'We have to think straight and think fast'

By Emanuel Pastreich

Emanuel Pastreich

Seventy-five years ago, Japan announced its decision to surrender its armies in East Asia to the United States and the Soviet Union unconditionally and to open up negotiations that would lead to a formal treaty of surrender signed on September 2, 1945, on the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

It was the end of a terrible war and many in the region hoped that some greater order of peace could be established rapidly, one that would fulfill the fervent dreams of those who had battled against imperialism and fascism for so long in every country, including within Japan.

But the rays of hope for a new day were mingled with memories of the rays of the rising sun of the Japanese imperial army's battle flag. Much of that negative spirit of militarism was never fully dismantled, but rather was redirected toward industrialization and the worst of that specter simply burrowed into the Japanese system of things.

And those rays of hope also overlapped with the bright flash of the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Hiroshima and on Nagasaki, rays of radiation that revealed a dark force lurking beneath the surface within the powerful nation that had overwhelmed the Japanese. Those nuclear weapons, which should have been immediately abolished in 1945, are still with us today, invisible, but far more powerful, ready to turn the entire Earth into an inferno at any moment.

The United Nations was established, the doors were open for a new open society in which all of humanity would receive the respect it deserved, and even within the United States military there were those who pushed for something greater, who asked more of themselves in 1945. For all the poverty and the fear of starvation that hovered over the heads of millions after the collapse of the Japanese empire, there was palpable hope for the future as well.

But the modern history of Northeast Asia would follow a narrow, winding path, a craggy outcrop of rock above and a perilous cliff down to an unforgiving sea below. The United States, still inspired by much of the internationalist, anti-fascist, ideas of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Vice President Henry Wallace, made efforts still to pursue a better future for the region, including initiatives for real democracy and for land reform. But on Wall Street, American financiers and old money with cozy ties to London, men who dreamed of picking up the tattered armor of the British Empire for themselves, they had other plans.

Slowly, but deliberately, they pushed out the anti-fascists and the New Dealers in Washington, D.C., and launched into a brutal "anti-communist" campaign that altered the debate on foreign policy for the next 75 years ― to this day.

That shift took a turn for the worse in 1949 when the battle in Washington, D.C., over the status of the new People's Republic of China was lost and a consensus was formed in opposition to recognizing this political reality. The American experts who suggested that the United States should continue to support the People's Republic of China or, at the minimum, recognize it as a nation, were drowned out by vindictive calls of "Who lost China?" Any American who suggested that communism was not the most important issue was promptly driven from the room.

The future of Asia in 1945 was bound to the future of Korea. That was the case at the time of the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-1985), and at the time of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) ― and it is the case today. Korea has the cultural sophistication, the institutional complexity and the geopolitical incentive to push for an integrated and cooperative Northeast Asia ― then and now.

The thoughtful intellectual Kim Gu led the efforts to create a unified Korea and to lay the foundations for an integrated and peaceful Northeast Asia back in 1945.

Kim Gu started out as scion of an established family who hoped to pass the civil service exams and to serve with distinction in government, but he would ultimately witness his country torn apart by foreign powers and he was compelled to take a stand against imperialism and eventually was forced to move his activities to Shanghai where he served as President of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea. He was preparing to take back Korea at the time he learned of the dropping of the atomic bombs in August 1945.

Kim Gu saw education and culture as the ultimate means to transform Korea and East Asia and to bring true happiness to the people. He wrote: "I want our nation to be the most beautiful nation, but that does not mean it must be the most powerful nation."

That simple line suggests why Korea, with its commitment to philosophical and cultural solutions, has the potential to lead in a manner not found in other nations.

Kim Gu also saw independence, and a new peace regime in East Asia, as something that all citizens must be a part of. Although he started out as an elitist, after suffering torture and oppression, time in prison opened his eyes to the sufferings of ordinary people. While in prison, he started to teach fellow prisoners and made the prison into a school. When we think about how our world is being made into an enormous prison today, we can derive inspiration from Kim Gu's vision about what we must do ― all the more true for intellectuals.

Kim Gu was assassinated in 1949, the critical year when tolerance for pan-Asianists, for dialogue with communists and socialists, collapsed. The simplistic demonization of communism altered the debate in Asia, replacing the anti-fascist alliances of the 1930s and 1940s with a new, and ultimately ambiguous, anti-communist alliance system.

Legitimate critiques of communist policies in Washington were skillfully mixed together with devious plans to make America the global player like the British Empire had been. The potion was ultimately poisonous. But the poison extracted from the envy of British hegemony was a slow-acting poison that only took full effect 75 years later.

Many well-intentioned Americans picked up the mandate for American leadership, unaware of what was implied. Just as Frodo Baggins in "The Lord of the Rings" could not fathom the significance of the ring he was given, so also Americans did not know exactly what this new alliance system implied.

Americans made tremendous contributions in Asia in scholarship, in the selfless efforts of the Peace Corps and in science.

