“JAPANESE ISRAEL”
The Hungarian writer, Itsván Bakony, in a small booklet entitled Jewish Fifth Column in Japan, {note 5} This is No. 9 in a series of small booklets, collectively entitled “Library of Political Secrets,” published in English by the Mexican Unión de Católicos Nacionalistas, some of which have been reprinted in the United States. The eleven booklets now in print (including No. 9). {end note 5} believes that if the tradition about the Jews in Japan in 471 is not a canard, those Jews left few descendants, so that the Jewish infiltration of Japan began, for all practical purposes, with the Jews who crawled in, disguised as Europeans, after Japan resumed intercourse with the West in the second half of the Nineteenth Century and again after the defeat of Japan in 1945. Although many of these intruders have intermarried with Japanese, the total number of Jews and half-breeds in Japan is, he believes, too small to permit effective subversion and ravage of that nation by the methods that the Jews have so successfully used against Europe and the United States. {note 6} Bakony admits, however, that the cuckoos in the Japanese nest constitute a threat to that nation’s future. He refers to Japanese authorities who attest that “with the intermarriage of Jewish immigrants (both male and female) from the 19th century on, with Japanese partners, the number of people in the country of Japanese-Jewish descent has been steadily on the rise. They use ordinary Japanese names; they have adopted Japanese customs and even the prevailing religions of Japan, such as Shinto and Buddhism; and they have come to possess racial and physiognomic traits such that it is very difficult to tell them from other Japanese — all of which makes this an infiltration that is becoming extremely dangerous for the future of Japan.” In ‘Populism’ and ‘Elitism’ I mentioned obiter (p.62, n. 40) the terrible success of the Jews in polluting the blood-lines of the British upper classes in preparation for the destruction of Great Britain. In Japan, the work of genetic subversion is even easier, for the Jews are not a White race and, although they may enter the country in the guise of American business men or members of the American Army of Occupation, they have no hesitation in assuring the Japanese of their hatred of the White race that has so grievously afflicted Japan: they are “fellow Orientals” with a racial enmity to the barbarous Aryans, who always “persecute” them. Thus in Japan the cunning invaders can appeal to national patriotism, whereas in England they had to appeal to the Anglo-Saxons’ greed and Christian superstitions. {end note 6} For this reason, Bakony says, the Jews are relying on the “Lost Tribes” hoax to delude the Japanese and undermine the society of “a land Judaism is determined at all costs to conquer and control.”
The Jews are therefore promoting a fraud that we may call “Japanese Israel” by analogy with the grotesque fiction which intoxicated many Anglo-Saxons. Bakony even estimates that McLeod may have been more than the simple-minded fantast that he appears to have been:
McLeod and a number of Japanese professors who, according to my information, are Japanese only on the outside and clandestine Jews on the inside, have disseminated these fables [that the Japanese are descendants of the Israelites and therefore have an “Identity” as Jews] for the purpose of diffusing throughout the country the religious imperialism with which the Jews seek to gain control over the Japanese people.
The attempt to bring Japan under the Jewish yoke by the “Identity” deceit combined with proselytism has had considerable success.
“Japanese Israel” is simply “British Israel” with the names changed. Old McLeod’s brainstorm was the source of the nonsense in Japan. His prime datum was history that he manufactured by asserting that the first emperor of Japan was named Osee and established his rule in 730 B.C. and must therefore have been the last king of Israel, Hosea (Osee in the Septuagint), who lit out for Japan before the Assyrian conquest in 722 B.C. It is charitable to suppose that McLeod came to Japan with a copious supply of Scotland’s great beverage. I do not see how he can have failed to know that even if one takes seriously the legends assembled in the Japanese Kojiki (of which there is a learned English translation by Professor B.H. Chamberlain) and the chronology that has been attached to it, the first ruler of Japan was Jimmu, great-grandson of the sun goddess, Amaterasu (who, by the way, had the customary virgin birth, but without a Holy Ghost to help with the gestation). Jimmu is explicitly said to be the first human being to govern anywhere in the Japanese islands, and the tradition fixes his date at 660 B.C. (which is why our 1983 is 2643 in the Japanese calendar). Jimmu is, of course, merely a legendary figure and Japanese scholars admit that there is no secure basis for history, as distinct from legends, until ten centuries later. Even the famous Jingo (A.D. 200 or 320) is falsely credited with aggressive warfare and divine inspiration, although she probably did exist and did replace her foolish husband as ruler of some part of a yet un-unified Japan.
