They are indeed the same people. They are reacting in character. The swing of mood that is natural to them is between intense effort and a lassitude that is sheer marking time. The Japanese at the present moment are chiefly conscious of defending their good name in defeat and they feel they can do this by being friendly. As a corollary, many feel they can do it most safely by being dependent. And it is an easy step to feeling that effort is suspect and that it is better to mark time. Lassitude spreads.
Yet the Japanese do not enjoy ennui. To ‘rouse oneself from lassitude,’ to ‘rouse others from lassitude’ is a constant call to the better life in Japan, and it was often on the lips of their broadcasters even in wartime. They campaign against their passivity in their own way. Their newspapers in the spring of 1946 keep talking about what a blot it is on the honor of Japan that ‘with the eyes of the whole world upon us,’ they have not cleaned up the shambles of bombing and have not got certain public utilities into operation. They complain about the lassitude of the homeless families who congregate to sleep at night in the railway stations where the Americans see them in their misery. The Japanese understand such appeals to their good name. They hope too that as a nation they will be able to put forward utmost efforts again in the future to work for a respected place in the United Nations Organization. That would be working for honor again, but in a new direction. If there is peace among the Great Powers in the future, Japan could take this road to self-respect.
For in Japan the constant goal is honor. It is necessary to command respect. The means one uses to that end are tools one takes up and then lays aside as circumstances dictate. When situations change, the Japanese can change their bearings and set themselves on a new course. Changing does not appear to them the moral issue that it does to Westerners. We go in for ‘principles,’ for convictions on ideological matters. When we lose, we are still of the same mind. Defeated Europeans everywhere banded together in underground movements. Except for a few diehards, the Japanese do not need to organize resistance movements and underground opposition to the occupying forces of the American Army. They feel no moral necessity to hold to the old line. From the first months, single Americans traveled safely on the sardine-packed trains to out-of-the-way corners of the country and were greeted with courtesy by erstwhile nationalistic officials. There have been no vendettas. When our jeeps drive through the villages the roads are lined with children shouting ‘Hello’ and ‘Good-bye,’ and the mother waves her baby’s hand to the American soldier when he is too small to do it by himself.
This right-about-face of the Japanese in defeat is hard for Americans to take at face value. It is nothing we could do. It is even harder for us to understand than the change of attitude in their prisoners of war in our internment camps. For the prisoners regarded themselves as dead to Japan, and we judged that we really did not know what ‘dead’ men might be capable of. Very few of those Westerners who knew Japan predicted that the same change of front characteristic of the prisoners of war might be found in Japan, too, after the defeat. Most of them believed that Japan ‘knew only victory or defeat,’ and that defeat would be in her eyes an insult to be avenged by continued desperate violence. Some believed that the national characteristics of the Japanese forbade their acceptance of any terms of peace. Such students of Japan had not understood giri. They had singled out, from among all the alternative procedures that give one an honorable name, the one conspicuous traditional technique of vengeance and aggression. They did not allow for the Japanese habit of taking another tack. They confused Japanese ethics of aggression with European forms, according to which any person or nation who fights has first to be convinced of the eternal righteousness of its cause and draw strength from reservoirs of hatred or of moral indignation.