The Land od the Rising Yen

was declared. The Times commented: ‘The Japanese Navy has
opened the war by an act of daring which is destined to take a place of honour
in naval annals’ 3 When thirty-seven years later,
after the breakdown of negotiations, the Japanese employed the same tactics
against the Americans, The Times condemned it as a fashionable trick of
Axis warfare and quoted Cordell Hull on the last Japanese note, describing it
as ‘crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions’.)
    In any case, the beginning of the
Second World War confirmed the legend of Japanese invincibility. Having nearly
knocked out the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor, Japan advanced and occupied
South-East Asia including the impregnable fortress Singapore; sank two British
battleships; invaded New Guinea; bombed Australia; threatened India — and all
this with a speed that made the German Blitzkrieg look like a boy
scouts’ war-game. The Japanese public knew all about the victories; it knew
little about the subsequent reverses. When defeat came it seemed even more
crushing because it was unexpected.
    Japan suffered terribly from the atomic bomb but
never adopted a pose of moral superiority, implying: ‘We would never have done
it!' The Japanese know perfectly well they would have used it had they had it.
They accept the idea that war is war; they give no quarter and accept none.
Total war, they recognize, knows no Queensberry Rules. If you develop a
devastating new weapon during a total war, you use it; you do not put it into
the War Museum.
    The devastation, horror and
inhumanity of the bomb were unspeakable and I am not trying to diminish its
effects, but neither am I trying to be frivolous when I say that, in the long
run, the bomb had certain beneficial effects on the Japanese psyche. It rid
them of guilt. The Japanese are not given to introspection and they were never
devoured by feelings of guilt; psychoanalysts make a poorer living in Tokyo than they used to in Freud’s Vienna or do in present-day New York. If war entitled
the enemies of Japan to drop atom-bombs on them, then they, too, are certainly
exculpated from the charges of lesser but nevertheless grave brutalities. The
trials of major and minor war criminals, as I have said, aroused nothing but
boredom in Japan; if they meant anything, they meant vicarious atonement for
the Japanese people. They paid the penalty through the lives of Tojo and the
others. (Altogether about nine hundred Asian war criminals were executed in Japan, Singapore, the Philippines and other former occupied territories.) Bills were settled, debts
were paid. But if the trials cleared the Japanese people, then the atom-bombs,
surely, tilted the moral balance in their favour. They had been wronged; they
became victims; they deserved — they felt — sympathy not condemnation.
    But as the Japanese are basically
disinclined to regard war as a moral issue, the second effect of the A-bombs is
even more important. The atom-bomb was a purely technical invention, like the
steamship in an earlier period: then Perry had steamships, the Japanese didn’t.
The A-bomb once again underlined the technical superiority of the United States. This was acknowledged, even admired. But it had nothing to do with military
prowess. The atom-bomb was dropped by the side which had it; not by the
side which possessed more courage, valour and military genius. But for the
atom-bomb, Japan would have remained undefeated. In this way the atom-bomb
preserves and upholds the belief in Japanese invincibility. The legend of
invincibility can thus gloriously survive the most devastating defeat.
    The A-bomb was Commodore Perry all
over again. It was Perry in a modern, diabolically destructive,
twentieth-century guise. It was not the only factor which defeated Japan but it was a decisive one. It opened the country up to the gaijin in an even
more crushing and irrevocable manner than the Commodore had done. Yet, history
never repeats itself. It moves in spirals, never in grooves. A century before, Japan had said: ‘Very well, let us learn the foreign devil’s skill and artifice and beat
him at his own game.’ Twentieth-century Japan still wants to beat, or at least
equal, the gaijin, but only in the more important economic field.
    The third and most important
psychological effect of the bomb was a thorough revolution. This revolution is
unmixed with moral indignation or self-pity: but it is deep and sincere; it is
profound and nation-wide. The Japanese, so