The Politics of Memory
in Japan and East Asia
Sven Saaler and Justin Aukema
Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus
Course Reader no. 7
2013

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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VOLUME EDITORSVEN SAALER AND JUSTIN AUKEMA
Sophia University

SERIES EDITORLAURA HEIN
Northwestern University

EDITORIAL BOARD
Mark Caprio
Lonny Carlile
Parks Coble
Sabine Frühstück
Tom Grunfeld
Laura HeinJames Huffman
Jeffrey Kingston
Susan Long
Laura Miller
Mark Ravina
Mark Selden
Stephen Vlastos

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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The copyright of all material in this course reader is held by the respective authors, except whereotherwise noted.
The copyright for the essay “Heroic Resistance and Victims of Atrocity: Negotiating theMemory of Japanese Imperialism in Chinese Museums,” originally published under the title“Horror and Atrocity: Memory of Japanese Imperialism in Chinese Museums,” is owned by the
Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press. All rights reserved.
The volume editors can be contacted at svensaaler@web.de and aukemajk@gmail.com.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia
Introduction

9Part 1: Introduction to the Topic: Memory, Responsibility, Reconciliation

10

Miriam Silverberg

12

Miriam Silverberg, “War Responsibility Revisited: Auschwitz in Japan,”
The Asia-Pacific Journal, July 11, 2007.
Richard Falk

31

Richard Falk, “War, War Crimes, Power and Justice: Toward a
Jurisprudence of Conscience,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 10.4.3, January 23,
2012.
Lily Gardner Feldman

43

Lily Gardner Feldman, “German-Polish Reconciliation in Comparative
Perspective: Lessons for Japan?,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 10.16.1, April 19,
2010.
Kazuhiko TOGO

62

Kazuhiko Togo, “Japan's historical Memory: Reconciliation With Asia,”
The Asia-Pacific Journal 8.52.4, December 23, 2008.
WADA Haruki

71

Wada Haruki, “Maritime Asia and the Future of a Northeast Asia
Community,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, October 27, 2008.
Part 2: Topics of Historical Memory in Japan
Section A: War Responsibility and Reparations

79

AWAYA Kentaro

82

Awaya Kentaro, “The Tokyo Tribunal, War Responsibility and theJapanese People,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, February 2, 2006.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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Yuki TANAKA

88

Yuki Tanaka, “Crime and Responsibility: War, the State, and JapaneseSociety,” The Asia Pacific Journal, August 20, 2006.
Tessa Morris-Suzuki

99

Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Who is Responsible? The Yomiuri Project and theEnduring Legacy of the Asia-Pacific War,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, June 19,
2007.
William Underwood

110

William Underwood, “The Aso Mining Company in World War II: History
and Japan’s Would-Be Premier,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, October 6, 2007.
Ivy Lee121

Ivy Lee, “Toward Reconciliation: The Nishimatsu Settlements for Chinese
Forced Labor in World War Two,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 10.32.6, August
9, 2010.
KANG Jian with an Introduction by William Underwood

140

Kang Jian, “Rejected by All Plaintiffs: Failure of the NishimatsuShinanogawa ‘Settlement’ with Chinese Forced Laborers in Wartime
Japan,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 10.32.5, August 9, 2010.
Section B: War Crimes

155

Mark Selden

157

Mark Selden, “War Crimes, Atrocities, and State Terrorism,” The AsiaPacific Journal, April 15, 2008.
Yoshiko NOZAKI
Yoshiko Nozaki, “The Comfort Women Controversy: History andTestimony,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, n.d.

178

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Kinue TOKUDOME

195

Kinue Tokudome, “The Japanese Apology on the ‘Comfort Women’ Cannot
Be Considered Official: Interview with Congressman Michael Honda,” The
Asia-Pacific Journal, May 31, 2007.
Frederick R. Dickinson

201

Frederick R. Dickinson, “Biohazard: Unit 731 in Postwar Japanese Politics
of National ‘Forgetfulness,’” The Asia-Pacific Journal, October 12, 2007.
SUZUKI Chieko

220

Suzuki Chieko, “The Hundred Head Contest: Reassessing the Nanjing
Massacre,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, n.d.
Section C: War Apologies

224

Jennifer Lind

225

Jennifer Lind, “Memory, Apology, and International Reconciliation,” The
Asia-Pacific Journal 8.47.7, November 21, 2008.
Alexis Dudden

232

Alexis Dudden, “Memories and Aporias in the Japan-Korea Relationship,”
The Asia-Pacific Journal 10.14.3, April 5, 2010.
Wada Haruki

247

Wada Haruki, “The Comfort Women, the Asian Women’s Fund and theDigital Museum,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, February 1, 2008.
Mark E. Caprio
Mark E. Caprio, “Neo-Nationalist Interpretations of Japan’s Annexation of
Korea: The Colonization Debate in Japan and South Korea,” The AsiaPacific Journal 10.44.4, November 1, 2010.

251

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Section D: The History Textbook Controversy

270

Yoshiko NOZAKI and Mark Selden

272

Yoshiko Nozaki and Mark Selden, “Japanese Textbook Controversies,
Nationalism, and Historical Memory: Intra- and Inter-national Conflicts,”
The Asia-Pacific Journal 9.24.5, June 15, 2009.
NAKAJIMA Takeshi

299

Nakajima Takeshi, “The Tokyo Tribunal, Justice Pal and the Revisionist
Distortion of History,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 9.44.3, October 31, 2011.
Mikyoung KIM

317

Mikyoung Kim, “Myth and Fact in Northeast Asia’s History Textbook
Controversies,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, August 15, 2008.
Takashi YOSHIDA

333

Takashi Yoshida, “The Nanjing Massacre. Changing Contours of History
and Memory in Japan, China, and the U.S.,” The Asia-Pacific Journal,
December 19, 2006.
Part 3: Sites of Japanese Memory: Museums, Memorials, Commemoration
Section A: Yasukuni Shrine, its War Museum, and other World War II Museums

340

TAKAHASHI Tetsuya

343

Takahashi Tetsuya, “The National Politics of the Yasukuni Shrine.” Trans.
Philip Seaton. Nationalisms in Japan. Ed. Naoko Shimazu. New York:
Routledge, 2006. 155-80.
John Breen
John Breen, “Yasukuni Shrine: Ritual and Memory,” The Asia-Pacific
Journal, June 3, 2005.

363

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

7Mark Selden369Mark Selden, “Japan, the United States and Yasukuni Nationalism: War,Historical Memory and the Future of the Asia Pacific,” The Asia-Pacific
Journal, September 10, 2008.
WAKAMIYA Yoshibumi and WATANABE Tsuneo

393

Wakamiya Yoshibumi and Watanabe Tsuneo, “Yomiuri and Asahi Editors
Call for a National Memorial to Replace Yasukuni,” The Asia-Pacific
Journal, February 14, 2006.
Takashi Yoshida

399

Takashi Yoshida, “Revising the Past, Complicating the Future: The
Yushukan War Museum in Modern Japanese History,” The Asia-Pacific
Journal, December 2, 2007.
Kirk A. Denton

409

Denton, Kirk A. “Heroic Resistance and Victims of Atrocity: Negotiating
the Memory of Japanese Imperialism in Chinese Museums.” Reenvisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective
Memories in Reform China. Ed. Ching Kwan Lee and Guobin Yang.
Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center, 2007. 245-86.
Jeff Kingston

443

Jeff Kingston, “Nanjing’s Massacre Memorial: Renovating War Memory in
Nanjing and Tokyo,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, August 22, 2008.
Section B: Kamikaze and Mass Suicide

471

James L. Huffman

473

James L. Huffman, “Challenging Kamikaze Stereotypes: ‘Wings of Defeat’on the Silver Screen,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, n.d.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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Yuki Tanaka

481

Yuki Tanaka, “The Songs of Nippon, the Yamato Museum and theInculcation of Japanese Nationalism,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, May 8,
2008.
ANIYA Masaaki

494

Aniya Masaaki, “Compulsory Mass Suicide, the Battle of Okinawa, andJapan's Textbook Controversy,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, January 6, 2008.
Mark Ealey
Mark Ealey, “The Martyrdom: Children and the Battle of Okinawa,” The
Asia-Pacific Journal, November 6, 2005.

508

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

9Introduction
This course reader explores issues of memory-making and memory-shaping inmodern Japan. The debates over historical memory in recent decades in Japan have major
contemporary significance, as do the problems emerging from “memory wars” in modern
societies more generally. We also explore the larger question of the uses and abuses ofhistory and its implications for contemporary and future political developments both inJapan and in international relations. This includes a discussion of issues such as war
responsibility, reparations for war and war crimes, apologies for war, and reconciliation.
After a general introduction to the problem of historical and social memory related
to the Asia-Pacific War and Japanese imperialism, we identify important sites of memory inJapan and their functions and historical development. Additionally, we investigate
representations of memory in Japanese society, and controversies surrounding
memorialization projects and history textbooks. Japan is divided, still today, about the ways
the past is presented in the public sphere. While a number of controversial memorials seek
to justify Japan’s wars and war crimes and some even beautify the Asia-Pacific War as awar of Asian liberation, in recent years, criticism has emerged within Japan that challenges
these kinds of unreflective narratives. In addition, the war is being memorialized in otherparts of Asia, often in ways that emphasize the ways that Japanese imperialism brought
disaster its former colonies or for neighboring countries.
Questions that will be explored in detail include: What are the political, ideologicaland aesthetic presuppositions of memory-making and of representations of history? Who
are the major actors in memory-making in modern Japan? What can we say about therelations of the individual and the state through the analysis of the politics of memory?

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Introduction to the Topic: Memory, Responsibility, Reconciliation“War Responsibility Revisited: Auschwitz in Japan”
Miriam Silverberg
July 11, 2007
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Miriam-Silverberg/2470“War, War Crimes, Power and Justice: Toward a Jurisprudence of Conscience”
Richard Falk
January 23, 2012
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Richard-Falk/3681“German-Polish Reconciliation in Comparative Perspective: Lessons for Japan?”
Lily Gardner Feldman
April 19, 2010
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Lily-Gardner_Feldman/3344“Japan’s Historical Memory: Reconciliation with Asia”
Kazuhiko Togo
December 23, 2008
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Kazuhiko-TOGO/2997“Maritime Asia and the Future of a Northeast Asia Community”
Wada Haruki
October 27, 2008
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Wada-Haruki/2934
This section will familiarize students with the concepts of “memory,” “warresponsibility” and “reconciliation” in global perspective. Miriam Silverberg’s essay, “WarResponsibility Revisited: Auschwitz in Japan,” asks how intellectuals deal with war, why
they support war, and how they revisit war. Referring to Japan, she points to the ambiguityof the term “war responsibility,” and introduces a variety of views expressed byintellectuals, including philosophers and literary critics, on Japanese war responsibility. As
the title suggests, she includes in her discussion a review of how Japanese intellectuals
have addressed the issue of Auschwitz—the legacy of the largest concentration camp in
Nazi Germany, and pre-eminent symbol of the destruction of European Jews.
Then, Richard Falk discusses the issue of criminal accountability, “of those who
commit crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and war crimes on behalf of asovereign state,” and traces the quest to achieve global justice through the use ofinternational law from the Nuremberg Trials in Germany and the Tokyo Trials after WorldWar II, to the foundation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2002. Falk notes thatthe common tendency of the victors, or those with the most wealth and power, toselectively prosecute and distribute judgment unfairly, poses significant challenges tojustice and equality. As one example of the consequences of such “victor’s justice”
judgments, Falk points to the continued threat and proliferation of nuclear weapons after
the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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Finally, Lily Gardner Feldman proposes the example of German-Polish discussions
about war and genocide as a possible framework for Japan’s process of reconciliation. She
gives a working definition of “reconciliation,” explains the role of “history” in reconciliation,and introduces institutions involved in reconciliation activities in Europe. As former
diplomat Kazuhiko Togo explains, though, the reconciliation process in Japan has been
hindered by the sharp split between right-wing and left-wing historical views among
Japanese. Overcoming this division, in Togo’s opinion, is the main task Japanese face before
they can come to terms with their past and achieve reconciliation with their Asianneighbors. Then, Wada Haruki offers a forward-looking perspective, expressing hope thatnational boundaries will be transcended and the creation of an East Asian Community, or,as he calls it, a “Common House of Northeast Asia,” will be achieved. However, the basic
condition, Wada stresses, is dialogue about historical issues and true reconciliation
between Japan and its neighbors about their common past. As an example of how to reachreconciliation, he quotes the resolution adopted by both houses of the U.S. Congress on Nov.
23, 1993, which apologized for overthrowing the government of the Hawaiian Kingdom
and declaring Hawaii an American protectorate in 1893. Without similar steps by Japan,
Wada claims, true reconciliation in East Asia will be difficult to achieve.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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War Responsibility Revisited: Auschwitz in Japan
Miriam Silverberg
Introduced by Ann Sherif

Miriam Silverberg

For more than five decades after the end of the World War II, Japan articulated an official
identity as a pacifist, anti-nuclear nation both domestically and in the international arena (itsformidable Self Defense Force notwithstanding). Since the end of the Cold War and the first Gulf
War in the early 1990s, however, the debate over revising Japan’s “Peace Constitution”
intensified. In particular, Article 9 of the Constitution, by which Japan renounces offensive war,has been under attack by politicians proclaiming the goal of becoming “a normal nation”, andthe present Abe administration has prioritized Constitutional revision. Along with politicians andthe citizenry, many intellectuals and artists have spoken against the possibility of Japan
identifying itself as a “nation that wages war”--thus rejecting its assumed role as advocate ofpeace and foe of nuclear arms. In June 2004, Nobel Prize winner Oe Kenzaburo, along withartists and intellectuals Inoue Hisashi, Komori Yoichi, and Kato Shuichi and others, formed the
Article 9 Association, which advocates “protection” or preservation of the present Constitution.

Members of Article 9 Association

In her article, Miriam Silverberg urges us to consider two complex questions: How do
intellectuals go to war? How do intellectuals revisit war? Although Silverberg frames thesequestions primarily in the context of the United States’ war on terror, she also certainly would
want readers to reflect on the involvement of Japan’s Self Defense Forces in the Iraq war, asSilverberg: War Responsibility Revisited

13

well as the debate over revision of the Constitution. The issues are intimately related to theraging controversy over Prime Ministerial visits to Yasukuni Shrine, where casualties of pastwars are enshrined. While Prime Minister Abe has thus far refrained from making a high profile
Yasukuni Shrine visit, discussion of the need for new sites of mourning persists. Some envision a
new government memorial for the dead of past wars separate from the Shinto shrine, whileothers assert the need for places to lay to rest and mourn the dead in future Japanese wars, wars
unimaginable under the present Constitution.
Silverberg reminds us of the extent to which Japan is haunted by its most recent major war, a
war that ended over sixty years ago. Entangled with ongoing debates over atrocities andbarbarisms committed in the course of battle are the inhumane acts “unrelated to war andcommitted mostly against innocent civilians,” that is, the former colonial subjects of theJapanese empire. We are reminded of the aborted process, in the early postwar, of “serious selfreflection” about war responsibility, complicity, and guilt by intellectuals such as Odagiri Hideo
and others for whom the war and imperialism was lived experience. Silverberg demands that we
shift our attention in revisiting “Japanese war-time behavior and post-war post-mortems” to thequestion of how intellectuals become complicit with or resist the road to war, rather than
“why?” If we do not understand the how—process and practice—we risk missing the interaction
between larger social forces and more intimate motives and ideas as part of history, whether in
relation to Japan’s Asia-Pacific War or contemporary American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In discussing the sometimes problematic media representation of visits to Auschwitz by Japanese
intellectuals such as Mori Tatsuya, Silverberg points out the conflicting demands between
historicity and cultural specificity, on the one hand, and the necessity for appealing touniversality and human empathy. Reluctantly, Silverberg critiques Mori’s glossy color images of
Auschwitz as “giving style to the Holocaust,” of somehow aestheticizing (and thus
commodifying) the horrifying pile of shoes belonging to those murdered in the concentration
camps. Yet Mori is not alone in succumbing to the seduction of beautifying the suffering ofothers. Indeed the annual World Press Photo Exhibition makes the viewer squirm with guilt andpleasure at the gorgeous images by photojournalists, spectacular color photos of a slaughteredcorpse in Darfur, or the pleading eyes of a starving child. But we must also pose the questions—is there only one proper mode of representation of atrocity? If the formal and aesthetic
properties of the image or text serve to facilitate empathy, awareness, a desire to know more,and even action—is making it beautiful, appealing, compelling always wrong?
Finally, Silverberg makes the point that many intellectuals and artists in Japan, along withordinary people, are far more aware of the world outside of Japan than are their Americancounterparts. This simple fact is one worth revisiting again and again. The imbalance ofknowledge, translation, and information between the U.S. and other countries goes a long way inexplaining America’s hubris and willingness to go to war with peoples in cultures it hardly
knows and whose languages it has not bothered to learn. Whether American and Japanese
intellectuals will find themselves allies in coming wars is another question. –Ann Sherif
How do intellectuals go to war? My first query emerged from the events that all too rapidly took
form following what came to be known as “September 11.” It may be no accident that the only
other day commemorated here in the United States by enunciating the date, is the “4th of July.”
Even the historian suspicious of linearity must admit that all interpretations of cause-and-effectare rendered suspect by this form of dating. Without notation of a calendar year the referenced

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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event is taken out of history and brought closer to the realm of myth, a realm much more
hospitable to the cyclical rituals of patriotism.
Without the date in terms of month, day, and year my second question, “How do intellectuals
revisit war?” is rendered almost unanswerable. Not only does one war merge into the next,
pronouncements in the months preceding the declaration of and thereby the legalization of battle,
are rendered invisible. How does the post September 11 War on Terrorism follow from thesaber–rattling of the preceding weeks? What date was the Patriot Act passed in relationship to
September 11? And how long after our government had begun to redefine the rights ofcitizenship, along with the privileges of the immigrant? We do not know; we were not paying
attention; we were out buying flags.
There were the exceptions. Within days of September 11, Susan Sontag pointed to a “disconnect
between the monstrous dose of reality and the self–righteous drivel and outright deceptions being
peddled by public figures and TV commentators.”

Susan Sontag

The media chose to repeat her assessment of those responsible for the violence “Whatever may
be said of the Perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.” Sontag was thenostracized for calling the enemy courageous. One year later, she was still trying to combat themainstream press with her reference to a “pseudo-declaration of a “pseudo-war.” Herexplanation, “…There are no endless wars; but there are declarations of the extension of powerby a state that believes it cannot be challenged” was all but ignored. (cf. Arundhati Roy’s similarreference to “what President Bush rather biblically calls ‘the task that does not end.’” Roy’s
response was also similar to Sontag’s indictment of Bush’s will to power: “I find myself thinking
a great deal of the relationships between citizens and the state.”) And in a chilling reminder ofthe rampant excesses of McCarthy’s reign, comedian and talk-show host, Bill Maher, saw his
program cancelled after a not dissimilar remark.[1]My second query, “How do Intellectuals Revisit War?” was prompted by the work of Japanesescholars, so many of whom looked toward the new millennium by looking back on the century as
an era of warfare. Equally important in directing me to my second question was the repetition of
the term jiko sekinin (self or personal responsibility) in the Japanese media after three young
Japanese citizens were taken hostage in Iraq in the Spring of 2004, at a time when I was
privileged to be affiliated with the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies at Seikei University. The
repeated use of the term appeared to me to coincide with an intensified attention to the questionof senso sekinin, the literal translation for which is “war responsibility.” The meaning of bothterms eluded me. While “self responsibility seemed somehow redundant, “war responsibility”
was ambiguous. An article in the April 30, 2004 issue of Shukan Asahi placed “selfSilverberg: War Responsibility Revisited

15

responsibility” in its recent context for me: It was the twisted strategy of the Koizumi
administration to discredit the hostages by publicly emphasizing their lack of “self –responsibility’” and by spreading innuendos accusing the three young citizens of staging theevent. The Weekly Asahi showed how the Yomiuri Shimbun had picked up the refrain: The three
had brought the situation on themselves and had greatly burdened the government by rushingirresponsibly into a dangerous region with no concern for self-responsibility [emphasis added].
They were to be held accountable to pay for their ransom because of “self-responsibility.” The
Weekly Asahi article went on to cite a media expert who placed the term jiko sekinin within its
place in the contemporary parole of late capitalist Japan. Over the past several years, the term
had been adopted as one of accusation by those in power eager to abnegate responsibility. The
media expert who contextualized the term, noted how industry had begun to talk in terms of the“’self responsibility’ of the consumer,” and that “even crime was now the ‘self-responsibility’ of
the citizenry.” She explained that it had become the means, not only of denying responsibility
but also of claiming authority and legitimacy in taking the offense in order to ensure theelimination of anyone different.[2]The term senso sekinin is not as easily defined as the mean-spirited jiko sekinin. Withincontemporary Japanese popular and academic parlance it seems to imply war guilt as associatedwith war crimes, loosely defined. However, as German writer, Gitta Sereny, has shown in her
memoir, The Healing Wound: Experiences and Reflections, Germany 1938-2001, the language
attached to the revisitation of war has consequences for the interpretation and adjudication of
wartime actions. She emphasizes the accomplishments of the Central Agency for Investigation incontrast with the work of the so-called ‘war crime trials’ conducted by the Allies. The Agency,
whose determinations, based on the distinction between a war crime (committed in the course of
war actions) and an ‘NS (Nationalist Socialist) crime’ (unrelated to war and committed mostly
against innocent civilians) was able to conduct landmark trials of national Socialist acts, leading
to the conviction of almost 6,500 individuals between 1958 and 1996. The Allies incorrectly
considered crimes committed by the SS or the Wehrmacht in occupied countries andconcentration and extermination camps outside of Germany to be war crimes, and thus out of thereach of the German courts which only had jurisdiction over crimes committed by Germans
against Germans. When, by 1950, most of those tried for ‘war crimes’ were released, those guiltyof what the German courts considered “NS crimes” were out of the reach of the court because of
the ruling of the Allies that these individuals could only be tried once.[3]While I am herein interested in most recent history, and will not address the premises, rulings, or
institutional and psychological legacies of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, Serenyi’s discussion
suggests the need for study of analogous developments, including the connections and distinction
between war crimes and inhumane acts that must be associated with both war and thearrangements of Japanese colonialism.[4] Instead, I would like to briefly examine some uses of
the term “wartime responsibility” before modifying my initial query, in order to ask how
Japanese intellectuals have gone to war.
The preface to the inaugural issue of Senso Sekinin Kenkyu (Studies in War Responsibility), thejournal of the Japan Resource Center for War Responsibility, confronted the ambiguity allowed
for by the term war responsibility: In order to ensure that acknowledgment of and apologies forresponsibility would go beyond lip service it was necessary to clarify “Who has what kind of
responsibility to whom?’”[5] In 1998, the first issue of Dainiki Senso Sekinin traced the process
whereby intellectuals in the literary world, most specifically those affiliated with Shin Nihon

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

16

Bungaku, approached “tracking down war responsibility” as early as October of 1945. By
December, Nakano Shigeharu was linking the necessity of “self-criticism” by “democratic’’
writers as part of his proposal to trace war responsibility, at the rally establishing the Shin Nihon
Bungakukai (New Japan Literary Organization). Those who had willingly and eagerly supported“the war of invasion” as well as those who had been coerced were equally responsible for
producing self-criticism that would show how their literature had contributed to the war effort.[6]It was literary critic, Odagiri Hideo, who pointed to the question of the language being
appropriated by intellectuals revisiting their actions in the June 1946 issue of Shin Nihon
Bungaku (New Japanese Literature). Therein, he argued that in the case of literature the term
“war responsibility” rather than “war crimes” was apposite. Odagiri’s rejection of the phrase”ichi oku sozange” (one hundred million all penitent), the mea culpa of the period immediately
following the end of the war, shows how the ambiguity surrounding war responsibility could
place the blame in varied sites. Odagiri’s “war responsibility” entailed serious self-reflection on
the part of authors. To talk in terms that placed the blame on the entire populace was “idiotic.”
To place the blame on the Japanese people was to remove blame from those directly responsible.
Putting the blame at the feet of the “one hundred million” most definitely shifted blame awayfrom the guilty. Another contributing factor was the inability of the In the end, however, New
Japan Literary Organization was unable to follow through on its promise to do more than namenames: to conduct in-depth analysis of how exactly literature had helped the war effort. It was
blocked from moving forward because a continuation in the naming of names (and literaryworks, etc.) would have meant that the culpability of authors on the left would become evenmore evident.[7]Today, the specificity that the term “war responsibility” was supposed to give to the process ofassigning guilt is largely absent, as is any reference to “war crimes.” The ‘one hundred million’(the Japanese subjects) are no longer guilty, but then, nobody is guilty. Thus no one is obligatedto discuss the grotesquerie of the violent acts and there is no subject attached to the term “warresponsibility.” There appears to be a consensus that senso sekinin refers to some kind of War
atrocity committed by some kind of group or individual. I am fully aware that this discussion can
begin to sound much too literal. It can be argued that the term “war guilt” is commonly used
when translating senso sekinin. But this both begs the question “guilty of what” and the question,“responsible to whom?” In fact when Prime Minister Higashikuni Naruhiko in fall 1945 called
for mass contrition of the 100,000,000 he was proclaiming that the people were guilty of losing
the war. He was asserting that the Japanese people had engaged in any kind of crime against
humanity. According to this logic, the Japanese people were responsible for carrying out theEmperor’s wishes and were thus guilty of losing his war. This was in marked contrast to theapproach of the Allies, who equated guilt with taking the initiative to go to war. If we accept theargument of Shukan Asahi that the Koizumi administration wielded the term “self responsibility”
as a diversionary tactic deflecting the attention of the populace away from examining Koizumi’s
dispatch of Japanese troops to Iraq in the first place, a repetition reveals itself. Just as Koizumi
blamed the young free-lance journalists and welfare worker for putting the Japanese nation atrisk, Higashikuni had concealed the responsibility of the Japanese leadership -- going backalmost two decades -- among the one hundred million guilty subjects. Shielded from view also,
were the Japanese intellectuals who went to war.[8]Silverberg: War Responsibility Revisited17

How Have Japanese Intellectuals Gone to War?
Nishikawa Nagao’s Senso no seiki wo koete, an example of Japanese scholarship revisiting thepast century as a century marked by warfare, includes a compelling discussion of the “out of theordinary moment” (iyo na shunkan) awaited by intellectuals. He quotes from literary works,
diaries and poetry by such writers as Dazai Osamu, and Takamura Kotaro that responded to thatout of the ordinary moment that arrived on December 8, 1941. Nishikawa wishes to make it clearthat literary figures were flooded by the emotions and excitement felt by the populace at large.
Writers actually embraced the moment “when words were not necessary.”[9] While Nishikawa
refers to fascism and notes the similarities to reminiscent of Nazi rhetoric, he holds the modern
nation-state responsible for similar responses to the onset of war both at other times in the historyof the modern Japanese nation-state and in other nations. Nonetheless it is Japanese history that
Nishikawa is discussing and the history of Japan that determined the nature of the emotional
responses. How, then, I would like to ask, could the Japanese intellectual of the 1930s and 1940s
go to war, as an intellectual?
My answer is that the options were fairly limited during the 1930s and 194Os. There were those,
like the writers of Jinmin Bunko, who expressed their sentiments in a literary magazine with noovert claim to a political agenda. At a time when the journal Bungei Seiki was naming names for
the Tokkotai (Secret Police) by pointing a finger at who was “Red” and who was “a leftist in
disguise” in each if its issues, Jinmin Bunko editor Takami Jun and colleagues engaged in theirown political activism by rushing to bookstores to flip through the pages of each new issue of
Bungei Seiki before the authorities could study the names. The fictional pieces published in theirjournal carried on the heritage of the Proletarian literature movement in a more muted fashion.
Similarly, the intellectuals among the Kibei (Japanese-American who received education in
Japan) who were incarcerated in the United States during the Pacific War started their own
literary magazines. To include these writers within Japanese literary history is not to deny them
the rights of US citizens as was done to them by their own government. My point is that thecultural orientation of these young people was forged within the context of pre-Pacific War
Japan, as is clear from the format of the literary magazines produced from within eachconcentration camp that was established for American citizens of Japanese descent and for their
Japan-born parents.
The journals, such as Doto (Raging Waves) the magazine that was an outgrowth of the Tule
Lake seinendan (youth corps) published from July 1944 through the June 22, 1945 issue, skirted
censorship with such images as the Statue of Liberty in tears, and articles such as “On National
History Education.” The date was October 7, 1944; the nation in question was Japan. The
concern was consideration of ‘the Japanese spirit.’ These literary journals were a way for
intellectuals who acted as intellectuals through the medium of the Japanese language to go to war
after they had been deemed un-American and incarcerated.
Most recently the journal Zenya has taken up the political cause of expressing the urgent need tocounter war, discrimination and colonialism through cultural commentary. I include it here,
within the context of visiting, rather than revisiting, because of its concern with our current stateof war. Its sense of urgency is expressed in its credo:
That the eve of catastrophe will become an eve of rebirth
The eve of war the eve of liberation
We will not abandon that hope; that desire.[10]The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

18

Other wartime intellectuals, less cautious in their opposition or less lucky, went to prison, where
they continued to write. I would argue that the prison diaries and the letters written from prisonby Proletarian writers along with such figures as Kawakami Hajime and Fukumoto Kazuo should
be studied as a genre of prison literature alongside such post-war autobiographical writing as
Yamashiro Tomoe’s multi-volume work.[11]Finally there were those who collaborated with the state. In the Japanese context the words“cooperated” or tenko (political apostasy) have been used to refer to intellectuals who produced
culture at the behest of the state. It is not my intent here to engage in an in depth discussion of
the scholarship on tenko.[12] The topic is too important and complex to treat in a cursory
fashion. For example there is the case of Sata Ineko. Since interviewing Sata Ineko three times
during the 1980’s I have spent a great deal of time trying to understand, “why?” Why one of theleading figures of the Proletarian literature movement -- I will not qualify her place in Japanese
literary history as “woman” Proletarian literature writer – abandoned her overt anti-imperialist
position to champion Japan’s occupation of virtually all of Asia? Recently I have begun to thinkthat the relevant question here, and in other interrogations of Japanese war-time behavior andpost-war post-mortems cannot be why, but must be “how?”
How Have Japanese Intellectuals Revisited War?
The postwar Japanese discourse on war responsibility has been one form of revisiting, and I
would include Sata Ineko’s attempts to explain her wartime collusion with the state in her
postwar literature and essays as examples of revisiting. In the post-war era, the practice ofstarting new journals with political ramifications, which, as I have mentioned was one way of“going to war”, became a form of going back to (or revisiting) war. For example, the theme of
the inaugural issue of Josei Senso Jinken (Women, War, Human Rights) was “What is war
responsibility?” The prefatory comments to this first issue by philosopher Shimizu Kiyoko
emphasized that neither in the pre-war years nor in the post-war moment had the Japanese people
been able to consider themselves as autonomous citizens. Neither Unit 731 nor the Rape of
Nanking nor even the “Comfort Woman” problem had been taught in the schools. The students
had been taught that Japan’s role as victim nation was to act as a virtuous example by spreadingan anti-war message. There was no room in this discourse for dissenting voices. It was the goalof the journal Women, War, Human Rights to foster debate on precisely these issues and makeavailable documentation through research. Hannah Arendt scholar Okano Yayo took up thetheme of senso sekinin by sharing the story of her awakening from the complacent position thatthe state as “subject” was responsible for bringing about the war and therefore those with nodirect engagement were not guilty of any responsibility.[13]More localized publications such as the booklet Our Inner Responsibility, published by highschool administrator Nagao Yuzo, have concurred with Okano. This re-publication of the antiwar writing of Watanabe Kiyoshi, who had joined the navy in 1941,[14] held the Japanesepeople and the Emperor accountable for the atrocities on the Asian continent. In the preface theeditor, Nagao, attributes war responsibility to the people, but his is a different position from theideological call for “one hundred million in contrition:” War responsibility is not just a matter ofthe Emperor at the top of a leadership; it is also the responsibility of the people of the nation. His
position regarding the call to contrition points to the speed with which those in power shifted
their language in the immediate aftermath of the war without serious reflection. For example,

Silverberg: War Responsibility Revisited

19“100 million in Contrition” was quickly displaced by “democracy” and “Building a cultured
nation” (bunka kokka kensetsu).”[15]These are but a small sample of the work of intellectuals who have revisited the Pacific War inorder to take responsibility for it. But there is another form of revisiting which seems to havebegun during the past decade. This is the Japanese pilgrimage to Auschwitz.
Auschwitz in Japan
Auschwitz may indeed be the most historiographically challenging topic for the historian of 20th
century Europe and the most emotionally loaded for historian and reader alike. Auschwitz has
become short-hand for the Holocaust, the term adopted in post World War Two parlance to referto the mass murder of over eleven million Europeans, among them Jews, the disabled including
the mentally ill, gypsies, homosexuals and political opponents of the Nazi regime which ruled
over Europe. It conjures up not only the question, “How can the historian find the language andthe form to represent Auschwitz as history, in history?” but also the intense query “Can andshould the intellectual write about Auschwitz?”[16]Entrance to Auschwitz

Central issues, which historians of Auschwitz who have determined that the Holocaust can andmust be written into history must confront, are the question of representation (how to write thishistory), the commodification of the Holocaust, and the question of how testimony of thesurvivor can be used as historical document. But perhaps the most daunting of the problems
facing these historians is the question of how to communicate with survivors and survivors ofsurvivors of this human experience of such tragic magnitude. The call from survivors has been
“Never Again;” the mandate they have given to the historian is “give us the history so that it will
not be forgotten and therefore not repeated.” Within this dialogue, emotion, which is always
inseparable from memory, is even more daunting in its ability to hang on. In the words ofGiorgio Agamben, “The aporia of Auschwitz is, indeed, the very aporia of historical knowledge:a non-coincidence between facts and truth, between verification and comprehension.”[17]The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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Auschwitz in today’s Poland

The historian of Auschwitz recounts the nightmares of those who dreamt and continued to dream
those nightmares. The question of universalizing must be faced head-on. In other words are thesenightmares qualitatively different from the nightmares of others tortured and massacred en
masse? By universalizing is one depriving the historical record of any iota of the horror that must
be preserved? Does not the term “holocaust” apply equally to the genocide of the Armenians
earlier in the century? And there is always Adorno’s haunting judgment -- poetry cannot be
written after Auschwitz; this would be a barbarism.[18]Leading historiographer and historian of medieval Europe, Gabrielle Spiegel argues that it is not
the fear that the history will be forgotten that drives those who push for the documentation of the
Holocaust, but the fear that it will become “normalized” as just another one of many historicalevents. It is, in other words, an exceptionalist stance.
What does it mean for the Japanese intellectual who would produce culture today? What purpose
does such a revisiting presume to serve? What message is sent by the Japanese intellectual“going back” to Auschwitz? The case of the artist Nara Yoshitomo, transnational celebrity,
known for his paintings and drawings of angry little girls, provides one set of answers.
Nara Yoshitomo at Auschwitz
Nara Yoshitomo (b. 1959), latch-key son of a petty bureaucrat and working mother, talented art
student in Japan and Germany, expatriate in Cologne, and at UCLA, and now internationalcause-celebre. It would seem that the author of Slashed With a Knife, Who Snatched the Babies,
Lullaby Supermarket, and I Don’t Mind If You Forget Me should belong in another study. Most
Nara fans would indeed be surprised that I have placed this superstar in an essay about
intellectuals going to war. The image of Nara which appears in the American and the Japanesepress is not one of a politicized artist, yet a close reading of Nara’s writings – and I would argue,
his imagery – reveals an intellectual who transgresses both conventional norms and political
positions. Of course, this raises the question “can art be transgressive if nobody notices that itis?” and the question “how can we track the transgressive nature of trans-national art?” in otherwords, is it transgressive if it challenges the power of some of the national sites on which it lands
and not all? Can one country’s kitsch be treacherous to the audience in a different country? If sodoes it deserve the sobriquet kitsch? And does kitsch have to be a pejorative term? Let me limit
myself here to a focus on Nara Yoshitomo as anti-war intellectual.[19]Silverberg: War Responsibility Revisited21

If we take Nara Yoshitomo at his word, in terms of what he has said about his art and his place inthe world, we find a marked contrast between his positions and what has been attributed to him
both in the U.S. and Japan. It is important to study Nara’s own language because as all scholarsof Japan know, according to the unwritten law of cultural exchange between Japan and the west
over the past two centuries, the Japanese intellectual, the Japanese artist, and the Japanese massaudience know western art, literature, and icons. Yet there is no reciprocity and little attempt atreciprocity. In other words, Japanese cultural producers and consumers are closely familiar withwestern culture and their western counterparts remain ignorant of the complexities of Japanesecultural transformations. In the case of Nara, the Western audience has access to a cultural
phenomenon but it presumes that there is nothing there to be translated. Nara is seen merely as a
cartoonist from a Japan-based, transnational anime culture. No critic in the West listens to thelanguage of the beings he creates, although they are quite vocal in more than one tongue. His
children, mostly little girls, express themselves in German, English, and Japanese. This is theinverse of the transnational phenomenon that Anne Allison has tracked. Just as her Pokemon
loses national character, Nara is marked as Japanese because supposedly the figures he produces
are cartoons (manga). No critic in any art review that I have read takes Nara’s art at more thanface value. No critic imagines the need to analyze the nature of these so-called cartoons or to
imagine the social implications of their polyglot, polymorphous presence. In Japan, Nara’s
young girl fans are enamoured of the ostensible cuteness of the creatures he creates. But the fact
is that Nara sends a clear anti-war message in his drawings, his diary and most recently, his
photographs. Part of that anti-war message is aimed at World War Two, and most specifically,
albeit briefly, at Auschwitz.

Nara Yoshitomo’s Light My Fire from 2001

The first entry in Nara’s published diary[20] is dated August 21, 1999. The afterword is dated
May 24, 2001. It follows him from Japan to Germany and to the United States and back to Japan.
The contradiction between the personal nature of the entries and their public status in a publishedwork is but one example of the tension between the representation of Nara as the simple, lonely,
reclusive artist and the phenomenal acclaim he has achieved internationally. There is also thecontradiction between his dismissal of pure art and his privileged place in the highest of art
magazines. The most direct political commentary in Nara’s illustrated picture books (most ofThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

22

which are exhibition catalogs) is the figure of a kamikaze pilot of indeterminate gender andattitude. Nor does the diary, which focuses on the artist’s adjustment to moving across borders
and his self-conscious attempt at assessing his own work, appear to depart from such
introspection. Therefore, the artist’s reference to Auschwitz is a sudden, jarring surprise to thehistorian:After breakfast I take the 7:35 IC to Krakow
It takes two hours and thirty minutes to get to Krakow
I can see field after field of fog from the window of the train from Warsaw
The train station in Krakow had been remodeled
Was it six years ago that I came here with Drota?
Saving my sightseeing for Krakow I go to Auschwitz
I tour Auschwitz and Birkenau
The scale of the land of the concentration camp when viewed from the tower is more real
than the items on display
I saw the room where father Kolbe died
There’s too much to think about and all I can do is tremble; there is no way I can write …
Nara’s discussion of Auschwitz extends no further. The following year Nara as intellectual
would go into the war zone in Afghanistan to take the photos that were to appear alongsidephotos by Kawauchi Rinko in the first issue of Foil. This was a special with the title of “no war.”
These photographs, many of them of children, send an upbeat message through theircomposition: they contain a flash of pink – a child’s shoe; the cap on a plastic container ofradiator coolant; a flower.[21] By the following year Nara’s drawings have gone to war as isevident in his exhibit “new works 2004” at the Blum & Poe Gallery in Los Angeles. Auschwitz
also reappears, in the slide-show room of Nara’s Los Angeles exhibit. Over fifty slides rotate to
be projected on one wall. Some are from the Afghanistan trip. Others are winsome pictures ofchildren who are clearly the offspring of his personal friends, in Europe. The Auschwitz image,
only one of many, goes by quickly, but the picture of the gate is unmistakable. Auschwitz has
become an integral part of Nara’s narrative. It is history brought into the present, world history
belonging to not only one place but to all places. In contrast, the pilgrimage taken to Auschwitz
in 1996 by Suh Kyung-sik and Takahashi Tetsuya was more site-specific.
Suh Kyungsik and Takahashi Tetsuya: Meeting up with Auschwitz
Although I am treating the pilgrimage to Auschwitz by zainichi writer Suh Kyungsik andJapanese philosopher Takahashi Tetsuya out of historic chronology in as much as it occurred
before Nara’s visit, I do so for reasons that will become clear. But first let me recapitulate how
Auschwitz appears in Danzetsu no Seiki Shogen no Jidai: Senso no kioku o meguru taiwa (ACentury of Breaks, an Era of Witnessing: Dialogues on Memories of War).[22] This bookconsists of transcriptions of a series of dialogues between the two intellectuals staged by
Iwanami Publishers in 1998 and 1999 and published in Sekai in 1999. By the time Suh wrote thepreface to the book, he had published his award-winning Travelling to Primo Levi and Takahashi
had published both Auschwitz and Us and his book on Japan’s “post-war responsibility.”[23]Following the preface, the book opens with a section titled “Meeting up at Auschwitz”(Aushiwitzdu de no deai) recounting the visit to the site when the two traveled to Poland together
in the summer of 1996. Takahashi recounts the reason for the visit: Suh was interested in the
Auschwitz survivor, writer Primo Levi. When he had made his pilgrimage to the grave of PrimoSilverberg: War Responsibility Revisited23

Levi, the sight of the number 174517 carved on Levi’s grave along with his name and dates had
made a strong impact. Claude Lanzmann’s film, Shoah along with Takahashi’s studies intwentieth century European philosophy had led Takahashi to what Lanzmann had called “thenon-places of memory” (non-lieux de la memoire).[24]This experience of Auschwitz is shaped by the images and preconceptions both bring with them.
A railroad crossing en route to the camp, from the station at Krakow, conjures forth for Suh animage of inmates from throughout Europe being transported to that spot in trains. When he visits
the I.G. Farben factory the business as usual production being conducted in the factory is chilling
because he can image the history left unrecounted by the words “Approximately 30,000 people
were killed at this site”, on a small memorial monument. But Suh’s meeting up with Auschwitz
is also occasion for him to insert his new knowledge of Auschwitz into his own personal
witnessing of history. At Auschwitz, it is block 11, the place within the death camp where, he
explains, those inmates who resisted were executed and tortured, that calls up the most intense
horror for him. Here, as elsewhere Suh makes clear that he brings with him to Auschwitz his
experience of the violence endured by his brothers who were imprisoned and tortured for two
decades by the South Korean government.
Takahashi’s understanding of Suh’s responses to Auschwitz leads to elaboration regarding Suh
Kyungsik’s place in Japan as a zainichi. (Korean in Japan). While the interpellation zainichi hascome to be translated as “resident Korean,” I employ the more literal translation here, in an
attempt to capture what I perceive to be a bluntness in categorizing those of Korean descent bornand brought up in Japan, who are treated legally as foreigners and who live their lives as a typeof foreign native. Takahashi calls Suh a survivor of colonial rule by Japanese imperialism and aliving witness. He also calls Suh a survivor of the cold war system in East Asia because of theexperiences of his brothers.
Takahashi elaborates on his own position, which as he explains is totally different from Suh’s
because he was brought up like any other Japanese person. By this he refers to the version of war
history as victims’ history that he was taught throughout childhood. Takahashi’s agenda at
Auschwitz is the tracking of Japanese war responsibility (senso sekinin). He explains thatmembers of his post-war generation of Japanese come into contact with memories of the war inthree ways: First there are stories told by those in the war. Secondly, they can confront the issueof memory through contact with Koreans-in-Japan and Chinese-in-Japan. The third source is thetestimony from Asian victims that began to appear in the early 1990s. It is the third avenue thatmost concerns Takahashi. Most specifically, the “Comfort Women” are the quintessential victim
survivors for the two intellectuals visiting Auschwitz from Japan. And for Suh and Takahashi,
the racism informing the Japanese colonial presence in Korea, which now allows contemporary
Japanese critics to deny the veracity of the testimony of the “Comfort Women,” appears to beanalogous to the racialism suffered by the Jews of the Holocaust.
Almost a decade later, and three years following the publication of the recollections of Takahashi
and Suh, a second pairing of a Korean intellectual in Japan and a Japanese intellectual made thesame pilgrimage to Auschwitz. To what extent this was an accident of history is not clear, but thebook, Traversing a Century of War: There Are Memories of War Which Must be Spoken of atThose Places, casts history in a very different form.[25]The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

24

Kang Sang Jung and Mori Tatsuya: Auschwitz in Color
In 2003, the second pair of intellectuals, one Zainichi and one Japanese, traveled to Auschwitz inorder to conduct a dialogue on site. This was one of four places of memory visited by Kang Sang
Jung, Tokyo University professor and media personality, and Mori Tatsuya, writer and directorof documentary films A and A2, about the Aum Shinrikyo sect. Their focus on place, as opposedto the non place in the dialogue on Auschwitz by Takahashi and Suh,was not the only differencein the two approaches. Although, like the first pair, they revisit war, they do so in order to return
to war in the present. The road trip takes the two to Auschwitz and to such sites of war as
Saxonhausen, the Ichigaya Kinenkan, site of the Tokyo war crimes tribunal, and to the war
museum in Seoul, which is dedicated to colonial and war-time outrages. Suh and Takahashi havedone their homework over the years; they know their Hannah Arendt, Adorno is quoted, and they
admit to the influence of the stock imagery of the Holocaust. But it is their own use of imagery
which sets this inquiry so apart from A Century of Breaks an Era of Witnessing.

Ichigaya Kinenkan in Shinjuku, Tokyo

Let us begin to follow the series of images of Auschwitz that open the book, starting with a twopage spread. On the left hand page, Tokyo professor, Kang, stands arms by his side, hands open.
He is dressed in black jacket, white oxford shirt, and dark jeans; a picture of the workerintellectual. On the page facing, Mori, director stands arms akimbo, in short sleeves, and baggy
pants: the artist-intellectual. They face the camera; they are standing at that divide that isemblematic of our remembered history of that nightmare that was Auschwitz. In other words
they stand where the tracks split and the caption is self-explanatory: “Auschwitz second
concentration camp; the entrance to Birkenau. It is said (?) that when the freight trains carrying
Jews arrived, this is where they were divided into laborers and non-laborers (those going to thegas chamber).” I have added the question mark.
The above is common knowledge; the image of the tracks omnipresent in our histories of
Auschwitz as signifier of the Holocaust. What is so different here is the camera eye which
foregrounds the two visitors. The tracks recede away from them and the gate is minimalized. The
horror of that moment and place appears secondary, also because both men face away from thetracks. (Kang appears to be looking down; is Mori staring into the distance?) Nowhere do I recall
having seen this space peopled in any published image. The central presence of the two men
raises the question “why?” Perhaps the conceit of showing the shape of the tracks only hasretained its hegemony because to place emptiness is to force the imagining of the dead and theliving dead while at the same time granting them respect and dignity.

