This is what Saburo Ienaga’s ordeal about: in a 1980 textbook he wrote about the infamous “Unit 731”–the Imperial Army’s gruesome experiments in bacteriological-weapons development during the war. The Ministry of Education, saying it was “too early” for such material to be in textbooks, stripped out the reference. In another book Ienaga wrote that during the Nanking massacre Japanese troops “raped Chinese women.” The ministry said such things happen in all wars, and therefore it should not be included in a textbook as if it were “a specific case.” And in a third case the ministry objected to Ienaga’s declaration in a textbook that Japan’s involvement in the Pacific war, during which 2 million Japanese died, was “imprudent.” In 1986 a judge upheld the ministry’s objections, writing that “there are extremely complicated matters in the process of war” and that “calling it ‘imprudent’ is not completely appropriate.”
Japan, in the next decade, may become the world’s most powerful industrial economy. It has been a faithful ally of the West in fighting the cold war and today, 50 years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, it is a peaceful, democratic nation. Its worldwide clout is increasing: U.S. Secretary of State James Baker visited Tokyo last week and, after embracing new Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, called on Japan to join the United States in a new global partnership. Japan, said Baker, should move beyond its “checkbook diplomacy” and play a far greater role in international affairs.
It would seem such a natural step. But for Japan, it won’t be easy. Baker’s rhetoric masks a simple fact, one that lies just below the surface of Tokyo’s relations with nearly every country in the world, the United States included: much of the world views the prospect of Japan as Number One–or even a close second–with deep unease. Part of that has to do with bitter economic disputes that will not go away anytime soon. Part, too, has to do with envy and, in the West, a largely unconscious racism. But there is more to it than all that. There is the war, still.
Japan is cursed, for reasons it seems unable to articulate, with an agonizing inability to face its own history squarely. In pointed contrast to its wartime ally Germany, where public education about the nation’s wartime history has been relentless and relentlessly honest, Japan, in the view of many scholars, has simply never come to terms with the war. Its Education Ministry, as the Ienaga case shows, has decreed a morally neutral history that goes down well at home but sticks in the throats of the Asian countries who suffered under Japanese wartime occupation. Japan in 1931, for example, did not “invade China,” as the rest of the world understands; according to many Japanese textbooks it “advanced into China.” As Yukio Okamoto, a former high-ranking official in the Japanese Foreign Ministry, puts it, “We have successfully swept everything related to the war under the rug. We painted everything with a single tone–that everything was a mistake.”
To a degree that still stuns most Americans, Japan’s view of the war differs vastly from the one held in the West. For Japan, there is no question of guilt or innocence. Nor is there even a cognizance of causality–of events happening because of what came before them. Most Americans see Pearl Harbor as the first in a series of events that pulled the United States into war and led, ultimately, to victory over fascism. In a century full of morally ambiguous American conflicts, World War II is an exception: the “good” war.
In the Japanese popular view, there is no right and wrong, there are only victims. The war was a natural disaster, like a tidal wave or a typhoon. “I remember we were urged to read sad memoirs, in which Japanese were suffering from the war,” says Noriko Yazawa, a 25-year-old worker at a steel company in Tokyo. “I learned [more] about the war on my own. Not in class. " The Ministry of Education successfully reinforces the message–Japan as victim–to the exclusion of almost everything else about the war. Just last month in Singapore, a teacher at a Japanese school for expatriate children showed her class a videotape about Tokyo’s brutal occupation of the Southeast Asian city-state during the war. The class was stunned. One 12-year-old student later wrote, “Here I am living in Singapore without the slightest idea that we had done something unforgivable to the people of this country. I’ve never read about this in our textbooks.”
Ironically, the education most Japanese students get is in part a legacy of the postwar American occupation. Soon after the war ended, America’s geopolitical attention turned to containment of Soviet communism. A devastated Japan looked like a ripe target for communist inroads, so Douglas MacArthur, commander of the Allied occupation forces, sought a quick economic and emotional recovery. He felt that a wrenching self-examination like the one underway in Germany–would be counterproductive. Ever since, for most Japanese the history of the war has centered on the American introduction of atomic warfare at Hiroshima and, later, Nagasaki. Kenzaburo Oe, 56, is a famous Japanese novelist who has written widely on the suffering of the victims at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was not until he was 30 years old, he says, that he got even an inkling that Americans see a linear historical link between Pearl Harbor and the atomic attacks. “I attended a literary seminar at Harvard University,” he says, “during which I was speaking about the victims of the Hiroshima blast. One day, an elegant old lady suddenly asked me how I felt about Pearl Harbor. It made me feel strange. I had never considered the Pearl Harbor attack as a national crime.”
