Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [145]
As the “master race” (shüjin minzoku), the Japanese believed that they had a moral right and duty to exercise leadership within the Co-Prosperity Sphere. “Asia,” moreover, was defined remarkably broadly. Japanese wartime cartographers showed both Europe and Africa as part of the Asian continent, and Japanese officials described America as Asia's “eastern wing.” In Emperor Hirohito's words, the Co-Prosperity Sphere would “enable all nations and races to assume their proper place in the world”—with Japan, of course, on top.13
By 1945, this lofty plan, like Japan itself, was a smoldering ruin. Intolerance was simultaneously the basis of these dreams of Japanese world domination and the catalyst for imperial Japan's destruction.
JAPAN'S STRANGELY CONTRADICTORY
CONCEPT OF “RACE”
During the early twentieth century, Japanese writers combined Western ideas of race, Confucian philosophy, and Shinto notions of moral and spiritual purity to produce a uniquely Japanese world-view. Japan modernized during a period when social Darwinism and so-called scientific racism were in vogue in the West. Western scientists and social scientists had purported to offer “empirical evidence” demonstrating the biological inferiority of Asians, along with blacks and other “colored” peoples. At the same time, gunboat diplomacy, coercive treaties, and superior Western economic development seemed to confirm Asia's (and Japan's) inferiority. In response, Japanese nationalist thinkers developed an elaborate mythic history that reversed Japan's inferior status by emphasizing the divine origin of the imperial line and the “purity” and superior moral virtue of the Japanese (or Yamato) people.
As a rationale for conquest, mastery, and exploitation, the story the Japanese told themselves was perfect. As Nakajima Chikuhei, a major industrialist and political leader, declared in 1940: “There are superior and inferior races in the world, and it is the sacred duty of the leading race to lead and enlighten the inferior ones.”14
At the same time, Japan's self-serving myths were suffused with ironies and contradictions. To begin with, the Japanese depicted themselves as not only the “purest” of peoples, but physically white. Fair skin had been highly esteemed in Japan since at least the eighth century. A light complexion was associated with personal beauty and high social status (hence the white painted faces of geisha or Noh actors). But by the twentieth century, the Japanese obsession with whiteness had been intensified by a deep inferiority complex vis-à-vis the West. Woodblock prints from the first Sino-Japanese war portrayed the Japanese as not only white-skinned and tall but clad in Western clothes. By contrast, the Chinese were shown as yellow-skinned, stocky, and dressed in Oriental garb.15
Especially with respect to their colonial subjects in the South Pacific, Japanese racism almost perfectly echoed European colonial racism. Official Japanese reports referred to Micronesian islanders as “lazy, uncivilized, inferior people” who could never escape their “lewd customs, barbarity…and debauchery.” According to a Japanese scholar in the 1950s: “Because their life is extremely simple and primitive…their thought is also childish. They do not possess any desire or spirit of self-improvement. Their pleasures are eating, dancing, and satisfying their sexual desires.” As a result, these “tropical peoples” urgently needed Japanese direction.16
With respect to the Chinese and Koreans, however, the Japanese had to tell a more complicated story. After all, many Chinese and Koreans were physically indistinguishable from the Japanese, and the countries shared many cultural traditions. As the newspaper editor and Japanese member of parliament Arakawa Gorö wrote of the Koreans in 1906:
There is nothing