Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (7 page)

Some of the rhetoric now coming from the United States, specifically in neoconservative circles, comes close to this vision, a curious development for the nation of competitive conformists, without “lofty ambitions,” admired by Tocqueville.

 

 

 

IT IS NOT SUPRISING THAT OF ALL MODERN EUROPEAN ideas, German-style ethnic nationalism—including pan-Germanism, which inspired the pan-Arabist ambitions of the early Ba’ath Party—held such appeal for non-Western intellectuals rebelling against the universalistic claims of Western imperialism. The sometimes lethal combination of reinterpreted native traditions and reactionary European ideas produced, among other things, variations of the death cult. This was particularly true in Japan, in many ways the most “Westernized” nation in Asia.

The most chilling, and certainly best known, symbol of human sacrifice in twentieth-century warfare is the kamikaze pilot, hurtling himself to his death at almost 600 mph onto the deck of an enemy vessel. Many missed their target and exploded or crashed into the sea. An alternative form of violent death for the kamikazes, or Tokkotai (Special Attack Forces), as Japanese more usually call them, was to be stuffed into a steel, cigar-shaped coffin and launched from a submarine as a human torpedo. This is how one such torpedo described his last moments on earth, clutching a cherry blossom branch:

Like this nineteen-year-old boy, many people still assume that Tokkotai operations were a harsh but integral part of Japanese culture, a reflection of ancient warrior codes, an aesthetic idea of voluntary death that is peculiarly Japanese. It is, in fact, hard to know to what extent the emotions expressed above were made to conform to an expected formula. There are too many clichés in such statements for them to be entirely believable. Private letters from kamikaze pilots to family or friends were often more reflective and anguished, and much less inclined to accept such ready-made concepts as falling like cherry blossoms or following samurai ways.

Most Tokkotai volunteers (under various degrees of pressure) were students from the humanities departments of top universities. Science students were considered to be less expendable. Letters reveal that all had read widely, often in at least three languages. Their most favored writers in German philosophy were Nietzsche, Hegel, Fichte, and Kant. In French literature: Gide, Romain Rolland, Balzac, Maupassant. In German: Thomas Mann, Schiller, Goethe, Hesse. Many reflected on the suicide of Socrates and on Kierkegaard’s writings about despair. A few were practicing Christians, and a surprising number took a Marxist view of politics and economics.
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These young men were patriotic, highly idealistic, and often wary of militaristic propaganda. Western capitalism and imperialism were seen as the enemy, to be sure, but their ultimate sacrifice (and idealism) was often justified and articulated through Western ideas. They had turned the West against the West, as it were, and in this they were typical children of modern Japanese history, for that is what Japan had been doing since the mid-nineteenth century.

The images are ancient: ritual samurai suicide, the beautiful evanescence of cherry blossoms, the divine emperor, dying on the battlefield like a “shattering crystal ball.” The words of the melancholy song rendered by kamikaze pilots before leaving on their fatal missions are from an eighth-century poem:

And yet the death cult responsible for the suicidal tactics in the last two years of World War II was not at all ancient, but part of a modern militarized political ideology that owed as much to sometimes misunderstood European ideas as to Japanese traditions. Like all non-Western nations in the nineteenth century, Japan was confronted with superior European power, and the Japanese tried to learn as much about its sources as possible. Forging cannon and catching up on scientific discoveries were just the beginning. One of the few Asian countries not to be colonized by a European empire, Japan went further than any other to protect itself from Western power by mimicry. Japan’s behavior at the end of its war with the West shows that suicide bombing is not necessarily a product of poverty, backwardness, or foreign oppression. In Japan, as in Germany, death cults thrived amid the highest degree of technological, cultural, and industrial sophistication.

