LAURENCE REES: And how can we understand the reasons for what you call the 'suicidal mentality' of the Japanese?

AKIRA IRIYE: Some people trace it back all the way to the feudal ethos. I think it seems to be a combination of two things. One is belief in Japanese national uniqueness, again this is an insular mentality, summed up in the sense that Japan is a unique country unlike any other country that can do things that no other country can do, and things like that. And this sense of uniqueness is combined with the Emperor worship. Again this is rather a recent origin: in the 1870s and 1880s the government decided to rally national opinion around the image of the Sacred Emperor, because this Emperor system seemed to be a long living line of Emperors; that is the longevity of the imperial line. Japan was unique and you died for your country but in fact you died for your Emperor, everything was in the name of the Emperor.  In war, in battle, [soldiers] fought for the sake of honouring the Emperor, that kind of thing. That is one, mental attitude.

And the second reason is a more material kind of reason. That is that the Japanese army is much more poorly equipped. So the Japanese say, well, maybe we’re not as good in producing so many weapons as the Americans, but we have this spiritual aspect to it, that we can fight not simply with guns, but we can fight with our spirit. That spirit is the spirit of our selflessness and this is nothing that is part of your fighting. You know this famous exhortation not to be taken prisoner of war because they say to be taken prisoner of war is a shameful thing. Why? Because it shows that you have not fought till the very end. To fight to the very end is to honour the Emperor and to show that you can compensate for meagre weapons by using yourself, perhaps as a human shield, or in a suicide attack.

For these reasons I think even as early as the Russian/Japanese War you get lots of Japanese casualties because they believe in it, that death in battle is an honourable thing. I would think that there were so few Japanese prisoners of war taken by the Russians because they either committed suicide or they just fought to the very end before the Russians could capture them. The same is true in the 1930’s as well. I think you brought dishonour to your family and to your parents if you were caught prisoner during the war, so for these reasons I think there is a sense that the war is never finished until the last man dies. And the last man dies because that’s what they’re supposed to do.

LAURENCE REES: How can we understand here in the West this phenomenal cultural pressure on the individual to conform?

AKIRA IRIYE: I think there is no question about that. I think a kind of collective mentality, or collectivist mentality, and also the idea that you are a member of this family, and what you do brings dishonour to your parents, but not only that, to the Emperor too. This is the whole idea of the nation as one family with the Emperor as the Divine Head. So whatever you do you are bringing either honour or dishonour to the Emperor. There’s nothing in between. So to die is more honourable than to live. I think the conception of life and death, things like that, are maybe at the basis of this. No individual thinking here. Of course there were people who were not that way, but they would not be able to express their opinion more clearly or more frankly during the war because of the mentality of wartime Japan.

LAURENCE REES: And so the Emperor must bare a huge responsibility, because he is the one person who can free people from this?

AKIRA IRIYE: The Emperor is the one person, and that’s why I think after the war he exhorts all the people to accept the peace. I think it proved to be quite useful for the occupying process under Macarthur that he could use the Emperor. If the Emperor said to every Japanese soldier: war is over, you’ve got to give up and you have to come home, they obeyed. I mean its just an amazing degree of acceptance of the defeat and surrender because the Emperor said so to them. And then there’s the famous Imperial announcement in January 1946 to tell the Japanese people that I’m human and no longer divine, I’m just a human being so don’t think of me as a God, and then the Japanese came to believe that the Emperor was in fact a human being. It became ok, acceptable to view the Emperor as a human being. I think one would hope that now, after some 60 years, that things have changed somewhat since that time. One often wonders why there is still the sense of collective identification, conformism and peer pressure which does still exist [in Japan], but one would hope that there’s a greater sense of individual identity and individual thinking.

LAURENCE REES: Certainly not as much individual identity or thinking in Japan as in the West, even now though?

AKIRA IRIYE: Yes, you’re right.