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By Root 1334 0

it would be mistaken to imagine Osamu’s society as a monolith. Lt. Gen. Kuribayashi Tadimichi, who had spent two years in the United States, wrote to his wife asserting his strong opposition to challenging so mighty a foe on the battlefield: ‘Its industrial potential is huge, and its people are energetic and versatile. One must never underestimate the Americans’ fighting ability.’ Eighteen-year-old Sasaki Hachiro mused to his diary: ‘How many really die “tragic deaths” in this war? I am sure there are more comical deaths under the disguise of tragic deaths … Comical deaths involve no joy of life, but are filled with agony without any meaning or value.’ Hachiro at an early stage resigned himself to his own extinction, and volunteered as a pilot with an almost explicit determination to satisfy fate, as indeed he did – shikata ga nai. His disdain for Japan’s militarists never faded: he persuaded his younger brother to become a science student with immunity from conscription, so that he, at least, might survive.

Hachiro’s contemporary Hayashi Tadao was another fatalist, strongly opposed to the war. His diary repeatedly expressed disgust towards his own country. He asked himself: ‘Japan, why don’t I love and respect you? … I feel that I have to accept the fate of my generation to fight in the war and die … We have to go to the battlefield without being able to express our opinions, criticise and argue pros and cons of issues … it is a great tragedy.’ Japan’s 1941–42 successes against feeble Western resistance caused both sides to overrate the power of Hirohito’s nation. Just as Germany was not strong enough to defeat the Soviet Union, Japan was too weak to sustain its Asian conquests unless the West chose to acquiesce in early defeats. But this, like so much else, is more readily apparent today than it was seventy years ago, in the midst of Japanese triumphs.

Until December 1941, the sluggish, humid, pampered rhythm of colonial life in Asia was scarcely interrupted by events in Europe. In America’s Philippines dependency, army nurse Lt. Earlyn Black was one of thousands of expatriates who revelled in a life of comfort and elegance, cushioned by submissive servants: ‘Each evening we dressed for dinner in long dresses, the men in tuxedos, dinner jackets with cummerbunds. It was very formal-type living. Even to go to the movies, we’d put on a long dress.’ Another nurse, twenty-five-year-old Lt. Hattie Brantly from Jefferson, Texas, found the notion of war with Japan inconceivable: ‘It was a joke and our Chief Nurse would say in the mess, “Have another biscuit, girls. You’re going to need this when the Japs get us” … We just sort of rocked along and were happy, and didn’t give it too much thought.’

Likewise in British Singapore, a Czech engineer, Val Kabouky, described the white residents as ‘modern Pompeians’. Even after more than two years of war, 31,000 Europeans among a population of five million Malays and Chinese kept up a parody of imperial privilege. New Western arrivals wishing to learn as much as was necessary of the local language could purchase a phrasebook entitled Malay for Mems – short for ‘Memsahibs’. It was couched in the language of command: ‘Put up the tennis net,’ ‘You must follow the Mem,’ ‘Shoot that man.’ In 1941 arriving troops, especially Australians, were disgusted to find themselves excluded from the colonists’ social bastions. Indians were not permitted to ride in the same rail carriages as the British, nor to enter their clubs. There was a mutiny in the Hyderabad Regiment when an Indian officer was ordered home for having sexual relations with a white woman; he was reinstated and the affair hushed up, but bitterness persisted. Lady Diana, wife of British minister Duff Cooper, wrote with aristocratic scorn for the pretensions of the British expatriates, ‘most frail, tarty and peasant-pompous’. Her own enthusiasm for Singapore’s tourist charms struck a bizarre note as catastrophe unfolded further north: ‘There is the working life of the Chinks going on before your eyes down every street – coffin-making,