3 - The Barnes Review

PAGE 46 the barnes review MAY/JUNE
[to whom] I am deeply indebted for inspiration
and assistance in every stage of the
preparation of my manuscript.” 3—A splendid,
but not surprising, tribute to this publication’s
inspiration and namesake.
Unless you are fortunate enough to
have read professors Barnes and
Tansill, the best you are apt to hear about
our bombing and destruction of nearly
700,000 Japanese civilians4 during World
War II is that “they had it coming for what
they did at Pearl Harbor.” Even though the
victims here were Asian women, children
and elderly, their killers for the most part
were white, wealthy liberals, which apparently
made the violence against their victims
acceptable, just as it does today in
Idaho, Texas, Florida, Serbia and Sudan.
By such tormented logic, we are informed
that Ja panese civilians were rightfully
slaughtered in the hundreds of thousands
and their country torched for what their
leaders did in Nanking, Hawaii and the
Philippines.
We are also expected to believe that
America went to war in 1941 because the
“Japs bombed Pearl Harbor.” Usually the
matter rests, ipse dixit, upon that bare
assertion. To question the proposition is to
be impatiently dismissed by FDR’s defenders
as unworthy of serious consideration.
As a leftist article of faith, it has earned
unquestioning acceptance since it was purchased
with the lives of 300,000 young
Americans. Once you have paid those
wages, you are not likely to disavow the
labor. And the more time that passes the
less likely any abnegation of the enterprise.
In the 1974 Paramount production,
Chinatown an obscenely wealthy murderer,
extortionist and pedophile politician
Noah Cross (played by John Huston) tells
private detective J.J. Gettes (Jack Nichol -
son), “Politicians, ugly buildings and
whores all get respectable if they last long
enough.” He might have added to his list,
lies told by rulers to their subjects to justify
and conceal murder.
With 12 million men under arms at the
height of the war between 1941 and 1945,
hardly a family in America did not have
someone in the conflict, engaged in the war
effort, lose someone in battle or to wounds,
or know of someone so lost. It became an
intensely personal war. Front windows in
family homes were adorned with little,
square, fringed rayon pennants sporting a
blue star on a white field for every son from
that home in the service and a gold star for
every one killed in battle. Casualty lists
published in the newspaper were posted in
store fronts and barber shops. We bought
war bonds, war savings stamps and sold
rendered fat from our cooking to the neighborhood
butcher. Gold Star Moms, gas
rationing, leg painting (due to the dearth of
nylons), scrap drives and blackouts were
daily reminders of the enormous price
America and its youngsters were paying
for this bloodiest of globalist adventures.
Even though we were a different people
then, a stronger, cohesive people with a
com mon history and a sense of ourselves,
FDR and his elite band of internationalists,
nonetheless, locked us into a savage warfare
state, where hatred of the “Japs” was
de rigeur. Not surprisingly, this pervasive
malevolence has been relied upon ever
since to rationalize the carnage Roosevelt
un leashed and make questioning the righteousness
of his “crusade” heresy.
But, since truth’s losing struggle with
the corrupt and mendacious presidency of
Bill Clinton, it has become inescapable for
most intelligent people to ask, as did professors
Barnes and Tansill 50 years ago,
“Why did the Japs bomb Pearl Harbor?”
How “surprised,” for that matter, was
Roosevelt about Japan’s attack? 5 Historian
Paul Johnson gives a partial answer in
Modern Times when he writes: “Roosevelt
had always been aggressive-minded in
Asia.” As early as December 1937, Johnson
relates, FDR had proposed to Britain a
total blockade of Japan. In fact, Roosevelt
regarded war with Japan as inevitable
and ...saw advantages in precipitating it
(emphasis added). 6
In 1542 the Portuguese discovered Japan
and opened trade in Kyushu. Within 30
years they had established a major port at
Nagasaki. They brought with them lucrative
trade arrangements, Jesuit missionaries
and firearms. Shortly thereafter, Span -
ish Franciscans followed and quickly be -
came competitors with the Society of Jesus
for religious, commercial and political
influence in the Japans. Within a few years
the new shogun, Teyasu Tokugawa, be came
alarmed at the growth of Chris tian ity,
Jesuit political intrigue and the internal
threat to his authority posed by the growing
foreign influence. By 1638, after bloody
suppression of the Franciscans a few years
earlier, the Portuguese and Span ish were
expelled.
The early Japanese elite were poets as
well as rulers. Out of this class of ruler elite
emerged the warrior-aristocrat, which
appeared by the 11th century in the person
of the samurai and “remains the most distinctly
Japanese type of leader down to
modern times.” 7
Samurai were raised from early child-
hood to serve and die for their liege lord or
daimyo. Above all, death was not to be
avoided but embraced. They were exempt
from taxation; they alone were permitted
to have two names; they performed no
man ual labor; they received a regular sti -
pend from their daimyo; and, for most of
their history, they were the only members
of Japanese society permitted to bear arms.
It was no minor matter that they had the
right to kill, at once, any member of the
lower classes who offended them. Until the
17th century, every daimyo had his own
private army of samurai, which might vary
in size from dozens of men to thousands.
Samurai adhered to a rigid discipline
called bushido, which among all of its
prin ciples came down to one thing: death in
his master’s service. Each samurai be lieved
that he had but one duty: “to firmly grasp
his sword and die.” 8 After all, “is not man
but a blossom taken by the wind?” 9 In fact,
dying was his chief business, 10 and upon
this creed the samurai meditated: the
inevitability of death and the transitoriness
of all things, especially human life. 11
In his epic novel, Musashi, based on the
life of a renowned 17th-century samurai,
Miyamoto Musashi, author Fiji Yoshikawa
describes a poignant farewell scene be -
tween our hero, Musashi, and Otsu, the girl
who loves him. Musashi is departing to
duel Kojiro, the most famous and deadliest
of all samurai. Otsu, fearful that Musashi
will be killed by Kojiro, promises she will
commit seppaku (suicide) if he dies. Mu -
sashi protests, but Otsu is firm:
I look forward with pleasure to the
day I die. It will be like a glorious morning
when the birds are singing. I will go
as happily as I would to my wedding. I
am not throwing my life away for a useless
cause. I have chosen to do what I am
doing, because by dying I can achieve
eternal life. 12
This brief soliloquy encapsulates the
samurai sentiment toward death and is
repeated by various characters throughout
the massive work. The book was published
in 1935—six years before Pearl Harbor—in
serialized form in Japan’s largest and most
prestigious newspaper, Asahi Shimbun.
Are we to assume that no one among FDR’s
gaggle of liberal intellectuals bothered to
read this Japanese equivalent of Gone With
the Wind and attempt to determine if such
folklore in any way imitated Japanese life?
The samurai did not luxuriate in a carefree
or thoughtless existence. It was one
marked by deep reflection, discipline and
by a severe code, the breach of which meant