Year Zero (41 page)

Six months later, some of the same Americans returned to the scene in a jeep. This time, the children appeared to be less afraid. One of the officers began to whistle “Swanee River,” and to the American party's intense satisfaction, the children sang the song with him in Japanese, followed by renderings of “Auld Lang Syne” and the “Maine Stein Song.” The party was equally pleased to note that the textbooks had been properly doctored; all “feudal” passages, referring to the war, to Japan's warrior past, to the emperor, and so on, had been blacked out with India ink. The principal, full of goodwill, spoke in English. He promised that all the wartime posters would be put on a bonfire and several more teachers, three of whom had served in the army, dismissed.
⁴³

However relieved many Japanese may have been by the relatively benign behavior of the American victors, and however grateful for the democratic reforms forced on their political elites, there were also more complicated feelings about American-style reeducation. A fascinating letter to the
Asahi
newspaper from a junior high school student perfectly expressed a common reaction among young Japanese to the volte-face by their elders; one day they were taught to worship the emperor and support the holy war in Asia, and the next, by the very same teachers, to denounce Japanese feudalism and support
demokurashii
.

The student begins his letter by observing that many adults are worried how hard it will be to change young minds raised with militarism. In
fact, he says, recent experience has made teenagers much more politically conscious. All they had ever known was that Japan was permanently at war. Peace was like “emerging from the dark into dazzling sunlight.” Everything they had been taught before was shown to be utterly wrong: “How could they ever trust their leaders, or indeed any adults again?” In fact, it was the adults, still often confused and ambivalent about the recent past, who should give cause for worry, for they clearly had more difficulty in freeing themselves from the spirit of militarism.
⁴⁴

His was the voice of one of the most politically active generations in Japan's modern history. Most were on the left, and all were filled with distrust of the old Japanese establishment and felt deeply betrayed when the Cold War prompted the same Americans who had come to Japan as teachers of freedom, pacifism, and democracy to embrace that old establishment, many of whose members had the blood of the last war on their hands. Japanese much like the young letter writer to the
Asahi
would pour into the streets of Tokyo in 1960 when Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, the Albert Speer of wartime Japan, ratified a security treaty with the U.S. that would turn Japan into a perpetual base for U.S. military operations in Asia. They protested against Japan's indirect—and highly lucrative—involvement in the Vietnam War, which seemed to echo earlier wars in Asia. The Japanese left, enraged by Japan's role in U.S. “imperialism,” and the right, just as enraged by having to abide by an “American” pacifist constitution, had one thing in common. To either side, the U.S. occupation seemed never to have ended.

To some people postwar
demokurashii
had come a little too easily, as a kind of gift from the foreign conquerors. A well-known cartoon by Kato Etsuro showed an ecstatic Japanese crowd, some still in military caps, raising their hands to the skies, from which parachuted canisters drop like manna from heaven bearing the words “democratic revolution.”
⁴⁵
To receive something one ought to have fought for oneself was a little humiliating.

Some of the humiliation was intended, but it was not directly aimed at the common Japanese people. The most emblematic photograph of the
Occupation, published in September 1945, was taken on the occasion of Emperor Hirohito's official visit (more an audience, really) to General MacArthur at SCAP's official residence. The emperor, forty-four years old, a mere stripling compared to the Supreme Commander, who was sixty-five, stands stiffly to attention in full morning dress. Next to him stands MacArthur, his superior authority made visible not just by his great height, but a studied casualness: the open-necked khaki shirt, hands comfortably lodged behind his hips.

The photo was printed in all the major newspapers, and the Japanese government, shocked by an image reeking of lèse-majesté, promptly forbade further publication. The following day, MacArthur revoked the ban and ordered new measures to guarantee press freedom. This did not mean that the Americans didn't censor the news as actively as they did in Germany. They did. Mention of Hiroshima was prohibited, for example, as were negative reports about the United States, or any criticism of SCAP's administration. (In 1946, a Japanese film titled
The Japanese Tragedy
was even banned for being too critical of the emperor's wartime role, since MacArthur, after all, had absolved him from all blame.)

Still, democracy was not just an empty word. Some of the revolutionary change dropped in those parachuted canisters was real enough. But there was still that lingering sense of shame, poignantly articulated by Takami Jun, one of the most thoughtful and honest Japanese writers of his time. He wrote in his diary on September 30:

When I think back to the fact that freedom, which naturally should have been given by the people's own government, could not be given, and instead has been bestowed for the first time by the military forces of a foreign country . . . I cannot escape feelings of shame. I am ashamed as someone who loves Japan, ashamed for Japan's sake.
⁴⁶

The feeling is understandable, but such utterances are a bit misleading. One of the conceits of the Occupation, still often heard, is that the
Americans built modern Japanese institutions from scratch, that “Westernization” began in 1945, and that the Japanese, thanks to benevolent U.S. guidance, jumped from “feudalism” to democracy in a year or two after their wartime defeat. In fact, democratic institutions, flawed and fragile as they may have been, were already in place by the 1920s. In Japan, as in the Western zones of Germany, after the war Western Allies created the conditions for those institutions to be restored on a firmer basis. This was not always automatic. Japanese politicians and bureaucrats often had to be forced to carry out democratic reforms which most people welcomed. What neither the Americans nor the Japanese could have anticipated, however, was that the one thing the Americans did concoct entirely by themselves would become both the cornerstone, and the burden, of the postwar Japanese identity.

Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, although it was written only in 1946, and thus outside the scope of this book, is still worth quoting, since it, more than anything else, expresses the idealism of 1945:

(1) Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. (2) To accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

In 1953, on a visit to Japan as Eisenhower's vice president, Richard Nixon shocked the Japanese by declaring that Article 9 had been a mistake. There was no reason why the Japanese shouldn't revise it. The United States wouldn't object. Indeed, the United States wanted Japan to be a strong ally against communism. But most Japanese disagreed. They refused to change their constitution because they were proud of it. Pacifism had given a nation which had slaughtered millions of people in several terrible wars a new sense of moral purpose, even superiority. Japan
would lead the world into a new era of peace. In Japanese eyes, it was the Americans, in Korea, Vietnam, and later in Iraq or Afghanistan, who ought to be condemned for refusing to relinquish the habit of war.

This, more or less, was the tone of public discourse in Japan for at least fifty years after the war. But pacifism came with a price. Idealism and reality soon diverged, and the Japanese, contrary to the words of their constitution, did rebuild their armed forces, disguised at first as police forces, and later as the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF). Not only was this hypocritical, but it failed to address another problem, resented almost equally by Japanese on both the right and the left. Japan was still dependent on the U.S. for its security; pacifism was professed under the nuclear umbrella of its former conquerors. There never was the equivalent in East Asia of NATO, or a European Union, allowing Japan to build trust and find a new place among its neighbors.

Article 9, still clung to by most people, but fiercely resented by the nationalistic right, has also muddled Japanese attitudes towards their own history. So long as liberals and leftists defend the pacifist clause as an essential penance for wartime guilt, the right maintains that Japan was no more guilty than any other country at war. If the Rape of Nanking or the Manila Massacre are reasons to deprive the nation of a sovereign right, then there is every reason to minimize the importance of those “incidents.” This hopelessly polarized political dispute, masquerading as a historical debate, has poisoned Japan's relations with the rest of Asia for decades. Apart from the one-sided dependence on the United States, this too has been part of the legacy of 1945, a year of many catastrophes that ended with such high hopes.

B
rian Urquhart, the young British army intelligence officer mentioned earlier in this book, the man who had been told to go on sick leave after he alerted his superior officers to the colossal risks of dropping Allied forces near the Dutch town of Arnhem in September 1944, could easily have ended up as a cynic. Operation Market-Garden, costing thousands of young lives, went ahead anyway. “Monty” wanted to outshine his American rival, General George Patton, no matter what. A little more than six months later, already disillusioned by the arrogant stupidity of his own side, Urquhart was among the first Allied soldiers to enter Bergen-Belsen. First, the idiocy, then the horror. When the war was finally over, he could not summon up much joy.

And yet, somehow, he avoided the trap of cynicism. He recalled in his memoir: “I did not meditate that things would never be the same. I hadn't had too much experience of the old order and did not feel I would miss it. I
did
think that the greatest task at hand would be to help prevent such disasters from ever happening again.”
¹

Before the war, Urquhart had been excited by the League of Nations. His internationalist enthusiasm had been inspired, he recalls, by his childhood connection to a private girls' boarding school, Badminton, run by an eccentric headmistress named Miss Beatrice M. Baker, known to all as BMB. Urquhart's mother taught at Badminton School. His aunt Lucy was the formidable BMB's partner, in the school and in life. At the age of six, Urquhart was the only little boy among more than two hundred girls. BMB's sympathies were very much on the left. Like many people at the time, she took a benign view of “Uncle Joe” Stalin. BMB also took in Jewish refugees from the Continent during the 1930s, not something most private boarding school headmistresses would have done at the time. She even made her girls, including my mother, who was a pupil during the war, march through the streets of Bristol under banners that read “Workers of the World Unite!”

After the war was over, Urquhart was briefly taken on by the historian Arnold Toynbee in a special department at the Foreign Office set up to gather intelligence from Nazi-occupied Holland. Since Holland was no longer under Nazi occupation, there was nothing much to do—a small example of the many bureaucratic oddities left over from the war. This assignment didn't last long, however. Urquhart's next employer was Gladwyn Jebb, the British diplomat in charge of organizing the recently established United Nations, whose charter he helped draft. For the rest of his professional life, Urquhart remained a loyal servant of that world institution whose ideals continued to move him, even as he viewed its flaws in practice with due skepticism.

