TELEVISION: Asking for it
Japan at War
Scene setting
It’s beyond argument that the case for British imperialism would never have gotten from Channel 4 the desperately understanding context doled out to its imitative Japanese offspring. And there’s little doubt that this was just one of several refreshing things that the excellent Japan at War benefited from. The central gimmick of the programme was its reliance on rare colour footage, but more than anything else, its great advantage lay in its evasion of the commonplace pieties of the Pacific War. By this I do not mean that it did anything other than abhor Japanese atrocities, but that as far as anything presented in English for a mass Anglophone audience can, it took us through Japan’s wars, not the wars we fought against her.
In the modern era, the wars of the rising sun started well before colour photography, but after Russia, Korea and various, detachable bits of China, an assertive Japan began her post-1918 wars by formalising her predominance in Manchuria. This, of course, was possible chiefly in consequence of both Russian, ie Soviet, and Chinese, relative weakness. The powers, conversely, capable of impinging upon Tokyo’s ’natural’ East Asian hegemony were directly the British, and indirectly the Americans. These wars of colour — as opportunistic, pan-Asiatic Japanese wartime propaganda against Western colonialism would have it — that Japan ended up fighting were most importantly against those two foes. Though it should not be forgotten that more Japanese soldiers fought the ragged Chinese than the armies of either Western power, it does have to be noted that not much in the way of colour film seems to have been expended on that conflict.
It’s sensibly beyond the scope of both this review, and the programme itself, to examine the whys and wherefores of both British and American policy towards Japan from the 1920s on. Japan at War sets itself the simple enough task of charting the progress of the wars she ended up fighting, not in accounting for the rather less visual process whereby she got into them. That said, and oddly reminiscent of the well grounded post-war debate as to Hirohito’s executive culpability, the programme does kick off with a Japan that had next to no choices as to war. That this empire had to fight or die, which isn’t quite true — the reverse indeed being the case. An aspect of this is that a rather limp and inexplicable trailing off of parliamentaryism is portrayed, when really Japanese civil government by the 1930s bore as much serious elective scrutiny as say the Reichstag exerted on the Kaiser’s cabinets before 1914. Less even: for the non-state institutions in Japanese society were far more attenuated than those of Wilhemine Germany. So in watching all of this, however sad it is, we probably shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that this was a fight they talked themselves into. No one, after all, declared war on Japan.
What went right went very right
By far the most admirable thing about this programme, other than the basic fact of its length (two hours: a DNB of a history programme by contemporary standards), was its timeframe. The war against China was where the main action kicked off, but this had been sensibly preceded by plenty of footage showing the closing moments of a more or less general peace.
One immensely impressive piece of footage was pegged to the fact of the Japanese cruiser present at the 1937 Spithead coronation review. This film, immaculate, crisp, astonishingly detailed and untouched, showed, for instance, close and evocative moving pictures of British aircraft carriers. Of these, HMS Courageous, has, to my knowledge, only one known set of colour stills of her in existence, yet here, as surely only part of their industry, the programme’s researchers had turned up colour reels of the great ship at anchor. This aspect of the production illustrates a very sensible usage of footage: wisely this was not restricted purely to ‘Japanese’ footage, ie that taken by Japanese photographers, or solely of events in Japan or mainland China. Rather, when obviously ‘foreign’ footage (principally British and American, of events in British or US possessions) was pertinent to understanding Japan, it was rightly employed. Assisting this was a sensibly subtle non-linear presentation of immediate pre-World War two history, as themes (eg naval power, colonial expansion, industrial output, etcetera) were all logically followed, before we got to the business of war itself.
There’s no escaping the fact that for obvious reasons the war between the advanced powers and Japan occupies more colour footage than does Japan’s war in China. Despite pretty pictures of pre-rape Nanking, the massacres themselves, and essentially all of the fighting against Chinese forces, lack glamorous images fit for twenty first century television.
Perhaps the single bravest editorial decision taken by the makers was for the voiceovers for primary material from Japanese sources. They were chiefly from diaries, and official communiqués, and to be honest, more than adequately filled the image-led gaps. But in a daring departure from po-faced modern practice, these testimonies were read out to us by, largely Western actors, employing stagey Japanese accents. Anything else would have been to wreck the flow of the programme (Tim Piggott-Smith as the authorial voice, otherwise solely original sources voiced over the footage i.e. no redundantly late interviews with diminished, but irrelevantly extant relics), but in many another piece of television history, this does happen.
Having the excerpts rendered in Japanese-accented English reminded us more fully that what accompanied the film was Japanese than any amount of competent reading could have done by British or American actors using their own dull drama school 'I'm doing a documentary' voices. Less important, but equally noticeable things that the programme got right about itself included: a surprisingly balanced part for the United States; an absence of self-defeating music; and, though examples slipped through, a thankful disinclination to put sound effects to film where there was none (eg colour footage of a train pulling in at a station which was originally silent, ending up with studio-produced hissing sounds — that sort of silliness).
