Japan, in her one great victory over a major power, showed that even as a victor she could carefully avoid humiliating a defeated enemy when it finally capitulated and when she did not consider that that nation had sneered at her. There is a famous photograph of the surrender of the Russian Army at Port Arthur in 1905 which is known to every Japanese. It shows the Russians wearing their swords. The victors and the vanquished can be distinguished only by their uniforms for the Russians were not stripped of their arms. The well-known Japanese account of that surrender tells that when General Stoessel, the Russian commander, signified his willingness to receive Japanese propositions of surrender, a Japanese captain and interpreter went to his headquarters taking food. ‘All the horses except General Stoessel’s own had been killed and eaten so that the present of fifty chickens and a hundred fresh eggs which the Japanese brought with them was welcome indeed.’ The meeting of General Stoessel and General Nogi was arranged for the following day. ‘The two generals clasped hands. Stoessel expressed his admiration for the courage of the Japanese an. General Nogi praised the long and brave defense of the Russians. Stoessel expressed his sympathy with Nogi for the loss of his two sons in the campaign . Stoessel presented his fine white Arab horse to General Nogi, but Nogi said that, much as he would like to receive it as his own from the General’s hands, it must first be presented to the Emperor. He promised, however, that if it came back to him, as he had every reason to believe it would, he would take care of it as if it had always been his.’ Everyone in Japan knew the stable which General Nogi built for General Stoessel’s horse in his front yard – a stable often described as more pretentious than Nogi’s own house, and after General Nogi’s death a part of the Nogi national shrine.
It has been said that the Japanese have changed between that day of the Russian surrender and the years of their occupation of the Philippines, for instance, when their wanton destructiveness and cruelty were known to all the world. To a people with the extreme situational ethics of the Japanese, however, this is not the necessary conclusion. In the first place, the enemy did not capitulate after Bataan; there was only a local surrender. Even when the Japanese, in their turn, surrendered in the Philippines, Japan was still fighting. In the second place, the Japanese never considered that the Russians had ‘insulted’ them in the early years of this century, whereas every Japanese was reared in the nine-teen-twenties and -thirties to regard United States policy as ‘taking Japan cheap,’ or in their phrase, ‘making her as faeces.’ This had been Japan’s reaction to the Exclusion Act, to the part the United States played in the Treaty of Portsmouth and in the Naval Parity agreements. The Japanese had been encourage to regard in the same way the growing economic r?le of the United States in the Far East and our racial attitudes toward the non-white peoples of the world. The victory over Russia and the victory over the United States in the Philippines, therefore, illustrate Japanese behavior in its two most opposed aspects: when insults are involved and when they are not.
The final victory of the United States again changed the situation for the Japanese. Their ultimate defeat brought about, as is usual in Japanese life, the abandonment of the course they had been pursuing. The peculiar ethic of the Japanese allowed them to wipe the slate clean. United States policy and General MacArthur’s administration have avoided writing fresh symbols of humiliation upon that washed slate, and have held simply to insisting on those things which in Japanese eyes are ‘natural consequences’ of defeat. It has worked.
The retention of the Emperor has been of great importance. It has been handled well. It was the Emperor who called first upon General MacArthur, not MacArthur upon him, and this was an object lesson to the Japanese the force of which it is hard for Westerners to appreciate. It is said that when it was suggested to the Emperor that he disavow his divinity, he protested that it would be a personal embarrassment to strip himself of something he did not have. The Japanese, he said truthfully, did not consider him a god in the Western sense. MacArthur’s Headquarters, however, urged upon him that the Occidental idea of his claim to divinity was bad for Japan’s international repute, and the Emperor agreed to accept the embarrassment the disavowal would cost him. He spoke on New Year’s Day, and asked to have all comments on his message translated for him from the world press. When he had read them, he sent a message to General MacArthur’s Headquarters saying that he was satisfied. Foreigners had obviously not understood before, and he was glad he had spoken.
The policy of the United States has also allowed the Japanese certain gratifications. The State-Army-Navy directive specifies that ‘encouragement shall be given and favor shown to the development of organizations in labor, industry and agriculture, organized on a democratic basis.’ Japanese labor has organized in many industries, and the old farmers’ unions which were active in the 1920s and 1930s are asserting themselves again. To many Japanese this initiative which they can now take to better their condition is a proof that Japan has won something as a consequence of this war. One American correspondent tells of a striker in Tokyo who looked up at a G.I. and said, beaming broadly, ‘Japan win, no?’ Strikes in Japan today have many parallels to the old Peasants’ Revolts where the farmers’ plea was always that the taxes and corvées to which they were subject interfered with adequate production. They were not class warfare in the Western sense, and they were not an attempt to change the system itself. Throughout Japan today strikes do not slow up production. The favorite form is for the workers ‘to occupy the plant, continue work and make management lose face by increasing production. Strikers at a Mitsui-owned coal mine barred all management personnel from the pits and stepped daily output up from 250 tons to 620. Workers at Ashio copper mines operated during a ‘‘strike," increased production, and doubled their own wages.’