Jimmu, who was quite literally the Son of Heaven, was traditionally the ancestor of all subsequent Sons of Heaven, including the present Emperor, but if one believes the legends (which are as full of incredible miracles as the Bible) and then shoves a fictitious Hosea into the genealogy, it is as easy to show that the present Emperor is a descendant of David and hence a Jew as it was to show that poor Queen Victoria derived her lineage from the same bandit. {note 7} It is generally believed that the tales about David were based on the exploits of a Jewish bandit who flourished at some uncertain date and so impressed his contemporaries that he became the hero of a cycle of folk-tales, much as some English outlaw’s adventures were elaborated into the stories about Robin Hood, with, of course, the differences that show the contrast between Jewish and Anglo-Saxon mentalities. I note, however, that Dr. Erich R. Bromme, in his Untergang des Christentums (Berlin, 1979-80), comes to the conclusion that there was only one David, a captain of the Persian army that kept order in southern Palestine, who took advantage of the defeat of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great to set himself up as King of an extemporized Kingdom of Israel in 332 B.C. and disseminated the tales about an earlier David to make his grab of local power seem legitimate. For a summary of Dr. Bromme’s conclusions, see Vol. V, pp. 304-307, where the relation of David’s forgeries to the Essene-Christian propaganda is stated concisely; for the many passages in which the evidence is presented, see the index at the end of Vol. V, s.v. ‘David.’ {end note 7}
So far as I know, McLeod’s balderdash was first taken seriously when it was revived in 1925 by Professor Chikao Fujisawa, who was quickly joined by the Professor Anasaki of whose philological sleight-of-hand we have already seen a specimen. One or the other of them, I believe, produced a real chestnut: the title of the Japanese Emperor, Mikado, is the Hebrew mi-Gad and therefore means that he is a descendant of the “lost tribe” of Gad. I am disappointed that no con man in Belfast has had the enterprise to go to Japan and make his fortune by teaching the Japanese that Jimmu is obviously just a spelling of Jimmy, so that the Mikado is indubitably a scion of a Scotch-Irishman who named his son Mike, and since Mike gave his name to his own son, the latter was known as Mike-do, ‘do’ being the standard abbreviation of ‘ditto,’ whence the title. And as for great-grandma Amaterasu, who could doubt that her name is simply the Greek definite article (as pronounced in Doric) + the word for ‘mother'(= Latin mater) + the genitive of the second-person pronoun (misused as in the low Greek of the “New Testament”), which was pronounced sû? Obviously Amaterasu means ‘your mama.’ Jimmy, you see, was a learned Scot, and the Mikados should be proud of such ancestry. Ain’t philology wonderful?
I gather that the hariolations of Professors Fujisawa and Anasaki inspired the foundation of a Holiness Church, of which the Bishop, Juju Nakada, proclaims that “it is God’s will that these two nations [the Ten Tribes who hit the road for Japan in 722 B.C. and the Two Tribes who have been vampires on the goyim in the rest of the world] be united after 3,000 years.” And, of course, Japanese Israelites who want to get in on the Holiness will have to turn to and help old Yahweh get his wish. He can’t do anything for himself these days, except perform a few trivial miracles in out-of-the-way places when no one is looking.
The Japanese are the politest people in the world, but even so, their failure to guffaw loudly when they hear such stuff would be unbelievable, if we did not know that during the past century many literate Englishmen, including a member of Parliament and an astronomer of some distinction, were able to believe the British version of that hokum, and to believe that the reunited Twelve Tribes would make the British Empire eternal. As it is, Bakony concludes his little essay with photographic reproductions of some items from the press. In one of these, from the Jewish Voice (17 September 1954), a Rabbi, just back from the Orient, reports that in Japan, a nation demoralized by her defeat at the hands of the Jews’ stooges nine years before, “tens of thousands of Japanese men and women-look forward to joining the ranks of Israel.”
