There is an old sarcastic saying to the effect that “you have to know so-and-so pretty well in order to dislike him.” That is about what seems to be happening to us in the Orient. We once were a highly popular nation in this part of the world, but that was when we remained many thousands of miles out of sight of the vast majority of Orientals.
Since the end of World War II we have become a great deal more visible in the Orient, first as liberators of a sort and lately as military protectors and economic advisers.
Thoughtful Orientals, like thoughtful people anywhere, will concede the American aid programs around the world to be examples not only of self interest, but also of generosity and good will. Certainly, no nation before has ever offered anything at all to the Orient without demanding a big Pound of flesh in return.
Not more than one Oriental in a hundred, however, can be thoughtful on the subject. The rest are emotional to the point of hysteria, where their conception of sovereignty is concerned. And this constant visibility of our military and civilian officialdom among them, plus the amount of advice and administration we extend with our aid, provokes an ever wider outcry of infringement of that very precious sovereignty.
Practically all Oriental nations, moreover, have had foreign troops and bureaucrats in their countries for anywhere from ten to a hundred years. They are resolved to be rid of them if they can, at no matter what cost to their own security. They are in no mood to make much distinction between our troops and administrators, who came as protectors and advisers, and those others who came in the past as overlords. Perhaps we ourselves do not always make adequate distinction, and perhaps advice at best is too close to administration.
Current Resentment
This is being written in the summer of 1957. Japan is presently in an uproar over the case of the American airman who shot a Japanese woman shell-scavenger. In May of this year a mob wrecked the American Embassy in Taiwan protesting acquittal of an American sergeant who shot a Chinese. Yesterday, a Korean boy three years old was shot and killed by an American soldier. Filipinos are demonstrating over a U. S. Navy-man who was sent home pending settlement of a traffic injury case. Koreans in Japan staged a “Yankee go home” mob scene some weeks ago in front of the American Embassy, and other mobs, hunger strikers, and so on appear before the Embassy practically continually.
The resistance to our administration of economic aid is, of course, non-violent, but just as disquieting. India has rejected aid on more than one occasion because of the strings which in Indian opinion were attached. Ceylon, Burma, and Indonesia have rejected American assistance programs at one time or another in the past, although they are among the nations most badly needing help. Other countries have at times refused surplus farm product transfers because of what they consider undesirable contingencies.
All of this is very unpleasant. It is so unpleasant that we are sometimes tempted to blame it all on either the natural contrariness of Orientals, or else the machinations of the Communists. The contrariness of Orientals toward us at present is real enough. It is part of their growing pains. While the Communists undoubtedly do their best to promote anti-American irritation, it is this apparent contrariness of the Orient which we seem unable to understand, and which we must understand and cope with if we are to do much of anything successful in the Orient.
The Touchiness of New Sovereignty
We Americans do not seem fully to appreciate it yet, but the Orient is going through an explosive awakening of nationalism. Indian Prime Minister Nehru shocked the recent Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in London, just as he has been shocking us for the past five or six years, when he made it clear that this transition of Orientals to national sovereignty and a place in the sun is of far more importance to them than the cold war struggle between the free world and the Communist world. No matter how much we may feel that they should, Orientals are simply not going to stand up and be counted for or against us in the cold war.
In the course of practicing their new sovereignty, Orientals are not going to be particularly rational or intelligent, or even reasonably protective of their own long term interests. They are going to be suspicious of every move made by us, and they are going to magnify out of all proportion every transgression which can be laid to us.
The tragedy for the world lies in the fact that the newly sovereign countries of the Orient are prepared to run the real—though not well calculated—risk of being swallowed by the Communists as an alternative to accepting anything which looks like control by us. They are fully capable of overrating their own strength and their own political ability and almost inevitably will misjudge the designs of the Communists toward them.
Via the Marshall Plan, we were able to help Western Europe over its postwar economic hump and into what seems today a genuine prosperity. We have been able on the military side to put together the NATO alliance, which, while no impregnable military force, is nevertheless an effective and amicable military partnership of America and Western Europe.