The Japanese transformation from a nation of feudal fiefdoms, presided over by a samurai dynasty, to a modern Western-style nation-state was always going to be a patchwork job. The constitution was largely Prussian, the navy was fashioned after the British Royal Navy, and so on. But the biggest problem for Meiji-period intellectuals and politicians was to find the most suitable model for a modern state. Some looked to Britain and the United States, attracted by the same bourgeois institutions that Tocqueville had analyzed so sympathetically. Others saw greater merit in the German model of ethnic nationalism: the
Volk
of heroic patriots ruled by a militarized monarchy. The latter prevailed and they proceeded to establish an authoritarian state along Germanic lines, dressed up in half-invented and frequently distorted Japanese traditions. The cult of young men dying for the emperor like cherry blossoms or shattering crystal was part of that new dressing.

The modern emperor cult was based partly on a misunderstanding of religion in the West. Trying to analyze the source of European power, nineteenth-century Japanese scholars concluded that Christianity, as a state religion, was the glue that held European nations together as disciplined communities. Used to Confucian codes of obedience to authority, they assumed that Christianity had the same effect in Europe. There were some Japanese in the early Meiji period who actually believed that all Japanese should become Christians as part of their quest for civilization and enlightenment, but they were in a minority. The more common view was that Japan needed its own state religion, and this was to be State Shinto, a politicized version of ancient rites, mostly to do with nature and fertility. The alternative to the Christian God was to be Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess; and the emperor, hitherto a remote and politically powerless figure in the old capital of Kyoto, was moved to Tokyo as a combination of kaiser, generalissimo, Shinto pope, and the highest living deity.

The most important document, the text that steered Japan into its ultimately disastrous course, was the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors, promulgated in 1882 at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. One of its key passages, which every Japanese soldier knew by heart, went: “Do not be beguiled by popular opinions, do not get involved in political activities, but singularly devote yourself to your most important obligation of loyalty to the emperor, and realize that the obligation is heavier than the mountains but death is lighter than a feather.”

Traditionally, Japanese emperors had divine attributes, as did thousands of other things, such as mountains, rivers, and rocks, as well as a huge family of deities. The idea that the emperor should be worshiped as a living god was new. His role as the supreme commander of soldiers and sailors was certainly new. That it should be considered a young man’s highest duty to die for him would have struck Japanese in earlier times as extremely eccentric. The ancient poem sung by kamikaze pilots before takeoff might suggest otherwise, but “the desire to die next to our emperor” referred specifically to guards who protected the western frontiers in the eighth century, when Chinese imperial customs were copied, only to be discarded later.

Self-sacrifice, in the form of ritual suicide, existed, but this was permitted only to the warrior caste. In any case, the samurai suicide was never an act of war, but more an expression of atonement for some form of dishonor: a transgression of some kind, or a humiliating defeat. Suicide was the samurai’s way to restore lost face in the living world by opting for death. In this sense, perhaps, those young idealists in 1945 who thought they were following the way of the warrior were not completely wrong. Some did see their sacrificial act as a restoration of honor to a nation that had clearly been defeated. But this was a sign more of romantic nationalism than of emperor worship, and thus the product quite as much of modern European history as of ancient Japanese customs.

The Japanese were far from being the only non-Western people who tried to face Western imperial power by adopting some extreme Western ideas. Radical Hindus in the 1920s formed an organization called the RSS and grafted European fascist ideas onto a modern interpretation of their own religious practices. Like Communists, they aimed at forging a “new man” by instilling discipline and obedience. Like German National Socialists, they stressed race as the basic component of the modern militarized nation. And from their khaki uniforms to their cult of fresh air and exercise, they took something from the British army too. The main idea was to submerge the individual into the Hindu nation by denying individual desires and the validity of individual autonomy. M. S. Golwalkar, the ideologue of this movement, wrote, “Each cell feels its identity with the entire body and is ever ready to sacrifice itself for the sake of the health and growth of the body. In fact, it is the self-immolation of millions of such cells that releases the energy for every bodily activity.”
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A very similar case was made in the 1920s and 1930s by Japanese philosophers, who matched up Hegel with Zen Buddhism. To call Hindu nationalism traditionally Indian would be as absurd as to call kamikaze tactics traditionally Japanese. It borrowed something from the Indian past, to be sure, just as kamikaze tactics did from the Japanese past, but without the influence of European ideas neither the RSS nor the Japanese Tokkotai would ever have taken the shape it did. When directed against the West, however, as they were in the Pacific war, these ideas depicted it as cowardly, addicted to comfort, and lacking in sacrificial spirit. By clinging to their lives, Westerners were deemed to be dishonorable, and thus less than true human beings.

