 I'm so happy to be here. I'm Jay Fidel, and this is History Lens, and John David, and a history professor at HPU. And we're going down the track of history today. Today, we're going to talk about the limits of Westernization, Part 4. That means you're at Part 1, 2, and 3 before us. And today, we're going to talk about post-war transformation. Right. And then we're going to ramp up on post-war, well, which war are you talking about? Right. So World War II. World War II. But before we do that... Hi, Jay. Hi, John. Before we do that, I just want to have a moment, okay? Okay. But in thinking about our discussions, you and me... Do you want a hug or something? Well, it's just an intellectual moment. An intellectual hug. I like it. Yeah. So, you know what? I've learned a lot from you in these discussions. And one of the things I've learned is that it's all connected. So if we have Chapter 4 today, we really need to look at Chapter 3 as a prerequisite to Chapter 4. And for Chapter 3, we needed to look at 2 and 1 and so forth. Which suggests the notion that all of it is connected, that you can't see one without looking... You can't see history in one period without looking at history in the previous period. But then you go a step further and say, well, that applies to all of history for all periods. That's true, yes. Whatever you're looking at, and that's not only history, but the world, then you have to look at everything that happened before in order to fully understand all the sea changes and the currents underneath the coming currents. It's an incredibly complex topic, history is, and the world is. It's a study of humanity, it's a study of what people, what the species has been doing with itself. And so it's so fascinating to me that it's all connected this way. The other thing I heard... And to our audience, that means you have to go back and watch Parts 1, 2, 3... Absolutely. Absolutely. Please do that. ...to understand this completely, what we're doing here. So... And the other thing I mentioned before the show began is I heard somebody on one of the media say yesterday that civil wars are never over. Now, you taught me here in this class, so to speak, that the American Civil War is not really over. There are still threads of it happening. Oh, yeah, absolutely. It has permeated our culture, our history, our lives. Even now, today, you could sit and you could identify strands of the civil war in our lives today. Sometimes it's very obvious. And then this fellow yesterday on the media said civil wars are never over and that every time you have a civil war, it perpetuates somehow. It's built into the DNA of that culture, that country, and you can't really separate it because it's always happening. But then you say, this is my last statement on the continuum. Yeah, go, Jay. Go. Listen, all things, all things that happen, not just civil wars, all things that happened are built into the DNA of that culture. Yeah, yeah. I think that's true. So that means I'm just wrapping all this together. Wrap it up, Jay. All of history of a given culture, including a country, a continent, a world, are all built in. So if you want to understand the DNA of the species, you have to know everything that happened. Yeah, so I'm a Jamesian in terms of philosophy. I have William James, that is. And William James, his philosophy, argued that all things were interconnected, that there was no kingship or there didn't need to be a kingship, there should be a federation of thought where things are interconnected and various, and there's no kind of central animating thesis in the world. So and I think that applies to my book as well. Of course, I covered William James in the book, but also James's argument really is an argument about the nature of modernity. And this is why we've made a mistake in giving modernity and the power of westernization too much emphasis, because it's actually a federation. It's not, westernization was never as monolithic as we thought it was going to be. It's actually interconnected with many other movements, including neoconfusionism, including a variety of different things, the historical experience of these stations. So there you go, Jay. You've got it. Well, I mean, it's just so it's really great to have these guys. It's a consciousness builder, an awareness builder to have these conversations. But let's talk about the subject for today, post-war transformation. Let's begin before the war so we can appreciate the post-war. So the war is, I use the word transformation, and I'm pretty serious about it, although you can see some continuities with the pre-war period, continuities in ideas about westernization, especially. But the war destroys a lot, it destroys the landscape of both China and Japan. Estimated 20 million Chinese people perish in World War II. There is one point, Jay, where Chiang Kai-shek has to decide, I'm going to stop the Japanese Army, which is advancing on the capital, or if I choose that, I'm going to kill a million of my own people in the process, or I let those people live and the Japanese Army conquers the capital of China. So there was a big dam. And to stop the Japanese Army, you push a hole in this dike, in this big