Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (17 page)

Until recently, it seemed possible to suggest (or at least hope) that much of the more intemperate nationalistic rhetoric that older
conservative politicians continued to spout at regular intervals was simply the carryover of wartime indoctrination by a cohort of largely unrepentant patriots. Then Japan entered the twenty-first century with a new conservative leader who made it embarrassingly clear that this was not the case. In a widely publicized speech to an association of Shinto priests, Prime Minister Mori Yoshir
ō
, born in 1937, saw fit to evoke the most extreme and exclusionist nationalistic rhetoric of the militaristic past by referring to Japan as an “emperor-centered land of the gods” (
tenn
ō
ch
Å«
shin to suru kami no kuni
). On another occasion, addressing another purely domestic audience, he spoke of Japan's present-day mission in terms of defending the
kokutai
, or “national polity”—thereby resurrecting the central code word in prewar emperor-worship. In a trice, Japan's new leader had established himself as the international community's most notorious practitioner of rhetorical necrophilia. He became, overnight, the latest personification of the Japanese aptitude for being unloved.

The rub in all this, however, is that Mori's reactionary language (which he attempted to explain away, but did not retract) led him to be unloved by most of his compatriots as well. The media flayed him, and his personal approval rating plummeted to between 10 and 20 percent in opinion polls. More tellingly, his Liberal Democratic Party dropped from 271 to 229 seats in the House of Representatives in the general election of June 2000, maintaining but a narrow minority over a polyglot opposition. While factors such as Japan's continuing economic doldrums also contributed to this precipitous decline, the prime minister had clearly crossed the line where acceptable patriotic rhetoric is concerned. He misread the depth to which even a conservative electorate recalls the war years with horror.
⁴

Non-Japanese, fixated as they usually are on the pronouncements of Japan's most bombastic nationalists, also tend to misread the tenor and complexity of popular Japanese recollections of World War II. Whereas Europeans commonly date the war from the German invasion of Poland in 1939, and Americans from the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, in Japan the war is usually dated from the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. In a name promoted by leftist scholars shortly after Japan's defeat, World War II in Asia is widely referred to as “the Fifteen-Year War.”

Most Japanese now also acknowledge that this fifteen-year conflict was a war of aggression. To non-Japanese, this may seem surprising, for the litany of right-wing Japanese pronouncements that the foreign press highlights leaves little room for anticipating serious critical popular consciousness about the war. If Japanese were asked “Was Japan an ‘Aggressor' in World War II?” most foreigners would probably predict that the response would be negative. In fact, this very question was posed to a random sample of people by the conservative
Yomiuri
newspaper in 1993. Fifty-three-point-one percent answered “Yes” and 24.8 percent “No,” while the remainder had no response. Among the wartime generation itself (people over seventy), whom one might expect to be most firmly indoctrinated in the propaganda of the holy war, only 39.5 percent responded that Japan was not an aggressor (41.1 percent said it was, and the rest had no response). Among respondents in their twenties, 61.7 percent agreed Japan had been an aggressor, and only 17.1 percent disagreed with this label.
⁵

This fracture of memory and perception accounts for much of the fervor of present-day nationalistic pronouncements in Japan. Whereas foreigners tend to isolate the most inflammatory right-wing utterances and interpret them as being representative of deep trends, the spokesmen for a new Japanese nationalism actually speak in almost apocalyptic terms of the
death
of patriotism in their country. Here, for example, is a representative passage from a pamphlet issued in 1998 by the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, one of the most influential associations of “revisionist” conservative academics:

This is, indeed, alarmingly reactionary language. It suggests that serious engagement with “the proper way for humans to live” was lost in Japan only after the defeat in World War II, when the war was belittled and overt patriotism came to be viewed with deep and widespread skepticism. Such rhetoric is of a piece with Prime Minister Mori's suggestion that Japan's true identity is to be found elsewhere than in postwar professions of a commitment to peace and democracy. To escape this perceived crisis of national identity, those associated with the movement to create a “correct” national history have declared that the very purpose of historical writing and education is to instill pride in the nation. Professor Fujioka Nobukatsu, one of the best-known spokesmen for the movement, puts it this way: “It is precisely its way of teaching its modern history that is the crucial determinant of the constitution of a people as a nation. The people that does not have a history to be proud of cannot constitute itself as a nation.”
⁶

Such assertions are heard with increasing frequency as Japan enters a new century as perplexed and tormented as ever concerning its identity as a modern nation. At the same time, however, we should not lose sight of the panic that runs through these pronouncements: the near-hysterical perception, that is, that since their defeat the Japanese, and especially the younger generations,
have become the
least
patriotic of contemporary peoples. How can one account for this? To individuals like those associated with the conservative “textbook reform” movement, the answer is clear. It is precisely because negative impressions of Japan as an aggressor in the wars of the mid-twentieth century run so deep that postwar Japanese have been unable to look upon their modern history and accomplishments with pride.

The interplay of war and memory in contemporary Japan is, in fact, even more complicated and convoluted than this dichotomy suggests. It is “kaleidoscopic” in the fullest sense, in that we can identify a great range of attitudes and opinions—and, with slight interpretive twists, make any number of patterns out of them. Five such patterns are singled out in the discussion that follows—five kinds of memory, as it were, that seem especially prominent in shaping the popular consciousness and public histories of Japan's war. They are [1] denial, [2] evocations of moral (or immoral) equivalence, [3] victim consciousness, [4] binational (U.S.-Japan) sanitizing of Japanese war crimes, and [5] popular discourses acknowledging guilt and responsibility.
⁷

It is reasonable to speak of a collection of Japanese ranging from right-wing thugs through conservative politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen to nationalistic journalists, academics, and even cartoonists that is devoted to “denying” Japan's war crimes. But what, specifically, is being denied?

