Both Iran and Japan have their imperial histories. The Persian empire covered large parts of Asia during the Pre-Islamic as well the Islamic era and even prevented the Ottomans from extending their footprint towards the east. In modern times, Iran’s imperial tendencies have worked through its proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthi in Yemen. The Japanese occupation of Chinese, Russian, Dutch and British Indian territories during WWII with confirmed stories of cruelty on civilians and PoWs had created a strong imperialistic image of that country. Both the countries had entered the twentieth century as monarchies, squeezed by the military and cultural weight of great powers.

After being forced to open to the outside world in the 1870s, for almost half a century, Japan saw the rapid modernisation of the then quintessentially oriental country. Thousands of kilometres away, an ancient civilisation was also in the throes of modernisation. In 1941, Iran’s 21-year-old son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Western-educated and inexperienced, but with a zeal for modernisation, twice arrested an emerging cleric Khomeini, causing a mass uprising. If the West had leaned on the king for creating a democratic dispensation, Iran might have escaped the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Iranians, with one of the oldest cultures at their roots, were never with the Shah or the Clerics. Islamic rulers did try to destroy the original Zoroastrian faith but people at large continued to venerate Cyrus who founded Persia in the 6th century BC. The majority of modern Iranians believe in God but one that allows women’s modern dresses, music, and alcohol.

In Japan, faith and nationalism had sustained all the upheaval, from the Shogunate to the Meiji to WWII and the atom bomb. Japan’s defeat in WWII and its occupation by the US, however, had the effect of bringing in democracy and its being allied with the West. In modern Japan, people are functionally areligious while they remain committed to spiritual traditions. Homes continue to have a washitsu or tatami room, used for relaxation and meditation.

The war has paused but here is a speculative question – If some day the theocracy collapses, what will Iran look like if democracy is imposed on it. Many surveys indicate that atheism, secularism as well as a softer approach to religion, never totally absent, are growing in Islam. It is well known that the anti-theocracy and pro-monarchy slogans were frequently raised during the protests. The protestors’ theme, since the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 has been zan, zendegi, āzādi or Women, Life, Freedom, certainly not music to the ears of the clerics, who focus mainly on obedience and the afterlife.

Iranian youngsters have a sport, ammāmeh-parāni or turban-tossing. A young person will sneak behind a cleric, knock off his turban and run away. Women have been making a bonfire of the hijabs and the portraits of the supreme leader. These very protestors, however, keep making pilgrimages to the shrines of saints, much as the Japanese keep visiting their shrines. In both cases, the shrines wear a festive look during holidays, indicative of a devotion which is enthusiastic and enjoyable, rather than one driven by social compulsion and requiring a sombre mood.

A vast majority of Iranians have continued to maintain religious tolerance even during these long decades of hardline theocratic rule. Even after being declared an Islamic Republic, the Iranians biggest festival continues to be Nowruz, the 3,000-year-old festival of spring, with its roots in Zoroastrianism, in spite of it colliding with the Islamic ideology. There are hundreds of working Christian churches, including the St. Sarkis Cathedral and St. George Church in Tehran. It may sound unbelievable but in spite of the regime’s rants against the Jews, there are more than 25 working synagogues in Tehran, Shiraz and Isfahan, which hold regular services. Vestiges of Zoroastrianism, the faith of the pre-Islamic Persian empire, remain in Iran with several working fire temples, the most prominent being the Atash Behram in Yazd. There are Hindu and Sikh places of worship too that have continued to work unmolested.

During WWII, the bulk of public opinion in the US about the future of Japan was sceptical and punitive. The US administration was not, however, driven by public opinion and was working out the modalities of occupation, of ending the occupation and of making Japan a democratic country, as brought into sharp focus by Dayna L. Barnes’s 2017 book, Architects of Occupation: American Experts and Planning for Postwar Japan. The US government’s goal that the expected US occupation would result in Japan becoming “a pacifist economic power supportive of a postwar American order” was clearly achieved.

Iran, with every passing day of the war, looked more like Japan near the end of WWII. Its armed forces have been badly hurt, though they continue to hit Israel and other countries in the region. The US had free run of Japanese skies before the atom bombs were dropped; the US and Israel had more or less the same freedom over Iran’s airspace, with its air force and air defence systems substantially degraded. Similar to the destruction of the mighty Japanese navy before the nuclear strikes, the Iranian navy too has been rendered virtually dysfunctional. Japanese leadership, civil and military, was by and large intact at the end of the war; in contrast, the Iranian leadership, both of the clerical order and of the IRGC, has been decimated, a process that had started much before the war through selective targeting of leaders and nuclear scientists by Israel.

The comparison of two nations, geographically far apart and culturally even farther apart, can be misleading and yet, some useful lessons can be drawn from the similarities and differences. The Japanese military leaders had begged Emperor Hirohito not to surrender; some had even tried to stage a coup against the emperor. In Iran, support for the theocracy is on the wane and a perception exists among the Iranians outside the ruling circle that the theocracy also bears some responsibility for inviting this war by its decades-long rhetoric demanding the destruction of America and Israel. This has frayed the “Islamic” in the Republic. The present supreme leader and the rest of the clergy, the IRGC and the Basij, enriched themselves and stashed national wealth abroad. These “loyalists” of the regime are today perceived as rats that will be among the first to abandon the sinking ship of the state, to lead a life of comfort somewhere else on the stolen wealth. The Nazis had done this on a large scale and there are reliable reports of some in Japan also having done this when the end was near.

It can be safely presumed that, as they had planned for the anticipated occupation of Japan, the US administration and its associated thinktanks are working out post-regime-collapse scenarios for Iran too. It is true that for serving its geopolitical interest, the US has supported many autocratic regimes around the world. For all the criticism on that score, it can be said without fear of being contradicted that the US has so far not attacked any democracy which was untainted by unpopular monarchy, totalitarianism or communism. After its wars, the US has attempted, though not always successfully, to establish democracy, after weakening the autocratic regimes. Today, Iran presents such a fertile ground, where a majority of people crave democracy. Whether they get it through a civil war, an unlikely scenario as they do not have the weapons to fight the heavily armed IRGC and the Basij, or they do it with the help of other democracies; is for the democratic world to ponder. / DAILY WORLD /

( R N prasher is a former IAS officer. The views expressed are his personal. )