No Refuge from Modernity?: The Intersections of American and Japanese Conservatisms, Russell Kirk, and Shirasu Jirō

Abstract

The Michigan Historical Review 42:1 (Spring 2016): 35-59©2016 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved No Refuge from Modernity?: The Intersections of American and Japanese Conservatisms, Russell Kirk, and Shirasu Jirō By Jason Michael Morgan There are circumstances under which it is not only more honorable to lose than to win, but quite truly less harmful, in the ultimate providence of God.1 The Pacific War, fought principally between two of the twentieth century’s mightiest naval forces, the United States and Japan, is often portrayed as an existential struggle between fascism and freedom. As Hollywood filmmaker Frank Capra outlined in his propaganda documentary series Why We Fight; as Ernie Pyle and Studs Terkel wrote in dispatches from the Pacific; as American newspapers—and Japanese ones, too—wrote in breathless editorials and sensational headlines; and as the rank-and-file soldiers on both sides had largely come to internalize and accept, the enemy was barbaric, treacherous, animal-like, brainwashed, vicious, subhuman, wily, rapacious, and cruel.2 The “Japs” on the one hand and the “Meriken” (a pejorative term for “Americans”) on the other were not only threats to one’s own AsiaPacific empire but, more important for propaganda purposes, also imperiled the peaceful world order. At least in the American estimation, the progressive forces of liberal democracy were faced with a mission as 1 Russell Kirk, on American atrocities in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Tokyo in 1945. A Program for Conservatives (Washington, DC: Henry Regnery, 1954), 266. 2 Studs Terkel, The Good War: An Oral History of WWII (New York, NY: The New Press, 1997); Harold Guard and John Tring, The Pacific War Uncensored: A War Correspondent’s Unvarnished Account of the Fight against Japan (Havertown, PA: Casemate, 2011); “Jap Fleet Smashed,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 7 June 1942, 1; “The Enemy’s Dream of a Final Line—But Now They Tremble with Fear at Our Attack—We Will Not Permit Any Fleet to Roam the Pacific,” Yomiuri Shimbun, 11 June 1942. All translations are by the author unless otherwise noted. 36 The Michigan Historical Review divinely-appointed as any Shintoist decree: to bring the light of civilization to the East and set colonized captives free.3 Though it is only slightly over seventy years since Japanese leaders signed the instrument of surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay—under the same American flag that Commodore Matthew C. Perry had flown aboard his flagship USS Susquehanna when he forcefully opened Japan to commerce ninety-two years before—historically-themed speeches given by both Japanese and American politicians announce the triumph of modernity as witnessed by Japan’s industrialization, democratization, and incorporation into the weak-bordered world of global capitalism.4 Even American historians, who elsewhere have been deeply critical of modernity, have recently lauded the achievements of the modern, postwar Japanese state. Modernity, the apparent victor in the Pacific War, is still proudly triumphant nearly three-quarters of a century after the fighting came to an end.5 Yet what is often removed from the historical narrative of the Pacific War is the role of modernity itself in creating the conditions possible for the occurrence of such a total war in the first place. Seen as a mirrored instantiation of modernity, the Pacific War thus seems much less like a titanic struggle between two juggernauts of radically different ontological type and much more like a thoroughly modern battle for complete domination under the cast of totalizing ideologies.6 The Allied demand for unconditional surrender, too, was symptomatic, not of an existential struggle between two diametrically opposed forces, but rather of the 3 Ian Buruma, “MacArthur’s Children,” review of John Dower’s Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War Two (New York, NY: Norton, 1999), New York Review of Books, October 21, 1999. nybooks.com/articles/archives/1999/oct/21/macarthurschildren ; Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895-1910 (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1998); George Akita and Brandon Palmer, The Japanese Colonial Legacy in Korea, 1910-1945 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2015). 4 See Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzō’s speech to the...