Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (20 page)

And it is the LDP that for over half a century provided the United States with its “men in Japan”—staunch conservatives, virulent anti-Communists, loyal supporters of the U.S.-Japan security agreement, steadfast proponents of the necessity of gradually expanding Japan's military role under the Pax Americana. Their more extreme nationalistic statements occasionally embarrassed their American patrons, but the larger
function
of their attempts to downplay the atrocious nature of Japanese behavior in World War II served the perceived interests of both governments. For if the Japanese populace is to be persuaded to support greater and more diversified remilitarization under the bilateral security treaty—as both Washington and Tokyo desire—it remains necessary to dispel the critical perception of past Japanese militarism and “aggression” that remains so strong in popular consciousness.
¹⁸

Why
is
“patriotism” still so suspect in Japan?

This question returns us to the phenomenon of victim consciousness and, more precisely, the manner in which this can be turned in positive and constructive directions. It also returns us
to the Japan of half a century ago—not merely to defeat and occupation, but to the broader experience of war itself. To speak of having been victimized, or having been “sacrificed,” was not merely a lament or rationalization or excuse. It opened up a world of interrogation.

It is difficult to exaggerate how bitter, heartfelt, and widespread such questioning was in the wake of the surrender, when it became possible to speak openly about such matters. Victimized, people asked,
by whom
? Or
by what
? Sacrifices
to what end
? And how, indeed, could one make atonement to the war dead so that their great sacrifice would not be in vain?

Being victims of the American air raids, or the atomic bombs, or the perceived double standards of the victorious powers was but one aspect of such consciousness. More potent and pervasive was a sense of having been victimized by war itself, by the stupidity of militarist leaders who had plunged the nation into the hopeless “holy war,” and by the ignorance of the general populace for having allowed itself to be so brainwashed.

These attitudes were not imposed by the victors. They erupted from within, and quickly coalesced in a set of widely accepted articles of faith. The country must not become embroiled in war in the future. The way to avoid being deceived again was to create a more rational and open society. To create such a society, committed to “peace and democracy,” was not only the path through which to regain national pride and international respect. It was also the only conceivable way by which the living could assure the dead that they had not perished in vain.

Such sentiments found expression at all levels. Teachers and scholars who had failed to speak out against the war experienced deep feelings of guilt for having thereby contributed to the deaths of kin and compatriots and, perhaps most poignantly, former students. Almost instinctively, many of them came together in what the influential political scientist Maruyama Masao later described as a “community of remorse” (
kaikon ky
ō
d
ō
tai
). More than a few academics turned to one form or another of Marxism to explain not
merely the structural dynamics that had propelled Japan to war, but also the false consciousness that had led most Japanese to go along with the militarists. The Communist Party, legalized under the occupation, made strong inroads into the ranks of organized labor, including the national teachers' union. Socialists, feminists, “old liberals,” religious leaders, academics, literary figures, media people in radio, journalism, and filmmaking who had chafed under the wartime censorship—all joined in a chorus of criticism and self-criticism.

Contempt for the militarists who had led the country to destruction was quite extraordinary in the half year or more that preceded the convening of the Tokyo trial in June 1946. It is striking to return to the public record of these years. Political cartoonists ridiculed yesterday's honorable leaders. Editorials and letters to the press complained that the victors were not arresting
more
top-level individuals. People expressed regret that the Japanese themselves had been excluded from participating directly in the investigation and prosecution of war criminals.

There were certainly elements of superficiality and outright deceit in this—“repainting signs,” as one of the cynical sayings of the time put it. The unregenerate did not speak their minds in public, and much sincere early criticism and self-criticism faded under the sheer pressures of daily life, the new fashions of the Cold War, and the accumulating sense of victor's double standards. Still, there have also been notable countertrends to the dilution of critical consciousness. In the years and decades that followed, engagement with issues of war memory and responsibility has been kept alive through a number of domestic controversies and confrontations. Notable among these are seemingly interminable debates concerning constitutional revision, the content of nationally certified textbooks, proper language for official “apologies” for imperial Japan's depredations, and the appropriate mission of the nation's still benignly labeled “self-defense forces.” To these has been added, in the last decade, the question of redress or reparations to individuals such as “comfort women,” prisoners of war, and civilians in
occupied areas who were personally victimized by Japan's “crimes against humanity.”

