Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (18 page)

Justice Pal has proven a godsend to those who have devoted themselves to repudiating “the Tokyo War Crimes Trial view of history,” for he gives their argument not merely a non-Japanese face (and, just as important, a non-Caucasian one), but also a dense theoretical scaffolding. They have used him sedulously, but not, in fact, fairly. The Tokyo trial was undeniably a poorly
conceived affair; but what the deniers of grievous Japanese war responsibility have done is use this vulnerable exercise in victor's justice—and Pal's stinging technical dissent from its premises and conclusions—as a smokescreen for covering up the real war crimes and acts of aggression the Japanese did commit in the course of their fifteen-year war.
⁹
Repudiating the trial has become a synecdoche for implying that imperial Japan was, after all, an “innocent” participant in the cataclysmic breakdown of world order—or, at least, no more guilty than other nations, and no more brutal on the battlefield and in occupied areas than other combatants.

It is within this larger context of repudiating “victor's justice” that the denial of more specific accusations of Japan's egregious acts of aggression and atrocity takes place. At a still grand level, and still within the framework of the war crimes trials, the revisionists vehemently reject the argument that imperial Japan was in any fundamental way comparable to its German ally. There was no Japanese counterpart to Hitler, they argue, or to the Nazi Party (which made charges of conspiracy more tenable at the Nuremberg trials). There was nothing comparable to the planned genocide we now speak of as the Holocaust. Thus, references to the 1937 Japanese massacre of civilians in Nanking as “the forgotten Holocaust of World War II” provoke especially emotional denials—which, again, become a smokescreen that obscures the terrible rape of the city that did occur, not to mention the systematic abuse of prisoners and civilians by the imperial forces in all theaters.
¹⁰

In calling attention to the double standards of the victors who sat in judgment at Tokyo—and who still sit in judgment of Japan today—the revisionists, as might be anticipated, are able to move with near abandon from the nineteenth century through the war itself right up to the present day. Justice Pal set the pattern for some of this argumentation, and in ways beyond simply calling attention to the deep (and, as of the time of the trial, ongoing) history of Western imperialism and colonial oppression. He ridiculed
the prosecution's repudiation of the “anti-Communism” defense offered by former war minister and prime minister T
ō
j
ō
Hideki and his cohorts, pointing out that most of the governments represented on the bench at the Tokyo trial were at that very moment themselves obsessed by the need to contain Communism (Pal was himself strongly anti-Communist). He was less than impressed when white prosecutors accused the Japanese of racial prejudice. And, in one of his most controversial and frequently cited passages, Pal suggested that the closest counterpart to Nazi atrocities in the war in Asia may well have been the American use of the atomic bombs. Pal did acknowledge heinous behavior by the Japanese. His point was that they were not alone in this.

Japan's neo-nationalists deploy such arguments as another form of diversion, even as a kind of historiographic
cancellation
of immorality—as if the transgressions of others exonerate one's own crimes. In American, British, and Australian circles, for example, the strongest and most ineradicable “memory” of Japanese atrocity is surely the abuse of prisoners of war (coupled, in the American case, with the “treachery” and “infamy” of the attack on Pearl Harbor). It was estimated at the Tokyo trial that over one-quarter of the Anglo-American servicemen who fell into Japanese hands died in captivity—a vastly greater percentage than died under Japan's Axis allies on the Western Front. Japanese conservatives, in their turn, “cancel” this by emphasizing not merely the wanton killing of Japanese civilians in American air raids, but—a more exact counterthrust—the much greater number of Japanese prisoners who surrendered to the Soviets in the final week of the war and suffered prolonged incarceration and a massive death toll in the Siberian gulags. Unlike many Americans and Europeans, Japanese conservatives never forget that the Allied victors who stood in self-righteous judgment of Japan included the Soviet Union.
¹¹

