Tagore’s letter to Yone Noguchi Noguchi, a Japanese poet well known in the West in the early decades of this century, and a friend of Tagore, tried passionately to enlist his support for Japan’s militarism in China.
Santiniketan, West Bengal 1 September 1938
Dear Noguchi, I am profoundly surprised by the letter that you have written to me: neither its temper nor its contents harmonize with the spirit of Japan which I learnt to admire in your writings and came to love through my personal contacts with you. It is sad to think that the passion of collective militarism may on occasion helplessly overwhelm even the creative artist, that genuine intellectual power should be led to offer its dignity and truth to be sacrificed at the shrine of the dark gods of war. You seem to agree with me in your condemnation of the massacre of Ethiopia by Fascist Italy but you would reserve murderous attack on Chinese millions for judgement under a different category. But surely judgements are based on principle, and no amount of special pleading can change the fact that in launching a ravening war on Chinese humanity, with all the deadly methods learnt from the West, Japan is infringing every moral principle on which civilization is based. You claim that Japan’s situation is unique, forgetting that military situations are always unique, and for their atrocities have never failed to arrange for special alliances which divinity for annihilation and torture on a large scale. Humanity, in spite of its many failures, has believed in a fundamental moral structure of society. When you speak, therefore, of ‘the inevitable means, terrible it is though, for establishing a new great world in the Asiatic continent’ — signifying, I supposed, the bombing of Chinese women and children and the desecration of ancient temples and universities as a means of saving China for Asia — you are ascribing to humanity a way of life which is not even inevitable among the animals and would certainly not apply to the East, in spite of her occasional aberrations. You are building your conception of an Asia which would be raised on a tower of skulls. I have, as you rightly point out, believed in the message of Asia, but I never dreamt that this message could be identified with deeds which brought exaltation to the heart of Tamerlane at his terrible efficiency in manslaughter. When I protested against ‘westernization’ in my lectures in Japan, I contrasted the rapacious imperialism which some of the nations of Europe were cultivating with the ideal of perfection preached by Buddha and Christ, with the great heritages of culture and good neighbourliness that went [in]to the making of Asiatic and other civilizations. I felt it to be my duty to warn the land of bushido, of great art and traditions of noble heroism, that this phase of scientific savagery which victimized western humanity and led their helpless masses to a moral cannibalism was never to be imitated by a virile people who had entered upon a glorious renascence and had every promise of a creative future before them. The doctrine ‘Asia for Asia’ which you enunciate in your letter, as an instrument of political blackmail, has all the virtues of a lesser Europe which I repudiate and nothing of the larger humanity that makes us one across barriers of political labels and divisions. I was amused to read the recent statement of a Tokyo politician that the military alliance of Japan with Italy and Germany was made for ‘highly spiritual and moral reasons’ and ‘had no materialistic considerations behind it.’ Quite so. What is not amusing is that artists and thinkers should echo such remarkable sentiments that translate military swagger into spiritual bravado. In the West, even in the critical days of war madness, there is never any dearth of great spirits who can raise their voice above the din of battle, and defy their own warmongers in the name of humanity. Such men have suffered, but never betrayed the conscience of their people which they represented. Asia will not be westernized if she can learn from such men: I still believe that there are such souls in Japan though we do not hear of them in those newspapers that are compelled at the cost of their extinction to reproduce their military master’s voice. ‘The betrayal of intellectuals’ of which the great French writer spoke after the European war, is a dangerous symptom of our age. You speak of the savings of the poor people of Japan, their silent sacrifice and suffering and take pride in betraying that this pathetic sacrifice is being exploited for gun-running and invasion of a neighbour’s hearth and home, that human wealth of greatness is pillaged for inhuman purposes. Propaganda, I know, has been reduced to a fine art, and it almost impossible for peoples in non-democratic countries to resist hourly doses of poison, but one had imagined that at least the men of intellect and imagination would themselves retain their gift of independent judgement. Evidently such is not always the case: behind sophisticated arguments seems to lie a mentality of perverted nationalism which makes the ‘intellectuals’ of today go blustering about their ‘ideologies’ dragooning their own ‘masses’ into paths of dissolution. I have known your people and I hate to believe that they could deliberately participate in the organized drugging of Chinese men and women by opium and heroin, but they do not know; in the meanwhile, representatives of Japanese culture in China are busy practising their craft on the multitudes caught in the grip of an organization of wholesale human pollution. Proofs of such forcible dragging in Manchukuo and China have been adduced by unimpeachable authorities. But from Japan there has come no protest, not even from her poets. Holding such opinions as many of your intellectuals do, I am not surprised that they are left ‘free’ by your Government to express themselves. I hope they enjoy their freedom. Retiring from such freedom into ‘a snail’s shell’ in order to savour the bliss of meditation on ‘life’s hopeful future’, appears to me to be an unnecessary act, even though you advise Japanese artists to do so by way of change. I cannot accept such separation between an artist’s function and his moral conscience. The luxury of enjoying special favouritism by virtue of identity with a Government which is engaged in demolition, in its neighbourhood, of all salient bases of life, and of escaping, at the same time, from any direct responsibility by a philosophy of escapism, seems to me to be another authentic symptom of the modern intellectual’s betrayal of humanity. Unfortunately the rest of the world is almost cowardly in any adequate expression of its judgement owing to ugly possibilities that it may be hatching for its own future, and those who are bent upon doing mischief are left alone to defile their history and blacken their reputation for all time to come. But such impunity in the long run bodes disaster, like unconsciousness of disease in its painless progress of ravage. I speak with utter sorrow for your people; your letter has hurt me to the depths of my being. I know that one day the disillusionment of your people will be complete, and through laborious centuries they will have to clear the debris of their civilization wrought to ruin by their own warlords run amok. They will realize that the aggressive war on China is insignificant as compared to the destruction of their inner spirit of chivalry of Japan which is proceeding with a ferocious severity. China is unconquerable, her civilization, under the dauntless leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, is displaying marvellous resources; the desperate loyalty of her peoples, united as never before; is creating a new age for that land. Caught unprepared by a gigantic machinery of war, hurled upon her peoples, China is holding her own; no temporary defeats can ever crush her fully aroused spirit. Faced by the borrowed science of Japanese militarism which is crudely western in character, China’s stand reveals an inherently superior moral stature. And today I understand more than ever before the meaning of the enthusiasm with which the big-hearted Japanese thinker Okakura assured me that ‘China is great.’ You do not realize that you are glorifying your neighbour at your own cost. But these are considerations on another plane: the sorrow remains that Japan, in the words of Madame Chiang Kai-shek which you must have read in the Spectator, is creating so many ghosts. Ghosts of immemorial works of Chinese art, of irreplaceable Chinese institutions, of great peace-loving communities drugged, tortured, and destroyed. ‘Who will lay the ghosts?’ she asks. Japanese and Chinese people, let us hope, will join hands together, in no distant future, in wiping off memories of a bitter past. True Asian humanity will be born. Poets will raise their song and be unashamed, one believes, to declare their faith again in a human destiny which cannot admit of a scientific mass production of fratricide. Yours sincerely, Rabindranath Tagore