Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (19 page)

And so, Americans have their commemorative memorial, even for an atrocious and lost war, and the Japanese do not. Again, the point is not whether drawing such a parallel between Japan in World War II and the United States in the Indochina War is accurate in every respect. Rather, this is but one more example of how Americans (and others) are seen as holding the Japanese to standards they themselves do not in practice observe. The veneration of Confederate soldiers and battlefield sites in the United States—despite (or even because of) their pro-slavery cause—is another such example. All people honor their war dead, but it seems particularly difficult to do so publicly in Japan.

In one form or another, this issue has percolated through all the debates on war and memory that have taken place since 1945. It came to a boil in the 1990s, when individuals and interest groups across the ideological spectrum vigorously debated the construction of a national museum that appropriately addressed the World War II years as “public history.” Powerful conservative lobbyists led by the Association of War Bereaved Families (
Nihon Izokukai
)
had long promoted such a museum as a vehicle for honoring the spirits of the Japanese war dead (
eirei
) and reminding younger generations of the hardship and sacrifices of these years. In opposition, Japanese associated with peace movements, the liberal media, and the academic left argued that any such facility must devote major attention to imperial Japan's aggression and atrocity. Names such as “Peace Prayer Hall” and “War Dead Peace Memorial Hall” were proposed as a way of turning such commemorative space into an overtly pacifist statement.

In the end, caution and conservatism prevailed. A multistory National Sh
ō
wa Memorial Museum (Sh
ō
wakan) opened its doors in Tokyo in 1999, with exhibits and programs designed to minimize controversial explicit interpretation of Japan's war and focus instead on the suffering of the Japanese people between 1935 and 1955.
¹³

Even before the Cold War intruded to distort public memories of World War II, the United States had taken care to suppress certain aspects of Japan's war responsibility. This took place in the context of the Tokyo war crimes trial, and amounted to an exercise in “victor's justice” just the opposite of the anti-Japanese bias that Japanese nationalists decry. For purely expedient political reasons, the Americans concealed the true nature and full enormity of Japanese war crimes.

This unfinished business has come back to haunt Japan, and properly so. At the same time, however, non-Japanese usually approach this as but one more example of “Japanese” perfidy: the thoroughly binational nature of the cover-up does not play well outside Japan. The major issues and crimes the American-led prosecution chose to ignore and/or suppress were [1] the emperor's knowledge of and responsibility for his country's aggression and acts of atrocity; [2] lethal “medical” experiments conducted on at least 3,000 prisoners in Manchuria by the notorious “Unit 731”; [3] recruitment and
virtual enslavement of many tens of thousands of so-called comfort women (
ianfu
) to service the emperor's soldiers and sailors sexually, the majority of them young Korean women; and [4] the full extent of Japan's use of chemical warfare in China. In the light of recent inquiries into the use of Caucasian and other POWs as slave labor in Japanese coal mines and other operations, it should be noted that the victors also formally decided to exclude any representatives of
zaibatsu
oligopolies from actual indictment for war crimes in the “Class A” trial in Tokyo. So substantial are these omissions that it does not seem too harsh to speak of criminal neglect, or even collusion, on the part of the prosecution itself.
¹⁴

The most appalling of these cover-ups was the case of Unit 731, involving high-level officers and scientific researchers whose practice of official, institutionalized murder is comparable to the crimes of the “Nazi doctors.” Unlike the German case, Japanese participants in these grotesque experiments on human subjects were granted secret immunity from prosecution in exchange for divulging their procedures and findings to the Americans. It naturally followed that the very existence of such practices within the formal structure of the Imperial Army had to be carefully suppressed by the Americans themselves thereafter.

Less sensational but more consequential where the question of popular Japanese consciousness of “war responsibility” is concerned was the exoneration of Emperor Hirohito from any responsibility whatsoever for the policies and actions undertaken in his name. Unlike Germany, where the Nazi regime was eliminated, there was no decisive break with the past in defeated Japan. Maintaining the same monarch on the throne under whom a decade and a half of Japanese aggression had been carried out was but the crowning symbol of this institutional and even personal continuity.

