foreign elements rendered inert. As Kurosawa said, words without a single comprehension of their meaning.

And you have a foreign idea. And you strip it of its humanity, its person, its soul. It is just that: Without personality. Souless. Anti-human.

Resting in wait for decades, the militarists watched as the foreign and modern floated in as ash. Coating everything. Meanwhile the 20th century Japanese were still 10th century Japanese. And in time system shock took place, and a violent
reaction began. The Prime Minister assassinated, the Militarists in power.

Japan is finally all Japanese again. And out come the knives...

Kamakazi. The Japanese were given glowing battle reports even as their carriers burned at Midway. They dropped one by one from the cliffs at Okinawa. They lived in poverty and filth. Unconcerned that the rest of the world was beginning to know the family car, the inhouse plumbing, freedom, liberty. Men throwing their lives away, flying into the decks of an enemy that has already won.

And that was the beauty of it.

Even to this day it is rare for the Japanese to know of the atrocity of WW2. Their part. One fellow on The World at War mentions the Korean and Chinese "pleasure women"... and without a note of irony he talked about how they enjoyed their duty and did it joyously. The government of Japan has still not recognized the Rape of Nanking. And this isn't some "US not recognizing Slavery Restitution" trip. Your average Japanese of the street doesn't even know of the Rape of Nanking. And there was that North Korean tour cyranoVR linked to.

Where the North Korean talked of the brutality of the Americans, the Japanese stood shocked: as if they came to the entire "Korean situtation" without any perspective.

The GENIUS. Of where the population itself is a self-sealing intellectual vacuum. Puncture resistant to any alien element of idea or vision. Even better in that it is self-sustaining, needing little of that dirty dictatorial nasty business.

Even BETTER, that those who are possibly the most dangerous to the inhabitance, are placed in the position to do maximal damage.

I'd say there must be a reason for it: the culture-shock, the comfort and safety (as nebulous as it might be) in innoculating one's self from dangerous memes. Of course it might be said that this works on a smaller scale as well.

And so it goes. To say that such a condition is pitiable is fine. Of course such a self-selection seems dangerous to everyone else. So pity them if you wish. And reason with them if it suits you.

But remember: eyes out, arms ready. I can already see the groups, parties, nations, and epochs forming outside...