Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [146]
Gorö went on, however, to clarify that these superficial similarities were deceiving:
If you look closely [at the Koreans], they appear to be a bit vacant, their mouths open and their eyes dull, somehow lacking In the lines of their mouths and faces you can discern a certain looseness, and when it comes to sanitation or sickness they are loose in the extreme. Indeed, to put it in the worst terms, one could even say that they are closer to beasts than to human beings.17
Every Japanese virtue was contrasted with a Korean vice. The Japanese were pure and clean; Koreans were “polluted” and “filthy.” Japanese were selfless; Koreans were selfish. Japanese were orderly and modern; Koreans were “barbarous” and “disorderly.” The complex tasks of modern life were thought to be completely beyond Koreans; they lacked the mental capacity even to work as railway station employees because they were “hopeless at adding up how many tickets they had punched.” “Like most barbarians (yabanjin), they cannot understand precise arithmetic.” Worse still, they were prone to lying, “gambling, swindling, stealing, and adultery.”
On the other hand, although lazy by nature, the Koreans had “an absurd degree of endurance” and thus were perfect beasts of burden. As Gorö explained, “The Koreans have great strength for carrying things; indeed, they carry things heavier than a Japanese horse could. I hear that it is not unusual for a Korean to carry a load weighing sixty or seventy kannte [490-570 pounds]. If you encourage them and put them to work under supervision, they are quite useful.”
The solution, then, was clear: The Koreans needed Japanese leadership.18
As with their Nazi allies, the theme of purification—racial, moral, and spiritual—was a constant theme in wartime Japan, finding expression in religion, popular culture, and (quite literally) the color of everyday life. In 1942, a patriotic song called “Divine Soldiers of the Sky” exalted parachuting troops who descended on their enemies like “pure white roses” from heaven. White, the color of Shinto priestly robes, had long been the color of Japanese purification rituals. But red, representing “brightness,” was Japanese as well. A famous article entitled “Establishing a Japanese Racial Worldview,” which appeared in 1942 in one of Japan's most popular magazines, explained that red was the color of blood and life:
The conception of purity associated with Shinto has been thought of hitherto as something pure white…The experienee of the day the war broke out, however, has shown the error of such thinking; and this error is indeed apparent to those who have actually engaged in the rite of purification (misogi). The color of purification is faint red, tinged with the pinkness of blood; it is the color of life itself. It is this very warmth of life which has made the cherry blossom the symbol of the Yamato spirit.
But it was not enough that the Japanese were themselves “pure-blooded” if the world they inhabited was not. In order to attain a “higher state of perfection and purity,” the Japanese were called upon to help purify the whole Asian continent and reform its polluted, beastlike, demonic inhabitants. As an influential group of Kyoto Imperial University professors explained, war was a “creative and constructive” means of advancing the ongoing historical process of “purification of sins.” Giving up one's life in battle, moreover, was the purest accomplishment of all. As the historian John Dower writes, “The ‘sacrifices’ of war were portrayed as truly sacerdotal, a bath of blood becoming the supreme form of spiritual cleansing.”19