This was a pragmatic decision on the part of the American victors, who deemed it expedient to use Emperor Hirohito to ensure popular acquiescence to the occupation. However reasonable this may have seemed at the time, the negative consequences of such a policy have been far-reaching. No serious investigation of the
emperor's actual wartime role and responsibility was ever undertaken. Carefully choreographed pronouncements by both Japanese royalists and the American occupation command made clear that Hirohito did not even bear
moral
responsibility for whatever had been done in his name. In a remarkable act of collusive intrigue that brought together high occupation officers, court circles, members of both the prosecution and defense staffs in the Tokyo trial, the “Class A” defendants, and the emperor himself, the Tokyo trial was “fixed” from the very outset to exclude any possible testimony that might seem to incriminate the sovereign. As two of the separate critical opinions that emerged from the trial noted, the emperor's exemption made these judicial proceedings farcical.
¹⁵

It is difficult to exaggerate how subtly but significantly this binational imperial cover-up impeded serious Japanese engagement with the issue of war responsibility, both at the time and in the decades that followed. Hirohito had been commander in chief of the imperial forces and the most exalted political figure in the nation. If
he
was deemed to have no responsibility whatsoever for the horrors and disasters that took place between his ascension to the throne in 1926 and the end of the war in 1945, why should ordinary Japanese even think of taking responsibility on themselves? Emperor Hirohito became postwar Japan's preeminent symbol, and facilitator, of non-responsibility and non-accountability.

This was compounded by his longevity. Hirohito outlived any of the other major national leaders of World War II by far, and remained on the throne until his death in 1989 at the age of eighty-nine. So long as he was alive, it was generally taboo to discuss his personal war responsibility in the mass media (though this did take place, often vigorously, in left-wing and certain liberal publications). When a journalist did make so bold as to ask Hirohito his thoughts about “war responsibility” in a famous press conference in 1975, following an unprecedented state visit to the United States, the emperor's response was revealing. “Concerning such a figure of speech,” he said, “I have not done much study of these literary matters and so do not understand well and am unable to answer.”
Here was a sobering window not only on the emperor personally, but also on his country and the new “Pacific partnership” he was commemorating with his visit.

As the years passed and the emperor became an increasingly fragile and hollowed-out figure, it became understandably difficult for younger generations to associate his long “Sh
ō
wa” era (1926–1989) with anything but a kind of innocuous banality. War, peace, prosperity blurred into one—so thoroughly, in fact, that as Japan entered the present century conservative politicians introduced an astonishingly reactionary proposal to establish “Sh
ō
wa Day” (
Sh
ō
wa no Hi
) as a national holiday in commemoration of the late sovereign. Nothing of this sort has taken place in Germany, of course; and if contemporary Japan still maintains a peculiar “aptitude for being unloved,” the binational imperial taboo must be factored in as a significant part of the explanation.
¹⁶

The Cold War impact on
American
thinking about Japanese war crimes and war responsibility was openly apparent by 1948. Although hundreds of Japanese had been arrested as potential “Class A” war criminals between 1945 and 1946, only twenty-eight were actually indicted (two died during the trial, and one was excused on grounds of mental incompetence). By the time the Tokyo trial ended in November 1948, only a handful of the others still remained in jail. When the Tokyo judgment came down, that small number too was immediately exempted from prosecution. Unlike Germany, where the showcase Nuremberg trial was followed by ongoing prosecution of Nazi war criminals, there was no ongoing prosecution, or even investigation, of possible top-level Japanese war criminals. No indigenous Japanese system was ever established to pursue these issues.

Quite the opposite took place. By around 1949, former members of the imperial forces were being recruited by the Americans to assist in anti-Communist intelligence activity vis-à-vis China in particular. The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 prompted initiation of Japanese rearmament under the U.S. occupation forces—and with this, of course, a concerted binational
campaign to
suppress
recollection of Japanese behavior in the “old” war that had ended (as of 1950) only a scant five years earlier. In the new imagery of the Cold War, “Red China” now replaced Japan as the truly threatening and atrocious menace in Asia.

