In more sedate intellectual circles, few have considered the observation by Justice Röling of the Netherlands after the Tokyo Tribunal where Japanese war criminals were tried and convicted: "From the Second World War above all two things are remembered: the German gas chambers and the American atomic bombings." Or the impressive dissent by the one independent Asian Justice, Radhabinod Pal of India, who wrote: "When the conduct of the nations is taken into account the law will perhaps be found to be that only a lost cause is a crime... if any indiscriminate destruction of civilian life and property is still illegitimate in warfare, then, in the Pacific war, this decision to use the atom bomb is the only near approach to the directives...of the Nazi leaders... Nothing like this could be traced to the present accused" at Tokyo, seven of whom were hanged along with over 900 other Japanese executed for war crimes; among them General Yamashita, executed for atrocities committed by troops over whom he had no control at the war's end. Even the reactions of high-ranking US military officials have been little noted, for example, Admiral William Leahy, chief of staff under the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations, who regarded nuclear weapons as "new and terrible instruments of uncivilized warfare," "a modern type of barbarism not worthy of Christian man," a reversion to the "ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages"; its use "would take us back in cruelty toward noncombatants to the days of Genghis Khan."⁴

Recognizing where power lies, Prime Minister Watanabe adopted US conventions in expressing Japan's regrets: he traced Japan's crimes to December 7, 1941, thus implicitly discounting hideous atrocities that killed 10 to 13 million Chinese, by conservative estimate, from 1937 through 1945, not to speak of earlier crimes.⁵

Passing silently over Watanabe's dating of the guilt, Weisman raises only one question: the evasiveness of the gesture at apology. The anniversary commemoration was based upon the same principle: killing, torturing, and otherwise abusing tens of millions of people may not be wholly meritorious, but a "sneak attack" on a naval base in a US colony is a crime of a completely different order. True, to heighten the recognition of Japan's iniquity, its atrocities and aggression in Asia are regularly tacked on to the indictment, but as an afterthought: the Pearl Harbor attack is the real crime, the initial act of aggression.

That decision has many merits. It enables us to ruminate on the strange defects of the Japanese character without having to confront some facts that are better removed from history. For example, the fact that pre-Pearl Harbor, much of the American business community and many US officials rejected "the generally accepted theory that Japan has been a big bully and China the downtrodden victim" (Ambassador Joseph Grew, an influential figure in Far East policy). The US objection to Japan's New Order in Asia, Grew explained in a speech in Tokyo in 1939, was that it imposed "a system of closed economy, ... depriving Americans of their long-established rights in China." He had nothing to say about China's right to national independence, the rape of Nanking, the invasion of Manchuria, and other such marginal issues. Secretary of State Cordell Hull adopted much the same priorities in the negotiations with Japanese Admiral Nomura before the Pearl Harbor attack, stressing US rights to equal access to the territories conquered by Japan in China. On November 7, Japan finally agreed to the US demand, offering to accept "the principle of nondiscrimination in commercial relations" in the Pacific, including China. But the wily Japanese added a qualifying clause: they would accept the principle only if it "were adopted throughout the world."

Hull was greatly shocked at this insolence. The principle was to apply in the Japanese sphere alone, he admonished the impudent arrivistes. The US and other Western powers could not be expected to respond in kind in their dominions, including India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Cuba, and other vast regions from which the Japanese had been effectively barred by extremely high tariffs when they unfairly began to win the competitive game in the 1920s.

Dismissing Japan's frivolous appeal to the British and American precedent, Hull deplored the "simplicity of mind that made it difficult for...[Japanese generals]...to see why the United States, on the one hand, should assert leadership in the Western Hemisphere with the Monroe Doctrine and, on the other, want to interfere with Japan's assuming leadership in Asia." He urged the Japanese government to "educate the generals" about this elementary distinction, reminding his backward pupils that the Monroe Doctrine, "as we interpret and apply it uniformly since 1823 only contemplates steps for our physical safety." Respected scholars chimed in with their endorsement, expressing their outrage over the inability of the little yellow men to perceive the difference between a great power like the US and a small-time operator like Japan, and to recognize that "The United States does not need to use military force to induce the Caribbean republics to permit American capital to find profitable investment. The doors are voluntarily open" -- as even the most cursory look at history will show.⁶

⁴ See PEHR, II 32f., 39. On the principles of justice employed, see also FRS, ch. 3, reprinted from a Yale Law Review symposium on Nuremberg and Vietnam. For excerpts from Pal's dissent, see APNM. See Minnear, Victor's Justice. Leahy, cited by Braw, Atomic Bomb, from his 1950 autobiography, I Was There.

⁵ Japan historian Herbert Bix, BG, April 19, 1992.

⁶ APNM, ch. 2, for further material and sources.