Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [142]
For an ordinary Japanese soldier, China was a miserably uncomfortable, as well as perilous, posting. “Your parents have got four other sons, so they shouldn’t miss you too much,” an NCO declared callously as he detailed Private Iwao Ajiro for service on an airfield an hour from Beijing. Ajiro hated everything about China, and that airfield. There were no facilities except a brothel staffed by Chinese and Korean comfort women, whom no one much cared for. Their Japanese counterparts were described euphemistically as “nurses,” or, in modern parlance, “paramedics.” “A man’s pay was only seven yen a month,” Ajiro complained, “and one of those women cost a yen.” The hoary old soldier said in 2005:
Nowadays the media387 go on and on about what terrible things Japan is supposed to have done in China. It’s a joke. They only tell one side of the story. What about all the Japanese who got killed out there? What do you think it was like for us in a signals section, who had to go out on patrols in parties of four or five, looking for line breaks? If you found a lot of cable missing and went to look for it in the nearby village, there’d be a hundred people there who could kill you—and sometimes did—if you pushed them too hard. They’d steal the cable not to “do their bit” against Japan, but because they were so dirt-poor they needed the stuff.
We Japanese take a bath every day. Those “chankoro”—“chinks”—were so desperate they only got a bath twice a year, at New Year and on their birthdays. They had no running water, only wells. Their houses were made of mud that melted in the rain. In the war, we sometimes ran short of toilet paper, but they never used anything but leaves—leaves, for heaven’s sake! Outside the great east gate of Beijing, you’d see pigs snuffling about. We used to argue about why they were so poor. We decided they were just lazy. Those Chinese would never do a thing more than they had to. The cleaners in our barracks would sit down and take a smoke as soon as they’d done exactly what orders laid down. Japanese, now, are different—we get on with things without being told to. Chinese water was always filthy, but they were so inured to it that they didn’t get ill. Ours had to be filtered before a Japanese soldier could drink it. We’d try to teach the Chinese how to do things properly. They just shook their heads and said: “We have our own way.” They’d never learn, never learn.
Ajiro’s testimony represents a vivid exposition of the cultural contempt which pervaded the occupying army in China. A modern Japanese historian observes laconically: “More than a million Japanese soldiers388 served in China, and not one of them troubled to learn its language.”
Yet Americans in the country suffered their own fatal illusions and frustrations, founded upon a romantic vision which had been a century in the making. “If the American way of life is to prevail in the world,” thundered a prominent member of the “China lobby,” novelist Pearl S. Buck, in 1942, “it must prevail in China.” The U.S. sought to make Chiang’s nation a major force in the Grand Alliance, an objective which proved wholly beyond the powers of both sponsor and protégé. Churchill was exasperated by what he perceived as a U.S. fixation with China—“an absolute farce”—which appeared to extend even to a willingness to grant Chiang a voice in the post-war settlement of Europe. The prime minister wrote to his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, in August 1944: “I have told the president389 I would be reasonably polite about this American obsession. But I cannot agree that we should take a positive attitude…”
The war efforts of both the Allies and Japan were drained by their respective China commitments, though the U.S. was vastly better able to bear its share. China was too crippled by its own burdens and dissensions to wage effective war against a foreign power. The Nationalist