The Perception Merchants

There is no peace at the cost of someone else’s misery.

An imaginary rendering of a war zone | Midjourney

Prisoner of war

In 1945, my grandfather was captured as a prisoner of war by the Soviet Union. 

“Nothing good comes from war,” he would repeat throughout his life. 

The phrase weighs heavily on us as we see yet another deadly conflict surface. 

“Those politicians and so-called leaders who say a war is unavoidable have never watched their comrades and people die before their eyes,” my grandfather would sigh every time a war broke out somewhere in the world.

A young doctor in his early twenties, my grandfather was sent to the frontlines of war to treat wounded Japanese soldiers in the harsh Siberian climate. When two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan had no choice but to surrender in August of 1945, he was taken prisoner alongside thousands of other Japanese soldiers stationed in Russia at the time. 

Back home was his pregnant wife—my grandmother—despaired, not knowing if she would ever see him again. A few months later, she gave birth to my father. Alone, she raised her two young sons, assuming that her husband had perished in the gulags. 

Then one afternoon on a summer day, as my father was playing in the front yard of a relative’s house where they lived, a strange man appeared at the gate, waving at him. That was my grandfather, returning home after several years, surprising everyone in the extended family. 

No one knew he was still alive. 

Tracing back the record, my father says he must have been four then. That fleeting early memory remains my father’s first glimpse of his father. 

After returning to Japan, my grandfather resumed his medical career. Upon saving enough money for his young family and his practice, he opened a clinic adjacent to their home. My grandmother used to tell us that he built the clinic right next to their house so that he could attend to his patients anytime they needed him, day or night. He did.

Until liver cancer claimed his health at the age of 70, he remained a practicing doctor. By the time he was diagnosed with his cancer, it was too late. 

I remember visiting my grandfather at a hospital and being shocked by how frail he had become in just a few months. He saw us come in and tried to get up, only to be caught by numerous tubes attached to his nose and various parts of his body. His mind was alert but his body was not. 

That afternoon, my grandmother was sobbing beside his bed and lamenting about how he could have taken care of himself better, not just others. The thought ate away at her. She would return to the same mourning over and over for many years. 

I was twelve or thirteen at the time. It was the first time that I witnessed a dying person with my eyes. 

Not long after, he was gone. 

Extreme measures

At the wake after his funeral, an old man approached our family members, including me. 

This man was missing a leg.

“Doctor Inamoto saved my life,” said the old man as he gave a deep bow towards my grandmother and then us. Tears were running down his face. 

This man and my grandfather were fellow prisoners in Siberia 45 years prior. My grandfather must have been 26 or 27. The man with an amputated leg was younger in his early twenties. A kid, I might call someone at that age today, and he still had both of his legs intact.

The living conditions in Siberia were brutal, my grandfather used to tell us. During the winter, nostrils and eyelashes would freeze from the subzero temperatures. Early in his imprisonment, he instructed his fellow Japanese soldiers to lie down next to each other as tightly as possible to preserve warmth at night. A few scoffed at the thought of cozying up with other men and strayed away. That night, they froze to death.

Siberia | Photo by Alex Dukhanov

The Russians had no reason to treat the captives from the enemy state with much decency.

In the morning, the Japanese prisoners would be served hardened bread and cold soup before being sent off into the forest to cut down and transport trees. With forced hard labor like this in a severe climate, some would get injured and it fell on my grandfather to treat and keep them alive. Medical supplies were lacking. From time to time, he would have to resort to extreme measures. And I mean, extreme.

This man was one of those cases. After suffering a terrible injury to his leg from field labor and without much antibiotics or penicillin inside the prison, his wound kept getting worse. It was inevitable that the infection would soon spread beyond his leg and to his torso, threatening his life. 

What my grandfather had at his disposal in prison was a limited amount of anesthetics, disinfectant, and crude equipment. Calling the operation that followed archaic would be an understatement. 

With a hand saw, my grandfather amputated the man’s leg.

