ABSTRACT
SINCE the day of Pearl Harbour the principal and dominating theme of Japanese propaganda for the home front has been steady and unrelenting emphasis on military and naval victories. It has been carried to incredible lengths and steadily maintained, in the face of accumulating evidence to the opposite, through the period of stalemate right into the period of reverses which has now got into its stride. Whatever happens is represented to the Japanese people as a victory, with the occasional slight variation of calling it a “defeat for the enemy”—a victory by implication. Nazi Germany followed the same tactics but had to give them up from about the time of the Stalingrad disaster, for two reasons. Adverse news cannot be shut out from the European continent to the extent it can be kept out of Japanese-controlled Asia; sooner or later the contradiction becomes too blatant and an adjustment must be made. Secondly, Nazi home propaganda committed the initial mistake of promising a quick “final” victory; it thereby led the German people to expect behind every victory announcement the actual end of the war; the fact that the war, which was promised to be a short one, dragged on and on gradually drained all the stimulative value out of “victory communiqués,” and the trumpets and fanfares which accompanied “special communiqués” became bitter irony and had to be silenced. The Japanese propagandists, on the other hand, can afford to go on blowing their fanfares for a considerable time to come; warned by their experiences in China, which incidentally served them as an excellent training ground, they never promised the people a short war; on the contrary, apart from a few over-hasty statements at the very beginning, they consistently emphasised the probable length of war and the impossibility of forecasting when it would end. What they did and do forecast is that it will end in their favour-some day. In the meantime their “victories” are not interpreted as having an immediate, decisive, but rather a future, cumulative effect. Therefore they can go on announcing them as they do without fearing to be suspected by their people of deceiving them. This is an important point, always to be taken into account in appreciating Japanese war news. It divests Japan’s fantastic claims of much that must look, to the Western mind, like sheer, hair-raising preposterousness. The Japanese, used to see their own national history in terms of thousands and tens of thousands of years of “unbroken succession,” do not, at least in their propaganda, grudge this war a few more decades or, if necessary, centuries. Whether, in actual fact, they can afford to do this is quite another matter. Here history will presumably disagree.
