Japan

Not surprisingly, publishers often claim that their latest offering takes the reader down a path never before trodden, to reveal new insights and understandings of well-worn topics and events. The Path of Infinite Sorrow is no exception, with the promise of a ‘whole new perspective’ on the Japanese side of the story of the Kokoda campaign in Papua during the early stages of World War II. In recent years, the status of Kokoda has challenged that of Gallipoli in the national consciousness, with a number of lengthy tomes, guidebooks, journal articles and newspaper articles, not to mention a feature movie, devoted to the campaign. But why another book, and does it offer anything new?

In 2004, the year after the US-led invasion of Iraq, Stefan Halper, a senior diplomat who had served Republican administrations from Nixon to Reagan, published America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, a celebrated and scathing critique of the neo-conservative influence on George W. Bush’s foreign policy. It was different after World War II, thought Halper, when US forces were welcomed as liberators. The occupations of Germany and Japan became models of what could be achieved. It is a theme that has found some resonance in the Obama administration.

Readers of this review will likely know of this book as a result of the howls of outrage reported in the media at the beginning of December concerning Max Hastings’s claims about Australian performance in the fighting in 1945. It is not fair to judge a long and complex book on the basis of a single, ten-page chapter, but since that is the section of the book that has attracted attention in this part of the world, it seems best to deal with it first before moving on to the rest of Hastings’s lengthy and detailed account of the final year of the war against Japan.

Modern Japanese Culture – what a seductive title! It evokes images of a fast-paced, technologically advanced nation with deep traditions reinventing itself as a post-industrial society with a rich culture. We immediately think of Kurosawa’s epic films, manga comics and anime, contemporary ceramics, video games, Issey Miyake’s extravaganzas, the sublime minimalism of Ando Tadao’s architecture, and the photography of Ishida Kiichiro, currently on display at the Museum of Sydney.

The Japanese tactics in today’s export war are identical with those they employed so successfully in 1941–42 against a bigger army than theirs in Malaya: they attack individual units ‘with surprise and with our strength concentrated’. This is one of the two leitmotifs of Russell Braddon’s book. The other is his notion of Japan’s ‘hundred years’ war’. During his years of captivity in Changi between 1942 and 1945, Braddon was told once by a Japanese officer: ‘This war will last a hundred years, Mr Braddon. I’m afraid you will never go home.’ Later, after the Japanese surrender in August 1945, when he was about to leave Changi, he passed a Japanese officer who was being escorted into the gaol. ‘In a spirit half of elation and half of spite I turned and shouted, “This war last one hundred years?” “Ninety-six years to go”, he called back; and neither of us bothered to bow.’