These were precisely the terms that prewar German nationalists or fascists used in their attacks on the West. They were opposed to the liberal bourgeois society, where individuals follow their own interests under the rule of law. And this is what made it relatively easy for Japanese militarists in the last year of the war to get bright, idealistic students to die for a lost cause. For these students, too, like so many bright, idealistic students everywhere, were against the bland
Komfortismus
of bourgeois liberalism.

Kamikaze pilots were not just fighting the Americans; they saw themselves as intellectual rebels against what they considered the Western corruption of Japan, the selfish greed of capitalism, the moral emptiness of liberalism, the shallowness of American culture. Their reading of Nietzsche, Hegel,

Fichte, and Marx reinforced this view. Militarism held no great appeal for them. On the contrary, many saw Japanese expansion into Asia as another import from the corrupt, imperialist West. Their final sacrifice, then, was rarely seen as a last-ditch attempt to win the war for Japan. They were too intelligent to fall for that. But many did hope that the purity and selflessness of their deaths would show the way to a better, more just, more authentic, more egalitarian Japan. One of them, named Sasaki Hachiro, who died at the age of twenty-two, wrote, “If the power of old capitalism is something we cannot get rid of so easily but if it can be crushed by defeat in war, we are turning the disaster into a fortunate event. We are now searching for a phoenix which rises out of the ashes.”
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This is what Vice Admiral Onishi Takijiro, the father of the kamikaze tactics, had to tell his pilots, before they set off to die: “Even if we are defeated, the noble spirit of the kamikaze attack corps will keep our homeland from ruin. Without this spirit, ruin would certainly follow defeat.”
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Onishi committed suicide in the samurai manner, by opening his stomach with a sword, on the night of Japan’s surrender.

 

 

 

OSAMA BIN LADEN’S USE OF DEATH CULT LANGUAGE to spur on his young followers bears many resemblances to the rhetoric of the kamikaze spirit. In an interview he gave in 1996, two months after the bombing of the al-Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which killed nineteen U.S. servicemen, bin Laden said: “The Crusader army became dust when we detonated al-Khobar, with courageous youth of Islam fearing no danger. If they are threatened [with death] they reply: ‘My death is a victory.’ ” His young warriors were different from American soldiers, he explained, for the Americans’ “problem will be how to persuade your troops to fight, while our problem will be how to restrain our youth from their turn.” Death, he said, “is truth and the ultimate destiny, and life will end anyway. If I don’t fight you, then my mother must be insane.” As for his young “knights”: “In the heat of battle they do not care [about dying], and cure the insanity of the enemy by their ‘insane’ courage.”
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This language is far removed from the mainstream of Islam. Bin Laden’s use of the word “insane” is more akin to the Nazis’ constant use of
fanatisch.
Human sacrifice is not an established Muslim tradition. Holy war always was justified in defense of the Islamic state, and believers who died in battle were promised heavenly delights, but glorification of death for its own sake was not part of this, especially in the Sunni tradition. Unlike the Christian martyr, who suffers torture and death for his faith, the Muslim martyr (
shahid
) is an active warrior, more like the kamikaze pilot. But his or her motives must be pure. It is not glorious to die for selfish reasons, or gratuitously, without any effect on the enemy. And the idea that freelance terrorists would enter paradise as martyrs by murdering unarmed civilians is a modern invention, one that would have horrified Muslims in the past, Shi’ite or Sunni, and still horrifies many Muslims today. Islam is not a death cult.