Portrait of a Japanese

"We'll defeat the Japanese in the end," said Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, "but we shouldn't look at the war with them through rose-colored glasses."

Secretary Stimson has had a record of Tightness about the Japanese stretching back to 1931, when, as Secretary of State, he condemned the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in terms far stronger than the rest of the diplomatic world was prepared then to accept. As Secretary of War he has personally been guilty of no cocky bombast, has indulged no huggermugger secrecy, has, instead, been frank, grave, honest. And so his words last week deserved a hearing.

He gave the warning because he respects the Japanese man as a fighting mechanism and wants the U.S. public not to underrate that mechanism. "There have been reports," he said, "that the Japanese in the Philippines are badly trained troops, ill-equipped. I regret to say that these are erroneous. The cold truth is that the Japanese are veterans and they are well-equipped. The Japanese soldier is short, wiry and tough. He is well-disciplined.

The Japanese staff officers' work has been of a high order." Outside. In battle dress a Japanese soldier looks like a badly wrapped brown paper package. His legs are too short, his pants are baggy, his leggings droop, his tunic is loose, his kit askew. He wears muddy leather shoes. He may have on a sweater or messy fatigue clothes.

But the sloppiness is misleading. For his size, this man-weapon carries an extraordinary amount of equipment. His .25-caliber rifle or machine gun is light and accurate to 1,000 yards. He can carry 400 rounds of its little bullets, twice as many as the load of larger bullets the larger U.S. trooper totes. He carries a bayonet, a canteen, a helmet with a little gold star on it. He carries five days' rations of rice and sardines, and he tends his own cooking.

Physically he is as tough as he is un handsome. From the top of his shaved head to the bottom of his splay-toed feet he is hard. His buttocks are big with marching. His arms are strong, and he can dig himself into a shallow trench quickly and neatly. His eyes are generally good, and there is no physical reason why his aim should not be clean.

He walks like a duck, runs like a man cut off at the knees. "They didn't charge," said one U.S. officer, describing a Japanese advance, "but crouched forward just a little bit, lifting their knees high in a sort of imitation goosestep. They kept coming forward in pairs, one directly behind the other."

Inside, the Japanese soldier is as tangled as the wires behind a telephone switchboard. From birth he has been taught the glory of dying for the Emperor. He knows what the manual says: "To die participating in the supreme holy enterprise of mankind (war) must be the greatest glory and the height of exaltation." Knowledge that he may die, that he may never go back to the gardens, the chrysanthemums, the neatness, the singing, the clean raw fish and warmed-up sake that are home, makes him in the field something quite different from what he was in peacetime Japan. It makes him ruthless, cruel, lascivious. When his officer is not looking he spits in the white prisoner's food. He has no compunction (since there has not been time to build prisoners' enclosures) in whamming his rifle down on the captives' insteps, to break bones and prevent escape. At home he was gentle, sensitive; he cried at the movies. Now he is different: he has raped Chinese girls and can't help wondering what white ones would be like.

But he is not bent on suicide, as popularly supposed. He will die, if he has to, but not eagerly. He is human; he can be cowed. Best description of his sensations in the face of death appears in Wheat and Soldiers, written by a young soldier after a year in China.

A soldier offered me his shovel. I took it and unconsciously traced the characters "Father" and "Mother" in the soft sand. Then I erased them and wrote the names of my wife and children. I touched the good-luck omen my mother had given me and I thought of her prayers for my safety. . . . I murmured: "I don't want to die. Can nothing help me?" I put my hand on my heart as though to stop its pounding and told myself that this was not fear. But I was apologizing to myself. For that's what it was--fear.

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