dam. But if you do that, you're going to flood this area, and you are going to drown a million Chinese peasants. What did he choose? He chose to put the hole in the dike. That's a hard decision. That's a terrible decision. So the World War II destroyed a tremendous amount. In Japan, most of the major cities of Japan were fire bombed and leveled, really. When you look at pictures of Tokyo and the cities that were nuclear bombed, of course, all of those cities were burned to the ground. Most structures in Japanese cities were made of wood, sometimes bamboo, very lightweight, but burns very easily, and the firebombing really wreaked havoc in Japan. So both of these nations are kind of on their knees. The war is such a great idea. It's a terrible thing. It's an awful thing. And typically, when we think about World War II, we think about the casualties in Europe. There are lots of casualties in the European War, really 20 million more in the Soviet Union, millions on the continent of Europe. And the problem with all these dead people is they don't write the history books. No, that's right. That's exactly right. They have nothing to say. They can't give testimony on how it was. We can only see it through their eyes and imagine how awful it was for them. Right. You're right. There are survivors, so you can read their testimonies, but you're right. So what happens is the landscape is destroyed, but also the intellectual frameworks become very burdened and in some cases are completely destroyed. And new frameworks emerge from the war. One of the frameworks which emerges from the war is the framework of American dominance and Americanization in East Asia. This is a version of Westernization. As in Europe. Exactly. That's right. So that narrative becomes powerful, and there are really two intellectuals who push that narrative to its most logical conclusion. And those intellectuals are John K. Fairbank and Edmund O. Reichauer. And Fairbank and Reichauer, of course, were both professors at Harvard University in the late 1930s, well, 1939. And then during World War II, both of them, and there you can see a picture of John K. Fairbank, both of them went back to Harvard after the war, but we'll talk more about that in a minute. This is a really interesting picture, because this is a picture of Fairbank when he was in China in 1933. He spent four years in China before the war. And Fairbank traveled with his wife, who she's got her head in his lap. That's Wilma Fairbank, traveled about Western China and actually visited the caves of Dunhuang. These are ancient caves with drawings in them. And this was also the route of the Silk Road. So it was very rural, though, wasn't it? Oh, yeah. It's desert. Really. Western China. This part of Western China is the Gobi Desert. Yes. So it's desert. And so Fairbank traveled around, and he got this, he interviewed a lot of people. He talked to a lot of people, because he was a graduate student and he wanted to gather information from a lot of different sources. So he talked to Chinese intellectuals. He talked to Western missionaries. And by and large, the Western missionaries were quite negative about China's westernization. The missionaries argue, you know what? China's westernization is really, it's skin deep. It's not really affecting the life of China in this time period. Or at least not very much. And this was really counter to Western media, Western newspapers in the United States and elsewhere, which said, you know, China is rapidly westernizing and they're becoming a more Christian nation. And pretty soon they'll be just like us. This is... That really wasn't true? No, it wasn't true. I mean, when you come out on this, was it skin deep or was it deep? It was, in fact, skin deep. Well, Fairbank was right about this, or his commentators were right about this. But Fairbank's idea was, you know, it has to be deeper, it should be deeper than skin deep. You've got all these students who had come back from America, these Chinese students returning to China, they should have an impact. The westernization should be a stronger, you know, a stronger emphasis, but it was, in fact, limited, the limits of westernization. So, so Fairbank is concerned about this. Now, Fairbank goes on, he gets his PhD at Oxford University in the late 1930s, and he takes a job at Harvard University, and then the war breaks out. And in 1942, Fairbank joins the OSS, which is the precursor to the CIA, a very interesting organization in World War II. And so, Fairbank is assigned to go back to China during the war, and he makes this incredibly circuitous route. He flies to Florida, and then to Brazil, and then to West Africa, takes a train and boats across Africa, goes the entire way, and then makes his way to India, and then finally flies across the Burma hump into Kunming. What a trip. Oh, it's this amazing trip. And this is while the war was going on. While the war is going on. So that flight across the Burma hump, across the Himalayas, that's a flight in which your life is at risk because the Japanese were shooting down American airplanes, flying that route because that was the supply route to get supplies into China. So he ends up in Chongqing in