Silverberg: War Responsibility Revisited

25

On to the second two-page spread whose caption refers to the oppressive air and smell of theunderground prison of Auschwitz and to the despairing cries of the Jews. These photos glow
with a golden light that works against the reference to despair. The following two pages are arevisiting, again, of one of the most repeated images of the Holocaust, the mountain of shoes.
The caption asks, “What does the mountain of shoes taken from the incarcerated Jewish people
say to us living in the present? To just be at a loss for words does not resolve anything.” Again,
the perspective differs. The canonized image that has been repeated for half a century is a black
and white picture of an undifferentiated mass of dulled leather, which the camera faces head on.
In other words, the pile of shoes rises before the observer, just as it does for the spectator who
would visit Auschwitz as museum, today. There, in person, the shoes appear as colorless up
close as in the authoritative black and white version. But here we have an itemizing of
Auschwitz in color. It is a pathway of shoes led by a red and gold sandal that is more appropriate
to a festive occasion than as apparel worn into a death camp. This is at first glance anaestheticization of a gruesome theft. It gives style to the Holocaust. The picture will most likely
not be unfamiliar to the consumer of the ubiquitous Japanese fashion magazine. One is tempted
to confront the filmmaker of not one but two documentaries coming out of the Aum Shinrikyo
incident wherein the technocratic youth trained to be the leaders of tomorrow’s Japan turned
against their society by releasing gas into the public space of the subway. One is tempted toaccuse Mori, the artist responsible for award-winning cinema, of willful blindness to the powerof pretty pictures. The historian must ask the two men to place the colored imagery in relation totheir conversations.
We here confront the question, “How to represent the Holocaust?” Related to this problem is thequestion of reception. For one, the image is much more clearly gendered. A man’s shoe lies
discarded alongside a fashionable woman’s sandal from the 1940’s atop a more comfortablewoman’s shoe, and one of a pair of boots. Because it is aestheticized and familiarized it will
speak to the young Japanese consumer. Could the shock of this re-representation provide a formof distancing for those more jaded with the Holocaust narrative? These delineated objects wereamong those rejected by Nara as non-compelling and yet here is a photo that in some ways
partakes of his style. (This is to say that a flash of color can remind the viewer of life even within
devastation).[26]
Aestheticization can be seen as trivializing or as a re-imagining, and the exchanges between
Kang and Mori speak to the latter. Although their ability to track down places of memory (Pierre
Nora’s lieux de memoire?) contrasts with the emphasis on the Nazi desire to eliminate traces andthe ensuing “non-places” foregrounded by Takahashi and Suh, it is the book that advertises
through glossy photographs – photographs not unreminiscent of the staged images of the strange
favored by retailer Parco in its advertisements at one time -- which more directly places
Auschwitz more directly in the zone revisited in the writing of Primo Levi. This is the “grayzone” -- a zone where death (and life) take on unprecedented meaning with an unprecedented
logic. This is a logic unfathomable to those not forced to live by its rules and its attendantmorality, Primo Levi’s “gray zone.” Again, Agamben’s paraphrasing provides relevant
elaboration. Agamben calls Levi’s gray zone “an area that is independent of every establishmentof responsibility” and a “zone of responsibility”[27] This is an unimaginable place that must be
imagined and Mori and Kang actively and openly struggle with this task. Before entering thespace of Auschwitz, Mori tries to grasp the meaning of Auschwitz as cynical tourist site.
Questions are posed: for the two of them is it a litmus test? Will it be a catalyst?[28]The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

26

Kang struggles to imagine the everyday of the SS in control of Auschwitz. The proximity of theirdining quarters to the crematorium puzzles and horrifies him. How is his response tempered byhis identity as zainichi? His answer is indirect. For it is Mori who brings up the parallel of themassacre of Koreans after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. (But it is Kang who names
Akutagawa Ryunosuke as member of a vigilante group.) Kang also sends readers to Zainichi, his
autobiography, for an account of former Korean Imperial soldiers’ drunken reminiscences. His
approach to Auschwitz as the limit of experience is to consider ningen wo koeta ningen (Thehuman who transcends the human). Through his search for understanding the “regular” (futsuuna) victimizer, he is able to introduce the topic of 731. (The SS man went home after work; the731 unit staff conducted their human experiments before attending a field day - a family time forbento lunches and relaxed chitchat.) He is interested in the perverted logic informing the“rational” standardization of the process of mass murder that Auschwitz made possible.[29] It is
Kang who connects racism, eugenics, and colonial rule. And it is also Kang who says that after
much pondering, he has concluded that it is less important to ask ”why Auschwitz” than to
examine how processes changed.[30] The distinction between zainichi and Japanese intellectualfor Suh and Takahashi, is the difference between a survivor of colonialism and a “regular”
Japanese citizen raised on post-war Japanese ideology. Kang is most overtly singled out aszainichi in a caption to one of the twenty-some photographs (with only a few exceptions thesefeature both Mori and Kang.) As if to explain their broad smiles as they pose in front of the
Independence Memorial Hall in Seoul, the explanation reads: “The second generation zainichi,
Kang, gently accepts Mori, who is prone to be nervous, and their conversation continues toexpand.”Why did these two intellectuals revisit war? Mori wants the Emperor accountable (responsible)
for war. Kang wants to revisit the last century of war in order to be able to respond to thisemerging century of war. The visit to Auschwitz is part of that process. Kang and Mori hope thatby clarifying accountability in the last world war, including the accountability of the U.S., asense of responsibility, in the best sense, can be fostered -- responsibility for the Other. And so
we come full circle.
Susan Sontag’s insight of September 2002, that we Americans were in a war with no foreseeable
end, and that this anti-terror war can never end, is rephrased by Kang Sang Jung: ‘We are now
living in a wartime with no beginning and no end.”[31] The concluding pages to Traversing a
Century of War describe the process whereby the war against terror has divided societies into the“normal” and the “out of the ordinary.” By the same token there is no acceptance of the Other.
Here is an example of the environment wherein the term jiko sekinin prospered. And what about
Auschwitz in Japan?
I introduced my three cases in relationship to three historiographical issues: representation,commodification, and testimony. Let me review in order to seek some preliminary connections:
Nara Yoshitomo provides almost no detail, background, or context for his entry. Nor does heraise any of the three topics. Yet his simple reference to shivering while trying to shape his visit
to Auschwitz into words, when paired with the malleable girl figures (of indeterminate race,
nationality or class, for that matter) that he creates, implies an expression of the kind of empathy
with the traumatized called for by Dominic LaCapra.[32] For LaCapra, such empathizing
involves affect and may counter victimization or self-victimization. The scholarship historicizing
traumatic events like the Holocaust must be premised on what LaCapra terms “empathetic
unsettlement.” This is possible and preferable, even if, like LaCapra, the historian’s experiences

Silverberg: War Responsibility Revisited27

do not include the traumatic event. Nara’s direct, seemingly unmediated response is thus an
instance of empathetic unsettlement.
Suh Kyungsik and Takahashi Tetsuya use a language of witnessing, with brief reference to thetwo most well known intellectual-survivors, Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. There is no discussionof testimony by Auschwitz survivors, nor of problems involving the use of testimony in terms ofveracity and the legitimacy of equating individual to group experience. Yet the two intellectuals
cannot be faulted. A close reading of their dialogues reveals an agenda at a specific historicjuncture. The “Comfort Women” had come forth to testify. They were accused of lying by a
newly powerful group of revisionist scholars who wished to “rectify” history teaching in theschools. Suh and Takahashi were recalling a past trip to Auschwitz, for present purposes. By thesame token, the two were responding to the picture of world war given by Susan Sontag andKang Sang Jung. Moving into the more recent past, if we follow Suh’s starting point for
discussing Korea-Japan relations, in a recent collection of writings, he no longer seems toidentify with Jewish–European survivors. The dyads are no longer Jew is to Nazi as Korean is toJapanese. The Palestinians have displaced Jews, as victims, and the Jewish survivors ofvictimization, as Kang notes, have bumped themselves into the position of victimizer.[33]I have given the benefit of the doubt to the shiny photographs in Traversing a Century of War.
However they do appear too close to the beautifully grotesque aesthetic of retailer Parco. At best
they are fashion shots of public intellectuals. In the conclusion to the book of dialogues between
Mori and Kang, Auschwitz appears as a cautionary tale: the trauma of the Holocaust is thesource of the oppression of the Palestinians. None of the cases described briefly above as sites of
Auschwitz published in Japan offers any detail of the everyday for inmates in Auschwitz. This is
in part understandable in the case of Kang’s concern to come to terms with the SS mentality. But
the predominance of Kang and Mori in their book, including the use of their inner thoughts,
renders them almost a substitute for the Europeans brought in box cars, the more fortunate ofwhom survived with “camp esperanto” and a will to live that enabled them to fatefully alter theirmoral structure.
The revisiting of Auschwitz has become a way for Japanese intellectuals to claim responsibility
for the nation’s past and future. A more pessimistic reading of these treatments of Auschwitz inJapan, is that unless they begin to be more peopled by inmates and survivors, they run the risk ofrecapitulating the rendering invisible of victims, just as the Japanese colonial discourse byintellectuals who had turned to embrace the state neglected to acknowledge the Asians alreadyresident in Asia, before the intrusion of Japanese foreigners throughout Asia and the Pacific.
Granted, fast and hard pronouncements are less than appropriate after the examination of alimited number of cases. Also, related topics bear examination. For example, Auschwitz inJapanese, in the vernacular language of Japanese mass culture has a different function in theJapanese hit drama, Shiroi Kyoto. Therein, documentary materials serve to encourage theforgetting of trauma. Auschwitz is used to humanize the self-centered hero, an ambitious young
surgeon. He is especially shaken by the account of the Nazi medical experiments. But thishistory stops at Auschwitz; neither the doctor nor the Japanese audience is told that this is also
the story of the Japanese in Asia. The responsibility of the intellectual going into war, theresponsibility to reject the exceptional and the universal but to associate with specifics has been
betrayed. One place of memory (or of non-place -- either will do) is being used to deny another.
Not always, but here, talking about war is a means of forgetting war. It is still a form ofsilencing, one of the most powerful weapons in our arsenal of war as we attempt to look into theThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

28

future, knowing full well that the past cannot repeat itself, and that even repeated nightmares arereformulated compositions.
Miriam Silverberg is Professor of History, UCLA. Her most recent book is Erotic GrotesqueNonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times. This article appeared in Review of Asia
and Pacific Studies, 29, 2005. It was edited, and published with a new introduction at Japan
Focus on July 11, 2007.
Ann Sherif is the director, East Asian Studies Program, Oberlin College and a Japan Focus
associate. She is the translator most recently of Yoshimoto Banana’s N.P.
After a long bout with illness, Miriam Rom Silverberg passed away in the early hours of Sunday,
March 16, 2008. Miriam spent her formative years in Tokyo where she graduated from theInternational School of the Sacred Heart before returning to the United States. With a Ph.D.
from the University of Chicago (1984), she became one of the most self-consciously theoretical
historians of modern Japan in the US and remained a relentless and original critic of JapaneseImperial history, popular culture, femininity, and social justice. As Professor of History andDirector of the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA, Miriam organized numerous
groundbreaking workshops and conferences, including one entitled "Feminism Confronts
Disability" in which she unfolded her own confrontation with Parkinson's into the academichumanistic register of disability studies. While struggling with illness, Miriam Silverberg
completed her masterful study of Japan's inter-war mass culture, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense(University of California Press, 2007) and until the last, she was a devoted teacher and mentor.
Miriam Silverberg is deeply missed by colleagues and friends across Pacific and Atlantic. HJapan carried fuller notes remembering Miriam Silverberg by James Fujii on March 18, 2008.
Notes:[1] Susan Sontag, “A Mature Democracy,” The New Yorker September 24, 2001, p. 32; Susan
Sontag, “Real Battles and Empty Metaphors,” The New York Times, op ed page, September 10,
2002. Maher’s statement was: "We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000
miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building -- say what you
want about it, it's not cowardly." Arundhati Roy, “Come September, ” in Roy War Talk
(Cambridge: South End Press, 2003), 46-47. (Originally a talk given on September 18, 2002)[2] “’Jiko sekinin’ iitateru Koizumi seiken no mujun,” Shukan Asahi, April 30, 2004, 27-29.
[3] Gitta Serenyi, The Healing Wound: Experiences and Reflections, Germany 1938-2001 (NewYork and London: W.W. Norton & Co.2001), xix-xx.
[4] See, for example the curtailing of testimony by expert witness Fujime Yuki during the
Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan's Military Sexual Slavery in Tokyo in
December, 2000.
[5] Arai Shinichi, “Sokan no Ji,” writing on behalf of the Japan War Responsibility Resource
Center, Senso Sekinin Kenkyu, sokango, 1993, 2.
[6] Taguchi Hiroshi, “Bungakusha no Senso Sekinin Tsuikyu,” in Ajia ni taisuru nihon no senso
sekinin wo tou , Minshu hotei junbi kai, ed. Dainiki senso sekinin, vol. 1. 1998, 31.

Silverberg: War Responsibility Revisited

29[7] Odagiri Hideo, Watashi no mita Showa no shiso to bungaku no gojunen, vol I (Shueisha,1988), 289-290.
[8] Suzuki Yuko traces the history of the slogan by carefully following press coverage. Suzuki
Yuko, “Ianfu” mondai to senso sekinin (Miraisha, 1996),25-26.
[9] Nishikawa Nagao, Senso no seiki o koete: gurooobaruka jidai no kokka. rekishi. minzoku(Heibonsha, 2002).
[10] Hagiwara Takuya, “Kokush kyoiku e no ichi kosatsu,” Doto, October 7, 1944, 4-15. See thefirst issue of Zenya , on the theme of culture and resistance, Zenya, Sokango, Autumn, 2004.
Zenya is carrying forth its pre-war legacy by continuing the tradition of the sponsoring lecture
series and public forums. The sense of overlapping yet transitional time expressed in the credo isreflected the inclusion of an unusual combination of modernist and postmodern visual images.
[11] Yamashiro Tomoe, Toraware no onnatachi, (Komichi Sobo, 1986). See especially vol. 1.
Muhyo no hana I I for vivid documentation of everyday life for an anti-war “thought crime
offender” in what was intended to be “the number one woman’s prison in the Orient.” Ibid., p.
56.
[12] The collaborative work by Tsurumi Shunsuke et al, Tenko, still remains the best overview.
See Shiso no Kagaku Kenyukai hen, Tenko, 3 vols. (Heibonsha, 1959-1962).
[13] Shimizu, Kiyoko, “Josei. Senso. Jinken” Gakkaishi sokango hakkan ni attate, Josei. Senso.
Jinken, Sokango, May 1998, 3-4. See also Okano Yayo, “Jugun ianfu mondai ga terashidasu
watashi” no shoso, Ibid. 62-92.
[14] Nagao Yuzo, Ed., Waga uchinaru senso sekinin : Ajia Taiheiyo senso. Watanabe Kiyoshi no
kokuhatsu sekinin.
[15] Nagao, pp. 2, 111[16] For a sophisticated discussion of such historiographical questions, see Saul Friedlander, ed.,Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution, (Harvard University Press,
1992).
[17] Giogio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone
Books, 2002) 12.
[18] Regarding Adorno’s famous pronouncement, see Klaus Hofman, “Poetry After Auschwitz –Adorno’s Dictum,” German Life and Letters 58:2 April 2005, 0016-877 (print); 1468-0483(online).
[19] See Nara Yoshitomo, Slash With a Knife (Little More, 2003 ), Nara, Who Snatched theBabies (Tomio Koyama Gallery, 2002), Nara, Lullaby Supermarket (Last Gasp, 2003), Nara, I
Don’t Mind if You Forget Me (Tankosha, 2001). Among the essayists for the catalog
accompanying Nara’s 2003 show, Nothing Ever Happens, Deborah Harry best captures thesensibility of Nara’s little girls. Harry’s essay “Insist on Little Girls” stands apart from much of
the English language commentary:: “…I knew this guy Nara had a keen insight. No cute, coy
innocents these. No Keane paintings pleading for sympathy. / These girls had ideas, intentions.
They knew the truth, like art does,…” See also Leonard Nimoy’s bold graphic, and cf. Ingrid
Schaffner’s discussion of Yoshida Kenko’s Essays in Idleness in “Idle Reflections on Yoshitomo

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

30

Nara’s Pop Art.” Nara Yoshitomo, Nothing Ever Happens (Museum of Contemporary Art,
Cleveland: Perceval Press, 2003) pp. 81, 86. 57-61. Perhaps it is no surprise that Blondie, therock singer, would be most simpatico with Nara, who thrives on rock music and works closelywith the language of rock.
[20] Nara Yoshitomo, Nara Note (Chikuma Shobo, 2001).
[21] See Foil vol. I, “no war,” (Little More), April, 2003. According to the editor of Foil, when
he called Nara to ask whether he wanted to join in the venture of going onsite to Afghanistan, forthe anti-war issue of Foil, Nara replied “It’s not very persuasive to say one is anti-war from a far
away safe country. We might not be able to do anything, but let’s go.”[22] Suh Kyungsik and Takahashi Tetsuya, Danzetsu no seiki shogen no jidai: senso no kioku omeguru taiwa (Iwanami Shoten, 2000).
[23] See Suh Kyungsik, Purimo Reebui e no tabi (Asahi Shanbun, 1999) and Takahashi Testuya,
Sengo sekininron (Kodansha, 1999).
[24] Suh and Takahashi, Danzetsu, pp.5-9.
[25] Mori Tatsuya and Kang Sang jung, Senso no seiki o koete: sono basho de katarareru beki
senso no kioku ga aru (Kodansha, 2004)[26] This reference to the use of color may bring to mind the red dress in the film Schindler’s
List. However I am referring only to Nara here. Regarding American consumption andcommodification of the Holocaust, see Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (NewYork: Houghton Mifflin: 1999).
[27] For a discussion of the moral universe of Primo Levi’s “Gray Zone” see Levi, “The Gray
Zone,” in Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (Vintage International, 1988). See also
Agamben, Remnants, pp.20-21[28] Mori and Kang, Senso, p.31.
[29] Ibid., pp.56-7.
[30] Ibid., pp.74-75, 79-80.
[31] Ibid., p.285.
[32] LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2001). pp. 40-42.
[33] Suh Kyungsik, Hakari ni kakete wa naranai:Niccho mondai o kangaeru zahyojiku (Kageshobo, 2003).

Falk: War, War Crimes, Power and Justice31

War, War Crimes, Power and Justice: Toward a Jurisprudence of Conscience
Richard FalkEver since German and Japanese leaders were prosecuted, convicted, and punished after WorldWar II at Nuremberg and Tokyo, there has been a wide split at the core of the global effort toimpose criminal accountability on those who commit crimes against peace, crimes against
humanity, and war crimes on behalf of a sovereign state. The law is always expected to pushtoward consistency of application as a condition of its legitimacy. In the setting of international
criminality the greatest danger to widely shared values is posed by those with the greatest power
and wealth, and it is precisely these leaders that are least likely to be held responsible or to feelthreatened by the prospect of being charged with international crimes. The global pattern of
enforcement to date has been one in which the comparatively petty criminals are increasingly
held to account while the Mafia bosses escape almost altogether from existing mechanisms ofinternational accountability. Such double standards are too rarely acknowledged in discussions ofinternational criminal law nor are their corrosive effects considered, but once understood, it
becomes clear that this pattern seriously compromises the claim that international criminal law iscapable of achieving global justice.
Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals
In a sense the pattern of double standards was encoded immediately after World War II in theseminal undertakings at Nuremberg and Tokyo that assumed the partially discrediting form of‘victors’ justice’ in the weak sense of the term. The strong sense of victors’ justice involves
imposing punishment on those who are innocent of substantive wrongdoing beyond themisfortune of being on the losing side in a war. The weak sense is that the implementation ofinternational criminal law is undertaken only against individuals on the losing side who areindeed responsible for substantive wrongdoing, while exempting seemingly guilty individuals on
the winning side. This results in double standards that weaken claims to be acting on the basis of
the rule of law. Nevertheless, the possibility often, but not always, exists of sentencing
procedures that can be sensitive to different degrees of criminality. Some efforts can and should
be made to close the gap between law as vengeance and law as justice. The prospects of securing
justice vary from case to case and tribunal to tribunal, depending on the context and auspices.
The Atomic Bomb Attacks
Yet even a weak sense of victors’ justice is not a minor flaw, its unacceptable inequality ofenforcement aside. It may act to exempt even the most severe and harmful forms of criminal
behavior from legal scrutiny, and thereby badly confuse our understanding of the distinction
between criminal and non-criminal activity. Surely the indiscriminate bombings of German andJapanese cities by Allied bomber fleets—no less than German and Japanese indiscriminate
bombing of Britain and China—and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
were ‘crimes’ that should have been investigated and prosecuted if the tribunals had been truly‘legal’ in the sense of imposing individual accountability on both victors and vanquished fortheir combat operations.
What is more, by refusing to prosecute victors, their substantive ‘crimes’ attained a kind of
perverse de facto legality. There is little doubt that had Germany or Japan developed the atomic
bomb first, and then used it, the individuals responsible would have been charged with andThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

32

convicted of crimes against humanity and war crimes by the victorious allied powers, and their
behavior stigmatized in the annals of customary international law.
The one judicial body to pass judgment on the atomic bomb attacks on Japanese cities was alower Tokyo court in the Shimoda decision handed down on December 7, 1963, that is, with asubtle touch of Japanese humility, the exact day of the 22nd anniversary of the Pearl Harborattacks.
The decision, relying on expert testimony
by respected Japanese specialists ininternational law, did conclude that theattacks on large cities violated existing
international law because of theirindiscriminate and toxic characteristics.
The case had been initiated by survivorsof Hiroshima and Nagasaki who sought
nominal damages and lacked any legal
standing to put forward criminal
allegations.
As might have been expected Japan as a
defeated state and one that remained
subordinate to American military power and diplomatic influence, was not inclined to pursue thematter any further, and seemed precluded from doing so by the peace treaty with the UnitedStates. Not surprisingly the Shimoda judgment virtually disappeared down the memory hole ofatomic diplomacy. In 1996 the International Court of Justice in an Advisory Opinion responding
to a question put to it by the UN General Assembly narrowly defined the conditions under which
it might possibly be lawful to resort to nuclear weapons in situations of extreme self-defense that
if applied to the 1945 atomic attacks would definitely result in their criminalization. As far as is
known no effort has been made by any nuclear weapons state to alter its doctrine governing
threat and use, including the threat of nuclear annihilation, in light of this most authoritative
assessment of the international law issues atstake by the World Court.
US battleship sinks at Pearl Harbor

Had the defeated states used an atomic
bomb and the perpetrators been charged
and convicted, this might have made it
somewhat more difficult for the victors torely upon nuclear weaponry in the future,and might have encouraged them to work
diligently and reasonably to negotiate atreaty regime of unconditional prohibition.
Instead, the victorious United States
Government has never been willing to
express formally even remorse for thesewartime atrocities that completely lacked
the partially redeeming feature of militarynecessity. It has retained, developed,

Firebombing of Tokyo March 9-10, 1945

Falk: War, War Crimes, Power and Justice33

possessed, deployed, and threatened other nations with the use of nuclear weapons on numerous
occasions, including the possibility of using weaponry with payloads many times the magnitudeof those first bombs dropped on Japan. As well, having opened this ultimate Pandora’s Box,
others have acquired the weaponry and relied upon its ultra-hazardous energy technology to
produce nuclear power.
It is not just the inherent unfairness of victors’ justice, but its tendency to normalize unacceptablewartime behavior if done by the winning side in a major war, which nullifies the very possibilityof a jurisprudence of conscience. The closest that the United States Government has come toacknowledge officially its culpability in relation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was contained in asingle line in Barack Obama’s speech of April 5, 2009 in Prague that envisioned a world without
nuclear weapons: “…as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States
has a moral responsibility to act.” Unfortunately, such a sentiment was neither a belated apology
nor was it repeated in Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech a few months later, norhave any concrete steps been taken to initiate a nuclear disarmament process in the course of the
Obama administration.
Fairness of Procedure
There are important matters of degree
that either mitigate or aggravate thecontention of victors’ justice. It was thecase, especially in Tokyo, that thetribunal allowed defendants to be
represented by competent lawyers andthat the judges assessed fairly theevidence against defendants that alleged
criminality. The Tokyo process evenproduced a celebrated dissenting opinion
by the Indian jurist, Radhabinod Pal, andthree Nazi defendants were acquitted by
the Nuremberg tribunal. In short, there
was a measure of procedural fairness inthese trials. It seems clear that Justice
Pal’s long dissenting opinion came as an
unpleasant surprise to those who had
Tokyo Trialarranged the tribunal. After all, Pal
questioned in form and substance theoverall legitimacy of what he believed to be a one-sided prosecutorial approach to theadministration of criminal justice. He particularly lamented the failure of the court to take into
account the Japanese rationale for recourse to war, especially the damaging impacts of coercive
encirclement of Japan by American grand strategy, which was perceived by Japanese leaders,reasonably in Pal’s understanding, as threatening the viability of the country. Pal also did little tohide his contempt for colonial powers sitting in judgment of the behavior of an Asian country. I
suppose it is part of the educative function of victors’ justice in a liberal society to note that it
became almost impossible for many years to obtain a copy of Judge Pal’s exhaustively reasoned
rejection of the major premise of the Tokyo war crimes tribunal.1

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

34

Selectively Prosecuting the Guilty
Without doubt those who were accusedof these international crimes at
Nuremberg and Tokyo did engage inactivity that could in many instances beproperly be viewed as morally depraved,
as well as criminal and deserving ofpunishment. And it was deemed relevant
to constructing a peaceful world order at
the time to send a clear signal to future
political leaders and militarycommanders that they would behenceforth held criminally responsible
Japanese Commemoration of Justice Pal
for their behavior, and could no longer
hide behind claims of sovereign
immunity and superior orders. But such a signal as delivered conveyed, at best, an ambiguous
message to the extent that it seemed that future victors in major wars were likely to continue to
avoid accountability even if they appeared to be manifestly guilty of committing international
crimes.
This split notion of accountability as between winners and losers remains descriptive of how
international criminal law is currently implemented. Indeed, the gap has widened over time, or atleast become more evident. This awareness is partly a result of increasing efforts by the intergovernmental system of states to hold losers and vulnerable political actors accountable while
holding firm the exemption of the powerful and their friends. The NGO community has by andlarge been opportunistic, supporting efforts to hold officials accountable for their criminality
without worrying too much about double standards and selective implementation, seeming toreason that a glass half full was to be preferred to an empty glass. This has had the unfortunate
effect of seeming to legitimate the hierarchical character of world order. By ignoring the crimesof the powerful political actors on the world stage while applauding the criminal prosecution of
weaker political actors, an attitude of normalcy or indifference becomes associated with double
standards in international criminal law.
The recent trend has exhibited a gradual increase in the availability of international mechanisms
to hold leaders accountable, including the establishment of a variety of special or ad hocinternational tribunals, including those constituted by civil society initiatives, to address serious
criminal allegations (former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, Japanese comfort women, indigenous
peoples) relating to genocide and crimes against humanity.
Crimes Against Peace
A more permanent venue for some initiatives along these lines came into being in 2002 with theunexpected establishment of the International Criminal Court. For reasons relevant to theargument made here, the negotiations of the ICC had to stop short of incorporating crimes
against peace into its claim of jurisdictional authority, reflecting the interest of major states in not
acknowledging restrictions on their use of what geopolitically oriented diplomats call ‘themilitary option,’ which reflects a thinly disguised insistence on discretion to use force as an
instrument of foreign policy despite the unconditional prohibitions of threats or uses of force inFalk: War, War Crimes, Power and Justice35

Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. The recent Israel, American, and British military threats directed
at Iran is a flagrant instance of relying on a non-defensive threat to use force against a sovereignstate. By Nuremberg or Charter standards such threat diplomacy would appear to be a naked
example of a crime against peace.
Again the issue of victors’ justice lurks in the background, but this time in a reverse relationshipto that pertaining to the atomic bomb. Here the World War II tribunals were most intent at thetime on criminalizing recourse to aggressive war, and were here on strong substantive grounds as
both the European and Asian theaters of warfare were definitely initiated by the states that went
on to lose the war and whose surviving leaders were being prosecuted. At Nuremberg, thejudgment went out of its way to declare that crimes against peace are the worst possible offense
against the law of nations, encompassing the lesser realities of crimes against humanity and war
crimes, and except for Justice Pal, the judges in both tribunals had little trouble reaching such alegal conclusion.
It was this conclusion that underlay the original conception of the UN as being a war prevention
institution (“to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” in the language of thepreamble to the charter) whose charter restricted valid claims to use force to situations of selfdefense against a prior armed attack or to occasions on which the Security Council mandated ause of force for the sake of international peace and security.
Despite such a legal foregrounding of this war prevention priority, the Security Council vetogiven to the winners in World War II conferred a permanent exemption from accountability of asort that continued and widened the failure to hold the winners criminally accountable at
Nuremberg or Tokyo. The practice of the UN has confirmed the refusal of these five permanent
members of the Security Council, along with a few other states, to live according to the preceptsof the charter. Indeed, they would bring geopolitical pressures to bear so that the Security
Council, as it did a few months ago, would mandate an interventionary use of force in Libya thatwas neither defensive nor necessary for the sake of international peace and security.2 Because of
its challenge to militarism and geopolitical reliance on force, crimes against peace has beenbasically marginalized as an international crime, supposedly because there was no agreement
among governments as to a definition of aggression, but more genuinely, because geopoliticalactors refused to accede to any formal challenge to their discretion to threaten and use force toresolve international conflicts or impose their political will. Here the leverage of geopoliticalpressure keeps the legal precedent set at Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II frombecoming a behavioral norm. That is, it was appropriate to criminalize the aggression ofGermany and Japan, but it is not acceptable to hamper the activities of geopolitical‘peacekeepers’ by the application of such a restrictive norm to their behavior. At present, forinstance, the standard American approach to its efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear
bomb is to announce with due gravity that the military option remains on the table, that is, athreat to initiate a non-defensive war. This threat is reinforced by a series of other coercive
measures, including UN sanctions and diplomatic pressures on third parties to forego economic
relations with Iran or to increase oil production so that Iran’s oil revenues will diminish. Such a
package of measures is designed to achieve the diplomatic goal of Iran’s renunciation of its
nuclear enrichment program.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

36

Tribunals and Historical Validation
There were other messages to the world arising from these seminal war crimes trials at the end ofWorld War II. For instance, the presentation of the case against the defendants was a way ofprosecuting the losing states while vindicating the winners. It was a matter of certifying thejustice by way of an extended judicial narrative that strengthened the moral credibility of thebattlefield outcome. The winning side by conducting trials of this kind takes advantage of theopportunity to reinforce claims as to the justice of battlefield verdicts by pronouncing on thecriminality of losers while overlooking the criminality of its own actions. This attempt to control
the judgments of history is more influential with short-run public opinion than it is withhistorians who over time look more objectively at the evidence except to the extent blinkered bytheir national or civilizational orientations. It also tends to make occupation seem reasonable, as
well as imposing restrictions on the future sovereignty of the defeated country.
But there were also short-term consequences of such a validation of the outcome of the war that
extended beyond securing the peace. The validation provided cover for the establishment of
more or less permanent American military bases in the Asia Pacific region, including in
Okinawa, mainland Japan, and South Korea, as well as establishing strategic claims over theentire region and exerting direct control over Micronesia and other Pacific Islands. In effect,
geopolitical expansionism and a triumphalist American grand strategy that extended its reachbeyond maintaining peace in the region after 1945. Undoubtedly, the unquestioned
accompaniment of holding the losers accountable and writing without critical commentary theofficial history of the war enabled this geopolitical project to go forward without debate, muchless criticism. In effect, the dynamics of establishing World War II as a ‘just war’ prepared theground for constructing what in some respect is an ‘unjust peace’ that has endured despite its
serious compromising of the sovereignty of several Pacific states.
The Nuremberg Promise
There was also another deferred effect of victors’ justice that was sensitive to its challenge to thelegitimacy of the original legal process. It made an attempt to overcome the flaw of double
standards by offering an informal commitment to being evenhanded in the future. This gesture to
remove criminal accountability from the domain of geopolitics can be labeled as ‘the Nuremberg
promise,’ and involves a commitment by the victors in the future to abide by the norms andprocedures used to punish the German and Japanese surviving military and political leaders. In
effect, to correct this flaw associated with victors’ justice by converting criminal accountability
from rule of power to rule of law applicable to all rather than a consequence of the outcome ofwars or a reflection of geopolitical hierarchy.
The Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg, Justice Robert Jackson (who had been excused temporarily
from serving as a member of the U.S. Supreme Court), gave this promise an enduring relevancein his official statement to the court: “If certain acts and violations of treaties are crimes, they arecrimes whether the United State does them or whether Germany does them. We are not prepared
to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to haveinvoked against us.” Peace activists frequently quote Jackson’s words, yet political leaders whotake no notice of either the original flaw at Nuremberg or the obligation to remove it consistently
ignore them. Jackson’s promise at Nuremberg was made in good faith, but its irrelevance to what
evolved over time suggests that the rhetoric at the time was not sufficient to generate a sense of

Falk: War, War Crimes, Power and Justice37

obligation on the part of American leaders who subsequently acted on behalf of the UnitedStates.
A parallel issue arises in relation to the willingness of a defeated country to accept thecriminalization of its leadership. The German philosopher, Karl Jaspers in his The Future ofGerman Guilt argued that the acceptability of these convictions and punishments of German
leaders would have to wait until it becomes clear in the future whether the Nuremberg promise
was going to be kept by the victors. If the promise was broken then in retrospect the Nuremberg
process should be treated as a legal form of vengeance rather than an expression of criminal
justice. Taking Jaspers seriously in this respect would raise questions about the liberal embraceof international criminal law despite its incorporation of double standards.
Since 1945 crimes by the victors in conflict, along with other geopolitical actors of regional
ambition, have continued to be overlooked by international criminal law, while prosecutions
reflecting geopolitical leverage have been happening at an accelerating pace without any
concerted intergovernmental or UN effort to correct the imbalance. Since the end of the Cold
War implementation of criminal responsibility has been increasingly imposed on losers in worldpolitics, including heads of state such as Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar
Qaddafi each of whom were deposed by Western military force, and either summarily executedor prosecuted.3
Institutionalizing International Criminal Law
This dual pattern of criminal accountability that cannot be fully reconciled with law orlegitimacy has given rise to several reformist efforts. Civil society and some governments havefavored a less imperfect legalization of criminal accountability, and raised liberal hopes byextraordinary efforts of a global coalition of NGOs and the commitment of a group of middle
powers in establishing the ICC despite the opposition of a geopolitical consensus. Fearful oflosing or compromising their impunity, such geopolitical heavyweights as the United States,
China, India, and Russia have refused to ratify the ICC, and the United States has gone further,pressuring over 100 countries to sign statements agreeing not to hand over to the ICC Americans
accused at The Hague of international crimes.
The result is that this and other formal and informal initiatives have not yet seriously impinged
on the hierarchal realities of world politics, which continue to exhibit an embrace of the Melian
ethos when it comes to criminal accountability: “the strong do what they will, the weak do what
they must.” Such an ethos marked, for Thucydides, unmistakable evidence of Athenian decline,
but for contemporary realists a different reading has been prevalent. Underpinning politicalrealism has been the premise that hard power calls the shots in history, and the losers have no
choice but to cope as best they can. Double standards persist: those who are enemies of the Westor evildoers in Africa are targets of global prosecutorial zeal, while those in the West who wage
aggressive war or mandate torture as national policies continue to enjoy impunity as far as
formal legal proceedings are concerned.
As suggested, the veto in the Security Council both complements the ‘naturalness’ of victors’
justice and is a prime instance of constitutionalizing double standards. The veto power, whilesounding the death knell for the UN in its assigned role of ensuring war prevention based on law
rather than geopolitics, is not without providing certain benefits to world order. This exit option
for several major actors is probably responsible for allowing the Organization to achieve andThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

38

maintain universality of membership even during times of intense geopolitical conflict. Without
the veto, the West would have likely pushed the Soviet Union and China out the door during theCold War years, and the UN would have lost its inclusive and universalist character in a manner
similar to the discrediting of the League of Nations, an experience after the end of World War I
that transformed Woodrow Wilson’s dream into a nightmare. Arguably the veto and victors’
justice are examples of Faustian bargains that enable a semblance of law and justice to be present
in international life, and to convey the impression that there is a morally evolutionary process atwork that introduces a gradually increasing measure of civility into the conduct of world politics.
The question is whether this appearance of civility is to be treated as a form of moral progress,
however slow or halting, or rather as the prostitution of law and institutions to geopoliticalabuses and ambitions. There is no assurance that the evolution of international criminal law has
any prospect of overcoming the current pattern of an open ended geopolitical right of exception.
Yet even this realist world of unequal states has been embodied imperfectly within the United
Nations. So conceived, even if the UN is judged by way of a geopolitical optic, the anachronistic
character of the 1945 Security Council persists as a remnant of the colonial era. This isdelegitimizing. 2012 is not 1945, but the difficulty of achieving constitutional reform within the
UN means that India, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, Germany, Japan, and South Africa seem
destined to remain permanent ladies in waiting as the UN goes about its serious geopoliticalbusiness. What this means for UN authority, including its sponsorship of the politics ofindividual criminal accountability, is that all that is ‘legal’ is more often than not ‘illegitimate,’and lacking in moral force.
My argument seeks to make two main points: first, double standards pervade the treatment of
war crimes eroding the authority and legitimacy of international criminal law; and secondly,
those geopolitical hierarchies that are embedded in the UN framework lose their authority andlegitimacy by not adapting to changing times and conditions, especially the collapse of thecolonial order and the rise of non-Western centers of soft and hard power. In this latter instance,
it is the inability to reflect the geopolitical ratio of power that partially hampers the legitimacy of
the UN, not its realist tendency to express its legitimacy by exhibiting in its procedures andstructures the relative strength of political actors. This durability of the original UN distributionof authority in the Security Council both reflects the difficulty of overcoming formallyentrenched positions of status and the political sense that the existing five permanent members
maintain a certain internal balance geographically (West versus Asia) that remains reflective ofworld power relations despite the hegemonic role played by the United States within and outsideof the UN. Of course, even if the UN enhanced its geopolitical legitimacy by taking account of
global shifts in capabilities and influence, this would not necessarily pose a challenge tohierarchy and double standards.
Universal Jurisdiction
There are different kinds of initiatives taken to close this gap between the legal and the legitimate
in relation to the criminality of political leaders and military commanders. One move is at thelevel of the sovereign state, which is to encourage domestic criminal law to extend its reach tocover international crimes. Such authority is known as Universal Jurisdiction (UJ), a hallowed
effort by states to overcome the enforcement weaknesses of international law, initially developed
to deal with the crime of piracy, which being interpreted as a crime against the whole world
could be prosecuted anywhere regardless of where the pirate operated. Many liberal democracies

Falk: War, War Crimes, Power and Justice39

in particular have regarded themselves to varying degrees as agents of the international legal
order as well as providing for the rule of law for relations within their national boundaries. This
has led governments to endow their judicial systems with some authority to apprehend andprosecute those viewed as criminally responsible for crimes of state even if the criminal acts
were performed outside of geographic boundaries. The legislating of UJ represented a strong
tendency during the latter half of the twentieth century in the liberal democracies, especially inWestern Europe to be proactive with respect to the implementation of international criminal law
by escaping to some extent from the constraints of geography.
This development reached public awareness in relation to the dramatic 1998 detention in Britainof Augusto Pinochet, former ruler of Chile, in response to an extradition request from Spain
where criminal charges had been judicially approved. The ambit of UJ is wider than its formal
implementation as its mere threat is intimidating, leading those prominent individuals who might
be detained and charged to avoid visits to countries where such claims might be plausibly made.
In late 2011 George W. Bush cancelled a speaking engagement in Switzerland because of
indications that he might be arrested and charged with international crimes if he ventured acrossthe Swiss borders. Similar reports have suggested that high Israeli officials have changed travelplans in response to warnings that they could face arrest, detention or extradition for alleged
crimes, especially in recent years those associated with either the Lebanon War of 2006 or the
2008-09 Israeli military attack on Gaza bearing the code name of Operation Cast Lead. In otherwords, the possibility of an assertion of UJ may have a behavioral and psychological impact even
if the defendant is not brought physically
before the court to stand trial.
As might be expected, UJ gave rise to avigorous geopolitical campaign ofpushback, especially by the governmentsof the United States and Israel. These
governments exhibited the most anxiety
that their leaders might be subject tocriminal apprehension by foreign
national courts even in countries thatwere political friends. As a result ofintense pressures, several of theEuropean UJ states have rolled back theirlegislation in response to Washington’s
demands, thereby calming somewhat the
Pinochet brought to trial
worries of travelers with records ofpublic service on behalf of their countries
that was potentially vulnerable to criminal prosecutions in foreign courts!
Civil Society Tribunals
There is another approach to spreading the net of criminal accountability that has been taken,
remains controversial, and yet seems responsive to the current global atmosphere of populist
discontent. It involves claims by civil society, by the peoples of the world, to establish
institutions and procedures designed to close the gap between law and legitimacy in relation to
the application of international criminal law. Such initiatives can be traced back to the 1966-67

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

40

establishment of the Bertrand Russell International Criminal Tribunal that examined charges ofaggression and war crimes associated with the American role in the Vietnam War. The charges
were weighed by a distinguished jury of private citizens composed of moral and cultural
authority figures headed by Jean-Paul Sartre. The Russell Tribunal was derided by critics at thetime as a ‘kangaroo court’ or a ‘circus’ because its legal conclusions were predetermined, andamounted to foregone conclusions. The critics condemned this initiative on several overlapping
grounds: that its outcome could be accurately anticipated in advance, that its authority was selfproclaimed and without governmental approval, that it had no control over those accused, that its
proceedings were one-sided, and that its capabilities fell far short of enforcement.
What was overlooked in such criticism was the degree to which this dismissal of the Russell
experiment reflected the monopolistic and self-serving claims of the state and state system tocontrol the administration of law, ignoring the contrary claims of society to have law
administered fairly in accord with justice, or at least to expose its distortions and double
standards. Also ignored by the critics was the fact that only such spontaneous initiatives ofconcerned persons and groups could overcome the blackout of truth on the matters of criminality
achieved by the geopolitics of impunity. The Russell Tribunal may not have been ‘legal’
understood in the sense of deriving its authority from the state or from internationalorganizations, but it was ‘legitimate’ in responding to double standards, by calling attention tomassive crimes and dangerous criminals who otherwise might enjoy a free pass, and by
producing a generally reliable and comprehensive narrative account of criminal patterns ofwrongdoing and flagrant violations of international law that destroy or disrupt the lives of entire
societies and millions of people. Such societal initiatives require great efforts that lack thebenefit of public funding, and only occur where the criminality being legally condemned seems
severe and extreme, and where geopolitical forces effectively preclude systematic inquiry by
established institutions of criminal law.4
It is against this background that we understand a steady stream of initiatives that build upon the
Russell experience in the 1960s. Starting in 1979, the Basso Foundation in Rome sponsored aseries of such proceedings under the rubric of the Permanent Peoples Tribunal that explored awide variety of unattended criminal wrongs, including dispossession of indigenous peoples, theMarcos dictatorship in the Philippines, massacres of Armenians, and self-determination claims of
oppressed peoples in Central America and elsewhere. In 2005 the Istanbul World Tribunal on
Iraq examined contentions of aggression and crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, andwar crimes associated with the U.S./UK invasion and occupation of Iraq, commencing in 2003,
causing as many as one million Iraqis to lose their lives, and several million to be permanently
displaced from home and country.5
In November 2011 the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, a direct institutional descendant of theoriginal Russell undertaking, held a session in South Africa to investigate charges of apartheid,
as a crime against humanity, being made against Israel. A few days later, the Kuala Lumpur War
Crimes Tribunal launched an inquiry into charges of criminality made against George W. Bushand Tony Blair for their roles in planning, initiating, and prosecuting the Iraq War, to befollowed a year later by a subsequent inquiry into torture charges made against Dick Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld, and Alberto Gonzales.6
Without doubt such societal efforts to bring at large war criminals to symbolic justice should
become a feature of the growing demand around the world for real global democracy sustainedFalk: War, War Crimes, Power and Justice41

by a rule of law that does not exempt from criminal accountability the rich and powerful whether
they are acting internally or internationally.
Conclusion
The problems of victors’ justice and double standards pervade and subvert the proper applicationof international law. As long as power, influence, and diplomatic skills are unevenly divided,
there will be some tendency for this to happen. Civil society is seeking to increase the ethical andpolitical relevance of international law in two ways: by illuminating the geopoliticalmanipulation of law and by forming its own parallel institutions that focus on the criminality ofthe strong and the victimization of the weak. There remain many obstacles on this road to global
justice, but at least some clearing of the geopolitical debris is beginning to take place. By
geopolitical debris is meant this opportunistic reliance on law when it serves the interests of thepowerful and victorious, and its determined avoidance and suppression whenever it restrains or
censures their behavior. Until international law has the capacity to treat equals equally thecorrective checks of progressive civil society are a vital ingredient of a jurisprudence of
conscience despite their lack of governmental legitimacy.7
Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law, Princeton
University, and United Nations Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur for the Occupied
Palestinian Territories. His recent books include Richard Falk and Mark Juergensmeyer, eds.,
Legality and Legitimacy in Global Affairs and Richard Falk and David Krieger, The Path to
Zero: Dialogues on Nuclear Danger.
Notes
I would like to thank Mark Selden for his editorial and substantive contributions this text, and to
Ayca Cubukcu for her most thoughtful comments on an initial draft.
1

International Military Tribunal for the Far East: Dissentient judgment of Justice R. B. Pal(Calcutta: Sanyal, 1953).
2

The authorizing resolution of the Security Council seemed limited to providing humanitarian
protection to the civilian population of the Libyan city of Benghazi,
but was operationally expanded by NATO to include a full-scale military air effort
to tip the balance in an internal civil war in favor of the anti-Qaddafi forces. UN Security
Council Resolution 1973, 17 March 2011 was officially delimited as establishing a ‘No-FlyZone’ over Libya, although there was accompanying language that should never have been
accepted by the five abstaining states to the effect that ‘all necessary measures’ were approved.
3

In Qaddafi’s case he was brutally killed by the military forces that captured him in his home
town of Sirte on 20 October 2011.
4

Investigative journalism does act as a partial complement to these efforts of citizens’ tribunals.
In Vietnam, for instance, Seymour Hersh made a notable contribution by exposing the execution
by American military personnel of Vietnamese villagers. See Seymour M. Hersh, Mylai 4: areport on the massacre and its aftermath (New York: Random House, 1970)
5

See Müge Gürsöy Sökmen, ed., World Tribunal on Iraq: making the case against the war(Northhampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2008)

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

42

6

I have written blog posts on both of these initiatives. Falk, “Israel and Apartheid? Reflections
on the Russell Tribunal on Palestine Session in South Africa,” Falk, “Kuala Lumpur War Crimes
Tribuanal: Bush and Blair Guilty.”
7

There is a need to clarify what is meant by ‘a jurisprudence of conscience’ beyond the narrow
claim of this article that law should treat equally all offenders of norms of international criminal
law. It is true that many who subjectively act on the basis of their conscience engage in behavior
that from other societal perspectives constitute crimes. For instance, the assassination of doctors
who perform abortions by right to life advocates offers one clear illustration.

Gardner Feldman: German-Polish Reconciliation in Comparative Perspective

43

German-Polish Reconciliation in Comparative Perspective: Lessons for Japan?1
Lily Gardner Feldman
The Japanese Case and the Benefits of Comparison
In 2008 and 2009, a series of historical issues once again defined the public space of JapaneseSouth Korean and Japanese-Chinese relations: the revisionist essay of General Tamogami
Toshio; Prime Minister Aso Taro’s acknowledgement of the use of slave labor in his family’s
wartime mine; new flare-ups in the longstanding territorial disputes over the Senkaku/Diaoyu
and Takeshima/Dokdo islets; ministerial visits to the Yasukuni Shrine; and Japanese government
approval of another amnesiac history textbook whitewashing Japan’s World War II aggression.2
These developments could be viewed as another episode in the periodic eruption of historyrelated problems that have affected Japan’s bilateral ties openly since 1982, with the anticipationthat they will ebb and flow depending on domestic and international circumstances.
Alternatively, these events also could be understood as contaminants that severely impede
Japan’s foreign policy, with the hope that now is a time to imagine fundamental change.
Hatoyama Yukio, the new Prime Minister of Japan, has chosen to entertain the possibility of aparadigm shift in how Japan deals with China and South Korea. In a June 2009 visit to the
Republic of Korea as head of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), when elaborating on his
vision for an East Asian or Asian-Pacific Community, Hatoyama drew on the Franco-German
experience of creating a regional organization for embedding their relationship on foundations ofpermanent peace.
Since assuming office, Prime Minister
Hatoyama’s first visit to Seoul instead of
Washington, D.C. (usually the first destination),and his pledge that neither he nor any of his
cabinet members will visit the Yasukuni Shrine,
have signaled his interest in Japan’s Asianneighbors and his emphasis on a reconciliatory
tone toward them.
In addition to the election victory of the
Democratic Party of Japan, there are signs that apath toward genuine reconciliation in Northeast
Hatoyama (left) and Lee in Seoul, October 9, 2009
Asia might now be approachable. First, there is
the reality of generational change, which means
the physical disappearance of some conservative, nationalist, and right-wing forces opposed toreconciliation and the emergence of a cohort with no historical experience of World War II.
Second, there is evidence of a growing differentiated view among some conservatives, forexample the Yomiuri Shimbun’s War Responsibility Reexamination Committee and Watanabe
Tsuneo’s criticism of ministerial visits to the Yasukuni Shrine.3 Third, public opinion surveys
demonstrate that “the affirmative view of the war...is being rejected by the wider society.”4
As scholars and practitioners have sought to understand the power of history issues in Asia andthe possibilities for ending the logjam over reconciliation, in the last decade many have looked toGermany’s experience with a foreign policy of reconciliation. The literature on Northeast AsianThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

44

reconciliation that considers the German case is welcome, but it is limited in four significant
ways: (1) Often the references to Germany are glancing or anecdotal.5 (2) Where greater
elaboration does occur, it centers on single topics, such as memory, narratives, textbooks,
education, or territorial disputes, largely ignoring the many other examples of Germany’s nongovernmental bilateral institutions and most of the governmental illustrations.6 (3) The mostdeveloped arguments for learning from the German case focus on either Franco-German orGerman-Polish relations, excluding the rich lessons provided by Germany’s partnerships with
Israel and the Czech Republic, the two cases where history issues in fact have been stickiest. (4)Even where there is a fuller treatment of Germany, the understanding of the German model ofreconciliation is flawed, overestimating harmony and perfect peace as the goal andunderestimating the considerable obstacles, crises, and vicissitudes that have accompanied theselong processes of bilateral peace-making, and whose surmounting has permitted authenticationof reconciliation. Particularly notable in Jennifer Lind’s work is the assumption that there has
been no backlash to the German government’s confrontation with the past. While not as
ferocious as the right-wing backlash in Japan, there was intense German opposition to
government and societal reconciliation behavior on a variety of occasions. The key lesson to belearned from those German experiences is that eventually (?) political and moral vision byGerman leaders successfully challenged the opposition and thereby authenticated andstrengthened reconciliation. Political and moral avoidance are not part of the toolbox ofreconciliation.7
The following analysis of German-Polish experience with reconciliation is useful for theJapanese case as it reveals both the persistence of historical issues and a robust
institutionalization that can limit the past’s explosive potential. It also refers to three other casesof reconciliation in German foreign policy – relations with France, Israel and the Czech Republic– to demonstrate the pattern and richness of the German example. The essay concludes with abrief review of the Japanese case under Prime Minister Hatoyama. Comparison is utilized here asan analytical framework and as a clarifier of choices with keen awareness that simple replicationis neither desirable nor possible for the Japanese situation. Even when there are inevitablesystemic and political culture differences, comparison can sharpen the contours of debate andilluminate policy preferences. Thomas Berger alerts us to three key differences between
Germany and Japan: in historical experiences; in allied involvement in shaping new narratives;and in the international/regional settings in which the two countries evolved from pariah status
after World War II.8 Yet, as he points out, the two countries face the same challenge ofconfronting the indelibility of the past at a time when history issues are high on the global
agenda. At a time when Japan shows signs of a political will and commitment to grapple with thepast, Germany can provide an important guide for the opportunities and hurdles etched in thelong, arduous and necessary process of reconciliation.
The Significance of the Polish CaseI have a maximal, “thick” definition of reconciliation that has also been called “structural.” By"reconciliation" I mean the process of building long-term peace and cooperation between former
enemies through bilateral institutions and relationships across governments and societies.
Reconciliation involves the development of friendship, trust, empathy and magnanimity. It
involves both ethical and emotional dimensions and practical and material aspects. In fact, twoGerman words, according to Polish analyst Artur Hajnicz, embrace the full meaning ofreconciliation: Versöhnung and Aussöhnung.9 Germany’s pursuit of reconciliation has

Gardner Feldman: German-Polish Reconciliation in Comparative Perspective

45

consistently reflected both meanings, melding moral imperative with pragmatic interest. This
concept of reconciliation does not infuse peace with a vision of harmony and tension-freecoexistence, but rather integrates differences between peoples. Productive contention about
history in a shared and cooperative framework for identifying and softening (but not eliminating)divergence is a more realistic goal than perfect peace. Authentication of reconciliation thus
emerges from challenge.
The sense of reconciliation used here for the German-Polish relationship accords with thecharacterizations of Marek Prawda - reconciliation means the management of diversity in acooperative framework; of Wladyslaw Bartoszewski – reconciliation incorporates squabbles
within a family; and of Dieter Bingen - reconciliation means a community of fate that involves
vicissitudes.10 Reconciliation is a long and difficult process, as German chancellor Willy Brandt
noted when writing about German-Polish reconciliation in 1976: “The soil in which
reconciliation could flourish required careful spadework.”11 Germany’s first chancellor, Konrad
Adenauer, had also used a gardening metaphor when speaking of Franco-German reconciliationand the 1963 friendship treaty between the two countries: “This friendship between France andGermany is like a rose that will always have buds and flowers,” and he added “thorns.”12 It is
this dual character of abundant blooms and sharp points that is at the heart of my understandingof reconciliation.
In outlining my framework of reconciliation, I try to answer the basic question of whether
German-Polish relations are durable, and therefore reparable, after the downturn in theirrelationship in the years 2000-2007 (particularly the last two years under Jaroslaw Kaczynski as
Prime Minister), or whether they were permanently damaged. The downturn was real, but it has
to be considered against the backdrop of the accumulated relationship built over forty years andagainst the reality of less public, stable and positive institutional relations at both thegovernmental and societal levels. My approach is to see relations both horizontally (over time)and vertically (across levels). In many respects, the dimensions of reconciliation evident inGerman-Polish relations can be identified also in Germany’s relations with France, Israel and theCzech Republic.
The Four Dimensions of Reconciliation
In reconciliation, the mix of pragmatism and morality as motives differs depending on history,
leadership, institutions and international context, that is the political dynamics of the process. I
will address these four dimensions in the German-Polish case and refer to findings from the othercases. Using the four factors permits a full panorama of the relationship rather than a snap-shot.
History
In the recasting of relations after conflict, there are three sequential factors which may take theform of stages relating to history: the past as stimulus, the acknowledgement of grievances, andthe past as present. Looking at “History” in this nuanced sense gives us a greater capacity tosituate contemporary German-Polish relations.
The Past as Stimulus
In the Franco-German and German-Israeli cases, the French and Israeli governments were
initially very reluctant to deal with Germany because of the horrors of World War II and theHolocaust. These attitudes changed quite quickly, beginning around 1950, and there was a

