ABC Radio National

Big Ideas





Date/Time 10 Dec 2016 5:46:41pm
"The US started bullying Japan in 1853 with the Commodore Perry incident, 'gunboat diplomacy' and kept at it ever since…"

You're certainly correct about that. By about 1900 the world was well aware the US was acting imperialistically and bullying Japan despite the fact that communications were nothing as compared to today—there being no radio or television etc! By then this fact had even reached popular culture in non-English speaking countries—in 1904 Giacomo Puccini's opera 'Madame Butterfly' premiered in Italian in Milan.

Moreover, the opera's plot depicts the ugly opportunistic horrible American whilst abroad at his worst: Pinkerton, a US Naval officer, marries 15-year-old (underage) Cio-Cio San in Nagasaki (ironic eh?) for sex then leaves her pregnant and clears off back to the US. Three years later he arrives back in Japan on the USS Abraham Lincoln with his now American wife and Cio-Cio San commits suicide (hara-kiri) leaving her poor little child (Pinkerton's son) beside her dead body with an American flag in his hand.

Clearly Madame Butterfly's début 107 years ago was taken as a metaphor for the ugly side of US 'gunboat diplomacy'/American imperialism (a respectable US Naval officer from the USS Abraham Lincoln only highlights the malevolence). I first saw this opera in its film version as a kid in the 1950s and I've never forgotten it.

Whether Japan would have erupted in 1941 in response to US provocation had US 'gunboat diplomacy' never had occurred is moot but I'm inclined to think not. Anyway, it's hypothetical as Japan's Meiji Restoration of 1868 was over a decade after Commodore Perry's efforts to open up Japan to trade and by then, thanks to Perry, it was clear Japan was behind the rest of the world. A modernising Japan led to the Sino-Japanese War 1894-5, Russo-Japanese War 1904-5 and WW-I which put Japan in good stead for another war by Pearl Harbor.

That said, despite US provocation of Japan, generally the US population and those of its allies believe that the war against Japan (and The Axis) was a just war—and mostly they still do.

The US is a very belligerent nation; it has been and remains the most warlike of modern democracies despite its own Civil War—which was one of the most horrible wars of modern times (it's as if the US learned nothing from this tragedy except to make it more aggressive).

The real tragedy of our time is that the US's allies, UK, Australia, NZ etc., have done little or nothing to ameliorate US's aggressive policies—take the Vietnam War or Iraq and Afghanistan for instance, we've actually encouraged the US by participating in these tragedies.
