preparations for retreat. The Allied victory would need to work like a samurai general’s victory of
old, with the collusion of the Emperor.
When the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese were on
the verge of starvation. The Showa Emperor, better known abroad by his given name of Hirohito,
broke with tradition by addressing his people directly, informing them that they must now stoically
‘endure the unendurable’, and surrender.
After Japan’s defeat, Hirohito made an even more infamous speech, the Declaration of
Humanity (ningen sungen). In it, he disavowed any claims on divine descent, renounced his
ancestors’ claim to be the children of the Sun Goddess, and essentially proclaimed that he was just a
man like any other. Japan itself, in a controversial constitutional change, also officially renounced
offensive warfare. At least on paper, there was no such thing as a Japanese army any more, only a
‘Self-Defence Force’.
Fictions of the samurai would return to haunt the Japanese through American propaganda.
Know Your Enemy: Japan (1945), produced by the US Department of War, placed strong emphasis on
the swords carried by Japanese officers, using them to tie the modern military to the medieval ethics
and concerns of the samurai class.
According to the film that instructed an entire generation of American servicemen about
their enemy, the samurai elite were an idle ruling class, distinguished by the right to bear swords,
with which they had the mandate to execute any commoner who offended them. Bushidō,
according to Know Your Enemy, is a code of absolute loyalty to one’s superiors, and one that
advocated victory at any cost, particularly through treachery and deceit. Treatment of the Christians
in the seventeenth century is brought right to the fore, with an emphasis on the ‘bloodthirsty’ spirit
of the Japanese people, as opposed to the peace—loving Christians they slaughtered — all very well,
but no mention is made of the threats made by the captain of the San Felipe, that the Christians
were a vanguard of a European invasion that would destroy Japanese society.
As one might expect from a propaganda film, Know Your Enemy plays up the concerns of the
military elite, and makes no apology for alluding, as did the rulers of wartime Japan themselves, to
the samurai past as a precedent for the conflicts of the present. In particular, the sword of the
samurai was targeted as the symbol of all that was wrong with Japan — a brutal, medieval
instrument, kept in the hands of a corrupt and privileged elite, used to suppress all thought of
Christian or democratic values. According to Know Your Enemy, it was the sword of the samurai that
stopped the twentieth-century Japanese from embracing the values of modern civilization.
Immediately after the war, American policy was similarly steered by the work of the cultural
anthropologist Ruth Benedict (1887-1948) who had been commissioned during the war to produce
an analysis and guide to the Japanese mind. The resultant work, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
Patterns of Japanese Culture (1946), was written under conditions in which Benedict was unable to
enter Japan itself, and instead is based on interviews with Japanese—Americans, and analyses of
newspaper clippings and available media. Benedict’s book, originally intended for military personnel,
was influential in establishing the role of the emperor as a focus of Japanese loyalty, and of
explaining some of the vagaries of behaviour of Japanese prisoners of war. In a move that has been
criticized ever since, Benedict described the Japanese mind in direct relation to twentieth—century
fanaticism of the resurgent samurai ethic. As the title implied, ‘the sword’ was seen as crucial
component of Japanese culture, and its wielders, the samurai, the masters of Japanese society.
Despite being prepared in something of a hurry, for a limited audience, The Chrysanthemum and the
Sword flourished long after its intended purpose. In the year of its author’s death, it was published in
Japanese, and contributed to a post—war sense of Japanese uniqueness, even among the Japanese
themselves.
It was the opinion of the Occupation forces that the Emperor of Japan, Hirohito, was the
ultimate unifying symbol. He should be kept in power, as they could be sure that whatever he did,
his people would follow. Just as the Minamoto had left the imperial line intact, just as the