In retrospect, those contributions were unfailingly diluted, or tinged, by other agendas that were not so benign. The balance, however, was still positive in Asia ― until recently.

There is one thing I will never be able to change about myself and that is my status as an American, and as an American who benefitted from the best of America's institutions.

I was trained in Chinese language and literature at Yale College as an undergraduate. I received a Ph.D. at Harvard University from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and I taught Asian studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and at George Washington University, for 10 years.

I met the central scholar of Asian studies, and prominent diplomat, Edwin Reishauer at the Inter-University Center in Yokohama, Japan, when I arrived to study there in 1987.

At the time I thought of his life as something of a model for how I could make a contribution. I did not know that I would myself deliver talks at the Harvard-Yenching Institute 15 years later, that I would play a role in diplomacy and security myself.

I also did not know that the entire American diplomatic and security system would completely lose its direction at that time and that the negative aspects of the American system would take over.

I believed in the positive role that America could play and I was one of a small group of American scholars who were deeply committed to the accurate understanding of Asia. We argued for more funding for Asian studies, we tried to inform average Americans about Asia and we tried to promote constructive policies in Washington, D.C.

But that group was losing influence in the United States from the late 1990s on. We wanted Americans to be more deeply engaged in Asia: in education, in science and in exchanges between citizens. But the trend was in the opposite direction. Intellectuals in general were being marginalized in American society, especially experts on Asia.

You see, intellectuals ceased to play a vital role in academics and in government from that time. In their place corporations pushing free trade agreements, weapons systems, and currency swaps replaced the thoughtful, if occasionally compromised, intellectuals in universities and government who had made things work. The consultants and lobbyists who run international relations for profit seized the reigns.

This disaster has reached a peak today under the Trump administration, but it has been a wave that started building in the 1990s, and whose origins can be traced back to the end of the Cold War, and even to the compromises of 1945.

I spent three years in Washington, D.C., on two occasions, working at a major think tank and observing up close the efforts to push an agenda in international relations that had nothing to do with security or prosperity, but that was marketed by public relations firms in every possible way. A jungle of security consulting firms driven by an endless search for short-term profit replaced the government officials with a sense of responsibility whom I knew when I started working on diplomacy and security in 2000.

Of course, the United States is not the only player in Northeast Asia today. But other nations are oddly unable to muster the vision, the tenacity and the long-term planning necessary to create a true Northeast Asian peace regime, one that rises above the national interests of any one country.

It is certainly not my opinion that the United States must play the central role in the prosperous development, the ethical governance or the secure peace of Northeast Asia. If the United States cannot clearly demonstrate in a scientific and logical manner that it has a positive role to play, then it has no role to play.

I do want to suggest that Northeast Asia brings together tremendous assets in terms of the profound teachings of Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism and other native traditions, in terms of scholarship and a culture of learning and ethics, and in terms of economic and technological influence around the world.

But we must first recognize the crisis that we face today and address that crisis directly. We must first address the collapse of biodiversity and prepare for the mitigation of climate change and the adaptation to its consequences at every level in society. Most of us still have our eyes shut tight.

We must turn to the best of Asia's culture for inspiration as to how to live a spiritually full life without needless consumption, and how to restore the technologies of organic farming and sustainable communities that made Northeast Asia so stable for millennia.

The Chinese scholar Lin Yutang wrote in his book "Between Tears and Laughter," published in London in 1945, about the dangers latent in a post-war order dominated by global powers and by global finance. He denounced the racist and imperialist assumptions flowing forward from London and infecting Washington, D.C., like a deadly virus.

What Lin Yutang wrote about that crisis resonates with the current situation in Northeast Asia at every level.

He wrote: "The purpose of this book is to say something that must be said and say it with simplicity. The age calls for simple statements and restatements of simple truths. The prophets of doom are involved, those who would bring light must be clear.

"Our problem is the problem of moral decay and regeneration. From a handful of dust faith must come. There is more hope in a heather rose than in all the tons of Teutonic philosophy.

"I do not know how to say these things, but God give me strength to say them. The shadow of another war already looms before us. We have to think straight and think fast."

And so, here we are, on the 75th anniversary of the end of the Pacific War, facing a crisis, and perhaps hidden within it are a few opportunities. That crisis demands that we change not merely a particular policy or habit, but rather how we perceive the world. The crisis demands that we see things for what they are.

The COVID 19 crisis represents that challenge. Now that is one hell of a virus. It is a virus, for sure, a lethal and highly contagious virus that is killing millions. What is unique about this virus, however, and what makes it so difficult to treat, is that its DNA bonds with human spirit and its RNA dig their roots deep into human intellect. This virus uses its ruthless mandibles to pry open the human soul so as to inject its deadly larva deep inside, far behind the eyes, where they devour us from within.

The post-Covid 19 world will be one in which we, here in Asia, have taken back control of our minds and our souls, one in which we can, as citizens, imagine a future for all citizens, and create that future. It will be a world in which we can realize the potential that was left behind in 1945.

Emanuel Pastreich is president of The Asia Institute.