These topics, all deserving of extended treatment, constitute a kind of “contested institutionalized memory” that has kept critical consciousness of World War II just as alive in Japan as the “triumphal” consciousness and mythologizing of that same conflict is kept alive in the United States. Heated clashes over revising the decidedly pacifistic provisions of the “no war” constitution, for example, have continued ever since the occupation ended in 1952. Invariably, these provoke evocation of the horrors of war in general and the irresponsibility of the prewar Japanese military machine in particular.
¹⁹
In much the same way, the textbook controversies that have drawn strong criticism from abroad since the mid-1960s do indeed reflect official attempts to downplay the “dark” aspects of Japan's modern history. At the same time, however, the cyclical nature of textbook certification—and the snail's-pace court cases deriving from legal challenges to the government's position—have served as an ongoing domestic education in the clash between orthodoxy and its critics.
²⁰

These contentious forms of institutionalized memory, running like a leitmotiv through postwar political discourse, have been given emphatic counterpoint by discrete incidents and occasions that likewise force war and peace issues to the forefront of popular consciousness. The end of the occupation in 1952, for instance, was accompanied by shocking “Bloody May Day” demonstrations protesting the Cold War nature of the peace settlement, with its attendant remilitarization of Japan and demonization of China. The mid-1950s witnessed the emergence of a broad-based antinuclear movement (sparked by the 1954 “Bikini incident,” in which Japanese fishermen were irradiated by fallout from a U.S. hydrogen-bomb test on the Bikini atoll). In 1959–60, pending renewal of the bilateral U.S.-Japan security treaty provoked massive protests in Tokyo, in which the issue of Japan's accelerated remilitarization under the eagle's wing was again dramatically called in question. (Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, America's “man in
Japan” on this occasion, was one of the accused “Class A” war criminals who escaped indictment in the Tokyo trial and was released from prison in its immediate wake.)
²¹

In the latter half of the 1960s, war and peace issues were compellingly reformulated in the context of nationwide protests against Japan's complicity in U.S. aggression in Indochina. Spearheaded by the highly articulate and media-savvy League for Peace in Vietnam (
Beheiren
), this New Left movement entailed not only placing U.S. behavior in the mirror of Japan's own atrocious war a quarter century earlier, but also reexamining the very notions of “victim” and “victimizer” (and the possibility, for Japanese then and now, of being simultaneously both).
²²
Hard on the heels of this, Japan's opening to China in the early 1970s paved the way for a truly wrenching confrontation with the debaucheries of imperial forces in the now resurrected China War. From this time on, a cadre of prolific scholars and journalists has continued to produce detailed accounts of Japanese war crimes, including the Rape of Nanking and the activities of Unit 731—materials that tend to pass under the radar of most non-Japanese observers and popular commentators.
²³
In some circles, it is true, the lingering presence of Emperor Hirohito on the throne continued to put a damper on forthright discussion of Japanese war responsibility. Ironically enough, the emperor's death in 1989 simultaneously rang the death knell for this particular royalist taboo. His passing was followed by the appearance of a number of hitherto repressed diaries and memoirs from the war years, and, once again, gave new impetus to public discussion of the issue of Japanese war responsibility.
²⁴

Can we draw some kind of “balance sheet” based on all this? Perhaps, but it is risky business. Watanabe Kazuo's despondent observation concerning Japan's peculiar “aptitude for being unloved” does seem as apposite now as it did in 1945, but why this is so where the issue of repentance is concerned is not easily explained. Watanabe's own explanation—that Japanese have
difficulty thinking in terms of equality and lack a genuinely deep sense of responsibility—is not very persuasive. To our ears today, such a note of cultural determinism sounds very much like a self-referential, self-deprecating sort of Orientalism. Watanabe himself was not trapped in such a world. Many of his compatriots escaped it as well, as the persistence of postwar discourses of responsibility and repentance attests. Or, to take an entirely different tack can it not be said that most nations, states, peoples, collectivities fall short when it comes to thinking in terms of equality and assuming a sense of responsibility for historical transgressions? Wherever we turn, “repentance” rarely holds a candle to self-righteousness or victim consciousness or parochial loyalties or, indeed, indifference to the sins of the past. The situation in Japan, on either side of the ledger, does not really seem exceptional.

