Lost in Translation? Lives may be at stake

In the grand days of the British Empire – or Empuh – we Engish speakers understood that if Johnny Foreigner didn’t understand what we were telling him, we just said it again, louder. After all, it was in his interests to cotton on, pronto. He needed to grasp our instructions to him before he faced the inevitable consequences of not carrying them out.

Things changed little as the accent of the English addressed to him became increasingly American. In fact, if anything, it was more important than ever that all those blighters, aliens as we liked to call them, learned God’s language because the stakes became even higher when they got into trouble for not knowing it.

The attitude prevails to this day, which is why foreign languages attract less and less attention in the curriculum of British schools. Or American ones, come to that.

Still. At the risk of sounding downright unpatriotic, this business of not knowing the lingo the lesser races speak has, occasionally, been a bit inconvenient to us rulers of the universe (sorry, don’t want you to think that we’re all of us rulers of the universe – I should have said the small number of us who take on the terrible burden of ruling the universe for the sake of all mankind). Take, for example, the run-up to that nasty spot of unpleasantness between the United States and the Empire of Japan. You know, in the Pacific, starting in December 1941. A business both sides could have well done without.

It seems things might have been just a bit helped by a better understanding of Japanese in the months before war broke out. Or, putting it another way, sometimes having a bit of information can be worse than having none at all. And if they’d grasped the language, the Yanks might have been considerably better off. Especially the ones who got killed or injured in said unpleasantness.

The Secretary of State of the time was Cordell Hull. And he had the benefit of code-breaking services that deserved their name of ‘Magic’. For instance, all messages from the Japanese Foreign Secretary Shigenori Tōgō to his negotiating in Washington were being cracked.

But then they had to be translated.

His translators led Hull to believe Tōgō had written to his team:

Well, the relations between Japan and the United States have reached the edge and our people are losing confidence in the possibility of ever adjusting them.

He should have read:

Strenuous efforts are being made day and night to adjust Japanese-American relations which are on the verge of rupture.

John Toland, who describes these exchanges in his invaluable book, The Rising Sun, tells us that many Japanese commentators think the translation errors of the time were deliberate. Toland doesn’t agree: “It is far more likely that the inaccuracies came from ignorance of the stylised Japanese used by diplomats. It is also possible that the hastily-trained translators wanted to make their copy more readable and interesting.”

The errors could be serious. For instance:

Conditions both within and without our empire are so tense that no longer is procrastination possible, yet in our sincerity to maintain pacific relationships between the Empire of Japan and the United States of America, we have decided, as a result of these deliberations, to gamble once more on the continuance of the parlays.

would have been better translated as:

The situation both within and outside the country is extremely pressing and we cannot afford any procrastination. Out of the sincere intention to maintain peaceful relations with the United States, the Imperial government continues the negotiations after thorough deliberations.

Worse still, the sentiment rendered as:

This time we are showing the limit of our friendship, this time we are making our last possible bargain, and I hope we can thus settle all our troubles with United States peaceably.

was really:

Now that we make the utmost concession in a spirit of complete friendliness for the sake of peaceful solution, we hope earnestly that the United States will, on entering the final stage of the negotiations, reconsider the matter and approach this crisis in a proper sprit with a view to preserving Japanese-American relations.

So what ensued was a dialogue of the deaf. Or perhaps deafness wasn’t the issue: we might say that, on the American side at least, what we had a team that was partially sighted – and that was perhaps worse than having no sight at all.

Pearl Harbor: a disaster that might have been avoided
with better knowledge of modern languages?

The negotiations, perhaps inevitably, failed. On 7 December, Japanese forces launched a devastating attack on Pearl Harbor. That started a war that would leave at least 2.5m Japanese dead and 106,000 Americans (in the Pacific Theatre).

And we still think that mastering foreign languages isn’t that important a goal?

Fighting yesterday's battles

Generals, it’s said, tend to fight the last war. As do admirals. Why, politicians too, and even their supporters.

It’s true that admirals, in learning their craft, often have to follow successful examples from the past. However, that’s only useful if conditions have remained the same. Sadly, they seldom do.

That can even happen when people make a valiant effort to get ahead of the game. Take US Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan. He researched the subject extensively and concluded that control of the sea was vital in war. The best way of winning such control was through a decisive action between great fleets, in which one would comprehensively defeat the other (see Trafalgar, for instance).