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

46

willingness to engage on both sides using moral arguments, as a direct response to the past.
There was a similar reticence in Poland, due to the nature of the Nazi crimes. In all three cases,
one can describe the starting position as one of enmity. Due to the Cold War, governmental
action initiating a process of reconciliation occurred much later in the Polish case, coming onlywith détente in the 1970s, and even later in the German-Czech case, after 1989.
Religious organizations in society played an important role in lubricating the government process
in the cases of France and Israel, just as they did in the German-Polish case in the 1950s and1960s, as acknowledged by government leaders. As with France and Israel, religious efforts
began early in Poland. As with France, in the Polish case it was both Protestant and Catholic
actors who led the way, as would be the case much later in the German-Czech example, after
1989. In the German-Israeli case, spiritual initiatives transcended religions, for example theSocieties for Christian-Jewish Cooperation (Gesellschaften für christlich-jüdische
Zusammenarbeit) and the Protestant-backed Peace with Israel (Friede mit Israel) movement.
Acknowledgment of Grievances
The second stage of history’s shaping role in reconciliation, Germany’s acknowledgment ofgrievances, involved converting the affective, moral component into pragmatic and material
needs and formal political commitment. In the Polish case, as with France, Israel and the Czech
Republic, the acknowledgment entailed the language referring to historical issues in bilateraltreaties and in major statements as well as symbolic expressions of reconciliation. For example,
the December 1970 Treaty between the Federal Republic of Germany and the People’s Republicof Poland on the Basis for Normalizing Their Relations acknowledged Poland as “the first
victim” of a murderous World War II and recognized the Oder-Neisse line as Poland’s westernborder, albeit de facto and not de jure.13
Other agreements recognizing historical grievances
followed: 1972 diplomatic relations; 1990 Border
Treaty; 1991 Good Neighborliness and Friendly
Cooperation Treaty; 1972, 1975 and 1991 compensation
payments (without calling them restitution to individuals
or reparations to the state); 2000 agreement on slave andforced labor (with Poland providing roughly one quarterof the recipients and receiving approximately one quarterof the funds). The Polish case demonstrates that someissues of history can be frozen and revived only years
later, mirroring the German-Israeli case; for example, it
was only in 1965, thirteen years after the 1952
Reparations Agreement, that diplomatic relations were
The 1970 Warsaw Treaty between
concluded between Germany and Israel. In the Czech
Germany and Poland settled outstanding
case, victims of Nazism received their first compensation
border issues with the Oder-Neisse linefrom Germany only in 1997.
With respect to statements and symbolic events, we should note their appearance before and after
1989. Before 1989 there were at least ten instances in the Polish case, including the 1958 speechat Warsaw university by Carlo Schmid, a key Social Democratic leader, who was also involved
in reconciliation with France and Israel; Brandt’s 1970 kneeling at the memorial for the Warsaw
Ghetto Uprising; and the 1981 “Package Initiative” (Paket-Initiative) through which ordinaryGardner Feldman: German-Polish Reconciliation in Comparative Perspective

47

Germans demonstrated their help for Polish society after the promulgation of martial law. There
were also ten “firsts” after 1989, including the November 1989 joint mass by Tadeusz
Mazowiecki and Helmut Kohl in Krzyzowa/Kreisau; the first speech of a German president,
Roman Herzog, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising in 1994; the first speech of a
Polish Foreign Minister, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, to the German parliament in April 1995; thefirst speech of a German president, Johannes Rau, to the Sejm in 2004. There are similar
examples from Germany’s relations with France, Israel and the Czech Republic: treaties,
agreements, statements, symbolic acts that acknowledged past misdeeds, memorialized historicalevents or asserted a fresh start in relations compared to the past.
Positive manifestations do not preclude missteps such as Chancellor Kohl’s first choice oflocation for the joint mass with Prime Minister Mazowiecki: Gora Swietej Anny (Annaberg, as it
is known in German), which was vigorously rejected by Poles for the Nazis had memorialized
there the Germans killed during the Polish uprisings of 1920-21. This faux pas was reminiscentof the German-Israeli case: In 1971, the German government opened its first cultural week in
Israel on the anniversary of Kristallnacht.
The Past as Present
The third expression of history’s importance for reconciliation has two main features: (1) debates
about the past, which can be divisive but necessary to authenticate the relationship; and (2)affirmative commitments in joint efforts to confront the past. The past is neither forgotten nor
represents a mere footnote; rather it is a “productive irritant” to be confronted constantly.
Regarding the debates, there are the three familiar historical issues that have separated Germans
and Poles in the period 2000-2007: the Center against Expulsion (Vertreibungszentrum) first
proposed by Erika Steinbach (Christian Democratic Union Bundestag member and president of
the Federation of Expellees) and to be created in Berlin with official approval; restitution andcompensation claims initiated by the Prussian Claims Society (Preußische Treuhand) thatprovoked the Polish Sejm claim for reparations from Germany to the Polish state; and the returnor restitution of confiscated, looted and displaced cultural assets.
Despite many heated debates in society and on the part of politicians, the first and second issues
do seem susceptible to resolution by the two governments. Even under the last (Jaroslaw
Kaczynski) Polish government, there were bilateral consultations on the Expulsion Center, and a
German commitment to Europeanize the subject matter. With the new Donald Tusk government,
there seems to be acceptance of the reality of the Center combined with a German-Polishagreement to work collaboratively on joint historical projects such as the exchange of exhibitions
and the creation of a World War II museum in Danzig. Yet, the past does not disappear
completely, for example in the contentious debate about membership of the board that willoversee the creation of the Expulsion Center.
On the issue of restitution and reparations, in the Schroeder government there were joint
German-Polish statements and actions rejecting the Prussian Claims Society’s initiatives and the
Sejm’s counter response. Even though Chancellor Angela Merkel rejected Prime Minister
Kazcynski’s October 2006 proposal for the mutual relinquishment of claims (the so-called “zerooption”), she has repeatedly come out against any German claims for compensation from Poland,
most recently during Tusk’s trip to Berlin in December 2007.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

48

The art question seems to be the thorniest in terms of resolution, with entrenched positions on
both sides, and German observers labeling cultural property in Poland the “last German prisonersof war.”14 In 2006, Klaus Ziemer, director of the German Historical Institute in Warsaw,
proposed that governments draw on the experience of deliberations between German and Polishart historians who together have effected a paradigm shift by developing the concept of“common cultural legacy” (ein gemeinsames Kulturerbe) for sharing rather than a national,
sovereign focus.
The “return of the past” has also been evident in German-Czech relations: the property claims of
Sudeten Germans; their call for rescission of the immediate postwar Benes Decrees and related
laws that permitted expropriation and exonerated Czech excesses in the expulsion of Sudeten
Germans from Czechoslovakia; the prolonged German unwillingness to provide restitution toCzech victims of Nazism; and the planned Expulsion Center in Berlin. In the case of Israel, thepast has also returned, both in the statements of the German literary figure Martin Walser about
the oppressive obligation to memorialize the Holocaust, and in anti-Semitic statements of themainstream German politicians Jürgen Möllemann (FDP) and Martin Hohmann (CDU). Like
Polish leaders, Israeli leaders have warned Germans not to confuse victims and perpetrators.
Concerning anti-Semitism in Germany, while the Israeli government has expressed concern, as
Germany’s partner in reconciliation it has also lauded the German government’s efforts tocombat this phenomenon. There are also recent, outstanding restitution issues for some citizensof Israel, which the German government has refused to recognize. We should note, however, that
Germany has paid 62 billion Euros in total restitution and reparations payments since 1952
(about one third to individual Israelis and the state of Israel). Even in Franco-German relations,where the past has played a lesser role than in the cases of Poland, Israel and the Czech Republic,
there was significant concern over President Jacques Chirac’s 2004 invitation to Schröder toattend the commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day.
The second set of activities dealing on a regularbasis with the past, but in an affirmative way, arethe actions of various civil society organizations.
There are too many to enumerate, but we canidentify three that are present in the Polish caseand across the other three cases: the bilateral
textbook commission, the Action
Reconciliation/Service for Peace (Aktion
Sühnezeichen/Friedensdienste) and the German
Historical Institute. Neither Israel nor the Czech
Republic has the latter in formal terms, but they
do have some equivalent: the German-Czech
Chirac, Schröder and Blair at D-Day Ceremony
Historians Commission (Deutsch-Tschechische
Historikerkommission) and the Institutes ofGerman History in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. These three organizations in all cases are linked intheir goals (education about the past; inculcation of a “culture of remembrance” Erinnerungskultur), means (meetings, publications) nature of history (broad conception but witha focus also on World War II and the Holocaust) and effect (creation of bilateral networks;
successor generations; and a model for other international dyads).

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Leadership
The second factor determining reconciliation is leadership. In relations of reconciliation,
leadership has to be visionary, willing to overcome domestic opposition, and capable of creating
leadership duos, often based on personal chemistry with political leaders in the other country,
and often spanning ideological lines. In the Franco-German and German-Israeli reconciliation
this happened early on with Adenuaer’s special relationship with de Gaulle and with BenGurion, but has continued throughout the life of the relationships (Schmidt-Giscard; KohlMitterrand; Schröder-Chirac) (Brandt-Meir; Strauss-Peres, Fischer-Sharon, Merkel-Olmert). The
close personal relationship between Vaclav Havel and Richard von Weizsäcker is often
mentioned in the German-Czech case, as is the personal link between Schröder and Czech Prime
Minister Spidla. Merkel’s time as a student in Prague, and her ability to speak Czech, contributed
to the personal connections she has developed to Czech leaders. In all of these cases, personalties helped ease difficult political relations.
Unlike in the French and Israeli cases, but similar to the Czech case, during the early years of theCold War, what Helmut Schmidt described as the “formal” impersonal diplomacy ofcommunism made it difficult to develop friendly relations between German and Polish leaders,
but it was not impossible, as the personal ties between Helmut Schmidt and Edward Gierek
demonstrated.
As an East German who grew up in the German Democratic Republic near the Polish border,
Angela Merkel has been unique among German chancellors in her ability to connect with Polishleaders on a personal level. Interaction with the new Polish Prime Minister Kazimierz
Marcinkiewicz during her December 2005 trip to Warsaw was aided by the fact that both leaders
were physicists by training, and that she recognized the personal dimension in all aspects ofpolitics. When relations were tense between Germany and Poland in spring 2007 and needed
redirection, both sides sought to develop a positive personal chemistry between Chancellor
Merkel and President Lech Kaczynski. With the new Polish government in fall 2007, there was
the sense, later borne out, that the long-standing personal connection (since the early 1990s)
between Merkel and Donald Tusk would contribute to the airing and resolution of bilateral and
EU differences.
Institutions
Relations of reconciliation are distinguished by a very high degree of bilateral institutionalization
at both the societal and governmental levels. The Franco-German tandem, dating from the 1963
Elysée Treaty, is the best known example, but the German-Israeli relationship is a close second,and German-Polish ties also display significant dimensions of institutionalization at both levels.
The German-Czech case is the least institutionalized, in part due to the hermetically-sealed
nature of Czechoslovak communism after 1968.
Societal Organizations
The plethora of societal connections between Germany and Poland are quite well-known, but
five features that cross the four cases bear emphasis: (1) The institutions are not ad hoc, but exist
with regularity over time and involve regeneration; (2) they span every area of societal life from
culture to economics, from science to trade unions, from sports encounters to religiousorganizations, from sister cities to youth exchange, from German political foundations toThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

50

individual party ties, from friendship associations to academic connections; (3) they often haveas patrons government or former government officials; (4) they maintain independent agendas,
even when they receive government funding; and (5) they show solidarity with the bilateral
partner in times of official crisis. As in the French and Israeli cases, the Polish-German societal
connections predated official relations.
A sixth characteristic of societal organizations in reconciliation relates to their relationships togovernments. There are four distinct roles that societal actors can play:(1) Catalysts, where they provide the initial stimulus for official relations (e.g., lay and church
hierarchy in the Polish and French cases; economic actors in the Polish and Israeli cases;
academic and student connections in the Polish and Israeli cases; dissidents in the Polish andCzech cases).
(2) Complements, where they augment official behavior on a daily basis (much of the societal
activity in the Polish, French, Israeli and Czech cases).
(3) Conduits, where they perform tasks, e.g. dealing with political oppositions, that officialdom
cannot always do. Here we see the German political foundations in the Polish case (offices after1989) and in the other three country cases with similar goals (confrontation with the past –Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit; European integration; comparative public policy), means(meetings, exchanges, publications) and outcomes. In the Polish and Czech cases, there was the
additional goal of democratization. In the Polish case, before 1989 the Friedrich Ebert
Foundation (in the 1970s) and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (after 1982) had contacts thatwere useful to their German parties in power.
(4) Competitors, where societal actors oppose official behavior (German expellee attitudes
regarding the Oder-Neisse border in the 1960s and 1970s; the activity of German nongovernmental actors during the emergence of Solidarnosc; the German expellee calls from 2000
on for a Center Against Expulsion). In all three Polish cases, the non-governmental actors
influenced governments either in the short-term or the long-term. Recent examples ofcompetition are present in the other country cases, for example the German media criticism of
Israel during the second intifada in the Middle East when the German government showedsolidarity with Israel; the opposition of the Sudetendeutsche Expellee Association(Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft) to the German government’s strong support of Czech
membership in the EU).
Governmental Institutions
As in Franco-German and German-Israeli relations, the connections between German and Polishsocietal actors dominated until the first major official breakthrough, in 1970, although there weregovernmental interactions and institutions in economics beforehand, echoing the priority given tothis area in Germany’s relations with Israel (Reparations Agreement 1952) and with France(European Coal and Steel Community 1952). Like the other three cases, German-Polishinstitutional ties evolved gradually. There have been three main stages of institutional
developments: 1970-1989 in which the new legal framework of the 1970 treaty produced new
institutions, but in a circumscribed way due to the reality of communism in Poland; 1989-2000,
the “golden years” of phenomenal bilateral growth in institutions following the 1989 agreements
and the 1991 treaty on the heels of the Cold War’s end;15 and (3) 2000-2007 when theGardner Feldman: German-Polish Reconciliation in Comparative Perspective

51

relationship was severely tested by differences between the two governments but institutional
developments remained stable.
As with Franco-German and German-Israeli relations and even in the more infant German-Czech
partnership, the first hallmark of reconciliation is institutionalization across all policy fields:
defense, economics, science and technology, the environment, law, transportation. In the Polishcase, as in the French and Czech cases, there is the added dimension of cross-border cooperation.
Secondly, parallel to Franco-German and German-Israeli relations, the first period of GermanPolish institutionalization did not witness massive proliferation, which then did take place in thesecond period. As a third feature of institutionalization, there is the creation and realization of aframework for regular government-to-government consultations and visits. As with FrancoGerman and German-Israeli relations, there are also joint cabinet meetings. German-Polishinstitutionalization has been deliberately patterned after the Franco-German case.
My focus here is on the third German-Polish period, labeled as “frosty” or an “ice age” from
2000-2007,16 beginning with Erika Steinbach’s initiative for a Center Against Expulsion andcontinuing with the installation in Poland of the Kaczynski twins. The latter introduced into
officialdom a heavy dose of populistic nationalism that meant frequent public criticisms ofGermany over history, often in response to societal actors in Germany, such as the Prussian
Claims Society, and sometimes in response to German government initiatives, for example theGerman-Russian gas pipeline agreement between Gerhard Schröder and Vladimir Putin.
Analysts differ over whether this period between 2005-2007 constituted a defining moment for
ties, moving them away permanently from partnership, or whether this was a temporary
breakdown in an otherwise solid relationship of reconciliation. Observers who emphasize theingrained nature of differences see only ritual in the relationship. Those who believe that theprocess of reconciliation has not been irretrievably interrupted emphasize the strength of societal
ties, and the blending of interests and values that join Poland and Germany. As in GermanIsraeli, Franco-German and German-Czech relations, reconciliation is occasionally punctuatedby crisis. The test of reconciliation is the ability to weather such periods.
The view advanced here is one of optimism for German-Polish relations, where reconciliation’s
robustness is borne out by three developments in the period 2000-2007: the continuity andpurpose of bilateral visits; the style and substance of statements about the relationship; and thenature of proposed solutions to disputes.
Continuity and Purpose. With the exception of Lech Kaczynski’s June 2006 cancellation of a
Weimar Triangle (Germany, France and Poland) meeting after he was lampooned by the German
paper die tageszeitung, there was a regular exchange of visits at the level of heads of governmentand state, including President Köhler (August 2005 and May 2006), Chancellor Merkel(December 2005 and March 2007), President Lech Kaczynski (March 2006) and Prime Minister
Jaroslaw Kaczynski (October 2006). There were also six joint meetings between the two cabinets
in the period 2000 and 2006, as well as frequent meetings of the defense ministers and foreign
ministers. The uniform purpose, even on the Polish side, was to “improve” and “deepen” therelationship.17
Style and Substance. The German government used the occasion of visits to be nonconfrontational and patient in style, with the goal of not inflaming relations. Polish leadersduring visits also tried to be less confrontational than on other occasions, reprising a German

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

52emphasis on the need for openness, honesty and a constructive approach to differences.18 The
sober and pragmatic style of Germany in these visits was accompanied by references to thesubstance of relations as a “partnership” denoted by “trust” and “friendship”, as well as asensitivity to the “dark chapters” of German history, indirectly elevating the moral dimension ofties, quite similar to the characterization of German-Israeli and Franco-German relations in theirmature stage.19
Solutions to Disputes. Institutional responses to problems in German-Polish relations took two
forms: the establishment of a broad framework to help guide relations, and the creation of issuespecific mechanisms. Already in late 2004 (taking effect in 2005), there were two major
responses to the difficulties in relations surrounding the reparations and restitution issue: theappointment in the German and Polish foreign ministries of Coordinators for German-Polish
Societal and Cross-Border Cooperation, and the announcement of the German-Polish Year under
the patronage of the German and Polish presidents. These choices reminded one of thedevelopments in Franco-German relations with the inauguration of the Blaesheim Process ofeven more regular official meetings (following the Franco-German discord at the 2000 EU Nicesummit on new decision-making rules) and the creation of a second level of coordinators (as partof the 40th anniversary of the Elysée treaty in 2003). Issue-specific consultation mechanisms inGerman-Polish relations included the working group on energy and the dialogue between theGerman Minister of State for Culture and the Polish Culture Minister over the Center for
Expulsion.
Finally, beyond the highly public institutional responses to general and specific problems, theoptimistic scenario would point to the quotidian, detailed and often quiet policy cooperation
between 2000 and 2007 in three policy arenas: cross-border activity, the environment anddefense.
International Context”International Context” covers both the larger global setting (relations with the US, with Russia
and NATO) and the specific regional framework of the EU. On the issue of relations with the US
and Russia, Germany and Poland continued to disagree over the German-Russian gas pipeline,
over US policy in Iraq and over missile defense (before the Russian invasion of Georgia),
although the Tusk government is looking for a détente with Russia and for less of a lock-stepwith the US. Other ties of reconciliation have tolerated well such differences, for example
concerning the US in German-Israeli relations and concerning Russia in German-Czech
relations. NATO has constituted an important framework within which German-Czech andGerman-Polish close military ties have evolved, both before membership in the Partnership for
Peace and since. At the same time, the two East European countries have differed with Germany
over NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine.
The dominant international framework for reconciliation has been the EU, and here again we canidentify the dualities that have marked the other three factors of reconciliation we haveconsidered so far. Similar to the case of Israel’s Free Trade Agreement, Association Agreement
and Action Plan with the EU, Germany has been the key advocate for Poland (and the Czech
Republic) in every step towards membership. Yet, the reality of Poland’s EU membership hasrevealed differences with Germany over the budget, constitutional questions and the climate andenergy package. All three issues were resolved with Germany extending itself beyond theregular, formal negotiations in order to secure an agreement with Poland. We should remember

Gardner Feldman: German-Polish Reconciliation in Comparative Perspective

53

that divergence does not have to be debilitating. In the case of the Franco-German pair in the EU,
research has shown that the larger the initial policy divergence, the greater the ultimate jointness
and influence, for example on economic and monetary union and common foreign and security
policy.20 There is barely an economic or foreign policy arena in the EU in which France andGermany have not floated joint proposals. A growing sense of common purpose can be seen in
the German-Polish efforts toward democratization in Ukraine (e.g., the joint visit of the German
and Polish foreign ministers to Kiev) and towards the EU’s Eastern Partnership (with Armenia,
Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine).
There is an additional point that leads one to long-term optimism concerning the German-Polish
dyad in the EU. As in the bilateral relationship, divergence is necessary to authenticate therelationship. By asserting itself in contentious policy debates, Poland feels it is converting into
fact, even if tentatively, the theoretical formula of equality of rights and responsibilities of all EU
member-states.21 As with France, the Polish sense of greater structural symmetry between
Germany and Poland is an important ingredient of reconciliation.
Conclusion
This essay has provided the main contours of German-Polish reconciliation and of its navigationof treacherous history issues; and has indicated that similar features define Germany’s otherreconciliations, notably those with France, Israel and the Czech Republic. While the Japanesecase is clearly in its infancy, a sketch of Japan’s new reconciliation thinking and tentative
practice is worthwhile along the four dimensions outlined at the beginning of the German case.
Without doubt, the process in Northeast Asia will be long and difficult, requiring extreme
patience on the part of governments and societies in an environment of in-grown skepticism anddeep tradition. Yet as the German case demonstrates, small initial steps can yield to larger strides
even when “many stones are scattered on the path” of reconciliation.22 Moreover, Sino-Japaneseand Japanese-South Korean relations are not starting from square one: there are already powerful
economic and financial links and vibrant ties in popular culture.
History
The new Japanese government has expressed its intention to be pro-active regarding the past, as
in Prime Minister Hatoyama’s statement to the South Korean President during a September 2009
meeting at the UN: “The new Democratic Party of Japan has the courage to face up to history.”23
Foreign Minister Okada repeated this perspective in his commitment to the 1995 statement by
Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi apology for Japan’s past behavior in the region. In the
February 2010 report of a joint Sino-Japanese history study, endorsed by the two governments,
for the first time Japan agreed to use “aggression” to characterize its behavior toward China from1937 to 1945.24 While there was no agreement about the number of Chinese killed in the 1937
Nanjing Massacre, the study was based on a common periodization. In many ways, it is an
auspicious start that could learn useful lessons from the way the German-Czech Historians
Commission has proceeded, including its willingness to entertain differing perspectives onhistory within a framework of ongoing dialogue and engagement. Similarly, in a February 2010
visit to South Korea Foreign Minister Okada expressed his regret for the Japanese occupation of
Korea.25
The reasoning of Prime Minister Hatoyama and Foreign Minister Okada appears bothphilosophical - as outlined below - and pragmatic - the need for a new approach to an expansive

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

54

China. Three specific historical disputes still clog the road to reconciliation: rights and demandsof victims’ groups, including Korean and Chinese sex slaves (“comfort women”) and slavelaborers; textbook issues; and territorial disputes.
On the first issue, as an opposition party since 2000, together with the Social Democratic Party
and the Communist Party, the DPJ initiated repeatedly bills in the Diet to address the emotionaland material needs of “comfort women.” Yet, the Japanese legal system has proved unbending in
its rejection of Korean and Chinese victims’ claims, arguing that the compensation issue had
been made moot by post-war Sino-Japanese (Joint Statement) and Japanese-South Korean (1965
treaty) agreements.26
Whether apology will now take the form the victims require – a resolution of the Diet, not just of
the government – is unclear, but two aspects of the German slave labor case are relevant. First,
the passage of time (six decades for Germany) mitigates neither the victims’ pain nor theperpetrators’ responsibility for action. Second, pragmatic motives (American lawsuits) had to bejoined by moral imperative (President Rau’s apology and request for forgiveness) to make theGerman slave labor negotiations successful. The general issue of apology appears to dominate
the debate about appropriate Japanese initiatives. In all four German cases, the government faced
significant domestic opposition to reconciliation overtures, including acknowledgement ofgrievances (a form of apology), yet persevered as an affirmation of the genuine desire forreconciliation without major domestic consequence. Germany has also demonstrated that legal
formalities do not preclude governments from making extra-legal political exceptions: first in its
decision in the 1950s to initiate reparations negotiations with Israel, a country that did not exist
at the time of the Holocaust; and second in the “special funds” it created on various occasions forindividual Jewish victims who were excluded from German domestic compensation legislation.
Regarding the history textbook issue, Japanese textbook characterization of the past continues todivide Japan and her neighbors, although Prime Minister Hatoyama has tried to moderate thetone.27 At the same time, the new Japanese Foreign Minister has been quick to suggest agovernment-sanctioned common history textbook among Japan, South Korea and China to buildon the existing trilateral work of scholars. Critics of the idea point to the fact that it took six
decades for France and Germany to write and use a government-sponsored common history
book. What is overlooked is the fact that there were path-breaking achievements long before thebook: the early creation of a Franco-German textbook commission and the conclusion already in
1951, shortly after the war, of a “Franco-German Agreement on Contentious Questions ofEuropean History.” The commission periodically produces recommendations for the teaching of
history and geography. The Franco-German experience was not unique: even during communism
in Poland, the German-Polish textbook commission could be created and issue recommendations
for teaching history as early as the 1970s. And similar commissions have produced results in theGerman-Israeli and German-Czech cases. While the product is important, the process of jointly
confronting the past with the goal of airing differences, and not history’s homogenization, is afruitful end itself.
Territorial issues deeply divide governments and societies in Northeast Asia. Prime Minster
Hatoyama has called for accelerating negotiations for a treaty that would make possible joint
development of undersea resources between China and Japan, and sees the Dokdo/Takeshimaislands as contested between Japan and South Korea (rather than belonging to Japan). However,observers are skeptical of any rapid movement on territorial disputes over either theGardner Feldman: German-Polish Reconciliation in Comparative Perspective

55

Senkaku/Diaoyu islands or the Dokdo/Takeshima islands, and, therefore, of the prospects forreconciliation in general. Again, the German-Polish case is instructive: it was not until German
unification in 1990 that Germany recognized de jure the Oder-Neisse border with Poland,
although it had been recognized de facto in 1970 as part of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik. During theintervening twenty years, Germany and Poland were building important governmental andsocietal networks even as Poland’s desire for de jure recognition of the border went unfulfilled.
A final dimension of “History” is the occurrence of symbolic events that can either propel or
impair the chances of reconciliation. Past visits to the Yasukuni Shrine by Japanese Prime
Ministers clearly disturbed China and South Korea. Hatoyama not only has promised not tomake such visits, but acted vigorously on his commitment. When over fifty Japanese lawmakers
visited the shrine for the annual fall festival in October 2009, no member of Hatoyama’s cabinet
participated. Another action of immense symbolic complexity is South Korean president Lee
Myung-bak’s invitation to Japanese Emperor Akihito to visit Seoul in 2010, the centennial ofJapan’s annexation of Korea. Similarly, there is the initiative for Prime Minister Hatoyama tovisit Nanjing to apologize for the 1937 massacre and for Chinese President Hu subsequently tovisit Hiroshima as an expression of Chinese peaceful aspirations.28 Even if the visits do not
ultimately materialize, the German cases suggest that the joint process of trying to fashion
symbolic events can itself contribute to reconciliation.
Leadership
It is too soon to tell whether Hatoyama’s new style of domestic politics prioritizing reconciliationin East Asia will succeed and how other East Asian leaders will respond with their own agendas,
but we do know that his approach of emphasizing yu-ai (fraternity, friendliness) does color his
foreign policy philosophy. It encompasses cooperation and mutual respect while recognizing
differences.29 Hatoyama specifically used the term to characterize his goals vis-à-vis China,
including his call to view the East China Sea as a “sea of fraternity” rather than a “sea ofconflict.”30 His leadership has also been demonstrated in the speed with which he has met with
South Korean and Chinese leaders: at the UN in New York, in Seoul, in Beijing for trilateralmeetings and in Thailand for the ASEAN-plus meetings – all within one month. South Korean
and Chinese leaders are certainly looking to Japan for initiatives in reshaping relations.31
Noteworthy in the German cases was the reality that on a number of occasions it was leaders in
the victim countries, for example Robert Schuman in France and Vaclav Havel inCzechoslovakia, who made overtures concerning reconciliation.
Institutions
The trilateral meeting among Japan, China and South Korea in Beijing on October 10, 2009 was
only the second time the threesome had met outside the ASEAN-plus 3 meetings (the first was inDecember 2008 in Japan).

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

56

The joint statement that emerged gave a clear
indication of intentions, even if the mechanisms
will take time to fashion: There were agreements
to “1) build mutual trust in the political field, 2)
deepen economic cooperation taking fulladvantage of high complementarities of the three
economies, 3) expand people-to-people
exchanges, 4) develop regional and sub-regional
cooperation, and 5) actively respond to global
issues.” They also agreed to confront together“sensitive issues,” meaning the past.32 Three
immediate challenges identified for continued
Lee, Wen and Hatoyama meet in Beijing
deliberation by the triad are economic
cooperation, the environment, and North Korean de-nuclearization, all highly practical issues.
The long-term perspective includes a plan for a free-trade area. The senior-level diplomatic
dialogue, launched in 2007, then met in February 2010 to implement the Beijing summit’s
conclusions. Additionally, South Korea is pushing for security to be part of trilateraldeliberations. As they seek to develop trilateral cooperation, the Weimar Triangle, createdamong Germany, France, and Poland in 1991 (combining two sets of reconciliation), could
furnish lessons in terms of sectors of cooperation, mechanisms, and barriers to exchange.
On the bilateral front, in the Sino-Japanese and Japanese-Korean relationships both high politics
issues, such as defense and North Korea, and technical issues, such as economic cooperation,
food safety and green technology, have been on the agenda of the numerous official andbureaucratic visits in the first six months of the Hatoyama government. Our Franco-German andGerman-Israeli reconciliation cases indicate the early priority to defense and economics, while
the German-Polish and German-Czech examples point to the importance of economic andtechnical issues during communism and defense only after the end of the Cold War.
In his October 26, 2009 major policy address to the Diet, Prime Minister Hatoyama emphasized
the active role of citizens and society in his new vision of politics. This initiative, if it bears fruit,
could begin to counter the argument that German reconciliation’s central role for civil society
cannot be replicated in the Japanese case where non-governmental actors have been anemic due
to legal and financial strictures. Indeed, the role of non-governmental organizations are evident
as Hatoyama reaches out to South Korea and China. The first China-Japan-Republic of Korea
Business Summit was held in Beijing in October, highlighting the role the private sector can playin new commercial and trade connections. Prior to his trip to Beijing, the chairman of the Japan
Business Federation impressed on Hatoyama the need for an intensification of economic
relations with China, while protecting Japan’s intellectual property rights.
Just before Hatoyama’s visit to Seoul in October more than thirty Japanese civil society groups(including “comfort women” and slave labor representatives) welcomed the Prime Minister’sviews on history, while repeating their demands for apology and compensation. At the end of
October, the citizens’ group Japan Network on Wartime Sexual Violence Against Womenreiterated their concerns in a meeting with DPJ Diet members. There, the DPJ’s Tsuji Megumi
underlined the cost of inaction for Japanese plans for an East Asian Community: “If we don’t
solve this problem, it would be impossible for Japan to speak out to East Asia on an equal
footing.”33 When Korean “comfort women” mounted their nine hundredth protest before theGardner Feldman: German-Polish Reconciliation in Comparative Perspective

57

Japanese Embassy in Seoul in January, Japanese civil society groups in Tokyo, Osaka andFukuoka organized signature collection drives to support the victims’ goals.34
International Context
There is no clarity regarding the role the US might play in fledgling reconciliation efforts by theJapanese government due to the turmoil in the US-Japan relationship itself as Hatoyama calls fora more equal economic and security relationship, moves that were met with stern admonition
during Secretary of Defense Robert Gates October, 2009 visit to Japan.35 There is greater clarity
about the new Japanese government’s goal of pragmatic cooperation concerning the creation of aregional East Asian Community (EAC), even if the precise form remains elusive. According toForeign Minister Okada, the US would not be part of the EAC, which has some American
observers concerned while others view it as a vehicle to embed China in a way that serves
American interests.36 Relying specifically on the Franco-German model (the 1950 SchumanPlan) that led to the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952 and the European Economic
Community in 1958, the proposal appears to involve an ASEAN plus 3 arrangement, but issuesof wider membership remain unresolved. As plans for a regional organization evolve, Japan’s
new government should keep in mind that the novelty of the Franco-German model was thesurrender of sovereignty by both countries, a sui generis departure in international relations.
Rather than the supranational features of the current European Union, its intergovernmental
dimensions are more relevant, as are the practices of other postwar economic intergovernmentalorganizations such as the European Free Trade Area. The European experience, while not fully
replicable, does tell us that bilateral reconciliation and regional reconciliation go hand in hand.
The same is surely true with respect to the three East Asian powers, China, Japan and South
Korea, and could have important repercussions for relations with North Korea as well.
As the new Japanese government explores possibilities for reconciliation, it would behoove it totake from the German experience the insight that divergence, debate and dissension are a naturalpart of relations of reconciliation, and that crisis is necessary to test and authenticate the new
relationship. Reconciliation is distinguished from lesser partnerships by its ability to manage
differences in a cooperative framework. This view is clear in the words of Willy Brandt, writing
about Franco-German reconciliation decades ago:
Bonn… [took] advantage of the… occasion to point out that the two nations’ special
circumstances would continue to yield differences of interest and opinion in many fields.
Friendship did not connote a neglect of one’s own interests or a lack of candor towards others.37
In the end, then, reconciliation is about both realism and idealism, a fact Prime Minister
Hatoyama seems to have recognized. Whether his notion of reconciliation resonates fully with
China and South Korea remains to be seen.
Lily Gardner-Feldman is the Harry and Helen Gray Senior Fellow and Director of the Society,
Culture & Politics Program at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies/The
Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Germany’s Foreign Policy of Reconciliation:
From Enmity to Amity, Rowman & Littlefield, 2012.
Notes
1

This essay is based on a lecture on German-Polish relations given February 25, 2008 at theGerman Historical Institute in Warsaw, with sponsorship from the Center for International

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

58

Relations and the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Warsaw. The ideas presented are drawn from theauthor’s book From Enmity to Amity, forthcoming. Copyright: Lily Gardner Feldman 2010.
2

On territorial disputes, see: Reinhard Drifte, “Territorial Conflicts in the East China Sea – From
Missed Opportunities to Negotiation Stalemate,” The Asia-Pacific Journal. On Aso mining see:Michael Bazyler, “Japan Should Follow the International Trend and Face Its History of WorldWar II Forced Labor,” The Asia-Pacific Journal. On textbook issues, see: Yoshiko Nozaki andMark Selden, “Japanese Textbook Controversies, Nationalism and Historical Memory: Intra- andInter-national Conflicts,” The Asia-Pacific Journal.
3

On the Yomiuri project, see: “Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Who is Responsible? The Yomiuri Project
and the Enduring Legacy of the Asia-Pacific War,” The Asia-Pacific Journal.
4

Sven Saaler, Politics, Memory and Public Opinion. The History Textbook Controversy andJapanese Society (Tokyo: Deutsches Institut für Japanstudien, 2005), 168. Phillip A. Seaton
reaches a similar conclusion in Japan’s Contested Memories: The ‘Memory Rifts’ in Historical
Consciousness of World War II (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).
5

See, for example, Masaru Tamamoto, “After the Tsunami, How Can Japan Lead,” Far East
Economic Review, Jan/Feb 2005; James C. Hsiung, “Periscoping the Future: Will China andJapan Ever Be Like France and Germany?” in James C. Hsiung, ed., China and Japan at Odds.
Deciphering the Perpetual Conflict (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Linbo Jin,“Historical Disputes in Sino-Japanese Relations,” paper presented to the Center for Northeast
Asian Policy Studies, Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., 9 June 2009; Youngshik Bong,“Domestic Politics of Dokdo,” paper presented to the conference “Dokdo, Takeshima, Liancourt
Rocks: History, Territory, and Sovereignty in Northeast Asia,” School of Advanced International
Studies/Johns Hopkins University, Washington, D.C., 26 June 2009.
6

One of the earliest comparative examinations is Ernestine Schlant and J. Thomas Rimer,
Legacies and Ambiguities: Postwar Fiction and Culture in West Germany and Japan (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). More recent publications include Takashi Inoguchi
and Lyn Jackson, Memories of War: The Second World War and Japanese Historical Memory in
Comparative Perspective (Tokyo: The United Nations University Press, 1998); Akiko
Hashimoto, “Japanese and German Projects of Moral Recovery: Toward a New Understandingof War Memories in Defeated Nations,” Occasional Papers in Japanese Studies, March 1999,
Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University; Charles S. Maier,“Foreword” in Joshua A. Fogel, ed., The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography(Berkeley: University of California, 2000); Sebastian Conrad, “Entangled Memories: Versions of
the Past in Germany and Japan, 1945-2001,” in Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 38 (1),2003; Gi-Wook Shin, Soon-Won Park, and Daqing Yang, “Introduction”; and Andrew Horvat,“A Strong State, Weak Civil Society, and Cold War Geopolitics: Why Japan Lags Behind
Europe in Confronting a Negative Past,” in Gi-Wook Shin, Soon-Won Park, and Daqing Yang,eds., Rethinking Historical Injustice and Reconciliation in Northeast Asia. The Korean
Experience (London and New York: Routledge, 2007); Thomas U. Berger, “A Model Penitent?
German Historical Memory and Foreign Policy in Comparative Perspective,” paper presented to
the 47th ISA Convention, San Diego, California, 23 March 2006; Thomas U. Berger, “Dealing
with Difficult Pasts: Japan’s ‘History Problem’ from a Theoretical and Comparative
Perspective,” in Kazuhiko Togo and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, eds., East Asia’s Haunted Present:
Historical Memories and the Resurgence of Nationalism (Westport, Conn: Praeger Security

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59

International, 2008); Julian Dierkes, Postwar History Education in Japan and the Germanys.
Guilty Lessons (London and New York: Routledge, 2010); Soon-Won Park, “History that Opens
to the Future: the First Common History of Northeast Asia”; and Daniel Chirot, “Europe’s
Troubled World War II Memories: Are They That Different?” in Gi-Wook Shin and Daniel
Sneider, eds., Divided Memories: History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia (London and New
York: Routledge, 2010 forthcoming).
7

On the German-Polish comparison, see Yinan He, The Search for Reconciliation. SinoJapanese and German-Polish Relations Since World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009). On the Franco-German comparison, see Jennifer Lind, Sorry States. Apologies inInternational Politics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2008). As suggested above,
this work does not capture the complexity and ambiguity that have characterized the Germancase. A further comparative work that looks beyond memory and apology by considering the roleof political leadership and NGOs is Yangmo Ku, “International Reconciliation in the Postwar
Era, 1945-2005: A Comparative Study of Japan-ROK and Franco-German Relations,” Asian
Perspective, vol. 32, no. 3, 2008.
8

Thomas U. Berger, Different Beds, Same Nightmare: The Politics of History in Germany andJapan, AICGS Policy Report no. 39 (Washington, D.C.: The American Institute forContemporary German Studies, 2009).
9

For the dual meaning, see: Artur Hajnicz, Polens Wende und Deutschlands Vereinigung. DieÖffnung zur Normalität (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1995), pp. 142-61.
10

See Marek Prawda’s statement when Ambassador to Sweden at the Stockholm International
Forum Truth, Justice and Reconciliation, April 23-24, 2002 here (accessed December 15, 2002);
the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung interview with Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, March 29, 2007 here
(accessed April 17, 2007); Dieter Bingen, “Die deutsch-polnischen Beziehungen und die
polnische Innenpolitik. Bilanz 15 Jahre nach der Unterzeichnung des Partnerschaftsvertrags,”
June 28, 2006, Hamburg University, Ringvorlesung “Osteuropa heute” here (accessed January
23, 2007).
11

Willy Brandt, People and Politics: The Years 1960-1975 (Boston: Little, Brown andCompany: 1978), p. 181.
12

For the text of the exchange between Adenauer and de Gaulle on the 1963 Franco-German
friendship treaty, using the rose metaphor, see: André Passeron, De Gaulle Parle 1962-1966(Paris: Fayard, 1966), p. 341.
13

According to the 1945 Potsdam Agreement among the US, France, the UK and the Soviet
Union, formal recognition of the border would have to await a settlement between the four
powers and a united Germany.
14

Reinhard Müller, “Rückgabe von Beutekunst. Die letzten deutschen Kriegsgefangenen,”Frankfurter Allgemeine FAZ.NET, July 26, 2007 here. Konrad Schuller, “Streit um ‘Beutekunst’.
Goethe in Krakau,” Frankfurter Allgemeine FAZ.NET, July 27, 2007 here (accessed January 8,2008).
15

The term is Dieter Bingen’s. See “Die deutsch-polnischen Beziehungen nach 1945,” Aus
Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 5-6/2005, January 31, 2005.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

60

16

Thomas Roser, “Deutsch-polnische Beziehungen; Schwieriger Gast, Frankfurter Rundschau,
October 30, 2006; Spiegel Online, ,”Merkel wünscht sich Freundschaft zu Polen,” Spiegel
Online, October 28, 2006.
17

See, for example, Jacques Schuster, “Polens Präsident verabschiedet sich mit
Gesprächsangeboten aus Berlin,” Die Welt, March 10, 2006; Sybille Korte, “Erste positive
Signale nach Monaten der Abkühlung,” Agence France Presse, October 27, 2006; AssociatedPress, “Merkel für bessere Zusammenarbeit mit Polen in der EU,” Associated Press, October 28,
2006; Associated Press, “Steinmeier wirbt für Verbesserung von deutsch-polnischem
Verhältnis,” Associated Press, October 26, 2006.
18

Der Bundespräsident, “Tischrede von Bundespräsident Horst Köhler beim Abendessen zu
Ehren des polnischen Präsidenten Lech Kaczynski und Frau Maria Kaczynski im Schloss
Bellevue,” March 8, 2006 here (accessed May 19, 2006); Agence France Presse, “Kaczynski:
Gute Beziehungen wichtig für Polen und Deutschland,” Agence France Presse, March 8, 2006;
General-Anzeiger (Bonn), “Kein Grund zur Sorge,” General-Anzeiger (Bonn), October 30, 2006.
19

Bundesregierung, “Nie wieder Politik zu Lasten unserer Nachbarn,” December 2, 2005, here
(accessed December 12, 2005); Bundeskanzlerin, “Looking ahead to the Future in GermanPolish Relations,” December 2, 2005 here (accessed January 17, 2006); Süddeutsche Zeitung,”
Polen will Zwist mit Deutschland beilegen,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 9, 2006; Holger
Schmale, “Der Charme des kleinen Mannes,” Berliner Zeitung, March 31, 2006; Michael
Fischer, “Neuer Ton in den deutsch-polnischen Beziehungen,” Associated Press, October 30,
2006; Die Bundeskanzlerin, “Rede von Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel an der Universität
Warschau,” March 16, 2007 here (accessed March 20, 2007); Associated Press, “Merkel: Wirwollen freundschaftliches Verhältnis zu Polen,” Associated Press, October 28, 2006.
20

On the relationship between initial divergence on the one hand and ultimate jointness andinfluence on the other, see: Douglas Webber, ed., The Franco-German Relationship in theEuropean Union (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), particularly “Conclusions.”
21

Interview with Janusz Reiter, former Polish ambassador to Germany, Der Spiegel, no. 2,
January 7, 2008.
22

This is the title of a book by one of the important societal architects of German-Israeli
reconciliation, Erich Lüth
23

Quoted in The Korea Herald, September 25, 2009.

24

China Daily, “Japan Admits War ‘Act of Aggression,’” China Daily, February 2, 2010.

25

The Japan Times, “Foreign Minister in Seoul,” The Japan Times, February 14, 2010.

26

BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific, “China Blasts Japan Court Ruling on Compensation for
Wartime Sex Slaves,” BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific, March 5, 2010; China Daily, “China Goads
Japan for Quick Action on Sex Slaves,” China Daily, March 6, 2010; Jung Sung-ki, “Tokyo
urged to Compensate for ‘Comfort Women,” Korea Times, March 15, 2010; Korea Times,“Individual War Victims,” Korea Times, March 15, 2010.
27

BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific, “South Korea Raps Japan’s New Education Handbook on
Disputed Islands,” BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific, December 25, 2009.

Gardner Feldman: German-Polish Reconciliation in Comparative Perspective

61

28

BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific, “Japan Seeks ‘New Beginning’ with South Korea in 2010 –Envoy,” BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific, January 28, 2010; Martin Fackler, “With Japan, U.S.
May Be Losing Diplomatic Ground to China,” The New York Times, January 24, 2010
29

BBC Worldwide Monitoring, “Japan PM Interviewed on ‘Enriching’ Japan-China Ties,” BBCWorldwide Monitoring, October 9, 2009.
30

Quoted in David McNeill, “New Japanese Prime Minister Aims to Spread a Little love Among
Asian Rivals,” The Irish Times, October 23, 2009.
31

Na Jeong-ju, “”Lee, Hatoyama Vow Constructive Ties,” Korea Times, September 24, 2009;
BBC Worldwide Monitoring, “China-Japan Ties Get Good Statr in Japan’s New Government –Official,” BBC Worldwide Monitoring, October 9, 2009.
32

The Korea Herald, “Korea, China, Japan,” The Korea Herald, October 14, 2009.

33

Quoted in Mariko Kato, “’Comfort Women’ Bill Gets New Life,” The Japan Times, October
29, 2009.
34

Oh Young-jin, “Ex-‘Comfort Women’ To Hold 900th Protest,” Korea Times, January 10,
2010.
35

For an overview of US-Japan relations with the new Hatoyama government, see:Congressional Research Service, “Japan-U.S. Relations: Issues for Congress,” CRS Report forCongress, 7-5700, November 25, 2009. See also: Mark Beeson, “East Asian Regionalism and theEnd of the Asia-Pacific: After American Hegemony,” The Asia-Pacific Journal; and Mark
Beeson, “The United States and East Asia: The Decline of Long-Distance Leadership,” The
Asia-Pacific Journal.
36

G. John Ikenberry and Charles A. Kupchan article, “A New Japan, a New Asia,” The New
York Times, January 22, 2010.
37

Brandt, People and Politics, p. 129.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

62

Japan’s Historical Memory: Reconciliation with Asia
Kazuhiko Togo
Introduction
Historical issues haunt Japan. The world is facing a crisis, which may become a once in a
century depression in the wake of Wall Street’s financial meltdown and the subsequent recession
throughout the world. Japan is no exception. At this time of crisis each country must show its
resilience to alleviate immediate pain while implementing a long-term policy to strengthen thefundamentals of its economy and society. Japan is asked to come up with a powerful economic
policy to overcome its crisis and contribute to global solutions. Barack Obama was electedpresident of the United States, and expectations are rising not only in the States but throughout
the world that the U.S. will confront this challenge effectively. This is a golden opportunity forJapan because the fundamentals of Japan-US relations are solid and much of Obama’s agenda
coincides precisely with what the Japanese government has asserted for decades: the necessity
for a sustainable global economy, emphasis on the environment, need for a long-term energy
policy, serious concern about nuclear disarmament, cooperation through the United Nations andso on. Why not come up with creative ideas to attract the attention of Obama’s new team andconsolidate the alliance?
At a time when Japan needs to concentrate its energy on such urgent problems, Gen. Tamogami
Toshio published a prize-winning thesis justifying pre-war Japanese wartime actions andclaiming that Japan was a victim of Kuomintang and Soviet intrigues forcing the nation to go to
war with the United States. Tamogami, the Air Self-Defense Force Chief-of-Staff, wasimmediately dismissed from the service, but because he was an officer of the highest rank theevent left uncertainty whether the post-war Japanese Self Defense Forces have developed abalanced and appropriate perspective on the nation’s past.

General Tamogami

Historical memory is a thorny issue in Japan where opinions are divided, and in particular, in
recent years views from the right have become louder and more shrill in attacking the left. I
argue, however, that there is a centrist view and that there is a need to be cognizant of it and tohelp consolidate it. The analysis which follows largely draws on my new book Rekishi to Gaiko:
Yasukuni-Ajia-Tokyosaiban (History and Foreign Policy: Yasukuni-Asia-The Tokyo Tribunal).

Togo: Japan’s Historical Memory

63

Historical memory in relation to Asia
In analyzing Japan’s war memory in relation to Asia, the central feeling which I wanted toconvey in this book was one of contrition generally shared by the Japanese of my generation. My
generation did not participate in the war and most of us have no direct memory of war. But werecall vividly the destruction which led to Japan’s defeat. In the process of post-war recovery
from that destruction, we learned of information disclosed at the Tokyo Tribunal on pastwrongdoings, including the Nanjing massacre, accounts of soldiers who came back from thefront, particularly from China, speaking of atrocities they committed, [1] reports by Japanesejournalists such as Honda Katsuichi who collected testimony from victimized Chinese in the
1970s, [2] and the publication of Morimura Seiichi’s Devil’s Gluttony (Akuma no hoshoku), a
1982 best seller describing the biological weapons experiments conducted by Unit 731.
The Nanjing massacre, which was disclosed during the Tokyo Tribunal, was heavily debated in
the first half of the 1980’s. The numbers of Chinese who perished in the massacre continued to
be debated, but Japanese of my generation wanted to know what happened and to draw moral
lessons from the incident. The following conclusion drawn by the veterans’ organization
Kaikosha well represents my generation’s memory of that incident. After the heated textbook
controversy in 1982, Kaikosha conducted its own research and concluded that there were at least
3,000 to 13,000 unlawful killings at Nanjing. This number was far less than those presented bysome Japanese scholars, and the 300,000 figure given by the Chinese government, but inannouncing its conclusion, Kaikosha made the following statement in the monthly journal Kaikoin March 1985:
We apologize deeply to the people of China. We say again, 13,000, and even our
minimum figure of 3,000, is an astonishingly huge number. We began our work ofchecking the military history, knowing that we were not completely clean. But withthis huge number, we simply have no words. Whatever the severity of war or
specificity of war psychology, we just lose words faced with this mass illegal
killing. As those associated with the prewar military, we apologize deeply to thepeople of China. It was truly a regrettable act of barbarity.