In Europe we ran into no particularly sensitive problem of sovereignty. European nations have been relatively sovereign since the time of the Roman Empire and no longer worry too much about it. Furthermore, imperialism and colonialism are European exports. Most of the evils the Europeans have suffered have been perpetrated by each other, and they are mature enough to know it. America has always gone to Europe as a liberator, and the main fear of most of Europe is that we will in fact go home too soon.
Anti-Colonialism
To the Orient, however, Europe means empire, and they see not much difference between Americans and Europeans. The imperial and colonial system has been the main hate of Orientals for far too many years to be replaced in any near future by more realistic fears of Communist designs. The struggle against Europe has been the life work of most of the politicians in most of the Orient, and the sovereignty they now cherish so jealously is a sovereignty wrested mostly from Europe. They are too old to change and will go on fighting the ghosts of the past.
Even in Japan, which has been independent since the beginning of history, the memory of our seven years of military occupation, while not bitter, is nevertheless recent, and the Japanese feeling of present sovereignty is not complete. Their reactions at present, therefore, correspond pretty closely to those of the newly independent former European colonies, although their government is stable and strongly oriented toward the West, and their institutions are modern and well developed. The Philippines maintain a cordiality toward us unparalleled by any other former colonial area, but nevertheless are possessed of the same hypersensitivity of new sovereignty.
Oriental pre-occupation with European Colonialism is everywhere apparent. In India there are current attempts to curb the learning and use of English, in spite of the fact that the widespread knowledge of this world language is one of the country’s economic and political assets. So also the Philippine efforts to make Tagalog a national language, and the current dropping of American and European history from school curriculums. In Indonesia, where the government cannot begin to govern its existing territory and certainly has shown no capacity for meeting its manifold economic, social, and political problems, one main preoccupation is that of trying to drive the Dutch out of New Guinea.
To Orientals, the Bandung Conference of Oriental States in Indonesia in 1955 was the most important international conference yet held. The conference concerned itself almost exclusively with Asiatic denunciation of past European colonialism. The only voice raised against the much more real dangers of Communist imperialism was that of Sir John Cotwallader, Prime Minister of Ceylon. He failed to survive his next election at home. His successor was elected on a rabble-rousing platform designed to chase out the remnants of British Empire. These imperial remnants were the bases still occupied by the British in Ceylon, which incidentally constituted Ceylon’s only military protection.
Our misfortune in the present scheme of things in the Orient is the fact that we are there in their midst, while the foreign Communists are mostly behind their iron and bamboo curtains. The Soviets and the Chinese Reds are able to keep their fingers in the trouble spots and to stir them vigorously by means of locally grown Communists who take their orders from abroad. We make our own trouble for ourselves in person.
In Japan, where we are currently embroiled in dozens of difficulties of local relations and where our military and government civilians are everywhere evident, there is hardly a Russian to be seen. There may be a hundred or so Soviet representatives in Japan, but they stay in their Embassy and, as a matter of fact, do not even unlock the gate except to admit infrequent visitors. Red China does not have any relations except an occasional trade mission.
The same thing is true in other countries of the Orient. The writer travels the free Orient constantly and has not seen a dozen Russians in as many years. The Red Chinese are surely active in many countries, but blend with the local populations and do their work in various indirect ways. Since they occupy the mainland of Asia, they can keep their military behind their own borders until it is used in earnest, as in the Korean War.
Not only do we have troops and bureaucrats in large numbers in the Orient, we multiply the effect by sending wives and families. We build post exchanges, commissaries, schools, clubs, bus lines, and all of the other paraphernalia of transferring a whole slice of the United States to a reluctant host country. In Japan with about 100,000 military and civilian government Americans, we have to hire a total of some 175,000 Japanese to housekeep them. That may be of some help to the Japanese economy, but it certainly looks like moving in to stay.
Human nature being what it is, Orientals who see Americans digging in but do not see any foreign Communists in their countries, are able to convince themselves that the Communists have no designs on them. A Japanese Diet Member recently made the statement that he would like to hear one good reason why the Soviet or Red Chinese should be thought to have any ulterior interest in Japan. Japanese newspapers are full of letters and editorials to the effect that the Soviet and Red China are busy developing their own countries, hence want peace, and will not bother their neighbors.