One does not believe any unsupported statement that emanates from the race that is trying to put over the “Holocaust” hoax, but an item in the Jerusalem Post (2 February 1980) seems factual in its report that a manufacturer of paper for computers, who owns a large plant in Japan, is moving his headquarters to the West Bank of the Jordan that the Jews recently took from the Moslems who had inhabited it for centuries. The industrialist, who is the head of a sect of two thousand persons in Japan, claims to be the son of a Japanese general who was killed in action during the recent war. He says that when he was a youngster on Okinawa, he fell seriously ill with tuberculosis and pleurisy, and a Christian missionary brought him a Bible with the usual sales talk. The sick boy read the book and it convinced him that whatever might be said for the Son of God, Papa was still the boss, and that “God had promised everything to the Jews and they were his Chosen.” And the boy soon convinced himself that he was a descendant of the “Lost Tribes” who had peopled Japan, so that he was himself one of the heirs to everything and that he had better head for Palestine, where the Messiah (Christ) may drop down from the clouds at any moment, in keeping with the Bible Prophecy, to put his heirs in undisputed possession of everything.
The slap-happy industrialist, who bears the odd name of Sadao O’Hara, says that he, as the son of a warrior, is a samurai, and the name of Japan’s military caste is a derivative of Samaria, whence they hailed. I do not know what he will do if he ever finds out that the Jews have been working for centuries to exterminate the Samaritans (e.g., their invasions of Samaria in the reign of Claudius around the date that some of the early Christian sects assigned to the Crucifixion) and are now on the verge of success. (There were about 300 Samaritans left alive ten years ago, and Begin has probably found time to cut their throats since then.)
It would seem, therefore, that the Jews are having some limited success in peddling the “Japanese Israel” hoax to weak-minded Japanese. Why a self-respecting Mongolian or Anglo-Saxon would wish to trace his ancestry to the tribe of squalid and vicious barbarian bandits described in the “Old Testament” is a psychological puzzle that defies explanation, but we must accept the fact that some members of both races do have so low an opinion of themselves.
Any nation can tolerate a few thousand eccentrics and oddities so long as the bulk of the population is sound, and if we are to estimate the chances that the Jews will be able to undermine Japan with the “Japanese Israel” hoax, we should take a necessarily hurried look at one episode in the long history of Japan.
JAPAN AND THE WEST
The appropriation of our technology should have occasioned no surprise. It was in keeping with the national character of the Japanese, who, from their first contacts with Europeans, exhibited an extraordinary eagerness to assimilate and emulate our civilization, our techniques, our methods, and even our fashions and fads. It is not too much to say that the Japanese, far more than any other alien race, have been fascinated by our culture, to which they have shown a hospitality that was interrupted only when their equally remarkable sense of racial cohesion and self-preservation made them realize that the advantages of contact with the West could then be bought only at the cost of national suicide.
In the past century, Japan has welcomed our scholars and men of letters, some of whom have reciprocated by so admiring their hosts’ culture that they elected to live in Japan. One thinks of the English scholar, Basil Hall Chamberlain, who became Professor of Japanese Philology in the Imperial University at Tokyo. Another prime example will occur to all who have interested themselves in American literature: Lafcadio Hearn, sent to Japan by Harper’s to write articles for their magazines, decided to remain in Japan, married a Japanese lady, and became Professor of English Literature in the Imperial University. He eventually decided, for the sake of his children, to become naturalized as a Japanese citizen, and soon thereafter the Japanese government, with a kind of Oriental logic, drastically reduced his salary in the university, on the grounds that a Japanese was worth much less than a European.
Even today, what is fashionable in the West thereby becomes fashionable in Japan, but it is noteworthy that even the most slavish imitations of the West are surcharged with something that is distinctively Japanese. They have taken over our “jazz,” but if you listen to a current “hit” produced in a Japanese night club, with the American music played by a Japanese orchestra and the American lyrics sung (usually in both English and Japanese) in the clear voice of a Japanese woman, your ears will tell you at once that the performance is unmistakably Japanese. Some of their artists have unthinkingly imitated the schizophrenic daubs of what some Americans call “modern art” and prize because it reflects the Jewish hatred of all visual beauty, but if you will examine the specimens reproduced on the last pages of Lucille R. Webber’s Japanese Woodblock Prints (Brigham Young University Press, 1979), you will see that something of the Far East has been added, in color or design, to even the most ugly and repulsive botches. Whatever the Japanese take over from us, they make their own.
The Japanese, who have always been characteristically eager to learn from foreigners, first came into contact with the West around 1543, when some Portuguese, on a voyage from Siam to Macao, were blown from their course and landed on one of the Japanese islands. They were received with wonted hospitality and, significantly, the local ruler, impressed by the crude firearms of the strangers, immediately ordered his armory to find a way to manufacture duplicates of the novel weapons. Thus began more than half a century of mutually profitable trade relations, during which the Portuguese, soon followed by the Spanish and the Dutch, tried to supply the Japanese demand for European wares and brought back rich cargoes of silks and other Japanese goods. Despite the rivalries of the three European nations engaged in this trade, this friendly and lucrative intercourse would have continued uninterrupted thereafter, had it been limited to commercial and intellectual relations.