Four decades later he wrote of that heady time in the fall of 1945:

. . . it is hard to recapture the freshness and enthusiasm of those pioneering days. The war was still vivid in everyone's mind and experience. Many of us had been in the armed forces, and others had only emerged from underground resistance movements a few months before. To work for peace was a dream fulfilled, and the
fact that everything had to be organized from scratch was an additional incentive.
²

One of Urquhart's closest friends in the UN secretariat was another man mentioned before, the French resistance fighter Stéphane Hessel, who was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo before being sent to Buchenwald and Dora. He was born in 1919, the same year as Urquhart. Hessel, too, had an unusual background. His father, Franz Hessel, a distinguished German writer and translator of Proust, was the model for Jules in
Jules et Jim
, the story of a fatal Franco-German love triangle, later made into the famous film by François Truffaut. Like Urquhart, Stéphane Hessel wanted to build a better world on a global stage. His ambition was spurred by something more remarkable than the usual loathing of war and longing for peace. He wrote in his memoir that it was “the cosmopolitanism of the concentration camps,” where men from many nations and classes were thrown together, that “pushed me towards diplomacy.”
³
Three years after the end of the war, he helped to draft the first Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted in 1948). Hessel died in 2013, at the age of ninety-five.

No doubt, Urquhart and Hessel were extraordinary men. But their idealism, born from the experience of devastation, was not out of the ordinary. The idea that a new world order had to be built, governed by a global organization, more robust and effective than the League of Nations, was widely believed. Some took this notion very far. Even before the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, proponents of world government often spoke in apocalyptic terms. Arnold Toynbee's pronouncements during the war that a Third World War could be prevented only by a world government, with a worldwide police force, would seem to be on the zany side, but he was taken seriously enough by senior figures in the U.S. State Department. A Gallup poll taken in April 1945 revealed that 81 percent of Americans wanted the U.S. to enter “a world organization with police power to maintain world peace.”
⁴

Since the concept of world government or world federation was quite vague, thinkers along these lines tended to project their personal ideals on the future. Mahatma Gandhi, not surprisingly, held that a world federation should be based on his principles of nonviolence. Toynbee argued that the worldwide police force, at least for some time to come, should be an Anglo-American operation. The idea was to create a “democratic Anglo-American World Commonwealth.”
⁵
He was not alone. Lord Lothian, the ambassador to Washington in 1939, saw the British Empire as the model for a federal world government. This, too, might strike one as not only self-serving but utterly fanciful. Yet the idea of a kind of liberal Anglo-Saxon hegemony was not unusual in Britain or the U.S. Churchill believed in it for a while. Indeed, the notion still pops up on occasion to feed the self-esteem of English-speaking dreamers, including one or two occupants of the White House.

The
New Yorker
writer E. B. White commented in that magazine that San Francisco was just the right place for a conference to draft the first United Nations Charter in the spring of 1945. After all, he said, the “United States is regarded by people everywhere as a dream come true, a sort of world state in miniature.”
⁶
If this kind of smugness feels rather stale today, it, too, has not totally vanished. Even so, E. B. White was quite aware of certain blemishes on the American dreamscape. He noted on May 5, a week after the San Francisco Conference had begun, that somewhere in California “a group of preservationists (we saw by the papers) were attempting to restrict residence in a certain area to ‘people of the Caucasian race.'”
⁷

Then there were the Europeans, often in the anti-Nazi, antifascist resistance, who saw European unity as the first step towards a united world. Already in 1942, the French resistance group Combat (also known as the Mouvement de Libération Nationale [MLN]) published a manifesto declaring that “The United States of Europe—a stage on the road to world union—will soon be a living reality for which we are fighting.”
⁸
One of the main figures in Combat was Albert Camus, not a man usually given to hyperbole. He was later in close touch with another group of antifascist
resisters who issued a manifesto for European unity even earlier, in 1941, from the tiny volcanic island of Ventotene, off the coast of Naples, where Altiero Spinelli and other Italian leftists were incarcerated by Mussolini in a bleak eighteenth-century prison built by the Bourbons. The so-called Ventotene Manifesto, written by one of the prisoners, the political thinker Ernesto Rossi, declared that national politics was for reactionaries, and all progressives should struggle for “a solid international state.” First a federal Europe, then a federal world.

The ideal of a united Europe is much older, of course, going at least as far back as the Holy Roman Empire in the ninth century. Since then the European ideal went through many changes, but there were two constant themes. One was the ideal of a unified Christendom, with Europe as the spiritual and political core. This goal would remain popular among Catholics—Erasmus for one—and especially French Catholics. Maximilien de Béthune, the duke de Sully (1560–1641), for example, conceived of a Christian European republic which the Turks could join only if they converted to the Christian faith.