To the question of why the Soviet should be interested in relatively unimportant Hungary, the John Doe of Asia is not sufficiently concerned or informed to think of a reply. To the question of why the Red Chinese were sufficiently interested to fight a war over Korea and Indochina, the Asian man-in-the-street all too often makes the dangerous reply that they were helping Asiatics fight against colonialism.
Only in Korea, Viet Nam, and in mainland circles in Taiwan, where they have had bloody experience, and in official Japanese circles is there an awareness of a Red menace. The rest of the Orient exhibits a naive and ostrich-like faith in the good will of the Communists. In Indonesia, which had to fight a Red-financed rebellion a few years ago, President Sukarno is now taking the local Communists into his government and refers to an Indonesian Government without Communists as a “three-legged horse.”
India, which is well aware of the steady Red Chinese encroachment in Tibet and Nepal, prefers to disregard it and rely on Red good will. Burma, however, knows that Red China has actually seized Burmese border territory and has taken a strong position in negotiations.
This morning’s Tokyo newspapers carried the tally of Japanese fishing vessels seized by the Russians. It totalled 56 from January through June of 1957, with 572 crew members. The newspaper reports dispassionately that this total is three boats fewer that the same period last year, which presumably indicated Soviet good faith in living up to its agreement. The whole is contained in three short paragraphs and rouses no comment whatever by the Japanese public.
Our visibility breeds just the opposite feeling. Even aside from the constant problems of human contact, are the questions of “why are your military here, if not to somehow control us?”* During the brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolt by the Soviet last fall, most Japanese advanced the opinion that our military in Japan would do the same thing if a Communist or Red-oriented government appeared to be taking over, peacefully or otherwise, in Japan.
To Orientals with a little knowledge of war, it is difficult to explain our military as protectors. The Japanese saw our garrison troops from Japan thrown into the early stages of the Korean war and saw that they were in no way capable of fighting even that small war. How do we convince them that the division and a half or thereabouts now in Japan could protect them against anything? The same reasoning applied elsewhere. We have only enough military on the spot to be irritating and not enough to conduct the kind of military operation which would be required as protection against the only sort of force likely to be thrown against them.
With the exception of Korea and Taiwan, furthermore, Orientals react coldly to the reasoning that the presence of our military would act as a trigger, pulling our whole strength into repelling any aggression against them. Most Orientals conceive of the triggering effect as much more likely to work in reverse, i.e., their countries would suffer as the result of action directed against our troops. The Communists do their best to promote this concept.
In economic matters also, our officials are present in major strength. They are visible on the spot, making decisions, saying yes and saying no, exerting the obvious power of money over the operations of local government, banking, and business. They make some friends, of course, and like the responsible military leaders, they bend over backwards to do their job well and without friction. The friction is nevertheless there.
The strings which we tie to our disbursement of economic aid are nothing more than those which we think necessary for wise use of the aid. We consider this sort of control more effective when applied largely on the spot. It is this very idea, however, which rubs against the sovereignty of the Orientals in whose countries we operate. They are far less interested, in this phase of their existence, in whether funds are wisely expended than they are in whether a group of visible foreigners sit in their country exercising the authority which goes with such spending.
We Are Mutually Alien
Everything which bears upon the touchy subject of Oriental sovereignty is compounded by the fact that we are Occidentals and alien. In western Europe, we go among descendants of our own ancestors who by and large look like us, act like us, talk pretty much like us, and live under the same social institutions we do. In the Orient we are among people of a different race, different customs, different traditions, and a totally different society.
In the Orient, not one American in a thousand ever learns enough Japanese or Chinese or Tagalog or Hindustani or Malay to carry on a conversation. We know nothing of their thousands of years old culture. Their music grates on our nerves. Their habits are incomprehensible. The ways of their governments are so strange to us that we often do not even know, until too late, that they are objecting to a course we are taking, much less why.
We are just as incomprehensible to them, and they are even more aware of the fact. A Japanese who has seen thousands of Americans in the last twelve years will still stop and stare in wonder if an American appears off the beaten track. An American who expresses a liking for Japanese raw fish or Korean Kimshi is regarded as a curiosity or as a fake. In most Oriental languages, the only word which really means alien or foreign is that used for Occidentals. Other Oriental foreigners are called something like third nationals.