All in all, the images were married to a great deal of editorial intelligence and productive skill. Which perhaps inevitably makes it still more of a pity quite what a dismal tale it is. For if there is one thing this programme foreshadows, but does not acknowledge itself as doing, it’s how like ‘us’, her other, the Japanese are. Thus, it also implicitly goes a long way to explaining how it is that of all the non-European peoples to encounter modernity, the Japanese have responded to it in, well, the most modern way.
Unnecessary suffering
Lacking the details in colour, the solitary failing of Japan in Colour is that it never quite shows us just how hollow her war time rhetoric of vague pan-Asian, though Japanese-led, ‘resistance’ to white colonialism was. Korea has an ambivalent history with Japan, despite the brutality, but China does not. That China had in the previous century lost more people in self-inflicted warfare than probably the combined populations of Britain, the US and Japan doesn’t diminish or alter Japan’s sheer wickedness in her execution of war. Nor, for understandable reasons of guilt-fused nationalism, would China's later, greater killings assuage the memory of the Japanese. In this, in the way she waged war, Japan proved herself to be at her least modern, and it inevitably provided its own reward.
But that’s to get ahead of ourselves. The war we all know was as attractively presented as it has to be: this is a war at least as savage as any other front during the second world war, but one which does suffer from an invariably more handsome battlefront than most. And a distinctive one too I’d suggest — we feel we know the scenes of the Pacific war in a way in which we do not know the other fighting of WWII, precisely because all the rest tends to the inter-changeable. Deserts are different, but rubble strewn cities are rubble strewn cities, and the grey North Atlantic is duller and more general still, but the Pacific! Now there’s a war we expect to recognise, and this clearly presents a danger for the makers of such a well-crafted programme.
Each vignette tells it own discreet story. Flame-throwing US tanks, as island after island was hopped, demonstrate the bloody hell that invasion of the home islands was going to require. Which landings would, we have to assume, have necessitated Soviet involvement, with all that that would have entailed in 1946. Betraying, you have to feel, the lack of emotional resonance submarining has yet to acquire amongst ‘white hat’ nations, as much as the absence of decent footage, the u-boats of the USN fail again to get the credit they deserve. Maybe other than the two happy times for the Germans (one per war), no navy has ever waged as effective and important a submarine campaign as did the United States against the Japanese empire. Her retreat to defeat is inextricably tied up in this arm of war, but ships sinking are ships sinking, so we saw few of them.
And then it ends. We all know how: we could probably describe it more easily to each other than just about event of the twentieth century. We’d get it wrong, morally, most of us (given the propensity of even the urban Japanese to live in wooden houses, mass firebombing already killed more in single raids than either atomic bomb did), but we’d know what we were talking about. It’s a tribute to this programme that the most diminished image in human history didn’t become the horribly wrong anti-climax it invariably is every other time it's shown to us.
Japan in peace
One of the least asked, but most interesting ‘what ifs’ of World War II comes from Japan’s entry into the conflict. The one everyone asks is, ‘what if Hitler hadn’t peevishly declared war on the US, would she still have entered the European theatre on the Allied side?’ Given FDR’s superhuman efforts to embroil her in that war, it’s hard not to think that Pearl Harbor could but only have speeded up whatever timetable he was working to. A more gamey question to ask is, ‘what if Japan — whose actions brought America to war — hadn’t declared war on Britain (and the Dutch)?’ In other words, what if there had been two, simultaneous hemispheric wars? one between Japan and the United States (with what passed for China) across the Pacific, and, one throughout the western Eurasian landmass, and the Arab littoral beneath it?
That Japan went to war with Britain too partially reflected hunger accentuated by evident British weakness in 1941, and more acutely, the need to get the oil of the East Indies in order to pursue the war she had started. But had Japan contrived only to fight the US, would Britain, creaking, in alliance with the USSR, against Germany and Italy, have been in any more of a rush to start a war against Japan, not least given American disinclination (as most recently trumpeted by Roosevelt in his 1940 re-election campaign) to start a war against Germany? Arguably not, and since what passed for Japan’s long term strategy was no more than to gain US assent to a fairly free Japanese hand in China, what an odd conflict it would have been. The forces that captured Malaya would have been available for Midway and Honolulu, the bases that eventually supported the American counter offensive would have been in neutral hands — and her own principal imperial possession, the Philippines, would presumably have been in Japanese hands. Any US military campaign would have had to go through the route pre-1941 wargames assumed, namely Alaska via the Aleutians and to the Kuriles and Sapporo and further south. A horrible job it would have been too, worse by far than the war that actually took place.
Yet we know that the Japanese in the end went for all, and got nothing. Their last great war (very possibly their last war ever) accomplished two signal things. US paramountcy over Japan herself has been the most enduring and perverse consequence. The second, chiefly through such inexcusable victories as Singapore, was to drive the occident out of Asia, from where it has never successfully returned. Therefore her colourful war lost Japan herself to the United States, and as of this moment, Asia to China. Which, as the saying goes, is a pretty black and white result.
Peter Greene Coates no longer seeks tenure in Wales
Peter Greene Coates, January 18, 2004 04:43 PM