Mahan was read around the world. British sailors devoured his work. The German Kaiser insisted his senior officers study him. Even distant Japan learned the lessons, and applied them in its comprehensive defeat of the Russian imperial fleet in 1905. 

The world’s then dominant naval power, Britain, decided to protect its position by equipping itself with huge battleships. They would be built of steel not wood and have massive guns mounted in turrets so they could be swung to fire in multiple directions. They would be called Dreadnoughts and the first, the original HMS Dreadnought, was launched in 1906. Other nations quickly followed suit, spending huge sums on their own giant battleships. They included the US, even though it had already been home to the event that would make these leviathans obsolete.

Dreadnoughts: already the past
And one plane: harbinger of the future

In 1903, the Wright Brothers gave the first demonstration of controlled, steered flight in a heavier-than-air machine. It wasn’t obvious at the time but the successors to that prototype, together with the submarine, would mark the catastrophic end of the time of the battleship – even though, at that stage, it hadn’t even begun.

The power of submarine warfare was shown in World War 1. Submarines were the unseen enemy that sank merchant as well as military ships, destroying a nation’s ability to defend its trade links, and therefore ultimately – especially for an island nation – its ability to survive at all.

Surface navies were sidelined. Britain and Germany fought only one major sea battle, at Jutland, and whatever Mahan may have thought, it proved indecisive. Instead, all the aspirants after Nelsonian glory in the Royal Navy had to resign themselves to a much less inspiring though far more necessary task: convoy protection. Keeping merchant ships afloat despite submarine depredations was the only way to keep vital supplies flowing.

Air power was dramatically demonstrated in World War 2. In just two waves of attack on 7 December 1941, Japanese carrier-borne aircraft destroyed the battleships of the US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. Just three days later, Japanese planes sank the British battleship Prince of Wales and her accompanying battlecruiser Repulse. The US fleet had been caught by surprise and sunk at anchor but the British ships had been at sea and fully prepared. No clearer illustration could be provided that battleships weren’t the decisive force at sea so many had believed: planes were. The era of the aircraft carrier had dawned. Just five months after Pearl Harbor, the US repelled a Japanese invasion force, at the battle of the Coral Sea – the first naval engagement in which the opposing fleets never sighted each other, instead battling it out through their aircraft.

Meanwhile, two submarine wars were being fought. In the Atlantic, the German U-boat offensive came close to starving Britain, but was ultimately defeated and, just as at the Coral Sea, the key factor was airpower: long range planes based in Iceland attacked submarines on the surface and hit them before they could dive. Meanwhile, the long-suffering Royal Navy had to spend most of its energy in the inglorious chore of guarding convoys.

In the Pacific, on the other hand, US submarines emerged victorious. In the last few months of the war, not a single tanker reached Japan, denying industry and the military of the fuel oil vital to prosecute the war. Japan’s failure to foresee the importance of submarine warfare and lay on counter-measures cost it dear.

Not everyone was caught up in the past. Some, in the Japanese and US navies alike, realised that new conditions had created the need for new doctrines. But many clung on to the old notions, particularly in Japan, where hankering for the decisive naval engagement between great ships survived until the end of the War.

They were looking backwards. It didn’t work. It was the people who moved with the times who came out on top.

A lesson we still need to learn. In Britain today, we have a Right that looks back nostalgically to a time when the country bestrode the world alone and didn’t need to depend on others. And we have a Left that longs to fight the battles of the forties and fifties again, where our salvation apparently lay with state control, forgetting that when we actually tried that out, the State proved more stifling than inspiring.

Ah, well. Yesterday’s battles. So much more fun to fight, even though they don’t prepare us particularly well for the far more complex ones we face today.

As the champions of the battleship discovered.

Terrorism: hardly a tactic refused by the West, and by no means an expression of power

The atmosphere today is febrile with the fear of terrorism. 

Not without reason. If the attacks on Paris prove anything, they prove that terrorists are capable of reaching right into the places we think of as safest and hit us there. That’s a prospect that makes ISIS seem frighteningly powerful.

We’d do well, however, not to be carried away by our natural fear. In particular, we mustn’t overstate the power of a terrorist movement. In reality, terrorism is precisely the opposite of the expression of power – it is a blind lashing out in impotence, by a movement incapable of exerting real power against its foes.