Our administrators and military leaders, who could probably quote the date of the Battle of Hastings or discuss the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, know nothing whatever of the history of the Orient, which is just as old and just as rich as that of Europe.
Being Americans, what we do not understand we too often ridicule. Lacking even a nodding acquaintance with the civilization of the Orient, the average American laughs at it and disparages it because it is different from home. This infuriates Orientals even more, if that is possible, than the coldly superior attitude of the former British colonial administrators. There are plenty of exceptions, of course, but they do nothing in total to disprove the general rule.
The ordinary Oriental, on the other hand, has no way in which to learn and understand American culture except through daily contact with Americans overseas. The American G.I., whatever his merits, and the American way of living overseas, whatever its comforts, are hardly representative of an impressively civilized culture. Orientals, therefore, surround our bases with prostitutes, tattoo parlors, nude photography shops and saloons, and in the end disparage our way of life as much as we do theirs.
The Matter of White and Non-White
As a final commentary on the human relationships between visible Americans and the host Oriental countries, there must be mentioned the matter of race and color, since it underlies much of the trouble.
The Oriental is brown or yellow, and the American is dominantly and intolerantly white. The Oriental is well aware and constantly informed, or misinformed, of American racial and color intolerance. It is a theme propagandized by the Communists and anyone else interested in baiting Americans.
When the Indian Ambassador was refused service in a Texas airport restaurant a few years ago, it was headline news in every Oriental newspaper. Invalidation by the State of Virginia of a marriage between a Chinese and an American got similar prominence. The current school integration trouble in the American south is as well reported in the Orient as in America. The writer is all too frequently asked by Oriental businessmen going to the United States for the first time, if they can expect to have trouble in restaurants and hotels because they are not white.
Americans also unfortunately carry this racial intolerance with them into the Orient, or at least Orientals believe that we do. Orientals are convinced that Americans place the value of an Oriental life well below that of an Occidental. This has been the root cause of the quickly generated violence against Americans when an Oriental is injured or killed by an American.
While most of the people in Taiwan, for example, are very much ashamed of the recent anti-American riot in Taipei, every one of the hundred or so Taiwan Chinese with whom the writer has talked is convinced beyond any argument that the G.I. who killed a Chinese prowler and was acquitted by the Army would have been found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to a good many years in prison if he had killed an American.
The universal word used by G.I.’s for Orientals is “gook.” They applied it to Japanese during the Pacific War, to Koreans of both sides during the Korean War, and to Chinese and all other Orientals whenever there is contact between them. Orientals consider the term racially insulting, which it is, consciously or otherwise.
The killing of a woman shell-scavenger in Japan by an American soldier might have been smoothed over without getting us into the mess in which we found ourselves, if the American public through the press had expressed the slightest sympathy for the dead woman or her family, which included five small children. Instead, the American public did its best to use a legal squabble as a reason for making a hero of the man who did the shooting. The Oriental reaction is exactly as should have been expected.
What Should We Do?
There certainly is no guaranteed course which we can follow in attempting to keep the presently free Orient in the free World. The course we are following now, however, seems all too probable to end in costly failure. We are barely holding our own in influencing Orientals, where the influence of Red China is growing steadily.
Maybe that Red Chinese influence is not matched by internal strength of the Red regime on the mainland, and maybe the 600 million or so individual, hungry, and unimpressionable Chinese will eventually go their way independently of the Soviet .... But these are too many maybes, and the rest of the Orient is too important to risk. A long new look at what we should do to protect it and to lend it help would seem overdue.
It is the writer’s opinion that one theme runs steadily through any appraisal of our ability to aid, protect, and influence the Orient. Given the problems of sovereignty and the friction inherent in long term close contact with us, the effectiveness of any program we adopt must depend upon the degree to which it can work by itself.
The extent of our visibility is a measure of the extent to which whatever we try to do will be slowed down, handicapped, and finally halted by the friction we generate in being visible. We must hope that we can help and influence the Orient to stay in the free world, but we cannot administer it into so doing. In daily contact with them, we are not compatible with Orientals and seem not capable of acting like guests only in their countries. Since they will not tolerate us on any other basis, we had better try to find policies and programs which can be made to function without local administration.
