excising any negative references to the Japanese. While I can appreciate the
sentiment, this move does the audience a major disservice. In the decades
leading up to this battle between colonial powers in the Pacific, negative
references played a central role. Ignoring this in the name of Asian box office
receipts places December 7, 1941 in a vacuum. Pearl Harbor provides no context
so, I’d like to try.
The build-up to Pearl Harbor began two decades prior to the attack when, in
1922, the U.S., Britain, and Japan agreed that the Japanese navy would not be
allowed more than 60 percent of the capital ship tonnage of the other two
powers. As resentment grew within Japan over this decidedly inequitable
agreement, that same year, the United States Supreme Court declared Japanese
immigrants ineligible for American citizenship. This decision was followed a
year later by the Supreme Court upholding a California and Washington ruling
denying Japanese the right to own property. A third judicial strike was dealt in
1924 with the Exclusion Act which virtually banned all Asian immigration.
Finally, in 1930, when the London Naval Treaty denied Japan naval hegemony in
its own waters, the groundwork for war (and “surprise attacks”) had been laid.
Upon realizing that Japan textiles were out-producing Lancashire mills, the
British Empire (including India, Australia, Burma, etc.) raised the tariff on
Japanese exports by 25 percent. Within a few years, the Dutch followed suit in
Indonesia and the West Indies, with the U.S. (in Cuba and the Philippines) not
far behind. This led to the Japanese claiming (correctly) encirclement by the
“ABCD” (American, British, Chinese, and Dutch) powers. Such moves, combined with
Japan’s expanding colonial designs, says Kenneth C. Davis, made “a clash between
Japan and the United States and the other Western nations over control of the
economy and resources of the Far East and Pacific . . . bound to happen.”
WWII, in the Pacific theater, was essentially a war between colonial powers. It
was not the Japanese invasion of China, the rape of Nanking, or the atrocities
in Manchuria that resulted in the United States declaring war on the Empire of
Japan. It was the attack of three of America’s territories‹the Philippines,
Guam, and Hawaii (Pearl Harbor)‹that provoked a military response.
On July 21, 1941, Japan signed a preliminary agreement with the
Nazi-sympathizing Vichy government of Marshal Henri Pétain, leading to Japanese
occupation of airfields and naval bases in Indochina. Almost immediately, the
U.S., Britain, and the Netherlands instituted a total embargo on oil and scrap
metal to Japan‹tantamount to a declaration of war. This was followed soon after
by the United States and Great Britain freezing all Japanese assets in their
respective countries. Radhabinod Pal, one of the judges in the post-war Tokyo
War Crimes Tribunal, later argued that the U.S. had clearly provoked the war
with Japan, calling the embargoes a “clear and potent threat to Japan’s very
existence.”
Which brings me to those negatives references I mentioned earlier.
Self-censorship in the name of profits will mislead movie-goers about the high
level of anti-Japanese racism cultivated by the “greatest generation.” The
Japanese soldiers (and, for that matter, all Japanese) were commonly referred to
and depicted as subhuman‹insects, monkeys, apes, rodents, or simply barbarians
that must be wiped out or exterminated. The American Legion Magazine’s cartoon
of monkeys in a zoo who had posted a sign reading, “Any similarity between us
and the Japs is purely coincidental” was typical. A U.S. Army poll in 1943 found
that roughly half of all GIs believed it would be necessary to kill every
Japanese on earth before peace could be achieved. As a December 1945 Fortune
poll revealed, American feelings for the Japanese did not soften after the war.
Nearly twenty-three percent of those questioned wished the U.S. could have
dropped “many more [atomic bombs] before the Japanese had a chance to
surrender.” Eugene B. Sledge, author of With the Old Breed at Peleliu and
Okinawa, wrote of his comrades “harvesting gold teeth” from the enemy dead. In
Okinawa, Sledge witnessed “the most repulsive thing I ever saw an American do in
the war”‹when a Marine officer stood over a Japanese corpse and urinated into
its mouth. Perhaps Edgar L. Jones, a former war correspondent in the Pacific,
put it best when he asked in the February 1946 Atlantic Monthly, ”What kind of
war do civilians suppose we fought anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood,
wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians,
finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and
in the Pacific boiled flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for
sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers.”
And then there was the man who’d eventually give the order to drop atomic bombs
on Japanese civilians: “We have used [the bomb] against those who have abandoned
all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare,” Harry Truman later
explained, thus justifying his decision to nuke a people that he termed
“savages, ruthless, merciless, and fanatic.”
Rationality in the Pacific was so rare during WW II that, ironically, it
required as a mouthpiece none other than prominent racist Colonel Charles A.
Lindbergh, Jr. Repelled by what he saw and heard of U.S. treatment of the
Japanese in the Pacific theater, the aviator spoke out. His sentiments are
summed up in the following journal entry: “It was freely admitted that some of
our soldiers tortured Jap prisoners and were as cruel and barbaric at times as
the Japs themselves. Our men think nothing of shooting a Japanese prisoner or a
soldier attempting to surrender. They treat the Jap with less respect than they
would give to an animal, and these acts are condoned by almost everyone. We
claim to be fighting for civilization, but the more I see of this war in the
Pacific the less right I think we have to claim to be civilized.”When Lindbergh
left the Pacific and arrived at customs in Hawaii, he was asked if he had any
Japanese bones in his baggage. It was, by then, a routine question
Like most Hollywood spectacles, Pearl Harbor is devoid of context. There’s only
one line alluding to U.S. economic and legislative provocation prior to December
7, 1941 and no hint at all of the internment camps and atomic bombs yet to come.
After three hours, World War II is still “The Good War,” America’s honor remains
untarnished, and the summer movie season is in full swing.
Surprise, surprise.
Mickey Z. (Michael Zezima) is the author of Saving Private Power: The Hidden
History of “The Good War” (Soft Skull Press, 2000), on which this article is
based. He can reached at [email protected].