Nor should we make the mistake of thinking the West incapable of acting in equally terrorist ways. Indeed, we should remember that when the Western democracies went for terrorism, they wreaked incomparably more harm than ISIS ever has.

After the defeat of France by Nazi Germany, Britain was briefly left to fight on alone – although it wasn’t quite as isolated as that sounds, since it could draw on the support of a still substantial empire. However, Britain was in no state to wage an effective ground war against Germany. Indeed, when France and Britain together had decided to strike at Germany using ground forces, it was through an invasion at Narvik in Norway, designed to win access to Swedish iron ore supplies, and deny them to the Nazis. The campaign ended in the ignominious retreat of the French and British forces, and the defeat of Norway by Germany, which promptly occupied the country (as it had Denmark on the way).

At sea, British dominance was unchallenged. But Germany wasn’t fighting a naval war, apart from the submarine campaign against convoys supplying Britain – in which it was giving the Royal Navy a tough battle.

So, in its inability to achieve any kind of success on land, and fully committed in a defensive battle at sea, Britain could only turn to air power to produce some evidence to its population of effective action against the enemy. Hence was born what came to be called the strategic bombing campaign. Cutting through technical and apparently neutral terms, that was the mass bombing of German cities.

The thing about bombing cities is that the only thing it will certainly do is kill a lot of civilians. Indeed, something like 305,000 Germans were killed by this campaign. Nearly 800,000 were wounded. 7.5 million were made homeless.

Aftermath of the bombing of a German city in World War 2

Naturally, the campaign wasn’t openly described as terrorism in Britain (it was, equally naturally, in Germany). It was justified as a way of degrading German industrial capacity, in which it was a failure: production continued to grow throughout the war. However, it was also presented as a means of breaking the population’s willingness to support the war. The Area Bombing Directive of Valentine’s Day 1942 (history is full of ironies) which began the carpet bombing of cities, set as its objective “to focus attacks on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular the industrial workers.” That really is the textbook definition of terrorism: deliberate targeting of a civilian population in order to destroy its morale.

The Germans used the same approach. Over 60,000 British deaths were caused by German bombing. The Germans were just as happy to adopt terrorist tactics as the British; only lack of resources prevented them causing the same level of damage.

So a first observation: it would take over 2000 attacks like last Friday’s in Paris to inflict on the French the kind of destruction the Allies wreaked in Germany. When it came to terror, we had the resources to be a lot more effective at it than ISIS is or ever will be.

And a second observation: it was no evidence of strength on the part of Britain, and later the USA. It’s hard to point to any advantage to the Allied cause that came from bombing German cities. Indeed, it often did us harm. As military historian Correlli Barnett has argued, the campaign diverted resources from providing air cover for convoys, driving Britain nearly to starvation at the height of the U-boat campaign. When it came to depleting German capacity, far more was achieved by bombing railways and canals. No, the bombing was the reaction of a nation that could see no way to win significant victories for the time being, lashing out at its enemies in the only way it could. It hardly mattered whether it did anything useful.

The use of terror tactics by ISIS is of the same order. It had some spectacular success initially in Iraq and Syria but now it’s bogged down. Terror is a way of venting its hatred against its enemies, whether in Lebanon, at Sharm El Sheikh, or in Paris, and it matters little whether it achieves anything for its cause.

In fact, it looks strongly as though ISIS is doing itself harm. It has brought down a Russian airliner and attacked Paris. That has suddenly brought together people who were having real trouble reaching any kind of common ground. We may even see NATO and Russia finally coordinating their actions in the Middle East to defeat ISIS, before considering the questions on which they have differences.

Rather like Japan attacking Pearl Harbor, ISIS may have woken a sleeping giant. That may seal its fate.

See what I mean? The use of terrorism doesn’t show power, it shows weakness. In this case, a possibly fatal weakness.

An early and illustrious exponent may explain why politicians indulge in so much BS

When it comes to BS, I’m sure most would agree that few can rival politicians. 

To be fair, I’ve worked, and even enjoyed working, with a number of salesmen (which includes women, by the way) who would give them a good run. Overall, however, I have to say that none achieve quite such outstanding mastery of BS as our statesmen.