Nanjing Memorial: the iconic 300,000 figure

Many of my generation remember Nanjing with this spirit of contrition. The numbers presented
diverge from other sources, but for many the fundamental issue was not the numbers but the factthat large-scale atrocities were committed. In this way the issue has been etched in historical

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

64

memory to be transmitted to future generations with a sense of contrition and questioning: how
could we have done this?
During the first half of the 1990’s serious talks were conducted between the Japanese and South
Korean governments on the issue of the comfort women. Recognition of the physical andspiritual pain of these women led to the 1993 Kono Statement, which acknowledged government
involvement, accepted Japanese responsibility, and expressed apology and determination to seek
ways of making concrete the nation’s apology and atonement. The statement became the basis
for the activities of the Asian Women’s Fund from 1995 to apologize, provide financial
compensation, and atone individually to former comfort women. [3]Asian Women’s Fund digital museum

The first half of the 1990’s was also the period when apologies to Korea and China were mostpowerfully expressed by the Japanese side. The apology to Korea was most vividly expressed
during President Roh Tae Woo’s visit to Japan in 1990. In relation to China, Emperor Akihito
expressed in his visit to China in 1992 his “deep sorrow” regarding the “period when our country
created tremendous suffering to the people of China.” The series of apologies culminated in
Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi’s comprehensive statement of 1995. The key paragraphreads as follows:“During a certain period in the not too distant past, Japan, following a mistaken
national policy, advanced along the road to war, only to ensnare the Japanese people
in a fateful crisis, and, through its colonial rule and aggression, caused tremendous
damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian
nations. In the hope that no such mistake be made in the future, I regard, in a spiritof humility, these irrefutable facts of history, and express here once again myfeelings of deep remorse and state my heartfelt apology. Allow me also to express
my feelings of profound mourning for all victims, both at home and abroad, of that
history.”
From the time of its pronouncement, the weight of this statement has been undermined byrebukes from conservative politicians and opinion leaders. But this statement had much greater
importance than has been appreciated, particularly by analysts and opinion leaders on Japan
relying on English texts. Above all, the wording and the spirit of this statement reflect well the
feeling of the Japanese of my generation who recognize that something was profoundly wrong in
the behavior of our soldiers in China acting so inhumanly. It also reflects our historical
understanding that policies of rigorous Japanization in Korea hurt deeply the feeling of Koreans.
The Murayama Statement was adopted by cabinet decision, which is the highest format ofgovernment decision making. Furthermore, as a member of the Japanese foreign ministry until
2002, I personally witnessed vividly that the statement had real life meaning, pointing the way inreconciliation talks with Great Britain, Korea and China in 1998 and the Netherlands in 2000.
Prime Minister Koizumi expressed historical contrition by practically confirming the Murayama
statement word for word at the Asia-African leaders’ meeting at Bandung in 2005 with added

Togo: Japan’s Historical Memory

65

emphasis on the record of post-war pacifism in Japan. The statement remains the official positionof the Japanese government.

Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi

Current situation and immediate task
Japan’s centrist position has been subjected to criticisms both by the left and the right. On
Nanjing, the number of victims shown by Kaikosha was far less than some scholars maintained,
and less than ten percent of the official number of 300,000 insisted on by the Chinese
government. On comfort women, the centrist position under the Kono Statement was attacked
from the left for its failure to accept legal responsibility and because atonement was provided byfunding from private citizens rather than by taxpayers’ money. Even when taxpayers’ money wasused, budgetary expenditures were made through the appropriation of humanitarian-medical
assistance, hence lacking the structure of contrition. The Murayama Statement was criticized on
the grounds that the expressions were too vague, failing to accept legal responsibility for Japan’s
wars of aggression from the Meiji to the end of World War II. It was said to be no more than the
result of careful “bureaucratic writing” devoid of personal spontaneity, in contrast to Willy
Brandt’s “kneeling down” at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970. Koizumi’s Bandung statement,
moreover, was quickly overshadowed by his yearly Yasukuni visits and is scarcely remembered.
But recently the right in Japan has been more vocal than the left in trying to bring down theabove-mentioned centrist position. They constitute a powerful minority. There are those who
argue that no “massacre” took place in Nanjing and that the perception of atrocities was
generated primarily by the Kuomintang’s war propaganda. The Kono Statement was heavily
criticized in the 1990’s on the basis that it led to a fundamental misconception of the comfort
station as a “rape center.” The Murayama Statement was rebuked as a symbol of “self negation”
of pre-war honor and a distortion of history. Koizumi’s historical apology was criticized as
harshly as Murayama’s by several prominent scholars from the right.
All the more because the centrist position rests on a still fragile foundation, the fundamental needremains for Japan to make further efforts to consolidate that position. One might argue that apolicy to perpetuate memories of the Nanjing massacre in the form of war museums in China is
no way to achieve reconciliation, but there is a need to make Kaikosha’s position better known
among all those who are interested in this issue, Japanese or otherwise. One may not accept theThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

66

view that the comfort station was a rape center, but what comes first is the sympathy andcontrition directed to the women who suffered there. The April 2007 Supreme Court verdict
relieving the state of legal responsibility for pre-war forced labor and the comfort stations is agenuine opportunity for the state to revive and extend on a moral basis the Asian Women Fund’s
activity. Even if that does not occur, there should be a way to uphold the spirit of the Kono
Statement. Supporting the Murayama Statement does not mean that all Japan’s pre-WWII
activities should be considered wrong and aggressive. There were genuine acts of idealism basedon the reality of the international situation which existed then. For instance, some Manchurian
Japanese tried to establish a land of harmony of five peoples in Manchuria toward the end of the
1920’s; Hirota Koki’s foreign policy after the establishment of Manchukuo was to limit Japan’s
expansion outside Manchuria; and Shigemitsu Mamoru asserted a policy of complete withdrawal
from China after the conclusion of the Pacific War. But these initiatives were rapidly overtaken
by expansionist moves or were articulated too late. In reality, there were irrefutable atrocities andarrogance in China. In this situation the Murayama Statement must be upheld as an importantpillar of Japanese historical memory. In the latest controversy around General Tamogami, mostof the media reports described his views as “diverging from the government’s view asformulated by the Murayama Statement.” That divergence cost General Tamogami his position
as soon as his article became public knowledge. It indicates the continued salience of the
Murayama Statement in the historical consciousness of the Japanese.
Is the consolidation of the centrists’ position really necessary?
Jennifer Lind wrote an inspiring article in Japan Focus questioning the traditional view that
apology is a prerequisite for reconciliation. [4] Historical records show that contrition was notnecessarily required for reconciliation. Furthermore, contrition expressed eloquently sometimes
aroused a backlash from nationalists at home. This, in turn, fueled emotions on the part of thosecountries with which apologists sought reconciliation. There is undeniable truth in Lind’s
observation.
When reconciliation between Japan and China was achieved in 1972, the history issue was justone of many factors under consideration. It was primarily political considerations of the power
balance under the Sino-Soviet split and U.S. detente policy that governed Mao and Zhou’s
thinking in normalizing relations with Japan. When Japan and Korea established diplomatic
relations in 1965 after 14 years of negotiations, it was primarily President Park Chung-Hee’s
determination to rebuild the South Korean economy rather than reconciliation achieved by bothsides that became the motive of normalization. Conversely, the Kono Statement became one of
the major objects of attack from the right in the latter part of the 1990’s, and its continuous
criticisms inflated Japan’s non-apologetic image. The Murayama Statement has long beenremembered for the right wing’s rebukes against it rather than its genuine apologetic intent, andthese right wing images fueled more anger in China and Korea. Ienaga Saburo’s victory in 1997
at the Supreme Court after 34 years of a court case against the state on history textbooks wasprobably a vital factor which invigorated the Tsukurukai movement demanding textbook
revision. All of these examples clearly indicate that had there not been major steps expressing
contrition, there would have been less backlash from the right, and, therefore, less occasion for
China and Korea to fuel further anger against Japan.
Having acknowledged all these factors, questions are bound to be raised: should such steps taken
to express contrition be avoided? After all, Japan has come to terms with all pre-war related

Togo: Japan’s Historical Memory

67

issues through the treaty structure of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Could not Japan just stay quiet
under this structure to avoid stirring emotions either from the left or from the right? Furthermore,henceforward, should Japan stay away from efforts to strengthen the middle road which
fundamentally express contrition, because these renewed efforts might invite a costly backlash?
These are questions raised by Lind, and they merit thorough consideration. I do not pretend that I
have full answers, but I consider that there are several reasons for continuing to consolidate themiddle.
First, it is important to understand all of Japan’s historical memory discourse in the context ofJapan’s own reconciliation with the past. This takes us back to the psychological hollow into
which Japan was thrown in August 1945, the overwhelming rise of negativism about pre-war
activities among opinion leaders, intellectuals, the media, and opposition leaders, followed bytimid efforts, which started in the 1960’s, to see pre-war history in better balance, acknowledging
some honor. Reconciliation with Asia was an important factor underlining the discourse, butmore often than not, how the Japanese could reach historical truth and reconcile with history was
the primary agenda. It is not easy just to halt that discourse until there emerges a middle road as aconsensus within society, or at least, as a common framework in which that discourse can be
conducted in a non-emotional manner.
Second, even if the way Japanese became embroiled in their historical discourse was not thewisest way to achieve reconciliation with Asia, history has already etched its lines on Japan’s
historical memory. Even if one contends that Nakasone’s visit to Yasukuni in 1985 andMurayama’s apology statement in 1995 were not the wisest moves, we have passed the point oferasing them. The accumulated line of apology has already become part of historical reality. If
the right, as a backlash against this centrist line, would dictate Japan’s historical memory anew
and establish a national memory outside the Kaikosha-Kono-Murayama statements, this would
be taken by the international community as a denial of past wrongdoings. As Lind underlined inher article, perceived denials provoke anger in the minds and hearts of all those who bear victim
consciousness. I see no alternative, so as to keep Japan’s reconciliation with its own history andeventually with Asia, to maintaining the positions expressed in the Kaikosha-Kono-Murayama
statements. The dialectical truth of human nature and politics is that, if one side intends tomodify the status quo and the other side just stays immobile hoping that the status quo ispreserved, the immobile side invariably loses. If one considers the Kaikosha-Kono-Murayama
statements to be the centrist line around which Japan might create a consensus, those who thinkthat way have to act to consolidate that position, even at the risk of provoking some sort of
backlash.
Third, I, therefore, argue that there is further need to consolidate the middle road by way ofresolving concrete issues which have split the historical discourse inside Japan. Yasukuni is
another example. I have argued already for more than two years that there is a need to introduce
some fundamental reform to Yasukuni, and while this reform is proceeding, prime ministers
should impose a moratorium on their visits. Since Koizumi’s visit to Yasukuni on August 15,
2006, no prime ministers have visited, but no reform has been introduced. Should this reform be
introduced, it may entail some political row from fundamentalists. That row itself might prove tobe provocative to the Chinese and Koreans, reminding them of their haunting historicalmemories. But then, could the Japanese just leave the Yasukuni issue in today’s suspended
situation, where the Emperor’s visit is de facto prohibited and prime ministers are at best put
under a moratorium? In my view, this domestic contradiction must be overcome.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

68

Prime Minister Koizumi at Yasukuni Shrine, August 15, 2006

How to achieve reconciliation with Asia?
This leads to the next crucial question: can Japan continue to seek harmonization of its own
memory with history, while achieving reconciliation with Asia simultaneously? This is again avery difficult question about which I do not have a definite answer. But I can outline the relevant
circumstances and indicate that further strengthening of the centrists’ position on historicalmemory may lead to, or at least be compatible with, reconciliation with Asia.
First, it is axiomatic to say that “apology is a one-way action, whereas reconciliation requires atwo-sided action. You apologize because you think your actions were wrong. You do notapologize on the condition that the apology be accepted.” [5] Keeping the centrist position strong
is partly based on the hope that this may be helpful to achieve reconciliation, but that does notmean that Japan is in a position to enforce reconciliation. China and Korea might have reasons to
accept or refuse reconciliation depending on their national memory and national interests. Should
an apology not immediately result in reconciliation, this should be well understood right from the
beginning.
Second, China and Korea have a clear policy option in dealing with the apology-backlash
situation in Japan. If China and Korea find it in their own interest to fuel anger against Japan’s
backlash, they may, of course, do so. But by responding emotionally against the backlash in
Japan, they risk fueling another backlash in Japan. Political relations between Japan and thatcountry would inevitably deteriorate. Would China or Korea invariably react emotionally against
a Japanese backlash? Not necessarily. The latest response by the Chinese and Korean
governments to the Tamogami’s incident could be considered reasonably contained, taking into
consideration Aso’s swift decision to relieve Tamogami of his official duties. Had the Chinese or
Korean government wanted to fuel nationalist emotions, Tamogami could have given ample
reason to point to him as a symbol of Japan’s growing non-apologetic behavior. This did not
happen. This may leave some hope that even if a nationalist backlash occurred in the futureagainst a strengthened centralist position, China and Korea’s reactions could remain reasonably
contained.

Togo: Japan’s Historical Memory69

Third, consolidation of the centrist position is certainly compatible with other measures which
would help to enhance reconciliation, as suggested by Lind. One of the clearest examples isrecently begun by countries in Northeast Asia to improve mutual understanding on history
textbooks. [6] Joint study and publication of history textbooks is a significant step toward
reconciliation. It must not, and it cannot, start with the objective to achieve a common textbook.
But it certainly should be able to compare how textbooks differ from one country to another anddiscuss why these differences emerge. A third party can be usefully involved. The latest projectof comparing history textbooks published in Japan, China, Korea, the U.S., and Taiwan at
Stanford University is one of the best examples.
Conclusion
The central theme of my new book is to urge Japanese society that the time has come toovercome the sharp split between the right and the left and develop a synthetic and centrist
position on historical memory. What I wanted to convey is a message which I have developed in
the course of my own trajectory (in spending six years abroad). Has not the time come to end
Japan’s drift on historical memory for 60 years and terminate the harsh split between the rightand the left? Differences of views would not be discontinued, but is there not a way to overcome
them and respect each other as Japanese and find a broad consensus on an all-Japan basis? [7]If so, how can we realistically achieve it? As Lind argues, part of the answer derives fromJapan’s domestic situation and the surrounding international situation. But in order to achievethat centrist position, I also urge that all Japanese become more interested in history, that
individually they read writings from the left and the right and that each develops his/her own
perspective on historical memory. I have learned much by reading narratives from both the rightand the left. I believe in the strength of reason. If everyone has the opportunity to consider
diverging views, ultimately, as individuals and as a nation, there should be a way to reach asynthetic position.
It is my earnest hope that through the consolidation of these non-extremist centrist positions,Japan would find a way to depoliticize historical memory issues in relation to China and Korea
and, ultimately, achieve reconciliation with Asia. There is also the issue of historical memory in
relation to the U.S., but that is a subject best dealt with in a separate article.
Kazuhiko Togo is the author of Rekishi to Gaiko: Yasukuni-Ajia-Tokyosaiban (History andForeign Policy: Yasukuni-Asia-The Tokyo Tribunal) (Kodansha 2008). He retired from the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2002. The book draws on personal experience in confronting
historical memory issues while teaching and researching in Leiden, Princeton, Tansui (Taiwan),
Santa Barbara (California) and Seoul in the years 2002-2007. He also co-edited East Asia’s
Haunted Present: Historical Memories and the Resurgence of Nationalism (Praeger Security
International, 2008) with Professor Tsuyoshi Hasegawa of the University of California, Santa
Barbara.
Notes[1] The accounts are here. (acess December 17, 2008)[2] Honda Katsuichi, Chugokuno Tabi, 1971 (Asahibunko, 1981).

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

70[3] For the activities of the Asian Women’s Fund, see their website: (access December 17, 2008).
Also refer to the report by Wada Haruki.
[4] Access the article here.
[5] Kazuhiko Togo, “A Moratorium on Yasukuni Visits,” Far Eastern Economic Review, June
2006, p.13
[6] See Mitani Hiroshi “The History Textbook Issue in Japan and East Asia: Institutional
Framework, Controversies, and International Efforts for Common Histories,” and Mikyoung
Kim “Myths, Milieu, and Facts: History Textbook Controversies in Northeast Asia,” in Tsuyoshi
Hasegawa and Kazuhiko Togo eds., East Asia’s Haunted Present: Historical Memories and the
Resurgence of Nationalism (Westport: Praeger Security International, 2008)[7] Rekishi to Gaiko: Yasukuni-Ajia-Tokyosaiban (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2008), pp.19-20.

Wada: Maritime Asia and the Future of a Northeast Asia Community

71

Maritime Asia and the Future of a Northeast Asia Community
Wada Haruki
Translated by Kyoko Selden
I. Transcending National Boundaries
We are now facing a critical situation. Not just Japan, but the world as a whole is in crisis. With
America at the center, globalization is racing ahead, but there are also strong countercurrents
with nationalism becoming stronger in various places. In the midst of war and terror, the threat ofglobal warming is becoming clear to all. In this world, I believe that we should advance toward
regionalism. In 2003 I hoisted this flag in a book entitled The Common House of Northeast Asia
— Declaration of a New Regionalism published by Heibonsha.
We cannot live by denying the existence of states However, it is necessary to relativize thenation state and to transcend state boundaries. This means that even as we belong to a state, we
belong to a region and to the world. In 2006 Karatani Kojin wrote a book called Toward theWorld Republic (Iwanami Shinsho). But this proposal to go beyond states and aim toward aworld republic is more dangerous than promising. If we think about the socialist Soviet Russia
that came to an end, it was precisely aiming at a single world state. To turn humanity into asingle state would require colossal violence. Moreover, the goal is unachievable. I think of the
future of humanity as a league of regional communities (chiiki kyodotai). It can be said that
regionalism is our utopia.
The idea of regionalism existed in the past. Japan has a failed history of trying to put regionalism
into practice. The Greater East Union of Nations (Daitogappo ron) of Tarui Tokichi, who
proposed a great united nation of the countries of Asian yellow peoples (Ajia ojin-koku no
ichidai renpo), ended in Japan’s annexation of Korea. Out of the Manchurian Incident, Ishihara
Kanji’s idea of an East Asian League (To-A Renmei) was created. Amidst the Sino-JapaneseWar, the theory of an East Asia Community (To-A Kyodotai) (1938) was proposed by Royama
Masamichi, who called for a regional economy of Japan, China and Manchuria. When theseideas reached a dead end, the concept of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Dai-To-A
Kyoeiken) was born. This was one with the Greater East Asia War. The practice of regionalism
was a billboard that covered aggression. So, with Japan’s surrender, regionalism too came to beforgotten.
After experiencing the nation’s defeat and the Korean War, Japanese people came to oppose themilitary. But at the same time, they depended on the United States. After the Asia Pacific War,
Asian peoples embarked on wars between communists and anti-communists. So in that period,
regionalism could exist only as an anti-communist alliance and a military bloc of Northeast Asia.
From that perspective, too, the Japanese people rejected regionalism.
However, in the late 1980s, the Cold War and state socialism ended, and in the 1990s new
conditions were created in East Asia: China’s economic development and South Korea’s
democratization were remarkable, while North Korea experienced a crisis. At this point, interestin regionalism emerged afresh.
ASEAN in 1997 invited China, South Korea and Japan to join a summit conference of ASEAN+3 out of which was born an East Asia Vision group. In 2001 it submitted a report called “WeThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

72

hope to create an East Asian Community (Kyodotai) for peace, prosperity and progress.”
ASEAN leaders supported that dream-like concept and in 2005 an East Asia Summit was held.
However, Japan and China were in conflict about who should participate. The US, which was notinvited, was dissatisfied, so the process has not been proceeding smoothly.

Map of ASEAN +3

On the other hand, Northeast Asia has been strongly coming to the fore. In February 2003 South
Korean Pres. Roh Moo-hyun, in his inaugural speech, talked about the advent of a new era ofNortheast Asia and stated that a community of regional peace and prosperity is his dream,
surprising the Korean people. However, in August of that year, the Six-Party Talks for halting
North Korean nuclear development began and, after much agonizing, in September 2005, thefourth round of talks issued a joint communiqué. In that communiqué, along with a solution to
nuclear problems, “the six parties pledged to make joint efforts for long lasting peace andstability in the Northeast Asia region” and “agreed to continue to support measures to promote
cooperative security throughout Northeast Asia”.
The six parties referred to China, South Korea, North Korea, Russia, the United States and Japan.
In fact, in 1990, when I proposed in Seoul the construction of the Northeast Asian People’s
House of Cohabitation (Tohoku Ajia jinrui kyosei no ie), I called for the participation of thesesix countries.

Wada: Maritime Asia and the Future of a Northeast Asia Community

73

Wada’s map outlining his conception of Northeast Asia: Hawaii (left) and Alaska (below)

Since 1995 I have been calling this the Common House of Northeast Asia (Tohoku Ajia kyodo
no ie). The concept in which steps toward regional community begin from cooperation in peaceand security is no longer a mere dream. It is a goal that the governments of the six countries
pledge.
II. Without Reconciliation There Can Be No Communal Life (Kyosei)
Those who think seriously about Northeast Asia Community (kyodotai) have no choice but todirectly confront the area’s special character. Its character is one of successive wars for 80 years
from 1894 to 1975.
No area anywhere in the world is so smeared with war (senso mamire). Thus it won’t suffice that
this area is simply at peace. In the absence of reconciliation, the area cannot live together.
The first fifty years of the eighty-year period was characterized by Japanese wars. The SinoJapanese War of 1894-5, from the perspective of the issues contested and the battlefield can becalled the first Korean War. Japan launched the Russo-Japanese War that followed in 1905 inorder to force Russia to recognize Japanese rule of Korea. As a result of the war, Japan
succeeded in making Korea a protectorate, then annexed it, and finally colonized it. In China,
from the Manchurian Incident of 1931, Japan made war in China and elsewhere for fifteen years.
Japan fought Russia in the Siberian War of 1918 with the dispatch of soldiers, again in the
Nomonhon Incident of 1939, and then in the Russo-Japanese War in August 1945. With the US,
Japan fought the ‘Greater East Asia War.’The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

74

The First Sino-Japanese War fought in Korea in a contemporary Japanese woodblock print

Indeed, for half a century, Japan fought once or more than once with all neighboring countries tothe West, North and East. Japan was always the attacker, and in the majority of cases, Japan was
the aggressor. Those who were attacked and invaded were left with ineradicable scars andindelible pain. The murder of empress Myeonseong, the Port Arthur Incident and Tsushima
Incident, and the Eulsa Treaty of 1905 making Korea a Japanese protectorate, Japan’s repressionof the March 1, 1919 Korean movement, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in China in 1937, theNanjing Massacre, and the Comfort Women, Pearl Harbor—these can never be forgotten.

The Geoncheonggung Residence in the Gyeongbok Palace, the site of the murder of Empress Myeonseong,
was reopened in 2007 for the first time in 98 years

Of course, on the Japanese side, too, there are indelible memories such as the Tokyo air raids, theBattle of Okinawa, and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings.

Wada: Maritime Asia and the Future of a Northeast Asia Community

75

When the war ended on August 15, 1945, the Japanese military was dismantled, the emperor was
stripped of military command, and Japan came to live under Article 9. However, the fact thatJapan’s war ended did not mean that the era of war in the area came to an end. Immediately, civil
war began in China between Guomindang and Communist forces and this lasted until 1949. In
Indochina, too, the Vietminh of Ho Chi Minh fought the French.
In 1950 the Korean War began. The two states born in the South and the North, occupied
separately by the United States and the Soviet Union, fought to achieve unification. But bothsides failed to achieve reunification. The war became a US-China war fought on Korean soil.
The Korean War achieved a moratorium in 1953, but did not go beyond that to sign a peace
treaty. The Indochina War ended, but in 1960 Vietnam became anew the main theatre in the
struggle between Communists and US-supported anti-Communists.
South Korea participated in this war and continued to fight for ten years. North Korea, too,
dispatched air force pilots. The US conducted the most cruel operations, producing large
numbers of deformed children through the use of Agent Orange.
Japan did not fight in these wars, but it supported the US and profited from them. The thirty-year
war in Japan’s neighborhood, involving national communism versus anti-communists and theUS, ended for the US in Vietnam in 1975.
Dreadful memories of the eighty-year war and pains that continue today still tear apart thepeoples of these areas. Assailants have to apologize, and the sorrow and pain of the victims haveto be healed. Damages that can be rectified should be compensated, hatred must be conquered,and forgiveness given.
Throughout the thirty-year war, Japan was unable to criticize itself and apologize for its own
wars. In 1972, the 27th year after the war, Japan expressed self-reflection (hansei) to the Chinese
people over the damage it had wrought by the war.
In 1995 the fiftieth year since the war, Japan’s Prime Minister Murayama spoke of self-reflection
and apology for the fact that Japan had inflicted damage and pain by colonial rule andaggression. Concerning comfort women issues, in 1993, Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono expressedreflection and apology.
In this, I think Japan made the minimum apologies that could become the basis for seeking
reconciliation with the various countries in the area.
Of course, it is necessary to deepen and put soul into this. In 2007, debate over whether to really
hew to the Murayama and Kõno statements became the moment for Prime Minister Abe Shinzo
to resign. The anger of the Okinawan people shattered the attempt to erase the truth of the
Okinawan War from Japanese textbooks.
On the other hand, the US has not yet apologized thirty-two years after the Vietnam War.
Naturally, no compensation is being given to the victims of Agent Orange.
As for the Korean War, whether the moratorium can shift to a peaceful order (heiwa taisei) has
become an issue in the Six-Party Talks.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

76

The people of this region that was at war for eighty years aspire to total reconciliation. Only
when everyone begins to walk in this direction will progress toward a common house forNortheast Asia be possible. The passion for reconciliation is an identity that unites this area.
III. Toward a Cooperative Body (kyoryoku tai) Through Joining Hands (renkei) in the
Islands
Northeast Asian countries are extremely diverse and heterogeneous historically, politically,
economically and culturally. Three countries have become parliamentary democracies (gikaisei)(Japan, South Korea and Taiwan), two are former communist countries (Russia and Mongolia),
and in two (China and North Korea) the Communist Party still rules. It is difficult for suchdiverse countries of Northeast Asia to become a cooperative body. However, should that berealized, this would have epochal significance for overcoming the divisions of humankind.
Something that binds Northeast Asia is the presence of Koreans who live in far-flung countries,
notably Japan, China, Sakhalin, and the former Soviet Union, as diaspora as a result of an
unfortunate history.
There are 2,400,000 Koreans in China, making possible the formation of a Korean autonomous
region in Yanbian, where the largest number reside. The US has 2,050,000 immigrants from
Korea. In Japan, including people from North and South, there are said to be 870,000 Korean
residents, but if you add those who obtained Japanese citizenship, the number is at least one
million. In the former Soviet Union, in and around Central Asia, there are 480,000 Koreans. As
Southeast Asia is the world of the overseas Chinese (with smaller numbers in Northeast Asia),
Northeast Asia is the world of the overseas Koreans.
Without neglecting their ethnic origins (minzokuteki sokoku), thinking about the nations inwhich they currently live, they are a presence that shapes all Northeast Asia. They are Northeast
Asians. In particular, more than 90% of Korean residents in Japan come from South Korea andthey are members of Japanese society. They have relatives who migrated to North Korea, so they
have body and heart split into three elements. Kang Sangjung, a Korean resident intellectual in
Japan, proposes a common house of Northeast Asia in the Japanese parliament committee. That,one can say, demonstrates the potential of Koreans as Northeast Asians.
Another thing that unifies the area is the network of large islands throughout Northeast Asia.
What is important for Northeast Asian peace, along with Korean issues, is resolution of the
Taiwan problem. Taiwan has taken steps toward claiming statehood, but it has not beenrecognized as a state. Therefore, it is impossible for Taiwan to participate in Northeast Asian
activities as a state. To break through this, we can consider Taiwan as one island and create aunion of Northeast Asian islands in which Taiwan participates.
The population of Taiwan is 20,700,000, making it the largest island in Northeast Asia
(excluding Japan’s main islands). Next to Taiwan comes Okinawa with a population of
1,340,000. Hawaii has a population of 1,210,000. Then there is Cheju with 550,000, andSakhalin with 540,000. In thinking of the US as a member of Northeast Asia, I think of thepresence of American residents in Japan and Korea, of American Army people throughout thearea, and the populations of Hawaii and Alaska should be included.
Many of these islands have a history of having been independent states. They were often thetargets of competition for plunder by powerful countries, and had frequent changes of masters.

Wada: Maritime Asia and the Future of a Northeast Asia Community77

And in war, fierce battles took place. Pearl Harbor, Okinawa, and the battle in Sakhalin are notyet forgotten. Cheju Island, which could have become a second Okinawa, was guarded tightly by
Japan. In Taiwan and Cheju, the most tragic repression occurred after Japan’s war ended. These
were the February 28 Incident in Taipei (1947) and the April 3 Uprising in Cheju (1948). As aresult, all islanders sincerely hope for peace. Cheju was formally named the Island of Peace by
the ROK government. However, apart from Cheju, all these islands are armed. They are islandsof military bases. For this very reason, it is hoped that these islands will join hands to protect
peace and link those states that constitute Northeast Asia. They should play that role. Theseislands, because of this history, comprise a world in which the most diverse ethnicities andcultures live together. They have a vision that is open to all.
What is noticed here is that the apology (shazai) resolution adopted by both houses of the US
Congress on Nov. 23, 1993 states that despite the fact that the US and Hawaiian Kingdom had
diplomatic relations for 67 years, in 1893 the American ambassador conspired to overthrow the
kingdom and declare Hawaii an American protectorate. It quotes the protest by Queen
Liliuokalani, which said that she gives up her political power in order to avoid bloodshed before
the landing of US Marines. Further, the apology records that President Cleveland, when
informed of this, did not approve the overthrow of the kingdom and demanded that the Queen be
restored to her position despite the fact that those who supported the overthrow of thegovernment had declared a Republic of Hawaii. Finally in 1898, President McKinley annexed
Hawaii.

Liliuokalani proclamation

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The US Congress, on the 100th anniversary of the illegitimate overthrow of the Hawaiian
kingdom recognized that the sovereignty of the indigenous Hawaiians had been crushed andresolved that the US apologize and turn this apology into a basis for reconciliation withindigenous Hawaiians. President Clinton signed the resolution. Behind the President’s signing
the resolution stood the congressmen from Hawaii. Two of them were Hawaiian natives, and two
were Japanese Hawaiians.
This is the America which has not taken the important action of apologizing for the Vietnam
War. This makes us reflect on what attitude Japan should take toward its incorporation of the
Ryukyu Kingdom and the annexation of Korea. The 100th anniversary of Korean annexation iscoming in 2010.
Wada Haruki is professor emeritus, Institute of Social Science, Tokyo University and a specialist
on Russia, Korea, and the Korean War.
This is a slightly revised version of three columns that were published in the Ryukyu Shimpo on
January 7, 8, and 9, 2008.

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Topics of Historical Memory in Japan
War Responsibility and Reparations“The Tokyo Tribunal, War Responsibility and the Japanese People”
Awaya Kentaro
February 2, 2006
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Awaya-Kentaro/2061“Crime and Responsibility: War, the State, and Japanese Society”
Yuki Tanaka
August 20, 2006
http://japanfocus.org/-Yuki-TANAKA/2200“Who is Responsible? The Yomiuri Project and the Enduring Legacy of the AsiaPacific War”
Tessa Morris-Suzuki
June 19, 2007
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Tessa-Morris_Suzuki/2455“The Aso Mining Company in World War II: History and Japan’s Would-Be Premier”
William Underwood
June 26, 2007
http://www.japanfocus.org/-William-Underwood/2537“Toward Reconciliation: The Nishimatsu Settlements for Chinese Forced Labor in
World War Two”
Ivy Lee with an Introduction by William Underwood
August 9, 2010
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Ivy-Lee/3400“Rejected by All Plaintiffs: Failure of the Nishimatsu-Shinanogawa ‘Settlement’ with
Chinese Forced Laborers in Wartime Japan”
Kang Jian, with an Introduction by William Underwood
August 9, 2010
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Kang-Jian/3399
The issue of reparations for wartime damages is closely linked to establishing the
war responsibility of the Japanese state. One starting point for a study of reparations are
the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. There, the wartime Japanese leadership was prosecuted forcrimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, based on both the BriandKellogg Pact (signed 1928), in which the signatories promised “not to use war to resolve
disputes,” and the Geneva Convention (1929) on the treatment of prisoners of war. At thisTokyo Tribunal, Japan formally accepted responsibility for the war in Asia and the Pacific.
Later, this acceptance of responsibility was reconfirmed in the Treaty of San Francisco,signed in 1951. Japan also paid reparations to a number of Asian nations throughout the
1950s and 1960s. Because Korea had been a part of the Empire of Japan, Japan insisted

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

80that it did not qualify for receiving reparations. However, after diplomatic relations
between Japan and South Korea were established (in 1965), Japan agreed to give long-term,
low-interest loans to Korea, which generally were seen as a substitute for reparations byboth governments. When diplomatic relations between Japan and the People’s Republic ofChina were established in 1972, a similar deal was inked: China did not claim reparations
from Japan, but Japan started to pay “Official Development Assistance” to China, which bothsides saw as a substitute for reparations. Japan and North Korea have never resolved thisissue and, moreover, have yet to establish diplomatic relations to this day.
But such treaties have not settled other issues surrounding Japan’s war
responsibility. In fact, as Awaya Kentaro points out, the actions of many postwar Japanesepoliticians have only served to muddle the issues. For example, politicians’ highly
controversial visits to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where a dozen war criminals areamong the enshrined deities, argues Awaya, actually violate the Treaty of San Francisco,which included a confirmation of the judgment of the Tokyo Trials. For Awaya, visits to
Yasukuni compound the larger problem that Japan’s postwar era has been characterized byforgetfulness of the wartime past rather than critical self-reflection of Japan’s role as aperpetrator. In the same vein, Yuki Tanaka uses the memory landscape of Hiroshima toemphasize the way that “victim consciousness” in postwar Japan thwarts acceptance of war.
There “the Japanese” are presented foremost as victims of the war, while Japaneseaggression is fading into the background of public awareness. But, as Tessa Morris-Suzuki
indicates, such developments have not gone unnoticed. She points to a project of thelargest daily newspaper, the Yomiuri Shinbun, to “clarify” war responsibility. The project, apart of escalating discussions in society since the 1990s about Japan’s war responsibility,
was the result of the often-heard claim that postwar Japan had not done enough to address
its wartime past. The publication identified the leadership of the army as the main culprit
responsible for Japan taking a path towards war, acknowledging Japanese war
responsibility while pinning it on a group that lost power in 1945. While the Yomiuri does
not argue that the war was justified, it focuses on military strategies and war diplomacy,
and still neglects war crimes and the treatment of citizens of other countries.
The second part of this section provides concrete examples of reparations for
specific war crimes, beginning with forced labor. William Underwood’s essay looks atforced labor in Japanese mines during the war, unveiling connections of contemporary
heavyweight politicians to prewar injustices. One of his examples is the company ownedby the family of former Prime Minister Asô Tarô, which made use of Korean and Chinese
POWs as forced laborers. Such personal connections, Underwood’s essay seems to shout,help explain why the Japanese political elite appear so unwilling to address historicalissues. Next, Underwood presents two conflicting opinions on a recent case ofcompensation paid to wartime forced laborers from China in an out-of-court compensationagreement. The two views, in intriguing and sometimes contradictory ways, demonstrate
the issues at stake in discussions on war responsibility and reparations for war crimes, aswell as the diversity among Japanese in their degree of acknowledgement of war
responsibility. In the first, Ivy Lee argues for the “need to fully appreciate” the efforts ofJapanese lawyers and courts to reach agreements on compensation for Chinese forcedlaborers. The 2010 settlement between Chinese forced laborers and Nishimatsu
Corporation, according to Lee, is particularly noteworthy, because it resulted not only incompensation, but also included an apology for crimes committed and the promise to build

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

81

“a memorial to memorialize the victims and to educate the public.” She sees muchsimilarity between this settlement and the German “Remembrance, Responsibility and
Future Fund” created in 2001 to pay compensation for wartime slave laborers from
Eastern Europe. On the other hand, Kang Jian, a Chinese lawyer representing the plaintiffs
in lawsuits against the Japanese state and Japanese corporations, strongly criticizes theout-of-court agreements. Regarding the 2000 agreement between Kajima Corporation andChinese forced laborers, she claims that it only led to a concealment of the facts that “theKajima Corporation enslaved the Chinese forced labor victims (…), evaded the facts ofperpetration, evaded its responsibility, gave charitable ‘relief’ to the Chinese forced labor
victims to terminate its legal liability, and crowned the charitable relief fund with the laurelof ‘Friendship Fund.’” In both cases, Underwood’s introductions stress that “legal claims
against Japan arising from war and colonialism have been dismissed by the top courts inJapan (…), reflecting the nation-centric interpretations of international law.”Internationally, it is still generally believed that individuals are not entitled to claim any
compensation from states, and this is the basis for a ruling by Japan’s Supreme Court in2007, that the “1972 treaty between Japan and China extinguished the right of Chinese
citizens to seek war-related damages.” On the other hand, it is exactly this international“custom” of excluding individual plaintiffs that the former forced laborers from China hope
to overturn by participating in a lawsuit in Japan.

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The Tokyo Tribunal, War Responsibility and the Japanese People
Awaya Kentaro
Translated by Timothy Amos
Approaching the 60th anniversary of the opening of the Tokyo Tribunal in 2006, public opinion
was divided over Prime Minister Koizumi’s visits to Yasukuni Shrine. One reason for opposition
to the visit was that Tokyo Tribunal Class A war criminals are enshrined there.
On August 15 1985, then Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, despite strong domestic andinternational criticism, carried out an official visit to Yasukuni. The government later
acknowledged during parliamentary questioning that it had accepted the verdict of the Tokyo
Tribunal through the San Francisco Peace Treaty. As a result, Prime Minister Nakasone refrained
from further visits to the shrine from the following year. Though aware of these historicaldevelopments, Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro has persisted in visiting Yasukuni Shrine since
his assumption of office in 2001. In 2005, he again visited the shrine in the face of strong
criticism in Japan and abroad. Conservative newspapers like the Sankei Shinbun take the viewthat “visiting the shrine is not a Treaty violation.” This argument, however, is not in the least
compelling. [1]In public opinion surveys, while opposition to Prime Minister Koizumi’s Yasukuni Shrine visits
is marginally greater, the numbers of those who voice support are not insignificant. This is, I
believe, a reflection of popular attitudes toward the Tokyo Tribunal. This article will focus on the
problem of ‘The Tokyo Tribunal and the contrition of Japanese people at that time.’
Tojo Hideki’s disgraceful behavior
The Tokyo Tribunal was convened on May 3 1946. After the testimony, counter-testimony,
rebuttal, counter-rebuttal, and closing statements of both the prosecutor and the defense, the trial
was concluded on April 16 1948 and the court adjourned. The court then reconvened on
November 4 1948, the reading of the verdict concluded on November 12, and sentences werehanded down.
With the convening of the Tokyo Tribunal, the Allied Powers and especially the U.S.
Government and GHQ (SCAP) had a particularly strong interest in the reaction of the Japanesepeople to the Tokyo Tribunal and their sense of war responsibility. For the Japanese, the initialshock came with the first war arrest warrants by the Occupation Forces on September 11, 1945.
When the U.S. forces sought to execute these warrants, former Prime Minister Tojo Hideki
unsuccessfully attempted to take his own life. The sensation caused by the attempted suicide of
the man who had been responsible for issuing the admonition in the Senjinkun (Imperial
Japanese Army Field Service Code) to “live without the humiliation of being taken prisoner anddie without leaving a blemish on your name” was immense.

Awaya: The Tokyo Tribunal, War Responsibility and the Japanese People

83

Tojo Hideki awaits sentencing, Movember 24, 1948.

The Home Affairs Ministry compiled a report on popular reactions from each region, but
recorded the overall situation as follows: “Regarding General Tojo’s decision to commit suicide,those completely sympathetic to the timing, method, and attitude shown in the suicide areexceedingly rare, and most people are thoroughly critical and reproving. The main reactions are
as follows:
1. The entire population has had their expectations completely betrayed because they believedthat General Tojo had refrained from taking his life till now in order to be able to stand before
the allied tribunal as the person bearing highest responsibility for the war and proudly uphold thejustice of the Japanese cause.
2. If Tojo was going to attempt suicide, he should have done it directly after the Imperial
declaration of the end of the war.
3. Hurriedly attempting to shoot himself with a pistol when the American troops arrived is not
the mark of a soldier. If he had died then and there, well and good, but to survive was truly
humiliating. Then to let himself go and to blather away saying things that did not need to be said
- well, we can only hope he will not cause the country harm …”
America’s exoneration of the Emperor
Elsewhere a September 13 report from police headquarters commented that “there is concern thatthe emperor might be affected.” With Tojo’s failed suicide attempt, anxiety began to surface thatthe search for those with war responsibility would reach the Showa Emperor. The arrest of war
criminals continued after this and there was tacit consent or support amongst the people. Because
the Occupation forces were letting various truths about the war be known through the press, theunderstanding amongst the population that they had been ‘deceived’ by military leaders andbureaucrats intensified and disaffection with these groups increased.
The Showa Emperor was the exception. A radical movement to pursue the Emperor as a war
criminal developed among the core group of the newly re-established Communist Party, whilefrom a different perspective, other groups, primarily intellectuals, began to favor the idea that theemperor ought to abdicate to accept a certain measure of war responsibility. The fact remains,

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however, that public opinion at the time supported the protection of the Emperor. An importantfactor here may have been the American anti-Japanese propaganda during the latter years of the
Asia Pacific War. The U.S. tried to drive a wedge between the military, which it attacked, andthe Emperor and the people, which it did not attack. This continued as part of Occupation
strategy and the political myth that ‘the Emperor and the people were fooled by the military’permeated deeply throughout the population. As a result, popular acceptance of criticism of
military leaders and of the responsibility of leaders revealed at the Tokyo Tribunal graduallystrengthened and coalesced around the exclusion of the Emperor from war responsibility.

Hirohito remade in a civilian image and guarded by U.S. forces, September 1945.

Nonetheless, the popular view of ‘the responsibility of the leaders’ was mostly passive,overshadowed by a consciousness that the people were in fact victims. Virtually no sense of
responsibility for attacks against the peoples of Asia was evident, nor was there any movement topursue in a positive way questions of war responsibility. This may be seen as the origin of the
failure of many people to accept war responsibility or to adopt as their own the task of‘overcoming the past.’
Through the Tokyo Tribunal, people became aware of and were shocked by the brutal actions of
the military such as the Nanking Massacre and similar matters revealed by the prosecution. But
as proceedings became drawn out, interest diminished and the spectacle even arose of ‘Tojo
popularity’ (Tojo ninki). This was due to the fact that while many defendants were onlyinterested in self-vindication, Tojo resolutely defended the policies of the Japanese government
during the war and stood up to Prosecutor Keenan.
This strategy, however, also met with a degree of failure. Tojo’s testimony on New Years Eve
1947 hinted at the Emperor’s war responsibility. This worried Prosecutor Keenan and those close
to the Imperial Court who had decided that the Emperor should be immune from responsibility.
Ultimately, however, through behind-the-scenes manoeuvring, Tojo revised his comments early
the following year, and this was the only point during the Tribunal when the actions of theEmperor surfaced.
Conscientious criticism blocked
The U.S. authorities were paying attention to the reactions of the Japanese people, and the report“Japanese reactions to the Class A War Crimes Tribunal” prepared in August 1948 by the Far
Eastern Section of the State Department’s Bureau of Investigation analysed it in this way: “The

Awaya: The Tokyo Tribunal, War Responsibility and the Japanese People85

attitude of many Japanese towards the trial is acquiescence to it as something that was bound tohappen because Japan lost the war.
ather than focusing on the war responsibility of the defendants resulting from their war crimes,
criticism is concentrated on their responsibility for leading the nation into defeat and bringing
shame and misery. That is, rather than responsibility for waging the war, the people areproblematizing their leaders’ responsibility for losing it.” The report continued: “The coolness of
the Japanese people towards the trial, if that can be considered their true sentiment, is also related
to the fact that the Emperor’s war responsibility is not being questioned. Moreover, even if there
is deep opposition to the abdication of the Emperor, at the very least the people consider theEmperor morally responsible for the war.”
The report went on to affirm that, “For a time after the end of the war, the Japanese people
clearly demanded that the war responsibility of former leaders who lead their country into a
tragic war be exposed. The Japanese people publicly censured the militarists and theirsupporters, and on occasion, even the role played by the Emperor during the war became thesubject of wide-ranging debate. At present, however, the demand to clarify war responsibility isslowly being replaced by the belief that national unity is indispensable for the rapid
reconstruction of the country” [2].
The same report suggests that as the Cold War between East and West intensified, the U.S.
halted the war crimes tribunal and began to emphasize economic development over the pursuit ofJapanese war responsibility. Japanese popular responses also began to shift in this direction. But
it should not be forgotten that this report was based on an analysis of newspaper bulletins at atime when GHQ was censoring all publications. It should also be kept in mind that GHQ inprinciple forbade criticism of the Tokyo Tribunal whether from the left or right, and that public
opinion was moulded by the censors to suit GHQ. The materials in the Prange Collection at the
University of Maryland, (which holds Japanese newspapers, publications, and films produced
during the Occupation) reveal that most rightwing criticism of the Tokyo Tribunal was censored.
Conversely, the pioneer human rights activist and lawyer Fuse Tatsuji and others at their
symposium reported in Jiyu konwakai (Talk on Freedom) called for appointment of a Japaneseprosecutor and pointed out the Emperor’s war responsibility.
Chofumi Tsura, a journalist and historian who attended that symposium, commented that “it isabsurd that the Japanese colonial rule of Taiwan and Korea is not being tried at the Tokyo
Tribunal.” He commented not only on the war responsibility of the Emperor but also on the war
responsibility of the Japanese people themselves. His article about the symposium wascompletely deleted by the censors. The Occupation forces did not permit even the kind of speechthat might be considered by today’s standards legitimate criticism. The case of Jiyu konwakai isbut one example among many.
The shameful behaviour of the Japanese
Six years after the conclusion of the Tokyo Tribunal in August 1955, the Japanese government
surveyed 3000 men and women on “The attitude of people towards war responsibility” (64.7%
response rate). During the interval between the Tokyo Tribunal and the survey, the ‘reverse
course’ had occurred, the Korean War began, and the San Francisco Peace Treaty was ratified,
but it is clear from the survey that subjective self-awareness surrounding the Tokyo Tribunal had
grown more warped and degenerate. To the question “Political and military leaders during theThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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war were punished by the victor nation through a military court: do you think it natural for this tohappen after having started a war? Do you think it inevitable considering Japan lost the war?”
19% responded that they thought it was ‘natural,’ 66% answered that they thought it ‘inevitable,’and 15% said that it was ‘unclear.’ Furthermore, to the question “Even if Japan lost, do you thinkthat the Tokyo Tribunal was an abysmal way to resolve matters?” 63% of people answered thatthey thought is was “utterly appalling” (hidosugiru) while only 31% answered “I don’t think so”[3].
The mitigation of the sentences of war criminals and the agitations for parole symbolized the
popular reaction to the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. After the Peace Treaty went into effect,‘Sugamo Prison’ had its name changed to Sugamo Detention Centre. Utsumi Aiko from Keisen
University points out that “the parole-for-war-criminals movement was driven by two groups:
those from outside who had ‘a sense of pity’ for the prisoners; and the war criminals themselves
who called for their own release as part of an anti-war peace movement. The movement that
arose out of ‘a sense of pity’ demanded ‘just set them free (tonikaku shakuho o) regardless of
how it is done’. The situation heated up to such an extent that expressions like ‘if you areJapanese, sign!’ became a catch phrase.”

Sugamo Prison, 1947

More than ten million people supported the 1952 campaign petitioning for the release of war
criminals. In the face of this surge of public opinion, the government commented that “public
sentiment in our country is that the war criminals are not criminals. Rather, they gather great
sympathy as victims of the war, and the number of people concerned about the war crimes
tribunal system itself is steadily increasing.” Not only that, but visits to Sugamo to express
support for the inmates by entertainers including dancing troupes, rakugo storytellers, andmanzai comics, as well as ‘Sugamo visitations’ (Sugamo mode) by prefectural friendshipsocieties, boomed. “The cold stare directed at war criminals transformed into a sympathetic gazeon them as war victims; they even began to be referred to as war heroes … and little by little thesense of war responsibility eroded” [4].

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This trend amounted to forgetting about Article 11 of the San Francisco Peace Treaty in which
Japan accepted the verdicts of the Tokyo Tribunal and the B and C level tribunals.

Four Japanese officers await trial for war crimes at Labuan Island, December 1945.

Yasukuni Shrine visits became the symbol of this loss of memory, not only for the people but
also for the government. We cannot talk of great gaps in post-war history without understanding
this forgetfulness. The popular attitude towards the Tokyo Tribunal that tried the A-class war
crimes was from beginning to end lacking in subjective self-consciousness, and even today
provides grounds for the criticism of the people of Asia about Japan’s ‘inability to deal with thepast.’
Awaya Kentaro is Professor at Rikkyo University and the author of numerous works on theTokyo Trials and wartime Japan. This article was published in Shukan Kinyobi on December 23,
2005. Posted at Japan Focus February 2, 2006.
Timothy Amos recently completed his PhD thesis Ambiguous Bodies: Writings on the Japanese
Outcaste at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National
University. He is a visiting fellow in the Division of Pacific and Asian History.
[1] Awaya Kentaro, Tokyo Saibanron. Tokyo: Otsuki Shoten, 1989.
[2] Quoted in Yoshida Yutaka, Nihonjin no sensokan. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995.
[3] Cabinet and Prime Minister’s Office Deliberative Council, Sengo junen no kaiko to tenbo:
kokumin no seijiteki iken, 1956; Quoted in Yoshida Yutaka, Nihonjin no sensokan.
[4] Quoted in Sugamo Purison. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 2004.

