War Without Mercy

War Without Mercy

In “War Without Mercy”, Dower’s principle is a surprising one: Though Western allies were clearly headed for victory, pure racism fueled the persistence and increase of hostilities in the Pacific setting during the final year of World War II, a period that saw as many casualties as in the first five years of the conflict combined. Dower does not reach this disturbing conclusion lightly. He combed through loads of propaganda films, news articles, military documents, and cartoons. Though his case is strong, Dower reduces other factors, such as the prolonged negotiations between the West and the Japanese.

During World War II, with the alliance of Germany and Italy made a propaganda campaign of obvious anti-white racism somewhat unreasonable. Furthermore, Japan's history of rapid and often passionate Westernization while opposing to colonialization by western powers largely prohibited such a propaganda approach. It is Dower's central idea that racial fear and hate were major factors that determined how both sides, Japanese and Anglo-American, perceived and dealt with the respective enemy, the "formulaic expression of Self and Other."

Dower begins by examining the propaganda thrown out by both war machines (including a Frank Capra documentary, Know Your Enemy - Japan) and finds fundamental patterns of stereotyping. A few clichÐ"©s that were found in this film was that it originally portrayed the Japanese as ordinary humans victimized by their leaders. "In everyday words," he writes, the "first kind of stereotyping could be summed up in the statement: you are the opposite of what you say you are and the opposite of us, not peaceful but warlike, not good but bad...In the second form of stereotyping, the formula ran more like this: you are what you say you are, but that itself is reprehensible." (30)

Japan, Germany and Italy, all world powers with great leaders and whose people were in great quantity. Overall, the Why We Fight films reflect the strategic priorities of the U.S. government and focused primarily on the struggle in the West. A Japanese equivalent to this series is titled The Battle of China. This was an epic paean to the resistance of the Chinese people against Japan’s aggression. Through all of the destruction and devastation of the Japanese, they come with this counterpoint that was heightened by a commentary in which Japan’s rhetoric of “co-existence and co-prosperity” was recited while the screen showed the devastation of China’s cities and the mutilated corpses of its men, women, and children.

"In the United States and Britain," Dower reminds us, "the Japanese were more hated than the Germans before as well as after Pearl Harbor. On this, there was no dispute among contemporary observers. They were perceived as a race apart, even a species apart -- and an overpoweringly monolithic one at that. There was no Japanese counterpart to the 'good German' in the popular consciousness of the Western Allies." (8) But there are two answers in the book that gives us a reason on why there was more hatred towards the Japanese than the Germans. These are the same Germans that engaged in a systematic genocide against millions of Jews. But why the Japanese were more hated than the Germans despite the latter’s orgy of violence, is surely in large part racial. It’s not a surprise that they were more hated due to the fact of how they humiliated the United States and Great Britain in their attacks of Pearl Harbor and Singapore.

There were “three insights” or theories that were put together by social scientists and analysts. The first was the “suicide psychology” argument, this is where it was maintained that the Japanese themselves, by their own fanaticism, invited destruction. The second is the “lessons of World War One” argument, which describes that the rise of the Nazis in Germany was attributed to the incomplete victory of the Allies in World War One. Anything less than careful defeat, it was maintained, would permit later nationalists to claim Japan had never really been defeated and, in Admiral Halsey’s words, to “use this peace as Germany did before themвЂ"to build up for another war.” The final theory that was come up with was the “psychological purge” argument, under which it was argued that great destruction and suffering should be inflicted upon Japan not simply as punishment, or because this was essential to end the war, but rather because only by turning Japan’s cities into ashes could the Japanese people as a whole be purged of their fanatic, militaristic sense of national and racial destiny.

So we have seen that the Japanese are by far the most hated and most studied according to these theories, but due to their style of fighting and vigorous approach to everything they have been coined a term. Lesser Men and Supermen" outlines a fascinating pattern whereby Japanese men were considered obsequious and inferior in American culture, until after Pearl Harbor, when the polarity switched and the Japanese became superhuman. As Dower remarks, "these transitions and juxtapositions in the Western image of the Japanese were abrupt and jarring: from subhuman to superhuman, lesser men to supermen. There was a common point throughout, in that the Japanese were rarely perceived as being human beings of a generally comparable and equal sort." (99)

In "The Pure Self," Dower describes how Japanese came to see whites not in terms of color but of "purity." "Where racism in the West was markedly characterized by denigration of others," writes Dower, "the Japanese were preoccupied far more exclusively with elevating themselves. While the Japanese were not in adept at belittling other races and saddling them with contemptuous stereotypes, they spent more time wrestling with the question of what it really meant to be 'Japanese,' how the 'Yamato