The answer varies. The most extreme position, as might be expected, simply counters the notion of Japan's grievous responsibility for engaging in militaristic aggression by resurrecting the propaganda of the war years. It argues, that is, that the emperor's loyal soldiers and sailors, fired by both love of country and pan-Asian idealism, were engaged in the mission of simultaneously defending their homeland and establishing a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”

Japan, from this perspective, was driven to war by strategic, ideological, and economic threats that came from all directions: the Soviet Union in the north; Soviet-led “international” Communism spilling into China, Korea, and Japan itself; chaos and violation of Japan's treaty rights in China (including Manchuria); global economic depression, and the rise of anti-Japanese trade policies that followed in the wake of this; American and European opposition to the establishment of a Japanese-style “Monroe sphere” in Asia; unfair and destabilizing treatment by the United States and Great Britain in international naval armaments treaties in the 1930s; “economic strangulation” by the so-called ABCD powers (America, Britain, China, and the Dutch) as the crisis in Asia intensified; etc. In responding to these multiple threats, the argument continues, imperial Japan's leaders did not just act in legitimate self-defense. They turned the crisis into a genuinely moral campaign to liberate all Asia from the oppressive Europeans and Americans, and to simultaneously create an impregnable bulwark against the rising tide of Communism. The “holy war” was thus both inescapable and altruistic.

Even among those who maintain that Japan was not an aggressor, however, relatively few subscribe to such undiluted jingoism. Here one encounters one of the more entertaining anomalies of the patriotic agenda. For whereas the heart and soul of old-fashioned Japanese-style nationalism lies in extolling the country's “peculiarly unique uniqueness” (as exemplified in Prime Minister Mori's archaic emperor-centered and Shinto-centered rhetoric), when it comes to the question of aggression and atrocity in World War II, uniqueness is more usually explicitly denied. In a world order that was collapsing into chaos everywhere, and in a global conflict that witnessed unspeakable brutality in all theaters and on all sides, this more modulated mode of denial goes, it is absurd to single out the Japanese as sole bearers of responsibility for the outbreak of conflict in Asia, or as sole perpetuators of acts of barbarism there. To do so amounts to simply perpetuating the victors' version of the war.

Those who deem it imperative to restore love of country by promoting a positive appreciation of Japan's twentieth-century experience are not concerned with merely downplaying or denying specific wartime horrors (such as the Rape of Nanking, abuse of POWs, or large-scale exploitation of “comfort women” to service the imperial forces sexually). They are very precise in identifying what constitutes the “old” historiography that must be repudiated. It takes two forms. One is the Marxist analysis of modern Japanese history that had an enormous impact in scholarly, journalistic, and educational circles for several decades after the war (emphasizing the authoritarian emperor system,
zaibatsu
-led capitalist “dual structure,” and other pernicious “feudal remnants” that all lay behind the domestic repression and overseas aggression of imperial Japan). The second target of revisionist ire is the outlook and values allegedly imposed on Japan during the postsurrender occupation by the American-led victors that lasted from 1945 to 1952. A target of particularly impassioned derision here is “the Tokyo War Crimes Trial view of history.”
⁸

This critical notion of “victor's history”—or victor's justice, or victor's double standards—entails a subtle turn in the kaleidoscope of war consciousness, amounting to an argument of moral relativism.

The Tokyo trial (formally, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East) is the great sitting duck of conservative Japanese revisionism, and for understandable reasons. These proceedings against accused “Class A” war criminals lasted almost three times as long as the counterpart Nuremberg trial of Nazi leaders; and when they limped to a close at the end of 1948, it already was apparent that the judgment imposed would not withstand the test of time very well. All twenty-five defendants were found guilty of war crimes, and seven were executed within a month after the courtroom proceedings
came to an end. Even the Allied judges themselves, however, were unable to come to unanimous agreement. Thus, the decisive “majority judgment” of the tribunal (supported by eight of eleven justices) was accompanied by five separate opinions criticizing the proceedings and sentences from one perspective or another. The most detailed and dramatic of these separate opinions came from the Indian justice, Radhabinod Pal, who found the very premises of the trial unsound and acquitted all twenty-five defendants.

Pal's detailed dissent, which ran to many hundreds of pages, was published in Japanese in 1952 (as soon as the post-defeat Allied occupation ended), and has remained the bible for Japanese critics of “victor's justice” ever since. His critique is substantive. Pal challenged the juridical premises of the tribunal on the grounds that the defendants were being tried for ex post facto “crimes” (that is, offenses such as “crimes against peace” that did not exist in international law before the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals were convened). He rejected as absurd the basic argument on which the prosecution rested its case in Tokyo: namely, the charge that Japan's leaders had been engaged in a “conspiracy to commit aggression” that dated back to 1928 (which meant that the defendants could not argue that they were acting in accordance with their perception of legitimate self-defense, and that all military actions by the Japanese from 1928 on thereby constituted “murder”). And, good Indian nationalist that he was, Pal took seriously the defendants' arguments that they were intent on liberating Asia from Western colonialism (or, at least, the argument that Asia needed such liberation). Unsurprisingly, he managed to smuggle more than a few sharp comments about European and American hypocrisy into his dissenting opinion.