Disposal of U. S. Forces
In the first place, an entirely new strategic appraisal seems necessary. We appear to be making it now, as witness the very recent announcement that ground combat troops are to be shortly pulled out of Japan and the removal will be largely completed by the end of this year. This is a good first move and will ameliorate a good deal of the friction.
Since relations with Japan are of decisive importance to us and since Japan is most likely to continually resent foreign military forces, removal of the 30,000 or so ground combat troops should be followed as quickly as possible by the stripping down of American air and naval strength in that country. We should leave only enough Americans in Japan to somehow maintain the bare mimimum of facilities which would be strategically indispensable to us in the event of war.
While functioning air strength in Japan, the northern anchor to our island chain, is desirable, the writer doubts that it is necessary. A friendly and cooperative Japan is much more valuable. Patrols can be flown from Okinawa or further south. Similarly, the Navy is certainly capable of enough mobility to do without bases at Yokosuka and Sasebo in Japan. No argument of military convenience is strong enough to justify having to defend our bases with tear gas against local mobs, as has happened in Japan. Furthermore, the adamant emotional hostility of Japan to any form of atomic weapons will limit severely the usefulness of these bases.
The same strategic reappraisal should be made elsewhere. When troops and bases create more friction than their military convenience justifies, they must be moved out and replaced by increased mobility of such forces concentrated elsewhere. This might even apply in the near future to Korea. Our ground combat troops there are too few to themselves stop any aggression in strength and will certainly provide increasing friction. The ROK forces are either by now capable of withstanding the initial shock of aggression, or they never will be.
The alternative in our own power position seems to be the concentration of forces in isolated island positions such as Okinawa, Guam, and so on, with the maintenance of only skeletonized bases in the major countries allowing it. We received plenty of Oriental abuse for holding Okinawa, but can withstand it. Okinawa is a small island wholly occupied by us, and the friction there can be localized. There, also, we are visible to and resented by only some 700,000 Okinawans, which is better that having the same experience among ninety million Japanese and twenty million Koreans.
The punishing power of nuclear weapons is such that withdrawal of large forces from advance areas should mean little reduction in power availability. Advance air strips are, of course, helpful in maintaining Air Force fighter strength in readiness. It seems not unreasonable, however, to expect the wide ranging naval air forces in the Pacific to carry that burden of mobile readiness.
MAAG Strength
Aside from actual forces, the military visibility in most Oriental areas is that of our Military Assistance Advisory Groups in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Viet Nam, the Philippines, and so on. These are certainly smaller and less evident than garrison forces and operating bases, but they can cause plenty of friction, as witness the recent riot in Taiwan. As a matter of casual observation and the application of common sense, it seems to the writer that the groups could be cut down in numbers pretty drastically.
There seems, for example, little reason why 3,000 American military personnel with all of their dependents, PX’s, etc. should be needed for advisory purpose in Taiwan. American business carries on technological assistance programs all over the Far East with one or two Americans at a time in buildings valued at many millions of dollars.
It seems to the writer that the military could advantageously make much greater use of the business system of training cadres of Orientals in the United States and having them in turn train their colleagues in their own countries. This is particularly true in the all important features of technological weapons training which should be directly comparable to industrial technical training. Similarly staff and command training could be more efficiently gained by bringing Oriental officers to the United States where better facilities are available.
Perhaps our large investment in military equipment in those countries would be not as well protected without our MAAG groups. That, however, seems an unavoidable feature of this type of operation. If we train their people as well as we can and give them the equipment they can use, then at best we can only hope and trust that they maintain it well and use it well. Our MAAG groups can do a better job only by interposing themselves into the local political and military organization, and that is a worse alternative, as this article has tried to illustrate.
In connection with this reappraisal of disposal of forces should come a hard look at the problem of “camp followers.” Our overseas military programs have reached the point where we are moving whole American cities with our forces. Entirely aside from the question of economy and military effectiveness, this transplanting of so much excess housekeeping grates upon the host countries in the Orient, who look upon it as a sort of military occupation. If we must keep military personnel in an Oriental country, they should come in as military organizations only and leave the dependents and family baggage train behind. They are supposed to be fighting forces and should look and act like such.
