Empire of the Sun

“Aircraft had always interested Jim, and especially the Japanese bombers that had devastated the Nantao and Hongkew districts of Shanghai in 1937.”

On his way to a Christmas party at his parents’ friends’ house, Jim plays with his balsa wood aircraft and thinks about his love of planes. On one level, this merely indicates an innocent and common childhood enthusiasm. However, Jim’s specific interest in the Japanese planes that bombed Shanghai, killing thousands, shows that something more sinister is at play. Jim has already started to identify with the indiscriminate violence and power of aerial warfare.

“Perhaps the spirit of the dead aviator had entered him, and the Japanese would join the war on the same side as the British?”

Jim has just returned from Hungjao Aerodrome where he sat in the cockpit of a crashed Japanese aircraft. Jim attributes a mystical significance to this event and feels a deep emotional bond with the now dead Japanese pilot. This contributes to Jim’s desire to join the Japanese air force and his confused—and severely mistaken—view that this could be compatible with fighting on the same side as the British.

“Jim always longed to climb aboard the freighters and explore their drowned cabins, a world of forgotten voyages overgrown by grottoes of rust.”

Just before the Japanese attack on the Petrel, Jim looks at some sunken Chinese freighters in the river opposite his hotel. The idea of these wrecks and the past adventures and stories they seem to contain fascinate Jim. This interest prefigures his continuing obsession throughout the novel with ruins and, increasingly, the process of death.

“The British newsreels were filled with lies.”

Following the Japanese sinking of the Petrel and their seizure of the International Settlement, Jim reflects on the falsity of British wartime propaganda. The newsreels suggested that the British could defeat the Japanese easily and that their two battleships in the region, “The Repulse” and “The Prince of Wales,” were unsinkable. Both claims are dramatically disproven. In turn, this leads Jim to question the broader authority and honesty of the world of British adults who raised him.

“Suddenly it occurred to him that these two American sailors might want to eat him.”

After weeks on his own, Jim ought to be happy to meet two sailors, Frank and Basie, ostensibly on the same “side” in the war as himself. However, Jim correctly intuits that the two sailors are manipulative and dangerous characters. While they might not literally want to eat him, they seek to use Jim for their own ends, even trying to sell him to Chinese merchants.

“He was bare-chested, and his emaciated ribs were like a birdcage in which Jim could almost see his heart fluttering.”

Jim describes a starving British soldier he sees in the detention centre at the open-air cinema run by the Japanese. On one level, this shows the horror and brutality of these places, where ill or injured prisoners are given severely inadequate rations and no medical care. The description also shows Jim’s growing indifference to human suffering and his interest in the aesthetic phenomenon of human skeletons and death.

“Once he and Basie had admitted their part in this supplementary ration scheme all guilt had gone.”

In the detention center, Jim helps nurse the injured Basie back to health and participates in his schemes to get more food. One of these involves taking the rations of dead or dying prisoners by stealing their mess tins. Disturbingly, Jim feels little remorse for engaging in such immoral activity. This demonstrates how thin the veneer of civilization and morality is when people are on the brink of starvation.

“For all their movement, the Japanese aircraft were its only fixed points, a second zodiac above the broken land.”

As Jim tries to sleep in a timber store on his way to the internment camp, he sees the lights of Japanese aircraft in the sky through the open doors. This comment shows how order and meaning in the ordinary world have been destroyed by the war. In the absence of this, the Japanese planes and the authority behind them seem to offer the only stable source of structure and meaning.

“He knew that the Chinese soldiers were being worked to death, that these starving men were laying their own bones in a carpet for the Japanese bombers who would land upon them.”

Before going to Lunghua camp, Jim and his fellow prisoners are forced to help build a runway nearby for the Japanese. There, Jim witnesses firsthand the horrific fate of the captured soldiers who are worked to death to increase the power of the force oppressing them. Symbolically, it is their bones which the Japanese planes land on after bombing other Chinese people. Jim’s realization prefigures both his own fear of death and his deepening connection to the Japanese air force.

“Naming the sewage-stained paths between the rotting huts after a vaguely remembered London allowed too many of the British prisoners to shut out the reality of the camp.”

Some of the British prisoners name the paths in the camp after famous streets in London, like “Piccadilly” and “Knightsbridge.” This action is absurd and inappropriate given the grim and filthy reality of the “streets” in the camp. As Jim highlights, this desperate nostalgia also blinds the British prisoners to the immediate demands of survival and escape. For example, Jim notes how the prisoners who made the signs do not help him clean the septic tanks or boil the water to make it safe. As one might expect, such behavior leads Jim to have a low opinion of the British.

“Talk of bravery embarrassed Jim. War had nothing to do with bravery… However brave, there was nothing the Japanese could do to stop those beautiful and effortless machines.”

In a discussion about whether the Japanese will fight if the Americans land at Woosung, Dr. Ransome reminds Jim of the boy’s belief in the bravery of Japanese soldiers. While Jim still contends that the Japanese soldiers are braver than their British or Chinese counterparts, his view of bravery and of war has changed during his time in the camp. Having seen the power of the American B-29 bombers firs hand, he realizes that courage is unimportant in modern warfare. This more cynical view of the war also foreshadows his disillusionment with the ideal of the fighter-pilot, in which he had invested so much emotional energy.

“[T]he doctor was curiously reluctant to discuss religious topics with Jim, although he himself went to church services on Sunday morning.”

Jim would like to discuss the question of the soul of a recently deceased prisoner, whom Jim helped to bury, with Dr. Ransome. The doctor’s reluctance to discuss any theological issues with Jim symbolizes the man’s unwillingness to confront the very immediate questions of life and death raised by existence in the camp. This is true despite the doctor going through the motions of religiosity by participating in services.

