Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. Howard Zinn
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and after release from prison he made a living by anonymously translating the writings of Rolland, Diderot, and others.
He took us to a lounge where others of the faculty were waiting for us: several philosophers, a theoretical physicist, a sociologist, a specialist in Oriental history, a professor of Japanese literature, and one Westerner—a tall, young Frenchman just back from the University of Saigon. I asked: how many members of this faculty support American policy in Vietnam? There were 600 on the faculty, including graduate assistants. No one knew any who supported American policy.
I kept asking this question wherever I went. In Osaka, a professor of international affairs replied that he thought perhaps one person on the whole faculty supported American policy. At a large meeting in Osaka I had publicly asked students who were in favor of the American position to speak up. My interpreter, a young chemistry professor with a doctorate from the University of Minnesota, said: “You can’t expect anyone here to take a pro-United States position.”
To the Japanese we met, it was so clear that America was in the wrong that they could not understand why anyone could believe President Johnson and his cabinet members. How could the United States be “fighting aggression,” they asked, when the “enemy” consisted entirely of Vietnamese, mostly Southerners, and no Chinese? The official South Vietnamese army had shown little enthusiasm, and so 300,000 American troops, transported across the Pacific, had taken over the war. “No country should be permitted, as the United States is doing, to smuggle counter-revolution to another country,” said a professor of literature at Hosei University in Tokyo.
Two planes, a jolting bus ride, and an auto trip through flooded, fresh-plowed fields, brought us to Sendai in northern Honshu. In rectangles of black mud marked off by willowy grass, women, bent low, their bicycles nearby, were transplanting rice seedlings. The streets were crowded with children in school uniforms, bookbags strapped to their backs, and teen-age girls on bikes wearing fresh aprons. A thousand students had gathered at Tohoku University for four hours of talk, with a long question-and-answer period. When this was over and we returned, tired, to our quarters at the Cooperative, we found fifty students waiting for us in the lobby, eager to continue the discussion. We trooped out in the night to a park, the fellows and girls sat cross-legged on the grass, and we talked into the small hours of the morning. There in the cool darkness of Sendai, I wondered why fifty Japanese kids would stay out after midnight to discuss the war in Vietnam, when Japan was only a minor accessory to American action. At the time the United States was helping the French crush the Algerian revolt, did any group of American students ever gather in the park at midnight to brood over this? Did a thousand ever meet to protest it?
By the end of our trip the answer was becoming clear; it lay in the Japanese people’s intense consciousness of their own recent history. Again and again, at virtually every meeting, there arose the accusation: “You are behaving in Asia as we once did.” There is widespread and vocal recognition of Japan’s own sins, from the Manchurian invasion of 1931 to Pearl Harbor. Japanese scholars have done much research on those years, and they see in American actions in Vietnam many of the same characteristics displayed by Japan in the thirties.
Unlike the Nazis, the Japanese did not abruptly replace parliamentary democracy with authoritarian dictatorship. Rather, there was an almost imperceptible growth of the power of the military within an outwardly parliamentary system. When the Japanese took Manchuria in 1931, then attacked China proper in 1937 and moved into Southeast Asia in 1940, they did not declaim crassly of world conquest as did Hitler, but spoke of a “co-prosperity sphere” which they were creating in Asia for the benefit of all.
I asked Professor Maruyama of Tokyo University, one of Japan’s most distinguished scholars, about this analogy. A political scientist and prolific author, who five years ago was invited to Harvard as a visiting professor, Maruyama is in his forties, smokes a pipe, has a sharp, strong nose and a warm smile. “There are many differences,” he said, “but one crucial element is quite the same: the apologies and justification created by both governments for what is basically an attempt by a strong nation to create a base of power inside a weaker one. Both Japan and the United States had difficulties and made excuses. The United States blames its difficulties in winning the Vietnamese war on China and North Vietnam. Japan attributed her failures not to the stubborn resistance of the Chinese but to the aid given China by Great Britain and the United States. Japan declared that its aim was to emancipate the people of Southeast Asia and to bring them economic development, just as the United States speaks now about economic and social reform while it carries on an essentially military action in Vietnam.”
American commentators have a habit of dismissing Japanese criticism of our foreign policy as the work of Communists or, more vaguely, “leftists.” This is comforting until one reflects that most public opinion in the world, even in countries allied to us, is to the left of ours. The United States has become, since that period when Europe’s monarchs feared we would spread the doctrine of revolution, a conservative nation. Even our “liberals” are conservative by global standards.
For instance, Maruyama had just met with McGeorge Bundy in Tokyo: “Now Mr. Bundy has a new job as head of the Ford Foundation. But psychologically, he is still with the government. He turned on me in a fury when I told him that never has the prestige of the United States been so low abroad, due to Vietnam.”
Our companions and interpreters in Japan were young nonparty intellectuals—two journalists, three novelists, a film producer, a poet, a philosopher—who decided early in 1965 to form a group called Beheiren dedicated to ending the Vietnam war. Their chairman, Oda Makoto, is a wry, 34-year-old novelist, big, tousle-haired, with unpressed coat and trousers, who refuses to wear a tie no matter how formal the occasion. Oda is critical of Communist China, but with no more heat than he is critical of Japan or America. He sees it as a new society with the truculence that new regimes generally show, but he does not see it as a threat to the rest of Asia. Like other Japanese intellectuals, Oda believes the United States is reacting to China with hysteria—and that people in Vietnam are dying unnecessarily because of this.
United States officials keep saying they are acting for the benefit of Asia, but Japan is a prime example of the fact that Asians themselves do not welcome the United States presence. The only countries giving substantial aid to the American military effort (Korea, Thailand) are those which are economically subservient to the United States, under its military occupation, and controlled by elites which can ignore popular will. Veteran correspondent Harrison Salisbury wrote from Asia (July 26, 1966) in The New York Times:
It is not only in the Communist world that opinion is aligned almost entirely against the American Vietnam policy. It is almost impossible to find any substantial public Asian support for it except within those nations benefiting directly from the huge United States investment, such as Thailand.
Asian opinion today seems to agree with what Harvard historian Edwin Reischauer wrote in 1954 in Wanted: An Asian Policy, that a policy based largely on stopping Communism is “a dangerous oversimplification of our Asian problem.”
There are American troops in Japan (under the much resented Security Treaty of 1960), and part of Japan’s territory, Okinawa, has been converted by the United States into one of the most powerful military bases in the world. (“Please tell your fellow Americans,” a Tokyo University sociologist said, “that the majority of Japanese do not think these military bases protect Japan’s security—in fact, they think these endanger our security.”) Nonetheless, the government of Premier Sato, while nodding and bowing to the United States State Department, keeps a wary eye on the Japanese public, knowing popular feeling. A high government official told several of us, off the record, that Japan would like to speak its mind on Vietnam to the United States but does not feel independently strong enough to do so.
Japan is something of an embarrassment to the United States government, because it was under America’s postwar tutelage that she put into her new Constitution the statement “… never again shall we be visited with the horrors of war through the action of government.” Article 9 contains a silent reproach to what the United States is doing in Vietnam: “… the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.”