Book Review
In Memory of a Great Sacrificed Canadian
by
William Krehm
Origins of the Modern Japanese State – Selected Writings of E.H. Norman.
Edited by John W. Dower. Edited with an introduction on E. H.Norman, “Japan
and the Uses of History,” by John W. Dower, Pantheon Books, Random House,
New York, 1975.
Just in case a younger generation may not know the name E.H. Norman, let me
quote from Dower’s introduction:
Norman’s death and the subsequent neglect of his work in the
West provide a saddening chapter on the politics of postwar American scholarship
in Japan. In his own words, Norman was ‘addicted to history,’ and
the brief tribute to Clio with which this volume begins suggests the intimate
link which he perceived between historical consciousness and man’s fate.
Although he did his doctoral work in Japanese history at Harvard, his prior
training was in at Victoria College in Toronto and Trinity College in Cambridge
in ancient and medieval European history. His parents were missionaries in
Nagano prefecture, and he lived in Japan from birth until his mid-teens. [His
work] breathes both an enviable knowledge of the West as well as the East,
and a sense of humility before the ‘delicate tracery’ of historical
change.
Norman died by suicide, run over by Washington’s great McCarthy machine
that churned out sentences of guilt by association. The main charge was that
he had attended Marxist study classes at university, and had thus met individuals
who years later became Soviet agents. But given Washington’s fulsome wartime
propaganda build-up for Joe Stalin (“Uncle Joe”), responsibilities
for that were far-flung. In that respect Washington made little distinction
between the servile dictators it had imposed and sustained in Central America
and its great Soviet ally. President Roosevelt himself was quoted saying of
President Anastasio Somoza, a gangster type sustained by the US in Nicaragua
during an entire era: “He is a son of a bitch, but his our son of a bitch.”
That bon mot covers much of Washington’s foreign politics to this day.
The McCarthy committee was stone-deaf to much revealing evidence of style. It
is not difficult to distinguish a great independent thinker from the stylistic
flat-footedness of an ideologue. And no agent – of Washington or of Stalin
– could produce the sensitive, profound handling of history by E.H. Norman.
The great turning point in Japanese history was the end of the period when the
Emperor was shorn of all actual power and secluded in Kyoto, while shoguns –
formally his servers – took over. This was known as the “shogunate”
or the “Bakufu” (literally the “tent government” or military
headquarters). It was “one of the most conscious attempts [anywhere] to
freeze society in a rigid mold. Every social class, and every subdivision within
it, had its own regulations covering all the minutiae of clothing, ceremony
and behavior. The criminal code, severe even by feudal standards, distinguished
between samurai – the warriors – and commoner.” The late Shogunate
held “It is enough to follow the books of old, and there is no need to
write new ones.” Scholars who pursued their studies in “Dutch learning”
(the Dutch were the only foreigners tolerated) were even executed. “Its
slogan was ‘revere officials and despise the people.’ Recent Western
scholarship has challenged this view of peasant immiseration by revealing increased
productivity beyond what was recognized at the time Norman wrote, and postulating
that this contributed to an over-all rise in living standards. What Norman did
observe was that misery and disaster were recurrent: that economic growth and
changes in the mode of production per se may have altered the nature of the
burden on the little man, but that the dispossessed can be crushed beneath the
wheels of change.”
Sound familiar? It should. There is in fact a tendency among critics of Norman’s
view that sees in modernization a virtue in itself that solves problems by “trickle-down.”
But he pointed to the relative lack in Japanese culture of compassion for the
weak and unfortunate. In the poisoned atmosphere of the 1940s, he emphasized
that this was the legacy of the cultural mold rather than any inherent racial
characteristic. “Norman’s interpretation of Japan’s rapid transition
from feudal society rests to a large extent upon the timing of this development,
‘the fortuitous concurrence of two processes: (1) the death agony of feudalism
and (2) the pressure exerted on Japan by the Western nations.’
The Western threat to Japan was primarily economic. Following the treaties
of the 1850s, the influx of foreign manufactures heightened the domestic economic
crisis by destroying home industries such as cotton, sugar and pulp and causing
drastic fluctuations in the money economy. In this way, Western imperialism
contributed to the turmoil which culminated in the overthrow of the Shogunate.
This economic pressure was perpetuated through the fixed tariffs imposed on
Japan under the unequal-treaty system, which served as a reminder to Japan’s
leaders that their development stood in danger of being stunted like China’s.
