Tom OLincoln - Australias Pacific War: Challenging a National Myth

In 1948, a remarkable letter surprised readers of The Sydney Morning Herald. The author was a veteran called Charles Huxtable. He was the epitome of respectability: a doctor who was so conservative-minded that he felt nervous about the spectre of a Labour government in Britain. Huxtable had been decorated in two world wars, and spent time as a POW. As a medical officer in Changi, he had seen the terrible consequences of brutality on the Burma-Thailand railway. Yet Huxtable called for mercy in the Tokyo war-crimes trial which was then about to deliver verdicts. All sides needed to be self-critical, he wrote. The wider Pacific War was bitter, racial and merciless and the cruelties of which the enemy were guilty did not exceed those practised by us.

In reply to another correspondent, Huxtable expanded the argument. Through Allied war policy in the Pacific, the soldiers had been taught to do things they disliked. He could tell his critics some stories they would not like to hear based on firsthand accounts. Australian and American policy in the Pacific seemed to have been one of ruthless extermination of the enemy with no provision for giving quarter and no intention to do so. By adopting such methods the Allies, in my opinion, have forfeited the right to sit in judgement on Japan as a nation.'1

Three years after the war it must have taken great courage for Charles Huxtable to write these words. Its easier for us to challenge conventional views of the war today. We should wait no longer.

1. Huxtable, letters: The Sydney Morning Herald, 31 May, 8 June, 16 June 1948, all p. 2; also Huxtable 1987: 7-8, 158.

Japan and Australia in the conflict of empires

From December 1941 a devastating conflict gripped the Asia-Pacific region. Ten to fifteen million died horrible deaths, perhaps hundreds of thousands were tortured and raped, cities were reduced to rubble and ash.'1 How could this happen? Despite a huge body of complex scholarly work, the popular consensus for many years has been a simple one: to blame Japan. As historian Peter Edwards puts it, Japan had revealed an expansionist and profoundly anti-democratic underside. This had to be eradicated, and it was.'2 The case seems closed.

But while the transgressions of the Japanese state are obviously important, the causes actually lie deeper. Many of them lie in the rise of imperialism, a global phenomenon with roots in Europe. European powers had seized the Americas and Australasia before 1800, colonised most of Asia, and carved up Africa. By the mid 19th century predominance within the system of empires was going to those who embraced industrial capitalism. Wealth from the colonies provided capital and materials for the factories, which worked long hours to create the products and military firepower that became, in their turn, the lifeblood of empires. When Marx and Engels wrote in 1848 that Western capitalism had, through exploitation of the world market, drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood, they were premature but they were on the right track. Western predators were about to batter down the Chinese walls of previously independent economies.'3 But there were some who sought to defy the trend.

For two centuries Japan had isolated itself from the world. During a long era of seclusion, the Tokugawa Shogunate had presided over a relatively peaceful society. It had brought the samurai warriors under central control and transformed them partly into a state bureaucracy. Japan threatened no one outside its borders. But the Western powers, eager to open up new markets, would not allow it to remain a backwater. The closed borders first came under pressure in the early 19th century, when Russian ships menaced Japanese settlements in the Kurile Islands. In response, the countrys specialists in foreign affairs began studying western military science and technology. It was the beginning of a fateful cycle.

In 1853 Commodore Matthew Perrys American ships arrived to begin forcing Japan to open to foreign trade and influence. The Tukogawa dragged their feet until British and French advances in China during the Second Opium War strengthened the Americans hand. But by the end of the decade, Japan had to concede not only the opening of five ports but the hated principle of extra-territoriality, which meant western residents lived under Western law, applied by consular courts. Lest the Japanese consider resisting, a British squadron flattened parts of Kagoshima in 1862, and two years later, western navies bombarded a fortress on the Shimonoseki Straights.'4

The Japanese ruling groups entered a crisis. To resolve it they fought out a series of complex struggles, of which the high point was the Meiji restoration which regrouped government around the emperor; but conflict continued for decades. The fall of the Shogunate and construction of a new political system and its ideologies around the emperor was a response to Western pressure, as expressed in the key slogan of the age: Sonno Joi, Revere the Emperor and Expel the Barbarians. Aizawa Seishisais 1825 book Shinron (New Proposals) had already argued for unity among Japanese elites based on loyalty to the emperor in order to defend the country. This now became urgent. The Japanese were learning about Britains conquest of India, and Chinas humiliation at Western hands. Eight years after Perrys visit, a Samurai visited Shanghai, and reported: Here most of the Chinese have become the servants of foreigners. When English and French people come walking the Chinese give way stealthily. Although the main power here is Chinese, it is really nothing but a colony of England and France who can be sure the same fate will not visit our country in the future?'5 Early in the 20th century, the nationalist thinker Hibino Yutaka wrote in an influential book that his country faced a world of sharp competition. Indeed a discarded scrap of flesh upon the Asiatic continent has the power to assemble the hungry vultures from the whole earth. He concluded that it was only when the nation had the strength to repulse its strongest enemies that we can in tranquillity sing the praises of peace.'6

And so Japans dominant class began creating an empire along with a military machine. They intended Japans gradual seizure of Korea, begun with the 1894 Sino-Japanese war, as a Perry-style exercise to force open markets but also as a way to confront Russia, which had begun building a railway to its own possessions in the far-east. In doing this the Japanese rulers pioneered brutal methods of colonisation that would make them notorious. At home Japan rushed to industrialise and lay the basis for an empire that could compete on equal terms. The combination of territorial expansion and breakneck industrial development, following the shock of foreign intervention, led to an equally dramatic development of national ideology. The more liberal intellectuals, politicians and bureaucrats saw the focus on the emperor as foreshadowing a kind of constitutional monarchy, but it translated into mainstream thought as an authoritarian emperor cult. A key term was the national essence (kokutai), which saw Japan as the country of the gods with the Emperor at its head.'7

Another ideological feature was resentment of western supremacy.

A Japanese vice-minister asked the British ambassador what one should make of the contrast between people in the East who worked long days to survive on the edge of starvation, and affluent ladies in London with nothing better to do than walk their dogs.'8 This had its measure of hypocrisy as if there were no rich people in Tokyo yet was also partly genuine. Similarly, some young rightist ideologues were genuinely enthusiastic about independence movements in the Wests Asian colonies. But the imperatives of competition with the West meant that seizing the resources of neighbouring countries remained the priority. An historian sums up Japanese nationalist thought, with its blend of imperialism and anti-westernism: