River Kwai - Japan Echo

Bridge on the River Kwai
162 min 1957
JAPAN ECHO Vol. 26, No. 6, December 1999------------------------------------- Prisoners in Burma
THE ANGLO-JAPANESE HOSTILITIES FROM A CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

HIRAKAWA Sukehiro With the passage of half a century since World War II, we might hope for a convergence of views on the hostilities of the 1940s. Concerning the war fought between the British and Japanese in Southeast Asia, however, a shared understanding has not been attained. Even among Japanese there are opinions ranging from, on the left, Marxist views holding to Japanese imperialistic aggression and, on the right, nationalistic justifications of the cause of the war. There are also differences in states of knowledge. In English one finds such books as Christopher Thorne's Allies of a Kind--The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan, 1941-1945. 1 Although his analysis is familiar to Japanese scholars, similar expressions of Japanese views are generally ignored in the West. My aim in what follows lies less in historical details themselves than in the views held and in the knowledge of those views.
As a sample, there are three works (of which I will discuss two later in detail) that have fixed images of the Anglo-Japanese hostilities in Japanese minds. The first work is a film, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), produced by Sam Spiegel and directed by David Lean. The immense popularity of the film has made it widely familiar. It deals with the notorious construction of the Burma-Siam railway by British prisoners of war in 1942-43. The British virtues of perseverance, inventiveness, and human dignity are personified by Alec Guinness in his unforgettable role as Colonel Nicholson. The hell of cruelties in the Japanese camps is memorably depicted. This film was based on a novel, Le pont de la riviere Kwai. 2 For many years this was prescribed as a text for the A-level examination in French in Britain, both reflecting and sustaining the popularity of the novel in that country.
The second work deals not with British but with Japanese prisoners of war in Burma after Japan's surrender in August 1945. The author, Aida Yeji, records in detail life in a British labor camp. His book, Aron Sheyohjo (The Ahlone Concentration Camp), was translated into English under the title Prisoner of the British. 3 The original was widely read among Japanese, becoming a bestseller in 1962. It contributed to the formation among the Japanese of an image of the British that differs greatly, I fear, from that which the British have traditionally held of themselves. The third work is Takeyama Michio's Biruma no tategoto (Harp of Burma), 4 which I unfortunately have little space to deal with here; I hope some of my readers have seen the film versions. 5
These titles of such varied origins may lead us to a kind of bifocal review of cultural aspects of what some term "civilization." Our first concern with this large subject will be the origins of the ideological background of what Japan called the Greater East Asia War while it was going on and what many Americans and Japanese today call the Pacific War, although the battles between the Japanese and the British took place mostly in Southeast Asia.

REACTING TO "THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN"
The most influential ideologue of Japan's war against the Anglo-Saxon nations was definitely Tokutomi Sohoh (1863-1957). 6 What is interesting about this journalist is that his opinions were formed as a reaction of sorts against typical opinions voiced in the West. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Western opinion leaders could ignore the reactions of Asians, while Asian opinion leaders were more or less obliged to pay attention to what was going on in the West. That asymmetry in attention comes of course from the asymmetry in power relations of the countries concerned. Throughout the nineteenth century the superiority of Western civilization appeared so evident that the British poet Rudyard Kipling could write a poem like "The White Man's Burden" without taking into account the reactions of races other than his own. Kipling's poem begins:

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain,
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.
Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hope to nought.

Altogether there are seven stanzas in which the civilizing mission of "the White Man" is glorified.

The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.

Born in India in 1865, Kipling was two years younger than Tokutomi. The poem was written in 1899, one year after the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. It was the time when the United States was emerging as an imperialistic power in Asia, having occupied the Philippines and made them its colonies in the Pacific.
"The White Man's Burden" was written by the most popular British poet of the time and was addressed to the American people. The poem was actually sent first to Theodore Roosevelt, then vice-president of the United States, before it was printed in Britain, appearing in the Times on February 4, 1899. Kipling was so popular as the national poet at that time that his poem was printed not in a literary magazine but in London's leading newspaper, and it appeared in the United States in the Baltimore Sun and the Chicago Tribune on February 5. Just one day later, on February 6, the Senate voted to approve American administration of the Philippines. Roosevelt wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge about Kipling's poem, saying that it "is rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansionist standpoint." 7 Roosevelt recognized that Kipling's poem held a strong political appeal to the public.
All these matters are more or less familiar. What is interesting--and what is still not very much known to Westerners--is the reaction that the poem provoked in Japan. As I have noted, Tokutomi was one of the most influential opinion leaders of Japan, a position he held for more than half a century until Japan's defeat in 1945. At the outset he was an Anglophile. But then, after Japan's victory over Russia in 1905, he began to talk about the "Yellow Man's burden." He advanced this concept in his journalism because he knew that after the breakdown of the myth of the invincibility of the White Man, new political movements were underway in colonies of the British Empire. His arguments, however, were not as self-assertive as Kipling's poem. Kipling urged his fellow countrymen and "peers," that is, Americans, to take up the burden of races other than their own. Tokutomi urged his fellow countrymen to take up the burden of oppressed peoples of the same "yellow" race of Asia, who were aspiring for independence. In short, "Asia for the Asians" was Tokutomi's argument--a sort of Asian version of the Monroe Doctrine.
These were not simple matters. Because Tokutomi's assertion was considered a challenge to the status quo of British supremacy in Asia, the Japanese ruling oligarchy did not like the propagation of this idea. Pan-Asianism, however, began to gain strength, especially after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. Okakura Kakuzoh's slogan "Asia is One" found ears in India and elsewhere in the British colonies. 8 Ironically, the reason Okakura's slogan was able to gain a sympathetic reception in some parts of Asia is that his books were written in English. Linguistically and therefore culturally Asia is not one. The common denominator among Asians of the Pan-Asianistic creed was political, namely, that they were against the White Man's rule. It was this anticolonialist sentiment that was more or less shared by peoples living in various parts of Asia.
In this context some reflections on the racial aspects of the problem are indispensable. Let us begin by quoting an article that triggered a series of reactions among Japanese intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century:
The Japanese cross the Yalu and defeat the Russians with precision in Manchuria. Their sailors destroy a European fleet elegantly. Immediately, we [Europeans] discern a danger that menaces us. If it exists, who has created it? The Asians have already known the white peril for many years. The sacking of the Summer Palace, the Peking massacres, the drownings of Blagoveshchensk, the partitioning of China--were not these causes of anxiety for the Chinese? And did the Japanese feel themselves safe under the cannons of Port Arthur? We have created the white peril. The white peril has created the yellow peril. 9
This article was written during the Russo-Japanese War by Anatole France, the most influential French writer at the beginning of the twentieth century. The idea that the yellow peril was created by the white peril brings to mind the assertion of certain blacks today who insist that the interracial problems between blacks and whites should not be called a black problem, since according to them, they are really a white problem. The presentation of this argument by a prominent French intellectual had strong repercussions among Japanese intellectuals. Leading figures among them, like Yanagita Kunio and Watsuji Tetsuroh, agreed with the view voiced by Anatole France. It should be noted that these intellectual undercurrents were strong even among pro-Western Japanese, and that must be one reason why the majority of the Japanese wholeheartedly supported Japan's war efforts during World War II.
The Japanese government of the Meiji (1868-1912) and Taishoh (1912-1926) eras behaved itself as a "good boy" within the comity of nations from the opening of the country in the nineteenth century through the late 1920s. Leading oligarchs like Yamagata Aritomo were very circumspect about international politics, and they did not venture to challenge Anglo-Saxon supremacy. Japan took part in the international expedition to North China in 1900 to put down the Boxer Rebellion, and the Anglo-Japanese alliance was concluded shortly thereafter. So long as that alliance was maintained, there was not much conflict between Britain and Japan. However, Pan-Asiatic opinion leaders like Tokutomi began to win followers among the younger generations. The Anglo-Japanese alliance was terminated in 1921. Meanwhile, movements against Japanese immigration grew rather violent on the West Coast of North America. The Japanese senior statesmen now steered the ship of the Japanese Empire with difficulty; Japan tried hard to play the role of the Britain of the East.
There was still much respect and admiration for Britain among Japanese businessmen, diplomats, and naval officers as Japan made efforts to build its colonial empire, studying British imperial administration in Egypt and elsewhere as it annexed first Taiwan and then Korea. One conspicuous difference between the British and Japanese histories of colonization is that no member of the British aristocracy ever married a member of a colonial princely family, whereas Japan's Princess Masako, from a branch of the imperial family, married Prince Yi Un, the heir of Korea's former ruling house, in 1920. This politically arranged marriage may give the impression that the annexation of Korea was conducted on equal terms, but this was certainly not the case. Furthermore, the railways and factories Japanese engineers built in Korea no doubt primarily served Japan's colonial purposes. All the same, it should be borne in mind that the development of heavy industry in a colony was something quite new and was rarely seen in European colonies.
We can identify the problem posed by Japanese Pan-Asianists like Tokutomi. They very much admired the builders of the British Empire. In Hong Kong and in Singapore, Japanese travelers marveled at the magnificent government buildings, splendid hotels, and majestic churches. The Japanese too built government buildings in Taipei, in Seoul and later in Changchun, the capital of Manchukuo. They also built Yamato Hotels and Shintoh shrines. But even as they strove to make Japan the Britain of the East, the Japanese had mixed feelings towards the British, and some openly resented the White Man's dominance in Asia.
From the 1860s to the outbreak of World War II, the main route from Japan to the Western world was by sea, starting from Yokohama or Kobe and proceeding to Marseilles or London with stops on the way at ports like Hong Kong, Manila, Saigon, Singapore, Penang, Colombo, Aden, Suez, and Port Said. The educational value of the Eurasian sea route was so high that a detailed description of the voyage appeared in a national elementary-school Japanese-language reader. The first mission of the shogunate to Europe took this route in 1862. Among the party was a young interpreter called Fukuzawa Yukichi, who later became the intellectual leader of the "civilization and enlightenment" movement. Itoh Hirobumi who, after distinguishing himself in the Meiji Restoration of 1868, was to become the chief political architect of Meiji Japan, also made this trip, traveling to England first as a stowaway aboard a British ship. Almost all the leading intellectuals of Japan's modernization took that route and, consequently, shared common experiences.
Even those Japanese who had formed an idealized view of Western civilization through their bookish knowledge were obliged to recognize the vast and ruthless expansion of the Western colonial powers. Once the Japanese left their own country, all the intermediate stops on the way to Europe were under Western, mainly British, rule. The reactions of Japanese travelers to the colonizing Europeans and colonized Asians were vividly recorded in many of their diaries. Not only army or navy men of chauvinistic temper but also Japanese of various civilian walks of life bridled at the manifestations of the White Man's dominance in Asia. There was a surprising degree of coincidence in the reactions of Japanese travelers witnessing similar scenes when white passengers threw coins from the sides of ships and native boys dived into the water to catch them. Mori ïgai's observations in 1884 and Natsume Sohseki's remarks in 1900 were practically identical. 10 Against the historical background of the age of nationalism, it was quite understandable that slogans like "Asia for the Asians" became popular among the common people of Japan, whose voices began to grow stronger as education and democratization progressed through the 1910s and 1920s. Japan's expansion into Korea and Manchuria was first justified in terms of Japan's national survival and security. Later it was declared an expression of Japan's duty towards less advanced peoples of Asia who needed leadership in their struggle against Western imperialism. In this way Tokutomi's "Yellow Man's burden" became the political slogan of the Japanese army and right-wing politicians. There was, however, an apparent contradiction in the Japanese attitude towards Britain. While Japan followed the British model, building an empire and maintaining colonies, self-righteous Japanese journalists began to denounce British colonialism, and in the 1930s the Japanese military together with some journalists began to attack the policy of the Japanese government symbolized by Foreign Minister Shidehara Kijeroh as an Anglophile pacifist diplomacy.
Following the Manchurian Incident in 1931, Japan's policy became what I would like to call anti-imperialistic imperialism. Objectively speaking, the Japan of the 1930s and early 1940s should be labeled an aggressor. Subjectively speaking, however, for many Japanese the war was fought for the liberation of East Asia. That sort of national self-conceit was something similar to the attitude of Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi people on the eve of the Gulf War. Their strongly nationalistic attitude and their "holy war" rhetoric reminded older Japanese of the atmosphere of Japan on the eve of war in the early 1940s.

THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI

What I have roughly sketched is a historical background of the development of the Japanese perspective on attitudes that led to the Anglo-Japanese conflict. I have not touched upon the problems of justice or injustice of the two parties' conduct in Southeast Asia.
In the film The Bridge on the River Kwai Japanese atrocities were vividly depicted. Yet I imagine that the reality of the British prisoners of war in the hell of a Japanese labor camp was even more gruesome than shown in the film. The only point I might make in defense of the Japanese of the war years is that the atrocities they committed differ qualitatively from the organized atrocities of Nazis in German-controlled areas, such as the attempted annihilation of the Jewish people. Wartime Japan was equated with Nazi Germany by the Allied nations. Having little knowledge, Westerners were obliged to understand "fascist" Japan by analogies. I am afraid, however, that superficial analogies and easy generalizations tend to give misleading ideas.
What has been discussed prepares the way for analysis. We may start with some basically mistaken conceptions perpetuated by the British film. The Bridge on the River Kwai deals with the recovery of faith in British virtues of perseverance and inventiveness. In short, it is a glorification of the superiority of Western civilization. The fall of Singapore in February 1942 was a national humiliation for the British, one that was taken to heart by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his colleagues. 11 The British officers and soldiers taken prisoner there were later mobilized by the Japanese army to finish the nearly 300 miles of the Burma-Siam railway in less than a year over a route that Western engineers had pronounced insuperably difficult. In the film Colonel Nicholson could successfully defy Japanese orders because he had a trump card: the British ability to do what the Japanese army could not, namely, build the bridge over the River Kwai. In the book written by Boulle, the bridge built by Japanese engineers was described in these terms: On this uncouth superstructure, which sometimes reached an enormous height, thick beams were laid in two parallel rows; and on top of these, the only timber to be more or less properly shaped, went the rails themselves. The bridge was then considered to be finished. It fulfilled the need of the hour. There was no parapet, no footpath. The only way to walk across was to step from one beam to another, balancing above the chasm--a feat at which the Japanese were adept. (Fielding translation, p. 60) The insinuation that the Japanese are apelike or antlike continues.
The first convoy would go jolting across at low speed. The engine sometimes came off the rails at the point where the bank met the bridge, but a gang of soldiers armed with crowbars usually managed to heave it upright again. The train would then move on. If the bridge was damaged at all more bits of timber would be added to the structure. And the next convoy would cross in the same way. The scaffolding would last a few days, a few weeks, sometimes even a few months, after which a flood would sweep it away, or else a series of more than usually violent jolts would make it capsize. (P. 60)
In the novel and film alike, every time the Japanese rebuilt the bridge, it would become unusable after a short time. Colonel Saitoh, the Japanese commander, was obliged to ask the help of British engineers among the prisoners. So began the reversal of relations. The British prisoners were now becoming masters of the situation. Boulle can explain the secret of the superiority of the methods of Western civilization (his Captain Reeves was formerly a civil engineer):
The methods of Western civilisation, of course, are not so elementary. Captain Reeves represented an essential element of that civilisation--the mechanical--and would never have dreamed of being guided by such primitive empiricism.
But when it comes to bridge-building, Western mechanical procedure entails a lot of gruelling preliminaries, which swell and multiply the number of operations leading up to the actual construction. . . . These figures in their turn, depend on co-efficients worked out according to "standard patterns," which in the civilised world are given in the form of mathematical tables. Mechanics, in fact, entail a complete a priori knowledge; and this mental creation, which precedes the material creation, is not the least important of the many achievements of Western genius. (Pp. 60-61)
Pierre Boulle, it seems, was under the influence of Paul Valery and his conquete methodique. His explanation is very Cartesian.
The successful defiance by the British prisoners, with their superior technological ability, makes a highly interesting story. However, as Ian Watt, one of the former British prisoners recollects, it certainly seemed odd that Boulle should base his plot on the illusion that the West still had a monopoly of technological skill. 12 Culturally speaking, one of the lessons to be learned from the Japanese capture of Singapore should have been that the myth of Western superiority in technology had already been dispelled, and needless to say, nothing much like Colonel Nicholson's successful defiance had actually taken place along the Burma-Siam railway. There was a self-complacency both in the filmmaker and in the audiences enjoying the film.
There are some sentimental fallacies, too. In the film Siamese girls are depicted as if they volunteered to help Allied commandos. But during the conflict, the poor villagers of Southeast Asia had no notion whatever of wanting to devote their lives to either the support of Western democracy or to the cause of the Greater East Asia War. Their daily life inevitably imposed on them a much more limited and self-interested horizon.
Local inhabitants of many areas of wartime Southeast Asia disliked the Japanese, although the degree and nature of the hostility differed considerably from one region to another. In the Philippines, for example, where battles were fought bitterly from October 1944 through August 1945, many civilians were killed and the animosity toward the Japanese grew very strong. But in the Dutch East Indies and Malaya, where the Japanese army had quickly swept away the Dutch and British forces, the inhabitants were friendly toward the Japanese liberators. In some places the degree of hostility varied among different races of the local population. In Singapore, for example, there was a sharp contrast between the inhabitants of Chinese ancestry and those of Malay or Indian ancestry, since the former suffered during the Japanese occupation because of their pro-China or pro-communist attitudes.
It is of course an illusion that Japanese forces were welcomed as liberators. It is, however, equally an illusion to think that after Japan's defeat former colonial masters were welcomed back to Southeast Asia. The power vacuum following the successive defeats of the two imperialistic powers, Britain and Japan, gave Asians the chance to become independent earlier than expected.
These are observations occasioned by The Bridge on the River Kwai. The more successful the film was, the wider became the discrepancy between the myth of Western superiority in technology and the British industrial reality. The belief that the British were the leading bridge builders of the world was severely shaken in 1985 when a Japanese company underbid them for the construction of a second bridge linking Europe and Asia at the Bosporus. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who suspected at first that the Japanese company had secretly dealt with the Turkish government by unfair means, seems finally to have discovered that Japan had made progress during the preceding century.

A JAPANESE PRISONER'S VIEW

Our second work, Prisoner of the British, is an account of two years spent by Professor Aida, or more exactly, by then Private Aida, in Burma after Japan's surrender in August 1945. Hundreds of popular novels and nonfictional narratives describing many gruesome atrocities committed by the Japanese in battle or in prison camps were published in the English-speaking world. The Japanese themselves were indoctrinated by the repeated propaganda under the American Occupation--which lasted longer than did the war itself. The American reeducation program held that the war had been carried out by the angelic forces of democracy fighting the wicked fascists. Japanese leftists, ranging from communists to pacifists, echoed this American view. Immediately after the war the situation was very curious. The continuing psychological alliance between Americans and Russians led to a kind of alliance between Americans and Japanese leftists. Marxist historians, who dominated Japanese academic circles, held to this revised interpretation of the war. The reason why the later career of Tokutomi, described by George Sansom as a "celebrated journalist and popular, if tendentious, historian," 13 was never studied by postwar Japanese historians is that they were afraid of ostracism. Anyone daring to write not unfavorably about the leading ideologue of the Greater East Asia War would certainly have been labeled a fascist. A problem with the postwar propaganda is that it created taboos among the Japanese, while a problem with the propaganda employed in wartime is that the victors continued to believe in it. This was shown, for example, by the drastic curtailment in 1995 of the Smithsonian Institution's exhibit on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was reduced to a display of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first A-bomb, when veterans protested plans to show photographs of the victims.
It is only natural that Japanese should not accept the black-and-white terms of the victors' rhetoric, and the Tokyo Trial (International Military Tribunal for the Far East) provides an example. The victors' justice of this war crimes tribunal was accepted by the Allied nations. In Japan, its assumptions were imposed by the American authorities, who controlled the mass media just as strictly as the Japanese authorities had during the war. That justice was accepted in Japan by leftists. Who, however, could believe that the Soviet army that invaded Manchuria on the eve of Japan's capitulation was part of the angelic force of democracy? That stage of the war, which lasted less than a week, led to several years of Soviet detention in Siberia for over half a million Japanese. A tenth of the Japanese prisoners died in Russian labor camps. There are many Japanese who, while recognizing that Japan deserved blame for acts committed during its militaristic years, do not agree with the one-sided views expounded in anti-Japanese propaganda through the four years of war and seven of occupation.
Let us have a look, therefore, from another angle. Two years after Japan's surrender, a history professor was repatriated from Burma. He was amazed to find his sister totally changed by American propaganda. Aida was not at home in that intellectual milieu. His account of his postwar experience in a British labor camp, åron Sheyohjo, finally appeared in 1962, becoming a bestseller. The book is full of interesting factual observations. In 1978 when I was visiting Princeton University I referred to it casually, since an English translation had appeared under the title Prisoner of the British. One after another, most of the faculty members of the Department of East Asian Studies began to read it, and they discussed it animatedly. I think the book worthy of attention.
In this case, too, there is an asymmetry: There was no brutal treatment of the Japanese prisoners of war after Japan's surrender in August 1945. (Aida became a prisoner of war only after the war ended.) The Japanese were not mistreated physically, as their British counterparts had been before 1945. However, according to Aida, the British were cruel "with detachment." Was this true or not? Was Aida just too touchy? Let us examine what he experienced and what he disliked most, because it was most humiliating. Certain passages have always caught the attention of my students. One concerns British women auxiliaries:
We (Japanese prisoners) entered the women's quarters with bucket, rag, broom and dustpan--without knocking. It was not necessary for us to knock when we entered any part of the barracks, including the lavatory. When we were first told this we felt flattered, thinking mistakenly that it showed how much we were trusted. But it was not a question of trust. Ordinarily, you assume that it is necessary to knock before entering a room because somebody may need time to cover himself or herself when they are not dressed or to recover from an embarrassing position. The British did not think this necessary if the person who entered was a Japanese or a Burmese. . . . One day as I entered the barracks to begin cleaning I was taken aback. A woman was standing completely naked before the mirror combing her hair. She turned round at the sound of the door opening but when she saw that it was only a Japanese soldier she resumed her position and continued combing her hair with complete indifference. There were a few more women in the room lying on their beds reading Life or some English magazines, but none of them took any notice. They remained exactly as they were. I swept the room and scrubbed the floor. The naked woman continued to comb and when she had finished she put on her underclothes, lay on her bed and began to smoke.
If a European had entered the room, the women would probably have shrieked and made a great fuss. The presence of a Japanese did not seem to register on their minds as the presence of a human being. (Allen and Ishiguro translation, pp. 31-32, emphasis added) The last remark is interesting: You do not feel embarrassed being naked in the presence of a cat or of a dog. Aida at first was astonished by the attitude of the British and wondered, quite wrongly, why they had to put up a show of looking so lordly and arrogant. Aida was mistaken. They were not pretending to be lordly. Their sense of absolute superiority over Asians, now reconfirmed by their victory over the Japanese, was quite spontaneous and came naturally to them. According to Aida's belated understanding, when the British women gave orders with their chin or feet or threw cigarettes to him on the floor, they were not acting intentionally to spite the Japanese prisoners of war. That kind of behavior was as natural to them in the late 1940s as breathing. Aida has an interesting comment:
I felt a great resentment towards this superior attitude on the part of the British, but there were two opposite reactions towards it amongst our men. Some, like me, felt very bitter; others did not seem to mind at all. I gradually became less sensitive about it myself, but the moment that happened, I realized that I had become part of the world . . . where the British were somehow accepted as a special kind of superior being. (P. 34)
The problem I wish to reconsider is the actual nature of this superiority. It certainly deserves examination. The assumption of Western technological superiority is a myth no more valid than the glorification by Boulle of a methodological conquest. This ends in cultural infatuation. What then of the kindred myth of racial superiority?
Within the span of a mere three and a half years, the colonized peoples of Southeast Asia witnessed two historical defeats: the first, the British surrender of Singapore; the second, the Japanese surrender. The psychological effect of these surrenders upon the peoples of the region was immense, as was recalled so vividly by the founding father of the state of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew. There was no doubt that the movements towards national independence were much accelerated by the defeat of their former European masters as well as by the defeat of their new conquerors from Japan. When Lieutenant General A. E. Percival surrendered Singapore to the Japanese in February 1942, Ken Harrison, sergeant in the Eighth Australian Division, wrote: "For the British it would never be the same again." 14 That is, the lands of Southeast Asia could not be the same colonial entities as before.

OF PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

Although potentially misleading, there is certain similarity between a colonizing action and a civilizing mission. I do not oppose all applications of the ideas Kipling propounded in his "White Man's Burden." The idea of peace-keeping operations, for example, is in a sense similar to that idea of taking up the burden. Indeed, we should "send forth the best [we] breed" to places suffering in today's "savage wars of peace." It would be a worthy mission for United Nations forces to "fill full the mouth of Famine" and "bid the sickness cease." The soldiers in peace-keeping operations should indeed accomplish their duties "in patience," taking care to "veil the threat of terror" and "check the show of pride."