This gave urgency to their objectives of creating a strong state and influenced
both the priorities which characterized economic growth, entailing a curtailment
of social and political reforms. Japan’s comparatively successful transition
to a modern state was accomplished in part because for reasons of their own
the Western powers did not attempt to clamp Japan in the vise of neocolonialism
during the period when the country was most vulnerable. The threat, however,
nevertheless remained, and the game of international power was played by Western
rules. Japan acquired extraterritorial rights in China before she had shaken
herself free of similar foreign privileges in her own land.
The Samurai Heritage
In his Japan’s Emergence as a Modern State (1940), Norman wrote
“Japan has been handicapped by her late entry on the stage of world politics
and by her economic insufficiency. [However, she recognized that] unity of purpose
and action among the great Powers can never be maintained long. The conclusion
was drawn that Japan’s opportunity would come at the moment of sharpest
tension between the powers. Patience, good judgment, and the will to strike
fast and hard at a moment’s notice have continued as characteristics of
Japanese foreign policy. In this way she acquired with a comparatively small
output of energy what other nations of greater economic strength have achieved
only after long wars, setbacks and even defeats. The Japanese Empire was built
in the course of thirty-five years or so. During that time she engaged in three
victorious wars, 1894-5 (with China), 1904-5 (with Russia), and 1914-8. None
of these exhausted Japan unduly. Nor did her next great advance of 1931-3, by
which Manchuria was pried loose from China with only desultory fighting. As
a yardstick to measure the success of this policy one might mention the continual
reverses suffered by the immense empire of Tsarist Russia during the 19th and
early 20th centuries.”
Japanese history unrolled in a matrix of such improbable circumstance that no
economic model developed in the West, Marxist or other, could possibly provide
a neat fit. The samurai – the warrior caste – were originally peasants
and landowners as well, but the introduction of cannon from the West, caused
cities and towns to throw up walls. To keep them in line the samurai were brought
to live within the fortifications or leave their families there as hostages.
Absentees, they leased their plots to plain peasants, who paid rent in rice,
the only existing currency. To lessen their exposure to the instability of rice
prices, this was soon transmutted into coin. And to handle the resulting transactions
the samurai turned to the lowest and most contemned of social groups –
the outcast etas alone excepted – money lenders and merchants. By marriage
or partnerships these were brought into alliances with samurai families to handle
the complex money transactions. For though murderously adept in wielding the
two long swords that marked their status, the samurai had no knowledge of the
simplest arithmetic. With the restoration of the Meiji monarchy (1867-8), the
sale of land plots was introduced to protect the usurious loans for which they
served as collateral. From such humble beginnings arose the grand alliances
of banks and world industries – the zaibatsu. This historic nexus still
contributes to the reluctance of the Japanese banks to foreclose on historic
customers, as the American model requires.
The presence of so many landless samurai, the shrinking pensions that replaced
the land that once was theirs, weighed heavily on Japanese politics. Some of
the now redundant samurai acquired forbidden Western learning and helped bring
it into the educational system. Others agitated for foreign wars – against
China and Korea and Russia – that would give them an outlet for their rusting
martial talents. Sober statesmen, meanwhile, restrained them until a central
government and a central policy, and a navy and army had been created to make
such wars a likely bet.
These multifaceted powers of analysis shows up as well in its planning its industrial
rebirth after the shattering defeat in the Second World War. Little was left
to the self-balancing market. Having so little foreign currency, they sought
out the lines of export as their ultimate goal to leave a maximum of net export
revenue. Certainly the bill was not filled by textiles, one of their main exports
before the war, could not fill the bill, since the cotton and yarn had to be
imported. They identified heavy machinery and automobiles. But first they had
to develop the supporting base for that. Hence they concentrated on steel and
iron, electrical and eventually electronics.
Over the years they resisted American pressure to allow their currency to float
upward to reflect the triumph of their exports. A contrary course would have
meant pushing up further the unaccustomed level of unemployment for Japan –
in the 6 and 7% range. Today, their automobile industry is competing successfully
the Americans in the US market. That contributed to their bank problem of the
last decade. Like the rest of the first world they are shifting a lot of their
manufacturing to China and other Asiatic countries.