The Europeans brought with them to Japan syphilis and Christianity. The former was easily kept under control, but the latter soon became epidemic. To the xenophilous Japanese, accustomed to the gentle doctrines of Buddhism and to religious eclecticism by which an individual made his choice among the forty-three popular varieties of Buddhism more or less admixed with Shinto or worked out some compromise of his own, the exotic cult was a great novelty. It differed from the religions they knew as much as (but not more than) “jazz” and “boogie-woogie” differ from the waltz and tango. It was foreign, but everyone knew that the doctrine of the Buddha had come from China, and learned men knew that it had reached China from a yet more distant land. There was a mysterious morbidity in the behavior of a god who had himself killed on a cross to save mortals from the consequences of his own anger, but gods are strange folk. After all, in Shinto, the Creator (Izanagi) had to go down into the underworld to rescue his wife (Izanami), who had died in child-birth, and that was as odd as anything Jesus had done.
Christianity, furthermore, was endued with the great prestige of a race that had attained manifest superiority in building ships, making weapons, and inventing many new mechanical devices and chemical processes, and had an equally great superiority in the knowledge that enabled them to range freely over a vast world in which Japan, Korea, and even China were but relatively small regions: perhaps they also knew more about the invisible world. And Christianity was promoted by Jesuits, who had perfected by long experience the subtle art of adapting their propaganda to the credulity of Oriental races. The new religion thus had a great fascination for the Japanese, and perhaps an even stronger appeal to the daimyos, the local rulers who, in that feudal society, were virtually independent monarchs, each in his own territory, and each of whom hoped to secure for his own harbor the profits of a lucrative commerce that was somehow tied up with the exotic religion.
Christianity spread rapidly in Japan, at first without opposition, since the people were accustomed to tolerate every variety of belief about the unknown. But here we are confronted by the question we could not answer above. What about the descendants of the 18,670 Jews and, perhaps, Judaized natives who are said to have been in Japan in 471? Did they leave many descendants eleven centuries later who were Jews, at least in the sense in which Mr. Shi in Kaifeng knew he was a Jew? If so, would they not have flocked enthusiastically to a religion that exalted a Jewish God and a Jewish Saviour? We know, furthermore, that the Jesuits, like the rest of the Catholic Church, were deeply infiltrated by Jews, and it would be a fair guess that some of those Marranos turned up in Japan. Could they have reached some understanding with their surviving congeners in the islands to create the dissension and turmoil from which their race habitually profits? All this, I remind you, is sheer speculation in vacuo, with no historical fact to support it.
The history of Christianity in Japan is far too complex to be summarized here, but there can be no doubt about the basic facts. {note 8} The most lucid and concise summary that I have seen is in the Eleventh and Twelfth Editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. XV, pp. 224-237. There is, of course, a vast amount of writing on this subject in English, much of it more or less vitiated by the tendency of Western writers, even if they are not Christians, to assume that Christianity, though false, is inherently superior to other religions, equally false. For a good presentation of the Christian view, see The Martyrs of Nagasaki, by Frederick Vincent Williams (Fresno, California, 1957), which records the claim that after the official suppression of Christianity in 1640, “tens of thousands” of Japanese continued to practice the forbidden cult secretly in the privacy of their own homes, and that there was even a kind of clandestine church that venerated a martyr named Bastian and had some thirty thousand members. These secret cults surfaced after 1865, when Christianity was again tolerated. Whether any or many of the crypto-Christians were also crypto-Jews is, of course, anyone’s guess. {end note 8} As soon as the apostles of a cult that claimed exclusive possession of the Truth about the Universe obtained a sufficiently large number of converts, they naturally indulged the Christian lust to persecute, destroy, and kill. They incited mobs to burn Buddhist temples, to destroy “pagan” art, to kill Buddhist priests, and to pillage the homes of wicked unbelievers. Feudal lords were induced, by faith or greed, to decree that all residents in their domains must be sloshed with holy water or decapitated. Lords who were so obdurate that they merely extended to their Christians the toleration they were accustomed to extend to all sects found that they had in their territory a tightly organized body of secret subversives, who were zealously exciting mutiny and revolt, and who, as soon as they got a civil war under way, would appear among the insurrectionists with banners that would enable Jesus to see whom he should help and whom he should smite. And, when necessary, his divinity was attested by the booming of cannon aboard Portuguese ships in the harbor.