This sense of victor's hypocrisy has grown stronger with the years. Most of the nations that sat in judgment in Nuremberg and Tokyo were, even at the time of these trials, embroiled in their own acts of violence, aggression, and political and racial repression.
Most engaged in subsequent mayhem and atrocity. None ever dreamed of allowing themselves to be held accountable to the new standards of international law that had ostensibly been established in the showcase trials in Germany and Japan. And—as our contemporary scrutiny of World War II “as history” reveals—
all
countries have engaged in the manipulation and obfuscation of public memory of their wartime conduct. Look at wartime anti-Semitism in the United States, for instance, and the vapid “Enola Gay” exhibition commemorating the atomic bomb that was installed in the Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in 1995. Look at the exaggerated “myth of the Resistance” in collaborationist France, exposed so belatedly in the trials of Paul Touvier and Maurice Papon; the Nazi bank accounts in “neutral” Switzerland; the popularity of the xenophobic Jorg Haider in Austria; and the Vatican's sustained refusal to acknowledge Pope Pius XII's appeasement of Hitler. And in Germany itself, to give but one recent example, look at the public honoring of the historian Ernst Nolte as the new millennium opened, for his recognition of the “rational core” of Hitler's anti-Semitism and anti-Communism.

Why, in such a world, the neo-nationalist “revisionists” ask, are the Japanese still singled out for particular censure? Does this not reflect plain anti-Japanese racism more than any innate propensity for being unloved?

The Japanese are hardly alone in their acute sense of victimization. Nor, where World War II is concerned, are they unique in conveying such victim consciousness through highly evocative, proper-name catchphrases. “Remember Hiroshima” has its obvious American analogue in “Remember Pearl Harbor” (or “Remember the Bataan Death March”). In British memory, “Singapore” and the “Burma-Thailand Railway” are comparable signatures of suffering from the war in Asia. For the Chinese, the encryption is “Nanking.” For Filipinos, “Manila.”

In Japan, however, postwar victim consciousness is inevitably coupled with the traumatic recollection of shattering defeat—with memory of futile death, that is, and the destruction in air raids of some sixty-six cities, culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All told, around 3 million Japanese, some 4 percent of the population, died in the war or as a result of it—leaving those who survived bereft of even the psychological consolation of ultimate victory. There could be no heroes for the losing side. It became commonplace to speak of the war dead themselves—and, indeed, of virtually all ordinary Japanese—as being “victims” and “sacrifices.”
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The decisive period when the Japanese might have been expected to learn about and acknowledge the true nature of their “holy war” was, of course, during the American-led occupation that followed the defeat and lasted until April 1952. As in the Nuremberg trial of Nazis, one explicit purpose of the “Class A” Tokyo trial was heuristic: to establish a body of evidence and testimony that would persuasively demonstrate the extent to which Japan had waged an atrocious war of aggression. As long as the Tokyo trial lasted, the Americans used their control of the Japanese mass media to ensure that the details of such “war crimes” were well publicized.

Many Japanese at the time were in fact deeply shocked by the revelation of barbaric behavior on the part of their fighting men. (Atrocities against Chinese civilians, the Japanese rape of Manila in 1945, and reported incidents of cannibalism by members of the imperial forces appear to have made a particularly strong impression.) Indeed, in scenes that almost seem to foreshadow the plight a few decades later of U.S. servicemen who had served in Vietnam, demobilized Japanese soldiers and sailors often complained bitterly about returning to their homeland only to be reviled as criminals by their own compatriots. The impact of this early publicity about Japanese war crimes, however, was severely blunted by the hardship of everyday life that most Japanese continued to confront for many years after the surrender. The repatriation from overseas of millions of demoralized military men and civilians took years to complete, leaving many families at home in a state of enervating
uncertainty. Those who made it back encountered, until around 1949, a country racked by industrial stagnation, massive unemployment, hyperinflation, severe food shortages, and a ravenous black market.

In this milieu, the plight of Japan's Asian victims, even when acknowledged, seemed remote and abstract. And it was difficult even to imagine yesterday's Caucasian enemies as having been victims at all. On the contrary, the well-fed, splendidly equipped, victorious Americans who now occupied Japan (together with a small U.K. contingent) were obviously people to be
envied
.

