WHO ARE THESE JAPANESE?

...And many of these inhumanities were perpetrated by individuals with the most lily-white skin pigmentation...

...He is worse than dead...

...One could scarcely improve on the words of Sun Fo, son of the leader of the Chinese nationalist revolution and spokesman for a country that has suffered more than any other from Japanese militarism: "The Japanese people, once they are rid of their present rulers, who are bringing ruin and suffering and despair to countless homes in their own land, will never want to undergo another war if they can exercise their own will freely...

...But I wonder whether he did not flinch a little at that revealing racial adjective "yellow," with all the implications of color superiority it implied...

...The moral is surely obvious...

...I was certainly not attracted by the Japanese way of life, because I am an incorrigible individualist and Japanese behavior is very strongly regulated by custom, convention, and state authority...

...Happily International Red Cross investigation has indicated that conditions in the prisoner camps in Japan proper are relatively good...

...He turned out to be a white-bearded, patriarchal figure, who persisted in brushing off my questions with Buddhist platitudes about how all peoples ought to live in love and harmony...

...I can remember many little acts of honesty and courtesy and consideration from everyday Japanese who were certainly not trying to put up a propaganda front: the shopkeeper who would insist on returning a slight overpayment, the peasant who would go out of his way to show a better trail on a mountain walk...

...The beast is never far below the surface in the man...

...Now it does not detract one' iota from the infamy of the treatment of the brave American, and Filipino war prisoners to note that the cruelties on Bataan and in the Philippine prison camps are only one link in a long and dreary chain of episodes of inhumanity of man to man...

...I asked him about Pan-Asianism and he promptly replied: "The day will come when Japan will send its troops, if necessary, to free our Asiatic brothers who are suffering under white oppression...

...These fit in only too well with the authenticated accounts of murder, rape, and pillage after the capture of Nanking, the capital of China, in 1937...

...Chamberlin's Years In Japan We have a right, as Americans, to be proud of the eyewitness accounts and pictures showing that captured Japanese are given food and drink and medical care on the same basis as our own men...

...he is disgraced...

...I once had the unusual opportunity in Tokyo of meeting and talking with Mitsuru Toyama, head of the notorious T31ack Dragon Society...

...There is nothing that would give more pleasure to Tojo and the Japanese militarists than authenticated reports that Americans were killing or torturing Japanese prisoners...

...In order to induce Japanese soldiers to fight to the last man they are systematically fed with scare stories about terrible forms of death which await them if they are taken alive...

...Not long after the beginning of the war in the Pacific a high American official attempted to console Dr...

...The impulse to demand reprisals in the face of such horrible cruelty is strong...

...But at one point Toyama did express an interesting quotable opinion...

...So formidable was his secret society that he had never been arrested or brought to trial...

...On the contrary we shall be ready and willing to re-establish normal relations with a new Japan whose government will be democratically constituted and responsible to the Japanese people as a whole...

...Dr...

...well beat those yellow blank-ety blanks yet...

...But if that Japanese is put in uniform and set to domineer over some other people, he very often becomes intolerable...

...in Burma they received some active aid from disgruntled Burmese nationalists...

...We should condemn these crimes because they are revolting cruelties, not because they were committed by men of a different color and smaller stature than ourselves...

...The Japanese people should be given every fair chance to improve their standard of living through peaceful development of industry, trade, and shipping, through putting their characteristics of industry, frugality, and organizing ability to constructive uses...

...The Japanese who had arranged the meeting had enough "face," or prestige, with Toyama to arrange the appointment, but not enough to make the old man open up and state his true ideas to a foreigner...

...There was also the idea of humiliating Americans in the eyes of the Filipinos...

...No armed force in the world enforces so relentlessly the idea that the soldier may die, but must never surrender...

...So there is unfortunately little reason to doubt the high death toll from bad treatment, malnutrition, and disease in the Philippine prison camps...

...The first condition of reacting intelligently to these Japanese militarist crimes is to- purge ourselves of racist thinking...

...Of a democratic republican Japan we Chinese have no fear...

...But in their attitude toward Japanese who are captured, our fighting men, as often happens, are a good deal more decent and levelheaded than certain hysterical civilians who perhaps try to compensate for their absence of combat service by shrill cries for gore...

...Few prisoners are taken in the grim fighting in the Pacific area...

...But there is a still higher reason for adhering to the standards and practices of what might be called relatively civilized warfare...

...Such a new .Japan must and will take her rightful place in the world community of law-abiding and peaceful nations...

...I think one's attitude toward Japan is determined to some extent by whether one knows the Japanese by having lived among them, or only through atrocity stories...

...Former Ambassador Joseph C. Grew spoke some wise and courageous words on this point, when he said that people "in Japan would not be informed in the slightest degree of the way in which American and Filipino prisoners were being treated...

...But it is easy to guess the considerations that would have prompted the Japanese militarist mind to resort to such a policy...

