HONORED AND DISHONORED GUESTS: Westerners in Wartime Japan | By W. Puck Brecher | Pacific Affairs

HONORED AND DISHONORED GUESTS: Westerners in Wartime Japan | By W. Puck Brecher | Pacific Affairs



BOOK REVIEWS, NORTHEAST ASIA


VOLUME 92 – NO. 2




HONORED AND DISHONORED GUESTS: Westerners in Wartime Japan | By W. Puck Brecher


Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. 399. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Asia Center; Harvard University Press [distributor], 2017. xiv, 370 pp. (Tables, illustrations, B&W photos.) US$49.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-97514-9.

Racism played a complex role in World War II. While the centrality of eugenics in Nazi politics and policies of genocide loom in public memory of the war—and John Dower has encouraged a generation of scholars to confront race hate in the Pacific theatre through his classic War Without Mercy (1986)—alliance fault lines make it difficult to cast World War II as racialized. China was allied with Great Britain and the United States, while Japan was part of the Axis powers alongside Germany and Italy. This dynamic meant that Western powers had Asian allies and enemies, and that Japan fought both against and alongside predominately white nations.

Puck Brecher’s new book, Honored and Dishonored Guests, dives into the ambiguity of race and bias in wartime Japan. Using the diaries, interviews, and memoirs of resident Westerners, it reconstructs the experiences of that community and the relationships Japanese civilians and administrators had with white foreigners. This is an admittedly narrow lens, as Brecher limits his study to only white foreigners, and relies on sources from the perspectives of that group. But the picture he finds there is a fascinating one, at odds with broad characterizations of predominate race-hate in Japanese propaganda and military activities abroad, including what Brecher calls the “voluminous retaliatory postwar scholarship” in the West on the cruelty and horrific mortality rates of prisoners of war in Japanese custody (217). Instead, he finds a divided white civilian community with overlapping and ambiguous statuses encountering nuanced treatment from Japanese locals throughout the war.

The book is structured into three parts. The first is a thoughtful and deft analysis of race consciousness and discrimination in Japan and a survey of the white foreigners living in the country. Part two examines the experiences of non-enemy whites in Japan during the war. Brecher finds that while they suffered some persecution, food depravation and air raids along with the rest of the civilian population, the treatment of this group was “generally amicable” (123). Ordinary civilians would barter and sometimes offer help to foreigners. Brecher argues that the forced evacuation of whites from cities was actually an example of white privilege because it provided safety from aid raids (212–214). The third section combines the stories of white enemy nationals and Axis nationals accused of spying and sabotage. It includes lengthy interview accounts of the torture and horrific treatment of suspected saboteurs. While painful reading, these stories are a vital account of the war experience for foreigners in Japan.

Brecher’s dissection of race issues in Japan in part is an especially valuable contribution to the field. Honored and Dishonored Guests argues that race was only one component in “distinction making” in prewar Japanese society, which placed individuals in an agreed social hierarchy based first on class, age, gender, and then on race and nationality (29). The result, Brecher argues, was a “Japanese situationalism” of multilayered distinction which accounts for the racial ambivalence he observes in Japan’s wartime public (117). The small number of white expatriates living in Japan in 1941 allows the author to paint portraits of the diverse experiences of individuals in this context, as Japanese responded to different kinds of foreigners at different times in different ways. As he examines the “cosmopolitan spheres of privilege” in which these foreigners lived, Brecher also illustrates the racisms and prejudices whites brought with them from Europe and the United States and recreated in microcosm (80). He argues that Europeans, especially German Jews, were more likely to experience racism from within the white expatriate community than from the local Japanese.

This book has two aims: first to illuminate “the living conditions of resident Westerners during the war years,” and second to “question the extent to which the Japanese conceptualized the conflict as a race war” (286). Honored and Dishonored Guests has unquestionably succeeded in its first aim, creating a careful and nuanced retelling of those lived group experiences through the voices of individuals. The approach of the book, which draws its source material from Western accounts, makes the second aim more difficult. The records used in this work reveal the biases and prejudices within the Western expat community, and what this insulated group of foreigners made of the limited number of Japanese they came into contact with in those few encounters they deemed significant enough to record. As Brecher states, the individuals in his study rarely spoke the language and were isolated from society: “interactions with Japanese was limited to minimal exchanges with their Japanese maids, servants, and office staff” (44). Records of Japanese employees behaving with pragmatism and racial ambivalence towards their foreign employers is not especially surprising, and can only tell part of the story of Japanese public opinion on race during the war. Rather, reconsidering Japanese perspectives using these records raises new research questions. What did these Japanese workers make of their Western employers? How did their relationships with individual foreigners and familiarity with foreign culture affect their perceptions of the West? Did their opinions diverge significantly from the majority of their compatriots who had no regular contact with foreign nationals?

Honored and Dishonored Guests expertly explores broad themes of race, class, war, and culture by telling individual stories. This humanization of history is both engaging and illuminating. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of modern Japan, race, public opinion, and the transnational role of “ordinary” people in history.

Dayna Barnes

City, University of London, London, United Kingdom

Last Revised: August 29, 2019