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Crime and Responsibility: War, the state, and Japanese society
Yuki Tanaka‘Forgetting, even getting history wrong, is an essential factor in the formation of a nation, which
is why the progress of historical studies is often a danger to nationality.’ Ernest Renan
In 2002, the Japanese government built the “Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for the
Atomic Bomb Victims” within the Hiroshima Peace Park. It is located less than two hundred
meters from the A-Bomb Peace Museum operated by the Hiroshima City Council. This new
Memorial Hall, funded and run by the Japanese government, includes the following message on
one of the wall panels:‘At one point in the 20th century, Japan walked the path of war. Then, on December 8,1941, Japan initiated hostilities against the U.S., Great Britain and others, plunging into
what came to be known as the Pacific War. This war was largely fought elsewhere in the
Asia Pacific region, but when the tide turned against Japan, American warplanes beganbombing the homeland, and Okinawa became a bloody battlefield. Within this context ofwar, on August 6, 1945, the world’s first atomic weapon, a bomb of unprecedented
destructive power, was dropped on the city of Hiroshima.’
Other panels present the following statements:‘The Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims is an effort
by the Japanese national government to remember and mourn the sacred sacrifice of theatomic bomb victims.’‘We hereby mourn those who perished in the atomic bombing. At the same time, werecall with great sorrow the many lives sacrificed to mistaken national policy.’ (emphases
added)

1. Hiroshima following the atomic bombing

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These formal statements clearly reflect the Japanese government’s assessment, but they also
articulate widely held popular attitudes concerning Japan’s war responsibility. In other words, inthe absence of explanation of any kind, the viewer is left to conclude that Japan simply,
inexplicably, “walked the path of war” and the “real” war started with the attack on Pearl Harboron December 8, 1941. That “real” war, in other words, did not begin on September 18, 1931, theday that the Japanese Army detonated an explosion on the South Manchurian railway, providing
the pretext for the seizure of Manchuria and the establishment of Manchukuo under Japanese
aegis. Nor did it begin on July 7, 1937, when the Marco Polo Bridge Incident plunged Japan intofull-scale war leading to the occupation of large areas of China. In the Memorial Hall’s
rendering, Japan’s major enemies in the Asia-Pacific War were the U.S. and Great Britain, notChina, still less the other Asian peoples that Japan conquered following the attack on Pearl
Harbor. In short, Japan was defeated by Anglo-Saxons not by Asians. Such an interpretation of
the history of the 15 year war (1931-45) naturally hinders full recognition of responsibility forJapan’s abhorrent military acts and the war losses that its Asian neighbors suffered as a result of
war and colonialism. It also fundamentally distorts the dynamics of power played out on thefields of colonialism and war in the first half of the twentieth century.
On the other hand, the atomic bomb is said to have been “dropped on the city of Hiroshima” as if
it were a natural calamity, without identified human agency, the consequence being that many
people were “sacrificed to mistaken national policy.” Thus the responsibility of American forces
for the killing of large numbers of civilians is not seriously questioned. Instead, the victims of
atomic bombing are simply presented as the “sacred sacrifice” of war, just as the nature ofJapan’s “mistaken national policies” is left unexamined. In particular, the words “sacredsacrifice” remove any reference to who killed so many people or why and for what these people
had to be “sacrificed.” This is partly due to the fact that the word “sacred” possesses a kind ofreligious function that blurs the historical process whereby these people became victims of war.
The word “sacred” tends to refute any mundane queries regarding the background of a “sacredperson.” In other words, it is widely accepted that once a person is apotheosized and becomes“sacred,” no one should catechize about his or her past. Here we can find a similarity with the“sacred souls” of soldiers enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine, where the issue of Japanese war crimes
remains unquestioned.
Because non-explanations of this kind are the characteristic not only of the Hiroshima National
Peace Memorial Hall but of most school textbooks and the school curriculum generally, theresult is that the majority of Japanese people remain ignorant not only of Japan’s war
responsibility, but also of the history of the Asia-Pacific War in general.
It is often said that the Japanese people tend to see themselves as victims of war rather than asassailants, largely due to the experience of U.S. aerial bombing towards the end of the war,
culminating in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Undoubtedly this was one ofmany factors that contributed to such a popular perception.
Indeed, the A-Bomb Peace Museum operated by the Hiroshima City Council is filled
predominantly with exhibits highlighting the victimization of the citizens of Hiroshima as aresult of indiscriminate bombing using the atomic bomb. Although there is a brief explanation of
the Nanjing Massacre in relation to the activities of the Imperial Army dispatched from
Hiroshima to China prior to the atomic bombing, the museum invariably presents the atomic
bombing of the city as the historically unprecedented and unparalleled victimization of JapaneseThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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citizens. Indubitably the museum conveys a powerful anti-nuclear message. Yet it is interesting
to note that the museum exhibits scarcely nothing except information on the bombing ofHiroshima, and even the bombing of Nagasaki and other landmarks of nuclear history are hardly
mentioned. Hence the museum fails to bring to light fundamental features common to all victimsof atomic bombings, nuclear tests, indiscriminate bombing, and war in general.

2. Collecting and classifying rubble that would eventually be exhibited at the Peace Memorial Museum.

Yet even this perception of “war victims” is rapidly fading, and younger generations no longer
recognize their nation’s war responsibility or even the price that war exacted on their own
society. Indeed, few have sufficient knowledge of Japan’s modern and contemporary history to
hold opinions concerning Japan and war.
We cannot give a simple answer to the question of why many Japanese failed to nurture a strong
sense of war responsibility. In this essay, I examine some important factors that have hindered
the cultivation of a clear public sense of Japanese war responsibility. I will particularly
concentrate on the 15 years after the war (1945 – 1960), the period in which the fundamental
framework of the Japanese popular concept of “war responsibility” was molded. This is becauseof my strong belief that a lack of of war responsibility among younger generations is not simply
due to a lack of education, but is deeply rooted in the very fabric of Japanese popular thinking on
war issues formulated and implanted in the early post-war period.
One of the new programs that GHQ (General Headquarters of the Allied Occupation Forces)
introduced in the early stages of the occupation was “the re-education of the Japanese.” The CIE(Civil Information and Education Section) of GHQ was given the task of teaching Japanesecitizens “the truth” about the war by revealing Japanese war crimes and highlighting theTanaka: Crime and Responsibility

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devastating consequences of the war including Japan’s destruction and defeat. Between
December 8 and 17, 1945, the CIE required all Japanese national newspapers to publish a seriesof articles drafted by CIE on the history of the Pacific War. At the same time, NHK (the Japan
Broadcasting Commission) ran a serial radio program called “This is the Truth.” This series,
designed and produced by CIE, was broadcast once a week over 10 weeks from December 9,1945. The content of the two series of articles and broadcasts can be summarized in thefollowing points.
1) Although they pinpoint the Manchurian Incident of 1931 as the start of the war andacknowledge the continuity between Japan’s invasion of China and the Sino-Japanese War aswell as the Pacific War, Japan’s colonial rule of Taiwan and Korea is completely ignored.
2) The decisive role of U.S military forces in determining the outcome of the war in the Pacific issingularly emphasized, while the anti-Japanese resistance carried out by Chinese forces overfifteen years, and by various Southeast Asian forces over four years, are ignored. The single
exception is brief mention of Filipino guerrillas who collaborated with American forces.
3) The responsibility of a handful of Japanese military leaders is emphasized, while Emperor
Hirohito and his close associates within the Imperial Court as well as business and media leaders,are simply characterized as “moderate groups” in contrast to the militarists.
4) Emphasizing Japanese military leaders’ concealment of the actual circumstances of the war
creates a popular image that the Japanese people were deceived by their military leaders. The
result was therefore to ignore the structural foundations that led Japan on the road to colonialism
and war.
On December 8, 1945, the same day that the newspaper series commenced, General MacArthur
issued an order to set up the IPS (International Prosecution Section) for the IMTFE (International
Military Tribunal for the Far East, popularly known as the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal) andappointed an American lawyer, Joseph Keenan, as the chief prosecutor. A-class war crime
suspects had already been arrested and the IMTFE was planned to open in May 1946. In short,one of the aims of the media exercises directed by CIE was to prepare the Japanese people toaccept the legitimacy of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal on basis of the official Americaninterpretation of the Asia-Pacific War.
The judges of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal were chosen from U.S. allies who fought in the
Pacific War. The result is that the justices were from 11 nations, namely the U.S., the U.K., theSoviet Union, France, Australia, Canada, China, Holland, New Zealand, India and thePhilippines. There were three Asian judges including one from China, which sustained by far thelargest casualties of Japanese invasion (serious estimates range between ten and twenty million
war-related deaths), as well as India and the Philippines. However, despite that fact that millionsof Asian died in the war and it was Asia that bore the brunt both of Japanese colonialism and war
deaths, no legal representative was drawn from Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Burma, IndoChina, Korea or Taiwan, and the court was dominated by Western allies of the U.S. It should
also be noted that the U.K., France and Holland as well as the United States were the colonial
rulers of large areas of Asia, in which national independence movements were underway
including the Dutch East Indies, Malaya, Singapore, Burma, the Philippines and Indochina.
Therefore, it is not surprising that Japanese responsibility toward Asian people was framed by
the tribunal in ways that focused on war atrocities and elided issues of colonialism.

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In addition, General MacArthur and the U.S. government protected Emperor Hirohito fromindictment as a war criminal, kept him on the throne, and shielded him even the necessity totestify. Their goal was, of course, to exploit the emperor system in order to smooth occupation
control of Japan. For this purpose, GHQ presented Hirohito as having been manipulated by the
military leaders, denying all direct exercise of power over the Imperial Forces - in other words,
the emperor, too, was a victim of the war. Further, Hirohito was credited with taking the crucial
initiative to end the war, that is, he emerged during the occupation as the peacemaker who saved
Japan from annihilation. MacArthur skillfully burnished the image of Hirohito of the peacemaker
as well as the key figure who “voluntarily” led the Japanese government to formulate the new
democratic Constitution renouncing all Japanese military forces. The U.S. in short, with theenthusiastic support of the Japanese government thus propagated an image of a “democratic
monarch” and a “peace monarch.”
In short, CIE’s “re-education programs” together with the American framing of the War Crimes
Tribunal and the projection of the myth of the peace emperor, had a huge impact upon theformation of the postwar Japanese self-image. That is, the Japanese were pitiable war-victims
like their humane emperor, who were deceived by military leaders represented by General Tojo
Hideki. The result was to relieve the Japanese people of the necessity to reflect seriously upon
the colonization and oppressive rule of Taiwan and Korea by Japan, war crimes such as the
Nanjing Massacre that their troops committed against the people of various nations in Asia, andthe emperor’s ultimate responsibility for the sufferings of vast numbers of Asian people. This
lack of reflection concerning responsibility towards their Asian neighbors is central tounderstanding why many Japanese still cannot overcome their prejudice toward other Asians.
John Dower makes the point well in his book, Embracing Defeat, as follows: ‘One of the mostpernicious aspects of the occupation was that the Asian peoples who had suffered most fromimperial Japan’s depredation – the Chinese, Koreans, Indonesians and Filipinos – had no serious
role, no influential presence at all in the defeated land. They became invisible. Asian
contributions to defeating the emperor’s soldiers and sailors were displaced by an all-consuming
focus on the American victory in the Pacific War.’ (p.27)
It should also be noted that one third of young Japanese men, who were born between 1920 and
1922, and who comprised the largest segment of the Japanese Imperial Forces, died by the end of
the war. Consequently many surviving men came to hold a deep sense of guilt about not having
died. This quite probably contributed to preventing them from engendering an acute sense of
responsibility for the Asian victims of the war. Typical of their attitude, was the determination to
adopt a strong resolve to work hard to help rebuild Japan on behalf of their deceased friends, i.e.,“true war victims” in their eyes.
This popular self-perception, which highlighted Japanese “victim-hood” and downplayed theirwar responsibility to Asia, was further augmented with signing of the San Francisco Peace
Treaty in September 1951. This treaty marked the formal cessation of the Asia-Pacific War,
ended the occupation of Japan by the Allied (primarily American) forces, and simultaneously
restored Japan’s independence, and consummated a US-Japan security treaty that provided forthe permanent stationing of U.S. forces that continues to this day, and lashed Japan firmly within
the arc of U.S. military power. With the refusal of the Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia
to sign the treaty, and with neither the People’s Republic of China (Beijing government) nor theRepublic of China (Taiwan) invited to attend, despite the fact that China had suffered theheaviest casualties in the war against Japan, the treaty was clearly revealed as a Cold War

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instrument of the U.S. In addition neither North Korea, fighting the U.S. in the Korean War, norSouth Korea were invited to attend, on the dubious ground that Korea was not a state at the timeof Japan’s surrender in 1945. India and Burma refused to participate in the conference, regarding
it as a “rigged affair” so that only four Asian nations – the Philippines, Indonesia, Ceylon andPakistan – attended the conference. Yet Indonesia never ratified the treaty, but signed a separate
peace treaty with Japan in 1958. The Philippines only ratified the treaty after it came into effect.
In this way, the “invisibility of Asia” was again conspicuous at the San Francisco Peace Treaty
Conference.

3. Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru signing the San Francisco Peace Treaty

The question of reparation is similarly important for locating Japan in comparative perspective,
particularly vis-à-vis German behavior. Under U.S. pressure the Allied nations waived all
reparation claims in accordance with Article 14 of the treaty. Later, Taiwan, China (both Beijing
and Taipei), the Soviet Union and India likewise renounced the right to reparations. Thus, Japan
eventually paid modest war reparations only to Burma, the Philippines, Indonesia, and South
Vietnam. In addition, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea eventually received small
amounts of economic aid and cooperation as Japan rejected the idea of paying reparations.
We have shown that the San Francisco Peace Treaty was less a peace treaty than an agreement tolash Japan to U.S. aims in the Asia Pacific. The combination of the Treaty and the AMPO
Security Pact signed on the same day strongly reflected America’s anti-communist policy andintention to use Japan to contain the Pacific side of the communist bloc (namely the Soviet
Union, China and North Korea) by retaining U.S. military bases in Japan, in particular, in
Okinawa. Therefore the treaty as a whole was lenient with respect to Japan’s war responsibility.
The Japanese government did perfunctorily acknowledge its war responsibility described in
Article 11: “Japan accepts the judgments of the International Military Tribunal for the Far Eastand of other Allied War Crimes Courts both within and outside Japan, and will carry out thesentences imposed thereby upon Japanese nationals imprisoned in Japan.” However, the same
article also opened the possibility that Japanese B- and C-class war criminals who were tried forcrimes against humanity such as war atrocities, and who constituted the great majority of war
criminals, would be granted clemency, reduction of sentences or parole if the foreign
government that conducted the war crimes tribunal agreed. Therefore, shortly after the San
Francisco Peace Treaty came into effect in April 1952, a movement demanding the release of Band C-class war criminals began, emphasizing the “unfairness of the war crimes tribunals” andthe “misery and hardship of the families of war criminals.” In this way, Japanese B- and C-class
war criminals came to be viewed as “victims of war” by Japanese people generally. By the endof 1958, all Japanese war criminals, including A-, B- and C-class were released from prison andpolitically rehabilitated.
As a result, by the early 1950s the basic framework of popular thinking on war issues, which has
hamstrung the development of a clear and deep sense of Japan’s national responsibility ever

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since, was well implanted within Japanese society. For its part, the Japanese government had
adopted a kind of double-standard ¬– on the one hand it officially accepted as a foreign policy
Article 11 of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, including the judgment of the Tokyo War Crimes
Tribunal, while refusing to accept war responsibility as a domestic policy. This is evident both in
the large-scale amnesty of those convicted by the Tokyo and the B- and C-class trials, and in the
failure to embed responsibility for the consequences of the war in its public statements, in its
textbooks, or in substantial reparations to the victims of colonialism and war. This contradiction,
which continues today, has been the main cause of friction between Japan and other Asian
nations, in particular China and South Korea. It is interesting to note that even such hawkish
politicians as Nakasone Yasuhiro could not openly negate the legality of Article 11 of the San
Francisco Peace Treaty while serving as prime minister. Even the current Prime Minister,
Koizumi Junichiro, does not publicly contradict the Japanese government’s official interpretationof the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal.
From around 1950, military histories written by former staff officers of the Japanese Imperial
Army and Navy Forces, such as Tsuji Masanobu, Kusaka Ryunosuke and Hattori Takushiro,
began to be published and many became bestsellers. However, as typified by Hattori’s Daitowa
Senso Zenshi (General History of the Great East Asian War), these popular books are written
strictly from the perspective of explaining Japan’s defeat, invariably attributed to the lack ofnatural resources and economic power. None address questions of Japanese colonialism,
aggression or the atrocities that Japanese troops committed throughout the Asia-Pacific region.
Indeed, Hattori does not even mention Japan’s warfare against guerilla forces in China, thePhilippines or elsewhere, as he did not regard “guerrillas” as proper military forces. For him“military history” was the history of war conducted only by regular military troops, i.e., in thiscase the Japanese Imperial Forces versus the Allied Forces.
However, in the late 1940s and early 1950s a number of books containing moving stories
conveying strong anti-war sentiment began to be published. One such influential publication was
Kike Wadatsumi no Koe (Listen to the Voices from the Sea), a 1949 collection of the lettershome, diaries and wills of young student soldiers (mostly kamikaze pilots). Although this book
had a profound anti-war message, one that resonated deeply with the Japanese people who had
experienced the destruction of their cities from the air in the final months of the war, it raised
few questions of Japanese responsibility for their deaths. It powerfully presents the young
students who died during the war as sympathetic “victims” of a war waged by irresponsible
military leaders. Nowhere, however, does it suggest Japanese responsibility for Asian victims of
the war. Two other remarkable books which appeared in the same period were semiautobiographical novels – Furyoki (Prisoner of War) and Nobi (Fires on the Plain) - both written
by Ooka Shohei, a former Japanese POW captured by the U.S forces in a jungle in thePhilippines. (Fires on the Plain was made into a film in 1959.) In these novels Ooka skillfully
describes the painful physical and psychological problems of a sick and emaciated Japanesesoldier struggling to survive the jungle fighting. These outstanding literary works convey a
profound anti-war sentiment. Yet again, in both novels, the focal point is a young Japanese
victimized by war, and little attention is paid to the Filipinos who were the targets of brutal
Japanese military conduct.

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4. Listen to the Voices From the Sea

Another book which became very popular in this period was Biruma no Tategoto (The Harp of
Burma) by Takeyama Michio. It is a story about a young Japanese soldier in Burma, whodeserted his troop and became a Buddhist monk. Even after the end of the war, he remained in
Burma in order to appease the souls of his dead comrades. Here too, the plight of the Burmese
people is completely ignored. Indeed, the author did not ever visit Burma. (The Harp of Burma
was made into a film in 1956, and again in 1985.)
From the mid 1950s, numerous memoirs of former soldiers were published. Most were written
by low ranking officers and noncommissioned officers, explaining how hard and bravely
ordinary Japanese men like themselves had fought during the war and how honorably they had
fulfilled their duties as Imperial soldiers. An interesting characteristic of these memoirs is thatmany authors criticized military leaders’ conduct of the war, including the abandonment of theirsoldiers in the final months of the war. In this sense there is a certain similarity with the book,
Listen to the Voice from the Sea. Yet these publications, too, contributed to the existing popular
perception of the Japanese as war-victims, and failed to address questions of war crimes
committed by Japanese against Asians.
In the latter half of the 1950s, partly due to popular peace movements in Japan against U.S.
nuclear tests conducted in the Pacific, the re-militarization of Japan and the existence of U.S.
military bases on Japanese soil, lively discussions regarding the Japanese people’s war
responsibility took place among the so-called progressive intellectuals. One product of thisferment was the publication of the book Showa-shi (A History of Showa) coauthored by threeprominent Marxist historians, Toyama Shigeki, Imai Seiichi and Fujiwara Akira. The question of“war responsibility” in this case, however, centered on the failure of Japanese citizens to preventthe invasion of China. That is, the focus was on citizens’ failure to halt militarism and fascism.
An important issue, to be sure. But little was said about the nature of Japanese killing andatrocities in China and nothing about the impact of Japanese militarism on other Asian nations.
Another important book published in this period is Gendai Seiji no Shiso to Kozo (The Thought
and Structure of Modern [Japanese] Politics) by political scientist Maruyama Masao. Maruyama
provided a theoretical explanation of the development of Japanese fascism and militarism inconjunction with the strengthening of emperor ideology from the Meiji era, but nowhere did he
address the question of the Japanese people’s war responsibility. In short, all of these works wereheavily inward-looking rather than outward-looking. Furthermore, these debates were conductedwithin a limited academic circle and in left-wing circles associated with the communist andsocialist parties. The result was that they had limited impact on popular perceptions of the war.
Popular feature films produced in the 1950s also shaped popular images of the Japanese as war
victims, including feature films directly dealing with B- and C-class war criminals. Among themthe most widely viewed was the 1958 film Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai (I Want be a Shellfish).
This is a story of an innocent man, who happily returned home to his wife after the war toThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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resume a normal life as a local barber only to be arrested as a war criminal and igiven the death
sentence. His crime was to have carried out the execution of an American POW, a survivingcrew-member of a B-29 bomber that was shot down over Japan. The film depicts him as anextremely unfortunate man in the lowest rank of the Japanese Imperial Army, who could notrefuse an order handed down from senior officers. The result is that he emerges not only as a
typical victim of Japanese militarism but also of the capriciousness of the war crimes tribunal.
(This film was remade for television in 1994.) Another film, Kabe Atsuki Heya (Room With aThick Wall), produced in 1953 is about B- and C-class war criminals detained in Sugamo Prison
and it too presents the prisoners as victims of war, while highlighting some legal defects of thetribunal.
Two other types of war-related feature films were produced in the 1950s: films on the bombingof Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and those presenting the brutality experienced by Japanese rank andfile soldiers in the Imperial Army. Between 1950 and 1955, several films about Hiroshima andNagasaki were produced. Amongst them were Nagasaki no Kane (The Bell of Nagasaki, 1950),
Nagasaki no Uta Wasureji (Never Forget the Song of Nagasaki, 1952), Genbaku no Ko (Child of
the A-Bomb, 1952), Hiroshima, 1953, and Kurosawa Akira’s Ikimono no Kiroku (Record of A
Living Being, 1955). The last three films are particularly impressive from storytelling and filmic
perspectives, and do not simply present Hibakusha (A-bomb victims) as the Japanese victims ofwar. Each has a profound and universal anti-nuclear weapon message. Yet none examines theimpact of Japanese war on Asian people, and none poses serious questions of Japanese war
responsibility.
The second group of films is represented by Shinku Chitai (Zone of Emptiness, 1952), based on
the novel of the same title by Noma Hiroshi, and Ningen no Joken (Human Condition, 1960)
based on a long story written by Gomikawa Junpei. Both films denounce the extreme brutality
inflicted upon Japanese soldiers by their superiors. Although the latter film briefly touches on theatrocities Japanese troops committed against the Chinese, the main theme of these films is still
the victimization of Japanese men through widespread inhumane conduct within the Japanesemilitary forces. At the time, the most popular work in this category was a series of comedies
called Nitohei Monogatari (The Story of A Private). In total ten films were produced in thisimmensely successful series between 1955 and 1961. It ridiculed the military system andideology of the Japanese Imperial Forces. In each film, rank and file soldiers are severely
maltreated by their seniors, and commanding officers are invariably corrupt and selfish. Eachfilm ends, moreover, with a revolt by rank and file soldiers against their officers at the end of thewar – a happy ending for audiences empathizing with the soldiers. In one film in this series,
Japanese soldiers rescue Japanese comfort women captured by merciless Chinese soldiers, and aChinese merchant closely collaborating with Chinese forces is presented in a dark light.
However, not one of the films in this series depicts Japanese atrocities against local people inoccupied territories.
Another popular film that deeply shaped the Japanese self-image as war-victims was Godzilla,
particularly its original 1954 version. As I analyzed in an earlier article, ‘Godzilla and the Bravo
Shot: Who Created and killed the Monster?’, in many aspects Godzilla symbolized B-29
bombers that repeatedly attacked cities from Hokkaido to Okinawa and dropped A-bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many scenes in this film evoked U.S. aerial attacks that took the livesof hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in the final months of the war. Thus, although thefilm’s effect is indirect, presented as it is through an entertaining monster film, it reaffirmed andTanaka: Crime and Responsibility

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strengthened the Japanese popular concept of being war victims not perpetrators of war crimes.
Overall, these films sent a remarkably consistent message and hence their effect in shaping
popular understanding of the Asia-Pacific War was vast.
Considering that feature films screened at local cinemas were one of the few sources ofentertainment available to the Japanese public in the post-war period, the above-mentioned films
undoubtedly played a considerable role in shaping a widely shared view of the Asia-Pacific War
amongst the general population. In 1958, for example, Japanese films attracted more than 1.1
billion viewers throughout the country.
In early 1965, U.S. forces began full-scale bombing of North Vietnam. Over the next decade,large numbers of bombers, troops and military supplies were dispatched from U.S military basesin Japan, including Okinawa. In April that year, “Beheiren” (Japan Peace for Vietnam Alliance)
was formed to oppose U.S. aggression and resist Japanese support for the U.S. war effort in
Vietnam. Popular fears that Japan might again be dragged into war provided an important
foundation for a relatively strong anti-war movement. Oda Makoto, a writer who led thismovement, promoted the idea that the Japanese people should avoid becoming “warperpetrators” by refusing to collaborate with the U.S. in bombing and killing Vietnamese. He
pointed out that, with respect to Japan’s own war experiences, hitherto ample attention had been
paid to the aspect of their own victimization, but few had addressed the responsibility of theJapanese as assailants. To grasp the possibility of Japanese becoming assailants in the Vietnam
War, he stressed the necessity to clearly recognize the historical fact that the Japanese people had
been both victims and assailants in the Asia-Pacific War. It was a powerful appeal at a time when
not only the general population but also the majority of intellectuals were preoccupied with only
one side of their war experiences, that as victims both of the Japanese military and of U.S.
bombing.
In addition to the Beheiren movement, efforts to normalize the relationship between Japan and
China that started in the early 1970s stimulated debate on Japan’s war responsibility to theChinese people. In this context, journalists such as Honda Katsuichi published detailed reports
about the Chinese victims of Japanese military atrocities, notably those committed during the
Nanjing Massacre. Some academics also started conducting research on war crimes that Japanese
troops committed in China and other occupied territories of Asia. From the late 1970s, scholars
such as Ienaga Saburo, Fujiwara Akira, Eguchi Keiichi and Oe Shinobu wrote about Japan’s war
responsibility, posing serious moral questions. Encouraged by the work of these scholars,
detailed accounts of hitherto unknown cases of Japanese war crimes – e.g., bacteriological
warfare, massacre of POWs and exploitation of “comfort women” - were produced in the 1980s
and 90s by historians such as Tsuneishi Keiichi, Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Kasahara Tokuji, Utsumi
Aiko and others. The impact of such scholarly work upon intellectual circles was profound.
Yet the effects that progressive political movements such as Beheiren and academic research on
Japanese war crimes had upon popular attitudes in Japan was insufficient to overcome the onesided victimization perspective on the Asia-Pacific War. The dominant Japanese self-image as
war victims infiltrated deeply into the psyche of many Japanese throughout the nation in the
1950s and 60s through both official and popular culture channels. It was no easy task for a
progressive political or academic movement to overcome that established view.
From the early 1990s, a backlash against the above-mentioned progressive academic work wastouched off by nationalist scholars, who denied the historical record of Japanese wartime

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atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre and the comfort women, and called on Japanese to takepride in their war record. Cartoonist Kobayashi Yoshinori was particularly influential intransmitting their views to a vast popular audience, and achieving a certain success inundermining the credibility of critical scholars. This backlash reverberated through the Japanese
Ministry of Education’s approval of the school textbook produced by nationalist scholars
associated with the Tsukurukai (The Association for Producing New Textbooks) group andgovernment introduction of a nation-wide school program to inculcate patriotism. In addition, asa result of Prime Minister Koizumi’s stern rejection of the criticism of neighboring nations
regarding his visits to Yasukuni Shrine, where Class A-war criminals are enshrined, and Foreign
Minister Aso Taro’s publicly urging the Emperor to visit Yasukuni Shrine, the issue of war
responsibility is again a national and international issue. The Liberal Democratic Party’s plan toamend the Japanese Peace Constitution in order to convert Japan’s Self Defense Forces to a fully
legitimate military force should be viewed in light of the question of war responsibility.
To grasp the rise of neo-nationalism in Japan in the 1990s, it is necessary to understand its closeinterrelationship with contemporary socio-economic phenomena such as “the bursting of the
bubble economy,” “financial crisis,” “globalization,” and “growing inequality.” But we should
also contemplate the entire framework of ethics, including the sense of moral responsibility.
Only when the Japanese people fully accept moral responsibility for the hardships inflicted on
Asian people through colonialism and war, will it be possible to achieve the aim described in the
preface of their Constitution “to occupy an honored place in an international society striving forthe preservation of peace, and the banishment of tyranny and slavery, oppression and intolerance
for all time from the earth.”
References* John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (W.W. Norton &Company/The New York Press, New York, 1999)*Awaya Kentaro, ‘The Tokyo Tribunal, War Responsibility and the Japanese People’ translated
by Timothy Amos.
* Oda Makoto, Nanshi no Shiso (Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo, 1991)* Takahashi Tetsuya, Sengo Sekinin-Ron (Kodansha, Tokyo, 2005)* Takahashi Tetsuya, Kokka to Gisei (Nippon Hosho Kyokai, Tokyo, 2005)* Yoshida Yutaka, Nipponjin no Senso-kan (Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo, 1995)
Yuki Tanaka is Research Professor, Hiroshima Peace Institute, author of Japan’s Comfort
Women. Sexual slavery and prostitution during World War II and the US Occupation, and acoordinator of Japan Focus.

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Who is Responsible? The Yomiuri Project and the Enduring Legacy of the Asia-PacificWar
Tessa Morris-Suzuki
When, in mid-2005, Japan’s Yomiuri newspaper began to publish a series of articles on thequestion of “war responsibility”, the event attracted nationwide and even international interest.
Now the newspaper series has become a book, published in a two-volume version in Japaneseand in a one-volume abridged English translation entitled Who Was Responsible? From Marco
Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbour. There can be no doubt that these publications mark an importantmoment in the long and vexed history of East Asia’s “history wars” – the ongoing conflicts
between Japan and its neighbors (particularly China and both Koreas) about memory of andresponsibility for Japan’s 20th century military expansion in Asia.
To assess the significance and impact of the Yomiuri project, though, it is important to see it in
the context of history-writing in Japan and of contemporary Northeast Asian international
relations. Before beginning to assess the content of the English-language volume, therefore, it isworth emphasizing what is not new about this work: There is nothing novel or unusual in
Japanese historians or journalists publicly debating the problem of war responsibility. They havebeen doing so, with much passion and soul-searching, for more than sixty years.
During a recent visit to Tokyo, a Japanese colleague showed me the cover of a journal he had
unearthed from the early 1950s, published by a group affiliated to the Japanese Communist
Party. The cover featured a striking cartoon of Emperor Hirohito standing atop a mountain ofskulls. Such graphic imagery is certainly highly risqué in the Japanese political context, where amiasma of taboo still surrounds critical comment on the person of the Emperor, and it is almost
impossible to imagine any major journal agreeing to publish such an image. But its presence on
the cover of this long-forgotten small-circulation magazine provides a stark reminder of the factthat questions of war responsibility, including those of the responsibility of Emperor Hirohito
himself, have been ongoing topics of heated discussion in Japan. Indeed for historians oftwentieth century Japan, a key task has been the search for an understanding of the processes that
led to the “Manchurian Incident”, the war in China, Pearl Harbour, Hiroshima and Japan’s
disastrous defeat in war.
One of the most influential early attempts to address this conundrum was the best-selling
paperback Showashi [“A History of Showa” – Showa being the reign of the Emperor Hirohito],
which was published in 1955, sold more than 100,000 copies in the six weeks following its
publication, and generated a prolonged public controversy now remembered in Japan as the“Showashi Debate”. Written by the eminent Marxian historians Toyama Shigeki, Imai Seiichi
and Fujiwara Akira, Showashi’s approach was very different from that of the current Yomiuri
volume. It sought, not so much to judge personal war guilt, as to define the underlying social andeconomic forces that led to war. [1]The popular success of Showashi is a reminder of the powerful influence which Marxism exerted
on postwar Japanese intellectual (though not political) life. However, searching criticisms of war
responsibility were of course not confined to Marxists. Critical liberal intellectuals such as
Maruyama Masao made profound contributions to the debate – Maruyama’s work focusing
particularly on the aspects of Japanese social structure and patterns of thought which had createdfertile ground for the rise of militarism. [2] In the 1950s and 1960s, war responsibility was

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debated not only in such academic works, but also in massively popular novels and films such as
Gomikawa Jumpei’s Ningen no Joken [The Human Condition], which appeared in novel, movie
and manga form, and included graphic representations of acts of brutality committed bymembers of the Japanese armed forces in China. [3]Ningen no Joken [The Human Condition]

Such criticism was only feebly echoed, however, at the political level, where Japan’s postwar
political leaders tended as far as possible to avoid the entire subject of war memory andresponsibility, making apologetic comments only when pushed, and even then in guarded andambiguous language which almost inevitably failed to satisfy those to whom the apologies wereaddressed. A symbolically significant and politically decisive moment in this history ofevasiveness came in the late 1950s, when the Japanese government addressed the task of paying
compensation to the Southeast Asian nations it had occupied during the Pacific War. With strong
support from the United States, Japan reached a series of bilateral reparations agreements which
involved government-to-government transfers of money for large-scale development andinfrastructure projects. Many of these projects were carried out by Japanese companies which
thus acquired the opportunity to re-establish an investment presence in the region. [4] No
personal payments were made to the individual victims of the occupation.
Similarly, when relations were later established with South Korea and the People’s Republic ofChina, development aid was used as a “substitute” for personal compensation. This process has
had ongoing consequences. On the one hand, it has created a lingering sense of injustice on thepart of many Asian victims of the war; on the other, it has left many people in Japan with thebelief that their country has already paid its dues, and therefore that continuing demands from
Asian critics that Japan “face its responsibilities” for wartime aggression are unreasonable.
An opportunity to resolve this unhappy legacy of history seemed to appear in the mid-1990s, as
the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Asia-Pacific War approached. At that time, the Liberal
Democratic Party, which had long held power in Japan (and is again in government today), wasin a state of some disarray, and the political situation was unusually fluid. In 1993 indeed, Prime

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Minister Hosokawa made what many see as the most full and explicit apology by a Japaneseleader, expressing his belief that:
it is important at this juncture that we state clearly before all the world our remorse at ourpast history and our renewed determination to do better. I would thus like to take thisopportunity to express anew our profound remorse and apologies for the fact that past
Japanese actions, including aggression and colonial rule, caused unbearable suffering andsorrow for so many people and to state that we will demonstrate our new determinationby contributing more than ever to world peace. [5]This, however, was not followed up by substantial practical measures by the Japanese
government. The most significant step taken to mark the occasion by the coalition Murayama
government (in power at the time of the anniversary of defeat) was the establishment of a
relatively modest fund for international research on the war and related issues: an act which wasseen by many as a characteristically timid and inadequate approach to the profound problem of
war responsibility.
In fact, if the mid-1990s marked a turning point, it proved to be a turn in the opposite direction:away from efforts to acknowledge war responsibility and towards a nationalistic reassertion of
pride in Japan’s past (including significant aspects of its wartime past). The years immediately
following the fiftieth anniversary witnessed an upsurge of revisionist writings by scholars andjournalists seeking to justify Japan’s prewar expansion and wartime policies. Most notable,
perhaps, was the creation in 1996 of the Society for History Textbook Reform [Atarashii Rekishi
Kyokasho o Tsukuru Kai] which sought to promote a nationalistic approach to history teaching,and developed history texts that minimized criticism of Japan’s colonialism and wartime
activities. [6] Of course, the revisionists did not have things all their own way. A number ofJapanese public figures, ranging from philosopher Takahashi Tetsuya to Miki Mutsuko (widow
of former Liberal Democratic Party Prime Minister Miki Takeo) have continued to write andspeak eloquently of the need for Japanese society and government to confront the unresolved
problem of war responsibility. [7] Meanwhile, an expanding number of collaborative history
projects by scholars in Japan, China and Korea was have also been seeking paths to common
understandings of the past. [8]The growing visibility of the revisionists, and the rising tide of nationalist sentiment in Japan,
however, brought a chorus of criticism from Japan’s neighbours, particularly China and South
Korea. Though the underlying causes of regional tensions are complex, and include economic
rivalry and domestic political problems, the most visible trigger for friction has been the questionof historical responsibility. Thus, when large groups of Chinese demonstrators attacked
Japanese-owned businesses and offices in April 2005, the overt cause of the conflict was theJapanese Ministry of Education’s decision to approve a new edition of the Society for History
Textbook Reform’s nationalistic textbook for use in schools. Throughout 2006 a major source ofregional tension was Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro’s insistence on making public visits to
the Yasukuni Shrine, the Shinto shrine to “those who fell in war” (that is, to members of themilitary killed in action), in which executed war criminals are among those whose spirits arerevered.

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Tsukurukai’s New History Textbook

II
The Yomiuri project, then, is in a sense just part of a long history of contests within Japansurrounding the memory of war. What is unusual about the project, however, is that it is a reexamination of the problem of war responsibility initiated by a newspaper generally considered
to be “right-of-centre”, and therefore expected to support a more nationalistic approach to thepast. The project can indeed be seen as one symptom of an interesting re-alignment in Japanesepolitical and intellectual life, in which some aspects of the traditional distinction between “right”
and “left” are being destabilized.
Conventionally, it has been the “right” which was expected to push the cause of nationalism, and“left” which was expected to espouse an internationalist attitude of remorse for past aggression
against Japan’s Asian neighbours. But the regional tensions intensified by Koizumi’s visits to the
Yasukuni Shrine and by nationalistic statements from some ruling-party politicians alarmed
some people (including significant sections of Japan’s business community and more liberal
members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party itself) whose general political stance is very far
from being “left-wing”.
Among those people was Watanabe Tsuneo, the 80-year-old Editor-in-Chief of the Yomiuri
Newspaper. As Watanabe makes clear in his Foreword to From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl
Harbor, his perspective on contemporary Japanese nationalism is influenced by his painful
personal memories of having been a wartime conscript soldier. He expresses deep discomfort at
the prospect of a Japan where memories of war are rapidly fading, while events like Koizumi’svisits to the Yasukuni Shrine offer an implicit indulgence to the convicted war criminals who areenshrined there alongside other fallen soldiers. “If things are left as they are,” writes Watanabe,“a skewed perception of history – without knowledge of the horrors of the war – will be handed
down to future generations.” (p. 8) A key problem emphasized in Watanabe’s Foreword is thefact that the Tokyo War Crimes Trials were conducted by the postwar Allied occupation
authorities, and that the Japanese judicial system never attempted its own prosecutions of war
criminals. As a result, it has been all too easy for Japanese people to dismiss the Tokyo Trial
verdicts as a hollow form of “victors’ justice”, without attempting to offer their own alternative
assessment of war guilt. Although Watanabe is quick to emphasize that the Yomiuri project is anautonomous initiative and “not due to pressure from China and/or South Korea”, he alsoemphasizes that a sincere effort by Japanese people to reconsider the problem of war

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responsibility is indispensable if Japan is to “forge friendship and peace with its neighbors in the
future”. (p. 9)
It was against the background of such concerns that the newspaper established the Yomiuri
Shimbun War Responsibility Reexamination Committee, which was entrusted with the task ofrevisiting the events of the war and making their own re-assessment of the judgments of theTokyo Trials. Though the members of the Committee were all Yomiuri journalists, they
consulted with a number of historians, whose opinions they drew on in reaching their own
conclusions on war responsibility. The project was launched at the time of the sixtiethanniversary of Japan’s defeat in war, and was one of a number of retrospective studies produced
by Japanese media to mark the occasion. (Other large-scale projects timed to coincide with thesixtieth anniversary included the eight volume series Ajia Taiheiyo Senso [The Asia-PacificWar], produced by the publishing house Iwanami Shoten. [9])The results of the Yomiuri team’s labors were two series of articles: the first serialized in the
Yomiuri newspaper from August 2005 to March 2006, and republished in Volume 1 of the
project’s Japanese language book, which is entitled Kensho – Senso Sekinin [Examining War
Responsibility]; the second serialized from March to August 2006, and republished in Volume 2.
[10] It is the second of the two volumes which (with some editing) provides the basis of the
English translation. The English version also includes a collection of contemporary documents,
not included in the Japanese original.
The decision to translate only Volume 2 seems to me to have been a regrettable one, since it
leaves English-language readers with a slightly misleading impression of the nature of the
project. In the Japanese version, the first volume is thematic, presenting a series of discussions ofissues such as the economic background to the war, the issue of political terrorism, the role of themedia, and the nature of war responsibility itself. The volume also contains interviews with two
foreign scholars – American China scholar Mark Selden and the Chinese historian Liu Jie(currently based at Tokyo’s Waseda University) – and a panel table discussion between a groupof Japanese public figures including writers and politicians.
By contrast, the second volume is essentially a chronological account of the war from the“Manchurian Incident” of 1931 to Japan’s defeat and occupation, in which the main emphasis ison a re-evaluation of the judgments of personal war responsibility made at the Tokyo War
Crimes Trials. The penultimate chapter offers a “re-trial”, in which the Yomiuri team presents its
own list of those most responsible for the disasters and sufferings of the War. Unsurprisingly,
they concur with the original Allied decision not to prosecute Emperor Hirohito, emphasizing theimage of Hirohito as an essentially peace-loving man who “stayed within the framework for aconstitutional head of state”. (p. 260) They also agree with the Tokyo Trial judgment of wartime
Prime Minister Tojo Hideki as holding major responsibility for launching aggression andmaintaining even when defeat was inevitable. (pp. 245-249)
On the other hand, they differ from the Tokyo Trials in emphasizing the war responsibility of
Konoe Fumimaro, Prime Minister from 1937-1939 and from 1940-1941, who committed suicide
before he could be brought to trial, and in highlighting the roles of several others (including
Kwantung Army officer Ishihara Kanji) who were never brought to trial. At the same time, theYomiuri project also highlights the fact that blame for the wrongs of the war does not lie withJapan alone. The US is criticized for its firebombing of Japanese cities and its decision to drop
atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while the Soviet Union is criticized for unilaterally

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revoking its neutrality pact and declaring war on Japan in early August 1945. (pp. 263-264).
Interestingly enough, James Auer, the American editor of the From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl
Harbor, distances himself from the Yomiuri journalists’ condemnation of the atomic bombings:
one of the few instances I have encountered of an editor firmly contradicting a key conclusion of
the book to which his name is attached. (p. 11-12)

Konoe Fumimaro

Because the English version excludes the thematic Volume 1, it gives the impression that theYomiuri Project is a dry and traditionally empirical account of the events of the War, providing
little discussion of social, economic or intellectual background. Such a criticism would be unfair,since (as we have seen) the background issues are addressed in some detail in the un-translated
first half of the project. But, even though Volume 1 offers a more reflective approach to the
problems of understanding the meaning of war responsibility, it remains true that the project as awhole takes a relatively orthodox approach to the determination of historical truth: it appears totell its readers the answer to the question “who was responsible?”, rather than encouraging themto generate their own answers to that question.
I will not attempt here to discuss the merits of each individual assessment of personal
responsibility made by the Yomiuri team, but would instead like to offer some more generalcomments about the strengths and weaknesses of the project as a whole.

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III
The most valuable contribution of the project has been its role in stimulating renewed publicdebate in Japan about the question of war responsibility. As Japan’s largest-selling newspaper,with a circulation of 10 million, the Yomiuri is particularly well-placed to bring the issue to wide
public attention. The project team’s findings make use of the opinions of relatively conservative
historians such as Hata Ikuhiko (who is known for his low estimate of the number of victims of
the Nanjing Massacre and of institutionalized sexual abuse by the Japanese military [11]).
Precisely by placing the discussion of war responsibility within this conservative framework,
however, the Yomiuri project has helped to make critical discussion of war responsibility“respectable”, and encouraged participation in the debate by those who might otherwise havefeared to approach such a sensitive topic. Meanwhile, their project has also encouraged
emulation by others: the Asahi newspaper – conventionally regarded as occupying the “liberalleft” end of the spectrum of Japanese broadsheet newspapers – was quick to respond by starting
its own re-examination of war responsibility.
The careful blow-by-blow account of the events of the war presented in From Marco Polo Bridge
to Pearl Harbor also sheds light on a number of aspects of the path to war which are probably not
as well known as they should be, either in Japan or elsewhere: among them the ideologicalbackground to the Manchurian Incident, the complex political divisions which beset the Japanesecabinets of the late 1930s, the story of the desperate last-minute efforts to avert war on the eve of
Pearl Harbor, and details of strategic blunders of Guadalcanal and the Battle of Okinawa.
Incidentally, it should be said that the temporal scope of the book is a good deal wider than its
English title suggests: rather than spanning the period from the Marco Polo Bridge incident of1937 to the Pearl Harbour attack of 1941, it actually covers the entire period from 1931 to theimmediate aftermath of Japan’s defeat in 1945.
On the other hand, the decision to focus on a re-examination of the Tokyo verdicts in itself
imposes some important limitations on the project. The Yomiuri Shimbun War Responsibility
Reexamination Committee, in other words, have chosen to place themselves within the distinctly
mid-twentieth century ethical and intellectual framework of the postwar war crimes trials,
despite the fact that (as later commentators have pointed out) this framework leaves importantquestions of historical responsibility unexamined. The problem of war responsibility is, after all,not only a matter of determining “Who was responsible?” It is also necessary to ask, “For what
crimes for which culprits to be judged?” In this project, two lacunae are particularly significant.
First, the Tokyo Trial prosecutors, who included representatives from the UK, Australia and theNetherlands, unsurprisingly chose not to address the problem of the oppression of colonizedpeoples. Their brief was to consider acts of aggression against independent nations, but colonial
expansion itself was not held up to critical scrutiny, nor was the treatment of colonial subjects.
The Yomiuri project, examining historical responsibility within the Tokyo Trials framework,
similarly has virtually nothing to say about Japan’s two major colonies, Korea and Taiwan. It
does not (for example) look at contentious issues of historical responsibility such as the killing of
Taiwanese Aboriginal people in the wake of the 1930 Musha uprising, or the use of forced laborfrom Korea during the Pacific War. [12] From this perspective, it is possible to question how far
the Yomiuri project will address Taiwanese and particularly Korea concerns about Japanese
historical amnesia.

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Second, the Tokyo Trials paid relatively scant attention to the problem of war crimes against
women, and had nothing at all to say about the institutionalized sexual abuse of Asian women inso-called “Comfort Stations” [ianjo], military and other officially sanctioned brothels. This
problem, however, began to be a topic of heated debate in Japan and other Asian countries in the
1990s. In the year 2000, a group of Asian women including the late Matsui Yayori organized theTokyo Women’s War Crimes Tribunal, which aimed to address this omission. The event waslargely ignored by the mainstream media: the one extensive TV report on the Tribunal, producedby the Japanese national broadcaster NHK was altered (according to plausible accounts) as aresult of pressure from conservative politicians including Japan’s present Prime Minister, Abe
Shinzo. In reviewing the Tokyo Trials’ original judgments on individual war responsibility, theYomiuri team once again draws a veil of silence over the problem of war crimes against women,
and thus their study leaves another of the most contentious issues of historical responsibility unaddressed.
These criticisms, however, should not prevent a recognition of the achievements of thisambitious project, and particularly of its role in influencing historical debate at a crucial momentin Northeast Asian international relations. Perhaps the most interesting and significant sectionsof From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbour, indeed, are the final chapter, entitled “What We
Should Learn from the Showa War”, and the Afterword, written by senior Yomiuri journalist
Asaumi Nobuo. These deal with the present and future as much as with the past. Asaumi’s
Afterword reveals a real sense of concern on the part of sections of the Japanese social elite thatthe country is repeating mistakes of the past. Implicit parallels are drawn between theirresponsible adventurism of prewar politicians and the nationalistic posturing of some of Japan’scontemporary leaders. (pp. 282-290) The closing sections of the book also note the responsibilityof the prewar media which, in Asaumi’s words “lost the spirit of upholding the principle offreedom of speech” (p. 290), and emphasize the problems the lack of widespread respect forhuman rights in prewar Japan. The lessons for the present are unmistakable.
The Yomiuri project’s answers to the question “Who Was Responsible?” are open to debate. But
its concluding message is clear, powerful and timely. Those who were directly responsible forcausing the disasters of the Asia-Pacific War have almost all passed on. But a different kind of
historical responsibility survives into the present. This is the responsibility (incumbent on thepeople of all countries) to know about their past and to heed its lessons. In that sense, all sectionsof Japanese society, from government and the mass media to the ordinary person in the street, areresponsible in the present for ensuring that their country does not once again slide towards
tension and conflict with its closest Asian neighbors. And in that sense, this project can be seen
as a valuable experiment in “responsible journalism”.
Tessa Morris-Suzuki is Professor of Japanese History, Convenor of the Division of Pacific andAsian History in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, and aJapan Focus associate. Her book Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan's Cold War has
just been published at Rowman & Littlefield, James E. Auer ed., Who Was Responsible? From
Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor. Tokyo, Yomiuri Shimbun, 2006, ISBN 4-643-06012-3.
This is a slightly revised and expanded version of an article that appeared in a special issue of
Asian Perspective 31.1, Spring 2007 on “Reconciliation Between China and Japan.” It was
published at Japan Focus on June 19, 2007.

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Notes
1. Toyama Shigeki, Imai Seiichi and Fujiwara Akira, Showashi [A History of Showa] (Tokyo,
Iwanami Shinsho, 1955); for a discussion see also Vanessa Buffy Ward, Intellectuals andPublishing: Communicating Ideas in Post-War Japan (Ph.D diss., Australian National University,
Canberra, 2004), pp. 221-231.
2. For example, Masao Maruyama, “The Ideology and Movement of Japanese Fascism”. Japan
Annual of Law and Politics, 1952, vol. 1, pp. 95-128; Masao Maruyama, (Trans. I. Morris),Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1963)
3. Gomikawa Junpei, Ningen no Joken [The Human Condition] (Tokyo, San-Ichi Shobo, 1967);
for further discussion of the tradition of critical popular writings in Japan see also Matthew
Penney, “‘The Most Crucial Education’: Saotome Katsumoto and Japanese Anti-War Thought”,
Japan Focus, 3 December 2005.
4. See for example Kunio Yoshihara, Japanese Investment in Southeast Asia (Honolulu,
University of Hawaii Press, 1978) pp. 53 and 72.
5. Policy Speech by Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro to the 127th session of the national Diet.
6. Nishio Kanji et al., Atarashii Rekishi Kyokasho [New History Textbook] (Tokyo, Fusosha,
2001), for a discussion, see Gavan McCormack, “The Japanese Movement to ‘Correct’ History”,
in Laura Hein and Mark Selden eds., Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan,
Germany and the United States (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 2001), pp 53-73.
7. See for example Takahashi Tetsuya, Rekishi/Shuseishugi [History / Revisionism] (Tokyo,
Iwanami Shoten, 2001); Takahashi Tetsuya, Yasukuni Mondai [The Yasukuni Problem] (Tokyo,
Chikuma Shinsho, 2005). On Miki Mutsuko, see for example “Japan’s Burden”, Asiaweek, 7June 1996, (accessed 26 January 2007)
8. These projects include the Historical Reconciliation Workshop [Rekishi Wakai Wakushoppu]
headed by Asahi journalist Funabashi Yoichi and the Committee for Japan-China-South Korea
Three Country Common Historical Materials [Nicchukan 3-koku Kyotsu Rekishi Kyozai Iinkai].
See Funabashi Yoichi ed., Nihon no Senso Sekinin o dou Kangaeru ka [How to Think About
Japan’s War Responsibility] (Tokyo, Asahi Shimbunsha, 2001); Nicchukan 3-goku Kyotsu
Rekishi Kyozai Iinkai ed., Mirai o Hiraku Rekishi: Higashi Ajia 3-goku no Kingendai-Shi[History opens the Future: The Modern and Contemporary History of Three East AsianCountries] (Tokyo, Kobunken, 2005).
9. Kurasawa Aiko, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Narita Ryuichi, Sugita Toru, Yoshida Yutaka and Yui
Daizaburo eds. Koza – Ajia Taiheiyo Senso. [The Asia-Pacific War] Vols 1-8. (Tokyo, Iwanami
Shoten, 2005-2006)
10. Yomiuri Shimbun Senso Sekinen Kensho Iinkai ed., Kensho – Senso Sekinin Vols. 1-2(Tokyo, Chuo Koronsha, 2006)
11. See Hata, Ikuhiko, Showashi no Nazo o Ou, Vols. 1-2, [Pursuing the Mysteries of Showa
History], (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjusha, 1993); Hata Ikuhiko, Ianjo to Senjo no Sei, [The Comfort
Stations and Sex on the Battle Front] (Tokyo, Shinchosha, 1999); for a discussion, see Soh
Chung-Hee Sarah, “Teikoku Nihon no ‘Gun Ian Seido’ Ron” [Debates on the ‘Military Comfort

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System’ in Imperial Japan”] in Kurasawa Aiko, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Narita Ryuichi, Sugita
Toru, Yoshida Yutaka and Yui Daizaburo eds. Koza – Ajia Taiheiyo Senso. [The Asia-PacificWar] Vol. 2. (Tokyo, Iwanami Shoten, 2005), pp. 347-380.
12. On the Musha uprising, see Leo Ching, Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and thePolitics of Identity Formation (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2001),
pp. 133-173; On the problem of forced labor, see for example William Underwood, “Names,
Bones and Unpaid Wages: Seeking redress for Korean Forced Laborer”, Parts 1 and 2, Japan
Focus, 10 September 2006, and , accessed 15 November 2006.
References
Ching, Leo, Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation(Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2001)
Funabashi Yoichi ed., Nihon no Senso Sekinin o dou Kangaeru ka, [How to Think About Japan’s
War Responsibility] (Tokyo, Asahi Shimbunsha, 2001)
Hata, Ikuhiko, Showashi no Nazo o Ou, Vols. 1-2, [Pursuing the Mysteries of Showa History],(Tokyo: Bungei Shunjusha, 1993)
Hata Ikuhiko, Ianjo to Senjo no Sei, [The Comfort Stations and Sex on the Battle Front] (Tokyo,
Shinchosha, 1999).
Kurasawa Aiko, Morris-Suzuki, Tessa, Narita Ryuichi, Sugita Toru, Yoshida Yutaka and Yui
Daizaburo eds. 2005-2006. Koza – Ajia Taiheiyo Senso. [The Asia-Pacific War] Vols 1-8.
Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.
Mackie, Vera. 2003. Feminism in Modern Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Maruyama, Masao. 1952. “The Ideology and Movement of Japanese Fascism”. Japan Annual of
Law and Politics. 1: 95-128.
Maruyama, Masao. 1963. (Trans. I. Morris). Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese
Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McCormack, Gavan. 2001. “The Japanese Movement to ‘Correct’ History”. In Censoring
History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany and the United States. Eds. Laura Hein andMark Selden. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe. 53-73.
Morris-Suzuki, Tessa, “Free Speech, Silenced Voices : the Japanese Media and the NHK
Affair“, Asiarights Journal, issue 4, 2005.
Nicchukan 3-goku Kyotsu Rekishi Kyozai Iinkai ed., Mirai o Hiraku Rekishi: Higashi Ajia 3goku no Kingendai-Shi [History opens the Future: The Modern and Contemporary History ofThree East Asian Countries] (Tokyo, Kobunken, 2005).
Nishio Kanji et al., Atarashii Rekishi Kyokasho [New History Textbook] (Tokyo, Fusosha,
2001)
Soh Chung-Hee Sarah, “Teikoku Nihon no ‘Gun Ian Seido’ Ron” [Debates on the ‘Military
Comfort System’ in Imperial Japan”] in Kurasawa Aiko, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Narita Ryuichi,

Morris-Suzuki: Who is Responsible?

