Saturday, December 6, 1997
War, peace
and learning to shed
our prejudices
Loyalty and character of Hawaii's Japanese
By A.A. Smyser
helped others shed racial biases
after Dec. 7, 1941
Star-BulletinHawaii's history would be quite different if, by 1941, important Caucasian leaders like Charles Hemenway, chairman of the University of Hawaii regents and Hawaiian Trust Co.; Robert Shivers, FBI director for Hawaii; and then-Colonel Kendall J. Fielder of Army Intelligence hadn't come to have full faith and confidence in Hawaii's Japanese people. We might have gone the West Coast internment route. In June 1941, I graduated from Penn State and was working for the Pittsburgh Press on Dec. 7.
I cannot recall either meeting or talking to an Asian before graduating from college. I shared all the prevalent prejudices. The word "Jap" rolled off my lips with ease.
But I had a sort of awakening on the night of Dec. 7. I was sent to Pittsburgh's Chinatown to get reactions to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Over and over, I was asked to tell our readers not to confuse Chinese people with Japanese people. We hate Japan, too, Chinatown residents told me. They reminded me that Japan was occupying parts of China. They further forged my anti-Japanese prejudice.
When the war was over, I was in a massive convoy that landed our first Army troops at Inchon, Korea. On the docks, we found Japanese officers still commanding Korean stevedore crews, waving swords over the heads of the workers and uttering guttural phrases that certainly weren't kindly.
On the train ride to Seoul from Inchon and in the center of Seoul itself, we found vast crowds of Koreans deliriously happy to soon be released from Japanese rule. It was the most mass emotion I had ever seen.
Next our ships carried U.S. Marines into North China to take over from the Japanese commands there. Again, delirium from the crowds as we were trucked into Tientsin.
Americans didn't like Japanese, Koreans didn't like Japanese, Chinese didn't like Japanese and later I found Filipinos didn't like Japanese.
It was pretty unanimous. No need to change my long-held prejudices.
The change didn't begin until I went to work for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on Feb. 4, 1946. There, I learned that the word "Jap" had never been allowed in the newspaper, not even in the headlines of the extras announcing the Pearl Harbor attack.
The other paper, the Advertiser, used it freely and many haoles in the community leadership condemned the Star-Bulletin for not using it, too.
But the owners, Joe and Betty Farrington, and the wonderfully remarkable editor who hired me, Riley Allen, stood fast.
They knew what Charles Hemenway knew, what Robert Shivers knew and what Col. Kendall Fielder knew: Hawaii's Japanese residents were as fine a group of people as you could find anywhere and surprisingly loyal to America considering that many were first- and second-generation immigrants.
Theirs was one of the most traumatic experiences of any people in World War II. Some of that was caught in "Our House Divided," a series of stories written for the Star-Bulletin for the 25th anniversary of the attack.
Staffer Tomi Knaefler visited divided families in both Japan and Hawaii to record how they faced the war with loved ones on both sides.
The series in 1991 became the basis for a book published by the University of Hawaii Press. I am proud to have had a major part in assigning Tomi to that story.
Earlier, in 1966, I had gone to Hiroshima, the prefecture from which many of Hawaii's Japanese came. Honolulu and Hiroshima had become sister cities.
Considering what had happened there, I was amazed by the friendliness with which I was received, starting with the mayor of Hiroshima, Shinzo Hamai.
He led the restoration of the city after the nuclear bomb attack. I rank him as one of the three greatest men I ever knew fairly well, along with Riley Allen and Henry Kaiser.
A further dramatic event came for me on Dec. 6, 1966. Capt. Mitsuo Fuchida, the leader of the Pearl Harbor attack, came to our house for dinner. A group of us did a interview with him, a wonderful 25th anniversary scoop for the Star-Bulletin.
Fuchida was by this time a Christian minister in Seattle, but what Japanese person could one want to hate more than the leader of the Pearl Harbor attack?
U.S. intelligence officer Wootch Fielder was at the dinner. So was Wootch's deputy, George Bicknell. So was the Rev. Abraham Akaka of Kawaiahao Church.
Conversation was guarded as the evening started, but it soon warmed up and became friendly.
Fuchida was an educated, charming gentleman. I brought out some aerial pictures of the bombing, ones taken by his task force. It excited him. He identified the target battleships, exclaiming the name of each one as he fingered it. He described the attack from his standpoint, including a few things we Americans call snafus.
Fuchida came to regret the war after it was over and converted to Christianity for complex reasons. But he remained proud that, as a military commander, he had accomplished well the mission assigned him on Dec. 7, 1941.
With grudging but growing admiration, our two U.S. intelligence officers on the ground that day came to agree. He was a military man doing what he was assigned to do and doing it well. The trouble lay above him.
By this time I had also learned that all Japanese, whether in Hawaii or Japan, have a common strong cultural background that emphasizes sacrifice, courage, endurance, family, camaraderie, solidarity, tenacity, persistence, pride, justice, responsibility, loyalty, obligation, duty and respect.
The world would be a better place if all five billion of us lived by such values.
Why then did we have the bloody Pacific War?
I think I have a clue to the answer. Tie those values to tyranny and the tyrant can go far. Something similar happened with Nazi Germany, Josef Stalin's USSR and Mao Tse-Tung's China.
When totalitarian leaders told their people to march and kill, they did -- probably driven by loyalty to the leader, trust in him and fear of personal reprisal if they didn't.
R.J. Rummel, recently retired professor at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, was sent to Japan as a young GI during the Korean War. He met and liked ordinary Japanese people, then asked the question I just posed: Why did we go to war with each other?
Rummel devoted his life to finding the answer. The best science is that which can stand mathematical proof.
Rummel turned to computers to see if he could isolate causes of war. He tested many potential correlations: proximity, territorial ambition, trade and economic issues, ethnic and religious rivalries, relative strength of arms, etc. He came out with answers he didn't expect.
The strongest correlation highlighted democracies and non-democracies. No two democracies had made war on each other in this century.
It turned out later that is true for most of history. It usually takes, he proved, a totalitarian country to cause a war.
But Rummel came up with an even more devastating indictment of totalitarianism. All the war deaths in this century total less than 40 million. But people killed by their own governments far exceed that number -- some 170 million, all but a few million of them under dictatorships.
Rummel broke down these numbers in considerable detail to show that he wasn't making them up. He then circulated them in scholarly journals without provoking any significant challenges to them.
His work is one of the reasons we have heard recent U.S. presidents talking about the importance of spreading democracy.
We all have heard that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Rummel carries that further. "Power kills" is the title of his summary work.
Sad to say, nearly half the world's people remain non-free. That is why the U.S., as the only remaining superpower, needs to retain a strong defense.
But there is progress. Democracy is spreading. Now that they all are democracies and integrated with each other in trade, there is no likelihood for another war between, for example, the U.S. and Japan or between France and Germany.
We have come far since 1941.
A.A. Smyser is a contributing editor for the Star-Bulletin.