The Japanese soon discovered that the coveted merchandise and learning of the West brought with it a spiritual plague that menaced their national identity at a time in which they already had enough troubles of their own. And the chaos was only augmented when Spanish ships brought in squads of Franciscans and Dominicans, who assured the bewildered Japanese that the Jesuits were a pack of vile and perfidious intriguers, while the Jesuits loudly protested the admission to Japanese territory of such scum as the ignorant and plebeian friars. When the Dutch appeared on the scene, it became necessary for the Catholic competitors to agree in assuring the Japanese that Satan had sent the Protestants to seduce True Believers to eternal damnation, while the Dutch lamented the future torments of souls that the fiendish Antichrists in Rome had already snared to be broiled forever on the gridirons of the underworld.
It is needless to remark that the several brands of Christians naturally employed holy mendacity and forgery to win souls and destroy competition. The first Englishman known to have taken up residence in Japan, Will Adams, owed his life to a feudal lord who was too intelligent or bewildered to believe the Jesuits, who assured him that Adams and his companions were pirates who preyed on the commerce of all nations and should be immediately executed. Adams, thus saved, appears to have been an experienced shipwright; he taught the Japanese how to build ships of Western size, and became a trusted friend of the shogun and, in effect, a Japanese nobleman in his own right. It may have been at Adams’ suggestion that the shogun despatched a trusted subordinate to Europe to observe the Christians in their own lands, where the amazed and appalled Japanese saw the mighty Westerners engaged in furiously butchering one another to conciliate their ferocious god. The report of that man and of other emissaries finally enabled the Japanese to understand the charms of Christian godliness and the beauties of a blood-thirsty fanaticism.
I will hazard a guess that the Japanese who marvelled at European culture also learned how Jesus had blessed the natives of Mexico and Peru. The Spanish conquistadores were ruthless men, as they had to be, but the Japanese in Europe probably heard tales that had been artfully exaggerated by the Catholic missionaries to those lands, who were always at odds with the civilian governors who refused to obey them. That seemed to confirm the tales told in Japan by each of the three brands of Christians, who solemnly assured the Japanese governors that the other two brands represented Europeans who were planning a sudden invasion and conquest of Japan. The holy men were lying, naturally, but in a sense they inadvertently told the truth, for Japan’s narrow islands, surrounded by the sea, were vulnerable, and had European colonies been established there, the innate vigor of our race, not yet palsied by its degenerative diseases, would probably have found a field for action there even before it did in India.
It was in the years around 1600 that Japanese envoys visited Europe, where they had to pretend they were Christians to avoid molestation, and where the several nations of Europe, inspired with Jewish ferocity and righteousness, were helping Jesus save souls and stamp out heresy with bloody ingenuity and zeal as they prepared for the climacteric piety of the Thirty Years’ War. The men from Nippon were astounded: they came from islands in which men fought bravely and often cruelly for intelligible and tangible purposes, but the forty-three Buddhist sects disputed vigorously about what the Buddha had meant while showing a polite consideration for each other and even good humor. The envoys, being benighted pagans, failed to see the need to help Jesus annihilate the Antichrist and all his minions, but they probably saw something of the deadly efficiency of European armies and returned home with a prescience that Japan had only the choice between becoming (anticipatorily) another Tahiti or finding some means of preserving her national identity and culture.
It would be tedious even to adumbrate the tangled and confusing events of the next forty years, as the Japanese in political power fluctuated between their desire for foreign trade and the arts and learning of the West and their fear of the demoralizing religion that Europeans brought with them as a deadly infection. In the meantime, as had happened earlier in Europe, the feudal system declined, and the successive Shoguns, who ruled in the name of the unapproachable Mikados, extended their authority of the central government over the whole of Japan. Eventually, Christianity was exempted from the toleration accorded all other religions and effectively suppressed, in blood where necessary. The Catholics were expelled, at first to the great profit of the Dutch, who for some years enjoyed a most lucrative trade on the condition that they would not attempt spiritual subversion, but finally even they were almost squeezed out. {note 9} The Japanese felt in honor bound to observe the letter of their treaty with the Dutch, which they never repudiated, but they imposed restrictions that the treaty had not explicitly forbidden, eventually confining the Dutch traders to Deshima, a tiny island in the harbor of Nagasaki, where they were kept in a kind of quarantine, and no Japanese (except prostitutes) could visit them without an official permit from the local authorities. Under these onorous restrictions, an exiguous trade between Holland and Japan was continued through all the years of Japan’s otherwise total isolation. {end note 9} After 1641, Japan embarked on a policy of total isolation, refusing admission to foreigners and forbidding Japanese to go abroad to lands whence they might bring back the plague.
