From: phung@attmail.com
Subject: NYT Book Review: Collective Amnesia in Tokyo (part I)
Organization: The Ohio State University; Department of Phyiscs
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1993 07:35:39 GMT


Collective Amnesia in Tokyo
---------------------------

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, Nov. 22, 1992


"JAPAN AT WAR: An Oral History"
By Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook
479 pp, New York
The New Press. $27.50.


By Stanley Karnow

	The powerful, eloquent, hideous and remarkably candid recollections
of Japanese veterans of World War II in "Japan at War: An Oral History"
amply confirm the worst allegations of American propaganda during the
conflict. With fanatical disregard for human life, Japanese soldiers
committed countless atrocities against both enemy combatants and 
innocent civilians. They were trained under an almost unbearably brutal
system of rigorous discipline deliberately designed to prepare them 
to brutalize others. Even more important, they were driven by unswerving
obedience to a culture that had implanted in them the conviction they 
were the so-called Yamato race, a superior breed whose duty it was to 
uphold the honor of their society, whatever that required.

	Though Japan has officially renounced the use of force, its leaders 
have never apologized for the nation's wartime behavior; the remarks of
Emperor Akihito during his recent visit to China, for instance, stopped
short of that. Textbooks in Japan have been censored to insure that 
they omit references to the "dark side" of the conflict. The Japanese 
people seem to agree with that policy. While their repugnance for war 
is pervasive, they lack a real grasp of Japan's central role in the 
conflagration. Instead, the authors of "Japan at War" maintain, they
believe that "like some natural cataclysm" the war simply "happened" to
them, and that it was not the consequence of anything "done" by them.
The Japan Times similarly noted this year that despite periodic 
revelations in the Japanese media of the country's "inhumane conduct" 
during World War II, "it is doubtful that many Japanese have retained a
keen sense of responsibility for ... past crimes."

	But Theodore F. Cook, a professor of history at William Paterson 
College of New Jersey, and Haruko Taya Cook, a writer and teacher who 
was a child in Japan during the war, discovered that this collective 
amnesia conceals a trauma that continues to torment the Japanese who
went through the war. The authors propitiously began their interviews
early in 1989, around the time of the death of Emperor Hirohito, in 
whose name the war had been waged. His death reminded some of the 
elderly Japanese Veterans they interviewed of their own mortality, 
spurring them "to release what they had been holding inside -- if not 
to confess, at least to confide."'

	Many veterans, at first reluctant to speak, ultimately uncorked
their emotions in a cathartic explosion. The Cooks report: "Tears were
a commonplace -- of sorrow, of bitterness or grief, of loving memory, 
of chagrin or even horror over acts committed. Voices choked. Bodies
were convulsed with sobs. There were actual groans of pain and anguish,
even grinding of teeth. Loud voices boomed from small frames and old
shoulders were squared, fists clenched, in anger and outrage."

	The interviews would have been even more spectacular had they 
been videotaped. But few of these people would have consented to face a
camera, as evidenced by their preference to speak in such remote spots 
as railroad stations, parks or even rice fields, presumably to protect
their privacy. In any case, there is drama enough in their spoken 
reminiscences.

	For the Japanese, the war did not start with their raid on Pearl 
Harbor in December 1941, but more than four years earlier, when they 
pushed deep into China in a campaign of slaughter and rape. They 
impressed nearly a million Koreans as slave laborers and abducted Korean
women as "comfort girls." Subsequently, as Japanese forces invaded 
Southeast Asia, they gratuitously ravaged and alienated indigenous 
peoples who had originally welcomed them as liberators from Western 
colonialism.

	Squeamish readers will recoil from the accounts of their cruelty. 
Shintaro Uno, a former intelligence agent in China, boasts of beheading
more than 40 prisoners and torturing untold numbers of others, explaining,
"We did it for the sake of our country. From our filial obligation to
our ancestors." Shozo Tominaga, then a young officer in China, recalls 
that his "trial of courage" was to decapitate a Chinese captive. Appalled
by the prospect but fearful of disgracing himself, he bowed to his 
commander, unsheathed his sword, took a deep breath and dispatched the 
wretch In a single stroke. "At that moment, I felt something change 
inside me," he says, "l don't know how to put it, but I gained strength
somewhere in my gut." He also remembers teaching recruits how to run 
their bayonets through living Chinese prisoners tied to poles, and 
engaging in the wholesale massacre of civilians, who, it was assumed, 
had sheltered and fed the enemy. "Human beings turned into murdering 
demons," he comments. "It was a natural extension of our training back 
in Japan."

	Like the Nazi scientists, the Japanese also experimented on live 
prisoners. They shot Chinese captives or severed their limbs to enable
Japanese medics to practice new techniques for treating battle wounds.
The victims invariably died, and often their brain tissue was sent to 
pharmaceutical companies for the manufacture of hormones. Dr. Ken Yuasa,
a participant in these atrocities who now works in a clinic near Tokyo,
looks back on his experience with remorse, saying: "It's outrageous to 
murder a person." But, he told the authors, "Everybody did it. At that
time we were doing something good."

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