Generally speaking, the ‘B’ in ‘BS’ stands for ‘Bull’. That’s why I was amused to come across a case of a fine BS performance by a politician where the ‘B’ stood for ‘Bird’.

The particular politician who established himself as a champion in this field was William Henry Seward. He would later win his place in history, firstly by being the front runner for the Republican US Presidential nomination in 1860. To the amazement of many, he failed to become the candidate, and then showed his quality by backing the rival who beat him, Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, at a time when the tradition was that candidates did not campaign for themselves, Seward did more to secure Lincoln’s election than any other man, canvassing 15 states, all but one of which went to his candidate in the general election, giving Lincoln the White House.

Seward then became Lincoln’s most valuable ally and his Secretary of State throughout the Civil War.

His great BS moment, however, came some time before all this. Back in 1856, then Senator Seward took legislative action to address the growing needs of US agriculture. At the time, one of the world’s main fertilisers was guano – sea bird excrement. BS, in fact.

Guano was mostly collected from islands on which the stuff had gathered for years or centuries. Rather like the Bull form of BS, which piles up in every increasing depth in our great legislative arenas.

Seward brought forward a proposal to give the US the right to occupy any guano island not already in the possession of a foreign nation. He was successful, and the Guano Island Law was enacted on 18 August 1856. Seward had made it clear that it was not intended to provide the United States with a means to extend its possessions, but only to give it access to sources of guano not claimed by anyone else, which could be given up later, once the supply had been exhausted.

However, though it left in this option for the US to withdraw from such islands, it didn’t make it obligatory to do so. Guano ceased to be a particularly useful fertiliser, as other new forms became available, soon after the law was adopted. But of the more than 100 islands claimed, the United States still holds on to twelve. One at least is relatively well known.

Within six months of its attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, which failed to eliminate the US threat to Japanese naval dominance of the Pacific, Japan had another go at achieving that aim. On 6 and 7 June 1942, a major battle was fought that cost Japan four aircraft carriers to the US’s one. By then, Japan no longer had the resources to make good such losses. In other words, it was a turning point in the war in the Pacific, after which Japan never again had the opportunity to knock out the US as a naval rival.

By what name do we call that battle? By the name of the American naval base that was the key to the Japanese attack: Midway.

Idyllic Midway Atoll.
But the airstrip shows that the military matters more than the guano

The Midway atoll was a collection of islands seized by the US under the provisions of Seward’s Guano Island Act. One of the twelve such possessions that was never given up. Even though the guano is, presumably, no longer anything more than a bit of an unsightly nuisance.

All this, I feel, makes Seward something of a BS star. I mean, how many politicians have achieved anything of such lasting effect from mere BS? He became a major American statesman later, one of the great Secretaries of State, but you have to admit that you can already see from his guano measure, that he would leave a lasting mark on American history.

Incidentally, the Guano Islands Act has never been repealed. It’s on the US statute book to this day. It’s still in effect.

Perhaps that’s why so many politicians go in for so much BS: they know from Seward’s example that it can be of historic importance.

Sadly, however, they seldom get beyond the Bull variety.

From Japan: a striking study of death in war, and another of peace in death

Don’t get me wrong: The Eternal Zero is not a great film. There’s far too much overacting, some of the sentiment is nothing short of cheesy, and the use of massed violins in the background whenever the plot gets poignant is so overstated you have to smile at it.

No. What makes The Eternal Zero worth watching is that it’s a Japanese view of the Japanese side in World War II, and that’s immensely refreshing.

The story starts with the discovery by a young woman and her younger brother that the man they have always called grandfather, is in fact the second husband of their grandmother and the stepfather, rather than natural father, of their mother. Their blood grandfather, Kyuzo Miyabe, was an airman of the Japanese Imperial Navy, killed in a 1945 Kamikaze mission. His role gives the film its title: he flew Mitsubishi Zero fighters.

The Mitsubishi Zero

The film has been criticised as a glorification of the Japanese war effort, which surprised me. It struck me as a well-crafted denunciation of the war. As the young people find out more about the film’s true protagonist, Miyabe, they get to know a man whose only objective in the war was to survive it and to return, alive, to his family. Already, after taking part in the attack on Pearl Harbor, where he points out to the triumphant young pilots that there was nothing to cheer about since they sank not a single aircraft carrier, he realises that the war is lost.