This policy has naturally aroused supercilious or indignant comment from Aryans who believe that Japan should not have protected herself from a degenerative disease by what seems a kind of obscurantism. I need only quote an authoritative summary.
It is apparent that Christian propagandism was responsible. The policy of seclusion adopted by Japan in the early part of the 17th century and resolutely pursued until the middle of the 19th, was anti-Christian, not anti-foreign. The fact cannot be too clearly recognized. {note 10} I quote from the article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica cited above. {end note 10}
The policy was maintained until the Japanese were convinced by events that our technology had so advanced during the intervening two hundred years that it was no longer possible for Japan to resist invasion. {note 11} A few years ago I heard a university lecturer unctuously tell an unprotesting audience how “peacefully” Japan had been “opened up to Christian civilization” by Commodore Perry and his fleet of steam-powered warships in 1854. It is true that the Japanese, overawed by the cannon of Perry’s ten “peaceful” warships, made some concessions, but Japan was not really “opened” to foreign commerce until after a British fleet had bombarded the city of Kagoshima and reduced it to rubble, and another British fleet, with a few American, French, and Dutch vessels added to make it seem international, levelled Shimonoseki in 1864 and imposed a fine of $3,000,000 on the local population. That finally convinced even the most reluctant Japanese of the charms of Western civilization, and thereafter they set out whole-heartedly to acquire its technological power. {end note 11} And from that fact the Japanese intelligently drew the lesson that they must learn and appropriate the technology against which they had become defenceless. How brilliantly they did so is now apparent, when, after having been terribly defeated in war, they are now defeating us on our own terms.
There is one question that we must again ask and be unable to answer. The suppression of Christianity in Japan necessarily involved bloodshed on a large scale. Western writers are usually most distressed by the fate of Christian missionaries who, having been expelled from Japan and courteously warned not to return, sneaked back into the islands under various disguises to continue their work of subversion until they were finally apprehended and executed. They must be presumed to have won the reward they sought. What concerns us here is the actual depletion of the Japanese population by the execution of Japanese who had become obstinately infatuated with the exotic religion. It seems impossible to estimate the total number slain. We hear that the Jesuits alone had made some 300,000 converts by 1595, and of many thousands brought to Jesus at various times and in various regions thereafter. How many of these recanted during sporadic efforts to restrict or suppress Christianity in one region or another is uncertain, as is the number who, in the end, like Panurge, maintained their convictions jusqu’au feu exclusivement. We should not reckon as Christians all the persons who perished on the losing side in revolts and civil wars that were incited by the Christians or in which Christians largely participated. The commonly quoted figure of 235,000 “martyrs” is considered by some writers excessive, while others would accept 500,000 as possible. We cannot even guess how many Jews who looked like Japanese perished in the several massacres of Christians, nor yet how many Marranos there were among the Japanese who are said to have clandestinely continued their practice of the forbidden cult after it had been officially suppressed.
The Japanese have shown a remarkable ability, for which I can call to mind no historical parallel, to throw off a foreign infection. One could even speculate that their experience with Christianity, like recovery from certain epidemic diseases, may have been actually beneficial, imparting a certain immunity by strengthening their racial consciousness and sense of national unity. It seems likely that “Japanese Israel” will have no significant effect.
JAPAN’S FUTURE
If Japan is deeply infested with Jews, she is doomed, and the details of her ruin would be of no interest, even if we could foresee them.
If she is not, she has a formidable potential, and unless she is destroyed by some external force, she will determine some part of the future of life on this globe. Her people have shown a national genius that gives them incontestable superiority among Mongolians. In the 1930s she tried to dominate and organize her race, and if she has an opportunity to do so, she will try again. Speculations about the unpredictable century ahead of us must include the obvious possibility that the rotting of our race will continue and the nations of the West will perish in the ignominious paresis they have brought upon themselves. The future will then belong to the Mongolians, and if they are directed by the manifestly superior intelligence of the Japanese, they will own this planet. Some of our descendants will probably survive to become the Ainu of Europe and North America.