109

Sugita Toru, Yoshida Yutaka and Yui Daizaburo eds. Koza – Ajia Taiheiyo Senso. [The AsiaPacific War] Vol. 2. (Tokyo, Iwanami Shoten, 2005), pp. 347-380.
Takahashi Tetsuya, Rekishi/Shuseishugi [History / Revisionism] (Tokyo, Iwanami Shoten, 2001)
Takahashi Tetsuya, Yasukuni Mondai [The Yasukuni Problem] (Tokyo, Chikuma Shinsho,
2005)
Toyama Shigeki, Imai Seiichi and Fujiwara Akira, Showashi [A History of Showa] (Tokyo,
Iwanami Shinsho, 1955).
Underwood, William, “Names, Bones and Unpaid Wages: Seeking redress for Korean Forced
Laborer”, Parts 1 and 2, Japan Focus, 10 September 2006.
Ward, Vanessa Buffy, Intellectuals and Publishing: Communicating Ideas in Post-War Japan.
(PhD diss., Australian National University, Canberra, 2004).
Yomiuri Shimbun Senso Sekinen Kensho Iinkai ed., Kensho – Senso Sekinin Vols. 1-2. (Tokyo,
Chuo Koronsha, 2006)
Yoshihara, Kunio, Japanese Investment in Southeast Asia (Honolulu, University of Hawaii
Press, 1978)

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The Aso Mining Company in World War II: History and Japan’s Would-Be PremierWilliam Underwood
Despite his recently failed third attempt to become prime minister, Aso Taro remains one ofJapan’s best-known and most influential politicians. The former foreign minister still aspires tothe top post and in two books published earlier this year he has sketched a road map for thenation.
Japan the Tremendous, a bestseller written in a populist tone, highlights the peaceful nature of
postwar Japan and calls the country a “fount of moral lessons” for Asia. Arc of Freedom andProsperity: Japan’s Expanding Diplomatic Horizons expatiates on Aso’s tenure as foreign
minister from October 2005 to August 2007.

Aso Taro: Japan’s future leader?

But a 1975 book called The 100-Year History of Aso sends a different message about the wouldbe prime minister’s view of World War II and his vision for Japan’s future.[1]Aso Taro oversaw publication of the 1,500-page company history as president and CEO of Aso
Cement Co. Marking the centennial of the family firm, the book suggests the United States
tricked Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor and glorifies the Japanese war effort with little criticalcommentary.
The World War II chapter of The 100-Year History of Aso begins by recapping the Imperial
Japanese Army’s move into Manchuria in 1931, followed in 1932 by the spread of war to
Shanghai and the establishment of the Japanese puppet state, Manchukuo. The book recounts the42-1 vote by which the League of Nations condemned Japanese expansionism in China in 1933
and Japan’s withdrawal from the world body.
Aso Takakichi, Aso Taro’s father, became the second president of Aso Mining Co. in 1934 atage 24. Aso Taro’s great-grandfather founded the business in 1872, supplying “black diamonds”
from the Kyushu coalfields to fuel Japan’s fast-modernizing economy. Aso Taro’s grandfather
died prematurely and never headed the firm.
Aso Takakichi forged his own identity as the new boss by establishing Aso Academy (AsoJuku), aiming at the cultivation of the “Aso man” capable of serving the nation in “spirit, bodyand technical ability.” The school styled itself as a “Showa Shoin Juku,” evoking the academy
founded by Yoshida Shoin in nearby Yamaguchi Prefecture that nurtured leaders of the early
Meiji era.

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Japan’s shift to a war production economy in the course of the 1930s prompted Aso Mining toopen a Tokyo office and new coal pits in Kyushu. Domestic business operations expanded in
Wakamatsu, Kobe, Osaka and Nagoya, while the company’s young president assessed theinternational situation during an overseas fact-finding trip for five months in 1936-37. By the endof the decade Japan was waging all-out war in China and on a military collision course with theWest.
In a section called “Aso Fights,” the corporate history quotes for several pages the January 1940
address to assembled employees by Aso Takakichi, whose son Taro would be born later thatyear. Aso sought to motivate the miners by portraying the firm as a front-line unit in Japan’s warof economic production, resolving as unit leader to share the fate of his troops.

Aso Takakichi, left, took charge of Aso Mining in the 1930s, while Aso Taro was running the family firm
when the corporate history was published in 1975. (The 100-Year History of Aso)

“In our country labor and management are one, facing in the same direction—toward theemperor. We must advance on the path of national duty,” Aso solemnly told his workforce,stressing the sacred nature of coal mining and the urgent need for greater self-sacrifice. “If it ispossible that anyone here does not understand this spirit of service to the nation, as a Japanese
subject he should be truly ashamed.”
Aso Takakichi struck an anti-capitalist chord by insisting that the corporation’s goal was not tomake money. He told the employees that while some profit was required to fulfill his duty ofcontinuing the family business, additional profits would be gladly distributed to workers first. He
pledged to reward workers by building facilities for their benefit and helping to improve public
services.
Noting that 1940 was the 2,600th anniversary of Japan’s mythical founding, Aso’s address
inventoried the challenges confronting the nation: the raging war in “Shina” (the diminutive
Japanese name for China), hostile relations with the Soviet Union and increasing friction with
the United States and the United Kingdom.

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Japan “forcibly advanced” into French Indochina in 1941, the book continues. In response theU.S., the U.K., France and Holland “tightened the net” around Japan by freezing overseas
financial assets and halting oil shipments to the nation. Late-1941 diplomatic negotiations
between Tokyo and Washington are reviewed in considerable detail.
“Whether we liked it or not and even as the world busily tried to avert war,” the Aso chronicle
states, “the unfortunate year of Showa sixteen (1941) was just like a pus-filled tumor that resists
medical treatment and bursts open. Charging into an economic war to secure natural resources
became unavoidable.”
Top U.S. leaders had detailed knowledge of Japanese military plans before the attack on Pearl
Harbor, according to Aso historians, who add that the Imperial Navy initially wanted to fightAmerica two years later. Japan was purposely allowed to strike the first blow in December 1941,
so that “Remember Pearl Harbor” could become a rallying cry for Americans.
“This cleverly united American opinion for war against Japan,” the book says. “But America lostthe backbone of its Pacific fleet as a result. Moreover, Germany and Italy declared war on the
United States, expanding the conflict into a world war.”
Aso Mining responded to this “most desperate crisis in Japanese history” by digging coal inrecord quantities. The company became like a “kamikaze special attack production unit.”“Coal is the mother of greater military strength,” wartime Prime Minister Tojo Hideki is quoted
as saying. Given Japan’s vulnerability with respect to oil, coal was indeed crucial to the Japanese
economy.
“In response to the enemy’s materiel offensive, we will fight by means of increased coalproduction,” said Kishi Nobusuke, then Japan’s minister of commerce and industry. “All miners
must come together in spirit and the patriotic mining industry must dash forward.”

Left: Aso miners doing calisthenics during the war; right: ore cars at the Aso Yoshikuma mine.
(The 100-Year History of Aso)

Tojo was executed as a Class A war criminal in 1948. Kishi was imprisoned for three years as aClass A war crimes suspect but never tried. He served as Japanese prime minister from 1957 to1960, and was a main founder of the LDP. Abe Shinzo, whose rocky year as prime minister
ended in September, is Kishi’s grandson.
Aso Taro’s grandfather was Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru, the most powerful Japanese leaderof the occupation era, while his wife is the daughter of former Prime Minister Suzuki Zenko.
Aso’s sister is married to Prince Tomohito of Mikasa, a first cousin of the current emperor. His

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great-great-grandfather, Okubo Toshimichi, was a chief architect of the modern Japanese state.
Aso’s family lineage thus runs from the upper echelons of the Meiji Restoration through postwar
Japan’s top political leadership to the royal family.
The 1975 book recalls wartime initiatives like the “Certain Decisive Victory Increased
Production Campaign." Government slogans included “Planes, ships and bullets: all thanks tocoal,” and “One lump of coal equals one drop of blood.”
Weekends disappeared during the move to a seven-day workweek, jokingly replaced by two
Mondays and two Fridays. But coal production eventually plunged as skilled miners became
soldiers and shipped out for overseas battlefields. The lack of mining materials and equipment
during the desperate late-war years led to reckless mining and ruined mines.
Aso Mining and Forced Labor
Severe manpower shortages necessitated the widespread use of forced labor in wartime Japan—
and at Aso Mining. Some 700,000 Korean labor conscripts were brought to Japan using varying
degrees of coercion beginning in 1939. The Japanese military transported more than 30,000
Allied prisoners of war to Japan beginning in 1942, while nearly 40,000 Chinese arrived undersimilarly forcible conditions starting in 1943.
Aso Mining was employing 7,996 Korean conscripts as of January 1944, according to a wartime
report by the Special Higher Police (Tokubetsu Koto Keisatsu), and 56 conscripts had recently
died. Fukuoka-based historians estimate Aso used a total of 12,000 Koreans between 1939 and
1945. The wartime police report shows that 61.5 percent of Aso's Korean laborers resisted
conscription by fleeing their work sites, the highest percentage of runaways in the region. While
this figure indicates that security conditions were not prison-like, most Korean conscripts inJapan were never properly paid for their work.

Young Korean labor conscripts at Aso Mining’s Atago mine: workers assigned to the Jowa dormitory in 1942(right) and the Yamato dormitory in 1943. (Hayashi Eidai photos)

There were also 300 Allied POWs at the Aso Yoshikuma mine in Fukuoka Prefecture.
Documentation includes the Aso Company Report of January 1946 and other records producedby the postwar Japanese government, as described by Japan Focus in May 2007.

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Yet the family conglomerate, now known as Aso Group and headed by Aso Taro’s younger
brother, has never publicly acknowledged or commented on its POW legacy. Recent phone calls
to the Fukuoka office of Aso Lafarge Cement were not returned.
A spokesperson for then-Foreign Minister Aso addressed the POW issue for the first time in June
2007, but stopped short of acknowledging the historical record (see article below). Previously,
the Foreign Ministry had cast doubt on foreign media reports about the Aso-POW connection.
Japanese-language media have avoided reporting the issue.
The 1,500-page Aso corporate history contains a single cryptic reference to wartime forcedlabor. As Japanese miners left for military service, the book says, “people like Korean laborers
and Chinese prisoners of war filled the void” in Japan’s mining industry.
Although 6,090 Chinese forced laborers were used at 16 sites in Fukuoka, and 11 percent ofthem died, Aso Mining was not one of the five Japanese companies involved. It is unclear why
the book mentions Chinese workers (and accurately describes them as “prisoners”) but omits theAllied POWs that Aso did use three decades earlier.
The Seoul government’s Truth Commission on Forced Mobilization Under Japanese Imperialism
has been vigorously researching wartime labor conscription since 2005. Assisted by Japanesecitizens, commission members spent a week in Kyushu in early 2007, searching mostly in vain
for information about Aso Mining’s extensive use of Korean conscripts.
Shortly after Aso Taro became foreign minister in late 2005, a South Korean truth commission
official charged that Japanese companies were not cooperating in efforts to locate the remains of
Korean workers still in Japan.
“The corporations’ survey of remains has been insincere,” the South Korean official said. “It isalso strange that the family company of the foreign minister, who should be setting an example,
has provided no information whatsoever.”[2]Aso Mining’s former Akasaka mine in the late 1970s and a
Korean forced to work there during World War II. (Hayashi Eidai photos)

Aso Group today consists of more than 60 companies in diverse fields such as health care,education, construction and real estate, while also supplying gasoline and running a golf course
located beside the former Yoshikuma mine. Aso Cement merged with Lafarge, the French
multinational and world’s largest cement maker, in 2001. Aso ceased coal mining in the 1960s.
Highlighting the company motto, “We deliver the best,” the flashy Aso Group website plays up
the family’s Meiji-era business roots and provides excerpts from The 100-Year History of Aso.
Yet wartime records related to Aso’s use of forced labor have apparently vanished.

Underwood: The Aso Mining Company in World War II115“We couldn't investigate into the history of Aso Mining even if we wanted to, because records
just aren't available from so long ago," an Aso Group official told the Associated Press inNovember 2005. “All we can say is that everybody employed forced labour during the war.
There must have been a dozen mining companies in Kyushu at the time, and they all used forced
labour. So it wasn't a practice limited to Aso Mining."[3]Disappearing Korean Remains
In February 2006 the Japanese Foreign Ministry (headed by Aso Taro) was informed by Aso
Group (headed by Aso Yutaka) that Aso Cement had returned six sets of Korean remains tofamily members living in the vicinity of the Aso Yoshikuma coal mine in 1984-85.[4]During redevelopment in the 1960s, a communal cemetery containing the cremated remains ofan estimated 504 people was discovered near the entrance to the recently closed Yoshikuma
mine. Aso Mining soon built a charnel house a few hundred meters from the cemetery andtransferred the remains into it.
In the early 1970s, Zainichi Korean and Japanese activists began researching the Fukuoka area’s
legacy of Korean forced labor. Hayashi Eidai, a respected local historian who has written 50
books about forced labor and other aspects of Japanese war conduct over the past four decades,
was one of the researchers involved.
Hayashi gained access to the Aso-built charnel house in 1975 and photographed six remains
containers (known as tsubo), each of them bearing a Korean name. The rest of the remains were
either unidentified or belonged to working-class Japanese with no known next of kin. Hayashi
returned to the Yoshikuma charnel house the following year to gather information for atelevision documentary.
By 1976, however, all six sets of Korean remains had been removed from the charnel house
shelves. Hayashi was shown a small hole beneath the shelves and told by the Buddhist priest in
charge that the Korean remains had been deposited in an underground storage area. The unusual
funerary practice was not further explained.

1975 images of the exterior and interior of the Aso Yoshikuma charnel house.
Six containers of Korean ashes (right) disappeared the following year. (Hayashi Eidai photos)

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Aso Taro was president of Aso Cement at the time; he left the post upon his election to theHouse of Representatives in 1979. Korean conscript remains may have been removed from the
shelves of the Aso Yoshikuma charnel house in 1975-76 because they were viewed as a potential
liability for the family scion’s political career.
Today, Hayashi and other Fukuoka-based researchers doubt the veracity of Aso Group’s claimthat the six sets of Korean remains were returned to family members.
Instead, the Fukuoka researchers suspect the ashes were removed from their individual
containers and dumped into the storage space beneath the Aso Yoshikuma charnel house. There
were no Korean families still living around the Yoshikuma mine to receive the remains in the
mid-1980s, according to Hayashi.
It is also unclear why Aso Cement supposedly handed over the ashes at that time: four decades
after the war’s end, two decades after the remains were exhumed from the cemetery at the
Yoshikuma site, and one decade after they disappeared from the charnel house shelves following
the first researcher inquiries.[5]The World War II chapter of the Aso history book concludes by describing the company’s latewar mining venture on the island of Celebes, now part of Indonesia. Two hundred Aso
employees were dispatched for the project at the request of the Imperial Navy and the Coal
Control Association. Aso’s hefty financial investment in the Celebes mine was lost due toJapan’s defeat.
Photographs in the book depict Aso workers doing calisthenics before entering the Kyushu
mines, a site visit by top sumo wrestlers, and various aspects of coal and cement production.
Another photo shows two carrier-based warplanes that Aso employees presented to the Imperial
Navy through their donated labor. Lyrics of patriotic mining songs are provided.

Left: Imperial Navy warplanes; right: Aso Mining officials in the Celebes. (The 100-Year History of Aso)

It is not surprising that an account of Aso Mining’s wartime activities includes the imperial
ideology and spiritual mobilization so central to the period. It is also true that the Aso dynasty
has made many positive contributions to the Fukuoka region since 1872, not only economicallybut in fields such as education and health care.

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Yet the book’s silence about the company’s own use of forced labor, and the suggestion thatJapan fought a morally just war it did not desire, are more troubling. A string of provocative
comments by Aso Taro appears to be connected to the version of Japanese history found in thecompany book project.
Aso has infuriated Koreans by defending Japan’s colonial rule and insisting that Koreans had
voluntarily requested Japanese names. He has also described contemporary Chinese militaryspending as a “considerable threat” and expressed his desire for Japan’s emperor to visit
Yasukuni shrine.
The Aso company line on World War II resembles the revisionist narrative being advanced by
Yasukuni’s controversial history museum, which seeks to justify Japan’s colonial rule andmilitary aggression. Aso opined as leader of Japan’s diplomatic corps—and before the mostoffensive exhibits were toned down—that the Yasukuni museum “merely shows what thewartime situations were."“Historical perspectives based on masochistic views don’t correspond with my philosophy,” Asosaid last month during a key debate with Fukuda Yasuo, referring to how he would approachcontentious war-related issues. Fukuda, who seeks to address Northeast Asia’s history problem
in a more conciliatory fashion, defeated Aso to become the current LDP president and Japaneseprime minister.
“Masochistic” (jigyakuteki) is a codeword used by Japanese groups, in and out of the LDP,
advocating a historical perspective that Japan’s neighbors say whitewashes Japanese war
misconduct. Whereas as Fukuda pledged during the campaign to avoid visiting Yasukuni whileheading the government, Aso insisted the opinions of foreign governments should be disregarded
when considering the question.
Aso left the helm of the Foreign Ministry and became LDP secretary general last August,following the party’s disastrous showing in Upper House elections in July. The new job wasviewed as the ideal springboard for Aso to eventually succeed Abe Shinzo as prime minister.
Most news reports of Abe’s sudden resignation in September mentioned Aso as the probablenext prime minister. LDP factions soon united around the grandfatherly Fukuda instead, but Aso
still received far more party support than expected, especially from local LDP chapters. Younger
Japanese are said to appreciate Aso’s unvarnished speaking style and identify with his passion
for manga comic books.
Although Aso Taro, 67, held key cabinet posts in both the Abe and Koizumi administrations, heturned down Prime Minister Fukuda’s request to join the current cabinet. “I want to have myhands free,” Aso told reporters, signaling that his prime ministerial ambitions remain intact.
Despite his reputation as an assertive nationalist, Aso served as the point man for Japan’s“values-oriented diplomacy” during his stint as foreign minister, while seeking a more proactiverole for Japan on the world stage. The related slogan for Aso’s recent campaign for thepremiership was “Japan’s Potential Power—Seeking Vitality and Security.”
Readers of The 100-Year History of Aso may sense a mismatch between the vision and the man
who would be prime minister.
..........

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Aso questions content of 1946 records
Aso Taro now possesses the postwar records proving that Aso Mining used Allied POW forcedlabor, but his spokesperson has made conflicting statements about their meaning.
Last June, I mailed the then-foreign minister both Japanese and English versions of the Aso
Company Report, produced by his family’s firm on Jan. 24, 1946. Ordered by Occupation
authorities investigating war crimes against Allied prisoners, the report clearly shows that 300
POWs were assigned to the Aso Yoshikuma coal mine.

Ex-POW Arthur Gigger was forced to work without pay for Aso Mining in 1945
(Ian Millard photo). Two of Gigger’s fellow Australians died at the Yoshikuma mine
and are buried in the Commonwealth War Cemetery in Yokohama.

Muramatsu Ichiro, Aso’s policy secretary, was then interviewed by telephone twice. “Theauthenticity of the documents is very high,” he said during a freewheeling, hour-longconversation on June 21. The report is written on company stationery and bears an official seal.
Muramatsu seemed to readily agree that the Australian, British and Dutch prisoners had dug coalfor Aso Mining beginning in May 1945. But he questioned whether their work could be
described as “forced labor,” stressing that the Aso Company Report says wages were paid.
Australian survivors of the Yoshikuma labor camp, however, have insisted they received nomoney from Aso.
“How was a POW any different from a conscripted Japanese worker?” Muramatsu asked.
He also raised the subject of Japanese POWs who were taken to Siberia by the Soviet Union to
perform forced labor after the war. About ten percent of the Japanese prisoners died. None haveever been compensated for their mistreatment by the Soviet Union, Russia or Japan.
The compensation fund for Nazi-era forced labor set up by Germany’s government andcorporations recently finished paying out some $6 billion to 1.7 million people living in 100
countries. Many of these recipients received wages during the war; some even lived in their own
homes.

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Muramatsu also said that Aso Mining Co. had no connection to Aso Cement Co., which washeaded by Aso Taro during most of the 1970s. But the Aso Group website today proudly
highlights the historical continuity of the family’s various businesses.

The abandoned Aso Yoshikuma work office (left) and ruined Yoshikuma mine buildings in the late 1970s.
(Hayashi Eidai photos)

A shorter, less cordial phone call to Aso’s policy secretary took place on June 22. I asked
Muramatsu to clarify whether the Allied prisoners performed “forced labor” at Yoshikuma andwhy they do not appear in The 100-Year History of Aso.
Muramatsu then reversed his previous position, refusing to acknowledge that Aso Mining used
Allied POWs at all.
He said the contents of the 1946 Aso Company Report should be accepted or rejected in their
entirety. With American war crimes investigators as its target audience, the report claims theWestern prisoners were treated better than Japanese workers and thanked Aso Mining staff bygiving them gifts after the war.
“Selectively using the records is dishonest,” Muramatsu said.
William Underwood, a faculty member at Kurume Institute of Technology and a Japan Focus
coordinator, completed his doctoral dissertation at Kyushu University on forced labor in
wartime Japan.
Japan Focus thanks Hayashi Eidai for access to his photo archives.
This is an expanded and updated version of an article that originally appeared in the Japan
Times on June 26, 2007.
Endnotes[1] Aso Hyakunen Shi. Iizuka, Fukuoka: Aso Cement Co., 1975.
[2] “Aso gaisho no kankei kaisha, choyosha ikotsu joho teikyo sezu, Kankoku de hihan.”Yomiuri Shimbun online (Kyushu edition), Dec. 24, 2005.
[3] “Japan FM family firm in spotlight.” BBC News online. Nov. 30, 2005. Available. It should
be noted that the Aso spokesman likely used the term “choyo” (best translated as labor“conscription”), not “kyosei renko” (best translated as “forced labor”).

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[4] “Aso gaisho no shinzoku kigyo, tanko shikichinai no Chosenjin ikotsu 6 tai wo henkan.”
Yomiuri Shimbun online (Kyushu edition), Feb. 28, 2006. See also “Firm of Aso’s father
returned remains of 6 Korean workers to kin.” Kyodo News International online, Feb. 28. 2006.
Available.
[5] This account of Korean remains at the Aso Yoshikuma charnel house (Japanese version here)is based on an unpublished manuscript, “Human Remains at the Aso Yoshikuma Coal Mine,”
received from Hayashi Eidai in July 2006 and follow-up conversations with him. Hayashi
prepared the manuscript for possible use by a Japanese Diet member during an interpellation
session, but the issue has never been raised in the Diet.

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Toward Reconciliation: The Nishimatsu Settlements for Chinese Forced Labor in WorldWar Two
Ivy Lee
Introduced by William Underwood
Introduction
As a recently retired sociology professor in the United States, Ivy Lee became actively involved
with global efforts to redress Japanese war crimes a few years before Kajima Co.'s controversial
settlement in 2000 with Chinese forced laborers from the notorious Hanaoka worksite. Kajima's
approach to resolving the Hanaoka injustice raised serious doubts about its corporate sincerity,
but the professional honesty and good faith of Japanese lawyers who provided pro bono
representation for the Chinese victims were also called into question by some critics in ways thatsuggested the need for careful investigation.
Lee's article below is motivated by a desire to advance the best interests of the aging survivors offorced labor in wartime Japan and their heirs, and to avoid an unnecessary repeat of such
Hanaoka-type acrimony that also pitted victims who accepted the Kajima money against victims
who did not. She seeks to clarify the content of the pair of compensation pacts Nishimatsu
Construction Co. concluded in 2009 and 2010, and in the process appraises the Nishimatsu
deals far more positively than Chinese attorney Kang Jian, whose sharp critique of thesettlements Lee systematically deconstructs.
This article also provides insight into the multibillion-dollar fund set up in Germany in 2000 tocompensate Nazi-era forced laborers, concluding that the path chosen by Nishimatsu generally
resembles the German precedent. Michael Bazyler, an authority on the Holocaust restitution
lawsuits of the 1990s and Germany's forced labor fund, similarly compared the Japanese andGerman cases in a 2009 article for The Asia-Pacific Journal. Bazyler also contributed to thearticle below.
Lee suggests the efforts of Japanese lawyers who have long pursued reparations on behalf ofChinese, and the challenges confronting them within Japan, need to be fully appreciated. In fact,
the progressive leaders of the Japanese lawyers group that has litigated nearly all the Chinese
legal claims since 1995 typically came of age during Japan's student movements of the 1960s. A
number of key players have passed from the scene already, and younger Japanese attorneys
engaged in the forced labor redress struggle will be hard pressed to match their seniors'
dedication and ability. Lee calls for greater awareness of the gap between the ideal settlementthat would be attainable in a perfect world and what can be realistically achieved in Japan today
in the wake of the Japan Supreme Court decision holding that Japan is not legally liable forcompensation to wartime forced laborers.
Over the longer term, the broad sweep of global political, economic and social conditions may
make the righting of historical wrongs, in some manner, nearly unavoidable. On August 6, theU.S. government for the first time sent official representatives to the annual commemoration of
the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. This was closely tied to the Obama administration's
proclaimed objective of nuclear non-proliferation and eventual nuclear disarmament, and to theextent those goals remain important, could become a step toward a forthright American apology
at some future A-bomb memorial service.

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Likewise amid the steady integration of the economies of Northeast Asia and shifting power
dynamics across the region, Japan may find its economic and political plans more and more
dependent on forthrightly addressing the legacy of World War Two. The sooner comprehensive
action is taken on ripe issues such as Chinese forced labor redress, the greater is the likelihoodthat authentic reconciliation will result. - William Underwood*****************
During the Asia-Pacific War, roughly 40,000 Chinese were abducted to perform hard labor at
135 sites in Japan under a 1942 Decree issued by the wartime Japanese Cabinet. The postwar
Japanese government has remained obdurately mute regarding its responsibility for Chinese
forced labor to date. Of the 35 Japanese companies that used Chinese forced labor, about twodozen are still in operation. These companies also uniformly sought to evade their responsibility
for over five decades until 2000 when Kajima Corp., at the exhortation of a Japanese judge,
secured a settlement with the Chinese forced laborers at its Hanaoka site.
Almost a decade elapsed before another Japanese company, Nishimatsu Construction Co., Ltd.,
voluntarily agreed to compensate Chinese forced laborers at its two wartime worksites in Japan:
Yasuno and Shinanogawa. The 2009 Yasuno agreement set up a compensation trust fund of 250
million yen (at 93 yen = 1 USD, approximately $2.69 million) for 360 Chinese forced laborers;
the 2010 Shinanogawa settlement contributed 128 million yen (approximately $1.38 million) toanother trust fund for 183 Chinese forced laborers. The forward momentum generated by the two
recent Nishimatsu agreements would seem sufficient to propel the issue of Chinese forced labor
toward a comprehensive resolution. Yet criticisms abound of these settlements both within andoutside of China. The redress movement is splintered at this point into two camps, creating a
deeply divisive atmosphere within the Chinese forced labor community. This paper examines the
opposing responses to the recent 2010 Shinanogawa settlement and evaluates their contrasting
approaches to settlements as an instrument for redressing historical injustice. It suggests that acomprehensive resolution of the forced labor issue may best be obtained in the political arenaand that the redress movement may well be advised to target the Japanese government as it bears
prime responsibility for the use of Chinese forced labor.
Confusion and Conflict in the Chinese Forced Labor Community
On April 26, 2010, Nishimatsu reached a settlement with the Chinese forced laborers (CFLs)
who were abducted to perform hard labor under inhumane conditions at the Shinanogawa sitefrom June of 1944 to January of 1945. As with the Nishimatsu Yasuno agreement in October
2009, the Shinanogawa settlement did not put to rest criticisms by redress activists in Canada,
the U.S., and China (hereafter referred to as "activists"), nor did it bring about the closure
Japanese attorneys and supporters of the CFLs (hereafter referred to as "supporters") had hopedfor. Instead, new charges are now being leveled directly at Nishimatsu and indirectly at the
supporters.
At first glance, the Shinanogawa settlement is even more controversial than the Yasuno
agreement. Kang Jian, the only Chinese lawyer in the team of Japanese attorneys who first filed
suit against Nishimatsu in Japan in 1997, charged the company with going around the fiveoriginal plaintiffs when negotiation was at an impasse to persuade other CFLs and theirdescendants, who were not involved in the protracted litigation, to settle instead. She argued that
CFLs are once again being abducted as they were during the Asia-Pacific War.[1] On April 27,

Lee: Toward Reconciliation

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2010, the day after the settlement, Kang held a press conference in Beijing in which somesurvivors accused Nishimatsu of an abduction-style settlement that was rejected by all theoriginal plaintiffs.[2] A number of websites in
China featured similar headlines.[3]Han Yinlin, aged 93, the only surviving CFL of
the five original plaintiffs, told his two sons that
the Shinanogawa settlement was something withwhich "to coax children only."[4] As he was too
frail to travel, his sons hurried to Beijing to
express their opposition to the settlement in the
April 27 press conference. Descendants andrelatives of other CFLs also attended. Holding
photographs of the deceased loved ones, they
insisted that money could not salve the woundsof yesteryear's atrocities. They echoed what
Relatives of wartime Chinese workers walk towardattorney Kang and other critics have said of thethe Tokyo Summary Court, where the second
settlement, namely, that it contains an apology
Nishimatsu settlement was finalized on April 26,
2010. In a message aimed mainly at Japanese
without substance and compensation colored bylawmakers, their banner urges a comprehensive
charity. For a small sum, Nishimatsu has bought
off some CFLs' right to claim, Kang declared [5]; solution to the Chinese forced labor redress issue.
(Xinhua / Ji Chunpeng photo)by not settling on these terms, however, other
CFLs retain their right to sue, she insisted.[6] To
buttress Kang's words and the original plaintiffs' determination, activists announced at the sametime that a fund has been set up to support the original and other plaintiffs who refused to settle
and help maintain their dignity in their continuing fight to claim compensation against
Nishimatsu.[7]On the same day as the Beijing press conference, Fukushima Mizuho, Chair of the Social
Democratic Party of Japan and then Minister for Consumer and Food Safety, received thedescendants and representatives of the CFLs who accepted the settlement in the Senate Hall inTokyo. She congratulated them on triumphing after years of legal struggle, vowing she would do
all she could to push for more settlements of the Chinese forced labor cases.[8] Back in China, Lu
Tangsuo, a CFL who rejected Kajima Corp.'s Hanaoka settlement in 2000, observed that most of
the Shinanogawa survivors chose settlement primarily because Nishimatsu voluntarily proposed
to issue an unambiguous apology on paper. "That's what Chinese demand and live for!" Lu
said.[9] Yet even those who accepted the current settlement could hardly resign themselves to thefact that signing on a piece of paper meant completely absolving Nishimatsu of its legal
responsibility for their enslavement.[10]The same controversy plagues Nishimatsu's 2009 settlement with CFLs from its Yasuno
worksite. Tempers flared at a December 2009 gathering in which disbursement of individual
money orders in the amount of 45,366 RMB (at 6.8 RMB = 1 USD, equivalent to $6,671) with acopy of the Yasuno settlement was made to the first group of actual survivors and widows of thedeceased. Li Liangjie, a CFL abducted to perform hard labor for Mitsui, loudly accused those
who settled as "traitors" who accepted because of the money.[11] Shao Yicheng, the lead plaintiffof the Yasuno litigation, angrily retorted, "(Since) you are a hero, why don't you go and dosomething (for the Chinese forced labor redress issue)?"[12]The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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The roots of this conflict can be traced back to the very first settlement in 2000 between Kajima
and the CFLs at its notorious Hanaoka worksite. The lead plaintiff, Geng Chun, signed off
initially on the settlement agreement but later reversed his stance to become a staunch opponent.
Activists also organized a fund in 2004 to dispense to CFLs who refused to settle monetary
support equivalent to what they would have received from Kajima.[13]Thus the CFL community, once united in its quest for justice, is now splintered into two groups:
those who accepted or approved of and those who rejected or disapproved of the settlements,
with little chance of reconciling their positions in the foreseeable future. Yet the Nishimatsu
settlements in general, and the latest one in particular, seemingly satisfy the three non-negotiable
demands of the Chinese forced labor redress movement: 1) Acknowledging atrocities to extend
an apology for crimes committed; 2) Erecting a memorial to memorialize the victims and toeducate the public; and 3) Compensating the victims.[14] What then causes these bitter
recriminations among the former Chinese forced laborers?
The Long and Tortuous Road to Reparations
When litigation was first initiated in the 1990s against the Japanese state and corporations thatused Chinese forced labor, the focus was on the victims and their vindication in Japanesecourtrooms. As the prospect of a final court victory receded over the years, and when out-ofcourt settlement remains seemingly the only option, the unity between the activists and the
supporters fractured. While CFLs are at loggerheads, their harsh words merely reflect thedivisions within and outside of China and among Chinese activists and supporters. As laborers
who survived under unspeakable Japanese atrocities, dispersed to toil again in postwar China,
CFLs probably know little of legal subtleties and ramifications, mostly viewing the settlement
terms through the lens of those who are more knowledgeable in the law, more persuasive, or
better able to exert more pressure on them.
Supporters consisting of Japanese and Chinese residing in Japan were the first to organize trips
to China in the mid-1980s and early 1990s to locate CFL survivors. They approached Japanese
attorneys who worked pro bono to file various forced labor lawsuits in Japanese courts. After
years of legal battle, the Japan Supreme Court finally ruled on April 27, 2007, that the right ofindividual Chinese victims to file legal claims in Japan was extinguished under the 1972 SinoJapanese Joint Communique. Accordingly, the supporters concluded that non-litigation
settlements may be the most realistic and attainable alternative at this point.[15] In standing
behind the settlements, these supporters hope to see the few remaining elderly victims derivesome solace from settling within their lifetime. Realizing time is not on the CFLs' side,
supporters would accept settlement terms that may be less than perfect, then try to negotiate forbetter terms in a future settlement.
Japanese attorney Uchida Masatoshi, a member of the legal team responsible for both the 2009
Yasuno and the 2000 Hanaoka negotiations, said as much when he pointed out that without thefirst Hanaoka settlement, there would not be the "more perfect" Yasuno settlement.[16]Statements from various CFLs illustrate that supporters correctly assess the sentiments of mostsurvivors in this respect. For example, Shao Yicheng, the lead plaintiff of the Yasuno case, said,"My heart is at ease now that I can live until I am compensated."[17] On the day her husband flew
to Japan as a representative of CFLs who accepted the Shinanogawa settlement, Yang Xi'en's
daughter-in-law told reporters, eyes brimming with tears, "Now my father-in-law and fellow
Chinese forced laborers can rest in peace ... "[18]Lee: Toward Reconciliation

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A second group of later arrivals to the CFL
redress fight, mostly ethnic Chinese activists in
the U.S. and Canada, as well as attorney Kangand others in China, have also worked
ceaselessly on different unresolved legacies of
the Japanese invasion since the mid-1990s. They
are not against settlements per se but would
rather fight on until they secure one in which thedefendant company acknowledges legal
responsibility and pays out an adequate amountof compensation which would not compromise
the dignity of CFLs who settle. As a model for
Chinese forced labor settlements, they look to
The first disbursement of compensation from
Germany's solution embodied in the
Nishimatsu
to workers from the Yasuno site took
Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future
place in December 2009. Shao Yicheng, lead plaintiff
Foundation. They also point to the US$20,000
in the Yasuno litigation in Japan, is shown holding
the American government, in its landmark 1988
his money order at left. (ND Daily photo)legislation, awarded each Japanese Americaninternee for internment during WWII. This camp has subtly hinted that the CFLs might havebeen misled by their Japanese attorneys, tapping into a pervasive mistrust, understandable inlight of the Sino-Japanese war. Kang wrote in 2009:
The case of Chinese laborers enslaved at the Yasuno worksite was represented exclusively bylawyers and a support group in Japan, with no participation from Chinese lawyers. While weshould trust the integrity and sincerity of these Japanese lawyers and supporters in helping the
Chinese victims, can we expect the victims to fully and accurately understand the terms of thesettlement and their implications, given the fact they were represented by lawyers who were
foreigners to them? I have some reservations about this.[19]With their latest call for overseas ethnic Chinese to unite behind them in supporting all CFLs
who have not settled and to oppose deals similar to the Nishimatsu agreements, activists in
Canada and the U.S. seem prepared to carry on the fight for their version of settlement for as
long as necessary.[20] They scored public relations victories in Japan and internationally indescribing how insulting to Chinese dignity these "so-called" settlements are. As newspapers andwebsites in China carry their eye-catching headlines, they are impacting public opinion there as
well. Supporters of the Nishimatsu approach, on the other hand, are more reticent, refraining
from open criticism of the other side, working step by step to achieve their goal and hoping theirstrategy will finally be vindicated by the results. They rely on their personal ties to the CFLs andthe latter's trust and appreciation of their support and efforts developed over the long years of
litigation. Wang Xuan, a supporter who works primarily with victims of Japan's biochemical
warfare in China, questioned the strategy of not settling: "What could the Chinese gain if they
don't accept the settlements? ... Do we want them (CFLs) to go to their graves with a grudging
hatred in their hearts? ... Where is the hope? Japanese attorneys who support litigation andJapanese peace supporters over the decades not only spend enormous sums of money, but are
growing old and dying off ..."[21]Calls within China to respect the wishes of the CFLs, as to whether they desire to settle or not,went unheeded.[22] In fact, the actual wishes of the survivors before the sound and fury began

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126

may never be known. To the quest for justice from the Japanese state and corporations is now
added an ideological dimension of conflict, a dimension that is no longer about the CFLs but,sadly, is fought through them.
Quibbling over Words
Activists' objections to the Shinanogawa settlement are a repeat of those against the earlier
Yasuno agreement. To frame the provisions which follow, the preamble to the settlement quotes
a passage from the 2007 Japan Supreme Court decision where the Court concludes that theindividual right to claim was waived by China in the 1972 Sino-Japanese Joint Communique.
However, due to the immense suffering of the CFLs, and the reimbursements Nishimatsu
received from the government after the war, the Court goes on to urge all (both) sides to work
toward providing relief to the plaintiffs.[23] Activists claim that "the liability for damages causedby such severe violation of human rights is distorted by Nishimatsu into an act of providing‘charitable relief.'"[24]Expecting challenges to be made, as in the first Nishimatsu settlement debate, regarding the useof the word "relief (救済)", an allusion that is unavoidable when quoting from the Japan
Supreme Court ruling, the translator of the Chinese version of the settlement offers explanatory
notes to clarify its meaning. The notes point out that "Chinese may have the impression that (theword) relief means ‘charity' and ‘benefaction' but (the phrase) ‘provide relief to victims' in thesettlement provision does not have either meaning."[25] Rather, in legal language, when used inreference to an individual's rights, it means to restore his/her rights and when used in relation to
victims, it signifies compensation to the victims for injuries/damages sustained. The notes
conclude: "‘Provide relief to victims' in the settlement's provision has the latter meaning."[26]The notes' explanation is not unique. Any search of online Chinese or English legal dictionaries
will yield the same definition for relief as given above. More interestingly, as "relief" also
appeared in some Japanese newspapers' discussion of the controversy surrounding the 2000
Hanaoka settlement, an article, in a 2002 published collection of works in Chinese entitled,
Abduction, Litigation, and Settlement, delves into its meaning and usage at some length. The
author, Lin Xin, of the Law Research Center, College of China Sociological Studies, affirms that"relief" in the context of settlements has no connotation of charity; he further distinguishes"charitable relief" which is voluntary from "legal relief" which is mandatory.[27]Another settlement term attorney Kang considers problematic is "compensation (償い金)",which she claims is not used in Japanese legal documents. As used in everyday language, itembraces a range of interpretations including repayment for what is owed. However, it does not,according to Kang, denote compensation for crimes committed.[28] The notes to the Chineseversion of the settlement contradict Kang's contention. Not only does the term signify
compensation, but its meaning is so broad as to encompass in its fold, shades of "repayment,compensation, money for atonement and so on."[29]Kang further links the use of this term "compensation" to the Asian Women Fund (AWF), 19952007, set up for compensating the so-called Comfort Women, and to Japanese officialdom in its
frequent communications regarding the AWF. The eventual failure of the AWF coupled with theJapanese officials' willingness to use this word, she reasons, is an indication that the word simply
means "help" or "support" and not actual compensation.[30] Such reasoning constitutes anLee: Toward Reconciliation

127

argument by association, and although illogical, has strong emotional appeal with an implicit
suggestion that the Nishimatsu approach cannot produce meaningful reconciliation.
More importantly, Kang's allegation trivializes the debate surrounding the AWF. Rather thandwelling on the details of the AWF controversy here, suffice it to say that while the Japanese
government was the only culprit in setting up a system of sexual slavery during the war, themoney for compensation came from citizen donations with the government contributing funds tocover administrative costs only. In other words, the AWF failed because most Comfort Women
refused to accept money from the Fund when the Japanese government refused at the time andstill refuses to acknowledge its responsibility.
Evasion of Legal Responsibility and Waiver of Right to Claim in Settlements
Activists also castigate Nishimatsu for its denial of legal responsibility in both the Yasuno andShinanogawa settlements. They either overlook or regard as irrelevant that on April 27, 2007,
Japan's Supreme Court ruled the 1972 Sino-Japanese Joint Communique effectively extinguished
Chinese victims' right to claim. The Chinese Foreign Ministry responded to the ruling two days
later. On April 29, it declared that although under the Communique, China had renounced war
reparations in the interest of "friendly relations between the two peoples," it was strongly
opposed to "the unbridled interpretation on this clause by the Supreme Court of Japan regardlessof China's repeated solemn representations."[31] The Ministry concluded that the Japan Supreme
Court's interpretation of the 1972 Communique was "illegal and null."[32]Nonetheless, Japanese courts are not bound by the Chinese government's interpretation. Instead,in Japan under Japanese law as announced by Japan's Supreme Court, neither Nishimatsu norother companies have any legal responsibility toward the CFLs.
The concept of legal responsibility bears further examination since CFLs who accepted thesettlements take issue likewise with Nishimatsu's refusal to admit legal responsibility. To CFLs
who are not schooled in legal intricacies, the company's refusal is probably equated with arepudiation of their having wronged the victims. Such sentiments are reinforced by activists'
assertions that Nishimatsu has "whitewashed" its "extreme violation of human rights ... into a
moral obligation."[33]Legal liability, however, is ascribed not only to heinous crimes; it also follows from various
minor and inadvertent legal violations. A driver inadvertently running into another car andcausing damage is legally liable for the damage but may not be morally culpable. Further, thecultivation of a sense of moral obligation to humanity is essential when the goal is to prevent a
recurrence of genocides and atrocities and to ensure future peace. In fact, it may be preferable tohave an individual or entity refrain from committing an offense out of a sense of moral
obligation than to have the individual or entity be punished (held legally responsible) after thefact. The activists are not doing the redress or peace movement a service in downgrading moral
obligation in comparison to legal responsibility.

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As noted above, legal responsibility has become
immaterial to the discussion of Chinese forcedlabor settlements in Japan ever since the 2007
Japan Supreme Court ruling. But the concept
assumes a central role in settlement disputes
since criticisms of various other aspects of thesettlements are ultimately linked to it. For
example, the first provision of the Hanaoka
settlement reaffirms a 1990 Joint Statement
issued by the CFLs and Kajima Corp. in which
the latter admits to responsibility for abducting
Out of a total of 183 forced laborers at the
CFLs to work under tremendous hardships at the
Shinanogawa worksite, 60 survivors or theirdescendants had been located by last May 6, when Hanaoka site based on a 1942 Decree from thethey attended a meeting in China explaining thewartime Japanese Cabinet. A similar statement
details of the settlement. (hbgrb.net photo)
also appears in both Nishimatsu settlements.
Activists stoutly denounce this description as a"dilution of historical facts" aimed at escaping legal responsibility.[34]However, the wartime Cabinet did issue a Decree for forced labor. More importantly, without theDecree, the companies that used forced labor could never have proceeded to abduct, with thecentral involvement of the Japanese Army, peasants from China's countryside. The fact thatindustries and companies facing a labor shortage might have first approached the state for suchan order[35] is inconsequential. If responsibility were to be assigned to the root cause of Chinese
forced labor, the Japanese government should shoulder the bulk of the blame since it started awar which led to the labor shortage in the first place. Debating whether use of the phrase "basedon" dilutes one's responsibility leads nowhere; there is enough blame to go around for both thegovernment and industries concerned.
Further, although activists embrace working toward a negotiated settlement, they decry
provisions in the Kajima and both Nishimatsu agreements that deny the victims the right to makefurther claims within and outside of Japan. Companies, however, do not settle out of a sense of
guilt or altruism so much as to put an end to lawsuits and legal hassles. Kajima entered into asettlement at the urging of the Tokyo High Court which stated: "This Court ... took account of
the serious sufferings experienced by the appellants ... and considered it appropriate to aim at an
overall solution on the basis of the Statement (the 1990 Joint Statement between CFLs andKajima Corp.). Thus, on September 10, 1999, the Court recommended a compromise ex
officio."[36] Nishimatsu approached the CFLs' attorneys when its channeling of illegal funds topoliticians through dummy organizations came to light in March of 2009, hoping that a
resolution with the CFLs would restore its tarnished reputation.[37] It would be foolhardy for any
corporation regardless of its motivation to leave the door ajar for future claims after settling.
Activists not only seem to have missed the central point of the defendant's having a settlement,
but also fail to comprehend that the denial of the right to claim and the denial of legal liability
are two sides of the same coin. After all, a settlement is a negotiated compromise to resolve allissues usually involving "waiver of any right to reopen or appeal the matter from both sides, ...
mutual release of any further claim by each party, a statement that neither side is admitting fault..."[38] Therefore, had Kajima and Nishimatsu explicitly acknowledged legal responsibility andnot required a waiver of right to claim, it would defeat their purpose in having a settlement. And

Lee: Toward Reconciliation

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with respect to the Nishimatsu agreements, whether such provisions are included in thesettlements is irrelevant as Japan's Supreme Court already ruled the CFLs' right to claim to be
non-existent.
Thus, despite Nishimatsu's expression in the settlements of an "apology for crimes committed," aliteral translation of the Japanese/Chinese characters (謝罪), activists bemoan its lack of sincerity
when comparing these settlements to the German Remembrance, Responsibility and Future
Fund, where the latter "squarely faced history and explicitly assumed responsibility, comforting
the hearts of victims."[39] Had the activists delved into the motivation for and the history of theGerman negotiations, they would have found striking similarities between the German andJapanese responses to forced labor claims.
The German Model for Reconciliation
The issue of legal responsibility that roils the Chinese activists and the CFL community was
seldom raised in the lead-up to the negotiations for the Remembrance, Responsibility and Future(RR&F) Fund. Instead, survivors of the slave labor as well as those of the Holocaust were moreconsumed with the question of moral accountability. Many objected to translating a quest forjustice into a tangible process of claims and compensations for they feared moral issues werebeing obscured. Opponents of compensation held a huge demonstration outside the Knesset
when legislators gathered to discuss the issue of claims in 1952.[40] Eventually, however, mostslave labor survivors, accepted compensations as a symbolic form of justice.
German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's memorable 1951 speech refers to Germany's moral andrestitutive responsibility only: "Unspeakable crimes were perpetrated in the name of the German
people which impose upon them the obligation to make moral and material amends ..."[41] Whenthe agreement was reached on the capped amount for the RR&F Fund on December 17, 1999,
German President Johannes Rau read from a statement which again contains no admission oflegal responsibility: "... both government and business accept the shared responsibility and moral
duty arising from the injustices of the past."[42] It is therefore "worth emphasizing," wrote
Michael Bazyler, a leading authority on Nazi-era settlements, "that Germany never admitted any
legal liability and, upon settlement, insisted that its only liability is moral and not legal."[43]Activists repeatedly question why Japanese corporations have not followed the path laid downby the German industries in establishing the RR&F Fund together with the German government.
Yet the German corporations too had the same overriding concern with legal immunity as
Kajima and Nishimatsu.[44] Nazi Germany's slave and forced labor workers were obtained by theGerman police and army under the then-existing racist laws. Much of that workforce was
employed by the Third Reich's public sector including schools and hospitals. After the war whenreparations were being contemplated for various Nazi-era crimes, German companies insisted
any payments for slave and forced laborers should come from the state since they had to usethem in support of Nazi Germany's wartime economy.[45] As compensation for these were
eventually excluded from any postwar reparations Germany made, the German firms too wanted
to put a decisive end to the flurry of legal claims that came after the first slave labor lawsuit
against Ford and its German subsidiary was filed in March of 1998 in Newark, New Jersey. They
feared the damage that was being done to their reputation in the U.S. where they had
considerable business dealings.