In The Western World and Japan, George Sansom observed that successful colonization is an expression of health and vigor in the colonizing people. 15 I warily agree with the British historian. If so, what are the indexes of success or failure in colonization? The inhabitants of Gibraltar do not wish that Gibraltar be returned to Spain. This is a clear sign that the British occupation of the peninsula is a success. The majority of the inhabitants of Hong Kong do not seem to have been very enthusiastic about the return of the territory to China. This may not be a sign of British success, but is a clear sign of the unpopularity of the People's Republic among the people of Hong Kong. In places like Singapore, where per capita income is now higher than in Britain, independence is a blessing, and the economic success of Southeast Asia will contribute to destroying the myth of racial superiority of so-called Aryans or Anglo-Saxons. Some rich Singaporean families hire nannies from Britain to teach their children English. That kind of new master-servant relationship has become possible because of the island-state's economic success. Historically speaking, the Chinese came to Singapore first as coolies, and the complaint that many British prisoners voiced against their Japanese wardens was: "The Japs treat us as if we were Chinese coolies." Very probably some Japanese soldiers ordered British soldiers to do the menial jobs that Chinese coolies had done, cleaning toilets and the like. That must have been very humiliating.
Chinese students coming to Japanese universities are very proud of their national or racial dignity. Some of them grew angry reading The Bridge on the River Kwai when they came on passages where, for example, British officers and other prisoners complain that they are treated by Japanese and Korean soldiers as if they were poor Chinese. It is undeniable that the Anglo-Japanese conflict in Southeast Asia also had an aspect of racial war.
Then there is also the third work that I cited above concerning prisoners of war in Burma. Takeyama Michio's Harp of Burma remains a classic of postwar juvenile literature and, following a not unfamiliar pattern, has also been taken up by an adult readership. While reminding us of the dead who were forgotten, Harp of Burma acquaints readers with different cultural values by means of the discussions among the Japanese soldiers in their prison camp. Why did we fight? For what purpose have we made such strenuous efforts to modernize our country? The novel invites its readers to think over the meaning of the modernization movement and its aftermath.
The Burmese are so religious that every man spends part of his youth as a monk, devoting himself to ascetic practices. For that reason we saw many young monks of about our own age. What a difference! In Japan all the young men wore soldiers' uniforms, but in Burma they put on priestly robes. We often argued about this. Compulsory military training or compulsory religious training--which was better? Which was more advanced? As a nation, as human beings, which should we choose?
It was a queer kind of argument that always ended in a stalemate. Briefly, the difference between the two ways of life seemed to be that in a country where young men wear military uniforms the youths of today will doubtless become the efficient, hard-working adults of tomorrow. If work is to be done, uniforms are necessary. On the other hand, priestly robes are meant for a life of quiet worship, not for strenuous work, least of all for war. . . .
In former times we Japanese wore clothes that were like clerical robes, but nowadays we usually wear uniform-like Western clothes. And that is only to be expected, since we have now become one of the most active and efficient nations in the world and our old peaceful, harmonious life is a thing of the past. The basic difference lies in the attitude of a people; whether, like the Burmese, to accept the world as it is, or to try to change it according to one's own designs. Everything hinges on this. (Hibbett translation, p. 46)
Some of you may find this kind of argument nonsensical. 16 Indeed some Burmese students are not satisfied with this kind of explanation concerning Burma, because they too are eager for modernization of their country. However, this kind of philosophical speculation is, I believe, still very much needed by some Japanese businessmen who work for work's sake.
Finally, some words about the meaning of the war in Southeast Asia seen from the British perspective. The British and Indian soldiers who fell in Burma are remembered in an inscription at the memorial at Kohima, one of the hard-fought fields:
When you go home
Tell them of us, and say:
For your tomorrow, We gave our today. 17 In a sense, this memorial is very sad. These soldiers did not give their today for a tomorrow that was in any sense national or imperial. Soon after the war the British presence in Burma was rendered impossible. The country became independent and quit the British Commonwealth of Nations; subsequently the government closed its borders to most foreigners except those very few Japanese ex-officers who had helped the Burmese organize their army of independence during the war. So it was quite an exception for the retired Lieutenant General Fujiwara Iwaichi to visit the cemetery at Kohima at a time when the British were not allowed to visit the graves of their own dead there. The retired general prayed over the graves of the British as well as the Japanese dead. On his return to Tokyo, Fujiwara wrote a letter to Queen Elizabeth to say that he had done so and that the graves were well looked after. To his surprise he received a reply from the queen, thanking him for what he had done. 18 On learning that, I felt hope that there had been a reconciliation between the British and the Japanese.
