Honored and Dishonored Guests: Westerners in Wartime Japan by W. Puck Brecher (review)

This is an important and groundbreaking book. A study of the Japanese treatment of Westerners living in Japan during World War II is long overdue, and for this reviewer, who lived through the war in Japan as a young boy, Honored and Dishonored Guests is often fascinating, disturbing, and revealing. Based on archival research and on firsthand accounts including memoirs and personal interviews, the book recreates a comprehensive picture of what it was like to live as a Westerner in wartime Japan. In many instances Westerners were surprisingly well treated, especially by the average Japanese who never fully internalized the government’s anti-Western propaganda. Still, as a number of the accounts in this book demonstrate, there was also a darker side. Japan entered the war as a constitutional monarchy in which, as author W. Puck Brecher shows, there was an ongoing respect for the rule of law, but it increasingly became a police state under the control of a powerful military. While the officers of the state, which vis-à-vis most Westerners living in Japan during World War II meant notably its three-tiered police system and courts, often felt compelled to uphold the law, the author shows that they were equally willing, when faced with the demands of new circumstances, to violate the law—particularly toward the end of the war. Essentially, wartime Japan was full of contradictions—as the author demonstrates in multiple ways. On the one hand, the state was formally committed to its own imperial ideology. But it was also, on the other hand, capable of creating pragmatic and situational solutions to complex problems. As the book’s title suggests, Westerners residing in Japan during World War II were in many instances “honored” guests (particularly if they were affiliated with the Allied forces), but they could also become “dishonored” guests. I think the term “guest” is quite revealing, for it hints at the nature of the Japanese social structure: during the war, those considered to be guests were placed in a privileged position, but these same Westerners—even those who had lived in Japan most of their lives—could never become truly Japanese and instead remained perennial outsiders.

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1, titled “Caucasians and Race in Imperial Japan,” begins with a chapter challenging historian John Dower’s notion that World War II in the Pacific was essentially a race war on both sides. Brecher does not deny that racism played a role on the Japanese side of the war, but his approach is more subtle. “Though Japanese and Westerners share ontological predispositions to racial discrimination,” he writes, “theirs was not a symmetrical race consciousness. Nor is it the case that, as Dower asserts, their ‘patterns of supremacism are analogous’ ” (p. 31). Japan, Brecher argues, “focused more on asserting its own spiritual and moral supremacy. Its propaganda was predicated more on its enemies’ historical behavior (imperialism) and cultural degeneracy (racism) than on racial grounds.” Moreover, he adds, “race ambivalence rather than race hate predominated among the wartime public whose perceptions of Westerners were shaped primarily by practical rather than ideological or moral concerns” (p. 32). Brecher underscores that at the core of this ambivalence were Japan’s long experience with Westerners, dating back to the Meiji Restoration, and its having based its own modern transformation on information and help from the West. Though encouraged by Japan’s xenophobic wartime leadership to hate Westerners, the Japanese public was reluctant to follow these leaders down the path of unbridled racism.

Chapter 2 traces the history of Westerners in Japan beginning with the opening of ports under the 1859 Harris Treaty. The treaty port system itself was designed to segregate Westerners from the rest of Japan, and Brecher notes that even after the end of the system in 1899 and well into the twentieth century, Westerners themselves “tended to honor this segregation as natural and necessary” (p...