the capital, and he's a very smart guy. So he witnesses the inefficiency of the nationalist government there in Chongqing. He witnesses the corruption of the government. He witnesses the abuse of intellectuals. I mean, he's really, he's understandably passionate about this because he himself is an intellectual. And the Chinese government is literally starving some intellectuals who have criticized it or who have been in opposition to it. And Fairbank is pleading with his American superiors back in Washington D.C. to send some supplies so that he can at least get food to these intellectuals in southern China. So Fairbank is arguing in the war. He sends these really sometimes pretty vicious letters back to his superior in Washington D.C., his superior is Elger Hiss, who is famous or infamous later on for being convicted of being a spy for the Soviet Union. And so he's very critical of the American role. He thinks the Americans are not doing enough to westernize China during the war. And the truth is China was kind of a second, you know, second rate partner. We didn't pay much attention to this agreement. No, we didn't pay much attention. We didn't. We gave military supplies, but not enough other kinds of supplies. And so there was actually very little chance of actually westernizing China as Fairbank wanted. And the other thing is that based upon what we've already talked in our other conversations about the book, China was actually going in a different direction. China was not that interested in just being westernized. China wanted to modernize. It wanted to modernize on its own terms. The nationalists had their idea. The communists under Mao Zedong had their idea. So this was a very complicated situation that Fairbank was in in China, but nonetheless it was distressing for him. He saw that the Guomandong would fail after the war because they were so corrupt. So he understood this well before other American officials, and he tried to let them know. They pretty much ignored him. You know, this is what happens to intellectuals. We get ignored by the important people. There has to be an environment to accept what they have to say or listen to them anyway. Exactly. So Fairbank goes back to the United States after the war. He now has a panache of reputation because he's served patriotically in the war. He's a knowledgeable professor at Harvard University, and so he publishes. He publishes a very important book in 1948 called The U.S. and China. The book is not actually about the U.S. at all. It's about Chinese history. But in that book he makes the argument that China is this ancient autocratic place, and it will always be that way. It's not going to westernize. How wrong could you be? Well, he's right about it, not evolving on the American or the Western model. He's exactly right about that. But no one could anticipate the swiftness with which the Communist Party would take over China. That's the point. You know, in his world, he was probably right because you couldn't see that far ahead. And the events in China, the changes in China, have happened so quickly that no one could really evaluate how fast. Exactly. Americans were thought flat-footed on this. We didn't really understand the strength of the Chinese Communist Party. We didn't know how big their army was or how good their fighting spirit was. And we overestimated Chiang Kai-shek's ability to hang on to power. And this goes to the question of whether the United States, through its intellectuals or otherwise, really understood Asia. Asia was very exotic in those days. Exactly. And he was one of the very few people who were really trying to understand it. It's very different. It's very different from our perspective. And this is part of the problem with arguing that they were simply just going to accept westernization, just use our model willy-nilly without actually thinking about the impact of it and without actually trying to modernize on their own terms, which is what they do eventually. Communists take power in 1949. Chiang Kai-shek flees to Taiwan. And today, the Guomandong is still there. It's still one of the ruling parties in Taiwan. Yeah, I don't know why, but this whole process reminds me of George W. Bush and his perception of the Middle East, how he was going to bring democracy to the Middle East. American democracy. Right. Right. I'm not realizing that the Middle East was much more complicated than... That's a very good example of it. Yeah. I mean, this is a problem. We tend to suffer from the idea that everybody's going to end up doing what we're doing because we're so great. We're so great. It's a hubris. It's an arrogance that we should probably try to work on. Now, we're going to work that out in one minute. I mean, in one minute, we're going to work out this hubris and then we'll come back and we'll be a little more modest about it. That's John David Dan, HPU history professor. We'll be right back. Aloha. I'm Wendy Lowe and I'm coming to you every other Tuesday at two o'clock. Live from Think Tech, Hawaii and on our show, we talk about taking your health back. What does that mean? It means mind, body and soul. Anything you can do that makes your body healthier and happier