In the popular Japanese view, the United States forfeited whatever claim to moral righteousness it might have had in defeating Tokyo’s militarists when it dropped the bombs. The prevailing view, instead, is one of moral symmetry between the two wartime combatants. “America is responsible for the disaster in Hiroshima, just as Japan is for the attack on Pearl Harbor,” says Kano Yamamoto, a 23-year-old employee at a Tokyo advertising agency. “I cannot take that horrible incident as only the consequence of something.” In particular, Japanese cannot comprehend why the second bomb needed to be dropped. It was strategically worthless. The point had already been made. “If the Japanese ever felt remorse,” former diplomat Okamoto says, “it was more than compensated for by Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
In Japan that is an emotion deeply felt. But there is no denying that its own historical blind spot has serious consequences today. It is part of the reason why otherwise sensitive people say things aloud about the Japanese that they would rarely say in private about anyone else. It was not the Germans of whom blue-blooded diplomat George Ball remarked famously, “You never know when they might go ape.” However unfair it maybe, the perception still lingers abroad that Japan regrets little about the war except the atomic bombings it suffered. And every step forward Tokyo takes to correct that impression seems to be counteracted by some hapless step backward. In the past year Emperor Akihito, the son of Hirohito in whose name Japan fought the war, has traveled to Southeast Asia to express “remorse” for what Japan had done during the war. He did the same at a dinner for South Korean President Roh Tae Woo in Tokyo. Japan’s neighbors appreciated both gestures. They were more than Hirohito had ever done.
A few months later, former deputy chief cabinet secretary Nobuo Ishihara undercut the effect. “It will take decades or even centuries before the correct judgment is delivered on who is responsible for the war,” he said during a dispute over whether Japan should attend ceremonies at Pearl Harbor and apologize for the attack, as some Americans had suggested. The remark caused a minor stir, but one German historian working in Japan during the episode couldn’t believe how quickly it died. Had Ishihara’s counterpart in Bonn said something similar, he said, “the government would have fallen in an instant.”
In Japan such declarations are almost routine. Shintaro Ishihara (no relation to Nobuo), a nationalist member of Parliament and the well-known author of “A Japan That Can Say No,” said in a magazine interview recently that it was time to revive the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan’s prewar drive to establish its dominance throughout the region. This is not quite the same as calling for a reconstruction of Auschwitz, but it does not go down well in China or anywhere else in Asia. Ishihara added that this time there would be no need for military action, because if Japan’s Asian neighbors resisted Tokyo could simply cut off aid and technology. That would “make them realize the consequences of their actions.”
Such sentiments clearly do nothing for Japan’s image at a crucial time in its history. An American ambassador in Asia states flatly that, at best, the attitude toward Japan is an unstable amalgam of trust and worry. “Nothing hurts the Japanese more today out here than their singular inability to come to grips with the war,” he says. “Germany was allowed to reunify because it has gone through that process. Japan still makes people nervous because it hasn’t.”
Japan’s tortured interpretations of the war also help prop up the suspicions that linger in American union halls and executive suites that Tokyo has simply harnessed its intrinsic martial instincts and directed them toward commerce. Charles Ferguson, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called the Japanese “technological Prussians” in a Harvard Business Review article two years ago. In 1985, in a New York Times Magazine article for which he was criticized bitterly, the late Theodore White wrote, “What we are faced with now is the idea that events contradict history’s logic. Perhaps we did not win the war. Perhaps the Japanese, unknown even to themselves [in 19451, were the winners.”
Are the fears that Japan is still fighting wholly misplaced? Does Japan view trade in Clausewitz terms: war by other means? Japan’s big, internationally competitive companies are, to be sure, very disciplined, even regimented organizations. And they do, on occasion, go overboard with martial metaphors. One of the slogans Komatsu Corp. uses to fire up employees is ENCIRCLE CATERPILLAR. (Caterpillar Inc. of Peoria, Ill., is Komatsu’s primary competitor.) The metaphor is further reinforced by neonationalists. The scholar Jun Eto wrote a popular book entitled “The War Between the U.S. and Japan Continues.” And there is now undeniably an increasing nationalism among young Japanese. “It’s more than pride and probably less than chauvinism,” says Shuichi Kato, a prominent social critic.
Books like Eto’s would surely be of less interest abroad if Japan hadn’t, as Okamoto says, swept history “under the rug.” More people would understand that the relentless competitiveness in business has much more to do with Japan’s own, centuries-old economic insecurity than with any imperial designs. They would realize, too, that fears of Japanese remilitarization are exaggerated. In fact, one thing the victim mentality in Japan has done is sink substantial antimilitary roots in the populace. Polls show that 57 percent of Japanese oppose the dispatch of “peacekeeping” troops to Cambodia even under United Nations auspices.
There have actually been signs since the death of Emperor Hirohito in 1989 that some wartime issues may be confronted more directly during his son Akihito’s reign. The print press and television recently have been full of blunt material recalling the war and Japanese abuses. One segment of a news show dealt quite thoroughly with the infamous Unit 731. Saburo Ienaga, however, still has doubts. He has lost a previous censorship case and he’s not very optimistic about the one now pending. “The public only wants to forget the unpleasant experience,” he wrote in 1971, and not much has changed since. Until it does, the history Japan ignores will continue to dog it in the rest of the world.
