Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (43 page)

11
. At the Tokyo tribunal, the prosecution calculated that a total of 9,348 U.S. and U.K. servicemen died at the hands of the Germans and Italians, out of a total of 235,473 prisoners. The corresponding figures given for the Pacific theater were 35,756 deaths out of 132,134 prisoners taken by the Japanese; see Dower,
Embracing Defeat
, 625n4. The official estimate of the number of Japanese prisoners who died in the hands of the Soviet Union is 55,000. Soviet sources, however, suggest that as many as 113,000 POWs may well have perished in the gulags between 1945 and 1956; see Philip West, Steven I. Levine, and Jackie Hiltz, eds.,
America's Wars in Asia: A Cultural Approach to History and Memory
(M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 232. The Soviet Union was one of the eleven Allied nations represented on the bench at the Tokyo trial, having entered the war in Asia at the last moment, in violation of its neutrality pact with Japan. This (a perfect example of the “double standards” argument, since the Tokyo tribunal found Japan's leaders guilty of violating international agreements),
plus
atrocities committed by the Soviet military against Japanese civilians and soldiers in Manchuria at the end of the war,
plus
the abusive years-long imprisonment of over half a million prisoners in Siberia, has understandably drawn particularly outraged attention from Japanese conservatives. The tactic of arguing that “nothing we may have done was as bad as the horrors perpetuated by the Soviets and Communists” is to be found, of course, among German conservatives as well.

12
. It is impossible to give exact figures for Japanese fatalities in World War II (or, by the same token, for any other peoples or nations). The confusion of the times made precise enumeration difficult if not impossible. Beyond this, however, whole categories of deaths sometimes are excluded from conventional calculations. Estimates of the number of Japanese killed in the air raids and by the atomic bombs vary, for example, while figures for the number of civilians slaughtered in ferocious battles such as Saipan and, most devastatingly, Okinawa often are neglected.
Little attention has been given to civilian deaths attributable to the collapse of the home front (such as more numerous deaths of mothers and infants in childbirth, as well as rising mortality from malnutrition, infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, etc.). War-related deaths that occurred after Japan's surrender are also difficult to tally. These would include prisoners who died in the hands of their captors (especially, but not exclusively, the Soviets), as well as those who died of war-related wounds or illness in the immediate or longer-term wake of the defeat. It would also include a truly forgotten category of Japanese war victims: the many tens of thousands of civilian men, women, and children who perished attempting to make their way home from Manchuria and other parts of China.

I attempted to examine the confusing available numbers in a 1986 publication; see Dower,
War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
(Pantheon Books, 1986), 293–301. The most recent “official” estimate given by the Japanese is a total of 3.1 million war dead (2.3 million servicemen and 800,000 civilians); see
Asahi Shimbun
, August 16, 2000. The total number of U.S. fatalities from all theaters of World War II was roughly 400,000. The number of Chinese war dead was at least four or five times that of the Japanese, possibly more. The point to keep in mind where Japanese war memories are concerned, in any case, is not the precise number of deaths but rather the intimate impact of these large numbers in strengthening the “victim consciousness” of virtually all who survived.

13
. At a very particular level of comparison, the “context-less” nature of the Vietnam War Memorial invites comparison to the atomic-bomb memorials in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Until recently, visitors to the latter sites could be excused for emerging with the impression that the war began in August 1945 and consisted primarily of innocent Japanese being slaughtered with nuclear weapons. Non-Japanese commentators routinely dwell on this as a typical example of Japan's peculiar “historical amnesia,” when in fact it is better understood as being typical not of Japan but of victim consciousness more generally.

