Points of reference
We'll answer most of your questions about the film tomorrow. We may not get to the re-education camps til next week, but since you are so curious, I'll make sure we get to it for sure then (if not tomorrow).
This post is a kind of "orientation" to some of the material you will hear tomorrow. My guess is that many of you will be familiar with the more contemporary versions of some of the actions described by the vets in the film.
The first vet you'll meet in the film will discuss (in great detail) what is now called "waterboarding," for example. You might know that waterboarding has figured prominently in the confirmation hearings for Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey. According to this source, waterboarding is when "the prisoner is bound to a board with feet raised, and cellophane wrapped round his head. Water is poured onto his face and is said to produce a fear of drowning which leads to a rapid demand for the suffering to end." A towel is used instead of cellophane in the story you will hear.
You will also hear some vets talk about rape and other forms of sexual violence. Even though one man indicates that it was illegal under military law, he explains that it still happened and that as long as a soldier made sure he wasn't discovered, he wouldn't be punished. You'll hear about how some men avoided discovery. This also might be an issue familiar to you if you remember the rape and murder of Abeer Qassim Hamza. If you don't remember, you can find quite a bit online. If you're pressed for time, you can read this.
In terms of our class so far, we've studied people who wanted to abolish the emperor system and stop the aggressive imperial push to colonize and expand. We've learned how they were punished for resisting what would develop into the kind of system we'll be exploring this week and next. Hopefully, you're already getting a sense of where this material fits into the larger picture of this class.
As you watch the film, I also want you to think about how Huang might have thought about Baba and the other men in "Sayonara Tsai-chien." What might Huang have imagined that could have predisposed him to dislike the Japanese tourists so much? Several of you commented about this aspect of that story, and maybe the film will give you a new window into thinking about how we might understand Huang's subjectivity.
Finally, those of you who attended Prof. Inoue's lecture will be interested to know that one of the vets (Mr. Suzuki) uses the word naichi (内地) to refer to Japan.
posted by adrienne @ 7:21 PM
18 comments
18 Comments:
If any of the anarchists had succeeded in assassinating the emperor, do you think what happened in China would have taken place? Would there have been a Pacific War? So much of what I've heard so far about the war crimes committed by Japanese soldiers revolves around the idea that following orders completely and without question honors the emperor, father of all Japanese. The soldiers had never met the emperor and never would, but the patriotic and nationalistic ideas had been instilled in them since they were young. However, I don't think this idealistic thinking alone can fully account for such debased war crimes, so there must have been a more immediate impetus, such as loss of station, beatings, or even death as a consequence of defying orders. When faced with the option of kill or be killed, the aggressor is unlikely to give you the option of simply walking away. I believe people are innately good, but when they're forced into a corner like that, my faith in humanity becomes shaky. Maybe I'm giving the soldiers too much credit.
If the Japanese Imperial system hadn't existed at that point, would soldiers have been forced into corners by a government with no center? How did this happen? Who's to blame? And are the conditions that culminated in the war crimes in China present in the US today?
I endlessly stunned by the kind of thought and imagination it requires to come up various torture methods. How one can so disspassionately come up with ways of causing extreem suffering. As writer I suppose I think of things which I would personally never do, but these methods are things which have been invented, tried, and tested!
I find it difficult to understand humanity when I see things like this. The whole idea of people being basically good wavers like a flame in a tornado in the face of such attrocities.
I often wonder the origins of torture methods also. Is someone paid to come up with these? Or does someone go through historical records and "browse their options"? All of it is so messed up. I think the use of torture is excessive and inhumane no matter the situation. Compared to the amount of people severely hurt or killed, how much useful information is actually accumulated by way of torture, if any at all?
I think that torture method dates back to the Spanish Inquisition during Ferdinand and Isabella's time. It's incredible to me how primitive a lot of these things are but effective as well. I've always been fascinated by torture from a psychological standpoint. How much the body can endure usually isn't the case.
Wow, deep questions, Karen! Unfortunately, until they invent a time travel machine or find a way to move through alternate dimensions (see: multiverse theory of physics, as opposed to string theory), we will never be able to prove a counterfactual, so there's no way of knowing effect Kanno Sugako would have had if she'd managed to off the Emperor. I think the real question is, "how much impact did the emperor system HAVE on Japanese military aggression, exactly?"
To try and answer that, I think it's a good idea to look at OTHER imperial nations, and how they've behaved without a "divine Emperor." We don't have to look very far, either; Great Britain, Germany, Russia, France, Portugal, the United States, Italy... everybody wanted an empire of their own, for resources and markets to benefit the "homeland." "Banana Republic" isn't just a clothing line; it was policy in Latin America.