The peace settlement under which Japan regained sovereignty in 1952 included most of the nations of the world but excluded the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. For these reasons, it was known at the time as a “separate” (as opposed to “overall”) peace, and strongly criticized as such by left-wing elements within Japan. Where the issue of war responsibility is concerned, perhaps the most consequential aspect of the peace settlement lay in the handling of reparations.

In the immediate aftermath of Japan's defeat, the concept of reparations was essentially punitive. Existing industrial plants were to be transferred to other countries in Asia that had been ravaged by the Japanese war machine. Not only would this help compensate these countries for their losses, the argument went. It could also serve as a mechanism whereby a “leveling” of industrial productivity throughout Asia might be promoted. For technical as well as political reasons, these initial plans proved stillborn. And by 1951–1952, when the peace settlement was being finalized, U.S. planners, led by John Foster Dulles, had completely turned about the very purpose of reparations. Such compensation would now be taken out of current Japanese production, or in the form of financial arrangements, with the fundamental objective of promoting economic integration between Japan and the less developed anti-Communist nations of Asia. These state-to-state agreements were to be directed at rehabilitating Japan as the “workshop” of Asia (just as Germany was to become the workshop of Europe) and, at one and the same time, at strengthening Asian participation in the economic containment of China. The last thing anyone in Washington or Tokyo wished to see was a Japan left vulnerable to subsequent claims for compensation for its wartime abuses and atrocities.

Over the decade that followed, the Japanese government fulfilled its obligations under the 1952 peace treaty by negotiating
bilateral “reparations” settlements with former enemy nations such as the Philippines, Burma, Indonesia, and South Vietnam. (The United States waived its right to reparations, as did the Kuomintang-led Republic of China on Taiwan, with which Japan had been forced to deal, rather than the Communist regime, at the time of the peace treaty.) Normalization of diplomatic relations with South Korea, delayed until 1965, was accompanied by a reparations agreement. (This rapprochement between Japan and the southern half of its former colony was promoted as part of the larger U.S. strategy of containment in Asia, coincident with the intensification of military engagement in Vietnam.) When Japan belatedly normalized relations with the People's Republic of China in 1972, on the other hand, the Chinese agreed not to pursue the issue of reparations. Through these various state-to-state transactions, all supported by the United States, Japan in theory formally addressed and resolved all outstanding war claims.
¹⁷

The bilateral “Pacific partnership” that arose on the foundations of the 1952 peace settlement was characterized, on the Japanese side, by the consolidation of a conservative “iron triangle” of politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen that has, for all practical purposes, maintained power to the present day. This coalition has always been racked with conflict and factionalism, and Japan scholars usually take care to repudiate the myth of a monolithic “Japan, Inc.” Nonetheless, in yet another suggestive contrast to the situation in postwar Germany, it can still be said that the Japanese government has essentially been controlled by the same conservative political lineage since 1949. The creation of the misnamed Liberal Democratic Party in 1955 established a tradition of “one-party” dominance that, with the exception of two weak non-LDP prime ministers between August 1993 and January 1996, carried through the Cold War up to 2009, when the fragile Democratic Party of Japan took over the premiership.
^*

LDP prime ministers usually, in one form or another, expressed generalized “regret” for Japanese behavior during the war years. Still, this is also the party that supported Kishi Nobusuke, an accused (but never indicted) “Class A” war criminal, as prime minister from 1957 to 1960. It is the party of former prime minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, who breached a long-standing taboo by officially visiting Yasukuni Shrine with his entire cabinet on the anniversary of the war's end in 1985, to pay homage to those who had died for the emperor in World War II. It is the LDP that secretly arranged for the seven defendants condemned to death in the Tokyo trial to be enshrined at Yasukuni; that supported watered-down textbook treatments of the war; that time and again appointed cabinet ministers given to inflammatory statements such as the denial of the Rape of Nanking.