14
. On the exclusion of Emperor Hirohito from war responsibility, see Dower,
Embracing Defeat
, chap. 9–11; also Herbert P. Bix,
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
(HarperCollins, 2000), especially chap. 15. The deplorable cover-up of the activities of Unit 731 is addressed in depth in Peter Williams and David Wallace,
Unit 731: Japan's Secret Biological Warfare in World War II
(The Free Press, 1989). The major
research-based critical Japanese study of the
ianfu
, by Yoshimi Yoshiaki, is now available in English under the title
Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II
(Columbia University Press, 2000). On chemical warfare, see Yuki Tanaka, “Poison Gas: The Story Japan Would Like to Forget,”
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
, October 1988, 10–19.

15
. The extraordinary American-Japanese collusion not only to keep the emperor out of the Tokyo trial, but also to ensure that no imputation whatsoever of his possible war responsibility be introduced into the proceedings, emerges vividly in the 1961 testimony given by Shiohara Tokisabur
ō
, a former defense attorney at the trial, to representatives of Yasukuni Jinja, the shrine dedicated to the memory of those who died for the emperor. (The archival citation is “Kyokut
ō
Kokusai Gunji Saiban Kankei Ch
ō
shu Shiry
ō
,” in Shoz
ō
Inoue Tadao Shiry
ō
, Yasukuni Kaik
ō
Bunko, July 4, 1961. I am indebted to Professor Yoshida Yutaka for sharing a copy of this document, which was unknown to me when I wrote
Embracing Defeat
.)

The neo-nationalist “revisionists” who have so vigorously attacked “the Tokyo War Crimes Trial view of history” have been surprisingly reticent, to date, on the emperor issue—in sharp contrast to the more thuggish element in the right. In some cases (such as the feature film mentioned in note 9), they have even used the emperor's exemption from the trials to
reinforce
their argument that defendants like T
ō
j
ō
were not ultimately responsible for the crimes with which they were charged.

16
. The transcript of the press conference appears in Takahashi Hiroshi,
Heika, Otazune M
ō
shiagemasu: Kisha Kaiken Zenkiroku to Ningen Tenn
ō
no Kiseki
(Bunshun Bunko, 1988), 226–27. The
nengo
system, by which the years are measured in accordance with the reign of the emperor (1945 was thus “Sh
ō
wa 20”), is a modern practice, dating back only to the nineteenth century. Its political and ideological ramifications are particularly pernicious in the case of Hirohito's “Sh
ō
wa” era. Not only does this highlight Japan's emperor-centered “uniqueness” as the key to postwar and contemporary national identity; simultaneously, it dilutes popular consciousness of the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s by essentially pouring these years into a larger brew of postwar peace and prosperity. The “Sh
ō
wa Day” proposal was shelved following the adverse public reaction to Prime Minister Mori's definition of Japan as an “emperor-centered land of the gods.” The Imperial
Household Agency controls all private materials pertaining to Emperor Hirohito (and his predecessors), and vigilantly guards these against outside scrutiny. The general taboo on serious discussion of the emperor as a political actor while he was still living extended to withholding from publication personal accounts by persons who had been close to him.

17
. For an overview of the claims for “individual” reparations from Japan that have proliferated since the mid-1990s, see Laura Hein, “Claiming Humanity and Legal Standing: Contemporary Demands for Redress from Japan for Its World War II Policies,” in John Torpey, ed.,
Politics and the Past: On Repairing Historical Injustices
(Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).

18
. If the phenomenon of “binational sanitizing of Japanese war crimes” were pursued in more detail, it undoubtedly would be found that Americans in general, at both official and media levels, became more critical of Japan's failure to address its “war responsibility” beginning in the early 1970s. The explanation for this seems obvious. This is when the exaggerated perception of Japan as an “economic superpower” threatening U.S. hegemony became voguish—and, with this, the resurrection of martial rhetoric and imagery (Japanese “treachery,” “economic war,” “a financial Pearl Harbor,” etc.). Coincident with this, the reopening of U.S. relations with China—and the rather heady and uncritical Sinophilism that accompanied this—made it politically acceptable and even fashionable for Americans to once again think sympathetically about China and its “suffering.”