Economic Administration
The same sort of reasoning must apply to our various economic aid programs in the Orient. The assistance is necessary, but its administration must be cut to the point where the friction generated does not outweigh the value of the aid.
There is no way in which public funds can be disbursed in a foreign aid program with no waste. It seems to the writer that our money is wasted when it is so carefully administered that it generates resentment to the point of rejection on the part of the receiving country.
We are now, for example, providing what may be considered grant aid to Korea, Taiwan, and Viet Nam. This aid is generally made on the theory of helping the economies of these countries to support the sort of military establishment considered necessary for defense against the real possibility of Communist aggression. Korea and Viet Nam have experienced this aggression, and Taiwan lives under daily threat of it.
Korea and Taiwan each maintain land forces of upwards of half a million men. Their support is demonstrably cheaper than the maintenance of anything like that number of American troops, but still is well beyond the resources of those countries. In addition Korea and Viet Nam are recovering from the devastation of war and the economic dislocation of partition of their territory.
The grant type of aid must presumably go on in those countries, and, since it takes the form to a great extent of commodity imports, it must carry a degree of local administration. Here again, however, we should be able to cut down upon the number of Americans on the local scene. We should move the functions to Washington under a programming system which is less visible than decision making by Americans stationed in the sensitive recipient countries.
A second and most useful form of economic help is that of technology. It has been estimated, for example, that Japanese rice production per unit of land is twice that of India. Our own production of coal per miner is at least five times the average of the Orient. Similar disparity exists in most other fields, some of it, of course, the result of the large and expensive machinery used in the advanced nations, but a good deal of it a matter of learnable techniques and relatively simple equipment.
Our government aid program gives major attention to this technical assistance. It is the famous Point 4 of President Truman’s inaugural address in 1949. We are running afoul, however, of the same human hazards we do in other fields. We send too many “experts” into the Orient, who require expensive housekeeping and who all too often irritate those whom they are supposed to teach. The experts usually do not know the language or anything of the customs, habits, and prejudices of the local population, and the programs tend to evolve into a sort of unwilling reform atmosphere.
Here also, much greater use should be made of the practice of giving Orientals training in techniques in the United States or elsewhere after which they in turn train their own people. Granting the difficulty of finding Orientals adequately prepared for such training in America, this approach is nevertheless the right one, and in the end easier and far more productive per unit of effective results than that of sending large numbers of American experts overseas. Private industry uses it exclusively. In an average size manufacturing plant, for example, one or two Americans would be sent overseas for short periods, while twenty or thirty of the nationals from that country would be trained in the United States.
It may be mentioned also that in bringing an Oriental to America for training, we usually create a friend and propagandist for America. Americans abroad do not very well represent their own culture. It is only in America that the freedom and good will of the American way of life can be appreciated, and Orientals who spend some time in America usually go back to their own countries carrying that appreciation. It should be evident that whatever they then say good about America gets a vastly wider belief than anything our own experts who go overseas can say or do.
Economic development aid in the Orient is too big a subject for treatment here. Suffice it to say that such overall economic development is a long term policy matter, where an ounce of wisdom in arriving at a firm policy which will serve our interests is worth many pounds of administrative activity in the countries to be developed.
As in the case of the military advisory groups, the cutting down of local economic-aid administration will reduce somewhat our ability to protect our investment. The parallel is the same, however. We can do a 100% effective job of supervision only by putting ourselves in the local political and administrative operation, and this defeats the whole purpose of the assistance.
We might as well resign ourselves to the fact that we can exert an influence in keeping the Orient free only by leaving them feeling free from our control. We may waste some money and some military effectiveness by doing so, but we will waste it all, if we do not.
After graduating from the Naval Academy in 1933, Mr. Reday resigned and took special training in the field of economics and international affairs. He returned to active duty from 1943 to 1953. Once more a civilian, he served with MSTS in the Pacific as Chief of Industry and Transportation in the Technical Assistance Mission in Indonesia.
Mr. Reday has been residing in Tokyo since 1953 as General Manager for the Far East for the Celanese Corporation of America. He has been a frequent contributor to the Proceedings.
* Editor’s Note: Removals of U. S. ground forces have recently been announced and were well received by the Japanese.