Within Japan, it is fair to speak of other kinds of balance sheets. One must certainly look to the general public rather than to the conservative tripod of ruling party, bureaucracy, and big business for genuine engagement with the issue of war responsibility—that “figure of speech” Emperor Hirohito found too literary for his tastes. Japan's deeply entrenched elites have proven steadfastly disinclined to seriously open either their minds or their archives on these matters; and where their pocketbooks are concerned, they remain wedded to the narrowest technical notions of reparations and redress. Here again, opinion polls suggest a public far readier than its leaders to acknowledge past wrongdoings, and to attend to them. A 1994 survey, for example, found that 80 percent of Japanese polled agreed that the government “has not adequately compensated the people of countries Japan invaded or colonized.”
²⁵

It is precisely this general receptivity to such “unpatriotic” notions that has given a desperate edge to the rise of a new wave of reactive neo-nationalism in the last decade, spearheaded by conservative academics who have learned to use the mass media quite masterfully. They have also learned to play the racial card adroitly—against Americans, Chinese, and Koreans in particular,
whom they unsurprisingly portray as being prejudiced against the Japanese. There is an ominous circularity in all this—and, to outsiders, a certain perverse reinforcement of Watanabe's old notion of an aptitude for being unloved.

__________________

*
This page has been lightly edited to take into account the electoral defeats of the Liberal Democratic Party, especially in 2009 (seven years after this essay was published).

World War II is branded the Good War in American popular consciousness, and for many reasons this will never change. Eradicating the menace of Nazi Germany and militaristic imperial Japan was a great and necessary accomplishment, and the United States played a major role in bringing this about. It also helps that most Americans, despite their country's postwar global engagement, are parochial when it comes to thinking about history. From this insular perspective, World War II began with Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and ended with the emperor's surrender broadcast in August 1945, shortly after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan's invasion of China in 1937 and Germany's blitzkrieg in Europe in 1939 barely figure in this account; the major role of the Soviet Union in defeating Nazi forces, and massive Soviet losses incurred in the process, scarcely register in the American psyche; and marginalized, virtually forgotten, too, is the role that Chinese Nationalist and Communist resistance movements played in sapping Japan's military strength and focus between 1937 and 1945, again at a cost of many millions killed. Beyond this, of course, World War II was America's last victorious war—as Korea, then Vietnam, and then Iraq and Afghanistan made painfully clear. No patriotic American is going to jettison
this
consoling counter-memory
.

The use of the atomic bombs against two densely populated Japanese cities slots neatly into the triumphal Good War narrative. In this telling, the bombs were necessary to persuade Japan's militarist leaders to surrender, and they saved countless thousands of American lives that otherwise would have been lost attempting to invade the Japanese home islands. Americans tend to think cinematically—we all do, really—and the standard scenario here is clear and simple. The United States is confronted by a fanatic enemy determined to fight to the bitter end; heroic airmen take off in their majestic Superfortress bombers without any fighter-plane escorts; they drop their bombs from miles above the two urban targets, cut away, and look back to behold awesome, multicolored, almost supernatural mushroom clouds rising to towering heights. Quick on this follows the sonorous, triumphal summing-up: the omniscient narrative voice-over telling us that eight days after Hiroshima, five days after Nagasaki, the emperor and his militarist advisers capitulated. “Thank God for the atomic bombs,” as the writer Paul Fussell later put it in a famous essay, to great approbation
.