To a visitor to Tokyo is impressed with the tip-top shape of its infrastructures
after a decade of slight “economic growth.” Its subway system, itstrains, railways, its educational system frequently make one ashamed of the
potholes in all these back home. In the 1950s and considerably before Senator McCarthy appeared on the scene,
Washington was using scholarly research on Japan as an ideological weapon. In
that it was pursuing the pattern pioneered by it in Central America and continued
in many other parts of the world. In the seventies one of the world’s semi-hushed
up scandals was revealed when a congressman forced the revelation of the bogus
Congress for Cultural Freedom set up by the CIA to commission thousands of articles
misinforming the public about rightist coups throughout the world. Fraudulent
academic texts were financed that still feed misinformation into the educational
system. Newspapermen were rewarded with genuine scoops that could guarantee
them lucrative reputations as reward for planting misleading misinformation
in their publications. No less an eminence than Arthur Koestler turned out to
have been ensnared in that web.
That caught up with E.H. Norman. Far from relying mainly on Marxism, his scholarship
on Japan stood in the way of the ideology that Washington was developing to
deliberately replace Marxism at its own game. The same Foster Dulles who bestrode
US Latin American policy in the 1950s made his power felt in academic views
on Japan. Quoting Dower again: “As far as Japan is concerned, the intellectual
tasks formulated by the [US] government in the late 1940s and early 1950s had
been met by the main line of Japanese studies in America. It penetrated the
Japanese intellectual world and attacked progressive scholars, de-emphasized
militarism and was gentle with capitalism. It met Dulles’s subtle concern
with emphasizing the social superiority of the Japanese by concentrating on
the successes of the prewar era and the positive features of its traditional
social and value structures. It presented Japan as a counter-model for developing
countries and deliberately focused upon the more attractive aspects of Japan’s
emergence as a modern state.
“Norman’s views have scant currency within the university establishment.
The dark, harsh night of his people under feudalism has been replaced by the
roseate dawn of early modernity. [The view was propagated that] the tragedy
of modern Japan was largely a dilemma of the interwar period could certainly
never be shared by a Chinese or Formosan or Korean nationalist, or by the great
majority of Japanese during the earlier period when ‘things had gone so
well.’
The thrust of such preoccupations has been extremely significant in
shaping many recent interpretations of Japanese external behavior. Japan’s
dilemma becomes an unfortunate problem of growth, much like acne in adolescence,
which might have been avoided if a few salves had been applied before the
unsightly condition erupted. What has not been seriously examined is the extent
to which the Japanese experience was similar to that of theoretically more
advanced capitalist countries.
Washington’s Cultural Hoax in Japan
“Norman’s axiom was: it is the effect rather than the motive which
should be of primary concern to the historian. In some of his shorter pieces
he called attention to the nature of Japanese behavior abroad: atrocities,
military occupation, military corruption and disobedience (as opposed to the
prevailing image of fanatical discipline), organized prostitution in subject
areas, and the crucial role of the narcotic trade in Japanese activities in
China, used to both finance aggression and, it was hoped, to debilitate Chinese
resistance.”
None of this fits into the official Washington model of “modernization”
or more currently Globalization and Deregulation. Even as it brings the world
ever greater disasters, it goes on admitting but a single remedy: more of the
same. And it was to that fatal flaw in our power structures that Norman fell
victim.
“On August 7, 1951, Professor Karl August Wittfogel testified before the
Senate Committee on Internal Security that he knew Norman from his attendance
at a Communist study group in 1938. This began the public hounding of Norman
that led to his destruction six years later, but the impact of the Senate Inquisition
was broader. These were the hearings which wracked and eviscerated Asian studies
in the US, and which made taboo even the using of terms like “feudal heritage,”
and the asking of scholarly questions, which could be equated with positions
held by communists.
From there the case against Norman patched together in Washington moved on wheels.
“Morris introduced a 1940 letter taken from the files of the Institute
of Pacific Relations (IPR), indicating that Norman, then assigned to the Canadian
Legation in Tokyo, might be persuaded to write for Pacific Affairs under
a nom de plume. The letter also suggested that ‘very secret messages’
concerning IPR business might be sent care of Norman.” Another witness
testified that “secret messages” mentioned in the letter referred
to the possibility of research manuscripts and involving
IPR branches in Tokyo and Shanghai. Such secrecy was considered potentially
necessary given the state of war between China and Japan. In fact, no such messages
were ever sent through Norman.
“Eugene Dooman of the State Department testifying before the committee
on September 14th leveled a further distorted, and ultimately fatal charge against
Norman, namely, that together with the John Emmerson of the State Department
he had abetted the growth of the postwar Communist Party. The issue involved
the release of Communist leaders Shiga Yoshio and Tokuda Kyuchi from prison
(where both had been incarcerated since 1928 and were released under a general
order from General MacArthur).” Dooman stopped short of pointing the finger
at MacArthur as a Communist agent on like grounds, but went on: “John Emmerson
of the US State Department and Norman went in a staff car to the prison and
brought Shiga and Tokuda back to their homes.