So, all the wealthy white powers have empires, some bigger than others. Japan gets in on the game pretty late, and I think is the only non-white power to get an empire and hold onto it. China was having all sorts of problems of its own at that point. The question evolves into "were the other imperial powers as vicious to their colonies as Japan was?" Well, what do you think? How much do you know about colonial history? Lets not forget that the white powers had a lot more experience with colonialism than Japan did.
Circling back around to the original question, I don't think we can lay all the blame for Japanese imperial atrocities at the feet of the emperor system. Certainly, the emperor system played a role. Still, even today when the emperor is officially "not divine," Japan, like America, displays an AMAZING amount of "cultural exceptionalism." I think it's the cultural exceptionalism, the sense that Japan is more "special," more "developed," more suited to determining the fate of other nations, that led to the kind of mentality where you can work 60,000 Burmese to death on railroad construction and not think too hard about it. If you think that you, being Japanese, are so far removed from your colonies, if you stop thinking of them as people Just Like You, then atrocity becomes easier. I think. I dunno.
Also, I think the fact that WE, the US, not only use waterboarding to torture people, but deny that it is torture and call it a "enhanced interrogation technique," sickens me. Not only is it inhumane, it's arrogance on a deep, deep level. It implies that our existence is somehow more important, if we will inflict pain and fear and probable PTSD on others on the off chance that we might possibly avoid some pain ourselves. I think that some of the same thought processes that we see in Japanese imperial aggression are alive and well in the US today.
Here endeth my absurdly long reply.
Like Angela, I was very intrigued by Karen's question. My thoughts are that if the emporer had been successfully executed, things might have actually been worse than they were. My reasoning comes as I compare such an incident to the 9/11 attacks. After these attacks, people were able to use it to justify not just the war in Afganistan, but the war in Iraq (which had no connection to the 9/11 attacks).
If the emporer were assassinated prior to Japan's war in the pacific, Japan might have been able to use that to gain support abroad. They used the same tactic with the Manchurian incident, but it would have carried more weight with the assassination of their head of state.
Of course, this is all ad-hoc speculation, but it's still an interesting thing to think about.
As for Sara's question on whether torture even comes up with information, I've heard in psychology classes that torture is heavily opposed by psychologists on the grounds that the information gained is almost always not credible. The person being tortured will most often say whatever they think will end the torture. This is why torture is so effective at getting confessions, but that confessions under torture are usually false confessions.
i'm not sure where and when (and why) torture originated, but I think that's like asking when rape originated, or murder, or beating someone up. I think there are a lot of different reasons why people torture other people. some reasons may involve sadism (marquee de sade) but most i think are derived from feelings of power. I agree with angela whole heartedly that a lot of violence and brutality is justified by a feeling of superiority. i don't think any of what we've read (both about torture and colonialism in general) would be possible without that specific group feeling above another group.
What if you were in a situation that you needed to torture someone? They were hiding your family, or they were going to kill your friends with a hidden bomb... I think in some circumstances that torture is required and acceptable. The methods or various types of torture are less humane then others, but I think water boarding is a effective less than lethal method. Being tortured or torturing someone just kind of comes with the territory or protecting your family or nation.
It seems to me that most torture methods develop from manipulating deep-seated, almost primal fears. As living things we have a natural aversion to things such as, oh, not being able to breathe - this particular example plays on the fact that it registers in our minds that water = no air. It takes a special sort of twisted mind to come up with things like this, but the fear it plays on is a pretty fundamental one.
As for the origin of torture, it's just applying something someone doesn't want or like (such as pain) in order to get something one wants. People are rather good at manipulating other people to get to their own end.
Wow, word to Randy about using an attack on the emperor like 9/11 or the Manchurian Incident! I hadn't thought of that.
Regarding torture, I don't remember who it was, but they had some British military guy who served in WWII on NPR a while back, who said that they learned more playing a chess game with their prisoners than they ever did through torture. When you're tortured, there's no reason to give the truth, you just have to say something that sounds halfway believable so they'll stop hurting you. Which is why it's ineffectual, in addition to being inhumane.
Cory P., I have to say I disagree with you. I understand that if you feel your loved ones are threatened you are willing to go to any length to protect them, but I don't think torture is justified. It doesn't give credible answers, and it assumes that the person you're torturing knows the information you want. Desperation, while understandable, is not a reason to torture. Obviously, the Bush Administration disagrees with me, but...
I've been thinking why Japan would attack China the year they did, with such brutality. Was Japan's goal just to take some natural resources, or to conquer and own all of China's mainland?! And plus they bomb America too! Ummmmm did Japan lose their mind?