The only other people who can match the Japanese in racial cohesion and a high average of intelligence are the Jews, but they are a parasitic race and have shown throughout history only a terrible and highly specialized power to destroy, to suck the life out of the nations on which they have fastened themselves. They have never shown the slightest ability to establish a civilization or even a viable barbarism of their own. If our race perishes and they cannot transfer themselves to the Mongolians, they will perish with us. Some of us may find that thought consoling.
Conjecture about the future, even if it is realistic and rational instead of romantic and emotional, can suggest a wide variety of possible consequences of the present, and too often the course of history has been turned by events that were unexpected and beyond human calculation. It is possible that our race has a latent vitality that will enable it to recover from a disease that now seems mortal. It is also possible that the Japanese have some latent infection or organic weakness that has not yet become apparent.
Very few men of our race have mastered the intricacies of the Japanese language and of the modalities of thought that are far greater obstacles than grammar and vocabulary to one who would read and understand the voluminous annals and literature; and of the few who have done so, yet fewer can appraise dispassionately and objectively what they have read. They alone are entitled to speak of the soul of Japan or, rather, of so much of that soul as can be perceived by an Aryan mind. They can at least measure the impassable gulf that separates the two races; the rest of us can only estimate it superficially.
One could compile an enormous bibliography of books about Japan in Western languages, even if one restricted it to books worth reading. There are many in English, more in German, a large number in French, and some in Spanish and Italian. I shall mention only the political histories by Murdoch and Yamagata and by Brinkley and Kikuchi, the history of literature by W. G. Aston, and the many interpretative essays by B. H. Chamberlain and Frank Brinkley. There is literature on Japanese subjects, notably the finely wrought prose of Lafcadio Hearn and John Masefield’s memorable tragedy, The Faithful. {note 12} I need not remark that while Madame Butterfly is a beautiful and moving opera, it tells you very little about Japan, It was based on an English imitation of Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysantheme, which has some value, especially for the author’s realization that he and his temporary wife had mentalities so diverse that, despite their domestic intimacy, no reciprocal understanding was possible. Cf. the experience of an American officer that I shall report below. It turns, of course, on the fact that he was American, not French. {end note 12} There are many translations from the Japanese. The earliest books in the language are compilations of traditions and legends from a prehistoric past, and these have been ably translated, the Kojiki by Chamberlain and the Nihongi by Aston. Donald Keene has edited an Anthology of Japanese Literature… to the Mid-Nineteenth Century, and there is even a Book of Japanese Verse in the Penguin series.
To my mind, the soul of Japan maybe described through a shimmering veil of impressionism in the No plays, of which there are more than five hundred, about half of which are still performed at times. There are several selections in English, but I think the misty melancholy of the more poetic plays was best rendered in French by Steinilber-Oberlin and Kuni Matsuo (Paris, 1929). Of what we may call the legitimate drama, the most famous author was Chikamatsu, whose plays have been translated by Donald Keene. I know Tarahiko Kori’s heroic tragedy, Yoshitorno, only in the Spanish version by Antonio Ferratges (Madrid, 1930).
The best-known Japanese novel is, of course, Lady Murasaki’s Genji, translated by Arthur Waley. Modern novels, written in imitation of Western fiction, must be used with great caution: some are trash. Yukio Mishima’s Forbidden Colors depicts painfully the demoralization that followed the defeat of Japan in 1945, from which she so quickly and brilliantly recovered. A better treatment of the same subject is Keene’s translation of Osamu Dazai’s The Setting Sun, an almost cruel portrayal of the demoralization, but accompanied by an indication of the reason for Japan’s resurgence: the man who does not give way to despair perceives that the Western poison, egalitarianism, is “the obscene and loathsome vengeance of the slave mentality.” A nation which does not forget that fact of life in its darkest hour is a nation that has the potentiality of greatness.