...One could not attribute this particular cruelty to Russians as a people...

...Making every allowance for exaggerations and inventions of war propaganda, the list of Nazi crimes against the peoples of the occupied countries and against the Jews, crimes that could be documented by official proclamations, is grim and long...

...It is simply that we cannot, for our own sakes, for the future of our own society, allow ourselves to be dragged down to the level of barbarism which was shown by the Japanese militarists in the Philippines...

...There has been a systematic effort in some quarters to represent these cruelties as uniquely and peculiarly Japanese, and this has given powerful support to the ugly undercurrent of racism that has affected the thinking of some Americans about the war with Japan...

...Hu Shih is a distinguished scholar and philosopher, with a good sense of humor...

...There is every justification for the wave of hot indignation that swept over the country because of these revelations, for the determination to press more energetically than ever the war against Japanese militarism and to bring to justice, if they can be found and identified, the men who have so flagrantly broken the conventions governing the treatment of prisoners and the laws of common decency and humanity...

...Two Constructive Suggestions There have been lynching mobs in the United States that have committed individual acts quite as sadistic as anything reported from the Philippines...

...The Ugly Undercurrent While the proper response to Japanese militarist cruelty is a more energetic prosecution of the war in the Pacific area, the atrocities in the Philippines have been exploited in some very undesirable ways...

...But in the Philippines tens of thousands of Filipino soldiers fought side by side with a smaller number of American troops...

...It is this racism that explains the unjustified discriminar tory treatment meted out to Japanese-Americans, as compared with German-Americans and Italian-Americans...

...But I simply cannot think of the great majority of the Japanese whom I knew intimately or casually as a "subhuman breed," to use the language of the New York Herald-Tribune, capable only of bestial atrocities...

...This was not according to the Japanese militarist idea of how an Oriental people should act...

...For, according to the stern code of the Japanese Army, a Japanese soldier who falls into enemy hands has ceased to exist...

...This is obviously good propaganda...

...Hu Shih, the Chinese Ambassador at that time, with the tactful remark: "Never mind, Dr...

...A second condition is to refuse to condemn the entire Japanese people for outrages of which the great majority of them are entirely ignorant...

...I have myself seen in Russia unheated freight cars packed with unfortunate so-called kulaks, or well-to-do peasants, men, women, and children, being sent to forced labor in concentration camps under conditions that assured a high death rate...

...It is not yet possible to establish the ultimate responsibility for these outrages, to ascertain from what source the order or authorization to be especially cruel in the treatment of prisoners originated...

...it was simply the ruthlessness of a ruling clique determined to carry out schemes of social and economic reconstruction regardless of the cost in lives and suffering...

...Ruthless examples had to be made of the captured Filipinos in order to convince their countrymen that the wise thing would be to climb on the Japanese bandwagon and support the Japanese-sponsored puppet regime...

...This, I think, was a primary consideration in the cruel treatment of the captured Filipinos...

...The wide publicizing of Japanese cruelties has stimulated discussion of "what to do" with Japan after the war and has caused some wild talk of isolating the Japanese islands from the rest of the world and watching the surplus population slowly starve to death...

...I spent four years in Japan from 1935 until 1939...

...Smash Militarism, Not People The truth of the matter is that the Japanese civilian at home, the farmer, the fisherman, the professor, the engineer, the worker has some attractive qualities and gets along in daily life with no more crime and brutality than people of any other country...

...It is our fate to live in an iron age, an age of global wars and violent revolutions, well adapted to release bestial instincts on a gigantic scale...

...But it must be firmly resisted, for the sake of our own standards of civilization, for the sake of the prisoners who still remain in Japanese hands...

...Japanese militarism must be smashed...

...If it could be filtered through to the Japanese who are still fighting it might, combined with the growing weight of our technical superiority, crack the hard shell of Japanese morale and lead to an earlier ending of the war, with a great consequent saving of American lives...

...Japanese Militarist Psychology Now in Malaya, in the Netherlands Indies, in Burma, the Japanese invaders encountered little, if any, opposition from the natives...

...As for the atrocities committed against Americans, these were to some extent an outgrowth of the racial hatred which is part of the Japanese militarist psychology...

...By WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN THERE is no reason to doubt the essential truth of the shocking stories of Japanese Army cruelty to American and Filipino war prisoners after the fall of Bataan and Corregidor...

...A first consideration should certainly be to save the lives of as many of the survivors as possible and in this matter one must hope that the State Department and the Red Cross will make every effort to get supplies to the prison camps and, by whatever means are most likely to influence the Japanese Government, to obtain an improvement in conditions...

...Toyama's name had been associated with a vast number of political assassinations and plots...

...Pan-Asianism, "Asia for the Asiatics," which in practice means Asia for the Japanese, is the gospel of the Japanese fanatical Army leaders and extreme nationalists...