[For our purposes, Toronto columnist Jonathan Kay’s intriguing observation, ‘It makes no moral sense that beauty should erase sin. And yet, in this world at least, it does’ should be slightly paraphrased by substituting “admiration” for “beauty.” This would broaden it, since beauty is one of the things that everyone admires. In the youtube clip below we see how strongly Jim, the protagonist of Steven Spielberg’s 1987 film Empire of the Sun, admires the Japanese, despite their sins of imperial aggression and racial superiority. It has been estimated that the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in the years leading up to the second World War resulted in the deaths of 20 million Chinese. And in the wider war that followed, thousands of Western prisoners, both soldiers and civilians, of whom Jim was one, suffered the inhuman treatment the Japanese Imperial army meted out as a matter of course to those who dishonoured themselves by surrender. Nevertheless, Jim admires and in some way even identifies with his captors. Perhaps the primary reason is what is called the “halo” effect. Jim is passionate about aircraft, and it could be argued that the propeller driven fighter aircraft of those few years represent the high aesthetic point in the history of aviation. But the airplane he admires, the Zero (by Mitsubishi), is a Japanese airplane. Though a dangerously superior machine when first encountered by American fighters, which it swept from the sky, it had now fallen behind in the relentless arms race. But that’s academic from Jim’s point of view. As a slave labourer in the internment camp adjacent the Japanese air base, the Zero is the only object he has the opportunity to worship. The exotic nature of Japanese culture with its discipline and ritual is probably an added attraction for a precocious boy like Jim. Finally there is an unspoken friendship between him and a Japanese boy, likewise smitten with airplanes, who view each other and share their passion through the barb wire that separates them. But admiration and love that is based on anything less than an absolute like “the good” must always be unstable. Sure enough, when the Americans attack the base in a plane that hopelessly outclasses the Zero, the P51 Mustang or, as Jim calls it, the Cadillac of the Sky, his dismay at the destruction of the air base he helped to build turns suddenly to delight. An American pilot who waves at him as he flies by transforms the reversal of Jim’s emotional allegiance into a kind of epiphany. The lesson to be taken, in my opinion, is that what is especially true of children is also true of grown up children: without a commitment to the absolute, emotions of loyalty can get transferred with a shocking rapidity from losers to winners.]

Jim arrives at the internment camp

The American attack on the air field

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