A people is best known through its myths and literature, but we obtain some further information, and a vast amount of misinformation, from Americans who have served in the army of occupation with which we afflicted Japan or were stationed there at the time when the government in Washington seized an opportunity to get many young Americans killed in Korea, to abort a possible prosperity in the United States by inflicting more taxes on the serfs, and to convince the whole world that Americans are utterly contemptible. {note 13} When we look back on that ignominious episode, we are apt to forget the subtlety of the propaganda that was employed in that application of the principle, “perpetual war for perpetual peace.” Intelligent observers, naturally, were unimpressed by the mouthpieces in the White House and elsewhere that yammered about “resisting aggression,” supporting the “United Nations,” and similar bilge, but another version had been prepared for them, a “confidential” report that the United States was belatedly moving against the Soviet Empire, and that the “real purpose” of the meddling in Korea was to “escalate” that action into a general attack on Bolshevism throughout the world and especially in its heartland, Russia. That seemed plausible at the time and for months or even a year fooled rational men. The ranking officer in Military Intelligence, whom I shall mention in the second paragraph below, was taken in by that clever deception when he was sent to Japan to direct from headquarters there certain kinds of espionage in Korea. He said that it was four months after the beginning of hostilities before he began to suspect the horrible truth, and as long before he saw that there was no alternative explanation — despite his access to much information that was concealed from the public. So great was then the weight of the old military tradition that American armies should try to be victorious! Some vestiges of that tradition even survived as late as the time when Vietnam was selected as a fresh pretext for bleeding the boobs. {end note 13}
The most acute of our observers return with one fundamental datum: “The Japanese are so polite that you can never even guess what they are thinking.” They are so polite they speak English to relieve the Americans of the need to acquire even a smattering of colloquial Japanese, although some may learn enough to add a few words to current slang. {note 14} One of the vulgar euphemisms in current use is ‘fox,’ which designates a young and especially libidinous female, being applied in college circles to the 22% of “co-eds” who, according to a recent survey, are eager to copulate on sight with any presentable male. In Western tradition, the fox is a type of craftiness, not lust, so I conjecture that this use of ‘fox’ (not, notice, ‘vixen’) had its source in Japan, where a particularly liberated and lascivious “sporting woman” (asobime) is said to be a werefox or to have been created from the bones of a horse and animated by the fox-goblin; hence many allusions in satirical verse. {end note 14} Some men return with a Japanese religion {note 15} The religion is most commonly the Rinzai sect of Zen, one of the sixty or more varieties of Buddhism that the Japanese have fashioned in their own image out of the Chinese Ch’an, which was a radical Chinese revision of the religion that was fashioned in India out of a travesty of the philosophy of Gautama, the Buddha. The Japanese doctrine is described by Alan W. Watts in The Way of Zen (New York, 1957) as well as any unverifiable belief can be described by a believer. Zen is said to be the basis of the warrior’s code of hushido, but I suspect that the connection is as adventitious as the relation of the Western chivalric tradition to Christianity. {end note 15} or a Japanese wife.{note 16} An American technician tells me that he is happy with his second or third wife, whom he brought back from Japan. “In Japan,” he says, “females are still women.” I leave to the reader reflection on the social implications. {end note 16} But few learn more about Japan than do tourists who spend two or three days ashore from a cruise ship.
What Westerners see and learn in Japan is strictly limited by the innate character of the Japanese, who instinctively combine courtesy with an inner reserve that is foreign to our nature. They keep their thoughts private, secret, with a mental discipline of which our race is incapable. I shall give you a good illustration of that basic fact.
When the United States was preparing to start shooting in Korea, a ranking officer of our Military Intelligence was sent to Japan to supervise from his headquarters there certain intelligence operations in Korea. He provided himself with a Japanese mistress from a very good middle-class family. His cover was some position in the Quartermaster’s Corps, and, of course, he was careful not to let his concubine know that he had any other military function. She was, in every way, a perfect mate, who seemed to anticipate his every wish and desire by some kind of instinct, sometimes when he was scarcely aware himself of precisely what he wanted.
The young woman’s two or three brothers had been officers in the Japanese army and had been killed in action. Her uncle and aunt had perished during our fire-bombing of Tokyo, when we destroyed sixteen square miles of the city and made a million persons homeless after a hundred thousand had been burned alive, boiled in the canals, or suffocated by the fire-storm. She and her mother had barely escaped alive from their burning home. The American tried to discover what his perfect concubine was really thinking, so, after many months of conjugal intimacy, he asked her about that American raid on Tokyo. Oh, yes, she remembered it vividly: she had seen the American planes come in like celestial butterflies, “silver wings in the moonlight, very pretty, very pretty!” It was only then that the American, being a highly intelligent man, realized how she hated him — hated him with an implacable — and noble hatred.
