The persistent sneering devil
of American racism led to a grave military error in the Pacific.
“(A)s the 1930s drew to a
close, most American officers in the Philippines regarded conflict between the
United States and Dai Nippon (literally Great Japan, as in Great Britain) as
inevitable,” wrote biographer William Manchester in American Caesar: Douglas
MacArthur 1880-1964. “But few of
them doubted a swift U.S. victory.
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| Japanese propaganda art from World War II |
“Even
MacArthur was misled by racial chauvinism; when he saw the skill with which
Japanese warplanes were flown in the first days of the war, he concluded that
the pilots must be white men.
“The
Japanese, Americans agreed, were a comical race. They wrote backward and read
backward. They built their houses from the roof down and pulled, instead of
pushing, their saws. Their baseball announcers gave the full count as ‘two and
three.’ Department-store bargain basements were on the top floor.
“Japanese
women gave men gifts on Saint Valentine’s Day. Papers were stapled in the upper
right-hand corner. To open their locks, you had to turn the key to the left. If
they fell in the mud, they laughed; telling you of grave personal misfortunes,
they grinned. Japanese murderers apologized to the victims’ families for
messing up the house, and the Japanese host who received you into his home with
exquisite courtesy might, upon meeting you in the street, shove you rudely into
the gutter.
“They
were stocky, bandy-legged and buck-toothed. Their civilians wore rumpled hats,
dark alpaca suits and tinted glasses in public. Their soldiers suited up in
uniforms resembling badly wrapped brown paper parcels. The notion that they
could shoot straight — not to mention lick red-blooded Americans — was regarded
in Manila as preposterous.” But,
as Manchester observed, “Really it was the Americans who were comic, or,
considering what lay ahead, tragicomic.”
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