Debate over Pearl Harbor attack still unresolved

By Martin Woollacott

LONDON: Approaching Hawaii at dawn on a Sunday, the attackers took the defenders by surprise, their planes sinking every battleship in the harbor and destroying all aircraft on the ground before they could take off.

The umpires ruled that the "enemy" had achieved a complete victory -- for this was an exercise during the American fleet maneuvers of 1932, and not the real thing, which came on another Sunday nine years later.

One of the fascinations of Pearl Harbor is that both sides so completely disregarded the clearest of lessons. The Americans knew they could be taken by surprise, and duly were so surprised. More seriously, the Japanese knew they could not win a war against the United States, but duly went on to start a war and to lose it.

Now Pearl Harbor is to be staged once again in an American film, following recent recreations of Normandy, Guadalcanal and Stalingrad. The conjunction of two factors, the age of film makers and the revolution in special effects, has made World War II battles newly attractive as film projects.

Some of the film makers, too young to be in the war themselves, nevertheless grew up in an atmosphere in which the remembered conflict towered over everything.

Now in their late 50s and 60s, they are recapturing this sense of the war's central importance. The special effects revolution makes it possible for them to conjure a battlefield that assaults the viewer in a way that is at once shocking and exciting, and is often termed realistic.

But that word begs many questions. The most obvious enduring characteristic of film, which is that it allows us to be observers in a way which we could never be in life, has a special application in films about war.

Battles, those who have survived them invariably say, are experienced in fragments, even by the men supposedly in charge of them. Recollected by military historians or recreated by writers or directors, they are almost always given a unity that must be in some sense artificial. The best history and fiction about war retains something of the original incoherence.

Even more important, battle out of its historical context is spectacle without sense, however accurate it may be in physical detail. Such films often lead to controversy between former enemies and former allies.

But it is usually confined to questions such as whether a particular contribution to victory has been slighted or whether one side has been wrongly accused of atrocious behavior.

The popular historical debate should be so much larger than this, particularly since the issues are still very much alive. Pearl Harbor, for example, was a battle that would never have taken place had Japan not gone to war 10 years earlier to annex parts of China and to dominate the rest of that country.

It was a mad plan and one carried out with great brutality. Yet the new Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, can suggest blandly that the war was undertaken only because "Japan became isolated from international society".

All four recent candidates in the recent campaign for the leadership of the Liberal Democratic party played to the ultra- right gallery. They supported the distribution of a new textbook that sanitizes and romanticizes Japan's war in China and South- east Asia. They pledged that, if elected, they would visit the Yasukuni Shrine, with its connections with Japanese generals and leaders who were convicted as war criminals.

Koizumi has renewed that pledge since his victory and also reiterated his desire to alter Japan's peace constitution so that it can resume the sovereign right to wage war and have "proper" armed forces. Such positions may have limited support among ordinary Japanese, particularly the young, but the belief that there was something defensible about what Japan was trying through force of arms to achieve in east Asia all those years ago has proved remarkably persistent.

"Harking back to the past," a South Korean diplomat wrote recently, "will harm Japan by undermining the trust of the rest of Asia."

Koizumi was born shortly after Pearl Harbor, but the meaning of that battle is important to him and to those of his age. His own eccentric views uneasily combine both rightist and pacifist ideas. But for others Pearl Harbor's justification is that the U.S. and Britain were intent on bringing down Japan's new order in Asia and that an encircled Japan had to fight back even if the chances of success were small.

Japan's failure to face up fully to the wrongness of the war it started in China in 1931 is most evident in this understanding of Japan's behavior as reaction rather than action. It is easy to go from this to see the war as a tragedy in which Japan was the principal victim. But the truth is that Japan could quite well have made other choices at the critical junctures.

If Japanese understanding of Pearl Harbor is defective, the same is true of America's popular perception of it. The grain of truth in Japanese arguments is that the battle was indeed a marker in the story of American power in Asia, a moment when the rising tide of that power was briefly checked, only to resume in full force within a few months.

From Pearl Harbor on, it was the U.S. rather than Japan which tried to reshape Asia, by war if necessary, first by defeating the Japanese, and then by fighting Koreans, Chinese and Vietnamese.

From Pearl Harbor in 1941 to the abandonment of South Vietnam in 1975 there is an arguable continuity, and that can be traced further through the years of confrontation and limited rapprochement with China until today.

The Bush administration, now preparing to receive its spy plane back in crates, also received an early lesson in the dangers inherent in maintaining America's Asian presence.

Emperor Hirohito's naval aide recorded in his diary that throughout the day on which Pearl Harbor was attacked "the emperor wore his naval uniform and seemed to be in a splendid mood". The Harvard scholar Herbert Bix has conclusively demonstrated in his recent book Hirohito that Hirohito was an active manager of the war rather than a reluctant passenger.

It is interesting that the main reason it has taken so long to establish the emperor's complicity is that the American occupation authorities and the Japanese establishment colluded mightily to obscure it.

In doing so and in many other actions America contributed toward the survival of the very attitudes that still prevent an objective view of the war in Japan.

Its own historical memory of the war, meanwhile, still centers on the unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor, rather than on the years of Japanese aggression in China which preceded it, or on the era of American dominance in east Asia which has followed it.

If it is true, as military strategist Karl von Clausewitz said, that "battles decide everything", it is also true that battles in themselves explain nothing.

-- Guardian News Service