The related ideal was eternal peace. In 1713, another Catholic Frenchman, the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, published his “Project for the Creation of Eternal Peace in Europe.” There would be a European senate, a European army, and the larger member-states would have equal voting rights.

Eternal peace and Christian unity were often identical in the minds of early pan-Europeanists. Peaceful unification was a religious notion, a Christian utopia. Not necessarily meant to be confined to the European continent, it was, like Christianity itself, a universalist aspiration. National borders, ideally, should be abolished in the earthly kingdom of God.

After the Enlightenment, a new version of this religious universalism was adopted by rationalists with only minor rhetorical changes. The French nineteenth-century poet and statesman Alphonse de Lamartine wrote a rationalist ode to European unity titled the “Marseillaise of Peace” (1841): “In the course of enlightenment, the world rises to unity / I am the fellow citizen of every thinking person / Truth is my country.” As foreign minister of France in the revolutionary year of 1848, Lamartine published
a Manifesto for Europe, promoting the French Republic as a model not just for Europe, but for all mankind.

A similar switch from religious to rationalist idealism took place at the end of World War II. In 1940, before the U.S. had even joined the war, an outfit called the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America set up a commission to work on a “Just and Durable Peace”—a bit premature, perhaps, but always a subject worth pursuing. Protestant ministers and laymen were sometimes joined by Jews and Catholics in this endeavor. “National missions on world order” were established in major U.S. cities. The need for a world organization was set out in a statement by the commission called the “Six Pillars of Peace.” Lest anyone suspect the statement was the work of idle dreamers, the chairman of the commission was John Foster Dulles, an admirer of Hitler in the early 1930s and a fierce cold warrior in the 1950s when he served as Eisenhower's secretary of state.

Dulles played a major role in some very shabby, not to say morally dubious, policies: he supported the French colonial war against the Vietminh nationalists, and he also helped to bring down the democratically elected Iranian government of premier Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953. Mosaddeq was regarded as soft on communism and a threat to Anglo-American oil interests. A coup, engineered by British agents and the CIA, led by Dulles's brother Allen, was the result. But Dulles's anticommunism was not only dictated by corporate business. He was a Christian moralist who believed that the war against godless communism was above all a moral enterprise. He also claimed to believe in what he called the “moral power” of the United Nations, and acted as an adviser to the U.S. delegation in San Francisco.
⁹
His response to the use of atomic bombs against Japan might seem unusual, not just for the time, but for a man associated with American conservatism, but it was not untypical of him: “If we, as a professedly Christian nation, feel morally free to use atomic energy in that way, men elsewhere will accept that verdict.”
¹⁰

It was indeed the devastation of Hiroshima that changed “one world” rhetoric from something that was often inspired by religious morality to something more secular, and immediate. Scientists were among the first
to warn about the implications of a weapon some of them had helped to create. The fearsome explosion of the first atomic bomb in the desert of New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, even prompted a quasi-religious response from Robert Oppenheimer, a leading figure in developing the bomb. He quoted words from the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita:

If the radiance of a thousand suns

Were to burst at once into the sky,

That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One . . .

Now, I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.

Einstein's first words on hearing about the bombing of Hiroshima were more prosaic: “Oh, weh!”
¹¹

Two months later, Einstein cosigned a letter to the
New York Times
, along with such prominent figures as Senator J. W. Fulbright and Owen J. Roberts, associate justice of the Supreme Court. They wrote, “The first atomic bomb destroyed more than the city of Hiroshima. It also exploded our inherited, outdated political ideas.”
¹²
These ideas included national sovereignty. The United Nations Charter agreed upon in San Francisco was just a beginning, they proclaimed: “We must aim at a Federal Constitution of the world, a working world-wide legal order, if we hope to prevent another atomic war.”

John Foster Dulles had argued for UN control of nuclear energy, before he changed his mind fast once the Soviet Union exploded its own bomb. Einstein, in an interview published in the
Atlantic Monthly
in November 1945, thought that the “secret of the bomb should be committed to a World Government, and the United States should immediately announce its readiness to give it to a World Government.”

The case for moral reason was perhaps made most succinctly by that old Christian socialist, the British prime minister, Clement Attlee, in a speech to the Canadian houses of parliament in the same month that Einstein's interview appeared in the
Atlantic Monthly
. Speaking partly in French, and very much with Hiroshima in mind, Attlee proposed that
science and morality had to be brought into harmony. He believed, as the
Times
of London reported, “that without a moral enthusiasm equal to that which savants bring to their researches, the civilization built over the centuries would be destroyed.”
¹³