is what we're going to be talking about. Whether it's spiritual health, mental health, fascia health, beautiful smile health, whatever it means, let's take healthy back. Aloha. Okay. We're back with history professor on history lens, John David Dan of HPU. So we're talking before and during the break about this notion of America going in there thinking its system was the best ever and trying to impose that. I mean, impose is probably the right word on places where it felt that these places needed it. And most recently that has happened in the Middle East, unsuccessfully, completely unsuccessfully. And to some extent, it was actually kind of disastrously disastrous in the Middle East. The question is, with the benefit of hindsight, had we done it differently, had we been more modest with less hubris, if you will, would we have done better? I mean, how much did we hurt ourselves by going in with this kind of hubris and saying to them ours is better than yours, you better adopt ours. Right. Of course, one of the things if you go in that way, you're not going to have the right facts. You're not going to have the right answers, right? So that's a problem. If you go in with the Westernization thesis and say, hey, you've got to be Western like us. And the other thing is you're missing opportunities to understand the Chinese and the Japanese on their own terms and help to implement solutions which might actually be more acceptable to them in the long run. So yeah, I think it did make a difference. I mean, the other example here is Japan, the American occupation in Japan, right? So the United States occupies military occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1952. Immediately after the war, we land troops there and we run Japan, well, with the help of the Japanese parliament which still exists and the Japanese prime minister which is still there until 1952, but so the idea of the occupation was that we could really recreate Japan in our own image and I suppose in some ways we were successful at that because we did rewrite their constitution for them and they accepted it and we did recreate the emperor as a symbol, not the absolute ruler, but just a symbol of the Japanese nation. So there were some successes in the occupation but the truth is there were a lot of failures in the occupation, a lot of ways in which we decided, you know what, we can't actually change the Japanese, they're not going to change quickly enough, it would be bad for us to change the Japanese. For instance, the American occupation forces wanted to dismantle the Zaibatsu system which is this big company system in Japan. And so we went about that in the first couple years, we took assets, we dismantled the boards of directors and such and then in 1948 we decided, oh, maybe that's not such a good idea because the Japanese economy was failing and part of why it was failing is because these big corporations were under duress. So in 1948 the American Scap occupation decides to reverse itself and lets some of these, the big heads of companies who had been purged. Now they're un-purged, they get to go back to their companies, we allow the Zaibatsu to reform alliances again, we give them back their assets, we really reverse this thing. Well, you know what I think the relationship the U.S. and Japan is really exemplary in terms of, you know, the way it all came together in the years post-war. Although they couldn't accept our system wholesale, fact is they accepted a lot of it and they benefited by it. But somewhere, the whole thing with the Zaibatsu, you know, sounds to me like a very important turning point. Instead of, you know, crushing them with our system, we became more like partners and we were sensitive to cultural, business cultural points that could work. Well, it was totally pragmatic on our side, we had to fight the Cold War. So in order to do that we needed Japan as a bulwark against communism in East Asia and therefore you had to rebuild their economy quickly or allow them to rebuild the economy. So we did not impose American free market principles upon Japan. Never happened and it's still not there today. You will hear complaint after complaint about how Japanese markets are not open to American competitors. It's not a free market economy like the American economy and neither is the Chinese economy. The Chinese economy and the Japanese economy with some big differences are more like one another than they are like the American economy. And we're still trying to invent a relationship. And we still don't really understand that in, you know, in our policymaking among our intellectuals. But one of the things that happens is American intellectuals look at the occupation and say, hey, we're going to Americanize, not just westernize, but we're going to Americanize Japan. It's a very exciting moment for people like Edwin O. Reichauer. So let's talk about Reichauer. Yes. We can bring a picture of Reichauer up. There's Edwin O. Reichauer. This is, I believe, from when he began as ambassador to Japan in 1961. He was appointed ambassador by the Kennedy administration, by John F. Kennedy. But right, let's go back in time and talk about Reichauer. But Reichauer was born and raised in Tokyo. His parents were missionaries. Pardon me. His father taught at Meiji Gakuin University. And so he had this experience of Japan, which was quite intimate. Reichauer does his graduate work at Harvard University. And then he gets his Ph.D. For his Ph.D., he studies an eighth-century Japanese monk, Buddhist monk, who goes to China. This is his Ph.D. thesis. It's like... Bringing it all together. It's so obscure, though. So Reichauer really knows nothing about modern Japan, right, other than his own experience of it as a boy. And Reichauer then, the war breaks out. Reichauer volunteers for the Army, and he becomes appointed the head of the Japanese translation, the Japanese language school for translators. He was fluent in Japanese. Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, he was fluent in Japanese. And then later, he actually goes into army intelligence and does some intelligence work. So after the war, he gets out. And like Fairbank, he decides, you know what? This is the moment. This is the moment where the market for a book on Japan, Japanese history, is going to explode. And he was right. Now, the thing is, Reichauer didn't have a background in modern Japan, like Fairbank and modern China. But he reinvented himself very quickly. He published his first book in 1946, bestseller, three editions, second book in 1950, bestseller, three more editions. People were really interested in this subject. People wanted to know about Japan and China. It was an incredible time. So you could really shape American views with your publications in this time period to a great extent. And that's what happened. With his credentials. With his credentials, he's back at Harvard teaching. So in his second book, the 1950 book, which is called The U.S. and Japan, again, it's not a book about the U.S. It's actually a book about Japanese history. But what he says in the introduction is, the United States has occidentalized Japan. It has brought Japan over to the Western world. It has modernized, and he uses the word westernized, it has westernized Japan more than any other nation in the world. So there's the argument. It's really the reason why I titled the book, The Limits of Westernization. So Reichauer looks at the occupation, he says, wow, we are really westernizing Japan now. But to a certain extent, that's true. But what he does is he projects this westernization back into the late 19th century, which is actually not true, in which I refute in the book. I really kind of take Reichauer's argument apart here. But so he's, if you want to know why Americans today would say, oh, we're still, you know, the Japanese have built themselves on the American model. If you want to know why we think that, it's Reichauer. It's Reichauer's first books, which shapes that argument. And then Reichauer's textbooks on Japan are popular right through the 90s. I used one of his textbooks when I taught Japanese history early on. So another element has to be that we've been friendly with Japan. Japan's been our ally. We've been Japan's ally on a geopolitical diplomatic basis. Our relations have been good, and you can't conflate that with whether they become westernized. That's true. That's true. And that does get conflated. Good word, Jay. You only have a minute left, John. So Fairbank, pardon me, Reichauer becomes ambassador to Japan, American ambassador to Japan. And he becomes strongly anti-communist in this time period, and really he has big problems with the Japanese left. They don't like him at all. In fact, he gets some lectures canceled at universities because the left has come to hate Reichauer so much. He's eventually actually attacked by a mentally ill Japanese person and nearly killed. But so both Fairbank and Reichauer indicate the way in which this narrative about the limits of westernization plays out in the post-war period because they are popular historians right through the 1980s. And their works are still read today by undergraduates and graduate students. And so they are the most powerful shapers of this idea that East Asia westernized on the American model. Which we still have incorporated into our thinking about Asia. Exactly, exactly. So what's next? What's chapter five on this, John? Well, I thought we were done, Jay. But actually we could do one more segment on East Asian intellectuals after World War II. Since we kind of, I planned on that for today, but we're running out of time. So let's do one more segment on East Asian intellectuals after World War II. And what we find there is devastation among intellectuals. Literal devastation in China where intellectuals are being assassinated and starved to death. And in Japan, psychological devastation, the devastation of realization that Japan had done horrible, horrible things in World War II. And how do you explain this? Oh, yeah. This would be really interesting. Yes. Because talking about Fairbank and Rice Shower and then looking at the other side of the looking glass. Right. What was going on there? That's right. Well, thank you so much. Looking forward to our next discussion, John. Thanks, Jay. Happy holidays. John, David and happy holidays. All right. Take care. All right. Bye.