A young Japanese soldier during World War II in Siberia | Midjourney

Multipolar world

A few years after my grandfather’s death, I attended an international school in Europe. The school had  250 students from over 70 different countries. It was a melting pot of cultures in its truest sense.

Some of my friends were from countries and regions in the midst of massive geopolitical changes of the 1990s: West and East Germany, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Georgia, the Middle East, Arab countries, and so on. 

Not only were many of those places just a few hours away from where my school was but watching on TV missiles being launched against the country where some of my friends were from made those conflicts that much more real for me as a teenager.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the school held a history forum for students and teachers. As there were kids from both sides of the wall, the school principal did not—could not—present a unipolar worldview. 

This type of forum happened several times during the time I was there: the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Gulf War, and the Slovenian War were the international events around which students and teachers at my school gathered to discuss.

I now realize that these forums helped me see the world from multiple perspectives and that there is a multitude of stories behind what we see on screens. On TV then and mobile now. 

The Perception Merchants of War

In 2002, a book called “The Advertising Agency of War” was published in Japan.  It was written by TV producer/director Toru Takagi at NHK, the BBC of Japan. 

Takagi’s job in the early 1990s was to scour raw materials from overseas and see what could be newsworthy for the Japanese audience the next morning. Some of the subjects he researched included the Bosnian War from 1992 to 1995 and the Kosovo War between 1998 and 1999.

During the Bosnian War, he would survey and watch gory raw photos and footage from the war zones. As those materials were being fed in real-time and lacked detailed context, he couldn’t know whether the Muslims or the Serbs were to blame for the wreckage and the bloodshed. After a few days, nations around the world would start criticizing the Serbs.

In the later years when Albanians were seeking Kosovo’s independence in the Kosovo War, one of the stories he reported was a massacre in which a large number of dead bodies were found in farmhouses. Again, within days, the media tone became “the Serbian side is to blame.”

As we speak, we see a similar narrative tag of war. Both sides are blaming each other for the bombing of a hospital that killed hundreds of innocent civilians.

Takagi wondered why in both wars he covered in the 90s, public opinion was biased against the Serbs.

Through his investigative work and on an online messaging board, Takagi came across the name of an American PR agency that was hired by the Bosnian government. The role the PR agency played was threefold. 

One, they trained the Bosnian government’s foreign minister to become an effective presenter and a capable public speaker on behalf of the government to the international media.

Second, the agency gathered various information about Bosnia's activities and wrote cohesive and easy-to-digest press releases that were favorable to the State of Bosnia. Those releases were then delivered to influential media people and outlets.

And third, with the use of words with highly emotional context such as “ethnic cleansing,” “concentration camps,” etc., the agency would craft messaging that made the international media, which had not shown much interest in the conflict, want to pick up the story.

Using a variety of techniques, these PR experts communicated with policymakers, congressional representatives of voters, opinion leaders, and journalists to create public opinion biased towards their client—the Bosnian government—and constituents. 

Towards the end of the book, Takagi gives a nickname to these PR specialists: The Information Merchants of Death. 

I’d rephrase it this way: The Perception Merchants of War.

Divergent narratives

After the inhumane attacks by the Hamas regime on Israel on October 7, 2023, the US government and many American news outlets were quick to use the word “terrorism” in their commentary and assessment of the situation. 

On the contrary, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida stopped short of calling it a “terrorist attack” when commenting about the situation over X/Twitter. It would take another three days for his office to use the phrase “terrorism” to criticize Hamas.

For the past week or so, I have noticed how the conflict is reported and explained in English vs. Japanese are off-sync. 

The English media, particularly American, focuses on what just happened and what could happen, whereas the Japanese media tends to include the larger context of history, dating back 2,000 years.

In addition, the Western nations such as the US and UK are undeniably pro-Israel but the Japanese government is vague at best. The White House issued a joint statement along with France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, to express their “steadfast and united support to the State of Israel.” Japan is yet to make a clear announcement of support.

Japan is a country of scarce natural resources such as oil and is heavily dependent on Arab nations and the United States. Like many countries, Japan still relies on oil in a myriad of ways. Siding with Israel will put Japan in a precarious position. 

Japan and Japanese leaders are notorious for being vague. However, in this instance, there is a good reason for it. It needs to be careful in how it constructs its messaging to not just the general public in Japan but to the international community.

Journalism, as well as political statements within the construct of states, cultures, and languages, can shape how we as individuals view the world, and particularly, what is happening on the ground in the Middle East now.

Geopolitical matters of the Middle East are not my domain of expertise, nor am I writing this to say the US is right and Japan is wrong, or vice versa.

I am writing this as a reminder that behind the information we see, there is a narrative with intent. That narrative is being designed with the agenda of influencing public opinion and how we perceive a specific nation-state or group. 

War as brand activation

We are a creature of perception. 

The information we consume and the narratives we are fed form our perception of the world around us. Perception becomes reality for each of us, however distorted it may be.

Every nation is a brand of sorts. Every international act is a way for a nation to build its image. War creates news and is highly visible. It instills fear in many and signifies strength for some. It galvanizes people, for better or worse.

War is the ultimate and the deadliest form of brand activation for a nation. 

In a 1992 interview, the director of the aforementioned PR agency hired by the Bosnian government commented:

“Our work is not to verify information. Our work is to accelerate the circulation of information favorable to us, to aim at judiciously chosen targets. We are not paid to moralize.” 

We live in an age in which, the more news and content spread, the more the information platforms benefit. The algorithm is designed in such a way that caters the information to the individual’s subconscious affinity, deepening the polarization of views and understanding of the world further.

In exchange for convenience, we’ve now become accustomed to living only within an information bubble that suits our tastes. Our perspective becomes narrower and narrower. 

News vs. PR. Information vs. narrative. Truth vs. lies.

The boundaries between them are not as clear as one might think. 

The inevitable

My grandfather’s wife, my grandmother, would live a much longer life. She turned 102 in the spring of this year.

My grandmother turning 100 in 2021 | Photo: Tadashi Inamoto 

When she was born in 1921, a global pandemic known as the Great Influenza had swept the world. Although it had subsided by the middle of 1920 in the West after claiming upwards of 50 million lives, the pandemic was ravaging Japan. 

While pregnant, my grandmother’s mother was infected with the deadly flu and so did her two daughters and one son. Her mother and two sisters would survive, but not the young boy. Only a couple of years old, he had lost his life to the disease before my grandmother was born. Getting tested for the flu wasn’t a simple task at the time and no one knows for sure whether my grandmother ever was infected by it or not.

By the time the next global pandemic, COVID-19, started becoming news around the world in early 2020, my grandmother was in a nursing home in Japan. We didn’t know seeing her would become such a rare occasion. 

Isolated from her family as well as being estranged from her other sons, my father became the only access she had to family on the outside. He would bring photos of her grandsons, and their kids to cheer her up. Photos of my brothers and I, and our respective kids, that is.

When she turned one hundred, she fell from her wheelchair and broke her leg. The doctor warned us that she may not make it through the operation. She did. The woman had nine lives. 

Blessed with the wonderful staff of the nursing home, their care, and her overall health, she managed to dodge the bullet of COVID-19 and never got infected. 

Like my grandfather in his later years, her body was getting weak but not her mind. Even at that age, she had vivid memories of her youth before, during, and after the war she had lived through. When Russia started to invade Ukraine in 2021, she would moan the same thing my grandfather used to.

A few weeks before this deadly conflict between Hamas and Israel broke, my grandmother left this world for good. Not from COVID, a fall from her wheelchair, or any inhuman act by a terrorist group. She just went to the other side quietly.

Had she lived a few weeks longer, she would have said the same thing:

“Nothing good comes from war.”

There is no peace at the cost of someone else’s misery.

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