Such books as Aida's and Takeyama's open for us a perspective different from that given by The Bridge on the River Kwai. For Boulle the superiority of the Western technological achievement was self-evident. For that French author, la civilisation meant Western civilization, and in the years following World War II, Japan and the Japanese were accused of having breached the law of nations as well as the Law, with a capital L, of Rudyard Kipling. Precisely in the name of civilization Japanese class A war criminals were indicted by the American chief prosecutor when the Tokyo Trial was opened in 1946, and some were sentenced to death. A citizen soldier in Takeyama's Harp of Burma, although recognizing the responsibility of the Japanese militarists, still murmurs: Was it not modern technological civilization itself that was partly responsible for so much destruction and so many calamities?
When we look back at what happened half a century ago, we are amazed at the rapidity with which the basic myths concerning technological, racial, religious, or cultural superiority, on the premise of which so many judgments were once formed, have come tumbling down. Probably everyone has a personal cultural perspective through which to look back at the history of the Anglo-Japanese conflict in Southeast Asia. One's perspective tends to become one's prejudice. My view may be jaundiced, but my conclusions are from the above three works related to prisoners of war in Burma.
1. Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind--The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan, 1941-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
2. Pierre Boulle, Le pont de la riviere Kwa• (Paris: Julliard, 1952), trans. Xan Fielding, The Bridge on the River Kwai (London: Secker & Warburg, 1954; reprint, London: Fontana Books, 1956).
3. Aida Yeji, åron Sheyohjo (Tokyo: Cheoh Kohron Sha, Chekoh Shinsho, 1962); Yeji Aida, Prisoner of the British, trans. Louis Allen and Hide Ishiguro (London: Cresset, 1966).
4. Takeyama Michio, Biruma no tategoto (first published in 1948; Tokyo: Shinchohsha, Shinchoh Bunko, 1959); Michio Takeyama, Harp of Burma, trans. Howard Hibbett (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1966).
5. The strength of the appeal of Takeyama's story may be suggested by the fact that the film version created by Ichikawa Kon won the San Giorgio prize at the 1956 Venice Film Festival. It is the only Japanese film on the list of 45 films and directors that the Vatican has cited as having special artistic and religious merit. In 1985 Ichikawa remade the film in color, and it was again an immense success in Japan. (On the Vatican list of films, see Gustav Niebuhr, "How the Church Chose the Best Films Ever," New York Times Review, April 7, 1996.)
6. A Vietnamese-Canadian scholar, Vinh Sinh, has written a study of Tokutomi: Tokutomi Sohoh, The Later Career (Toronto: Joint Centre for Asia Pacific Studies of the University of Toronto and York University, 1986).
7. Charles Carrington, Rudyard Kipling, His Life and Work (London: Macmillan, 1955), p. 278.
8. Concerning the psychological awakening of Asians after Japan's victory over Russia, the autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru is most revealing.
9. Anatole France, Sur la pierre blanche (On the White Rock), (Paris: Calmann-Levy). This passage is from chapter 4, which was written after the completion of the first version in 1903 and was inserted in later editions.
10. See ïgai's diary entry for September 11, 1884, and Sohseki's for September 25, 1900.
11. Churchill's dejection is reported by Lord Moran in Winston Churchill (London: Constable, 1966), p. 27.
12. Ian Watt, "Bridges Over the Kwai," The Listener, August 6, 1959, pp. 216-18.
13. George Sansom, The Western World and Japan (London: Cresset, 1950), p. 283.
14. Harrison's comment is taken from an exhibit at the Singapore History Museum. The museum originally had pictures only concerning Japan's surrender in August 1945; pictures concerning the British capitulation of February 1942 were added many years later.
15. Sansom, The Western World and Japan, p. 73.
16. The argument about the Japanese adoption of Western clothes seems to have been borrowed by the erudite Takeyama from the conversation between the Chinese mandarin Li Hung-chang and the Japanese modernizer Mori Arinori in Peking in 1876. See ïkubo Toshiaki, ed., Mori Arinori Zenshe (Complete Works of Mori Arinori) (reprint, Tokyo: Senbundoh, 1972), vol. 1, pp. 152-66.
17. Louis Allen, Burma, The Longest War (London: Dent, 1984), p. 635.
18. Ibid., p. 636. © 1999 Japan Echo Inc.