“[T]here was something absurd about their high-pitched voices—as affected as the rugby match which Dr Ransome had arranged the previous winter.”

Much of the activity in Lunghua camp, especially by the British prisoners, is designed to distract them from the grim realities of life and their fears about what will happen afterwards. As such, plays are performed, a camp school is set up, and Dr. Ransome even organizes a rugby match. On one level, these activities can be seen as helping prisoners deal psychologically with the horror of the camp and avoiding despair. On another level, however, and particularly as rations start to be cut, they allow for a collective deception about their true plight and hinder any practical efforts to address it.

“It was doubly ironic, as Jim heard Dr Ransome remark, that their value continued to rise even though almost all the prisoners in the camp were either impotent or infertile.”

In the camp, contraceptives are used as a form of currency, even though there is widespread impotence and infertility, caused by malnutrition and stress. In one sense, this strange reality highlights the persistent desire of human beings to trade and use systems of money, even in the most unlikely of settings. It also highlights the desperate desire of the inmates to maintain a sense of normalcy by having a trading system.

“The whole display, like their lack of weapons, was intended to show the British prisoners that the Japanese despised them, first for being prisoners, and then for not daring to move an inch[...].”

In the camp parade ground, the Japanese soldiers beat a Chinese rickshaw driver to death in full view of the British inmates. As Jim highlights, this is a show of authority designed to humiliate the British. The Japanese are emphasizing the British’s status as prisoners insofar as they are unwilling to risk their safety or life to help another or for their own honor. Such a demonstration makes Jim lose respect for the British and makes him identify with the Japanese even more strongly.

“Remember you’re British.”

Mr. Maxted reproaches Jim when Jim is about to explain that the Japanese soldiers do not need to kill them because “they are already dead.” Maxted’s remark is intended to emphasize a supposedly “British” commitment to rationality and level-headedness and a refusal to fall prey to pessimism or excess emotion. The remark highlights Jim’s conflicted identity. He is seen as British and encouraged by the other inmates to identify with British values. However, Jim was brought up in China, identifies with Japanese pilots, and due to his experience is increasingly drawn toward an “un-British” stoical pessimism.

“Pushing the wooden box into the river had been a sentimental but pointless gesture, his first adult act.”

On the march to Nantao stadium, Jim takes his remaining possessions in a wooden box. However, the difficulty and rigor of the walk leads Jim to abandon this box in a river. On one level, this is merely a practical necessity. On another level, it symbolizes Jim’s break from the past and from the childhood world represented by his possessions in the box.

“An immense pathos surrounded the throttle and undercarriage levers, the rivets stamped into the metal fabric by some unknown Japanese woman on the Mitsubishi assembly line.”

Jim sees the underside of a downed Japanese Zero fighter plane. His comments reveal his intense emotional attachment to Japanese airplanes that only deepens as the novel progresses. At the same time, it shows how the now adolescent Jim is projecting his frustrated libidinal energy onto these machines, tying his love for them to an imagined Japanese woman who helped make them.

“He was going back to his real home. If Shanghai was too dangerous, perhaps his mother and father would leave Amherst Avenue and live with him in Lunghua.”

After surviving the march to Nantao stadium, Jim returns to Lunghua camp. He has become so accustomed to life there that he now considers this to be his real home, not Amherst Avenue, and wishes his parents to join him there. This fact is a sad testimony to the extent to which Jim has become institutionalized by the camp and how he cannot imagine a life beyond it.

“The Americans in these magazines had fought an heroic war, closer to the comic books than Jim had read as a child. Even the dead were glamorized, the living’s idea of the dead […].”

Jim reads descriptions of the war in copies of “Reader’s Digest.” He feels that these accounts bear little resemblance to his own experience. They seem to present a romanticized vision of the war based on courage, noble sacrifice, and unambiguous enemies and victories. In contrast, Jim’s war is characterized by ambiguity and chaos. People rarely act heroically, and the lines between friends and enemies are often unclear. Ballard suggests that Jim’s experience of the war is closer to reality than the standard historical or cinematic accounts are.

“The war had changed the Chinese people… lost puppet soldiers looked at Europeans in a way Jim had never seen before the war, as if they no longer existed.”

Jim is captured by a group of bandits, the leader of which is an ex-Chinese officer named Captain Soong. Soong’s attitude towards him is emblematic of a change of attitude on the part of Chinese people towards Europeans living in China. They are no longer deferential or subservient to Europeans. Instead, inspired by Japan’s successes against the European powers in the war, they wish to be masters of their own destiny without European or American influence.

“He needed the pilot to help him survive the war, this imaginary twin he had invented… If the Japanese was dead, part of himself had died.”

Jim sees the corpse of the Japanese pilot who gave him a melon and in whom he had invested so much emotional energy. Indeed, he has come to narcissistically see himself in the pilot and identify him with the hope for a better and heroic life beyond the banality and horror of the war. As such, seeing the pilot dead signifies for Jim the death of all hope for the future and, in a sense, his own death.

“Whatever contribution their troops had made to the Allied victory had long been discounted, lost under the layers of newsreels that had imposed their own truth upon the war.”

In Shanghai, immediately after the war, newsreels are projected onto the scaffolding of the Bund Street by the Nationalist military governor. They show, as Jim observes, the familiar images of Allied victory over the Axis powers. However, these newsreels carefully omit any reference to the Chinese Communists who also fought the Japanese. This shows how the Allied powers are already using propaganda and gearing up for another conflict, this time with Communists in China and Asia generally. It also demonstrates the prescience of Jim’s comments about the new war starting in Asia right after the present one.