Free Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering by John W. Dower

was cultivated as the very essence of a powerful racial ideology. Like esoteric mantras, a variety of evocative (and often archaic) words and phrases were introduced to convey the special racial and moral qualities of the Japanese; and like esoteric mandalas, certain visual images (sun, sword, cherry blossom, snowcapped Mount Fuji, an abstract “brightness”) and auspicious colors (white and red) were elevated as particularistic symbols of the purity of the Japanese spirit.
    Where Westerners had turned eventually to pseudoscience and dubious social science to bolster theories of the inherent inferiority of nonwhite and non-Western peoples, the Japanese turned to mythohistory, where they found the origins of their superiority in the divine descent of their sovereign and the racial and cultural homogeneity of the sovereign’s loyal subjects. Deity, monarch, and populace were made one, and no words captured thismore effectively than the transcendent old phrase resurrected to supersede plain reference to “the Japanese”: Yamato minzoku , the “Yamato race.” “Yamato”—the name of the place where Jimmu, grandson of the grandson of the sun goddess, was alleged to have founded the imperial line in 660 B.C .—was redolent with the archaic mystique of celestial genetics that made Japan the divine land and the Japanese the chosen people. In Yamato minzoku , the association became explicitly racial and exclusionary. The race had no identity apart from the throne and the traditions that had grown up around it, and no outsider could hope to penetrate this community. This was blood nationalism of an exceptionally potent sort.
    Many of these themes were elaborated in the ideological writings of the 1930s and early 1940s, and the cause of blood nationalism was elevated when 1940 became the occasion for massive ceremony and festivity in celebration of the 2,600-year anniversary of the “national foundation day.” At the same time, the racial ideologues took care to emphasize that purity was not merely an original state, but also an ongoing process for each Japanese. Purity entailed virtues that needed to be cultivated, and preeminent among these were two moral ideals originally brought to Japan from China: loyalty and filial piety ( ch Å« k ō ). Why these became a higher expression of morality in Japan than elsewhere, higher even than in China, was explained by their ultimate focus in the divine sovereign. Purity lay in transcendence of ego and identification with a greater truth or cause; and in the crisis years of the 1930s and early 1940s this greater truth was equated with the militarized imperial state. War itself, with all the sacrifice it demanded, became an act of purification. And death in war, the ultimate expression of selflessness, became the supreme attainment of this innate Japanese purity. We know now that most Japanese fighting men who died slowly did not pass away with the emperor’s name on their lips, as propaganda claimed they did. Most often they called (as GIs did also) for their mothers. Still, they fought and died with fervor and bravery, enveloped in the propaganda of beingthe divine soldiers of the divine land, and this contributed to the aura of a people possessed of special powers.
    Both the Western myth of the superman and the bogey of the Yellow Peril had their analogue in this emphasis the Japanese themselves placed on their unique suprarational spiritual qualities. In Western eyes, however, this same spectacle of fanatical mass behavior also reinforced the image of the little men, of the Japanese as a homogeneous, undifferentiated mass. There is no small irony in this, for what we see here is the coalescence of Japanese indoctrination with the grossest anti-Japanese stereotypes of the Westerners. In the crudest of Anglo-American colloquialisms, it was argued that “a Jap is a Jap” (the famous quotation of General John DeWitt, who directed