From then on, therefore, he sees every life lost as a waste. Some of the finest young Japanese men are being recruited as pilots; he believes that they have much more to contribute to Japan alive, after the fighting is over, than dead in a lost cause. That view only intensifies when he finds himself training these men to take part in Kamikaze missions.

Sacrificial victims in a hopeless cause

Did anyone hold these views in Japan back then? I don’t know. But it’s a pleasure to see them being advanced by a film maker today, as a legitimate view of the war, especially when leading figures, such as Prime Minister Shinzō Abe, are still not prepared to face up to the shame and waste of the nation’s war effort. And whatever its other failings, the film communicates its central message powerfully.

So how did a man committed to surviving manage to die as a Kamikaze pilot? Well, that’s the central irony of the film, and you’ll have to watch it to find out. In my view, the explanation it gave worked and wrapped up the plot well. If, perhaps, a little cheesily…

Still, well worth watching for all that.

Departures – a film I keep coming back to

Since I’m on the subject of Japanese films, did you ever see Departures? Now that really is extraordinarily good. The fact was recognised in its winning the 2009 Oscar for best foreign film (beating Waltz with Bashir which is maybe a little over the top – the Israeli study of the horror of the invasion of Lebanon is outstanding).

Departures is the tale of a young cellist with a Tokyo symphony orchestra that goes bankrupt. He’s forced to find a new job, for which he heads back to the old family home he has inherited, out in the country, where he was brought up by his mother after his father left them. He takes a job with a company called ‘Departures’. However, it isn’t a travel agency, which would have been honourable, but a company concerned with that other, final departure we all have to face, to an undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller ever returns.

The handling of the dead is, apparently, regarded as far from honourable, leading to terrible shame when the truth finally comes out.

The film deals with issues of life as well as of death, it handles loss and joy, shame and vindication, with sensitivity and poignancy. It explores what it is to be a parent, a partner or a child. It shows how colleagues can react with loyalty and support. Above all, it shows how the sensitive and, in this instance, supremely skilful treatment of a dead body can contribute to making harrowing loss bearable.

A bereavement accompanied can be more bearable

Strongly to be recommended.

Fun with counter-factuals

The counter-factual is one of the more amusing ways of looking at history. Completely useless, but when did that ever make things less fun? It’s entertaining to wonder what would have happened if Lincoln had not been murdered or if Dubya Bush had had a working brain. Entertaining but useless because we’re stuck with the history we have and that just wasn’t the way things worked out, whatever we might have wished.

But as well counter-factuals about people, you can also play the game with dates. For instance, 7 December 1941. That, as few Americans will need reminding, is the day the Japanese Imperial Navy launched its ultimately disastrous attack on Pearl Harbor. 


Perhaps the real key date is actually not 7 December but 12 November, the day the decision to launch the attack was probably finalised. 

Pearl Harbor: bad news for the US at first glance;
far worse for Japan (and Germany) on more mature reflection

There was nothing inevitable about the decision. The Japanese didn’t have to swing South after their successful campaigns in China, they certainly didn’t have to attack the United States. They could have chosen to go North and take on the Soviet Union, ignoring the US Pacific Holdings and West European Powers whose colonies they walked all over in South East Asia.

Had Japan taken on the Soviets, there’s no reason to assume the US would have entered the war at that time. There was massive opposition to that entanglement and Roosevelt, whatever his personal feelings, would have found it hard to get stuck in against the pressure. And joining in the war to help out the Soviet Union? That would have gone down like a lead balloon.

So just at the time that the Soviets were in a battle for their lives against Nazi Germany, whose forces came within 12 miles of the centre of Moscow, they might have found themselves oblige to divert forces eastward to counter an invasion from that quarter. Would the Germans then have been beaten in the West? And had Germany been able to extract its forces from a successful campaign in Russia, how long would Britain have lasted?

But none of that happened. On 12 November 1941 the Japanese decided that it was sensible to take on the might of the United States. The Germans who were determined to support their Japanese allies against the US, declared war, and Roosevelt was in with an excellent justification and no need to overcome public opinion.

It was probably the most stupid decision the Japanese government could have taken. As a result, where I might deplore it in the case of Dubya, I’m delighted by this demonstration that imbecility is not incompatible with high political office:  the alternative suggests outcomes I prefer not to contemplate.


12 November 1941: a date that deserves a glass raising to it.