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The German industries then called on the newly-elected Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to assist
them with their legal troubles. To its credit, the German government stepped up to shoulder its
share of the responsibility. However, even then, its motivation was "to counter lawsuits,
particularly class action lawsuits, and to remove the basis of the campaign being led against
German industry and our country."[46] In agreeing to compensation, German corporations wanted
in return "legal peace", a term which entails an end to all existing and future claims in U.S.
courts. Accordingly, early in 1999, Schroeder sought to resolve the issue on a state-to-state basiswith the U.S. Together, American and German negotiators devised a solution that would address
the issues of moral and historical responsibility while ensuring a lasting and all-embracing "legal
peace" for German companies in the U.S.[47]The solution was the creation of a national foundation, the sole forum outside of the courts, forresolving all claims, including slave and forced labor, arising out of the Nazi-era. The Berlin
Accords, a set of agreements ratifying the compromises arrived at in the negotiations, consistedof a Joint Statement of Principles signed by the U.S., Germany and other governments who had
an interest and participated in the talks, as well as an Executive Agreement between U.S. andGermany promising "legal peace." Pursuant to these Agreements, the German Bundestag enacted
legislation to establish the RR&F Foundation endowed with 10 billion DM, half funded by theindustries and half by the government.[48] In 2001 when the Bundestag ascertained "legal peace"
was sufficiently achieved, funds were released to be distributed to the victims.[49]Thus it can be seen that in practical terms, the situation of the German companies does not
greatly differ from that of Kajima and Nishimatsu. Their concern with legal peace is equivalent
to the waivers of right to claim Kajima and Nishimatsu stipulated in the settlements; theinsistence that their responsibility extends to the moral and historical but not the legal realm is
identical. Since CFLs know little of the German solution other than from the activists' highpraise, their belief that Kajima and Nishimatsu should not be allowed to evade their legal
responsibility persists even among many of those who accepted the settlements.
Further, it should be noted that German companies' initial insistence that it was the state whichbears prime responsibility for the use of slave and forced labor is no different from the Japanesecompanies'. Their motivation for coming to the bargaining table is also the same. German
companies may have had a more sincere desire to do the right thing but this, being an intangible
factor, is difficult to ascertain and substantiate.
A significant difference does exist, however, between the German government's readyacceptance of responsibility and the Japanese government's steady denial. With the involvementof the German government, the solution arrived at is on a state-to-state basis, able to guarantee
an enduring legal peace. Yet even the German government admitted no legal responsibility, andthough ready to compensate, refused to consider a comprehensive out-of-court settlement as asolution, as it implied the slave and forced labor survivors might have a legal basis for pursuingtheir claims. As to keeping its end of the bargain within a framework of separation of powers, theU.S. Department of Justice had to file numerous Statements of Interest to press for dismissal of
all claims against German companies in U.S. courts. Eventually almost 70 such lawsuits weredismissed.[50] In 2003 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld President Clinton's power to enter into the
Executive Agreement of the Berlin Accords, a decision which had the same effect as the Japan
Supreme Court's dismissal of the CFLs' right to claim. The door to filing claims in U.S. courts
was effectively closed from then on.

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Without the government's participation in Japan, the Japanese companies have been left to theirown devices to resolve the legacy of forced labor claims on a piecemeal and individual basis. A
questionable stipulation found in all three of the Japanese corporate settlements might have been
included for the very purpose of ensuring legal peace. This provision asks those who accepted
the settlement either to prevent other CFLs from suing Kajima, or to resolve the matter among
themselves so Nishimatsu would not bear the burden of claims again.[51] Whatever the rationale
for its inclusion, the provision may not be enforceable when challenged in court as its execution
involves stripping other CFLs who had not participated in the settlement of their right to sue.
Viewed in the context of the German negotiations, the provision may be seen as the twocompanies' solution to the quest for legal peace. In the eyes of the activists, however, theprovision enables Nishimatsu to lure and buy off "accessories" with a paltry sum.[52]Unfortunately, with this accusation the integrity of the Japanese attorneys who negotiated for,and CFLs who accepted, the settlements is also called into question.
Setting a Price for True Remorse
Supporters and activists alike realize that no amount of money could ever compensate the CFLs
for their horrendous suffering, and loss of health or life. Their efforts are directed at obtaining
validation for the enslavement CFLs endured and delayed justice for the crimes committed
against them. But money does matter as a signal that they have achieved their goal. So the CFL
redress movement is not about - yet at the same time is also about - the money CFLs should
receive in restitution.
Under the RR&F Fund the slave laborers of Germany, i.e., those who were taken fromconcentration camps to be worked to death, were paid $7,500, and the forced laborers were paid
$2,500, unless they endured extreme hardships (as the CFLs in Japan routinely did), in whichcase they were entitled to the same amount as the slave laborers.[53] Few slave and forced labor
survivors and descendants were satisfied with their compensation, but most accepted it
eventually as symbolic and the best they could do under the circumstances.[54] In 1999 German
President Rau correctly assessed their sentiments in these words, "What they want is for theirsuffering to be recognized as suffering and for the injustice done to them to be named injustice ...
we will not forget their suffering."[55]Beginning in June of this year, the CFLs or theirdescendants in the Shinanogawa settlement will
be receiving approximately 50,000 RMB (at 6.8
RMB=1 USD, roughly equivalent to $7,352) incompensation [56]; the CFLs or their descendants
in the Yasuno settlement started receiving 45,366
RMB (at 6.8 RMB= 1 USD, roughly equivalent
to $6,671) in December of 2009.[57] President
Rau's words mentioned above express CFLs'
sentiments as well. Perhaps Liu Huanxin, almost
70 years old, whose father was abducted, best
Last May 8 the first meeting of the Administrative
captured the complex and conflicting attitudes
Committee of the Shinanogawa Peace Fund was
CFLs have toward compensation. Liu could not held by the China Human Rights Development
Foundation, the Beijing organization entrusted withhold back his tears when he returned home on
April 27, 2010, after learning of the settlement, making disbursements. (humanrights.com.cn photo)The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

132

saying "Half a decade - the day we waited for finally arrived ... this settlement gives us comfort
and yet it's hard to accept because what we want is dignity, not money; the tragic experience of
abduction can never be wiped out by money."[58]The Nishimatsu CFLs are, or will be, receiving compensation comparable to Germany's slaveand forced laborers. Activists object to national dignity being compromised at this amount whilemore reasonable voices in China urge that CFLs not be burdened with a fight for national dignity
when they had fought so hard simply to survive under unspeakable Japanese atrocities during thewar.[59] Attorney Kang considers Nishimatsu's compensation too trifling a sum to indicate true
remorse or a genuine desire for reconciliation.[60] Apparently, in compensation amount, activists
desist from using the German model for comparison. Instead, they turn to $20,000, the sum the
U.S. government paid to each ethnic Japanese person it interned during the Second World
War.[61]
Admittedly, Nishimatsu's compensation, like the compensation the German fund paid out, is too
little and comes too late, but it does have a symbolic value beyond its monetary one. The money
CFLs received from funds ethnic Chinese activists set up to support them after they rejected
either the Kajima or the Nishimatsu settlements (See Endnotes 7 and 13) simply did not deliver
the same emotional payload. Consequently most of the located Shinanogawa victims accepted
the compensation from Nishimatsu in spite of the press conference attorney Kang held tomobilize public opinion in China against the settlement. The activists could afford to wait forcompensation amounts that would "demonstrate" true remorse. Surviving CFLs in their late 80s
and 90s cannot, a consideration the Japanese attorneys and their supporters are keenly aware ofwhen they urge settlement as an option.
Progress Made from the Hanaoka to the Shinanogawa Settlements
The splintering of the forced labor redress movement created so much confusion that it has
tended to obscure the most significant achievement the movement produced to date. Throughinitiating legal proceedings in the 1990s, supporters and Japanese attorneys have successfully
used the legal system in Japan to establish on record the historical facts of and the moral
responsibility for Chinese forced labor on the part of both the Japanese government andcompanies during the Asia-Pacific War.
Rather than recognizing this achievement and focusing on the future, activists rehash instead thelegal minutia of past agreements. They either deny or downplay supporters' claim that
improvements have been made in the terms of the agreements from Hanaoka to Yasuno andShinanogawa; they question the possibility of progress when all three settlements are built on thetwin "false" premises of victims' waiver of right to claim and the companies' non-admission oflegal liability. To evaluate these assertions and counter-assertions, an analysis will be made ofthe extent to which these settlements meet the three non-negotiable demands of the Chinese
forced labor redress movement: 1) Acknowledging atrocities to extend an apology for crimes
committed; 2) Erecting a memorial to memorialize the victims and to educate the public; and 3)
Compensating the victims.
Apology (for crimes committed): The Hanaoka settlement does not contain an expression of
apology in the agreement itself. Instead its first provision reaffirms the Joint Statement Kajima
and the CFLs issued in 1990, in which Kajima acknowledges historical responsibility andLee: Toward Reconciliation

133

extends its apology. Both Nishimatsu settlements explicitly acknowledge historical responsibility
and proffer a sincere apology in the documents themselves.
The first Hanaoka provision ends with a jarring and abrupt sentence to the effect that the CFLs
note Kajima admits no legal liability.[62] In contrast, both Nishimatsu settlements do not claim thecompany has no legal liability, probably because it is unnecessary after the 2007 Supreme Court
ruling.
Erecting a Memorial and Educating the Public. In addition to the apology, the Shinanogawa
agreement provides for a "Shinanogawa Peace Fund" to be set up for compensating the CFLs,
memorial services for the deceased, research to locate the rest of the 183 Shinanogawa CFLs andother matters.[63] Sufficient funds to build a memorial exist if the victims so desire, although thesettlement itself does not explicitly mention a memorial. Erecting a memorial is explicitly
included in Yasuno, the first Nishimatsu settlement.[64] On the other hand, the "Hanaoka Peace
and Goodwill Foundation" Kajima established only provided for "memorial services for thevictims, the self-help efforts and care of the victims and their families, and education of theirchildren."[65] No stipulation exists to provide for erecting a Hanaoka memorial.
Compensation: The money the victims received from the "Hanaoka Peace and Goodwill
Foundation" is for their "care" and other matters as quoted above; it is not for compensation, orat least not explicitly named as such.[66] In the Nishimatsu settlements, the amount the victims
have received or will receive is called "compensation," although, as previously discussed,
activists claim otherwise in their semantic critique of the Shinanogawa agreement. Further, in the
Yasuno settlement funds to be used for compensation are specifically referred to as"reconciliation money".[67]By September of 2001, the Hanaoka Peace and Goodwill Foundation had disbursed funds to 21
Chinese forced laborers, each of whom received 250,000 yen.[68] The exchange rate as of
September 15, 2001, was 117.35 yen = 1 USD; the amount worked out to slightly more than
$2,000 per victim. As noted above, Nishimatsu began its first disbursement of the Yasuno
Friendship Fund at US$6,671 per victim in December of 2009 while the Shinanogawa victims
are expected to receive US$7,352 starting mid-2010.
The above analysis shows that, in addition to the overall success in establishing historical andmoral responsibility, Japanese attorneys and supporters secured progressively better settlement
terms from the Hanaoka to the Shinanogawa agreements. Activists' demand for an admission oflegal liability and retention of CFLs' right to claim goes beyond what could be accommodated
within the framework of a negotiated settlement. It bears repeating that German companies neveradmitted legal liability and the activists' model for reconciliation, the RR&F Foundation, wasfounded partly on President Clinton's promise of "legal peace."
Japanese attorneys worked pro bono and long and hard on behalf of the victims. The separate
teams of attorneys for Yasuno and Shinanogawa, in response to the critique that the Hanaoka
settlement compromises the right to sue of CFLs who refuse to settle, negotiated a "confirmation
statement" in which Nishimatsu explicitly affirms this right is not extinguished. The
Shinanogawa team of Japanese attorneys negotiated for more concessions in a settlement that is
only six months apart from the earlier Yasuno settlement. Not only is the compensation amountincreased for a shorter duration of enslavement in Japan, but the compensation fund is, for the
first time, deposited with a Chinese organization which is responsible for its administration, thus

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134

demonstrating the Japanese attorneys' responsiveness to the wishes of the activists and Chinese
public.[69] There is, of course, always room for improvement. In future negotiations, the Japanese
attorneys could aim to remove the provision which foists on the victims and the organization
holding the compensation fund the responsibility to relieve the settling Japanese company offurther claims.
Activists make little allowance for pressures that might be exerted by other Japanese companies
and historical revisionists on Nishimatsu for its readiness to settle, nor do they show any
understanding of factors that limit the concessions the company could make in the final
agreement. They might have won a short-term, public-relations victory by proclaiming the
Shinanogawa settlement to be one "without the original plaintiffs." They might even have setthemselves up to be the sole arbiter of Nishimatsu's sincerity and depth of remorse. Yet whether
Nishimatsu is sincere and adequately remorseful are intangibles, subject to interpretation andtherefore irrelevant. What is relevant, however, is the example Nishimatsu sets in its willingness
to reconcile even though the Japan Supreme Court had extinguished the CFLs' legal right toclaim in 2007. Hopefully other companies will follow this example in the near future.
The Way Forward
The main obstacle to achieving a comprehensive redress of the Chinese forced labor issue is theJapanese government's unyielding intransigence in denying responsibility. If all the Japanesecompanies that used Chinese forced labor were to enter into individual compensationagreements, the resolution of the issue is still incomplete without holding the Japanese
government responsible. On the other hand, if the Japanese government were to accept
responsibility, show repentance and provide the necessary restitution, other Japanese companies
would surely follow suit. Therefore, having effectively utilized the Japanese legal system toestablish historical and moral responsibility, the CFL redress movement may well be advised tomove onto the political arena, training its sights on the Japanese government.
In the last decade China's phenomenal economic growth has been likened by some to a risingtide that lifts all boats of the other nations in Asia, including Japan. China became the largest
trading partner of Japan in 2009, putting it ahead of the U.S., its share being a record 20.5
percent of Japan's total trade.[70] If the Chinese government were to become more vocal in its
support of the CFLs[71] and/or Japanese companies were to exert pressure on its own government
in the interest of retaining the goodwill of Chinese consumers and their already establishedmarket positions in China, then the Japanese government might be brought around to thebargaining table. A comprehensive resolution of the Chinese forced labor issue is therefore notnecessarily out of reach. Indeed, voices urging the Japanese government to take action can beheard from Japan to China.[72] With time and the gathering momentum of the Nishimatsu
settlements, these voices will hopefully grow too loud and insistent to be ignored.
Ivy Lee is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at California State University, Sacramento. Since
her retirement in 1997, she has worked toward and written on redressing Japanese atrocities
committed in the Asia-Pacific War. She was the co-leader of a nationwide coalition of ethnic
Chinese and American POWs who pushed for legislation to declassify Japanese war crimes
documents held in the U.S. In December of 2000, after a two-year drive, the legislation was
signed into law by President Clinton, under the "Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Actof 2000," Title VIII of Public Law 106-567. Lee was the 2001-2002 president of Global Alliancefor Preserving the History of WW II in Asia, and an appointed member of the California

Lee: Toward Reconciliation

135

Taskforce on Holocaust, Genocide, Human Rights, and Tolerance Education, created by
Assembly Bill (AB) 2002 in 2003 and extended by AB 1175 through 2007.
Editor's Note: This article does not necessarily represent the views of the current leadership of
the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of WW II in Asia.
William Underwood researches ongoing reparations movements for forced labor in wartime
Japan.
Michael Bazyler, Professor of Law at Chapman University, contributed to this article. A leading
authority on the use of American and European courts to redress genocide and other historicalwrongs, Bazyler wrote the book, Holocaust Justice: The Battle for Restitution in America's
Courts (New York University Press, 2003), which was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court andreviewed, among others, in the Harvard Law Review, and Financial Times (London). Bazyler iscurrently serving on the legal team that filed the first case in the U.S. for the return of
religious/cultural objects arising out of the Armenian genocide.
Endnotes[1] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/hqcj/zxqxb/2010-04-29/content_236115.html, accessed
4/29/2010[2] http://bjyouth.ynet.com/article.jsp?oid=65155321, accessed 4/29/2010[3] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/hqcj/zxqxb/2010-04-29/content_236115.html;
http://bj.yzdsb.com.cn/system/2010/04/27/010462988.shtml
http://intl.ce.cn/zgysj/201004/29/t20100429_21341426.shtml, accessed 4/29/2010[4] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/hqcj/zxqxb/2010-04-29/content_236115.html[5] http://bjyouth.ynet.com/article.jsp?oid=65155321[6] Ibid.
[7] http://newnews.ca/?action-viewnews-itemid-51076,
http://www.anpopo.com/show-35637-1.html, accessed 4/30/2010
On April 26, 2010, in a press release sent to the Chinese media in Canada, Canada ALPHA
announced that together with Wai Ming Charitable Foundation Fund, Ltd. of Hong Kong, they
will solicit money from overseas ethnic Chinese to found a fund in support of Chinese forcedlaborers to continue their struggle for obtaining historical justice. In addition, Canada ALPHA
and Wai Ming will each contribute 350,000 RMB (at 6.8 RMB = 1 USD, equivalent to $51,470
each) toward the founding of this fund. The five original plaintiffs and two other CFLs who haveindicated they will reject the settlement, will receive 50,000 RMB, the same amount as those
who settled, from this fund.
[8] http://news.163.com/10/0428/10/65BOH53I000146BD.html, accessed 4/30/2010[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

136[11] http://gcontent.nddaily.com/3/40/340a39045c40d50d/Blog/6d7/ca5653.html, accessed
5/1/2010[12] Ibid.
[13] The Global Alliance for Preserving the History of WW II in Asia announced that theorganization, together with concerned individuals in China, founded a Subsidy to Victims
Rejecting Kajima's Hanaoka Settlement Fund in December of 2004. Money had already beenraised from GA affiliates, with British Columbia chapter of Association for Learning and
Preserving the History of WW II in Asia, British Columbia (BC ALPHA), and Toronto ALPHA
contributing 25,000 RMB each, a member of another San Francisco GA affiliate contributing
100,000 RMB and various individuals in China contributing a total of 6,200 RMB. The Fundwould solicit donations from all overseas ethnic Chinese toward the goal of a fund total of
225,000 RMB. It started its first distribution toward the end of 2004 of 25,000 RMB (at 8.28
RMB = 1 USD on December 15, 2004, equivalent to $3,048) to each Hanaoka victim who
rejected the settlement.
[14] http://news.sohu.com/20091103/n267921800.shtml, accessed 5/1/2010. The three nonnegotiable demands are described by Prof. Liu Bao Chen, a researcher at the Forced Labor
Research Center, Hebei University, who was first approached by Chinese residing in Japan tolocate the Hanaoka survivors and who participated throughout the whole course of the Yasuno
litigation and negotiations.
[15] http://big5.china.com.cn/international/txt/2009-11/03/content_18819279_2.htm, accessed
5/27/2010[16] http://gcontent.nddaily.com/3/40/340a39045c40d50d/Blog/6d7/ca5653.html[17] http://news.sohu.com/20091103/n267921800.shtml,[18] http://www.longevitys.com/n489992c26.aspx, accessed 4/28/2010[19] Kang Jian, Arimitsu Ken and William Underwood, "Assessing the Nishimatsu Corporate
Approach to Redressing Chinese Forced Labor in Wartime Japan," The Asia-Pacific Journal, 471-09, November 23, 2009;[20] http://www.anpopo.com/show-35637-1.html, http://newnews.ca/?action-viewnews-itemid51076[21] http://www.ccvic.com/guoji/redianpinglun/20100427/144264.shtml, accessed 4/29/2010[22] http://www.chinaqll.com/Html/qyjm/14_187.htm, accessed 4/20/2010[23] http://www.china918.cn/news/suopei/xisonghj/2010/0510/497.html, accessed 5/14/2010[24] http://www.stopracism.ca/content/nishimatsu-construction-co-ltd-slave-labour-settlement,
accessed 4/30/2010[25] http://www.china918.cn/news/suopei/xisonghj/2010/0510/497.html[26] Ibid.

Lee: Toward Reconciliation

137[27] Lin Yin, "The Legal Meaning of the Hanaoka Compensation Case Settlement and Related
Questions," in Abduction, Litigation, and Settlement, edited by Luo Wei-Long (Academy Press,
China, 2002) 164-165[28] http://www.china918.cn/news/suopei/xisonghj/2010/0513/498.html, accessed 5/15/2010[29] http://www.china918.cn/news/suopei/xisonghj/2010/0510/497.html[30] http://www.china918.cn/news/suopei/xisonghj/2010/0513/498.html[31] http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/xwfw/s2510/2535/t315036.htm, accessed 5/26/2010. Liu
Jianchao's statement clearly implies China has not given up the individual citizens' right to claim
although it has renounced war reparations between the two states in the Joint Communique.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Kang Jian et al, (November 23, 2009)[34] Ibid.
[35] Ibid.
[36] http://www.iwanami.co.jp/jpworld/text/hanaoka02.html, accessed 5/25/2010[37] http://www.66law.cn/archive/news/2010-05-10/38678_1.aspx, accessed 5/24/2010[38] http://dictionary.law.com/Default.aspx?selected=750, accessed 5/2/2010[39] Kang Jian et al, (November 23, 2009)[40] Gideon Taylor, "Where Morality Meets Money," in Holocaust Restitution edited by Michael
Bazyler and Roger Alford (New York: New York University Press, 2006) 163-169[41] http://www.claimscon.org/?url=history, accessed 5/27/2010[42] Gideon Taylor (2006), 163-169[43] Michael Bazyler, "Japan Should Follow the International Trend and Face Its History ofWorld War II Forced Labor" The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 5-3-09, January 29, 2009.
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Michael-Bazyler/3030[44] Michael Bazyler, Holocaust Justice: The Battle for Restitution in American's Courts (NY:New York University Press, 2003), 83[45] Ibid., 61[46] Roger Cohen, "German Companies Set Up Fund for Slave Laborers under Nazis." NewYork Times, February 17, 1999, A1. Quoted in Bazyler (2003) 83[47] Michael Bazyler (November 23, 2003), 83-88[48] Ibid., 79-83[49] Ibid., 89-92

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia138[50] Roger Witten, "How Swiss Banks and German Companies Came to Terms with the
Wrenching Legacies of the Holocaust and World War II," Holocaust Restitution edited byMichael Bazyler and Roger Alford (NY":New York University Press, 2006) 88[51] http://www.china918.cn/news/suopei/xisonghj/2010/0510/497.html[52] http://www.china918.cn/news/suopei/xisonghj/2010/0513/498.html[53] Michael Bazyler (2003), 81[54] Ibid., 101-105[55] Gideon Taylor (2006), 166[56] http://news.xinhuanet.com/world/2010-04/26/c_1257467.htm, accessed 5/24/2010[57] http://gcontent.nddaily.com/3/40/340a39045c40d50d/Blog/6d7/ca5653.html[58] http://www.longevitys.com/n489992c26.aspx[59] http://www.chinaqll.com/Html/qyjm/14_187.htm[60] http://www.china918.cn/news/suopei/xisonghj/2010/0513/498.html[61] Ibid.
[62] http://www.jca.apc.org/hanaokajiken/eng%20provisions.htm, accessed 5/1/2010[63] http://www.china918.cn/news/suopei/xisonghj/2010/0510/497.html[64] http://www.china918.cn/news/suopei/2009/1023/322.html, accessed 5/1/2010[65] http://www.jca.apc.org/hanaokajiken/eng%20provisions.htm[66] Ibid.
[67] http://www.china918.cn/news/suopei/2009/1023/322.html[68] Miki Y. Ishikida, Toward Peace: War Responsibility, Postwar Compensation, and Peace
Movements and Education in Japan (NE: Center for US-Japan Comparative Social Studies,2005) 43[69] http://www.hr-china.org/human/2010-05/10/content_3504418.htm, accessed 5/24/2010[70] http://www.jetro.go.jp/en/news/releases/20100217809-news, accessed 5/30/2010[71] http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/xwfw/s2510/2535/t315036.htm
On occasions when queried about the Chinese forced labor issue, the Chinese Foreign Ministry
has spoken out and asked Japan to face squarely its unresolved war legacy. For example, when
responding to the Japan Supreme Court's 2007 ruling, the Ministry spokesperson said on April
29, 2007, "The conscription of the forced and enslaved labour is a grave crime committed by
Japanese militarism against the Chinese people. It is also an existing major human rights issue
yet to be properly addressed. China has requested Japan to properly handle relevant issues in an
attitude responsible for history."Lee: Toward Reconciliation

139

http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/xwfw/s2510/2535/t628660.htm
The same words were repeated again on November 23, 2009, when the spokesperson was asked
about another verdict on Chinese forced labor at Sakata port, Yamagata prefecture.
http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/xwfw/s2510/2511/t335373.htm
The Ministry has also remarked on Japan's other unresolved war legacies. Regarding the issue of
Comfort Women, for example, the Ministry spokesperson said on June 30, 2007, "The positionof China on the "comfort women" issue is consistent and clear-cut. The conscription of "comfort
women" is one of the grave crimes committed by the Japanese militarism against the people ofthe invaded countries including China during the Second World War. We request the Japanese
government to listen to the just appeal of the international community, properly and earnestly
handle the issue left over from history in an attitude responsible for history."[72] http://www.japanfocus.org/-Arimitsu-Ken/3256
Ken Arimitsu wrote in the companion piece in Kang Jian et al., (November 23, 2009), that"Clarifying Japan's national responsibility and securing the necessary redress funding will be asure step towards an age of trust and peace-building."
http://news.163.com/10/0428/10/65BOH53I000146BD.html
Recognizing that the path to litigation is closed, Deng Jianguo, the head of the Attorneys
Association for Forced Labor Issues is quoted as having remarked "We feel it is time for theJapanese Government to speak up," noting the only way to resolve the problem now is throughpolitics.

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Rejected by All Plaintiffs: Failure of the Nishimatsu-Shinanogawa “Settlement” with
Chinese Forced Laborers in Wartime Japan
Kang Jian[1]Introduced by William Underwood
Introduction
Japanese lawyers and activists supporting compensation lawsuits for Chinese forced labor in
wartime Japan once called Chinese attorney Kang Jian the “window.” The term acknowledged
Kang’s pivotal role in coordinating between plaintiffs typically located in the Chinesecountryside and Japanese legal teams pressing claims on their behalf in a dozen courtrooms
across Japan over the past decade.
However, the close cooperation between Kang and the Japanese Lawyers Group for Chinese
War Victims' Compensation Claims broke down in April 2010, at least temporarily, following theout-of-court compensation agreement by Nishimatsu Construction Co. with forced laborers fromits Shinanogawa worksite in Niigata. Late in the process of hammering out the settlement fundworth 128 million yen (about $1.28 million), the five plaintiffs’ Japanese lawyers began
negotiating with Nishimatsu on behalf of the larger group of Shinanogawa victims who had notparticipated in litigation. Flanked by Kang, these five plaintiffs rejected the Nishimatsu pact at apress conference in Beijing the day after it was finalized in Tokyo.
Attorney Kang in the article below severely criticizes the twin pillars of the NishimatsuShinanogawa accord: the Japan Supreme Court’s ruling in 2007 that the 1972 treaty between
Japan and China extinguished the right of Chinese citizens to seek war-related damages, andNishimatsu’s insistence that it bears no legal liability for wartime forced labor. The article alsosuggests deeper questions about the justice of group settlements for historical wrongdoing that
include symbolic compensation to victims who have not agreed with settlement terms in advance.
Kang raised similar objections in a previous Asia-Pacific Journal article about Nishimatsu’s
first voluntary settlement last October with Chinese laborers from its Yasuno worksite inHiroshima, following one of the few lawsuits in which neither Kang nor the main Japaneselawyers group was involved. (See Redress Crossroads in Japan: Decisive Phase in Campaigns toCompensate Korean and Chinese Wartime Forced Laborers for recent developments involving
forced labor redress for Chinese, Koreans and Allied POWs.)
The reparations claim for Chinese forced laborers remains particularly compelling andpotentially resolvable. Many victims were farmers abducted from their fields by Japanesesoldiers in the final two years of the war, and then taken to Japan for harsh labor at corporateowned worksites with fatality rates of up to 50 percent. There were 38,935 workers according todetailed records that were secretly produced by the Japanese government in 1946, and thensuppressed or destroyed once the very real threat of widespread war crimes prosecutions had
blown over. The 35 companies involved received postwar indemnification payments from thestate for losses supposedly incurred, even though wages were almost never paid during the war.
Less than 1,000 former workers are believed to be alive today and their identities (if not in allcases exact locations) are well known.

Kang: Rejected by All Plaintiffs

141

Most significantly, Japanese courts in recent years have established the forcible, illegal natureof the Chinese labor program beyond any doubt, and ruled that it was jointly carried out by theJapanese state and industrial sector. Prior to the “death-knell” decision by the Japan Supreme
Court in 2007, lower courts usually let the government and corporations off the legal hook on
the respective grounds of state immunity and time limits for filing claims. Yet even in rejecting
lawsuits Japanese judges on multiple occasions recommended that non-judicial avenues ofredress be explored, while four actual courtroom victories infused Chinese forced labor redressefforts with a rare sense of legal momentum.
The Tokyo District Court in July 2001 ordered the state to pay the family of Liu Lianren for the
13 years he spent in hiding after he escaped from a Hokkaido mine just before the war ended.
The Fukuoka District Court in April 2002 described Mitsui & Co.’s conduct as “evil” andordered the company to compensate plaintiffs. The Niigata District Court in March 2004 foundboth the state and the transport company Rinko Co. liable for damages. The Hiroshima High
Court in July 2004 ordered Nishimatsu to compensate plaintiffs from the Yasuno site.
The last was the ruling overturned by the Supreme Court on treaty-based grounds, ensuring thatneither the Japanese government nor the companies will ever be required by Japanese courts topay damages to Chinese claimants. It was a highly orthodox and largely expected decision by the
top court, even if the claims waiver language in Japan’s 1972 treaty with China was (for reasons
related to Japan’s 1952 treaty with Taiwan) more ambiguous than that found in treaties with theAllied nations in 1951 or with South Korea in 1965.
Basically all of the myriad legal claims against Japan arising from war and colonialism havenow been dismissed by the top courts in Japan and/or claimants’ own countries, reflecting thenation-centric interpretations of international law that currently prevail. This means that war
redress demands have per force moved into the political, economic and moral arenas, withlegislative action having emerged within an ongoing global trend as the most effective means ofrepairing past injustices.
In the case of Chinese forced labor, the best way forward might be for the generally ambivalent
Chinese government to bring more pressure to bear on the Japanese government and thecorporate users of forced labor that are becoming increasingly dependent on the Chinese
market. If China were to permit compensation lawsuits to proceed in Chinese courts, forexample, the public relations fallout would probably send major companies like Mitsubishi
Materials to the negotiation table even if the suits were never actually adjudicated. Mitsubishi istoday a prime target of attorneys and citizens groups in both China and Japan, as the firm has
indicated its willingness to settle Chinese claims on the condition the Japanese government
participates in the process.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, meanwhile, announced in July 2010 that it would open
compensation talks with Korean women deceived as teenagers into working without pay at its
wartime aircraft factory in Nagoya. That surprise move in the teishintai (or “volunteer corps”)
case came only after many years of grassroots activism, first by Japanese and later by Koreans,as well as direct involvement by Seoul authorities in the form of the Truth Commission on
Forced Mobilization Under Japanese Imperialism. Mitsubishi’s resistance to addressing theteishintai matter was finally broken by a petition signed by more than 130,000 South Korean
citizens and 100 members of the National Assembly – along with a credible threat of organized
consumer boycotts.

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Japanese attorney Takahashi Toru has told The Asia-Pacific Journal that the Lawyers Group for
Chinese War Victims' Compensation Claims plans to meet soon with the 20 or so still-extant
companies that used Chinese forced labor, to encourage them to follow the Nishimatsu example.
Two firms, Hazama Co. and Tekken Construction Co., were co-defendants with Nishimatsu (andthe Japanese state) in the Shinanogawa lawsuit, but have taken no steps toward reconciliation. It
is hoped that a critical mass of these Japanese companies will eventually recognize that
resolution of the Chinese forced labor issue is in their corporate self-interest, and that they willin turn help persuade the Japanese government to set up a comprehensive state-industry
compensation mechanism just as Germany did in 2000.
Prior to assuming the reins of power one year ago, the Democratic Party of Japan had
established a party subcommittee for addressing the Chinese forced labor problem, along with
subcommittees for issues involving Allied POWs and the repatriation of war-related remains.
The DPJ also campaigned on proactively settling historical matters that had festered during ahalf-century of rule by the Liberal Democratic Party. But meaningful legislative or
administrative action on forced labor by Japan will not occur unless the DPJ, which fared
poorly in July’s national elections, can consolidate its political position, or in the absence ofsignificant domestic and/or international pressure on the issue.
Given both the Japan Supreme Court ruling and the German precedent, future Japanesemeasures concerning Chinese forced labor, at the state or corporate level, will almost surely becouched in moral and humanitarian—not legal—terms. Upcoming agreements likely will be
explicitly premised on the April 2007 ruling and a denial of legal liability by the Japanese side,and it is the inclusion of these premises in the Nishimatsu-Shinanogawa deal that is Kang Jian’scentral objection in the article that follows. The reparations road ahead may, however, involve
both Japanese government creation of a framework for settlement and corporate payments tovictims.
Kang’s voice is that of a ground-floor participant and major figure in a transnational movement
and legal process now approaching a decisive stage. Her important role of many years infighting for justice for Chinese forced laborers, and her influential position in Chinese legal
circles, entitle her views to a respectful hearing. –William Underwood**************************On April 26, 2010, Japan's Nishimatsu Construction Corporation (hereafter called Nishimatsu)
and descendants of a number of Chinese victims of wartime forced labor at the Shinanogawa
worksite in Japan signed an out-of-court settlement agreement. Some media phrased this action
as "Nishimatsu arrived at a settlement with the Chinese forced laborer plaintiffs", or "Nishimatsu
will pay damages to 183 Chinese victims of forced labor".
The truth is that all the plaintiffs of the Nishimatsu-Shinanogawa forced labor lawsuit in Japan,
who were confirmed by both Nishimatsu and the plaintiffs' Japanese attorneys in June 2009 as
the representatives to negotiate with the company, did not sign any settlement agreement with
Nishimatsu. The root cause for this are: (a) Nishimatsu insisted to state in the content of the
Nishimatsu-Shinanogawa Settlement Agreement[2] that "Chinese people's right to claim had been
waived", but did not allow the plaintiffs to express side by side in the Settlement Agreement thatthey could not accept this wrong viewpoint; (b) In order to make clear its unyielding position of
not taking any legal liability, Nishimatsu deliberately uses the term "atonement money (償い金)"

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to ambiguously name the damages that they should have paid to the Chinese victims; and (c)Moreover, Nishimatsu unreasonably requires those who accept the "settlement" to bear hereafter
the obligation of ensuring that the corporation will be immune from any future liability from anyother parties for this case. This article discusses these and other shortcomings of theunacceptable "settlement" in detail.
The position of rejecting the NishimatsuShinanogawa Settlement Agreement by all
plaintiffs is supported by many concerned
individuals and organizations including Canada
ALPHA (Association for Learning and
Preserving the History of WWII in Asia).[3]1. Initiation of the settlement for NishimatsuShinanogawa forced laborer lawsuit
Han Yinglin (deceased on June 7, 2010), Hou
Zhenhai (deceased), Guo Zhen (deceased), Li
The five plaintiffs in the Shinanogawa lawsuit[4]
against Nishimatsu, along with heirs of two other Shu (deceased), and Li Xiang (deceased) are
victims, announce their opposition to thefive of the victims of wartime forced labor whocompensation pact at a Beijing press conference on were abducted to Nishimatsu's Shinanogawa
April 27. (photo courtesy of Kang Jian)
worksite in Niigata Prefecture of Japan for hardlabor in 1944. At the Tokyo District Court on
September 18, 1997, they sued the Japanese government, Nishimatsu, Hazama Co. and Tekken
Construction Co. for abduction and enslavement, demanding that the defendants openly
apologize to the Chinese victims in both Chinese and Japanese media and pay each plaintiff
damages of 20 million yen.
On March 11, 2003, the Tokyo District Court made the judgment of the first trial. The Court did
not verify the facts of perpetration and dismissed the claim of the plaintiffs on the ground of
statutory time limit.
The plaintiffs appealed immediately. On June 16, 2006, the Tokyo High Court made thejudgment of the second trial. The court verified in detail the facts of victimization presented byeach of the plaintiffs and the tortuous acts jointly committed by the State of Japan and theJapanese corporations, in which they abducted and enslaved the Chinese victims of forced labor.
The plaintiffs' claim, however, was dismissed again on the ground of statutory time limit.
The plaintiffs then appealed to the Supreme Court of Japan. On June 15, 2007, the Second Petty
Bench of the Supreme Court summarily dismissed the appeal of the plaintiffs without citing any
legal grounds.
In 2009, senior officials of Nishimatsu were investigated by Japanese authorities for illegal
political contributions and the senior management was then reorganized. In consideration of thecorporation's business strategy and other factors such as improvement of its public image,
Nishimatsu expressed in May 2009 its wish to resolve the historical issue by settling out of courtwith the Chinese victims of forced labor at its Shinanogawa worksite (as well as victims from theseparate Yasuno worksite). The Chinese victims responded positively to this. In June 2009, theauthor went to Tokyo in the capacity of agent for the Chinese plaintiffs from Shinanogawa and,

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together with the Japanese lawyers who represented the Chinese plaintiffs, negotiated with
Nishimatsu.
At that time, the Nishimatsu representatives indicated that they would handle this case following
the Hanaoka "settlement" model. The author unambiguously expressed that the Hanaoka"settlement" model should not be used because the Hanaoka "settlement" was characterized by
the following features: the Kajima Corporation that enslaved the Chinese forced labor victims at
its Hanaoka worksite evaded the facts of perpetration, evaded its responsibility, gave charitable"relief" to the Chinese forced labor victims to terminate its legal liability, and crowned thecharitable relief fund with the laurel of "Friendship Fund". In addition, the Hanaoka Settlement
Agreement contains a provision that inappropriately restricts the rights of any third party,
including those who refuse to accept this "settlement", to claim damages from Kajima, theperpetrating corporation.
As the Nishimatsu-Shinanogawa settlement negotiation stemmed from the lawsuit claims fordamages by the plaintiffs, both parties established the principle at the initial stage of negotiationthat the plaintiffs in the litigation be the representatives of the victims' side throughout thenegotiation.

Chinese-language materials used to rally support for the strong redress claim
stemming from Chinese forced labor. The man at left worked at the
Nishimatsu Yasuno site, while the man at right was pressed into unpaid service
for Mitsui & Co. (photo courtesy of Kang Jian)

A few months later, when proposing the settlement provisions, Nishimatsu insisted on includingin the settlement agreement the wrong judgment made on April 27, 2007, by the Supreme Court
of Japan. In that landmark ruling, the court held that the Chinese people's right to claim fordamages had been waived in 1972, yet it also stated there is an expectation that the Chinese
plaintiffs be given appropriate relief. Nishimatsu has taken this ruling as the premise for making
a settlement with the Chinese victims of forced labor.
As representatives of the Chinese forced labor victims of the Shinanogawa worksite at thenegotiation, all the plaintiffs made clear that the wrong conclusion derived from the unilateralinterpretation of the China-Japan Joint Communique of 1972 by the Supreme Court of Japan
should not be written into the Settlement Agreement. In compromise and to allow the opposite
positions of the two sides on this issue to be expressed, the plaintiffs proposed that the Chinese
victims' position of not accepting that "Chinese people's right to claim had been waived" should

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also be written into the same provision of the Settlement Agreement. Another proposed option
was moving this controversial content from the Settlement Agreement to the Confirmation Items
document. Nishimatsu rejected the plaintiffs' proposals categorically.
2. Nishimatsu's intention to insist that "Chinese people's right to claim had been waived"
as the premise for settlement
The Chinese victims of Japan's war of aggression against China brought over 20 legal claims fordamages, one after the other, to Japanese courts against the Japanese government andcorporations. The Japanese courts that undertook the trial of these cases had made many rulings
already before April 27, 2007, but none of these judgments ruled that the Chinese people's rightto claim had been waived.
On April 27, 2007, the Supreme Court of Japan made a ruling (hereafter called the 4/27 ruling)on the Nishimatsu-Yasuno forced labor case, deciding that the government of China, on signing
the China-Japan Joint Communique, had waived fully the right to claim, including that of theChinese nationals.
On the same day that the Supreme Court of Japan made the ruling, the spokesperson of theChinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a firmly worded statement expressing explicitly that"the interpretation of the China-Japan Joint Communique made by the Supreme Court of Japanis illegal and invalid."
After the 4/27 ruling was made, some Chinese and Japanese scholars of law and history studied
and discussed the court ruling. They arrived at a common understanding that it is an obvious
violation of the basic principle of international laws for the Supreme Court of Japan to use the
San Francisco Peace Treaty, to which China was not a party, as its framework to unilaterallyinterpret the China-Japan Joint Communique and to rule that "Chinese people's right to claim fordamages from Japan had been waived". Thus, the court's conclusion that "Chinese people's rightto claim for damages had been waived" cannot be established. How to correct this wrong rulingwill become a major issue from now on for both China and Japan in relation to finding ways totruly resolve the wartime legacy.
In June 2007, when the Supreme Court of Japan dismissed the appeal of the plaintiffs of the
Nishimatsu-Shinanogawa forced labor case, it did not give any reason and only simply stated in a
few lines that the appeal was dismissed. The verdict did not mention anything at all about"Chinese people's right to claim had been waived". Hence, the ruling of the second trial at theTokyo High Court on the Nishimatsu-Shinanogawa forced labor case came into effect. In its
verdict, the Tokyo High Court affirmed in detail the facts about the sufferings of Han Yinglin
and the other four plaintiffs, affirmed also the illegal acts committed against the Chinese forcedlabor victims by the Japanese government, Nishimatsu and other perpetrating corporations. This
court dismissed the victims' claim on the ground of exceeding the time limitations and the repose
period for filing suit, but it did not rule that the Chinese people's right to claim had been waived.
The Japanese lawyers who represent the plaintiffs also agree with the above analysis of thecourse of events.
If Nishimatsu really has the sincerity to make a settlement with the Chinese victims of forcedlabor, and if the company must cite a Japanese court ruling as a preamble of the Settlement
Agreement, then the logical choice should be the verdict of the second trial made by the Tokyo

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High Court. Nishimatsu, however, insisted on quoting the 4/27 ruling, which was not specificallymade for the Shinanogawa case. The reason for this choice is self-explanatory. It is precisely
because this 4/27 ruling decided that the "Chinese people's right to claim damages from Japan
had been waived".
The Yasuno Settlement Agreement signed on October 23, 2009, between Nishimatsu and some
Chinese forced labor victims and their descendants of the Yasuno worksite also included similar
content asserting that "Chinese people's right to claim damages had been waived".
Nishimatsu insisted to insert also in the Shinanogawa Settlement Agreement the 4/27 ruling. Its
intention is to forcibly establish a "settlement" model on the premise that "Chinese people's rightto claim damages had been waived". This "settlement" model is to help the Japanese side toevade legal liabilities regarding their serious violations of human rights and international laws.
This "settlement" model will also produce another effect: Although various spokespersons of theChinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs repeatedly denounced the wrong rulings made by thedifferent levels of Japanese courts on or after April 27, 2007, the fact that there are Chinese
victims who accept settlement agreements based on this model implies that they accept thewrong rulings regarding "Chinese people's right to claim damages had been waived". The
construction of this reality will inevitably have adverse impacts on the resolution of war legacy
issues.
3. Plaintiffs being involuntarily and forcibly included as part of the "Settlement" definedby Nishimatsu
Ignoring the principle of reciprocity, Nishimatsu insisted on writing into the Settlement
Agreement that "Chinese people's right to claim had been waived" and objected to the inclusionof the plaintiffs' position of not accepting the 4/27 ruling in the same provision. In the spirit ofcompromise, the plaintiffs then proposed moving all such contents to the Confirmation Items
document, but even this rightful demand was rejected by Nishimatsu. According to the Japaneselawyers of the plaintiffs, the President of Nishimatsu had explicitly stated that not a single wordof the Settlement Agreement (the version finalized in December 2009) would be changed, andthat the lawyers could write whatever they liked in the Confirmation Items because after all the
President would not sign on the Confirmation Items document. This confession of the President
indicates that Nishimatsu has no intention to truly reflect on the facts of perpetration or tosincerely apologize. It also shows that Nishimatsu knows the difference in terms of legal status
between the Settlement Agreement and the Confirmation Items document.[5]On March 22, 2010, all the plaintiffs who had been confirmed as the representative body at the
beginning of the negotiation with Nishimatsu, issued a statement rejecting the insincere
Settlement Agreement offered by Nishimatsu. At the same time, the plaintiffs' statement
expressed explicitly,"If your corporation signs this Settlement Agreement with other Chinese forced labor victims ortheir descendants of the Nishimatsu-Shinanogawa worksite, then it should state clearly in the
Settlement Agreement that the proposed "solution" for the forced laborers at the Shinanogawa
worksite does not include us in terms of the number of victims to be paid and the amount ofmoney involved, and also deduct the sum meant for us from the total amount of the so-calledKang: Rejected by All Plaintiffs

147‘atonement money'; otherwise we shall take it as a new violation of our legal rights andinterests, and will hold your corporation accountable for such deed."
Nevertheless, when Nishimatsu disclosed information about the "settlement" to the Japanese
media on April 17, 2010, it continued to include the plaintiffs as part of its "settlement"
arrangements.
As the agent of the Chinese plaintiffs, the author therefore issued a protest letter to Nishimatsu
on April 19, 2010, but the corporation has not made any response. In the Settlement Agreement
signed on April 26, 2010, Nishimatsu continued to include the plaintiffs who had already openly
stated their rejection of this Settlement Agreement in its "settlement" arrangements. While
Nishimatsu has yet to resolve its wartime forced labor issue, it violates de facto the human rightsof the Chinese forced labor victims once again.
Nishimatsu has pushed aggressively thisproblematic "settlement" model, deliberately
creating a false impression that the legacy issueof abducting and enslaving Chinese forced labor
victims has achieved a "complete resolution".
The purpose is to buy out its legal liability forsevere human rights violation with a small sumof money. Once some Chinese victims accept
and sign on to such a "settlement", despite thefact that these signatories do not haveauthorization from all other victims, Nishimatsu
will regard "Chinese people's right to claim had
been waived" to be an established fact and aChinese news coverage of the Nishimatsu"complete resolution" of the issue to be achieved.
Shinanogawa settlement and its rejection by
This is the effect of such a "settlement" model.
plaintiffs involved in the lengthy litigation.
From a legal point of view, unless one is
authorized, one has no authority to sign on behalf of others. However, this principle is violated in
the Nishimatsu-Shinanogawa "settlement" as the victims who have explicitly rejected theSettlement Agreement and those who have not yet been located are all involuntarily included in
the binding provisions of this Settlement Agreement. Their claim issues are also unilaterally
regarded as resolved within the "complete resolution". Such a deed is in obvious violation of law
and blatantly disrespects the human rights of these victims.
Nishimatsu dodges with ease its legal liability and historical responsibility of severe humanrights violation by paying a petty sum of less than 50,000 Chinese Yuan Renminbi to each victimof the Shinanogawa worksite or their heirs. The Chinese victims' side, on the other hand, pays aheavy price of losing the right to legal recourse henceforth as stipulated in Clause 6-1 of the
Nishimatsu-Shinanogawa Settlement Agreement, that "... the victims' side gives up all the rights
to claim from the appellant (i.e. Nishimatsu) in Japan as well as in other countries and regions".
4. The "relief (救濟)" in the Settlement Agreement is not relief under legal rights
The preamble of the Nishimatsu-Shinanogawa Settlement Agreement cites the 4/27 ruling of theSupreme Court of Japan. The Court ruled that Chinese people's legal right to claim had been
waived. The Court, at the same time, opined, "It is expected that the concerned parties, including

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the appellant (i.e. Nishimatsu), will make an effort to provide relief for the losses suffered by thevictims in this case".
According to the original text of the 4/27 ruling, the term "relief" mentioned in the verdict isobviously NOT implying relief in the judicial sense. In the legal domain, "judicial relief" refers
to relief as the right of the litigant. For the term "relief (救濟)" outside the judicial domain, it
refers to "helping people in want or living in a disaster area with money or materials", according
to the Modern Chinese Dictionary.
The 4/27 ruling of the Supreme Court of Japan already concluded clearly that legally the Chinese
people had lost their right to claim, implying that they had thus also lost the right to judicial
relief in court. Hence, the type of "relief", as opined by the Court, from Nishimatsu and otherconcerned parties for the Chinese forced labor victims certainly does not refer to judicial relief.
Thus, the meaning of the term "relief (救濟)" used in the Settlement Agreement can only be
relief of a charitable nature.
5. "Atonement Money (償い金)" is not "Damages (賠償金)""Atonement money" (償い金) is not a legal term. In Japanese, the term is of daily usage with abroad connotation, having emotional hues and the meaning of repaying indebtedness.
"Damages" (賠償金) is a legal term with clear connotation, meaning to assume liability bymaking payment to the victim. This term in both Japanese kanji (賠償金) and traditional Chinesecharacters (賠償金) is identical and has essentially the same meaning.
In 1995, under pressure from different quarters, the government of Japan set up the Asian
Women's Fund to handle the issue of "comfort women" forced into sexual servitude by theJapanese military.
Based on the Japanese government's position that the issue of "comfort women" was alreadyresolved in the peace treaties made by Japan with the victims' countries, the money paid to thevictims should not be termed as damages or compensation. Hence, the term "consolation money(慰問金)" was used in the tentative plan released to the public through the media in August
1994. This term was repudiated by various stakeholders. In order to uphold its position of notassuming the liability, the Japanese government sought out another term, "atonement money (償い金)", and used it to replace "consolation money". Thereafter, the term "atonement money"
appeared many times in the planning and promotion documents of the Asian Women's Fundissued by the then-Chief Cabinet Secretary and other top politicians.
In the Asian Women's Fund, the Japanese government ambiguously shifted its liability frompaying damages to giving out "humanitarian" aid, including medical assistance, to the victims.
Such a shift reflected the charitable relief hue of the Fund. The term "atonement money",according to the goals of the Asian Women's Fund, became the substitute term for "aid", and wasused frequently in the official documents of the Fund. It was exactly due to the insincerity of theJapanese government and its unwillingness to undertake liability that the Asian Women's Fundwas boycotted and criticized by the overwhelming majority of the victims and concernedorganizations in Asia. At present, the Fund has concluded its payouts and related activities.