China's dynastic rule ended in 1912. I think this pumped up Japan a lot. There were no longer two great empires. The Japanese people might have gotten a boost "see! the Chinese emperor has died childless, our emperor is strong and from God!" Well 20 years later Japan decided (to attempt) to take over China since the Chinese no longer took orders from a God, like Japan!
Well, here's the deal Japan. China had way better empires than you will ever have. China had MASSIVE empires for thousands of years. You can't touch what China had. (The Japanese first appear in written history in China’s Book of Han.) After 1912 you decided to show your ego, attack China, and try to rub it in their face "this is what the last empire is made of!" NOT MUCH. Unless you think killing civilians is what great empires do...o snap.
[that was for the leaders of imperial japan, not towards everything else Japanese]
Well, as Angela said, even if you torture someone you might not get the answers you want. Like one of the men described in the movie, the people they were torturing for information were desperate to talk--only that had nothing to say. They didn't know anything. There was no point in it except the power trip, just like the other incidents we heard described in the film... Cutting someone's head off for "practice," or throwing a woman in a well just because she wouldn't let you rape her...disgusting.
In regards to the contemporary use of torture, I'm pretty sure it's also bogus because the way that terrorist networks operate is that the individuals know next to nothing. One member of a terror cell receives orders from someone, who in turn gets his orders from someone else, and, while all the tiny pieces add up to a terror network, the pieces themselves don't know much of anything.
In conclusion, torture is bad.
I can't help, but to think of how racism and xenophobia are still evident and I think this film and the history shows how. Here we have a group of people who brutality kill another for a unjustifiable reason and degrade this group to that of an animal, sub-human and so forth. Therefore the survivors of such brutality are left with the burning memory of such attacks of this group. Their stories are shared with their children and children's children and so forth and now you have a perpetuation of hatred for one race to another based on historical accounts that most likely have nothing to do with your current condition. I can see why we have people who hate others before even knowing them individually because that's the problem. We, as a society don't see things as individually committed or hold the particular prospects accountable, we loop them and all that resemble them together. We can see this hatred for another race displaye by Huang who completely despises the Japanese for what "they did" to his family lineage, but it wasn't all of them and that's what we have to remember.
Responding to the very first comment that Karin asked, in my opinion there probably would have never been a pacific war because the expansion was to satisfy the Emperor and everything they did in China was to satisfy the Emperor. Although, I'm not quite sure what Japan would be like if they were never involved in WWII...
It gets me every time when I hear what the Japanese military did to innocent Chinese people. We are all created as equals.
Along with Cory P.'s comment, I doubt that Japan tortured the Chinese to protect their family, homeland, and the Emperor. They just thought that the Chinese were "sub-human," so they thought it was perfectly fine. In addtion, it's believed that Japan started the Mukden Incident in order to expand in China and to have a reason for expanding.
I guess it's kind of like when two 16 year olds killed a 64 year old homeless man that was considered a BURAKU-MIN.
While the Pacific war was in responce to the Emperor calling for expansion......we should remeber that the expansion of Japan was in response to the expansion of the West. As for what the movie talked about, what makes people so shocked that the toture happened. Even today, under the current US government people are getting tortured. The Des Moines Register even ran a story about Iraq people getting waterboarded but the American government does not consider that illegal or torture. I'm not saying any of this is right, but when people don't question their orders, and try to get information "by anymeans necessary" they do extreme things.
In one of my communcation classes we talked about "radicalization", and how people become radicalized. We used a modernexample......"Let's say that there is something going on that you really don't care about. Because you don't care you don't take any action. Now the government storms into your house because they think you did something...now you know you did nothing, but the government still storms in and destroys your stuff looking for something you supposedly did. Now you are radicalized and will fight for what you really didn't care about before". People get radicalized in different ways....and due to what the people talked about in the movie, I can see how the Chinese are radicalized against the Japanese......and how most are radicalized against America (by what's going on right now).
Yeah, I know it's a long and delayed post, I'm sorry
Speaking of delayed posts :-)
I too disagree with cory p.'s comment. Although i have never been put in a situation that caused me to go above and beyond to protect my loved ones, I highly doubt that even in the situation I would become submissive to torture as a means of getting even or otherwise. I agree with jericho's comment that it is highly unlikely the japanese were protecting their families, homeland, etc. Unfortunately they were trained to be naturally violent and aggressive towards the chinese because they were not human. And how can it be a crime to rape, kill, and torture those who are subhuman right...
Interesting, I've never heard of the term "water boarding" until this class and now it is one of the big arguing points for the next election. This weekend I watched the Republican debate and Mitt Romney and John McCain started to argue whether we should continue to use it as a torture technique. In the end they essentially agreed that we shouldn't reveal what extents the US is willing to ignore the Geneva convention in order to get information. It's funny how hypocritical the government is about the treatment of prisoners.
- Oliver
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