West Across the Pacific: American Involvement in East Asia from 1 ...

Some may question choices of emphasis that Conroy makes on grounds that his work encourages collaborationism. For example, among Chinese leaders, Wang Ching-wei, the former close associate of Sun Yat-sen who was willing to accommodate the Japanese invasion of China and become the head of Japan’s China, receives more of Conroy’s attention that either Mao Tse-tung or Chiang Kai-shek. However, as Conroy implicitly argues, “collaborationist” is only a word, in fact a power-laden one usually trotted out to justify absolute adherence to certain military or so-called patriotic agendas. Like the word “appeaser,” it may have a certain appropriateness in rare good versus evil situations, such as closing ranks against the Nazis. But on a question such as, was it even acceptable to consider China’s accommodating Japan, or the United States’ accommodating Japan, or later the United States’ accommodating communism, it might be pointed out that a collaborationist or appeaser from one angle represents a peacemaker from another. Conroy again and again tries to search out the peacemakers or would-be peacemakers from amid the pomp of militarists and patriots and the debris of historical records. Did a certain embassy official, or perhaps a private businessman, Quaker service representative, or some young left-wing idealist, try to bridge a gap? Conroy shows special interest in people not stuck rigidly to a nation-state or an -ism. In this way, he anticipates the postmodern sense that rigid categories of my nation and my enemy’s nation, my -ism and my enemy’s ism, are out of date.

One cannot utter the forbidden thought, “It didn’t matter so much that the United States defeated Japan,” meaning that other outcomes—not necessarily Japan’s defeating the United States, but Japan’s becoming as hegemonic in East Asia as the United States in Latin America—might not have led to any worse a twenty-first century than what actually came to be. Postmodern-postcolonialism, of course, brings forbidden thoughts from the margins. “Son, if it hadn’t been for these young men fighting for our freedom in this or that place, we wouldn’t have the world you and I take for granted today!” Maybe, but is this not also a truism? Granted, we would live in another world, but who knows its chain of events?