Japan’s real strength which she can use in remarking herself into a peaceful nation lies in her ability to say of a course of action, ‘That failed,’ and then to throw her energies into other channels. The Japanese have an ethic of alternatives. They tried to achieve their ‘proper place’ in war, and they lost. That course, now, they can discard, because their whole training has conditioned them to possible changes of direction. Nations with a more absolutist ethic must convince themselves that they are fighting for principles. When they surrender to the victors, they say, ‘Right was lost when we were defeated,’ and their self-respect demands that they work to make this ‘right’ win next time. Or they can beat their breasts and confess their guilt. The Japanese need do neither. Five days after VJ-Day, before an American had landed on Japan, the great Tokyo paper, the Mainichi Shimbun, could speak of defeat and of the political changes it would bring, and say, ‘But it was all to the good for the ultimate salvation of Japan.’ The editorial stressed that no one should forget for a moment that they had been completely defeated. Because their effort to build up a Japan based on sheer might had met with utter failure, they must henceforth tread the path of a peaceful nation. The Asahi, another great Tokyo newspaper, that same week characterized Japan’s late ‘excessive faith in military force’ as ‘a serious error’ in its national and international policy. ‘The old attitude, from which we could gain so little and suffered so much, should be discarded for a new one which is rooted in international co-operation and love of peace.’
The Westerner observes this shift in what he regards as principles and suspects it. It is, however, an integral part of the conduct of life in Japan, whether in personal or in international relations. The Japanese sees that he has made an ‘error’ in embarking on a course of action which does not achieve its goal. When it fails, he discards it as a lost cause, for he is not conditioned to pursue lost causes. ‘It is no use,’ he says, ‘biting one’s navel.’ Militarism was in the nineteen-thirties the accepted means by which they thought to gain the admiration of the world – an admiration to be based on their armed might – and they accepted all the sacrifices such a program required. On August 14, 1945, the Emperor, the sanctioned voice of Japan, told them that they had lost. They accepted all that such a fact implied. It meant the presence of American troops, so they welcomed them. It meant the failure of their dynastic enterprise, so they were willing to consider a Constitution which outlawed war. Ten days after VJ-Day, their newspaper, the Yomiuri-Hochi, could write about the ‘Beginning of a New Art and New Culture,’ and could say, ‘There must be a firm conviction in our hearts that military defeat has nothing to do with the value of a nation’s culture. Military defeat should serve as an impetus. (for) it has taken no less than national defeat for the Japanese people to lift their minds truly to the world, to see things objectively as they really are. Every irrationality that has warped Japanese thinking must be eliminated by frank analysis . It takes courage to look this defeat in the face as a stark fact, (but we must) put our faith in Nippon’s culture of tomorrow.’ They had tried one course of action and been defeated. Today they would try the peaceful arts of life. ‘Japan,’ their editorials repeated, ‘must be respected among the nations of the world,’ and it was the duty of the Japanese to deserve this respect on a new basis.
These newspaper editorials were not just the voice of a few intellectuals; the common people on a Tokyo street and is a remote village make the same right-about-face. It has been incredible to American occupying troops that these friendly people are the ones who had vowed to fight to the death with bamboo spears. The Japanese ethic contains much which Americans repudiate, but American experiences during the occupation of Japan have been an excellent demonstration of how many favorable aspects a strange ethic can have.
American administration of Japan under General MacArthur has accepted this Japanese ability to sail a new course. It has not impeded that course by insisting on using techniques of humiliation. It would have been culturally acceptable according to Western ethics if we had done so. For it is a tenet of Occidental ethics that humiliation and punishment are socially effective means to bring about a wrongdoers conviction of sin. Such admission of sin is then a first step in his rehabilitation. The Japanese, as we have seen, state the issue in another way. Their ethic makes a man responsible for all the implications of his acts, and the natural consequences of an error should convince him of its undesirability. These natural consequences may even be defeat in an all-out war. But these are not situations which the Japanese must resent as humiliating. In the Japanese lexicon, a person or a nation humiliates another by detraction, ridicule, contempt, belittling, and insisting on symbols of dishonor. When the Japanese believe themselves humiliated, revenge is a virtue. No matter how strongly Western ethics condemn such a tenet, the effectiveness of American occupation of Japan depends on American self-restraint on this point. For the Japanese separate ridicule, which they terribly resent, from ‘natural consequences,’ which according to the terms of their surrender include such things as demilitarization and even Spartan imposition of indemnities.