“The initial Wittfogel accusation against Norman drew [an] immediate
response from the Department of External Affairs of the Canadian Government:
Mr. Norman was subject to the normal security investigation by the proper authorities
of the Canadian Government, according to rules which apply to all members of
the Department of External Affairs. Subsequently, reports reached the Department
which reflected on Mr. Norman’s loyalty and alleged previous association
with the Communist Party. These reports were very carefully and fully investigated
by the security authorities of the Government, and as a result Mr. Norman was
given a clean bill of health, and he therefore remains a trusted and valuable
official of the Department.
On August 16 Lester Pearson, Secretary of State for External Affairs,
also released a statement reaffirming confidence in Norman, castigating the
subcommittee and expressing ‘regret and annoyance that his name had been
dragged into their hearings on the basis of an unimpressive and unsubstantiated
allegation by a former Communist.’ Norman at the time was head of the
Far Eastern desk in External Affairs, and in a strong gesture of confidence
Pearson brought him as his chief adviser to the Japanese peace treaty conference
at San Francisco the following month. After affixing his signature to the
treaty documents, Pearson handed the gold pen with which he had signed for
Canada to Norman, ‘I’m giving this to the person who really did
the work.’
Then comes a significant paragraph:
Although Pearson and his government staunchly defended him, a more complex
background to the events of 1951-2 became
apparent after Norman’s death. It was learned then that as early as 1950
he had been subjected to a gruelling six-month investigation by the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police, during which he purportedly acknowledged his earlier,
and mistaken, ‘campus flirtation with Marxism.’ Pearson himself
later claimed that Norman himself had requested the investigation (apparently
after an accusation had been directed against him by a Canadian ex-party member).
The 1950 report remains closed, and the precise sequence of events is confused
and opaque, replete with secret informants, alleged mistaken identities, fallacious
and amended reports and seemingly inconsistent dates. It was of considerable
significance, however, for although the Canadian Government concluded that
Norman was not a Communist and his loyalty and integrity were beyond question,
the information was in fact made available to the US Government, presumably
to the FBI, as a matter of routine exchange of security information. And it
appears to have subsequently made its way into the hands of the witch-hunters
of the Senate sub-committee.
This is an automatic procedure that was in place before Norman’s tragedy
and proceeds right to this day, as witness the recent deportation by the US
of a naturalized Canadian to Syria, where he was subjected to imprisonment and
torture. It reduces Canadian sovereignty over its citizens and officials to
mere road-bumps before the whim of the US secret services. Paul Martin’s
statement, made in April 2003 is hardly reassuring on the point:
“Canada has to take a more sophisticated approach to ties with the US….
Multilateralism is a means not an end.”
That would seem to take care of our sovereignty as well.
But back to Norman. “In 1953 Norman was appointed High Commissioner to
New Zealand, a minor post which he repeatedly described as exile. Three years
later, however, he was recalled to assume a position of immense important –
Ambassador to Egypt. With the Suez crisis of 1957, [came] a period of sheer
physical and mental exhaustion – an exceptional personal accomplishment.
For Norman is credited with having persuaded Nasser to permit the entry of the
UN peace-keeping forces into Egypt in the wake of the British, French and Israeli
invasion. Lester Pearson later received the Nobel Peace Prize for his endeavors
in the Middle East at this time; much of the real work and accomplishment, it
has been suggested privately by a senior Canadian diplomat, was Norman’s.
At this moment, the Senate subcommittee renewed its accusation, in hearings
on ‘The Scope of Soviet Activity in the US.’ The reopening of the
old inquest came at a time when Norman was, by all accounts, exhausted by his
endeavours He wrote to Pearson [that] he believed this could only embarrass
his government and threaten the fragile Middle East peace. His behavior became
erratic. On a doctor’s advice he drafted a telegram requesting a temporary
holiday leave, to be sent on April 4th. However, on the morning of that day,
he [went] to the apartment building where a friend lived, and took an elevator
to the ninth floor and walked to the roof, and walking backward, fell to a parking
lot below. He died instantaneously, aged forty-seven One of the two letters
he left, to a friend, read “I have no option. I must kill myself, for I
live without hope.”
That message is timely for Canada as a nation, as our new government takes over.