The second circumstance that blunted development of a deeper Japanese sense of war responsibility was the Cold War. By the time the Korean War erupted in 1950 (and sparked Japanese economic recovery with a vigorous war boom), the Cold War had long since intervened to destroy not merely the old wartime Allied alliance but the old wartime enmities as well. Japan, like West Germany, became central to U.S. anti-Communist strategy militarily as well as economically; and, in this context, both forgetting the recent atrocities of the former Axis partners and
playing up
the danger of them becoming victimized by Soviet-led Communism served U.S. purposes. It is a bad joke, but T
ō
j
ō
might well have been recruited as a ghostwriter for the new “Pacific partners.”

Until the Cold War ended, the U.S.-Japan relationship provided Japan's conservative leaders with a clear, fixed, almost myopic sense of security and national identity. Tokyo's relationship with Washington was the great axis around which all of Japan's international activities revolved—to a much greater degree than was to be seen in the relationship between Germany and the United States. Whereas Germany was part of the larger NATO alliance, Japan took particular pride in being America's critical
bilateral
partner in Asia. And whereas Germany, over the decades, found it imperative to carefully build constructive relationships with its continental neighbors and former enemies, Japan's conservative governments followed a less independently creative course. Locked in the American embrace, their archipelago studded with U.S. military
bases like a monstrous stationary battleship off the coast of Asia (the “battleship” metaphor is beloved of strategic planners), and their economy geared more to the United States and Europe than to Asia, they seem to have built more fragile bridges to their neighbors. Certainly, the end of the bipolar certainties of the Cold War, coupled with the dramatic rise of China as a formidable rival to Japan in the struggle for leadership in Asia, has created a mounting sense of insecurity in the last decade. The recent emergence of more strident nationalistic voices can be interpreted, at least in considerable part, as one manifestation of this new sense of vulnerability.

Even before the end of the Cold War, however, the peculiarly ingrown nature of the U.S.-Japan relationship had the paradoxical effect of enhancing Japanese victim consciousness even as it provided the security of strategic protection under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. The relationship has never been a genuinely equal one. (From the beginning, one mission of the U.S. military forces in Japan—almost never stated publicly—has been to ensure strategic control of Japan.) One can, of course, qualify this in various ways. Obviously, for instance, Japan has exercised considerable autonomy—considerable “economic nationalism,” some would say—within the Pax Americana. Be that as it may, it is still difficult to deny the unusual degree to which the nation's status vis-à-vis the United States has been one of dependent, or subordinate, independence ever since the occupation ended in 1952. Even the zealous spokesmen for the “Pacific partnership” who deny this must acknowledge that many observers, both in and outside Japan, take it for granted that this is the case.

This is a wearying psychological situation under which to operate for so long. Nor is it the end of this complicated story. For even at the height of the Cold War, the peculiar imbalances in the bilateral relationship operated in ways that tended to turn the very phenomenon of “victim consciousness” itself into yet one more example of the double standards by which Japan tends to be judged. The American war in Indochina provides the most vivid example
of this. It is not unreasonable to see this war, in its ferocity and futility, as a rough American counterpart to Japan's own atrocious lost war of several decades earlier. (U.S. planners in the 1960s even went so far as to study Japan's scorched-earth anti-Communist tactics in rural China in the 1930s and early 1940s for lessons pertinent to their own “pacification” campaign in Vietnam.) At the same time, it is obviously not politically acceptable to suggest such a comparison in the United States. The deep sense of suffering and victimization that defines mainstream American recollections and commemorations of this conflict is carved in stone in the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. By the same token, visitors who come to pay their respects here are almost literally walled off from imagining the millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians and Laotians who also died in that tragedy. During the Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush went so far as to speak of there being a “statute of limitations” on self-recrimination where America's terrible war of a mere few decades earlier was concerned.