19
. For the constitutional debates at the start of the new century, see Glen D. Hook and Gavan McCormack, eds.,
Japan's Contested Constitution
(Routledge, 2001). I have tried to sketch out the broader milieu of postwar political and ideological contention—a topic that runs against the grain of popular stereotypes of Japan as a peculiarly harmonious and “consensual” society—in chapter 8 in this present volume.

20
. The famous “Ienaga textbook case,” involving a legal challenge to the Ministry of Education's certification process, was initiated in 1965 and dragged through the courts for some three decades. The case attracted a strong cadre of activist supporters, and the media publicity that accompanied the protracted process of appeal and reappeal made Ienaga's position far more widely known than would have been the case if his textbook had just been allowed to pass into the system of approved texts. For a recent intimate account, see Ienaga Sabur
ō
,
Japan's
Past, Japan's Future: One Historian's Odyssey
, translated and introduced by Richard H. Minear (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).

21
. The best English source on the security treaty struggle is George R. Packard III,
Protest in Tokyo
:
The Security Treaty Crisis of 1960
(Princeton University Press, 1966).

22
. These “New Left” protests are well treated in Thomas R.H. Havens,
Fire Across the Sea: The Vietnam War and Japan, 1965–1975
(Princeton University Press, 1987).

23
. For a belated English-language sample of popular writings on war crimes in China beginning in the early 1970s, see Honda Katsuichi,
The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan's National Shame
(M.E. Sharpe, 1999). Historians affiliated with Marxist-oriented research organizations such as the large and influential Rekishigaku Kenky
Å«
kai turned attention to these issues soon after the defeat, and have consistently played an important role in uncovering basic archival materials. In 1993, these research activities were elevated to a new level with the establishment of Japan's War Responsibility Data Center (Nihon no Sens
ō
Sekinin Shiry
ō
Sent
ā
), publisher of an invaluable quarterly titled
Sens
ō
Sekinin Kenky
Å«
(The report on Japan's war responsibility).

24
. Bix's study of Hirohito, cited in note 14, draws extensively on primary as well as secondary materials that became available after the emperor's death. It is perhaps a sign of changing times that the Japanese translation of his prize-winning study was picked up by Kodansha, one of Japan's largest mainstream publishing houses.

25
.
New York Times
, March 6, 1995; cited in Mark Osiel,
Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory, and the Law
(Transaction, 1997), 183, 189.

1
. Hara Mieko, untitled memoir in
Children of Hiroshima
, ed. Publishing Committee for “Children of Hiroshima” (Tokyo, 1980), 244–46, quoted in John Whittier Treat,
Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb
(University of Chicago Press, 1995).

2
. The first occupation forces did not arrive in Japan until the very end of August; the formal surrender ceremony took place on September 2; and the occupation headquarters in Tokyo did not become effectively operational until mid-September. Formal occupation
censorship generally is dated from September 19, 1945, when a press code was announced. Beginning on October 5, prepublication censorship was imposed on major newspapers and periodicals. For general accounts concerning nuclear-related censorship see Matsuura S
ō
z
ō
,
Senry
ō
ka no Genron Danatsu
(Suppression of speech under the occupation) (Tokyo, 1969), esp. 167–212; Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, comp.,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings
, trans. Eisei Ishikawa and David L. Swain (Basic Books, 1981), 5, 503–13, 564, 585 (hereafter this basic source, originally published in Japanese in 1979, is cited as
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
); Monica Braw,
The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Occupied Japan
(M.E. Sharpe, 1991); and Glen D. Hook, “Censorship and Reportage of Atomic Damage and Casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,”
Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars
23 (January–March 1991): 13–25.

3
. Hatoyama's statement appeared in
Asahi Shimbun
, September 15, 1945. His account of this incident and enduring contempt of the “recklessness” and hypocrisy exemplified in the U.S. use of the atomic bombs and punishment of him for criticizing this emerges clearly in his memoirs:
Hatoyama Ichir
ō
Kaikoroku
[Hatoyama Ichir
ō
memoirs) (Tokyo, 1957), 49–51.