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If Nishimatsu officials had the sincerity to makesettlement, to offer apology and pay damages to
the Chinese forced labor victims, why do they
not use the term "damages (賠償金)" that has thesame written characters in both Chinese andJapanese, and has the same and unambiguous
connotation in the two languages?
The term "atonement money" in the NishimatsuShinanogawa Settlement Agreement echoes the
purpose of citing the 4/27 ruling in the preambleof this Agreement. The purpose of insisting thatthe "Chinese people's right to claim damages had Letter sent by Chinese plaintiffs to Nishimatsu andthe plaintiffs' Japanese lawyers last March,
been waived" is to shirk the legal liability.
opposing the Shinanogawa settlement that wasHence, in provisions regarding payment to theconcluded the following month with other victims
Chinese victims, the Agreement vigorously
and descendants. (photo courtesy of Kang Jian)
avoided using the term "damages", a proper legal
term that implies undertaking liability.
Therefore, the term "atonement money (償い金)" viewed in the context of its intentional usage
in the Asian Women's Fund and in the Nishimatsu-Shinanogawa Settlement Agreement is,
without doubt, not "damages" as claimed by some supporters of this Settlement Agreement.
It is also worth mentioning that the legally valid version of the Settlement Agreement confirmedin the Tokyo Summary Court is the Japanese version, not the translated Chinese one. Therefore,
in the Chinese version as provided by the Japanese lawyers, the term "atonement money (償い金)" being translated as "damages (賠償金)" is misleading to Chinese readers.
6. Subsequent obligations for those who have accepted the "settlement" and also for theiragentsClause 6-2 of the Nishimatsu-Shinanogawa Settlement Agreement stipulated that "the otherparty (i.e. the Chinese forced labor victims and their descendants) and their agents...., from now
on have the responsibility, regardless of whether they have submitted the required document as
mentioned in Clause 5-7, to ensure that the appellant (i.e. Nishimatsu) would not have any
burden whenever anyone outside the other party makes a damage claim against the appellant."
The implication of Clause 6-2 of the Settlement Agreement is that from now on, wheneveranybody makes a damage claim against Nishimatsu regarding its enslavement of Chinese forcedlaborers (even though the person who makes the claim has not accepted this "settlement"), those
who have accepted this "settlement" and their agents will have the responsibility to comeforward to resolve this claim issue, making sure that Nishimatsu will not have any further
burden. In plain language, Nishimatsu has paid out a small sum of money to enlist some helping
hands.
In this provision (i.e. Clause 6-2), reference is made to Clause 5-7 which stipulates that the China
Human Rights Development Foundation has the obligation to explain the purpose of this"settlement" to those who request payment of the "atonement money". Clause 5-7 also states that
the Chinese victims who accept the "atonement money" have to sign two copies of the document

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acknowledging the purpose of the "settlement", and that one of the copies will be submitted to
Nishimatsu by the China Human Development Foundation.
7. Different Legal Status of the Settlement Agreement and the Confirmation Items
Document
Two documents arose from the Nishimatsu-Shinanogawa "settlement", the Settlement
Agreement signed by both parties (i.e. the President of Nishimatsu and some non-plaintiff
victims' heirs) and the Confirmation Items document signed only by the lawyers of Nishimatsu
and the Japanese lawyers, who were authorized to sign by the non-plaintiff victims anddescendants - even as the five actual plaintiffs whom the Japanese lawyers had been representing
refused to take part in the agreements. Similar arrangement was made in the case of the
Nishimatsu-Yasuno "settlement" on October 23, 2009.
Why are there two documents arising from one "settlement"? An analysis of the status and thelegal efficacy of the two documents is necessary.
Firstly, in terms of process and format, the Settlement Agreement was signed by Nishimatsu andsome descendants of some victim laborers, and was also verified by the Tokyo Summary Court.
The Confirmation Items, on the other hand, was signed only by the Japanese lawyers
commissioned by the respective parties, but was not verified by the Tokyo Summary Court.
Hence, the Settlement Agreement is a judicial
document and the Confirmation Items document
is not.
Secondly, in terms of contents, the Confirmation
Items list out the two parties' opposite positions
and their different understandings concerningsome critical contents of the Settlement
Agreement.
However, some parts of the statements made in
the Confirmation Items, in fact, exceed the
In Beijing last April at the office of attorney Kang stipulated meaning of the concerned provisions
Jian, far left, plaintiffs and family members in the in the Settlement Agreement. Moreover, in the
Settlement Agreement that was verified by the
Chinese forced labor lawsuit against Nishimatsu
discuss their rejection of the Shinanogawa pact.
Tokyo Summary Court, there is no mention(photo courtesy of Kang Jian)
about the status of the Confirmation Items
document in this "settlement" nor even about its
existence. Therefore, the legal efficacy of the Confirmation Items is highly questionable. Even if
both parties may ratify afterwards what their Japanese lawyers have done regarding theConfirmation Items, since the Confirmation Items document was not verified in the court, itslegal status is not comparable to the Settlement Agreement.
Obviously, in terms of format, the Settlement Agreement is in a superior position and theConfirmation Items document, which is in an inferior position, does not have the legal efficacy
that supersedes the Settlement Agreement.

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8. Conclusion
As agent of the Chinese plaintiffs, the author participated in many compensation lawsuitsbrought to the courts of Japan by victims of forced labor and "comfort women". In the course of
these litigations of more than ten years, having been in contact with hundreds of victims andlearned from their painful stories, I feel strongly the evils of the war that caused extremely
serious pain and suffering to the Chinese. Until now, the government of Japan and the concernedJapanese corporations have not yet undertaken their liability towards the victims. As an attorney,
I feel obliged to help the victims to realize their fundamental desires for defending their dignity
and human rights.
In the process of negotiation with Nishimatsu for almost a whole year, the Shinanogawa lawsuit
plaintiffs made huge efforts in attempting to reach a sincere settlement while upholding theirrightful position. Together with the author, they gave frank opinions, via their Japanese lawyers,
on the proposed settlement terms to Nishimatsu. For example, in the draft of the Shinanogawa
Settlement Agreement, Nishimatsu used similar wordings as in the Yasuno Settlement
Agreement to acknowledge its "historical responsibility". However, without putting this in thecontext of Nishimatsu's acts of enslaving the victimized Chinese laborers, such acknowledgment
becomes vague and empty.
With input from the plaintiffs and the author, Nishimatsu agreed to specify in Clause 1 of theSettlement Agreement the time when the violations occurred, i.e. "during World War II", and to
replace the term "labor" with "forced labor". For another example, the plaintiffs and the author
believed the name of the fund for settlement should reflect, to a certain extent, the gravity andliability of the serious human rights violations committed by Nishimatsu. However, Nishimatsu
at first proposed to name it as "Peace and Friendship Fund", the same name used in the Yasuno"settlement". We did not agree to follow the Yasuno "settlement" in having the term "friendship"in the name of the fund. Instead, we proposed two options: (1) "Historical Responsibility Fund"or (2) "Peace Fund". Eventually Nishimatsu accepted naming the fund as "Peace Fund".
In the Nishimatsu-Shinanogawa Settlement Agreement, there are words like "apology" and "deepand profound retrospection". As Guan Jianqiang, Professor of International Law at East China
University of Political Science and Law, pointed out in his March 2010 article, "Suggestions
Made Before the Finalization of the Shinanogawa Settlement":"Although the apology of the Japanese corporation is stated in the Agreement, it lacks an
explanation of why the Japanese corporation apologizes. In other words, without adding in theapology provision statements like: ‘the corporation enslaved the victims and obtained benefits
from doing so...', any apology made to the victims is really confusing in logic."[6]Around the time of the Nishimatsu Yasuno and Nishimatsu Shinanogawa Settlements, thesupporters of those "settlements" pointed out that the surviving Chinese victims were getting
senior in age and it would be of comfort to surviving victims if they could receive somemonetary "compensation" while still alive.
However, the author feels these supporters are confused about a principle: that the violations
perpetrated by the concerned Japanese corporations have caused serious and permanent harm to
the bodies and minds of the victims. So unquestionably the perpetrators owe the responsibility to
pay damages to the victims. Yet if their reasoning becomes that of only providing some

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monetary assistance for the victims, they can realize this simply by fund-raising from the public.
So it is wrong to use such reasoning to give up the rightful demand for damages from theperpetrating corporations. Monetary assistance and fulfilling responsibility to pay damages are
two approaches with two distinct and different implications. These two approaches should not be
confused, otherwise the perpetrators can easily evade their liability.

Attorney Kang Jian, far right, at the Foreign
Correspondents' Club of Japan in 2007. To the leftof Kang is Thekla Lit of the activist group Canada
ALPHA. To the left of Lit is a survivor of Chinese
forced labor in Japan. (photo courtesy of Kang Jian)

Upon learning that the Nishimatsu-Shinanogawa plaintiffs rejected publicly the insincere"settlement" agreement, concerned Chinese people, including overseas Chinese, are deeply
touched. Despite their own not-so-well-off financial situations, these surviving victims or theirheirs have stood their ground to defend human rights, their own dignity, and China's national
dignity. To show support and respect for these plaintiffs, some concerned Chinese individuals
and groups came forward to offer financial assistance. Such act is a realization of the universal
desire to uphold human rights, to offer mutual respect and support in a united struggle against
injustice. This generous act of supporting struggle against injustice is by nature totally different
from Nishimatsu's offer of charitable relief, cloaked under the name of "atonement money". Such
generosity from the broader community also proves that it is not impossible to solicit public
donations to financially assist the victims in their struggle to demand damages from theperpetrators.
There are those who feel the amount granted to each Nazi slave laborer under the German
Foundation "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future" is somewhat lower than what wasoffered by Nishimatsu's settlement funds, so the fact that the former fund was praised while thelatter was criticized appears to be unfair to the Japanese side.
The author would like to point out that the above opinion holders might have overlooked thelegislations and the series of actions postwar Germany has been undertaking, which reflect
Germany's resolve to face history and to deal with its war responsibilities squarely. In these
aspects, Germany is far ahead of Japan, as agreed by the international community. The primaryconcern in this Nishimatsu "settlement" is its premise-that Nishimatsu evades its liability andoffers "atonement money" that is tinted with hues of charity. Thus the Nishimatsu "settlement"

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fund cannot be compared to the Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation ofGermany.
The Japanese lawyers representing the Chinese forced labor plaintiffs in nearly all the damage
claim lawsuits suggested setting up a foundation for comprehensively settling all compensation
issues regarding Chinese forced labor. As the Chinese lawyer involved in the Shinanogawa
lawsuit and numerous other compensation lawsuits brought to the courts of Japan by victims offorced labor, the author and various plaintiffs supported this suggestion. So on November 5,
2008, 103 plaintiffs of Chinese forced labor lawsuits officially sent to the Japanese Governmentand concerned corporations the "Proposal on the Complete Resolution for the Issue of Abductionof Chinese People to Japan for Forced Labor during Wartime".[7] The thrust of this proposal is toseek an out-of-court settlement and to set up a foundation to settle once and for all the issues
around the severe human rights violations involved in the abduction of Chinese people to Japanfor forced labor.
The author does not deny that out-of-court settlement is one of the means to resolve issues ofwartime legacy. While this proposed settlement implies certain compromise, it does not sacrifice
basic principle. Being the liable parties, the Japanese Government and the concerned
corporations should face the historical facts squarely, undertake the liability, apologize to theChinese victims, and pay compensation-this is the uncompromisable principle within asettlement.
Undoubtedly both the Japanese government and the concerned corporations should sincerely
apologize and compensate the forced labor victims for the brutal mistreatment during theircaptivity. However, Nishimatsu only offered some money of charitable relief hue to the victims.
This perfunctory and casual approach adopted by Nishimatsu to end its liabilities for such grave
human rights violations is not acceptable because it totally contradicts the plaintiffs' original
objective in the damages claim.
Since the Nishimatsu "settlements" have so many problems, the Chinese forced labor victim
plaintiffs in 13 compensation lawsuits in Japan assume the core member roles and have united
with other non-plaintiff forced labor victims and their descendents to form the Federation of
WWII Chinese Forced Laborers. The objective of the Federation is to defend the legal rights of
the nearly 40,000 Chinese abducted to Japan for forced labor, and to steadfastly demand thatJapan and the concerned corporations make sincere apology and compensations.
In addition, the International Labor Organization of the United Nations has repeatedly issued
statements urging the Japanese government to offer apology and compensation to victims of its
forced labor and military sexual slavery ("comfort women") during wartime.
Since 2007, the United States of America, the Netherlands, Canada, the European Union, andsome two dozen municipalities in Japan have passed resolutions urging Japan to apologize to andcompensate the "comfort women" victims. Recently I learned that the State of California, whilecalling for tenders for its High Speed Railway construction, plans to include a provision that thecompanies tendering will be checked for its activities during WWII.
The above series of events prove that the international community has never given up its concern
about the atrocities committed by Japan during WWII and Japan's war crime responsibilities.

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Such atrocities and responsibilities will not be forgotten nor disappear with time: the only option
for Japan is to sincerely apologize and compensate its victims.
Kang Jian is an attorney and Director of Beijing Fang Yuan Law Firm, member of theConstitutional Human Rights Committee of the All Chinese Lawyers Association (ACLA),
member of the Disciplinary Committee of Beijing Lawyers Association, Deputy Director of the
ACLA Steering Committee of Compensation Litigations Against Japan for WWII Chinese
Victims, and Executive Director of the Investigation Committee on Atrocities Committed Against
Former Chinese "Comfort Women". As agent for former Chinese "comfort women" and forcedlaborers, Kang Jian participated in a total of 13 damage claim lawsuits against the Japanese
government and Japanese corporations in the courts of Tokyo, Fukuoka, Niigata, Gunma, Kyoto,
Sapporo, Yamagata and elsewhere since 1995.
William Underwood researches ongoing reparations movements for forced labor in wartime
Japan.
This is the English translation of an updated version of Kang's article originally written in
Chinese. The updated article was prepared for The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. The
English translation was provided by Thekla Lit, Co-chair of Canada ALPHA (Association for
Learning and Preserving the History of WWII in Asia).
Endnotes[1] This article is a revised version of my previous article entitled A "Settlement" Based on thePremise of the Right to Claim Being Waived - Comment on the Nishimatsu-Shinanogawa"Settlement" published in China Legal Daily and People's Daily OnlinePeopl on May 18, 2010.
[2] For the Nishimatsu-Shinanagawa Settlement Agreement refer to Appendix A for the Japaneseversion and Appendix B for the translated Chinese version as provided by the Japanese lawyers
representing the Chinese victims.
[3] Refer to Appendix E - Statement issued by Canada ALPHA on March 25, 2010.
[4] Besides Han Yinglin, the other 4 forced labor plaintiffs all passed away during the course of
the litigation. Their descendants who inherited their legal status as plaintiffs were formallyrecognized by the Japan courts.
[5] For Confirmation Items refer to Appendix C for the Japanese version and Appendix D for thetranslated Chinese version as provided by the Japanese lawyers representing the Chinese victims.
[6] For Prof. Guan Jianqiang's article refer to Appendix F.
[7] For the "Proposal on the Complete Resolution of the Issue of Abduction of the Chinese
People to Japan for Forced Labor during Wartime" refer to Appendix G.
The online version of this article contains seven Japanese-language appendices in PDF
format.

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Topics of Historical Memory in JapanWar Crimes“War Crimes, Atrocities, and State Terrorism”
Mark Selden
April 15, 2008
http://japanfocus.org/-Mark-Selden/2724“The Comfort Women Controversy: History and Testimony”
Yoshiko Nozaki
N.D.
http://japanfocus.org/-Yoshiko-Nozaki/2063“The Japanese Apology on the ‘Comfort Women’ Cannot Be Considered Official:
Interview with Congressman Michael Honda”
Kinue Tokudome
May 31, 2007
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Michael-Honda/2438“Biohazard: Unit 731 in Postwar Japanese Politics of National ‘Forgetfulness’”
Frederick R. Dickinson
October 12, 2007
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Frederick_R_-Dickinson/2543“The Hundred Head Contest: Reassessing the Nanjing Massacre”
Suzuki Chieko
December 12, 2003
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Suzuki-Chieko/1792
This section focuses on Japanese war crimes, beyond the act of war itself, that are at
the center of discussions about whether Japanese have adequately reflected on their war
responsibility. Mark Selden offers “a comparative framework for understanding war
atrocities and the ways in which they are remembered, forgotten and memorialized,”emphasizing the ubiquity and perseverance of these issues. He deals with the “politics ofdenial” in reference to both the Nanjing Massacre (1937-38) by Japan and the atomic
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of Tokyo by the United States ofAmerica. Selden emphasizes that nationalism often has “obfuscated, even eradicated,memories of the war crimes and atrocities committed by one’s own nation.” In this context,
he contrasts Japan and the U.S.A. to Germany, with the two former countries both strongly
resisting apology and compensations to the present day.
Yoshiko Nozaki and Kinue Tokudome delve further into this issue to discuss the“military comfort women”—forced labor in the form of sex slavery by the Japanesemilitary—and the question of apology and compensation for the victims. Neonationalists(and conservative historians) have argued that the oral testimony by the now-aged women
does not carry sufficient weight as authoritative historical sources and that written sources
are the only reliable basis for historical writing. Nozaki introduces the arguments ofThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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progressive and feminist historians, who advocate for oral testimonies as a way to establish
the history of the comfort women, or any other group of imprisoned people, and respectthem as historical actors. Tokudome also interviews California Congressman Mike Honda,
who has lobbied for a U.S. Congressional resolution demanding that Japan “formallyacknowledge, apologize, and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal
manner” for the comfort women. His move shows that the comfort women issue isreceiving broad attention in the international arena. Moving to another issue the Japanese
government has never formally addressed, Frederick Dickinson introduces the history of
Unit 731, an Army unit that conducted experiments with chemical and biological weapons
on prisoners of war (POWs). Lastly, Suzuki Chieko's article looks at the historiography andrecent court rulings revolving around the Nanjing Massacre, an event that conservative
Japanese politicians such as Ishihara Shintarô, the former longtime governor of Tokyo, andmore recently, Kawamura Takashi, the mayor of Nagoya, have insisted never took place.

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Japanese and American War Atrocities, Historical Memory and Reconciliation: WorldWar II to Today
Mark Selden
War Crimes, Atrocities and State Terrorism
The controversies that continue to swirl around the Nanjing Massacre, the military comfort
women, Unit 731 and other Japanese military atrocities rooted in colonialism and the Asia
Pacific War are critical not only to understanding the dynamics of war, peace, and terror in thelong twentieth century. They are also vital for understanding war memory and denial, with
implications for peace and regional accommodation in the Asia Pacific region and the US-Japan
relationship. [1]This article offers a comparative framework for understanding war atrocities and the ways inwhich they are remembered, forgotten and memorialized. It examines a number of high profile
atrocities in an effort to understand their character and the reasons why recognizing andaccepting responsibility for their actions have been so difficult. Neither committing atrocities nor
suppressing their memories is the exclusive property of a single nation. The issues examined
here begin with atrocities committed during the Asia Pacific War and continue to the present.
What explains the fact that Japanese denial and refusal to provide compensation to victims haslong been the subject of sharp domestic and international contention, while there has been
relatively little analysis of United States atrocities, less criticism or recrimination for thatnation’s commission and denial of atrocities, and still less demand for reparations? What are theconsequences of this difference for the two nations and the contemporary international relationsof the Asia Pacific?
Among the war crimes and atrocities committed in World War II, the Nanjing Massacre . . . or
Rape of Nanjing, or Nankin Daigyakusatsu, or Nankin Jiken (Japanese) or Nanjing Datusha(Chinese) . . . remains the most controversial. These different names signal alternative Japanese,
Chinese and international perceptions of the event: as “incident”, as “massacre”, as “rape”, as“massive butchery”.
The Nanjing Massacre is controversial not because the most basic facts are in doubt, although
historians continue to contest the number of deaths and the interpretation of certain events.
Rather it is controversial because of the shocking scale of the killing of Chinese civilians andprisoners of war in a single locale, because of the politics of denial, and because the relationshipbetween the massacre and the character of the wider war remains little understood despite theoutstanding research of Japanese and other scholars and journalists. [2]Japanese neonationalists deny the very existence of a massacre and successive postwar Japanese
governments have refused to accept responsibility for either the massacre or the wider war of
aggression in which ten to thirty million Chinese died, explaining why these issues remain
controversial. To understand why the Japanese government continues to fight this and other war
memory battles in ways that poison its relations not only with its Asian neighbors but also with
the United States and European nations requires reconsideration not only of contemporary
Japanese nationalism, but also of the Cold War power structure that the US set in place during
the occupation.

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The US insulated Japan from war responsibility, first by maintaining Hirohito on the throne andshielding him from war crimes charges, second by protecting the Japanese state from war
reparations claims from victims of colonialism, invasion, and atrocities, and finally by using its
troops and bases both to guarantee Japan’s defense and to isolate it from China, the Soviet
Union, and other US rivals.
Before turning to this issue, one other question should be posed: more than six decades since
Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War, by what right does an American critically address issues of the
Nanjing Massacre and Japan’s wartime atrocities? Stated differently, in the course of those six
decades US military forces have repeatedly violated international law and humanitarian ethics,
notably in Korea, Indochina, Iraq and Afghanistan. In the course of those decades, Japan has
never fought a war, although it has steadfastly backed the US in each of its wars. Yet Asian andglobal attention continues to focus on Japanese war atrocities and their denial, while paying little
attention to those committed and denied by the United States.
Attempts to gauge war atrocities and to understand the ways in which they are remembered andsuppressed, require the application of universal standards as articulated in the Nuremberg andTokyo trials. In an age of nationalism, it is particularly important to apply such standards to the
conduct of one’s own nation. The German case, to which I return below, is particularly
instructive. Germany, like Japan, was defeated by a US-led coalition, and the US played a keyrole in shaping institutions, war memories, and responses to war atrocities in both Germany andJapan. [3] Nevertheless, the outcomes in the two nations in the form of historical memory andreconciliation in the wake of war atrocities have differed sharply.
To unravel the most contentious memory wars in the Asia Pacific, I begin by offering acomparative framework for assessing Japanese and American war atrocities. I examine Japan’s
Nanjing Massacre and the American firebombing and atomic bombing of Japanese cities during
World War II as each nation’s signature atrocities. In each instance, I cast the issues in relation to
the wider conduct of the war, and in the American case consider the legacy of the bombing for
subsequent wars down to the present. At the center of the analysis is the assessment of theseexamples in light of principles of international law developed over many decades from the latenineteenth century, notably those enshrined in the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials, and the Geneva
Convention of 1949, that identify as acts of terrorism and crimes against humanity the slaughterof civilians and noncombatants by states and their militaries. [4] It is only by considering crimes
by the victors as well as the vanquished in the Asia Pacific War and other wars that it is possible
to lay to rest the ghosts of suppressed memories in order to build foundations for a peacefulcooperative order in the Asia Pacific.
But first, Nanjing.
The Nanjing Massacre and Structures of Violence in the Sino-Japanese War
Substantial portions of the Nanjing Massacre literature in English and Chinese—both thescholarship and the public debate—treat the event as emblematic of the wartime conduct of theJapanese, thereby essentializing the massacre as the embodiment of the Japanese character. In
the discussion that follows, I seek to locate the unique and conjunctural features of the massacrein order to understand its relationship to the character of Japan’s protracted China war and thewider Asia Pacific War.

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Just as a small staged event by Japanese officers in 1931 provided the pretext for Japan’s seizureof China’s Northeast and creation of the dependent state of Manchukuo, the minor clash between
Japanese and Chinese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge on July 7, 1937 paved the way for fullscale invasion of China south of the Great Wall. By July 27, Japanese reinforcements from
Korea and Manchuria as well as Naval Air Force units had joined the fight. The Army HighCommand dispatched three divisions from Japan and called up 209,000 men. With Japan’s
seizure of Beiping and Tianjin the next day, and an attack on Shanghai in August, the(undeclared) war began in earnest. In October, a Shanghai Expeditionary Army (SEA) underGen. Matsui Iwane with six divisions was ordered to destroy enemy forces in and around
Shanghai. The Tenth Army commanded by Gen. Yanagawa Heisuke with four divisions soon
joined in. Anticipating rapid surrender by Chiang Kai-shek’s National Government, the Japanesemilitary encountered stiff resistance: 9,185 Japanese were killed and 31,125 wounded at
Shanghai. But after landing at Hangzhou Bay, Japanese forces quickly gained control of
Shanghai. By November 7, the two Japanese armies combined to form a Central China Area
Army (CCAA) with an estimated 160,000-200,000 men. [5]With Chinese forces in flight, Matsui’s CCAA, with no orders from Tokyo, set out to capture theChinese capital, Nanjing. Each unit competed for the honor of being the first to enter the capital.
Historians such as Fujiwara Akira and Yoshida Yutaka sensibly date the start of the Nanjing
Massacre to the atrocities committed against civilians en route to Nanjing. “Thus began,”
Fujiwara wrote, “the most enormous, expensive, and deadly war in modern Japanese history—
one waged without just cause or cogent reason.” And one that paved the way toward the Asia
Pacific War that followed.
Japan’s behavior at Nanjing departed dramatically from that in the capture of cities in earlier
Japanese military engagements from the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 forward. One reason forthe barbarity of Japanese troops at Nanjing and subsequently was that, counting on the “shock
and awe” of the November attack on Shanghai to produce surrender, they were unprepared forthe fierce resistance and heavy casualties that they encountered, prompting a desire for revenge.
Indeed, throughout the war, like the Americans in Vietnam decades later, the Japanese displayeda profound inability to grasp the roots and strength of the nationalist resistance in the face of
invading forces who enjoyed overwhelming weapons and logistical superiority. A second reason
for the atrocities was that, as the two armies raced to capture Nanjing, the high command lost
control, resulting in a volatile and violent situation.
The contempt felt by the Japanese military for Chinese military forces and the Chinese people set
in motion a dynamic that led to the massacre. In the absence of a declaration of war, as Utsumi
Aiko notes, the Japanese high command held that it was under no obligation to treat captured
Chinese soldiers as POWs or observe other international principles of warfare that Japan had
scrupulously adhered to in the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War, such as the protection of the rights
of civilians. Later, Japan would recognize captured US and Allied forces as POWs, although
they too were treated badly. [6]As Yoshida Yutaka notes, Japanese forces were subjected to extreme physical and mental abuse.
Regularly sent on forced marches carrying 30-60 kilograms of equipment, they also faced
ruthless military discipline. Perhaps most important for understanding the pattern of atrocities
that emerged in 1937, in the absence of food provisions, as the troops raced toward Nanjing, theyplundered villages and slaughtered their inhabitants in order to provision themselves. [7]The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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Gen. Matsui enters Nanjing

Chinese forces were belatedly ordered to retreat from Nanjing on the evening of December 12,
but Japanese troops had already surrounded the city and many were captured. Other Chinese
troops discarded weapons and uniforms and sought to blend in with the civilian population or
surrender. Using diaries, battle reports, press accounts and interviews, Fujiwara Akira documents
the slaughter of tens of thousands of POWs, including 14,777 by the Yamada Detachment of the
13th Division. Yang Daqing points out that Gen. Yamada had his troops execute the prisoners
after twice being told by Shanghai Expeditionary Army headquarters to “kill them all”. [8]Major Gen. Sasaki Toichi confided to his diary on December 13:. . . our detachment alone must have taken care of over 20,000. Later, the enemy
surrendered in the thousands. Frenzied troops--rebuffing efforts by superiors to restrain
them--finished off these POWs one after another. . . . men would yell, ‘Kill the wholedamn lot!” after recalling the past ten days of bloody fighting in which so many buddies
had shed so much blood.’”
The killing at Nanjing was not limited to captured Chinese soldiers. Large numbers of civilians
were raped and/or killed. Lt. Gen. Okamura Yasuji, who in 1938 became commander of the 10th
Army, recalled “that tens of thousands of acts of violence, such as looting and rape, took placeagainst civilians during the assault on Nanjing. Second, front-line troops indulged in the evil
practice of executing POWs on the pretext of [lacking] rations.”
Chinese and foreigners in Nanjing comprehensively documented the crimes committed in theimmediate aftermath of Japanese capture of the city. Nevertheless, as the above evidence
indicates, the most important and telling evidence of the massacre is that provided by Japanese
troops who participated in the capture of the city. What should have been a fatal blow to“Nanjing denial” occurred when the Kaikosha, a fraternal order of former military officers andneonationalist revisionists, issued a call to soldiers who had fought in Nanjing to describe theirexperience. Publishing the responses in a March 1985 “Summing Up”, editor Katogawa Kotaro
cited reports by Unemoto Masami that he saw 3-6,000 victims, and by Itakura Masaaki of 13,000
deaths. Katogawa concluded: “No matter what the conditions of battle were, and no matter howthat affected the hearts of men, such large-scale illegal killings cannot be justified. As someone
affiliated with the former Japanese army, I can only apologize deeply to the Chinese people.”Selden: Japanese and American War Atrocities, Historical Memory and Reconciliation

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A fatal blow . . . except that incontrovertible evidence provided by unimpeachable sources has
never stayed the hands of incorrigible deniers. I have highlighted the direct testimony ofJapanese generals and enlisted men who documented the range and scale of atrocities committed
during the Nanjing Massacre in order to show how difficult it is, even under such circumstances,to overcome denial.
Two other points emerge clearly from this discussion. The first is that the atrocities at Nanjing—
just as with the comfort women— have been the subject of fierce public controversy. This
controversy has erupted again and again over the textbook content and the statements of leaders
ever since Japan’s surrender, and particularly since the 1990s. The second is that, unlike theirleaders, many Japanese citizens have consistently recognized and deeply regretted Japanese
atrocities. Many have also supported reparations for victims.

Nanjing Memorial Museum with figure of 300,000 deaths

The massacre had consequences far beyond Nanjing. The Japanese high command, up to
Emperor Hirohito, the commander-in-chief, while closely monitoring events at Nanjing, issued
no reprimand and meted out no punishment to the officers and men who perpetrated thesecrimes. Instead, the leadership and the press celebrated the victory at the Chinese capital in waysthat invite comparison with the elation of an American president as US forces seized Baghdad
within weeks of the 2003 invasion. [9] In both cases, the ‘victory’ initiated what proved to be thebeginning not the end of a war that could neither be won nor terminated for years to come. In
both instances, it was followed by atrocities that intensified and were extended from the capitalto the entire country.
Following the Nanjing Massacre, the Japanese high command did move determinedly to rein introops to prevent further anarchic violence, particularly violence played out in front of theChinese and international press. Leaders feared that such wanton acts could undermine efforts to
win over, or at least neutralize, the Chinese population and lead to Japan’s international isolation.
A measure of the success of the leadership’s response to the Nanjing Massacre is that no incidentof comparable proportions occurred during the capture of a major Chinese city over the next
eight years of war. Japan succeeded in capturing and pacifying major Chinese cities, not least by
winning the accommodation of significant elites in Manchukuo and in the Nanjing governmentof Wang Jingwei, as well as in cities directly ruled by Japanese forces and administrators. [10]This was not, however, the end of the slaughter of Chinese civilians and captives. Far from it.
Throughout the war, Japan continued to rain destruction from the air on Chongqing, Chiang Kaishek’s wartime capital, and in the final years of the war it deployed chemical and biologicalbombs against Ningbo and throughout Zhejiang and Hunan provinces. [11]The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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Above all, the slaughter of civilians that characterized the Nanjing Massacre was subsequently
enacted throughout the rural areas where resistance stalemated Japanese forces in the course ofeight years of war. This is illustrated by the sanko sakusen or Three-All Policies implemented
throughout rural North China by Japanese forces seeking to crush both the Communist-led
resistance in guerrilla base areas behind Japanese lines and in areas dominated by Guomindang
and warlord troops. [12] Other measures implemented at Nanjing would exact a heavy toll on the
countryside: military units regularly relied on plunder to secure provisions, conducted systematicslaughter of villagers in contested areas, and denied POW status to Chinese captives, often
killing all prisoners. Above all, where Japanese forces encountered resistance, they adopted
scorched earth policies depriving villagers of subsistence.
One leadership response to the adverse effects of the massacre is the establishment of the
comfort woman system immediately after the capture of Nanjing, in an effort to control andchannel the sexual energies of Japanese soldiers. [13] The comfort woman system offers acompelling example of the structural character of atrocities associated with Japan’s China
invasion and subsequently with the Asia Pacific War.
In short, the anarchy first seen at Nanjing paved the way for more systematic policies ofslaughter carried out by the Japanese military throughout the countryside. The comfort woman
system and the three-all policies reveal important ways in which systematic oppression occurredin every theater of war and was orchestrated by the military high command in Tokyo.
Nanjing then is less a typical atrocity than a key event that shaped the everyday structure ofJapanese atrocities over eight years of war. While postwar Japanese and American leaders havechosen primarily to “remember” Japan’s defeat at the hands of the Americans, the China war
took a heavy toll on both Japanese forces and Chinese lives. In the end, Japan faced a stalemated
war in China, but one that paved the way for the Pacific War, in which Japan confronted the US
and its allies.
The Nanjing Massacre was a signature atrocity of twentieth century warfare. But war atrocities
were not unique to Japan.
American War Atrocities: Civilian Bombing, State Terror and International Law
Throughout the long twentieth century, and particularly since World War II, the inexorable
advance of weapons technology has gone hand-in-hand with international efforts to place limits
on killing and the barbarism associated with war, notably indiscriminate bombing raids and otherattacks directed against civilians. Advances in international law have provided important pointsof reference for establishing international governance norms and for inspiring and guiding social
movements seeking to control the ravages of war and advance the cause of world peace.
In the following sections I consider the conduct of US warfare from the perspective of theemerging norms. In light of these norms, international criticism has long centered on German
and Japanese atrocities, notably the Holocaust and specific atrocities including the Nanjing
Massacre, the comfort women and the bio-warfare conducted by Unit 731. Rarely has the UnitedStates been systematically criticized, still less punished, for war atrocities. Its actions, notably theatomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and its conduct of the Indochina Wars promptedinternational controversy. [14] However, It has never been required to change the fundamental

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character of the wars it wages, to engage in self-criticism at the level of state or people, or to pay
reparations to other nations or to individual victims of war atrocities.
While the strategic impact and ethical implications of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima andNagasaki have generated a vast contentious literature, US destruction of more than sixty
Japanese cities prior to Hiroshima has until recently been slighted both in the scholarly literaturesin English and Japanese, and in popular consciousness in Japan, the US, and globally. [15]Germany, England and Japan led the way in what is euphemistically known as “area bombing”,
the targeting for destruction of entire cities with conventional weapons. From 1932 to the earlyyears of World War II, the United States repeatedly criticized the bombing of cities. President
Franklin Roosevelt appealed to the warring nations in 1939 on the first day of World War II,“under no circumstances [to] undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations orof unfortified cities.” [16] After Pearl Harbor, the US continued to claim the moral high groundby abjuring civilian bombing. This stance was consistent with the prevailing Air Force view thatthe most efficient bombing strategies were those that pinpointed destruction of enemy forces andstrategic installations, not those designed to terrorize or kill noncombatants.
Nevertheless, the US collaborated with Britain in indiscriminate bombing at Casablanca in 1943.
While the British sought to destroy entire cities, the Americans continued to target military andindustrial sites. On February 13-14, 1945, British bombers followed by US planes destroyed
Dresden, a historic cultural center with no significant military industry or bases. By conservative
estimate, 35,000 people were incinerated in that single raid. [17]But it was in Japan, in the final six months of the war, that the US deployed air power in a
campaign to burn whole cities to the ground and terrorize, incapacitate, and kill their largely
defenseless residents, in order to force surrender. In those months the American way of war, withthe bombing of cities at its center, was set in place.
Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, appointed commander of the 21st Bomber Command in the Pacific on
January 20, 1945, became the primary architect, a strategic innovator, and most quotablespokesman for the US policy of putting enemy cities to the torch. The full fury of firebombing
was first unleashed on the night of March 9-10, 1945 when LeMay sent 334 B-29s low overTokyo, unloading 496,000 incendiaries in that single raid. Their mission was to reduce the city to
rubble, kill its citizens, and instill terror in the survivors. The attack on an area that the US
Strategic Bombing Survey estimated to be 84.7 percent residential succeeded beyond theplanners’ wildest dreams. Whipped by fierce winds, flames detonated by the bombs leaped
across a fifteen-square-mile area of Tokyo generating immense firestorms.

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Tokyo after the firebombing

How many people died on the night of March 9-10, in what flight commander Gen. Thomas
Power termed “the greatest single disaster incurred by any enemy in military history?” Thefigure of roughly 100,000 deaths and one million homes destroyed, provided by Japanese andAmerican authorities may understate the destruction, given the population density, windconditions, and survivors’ accounts. [18] An estimated 1.5 million people lived in the burned out
areas. Given a near total inability to fight fires of the magnitude and speed produced by thebombs, casualties could have been several times higher than these estimates. The figure of
100,000 deaths in Tokyo may be compared with total US casualties in the four years of the
Pacific War—103,000—and Japanese war casualties of more than three million.

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Police photographer Ishikawa Toyo’s closeup of Tokyo after the firebombing

Following the Tokyo raid of March 9-10, the US extended firebombing nationwide. In the tenday period beginning on March 9, 9,373 tons of bombs destroyed 31 square miles of Tokyo,
Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe. Overall, bombing strikes pulverized 40 percent of the 66 Japanesecities targeted. [19]Many more (primarily civilians) died in the firebombing of Japanese cities than in Hiroshima(140,000 by the end of 1945) and Nagasaki (70,000). The bombing was driven not only by abelief that it could end the war but also, as Max Hastings shows, by the attempt by the Air Forceto claim credit for the US victory, and to redeem the enormous costs of developing andproducing thousands of B-29s and the $2 billion cost of the atomic bomb. [20]Ishikawa Toyo. A child’s corpse in the Tokyo bombing

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The most important way in which World War II shaped the moral and tenor of mass destruction
was the erosion of the stigma associated with the targeting of civilian populations from the air. If
area bombing remained controversial throughout much of World War II, something to beconcealed or denied by its practitioners, by the end of the war, with the enormous increase indestructive power of bombing, it had become the centerpiece of US war making, and therefore
the international norm. [21] This approach to the destruction of cities, which was perfected in
1944-45, melded technological predominance with minimization of US casualties to produce
overwhelming “kill ratios”.
The USAAF offered this ecstatic assessment of LeMay’s missions claiming that the firebombing
and atomic bombing secured US victory and averted a costly land battle: [22]In its climactic five months of jellied fire attacks, the vaunted Twentieth killed outright
310,000 Japanese, injured 412,000 more, and rendered 9,200,000 homeless . . . Never inthe history of war had such colossal devastation been visited on an enemy at so slight a costto the conqueror . . . The 1945 application of American Power, so destructive andconcentrated as to cremate 65 Japanese cities in five months, forced an enemy’s surrender
without land invasion for the first time in military history. . . . Very long range air power
gained victory, decisive and complete.
This triumphalist (and flawed) account, which exaggerated the efficacy of air power and ignored
the critical importance of sea power, the Soviet attack on Japan, and US softening of the terms of
the Potsdam Declaration to guarantee the security of Hirohito, would not only deeply inflect
American remembrance of victory in the Pacific War, it would profoundly shape the conduct of
all subsequent American wars.
How should we compare the Nanjing Massacre and the bombing of cities? The Nanjing
Massacre involved face-to-face slaughter of civilians and captured soldiers. By contrast, in US
bombing of cities technological annihilation from the air distanced victim from assailant. [23]Yet it is worth reflecting on the common elements. Most notably, mass slaughter of civilians.
Why have only the atrocities of Japan at Nanjing and elsewhere drawn consistent internationalcondemnation and vigorous debate, despite the fact that the US likewise engaged—and continues
to engage—in mass slaughter of civilians in violation both of international law and ethics?
American War Crimes and the Problem of Impunity
Victory in World War II propelled the US to a hegemonic position globally. It also gave it,
together with its allies, authority to define and punish war crimes committed by vanquishednations. This privileged position was and remains a major obstacle to a thoroughgoingreassessment of the American conduct of World War II and subsequent wars.
The logical starting point for such an investigation is reexamination of the systematic bombing ofcivilians in Japanese cities. Only by engaging the issues raised by such a reexamination—from
which Americans were explicitly shielded by judges during the Tokyo Tribunals—is it possible
to begin to approach the Nuremberg ideal, which holds victors as well as vanquished to the same
standard with respect to crimes against humanity, or the yardstick of the 1949 Geneva Accord,
which mandates the protection of all civilians in time of war. This is the principle of universality
proclaimed at Nuremberg and violated in practice by the US ever since.

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Every US president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush has endorsed in practice anapproach to warfare that targets entire populations for annihilation, one that eliminates all
vestiges of distinction between combatant and noncombatant. The centrality of the use of air
power to target civilian populations runs like a red line from the US bombings of Germany andJapan 1944-45 through the Korean and Indochinese wars to the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and
Iraq wars. [24]In the course of three years, US/UN forces in Korea flew 1,040,708 sorties and dropped 386,037
tons of bombs and 32,357 tons of napalm. Counting all types of airborne ordnance, including
rockets and machine-gun ammunition, the total comes to 698,000 tons. Using UN data, Marilyn
Young estimates the death toll in Korea, mostly noncombatants, at two to four million. [25]Three examples from the Indochina War illustrate the nature of US bombing of civilians. In aburst of anger on Dec. 9, 1970, President Richard M. Nixon railed at what he saw as the Air
Force’s lackluster bombing campaign in Cambodia. “I want them to hit everything. I want themto use the big planes, the small planes, everything they can that will help out there, and let’s startgiving them a little shock.” Kissinger relayed the order: “A massive bombing campaign in
Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves.” [26] In the course of the Vietnam War,the US also embraced cluster bombs and chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction as
integral parts of its arsenal.
An important US strategic development of the Indochina War was the extension of the arc ofcivilian bombing from cities to the countryside. In addition to firebombs and cluster bombs, theUS introduced Agent Orange (chemical defoliation), which not only eliminated the forest cover,but exacted a heavy long-term toll on the local population including large-scale intergenerational
damage in the form of birth defects. [27]In Iraq, the US military, while continuing to pursue massive bombing of neighborhoods in
Fallujah, Baghdad and elsewhere, has thrown a cloak of silence over the air war. While themedia has averted its eyes and cameras, air power remains among the major causes of death,
destruction, dislocation and division in contemporary Iraq. [28]The war had taken approximately
655,000 lives by the summer of 2006 and close to twice that number by the fall of 2007,
according to the most authoritative study to date, that of The Lancet. Air war has also played amajor part in creating the world’s most acute refugee problem. By early 2006 the United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that 1.7 million Iraqis had fled the country while
approximately the same number were internal refugees, with the total number of refugees risingwell over 4 million by 2008. [29] Nearly all of the dead and displaced are civilians.

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Destroying Fallujah in order to save it

Both the plight of refugees and the intensification of aerial bombing of 2007 and 2008 have been
largely invisible in the US mainstream press, This is the central reality of American state terror
in Iraq. Nevertheless, despite America’s unchallenged air supremacy in Iraq since 1991, despite
the creation of an array of military bases to permanently occupy that country and anchor
American power in the Middle East, as the war enters its sixth year there is no end in sight to US
warfare in Iraq and throughout the region. [30] Indeed, as the presidential debate makes clear,
there is little prospect of exit for the US from an Iraq located at the epicenter of the world’s
richest oil holdings, regardless of the outcome of the election. It is of course a region in which
the geopolitical stakes far exceed those in Korea or Vietnam.

Iraqi refugees on the Syrian borderHistorical Memory and the Future of the Asia Pacific
I began by considering the Nanjing Massacre’s relationship to structural and ideologicalfoundations of Japanese colonialism and war making and US bombing of Japanese civilians inSelden: Japanese and American War Atrocities, Historical Memory and Reconciliation

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the Pacific War in 1945, and subsequently of Korean, Indochinese and Iraqi civilians. In each
instance the primary focus has not been the headlined atrocity—Nanjing, Hiroshima, Nogunri,
Mylai, Abu Ghraib— but the foundational practices that systematically violate international law
provisions designed to protect civilians.
In both the Japanese and US cases, nationalism and national pride in the service of war andempire eased the path for war crimes perpetrated against civilian populations. In both countries,
nationalism has obfuscated, even eradicated, memories of the war crimes and atrocities
committed by one’s own nation, while privileging memory of the atrocities committed byadversaries. Consider, for example, American memories of the killing of 2,800 mainly
Americans on September 11, 2001 compared with more than one million Iraqi deaths, millions
more injured, and more than four million refugees. Heroic virtue reigns supreme in official
memory and in representations such as museums, monuments, and textbooks, and often, but notalways, in popular memory.
Striking differences distinguish Japanese and US responses to their respective war atrocities andwar crimes. Occupied Japan looked back at the war from the midst of bombed out cities and an
economy in ruins, grieving the loss of three million compatriots. But also, buoyed by postwar
hopes, significant numbers of Japanese reflected on and criticized imperial Japan’s war crimes.
Many embraced and continue to embrace the peace provision of the Constitution, which
renounced war-making capacity for Japan. A Japan that was perpetually at war between 1895
and 1945 has not gone to war for more than six decades. It is fair to attribute this transformationin part to the widespread aversion toward war and embrace of the principles enshrined in Article
9 of the peace constitution, though it is equally necessary to factor in Japan’s position ofsubordination to American power and its financial and logistical support for every US war since
Korea.
In the decades since 1945, the issues of war have remained alive and contentious in publicmemory and in the actions of the Japanese state. After the formal independence promulgated by
the 1951 San Francisco Treaty, with Hirohito still on the throne, Japanese governments
reaffirmed the aims of colonialism and war of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of
the1931-45 era. They released from prison and restored the reputations of former war criminals,
making possible the election of Kishi Nobusuke as Prime Minister (and subsequently his
grandson Abe Shinzo). In 1955, when the Liberal Democratic Party inaugurated its nearly fortyyear grip on power, the Ministry of Education, tried to force authors of textbooks to downplay oromit altogether reference to the Nanjing Massacre, the comfort women, Unit 731, and militarycoerced suicides of Okinawan citizens during the Battle of Okinawa. Yet these official efforts,then and since, have never gone unchallenged by the victims, by historians, or by peace activists.
From the early 1980s, memory controversies over textbook treatments of colonialism and war
precipitated international disputes with China and Korea as well as in Okinawa. In Japan,
conservative governments backed by neonationalist groups clashed with citizens and scholars
who embraced criticism of Japan’s war crimes and supported the peace constitution. [31]In contrast to this half-century debate within Japan, not only the US government but also mostAmericans remain oblivious to the war atrocities committed by US forces as outlined above. The
exceptions are important. Investigative reporting revealing atrocities such as the massacres atNogunri in Korea and My Lai in Vietnam, and torture at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq andGuantanamo Bay, Cuba, have convinced most Americans that these events took place. Yet,

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precisely as presented in the official story and reiterated in the press, most of them see these as
aberrant crimes committed by a handful of low-ranking officers and enlisted men. In each case,prosecution and sentencing burnished the image of American justice. The embedded structure ofviolence, the strategic thinking that lay behind the specific incident, and the responsibility for theatrocities committed up the chain of command, were silenced or ignored.
Two exceptions to the lack of reflection and resistance to apology provide perspective on
American complacency about its conduct of wars. President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil
Liberties Act of 1988, which offered apologies and reparations to survivors among the 110,000
Japanese and Japanese Americans who had been interned by the US government in the years
1942-45. Then, in 1993 on the one hundredth anniversary of the US overthrow of the Hawaiian
monarchy, President Bill Clinton offered an apology (but no recompense) to native Hawai’ans.
In both cases, the crucial fact is that the victims’ descendants are American citizens andapologies proved to be good politics for the incumbent. [32]One additional quasi-apology bears mention. In March 1999, Clinton, speaking in Guatemala
City of the US role in the killing of 200,000 Guatemalans over previous decades, made thisstatement: “For the United States, it is important that I state clearly that support for militaryforces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong
and the United States must not repeat that mistake.” The remarks had a certain politicalsignificance at the time, yet they had more of the weight of a feather than of Mt. Tai. No word of
apology was included. No remuneration was made to victims. And, above all, the United States
did not act to end its violent interventions in scores of countries in Latin America, Asia or
elsewhere. [33]
There have of course been no apologies or reparations for US firebombing or atomic bombing ofJapan, or for killing millions and creating vast numbers of refugees in Korea, Vietnam or Iraq, orfor US interventions in scores of other ongoing conflicts in the Americas and Asia. Such is theprerogative of impunity of the world’s most powerful nation. [34]However, there has been one important act of recognition of the systemic character of American
atrocities in Vietnam, and subsequently in Iraq. Just as Japanese troops provided the mostcompelling testimony on Japanese wartime atrocities, it is American veterans whose testimony
most effectively unmasked the deep structure of the American way of war in Vietnam and Iraq.
In the Winter Soldier investigation in Detroit on January 31 to February 2, 1971, Vietnam
Veterans Against the War organized testimony by 109 discharged veterans and 16 civilians. John
Kerry, later a US Senator and presidential candidate testified two months later in hearings at the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee as representative of the Winter Soldier event. Kerrysummed up the testimony: [35]They had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable
telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies,
randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot
cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside ofSouth Vietnam. . .”

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Kerry continued: “We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them . . . . We learned themeaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placeda cheapness on the lives of orientals.”
On March 13-16, 2008 a second Winter Soldier gathering took place in Washington DC, withhundreds of Iraq War veterans providing testimony, photographs and videos documenting
brutality, torture and murder in cases such as the Haditha Massacre and the Abu Ghraib torture.
[36] As in the first Winter Soldier, the mainstream media ignored the event organized by Iraq
Veterans Against War. Again, however, the voices of these veterans have reached out to somethrough films and new electronic and broadcast media such as YouTube.

IVAW prepare for Winter Soldier 2008

The importance of apology and reparations lies in the fact that through processes of recognitionof wrongdoing and efforts to make amends (however belated or inadequate) to victims, thepoisonous legacies of war and colonialism may be alleviated or overcome and foundations laid
for a harmonious future. In Germany, this involved renunciation of Nazism, the formation of a
new government distinctive from and critical of the former government; consensus expressed in
the nation’s textbooks and curricula critical of Nazi genocide and aggression; monuments andmuseums commemorating the victims; and payment of substantial reparations to individual
victims (albeit under US pressure). All of these actions paved the way for Germany’s
reemergence at the center of the European Union.
In contrast to their German counterparts, Japanese and American leaders have strongly resisted
apology and reparations. While many Japanese people have reflected deeply on their nation’s
war atrocities, Japanese leaders, sheltered from Asia by the US-Japan security relationship, hadlittle incentive to reflect deeply on the nation’s wartime record in China or elsewhere.
Americans, for their part, have felt little pressure either domestic or international to apologize orprovide reparations to victims from other nations.

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Material foundations for a breakthrough in international relations in the Asia Pacific exist in thebooming economic, financial, and trade ties across the region. In particular, strong links exist
among Japan, China and South Korea, each of which are among the others’ first or second
leading trade and investment partners. Nor is the opening limited to economics. Equally notable
are burgeoning cultural relations. For example, “the Korean wave” in TV and film is taking
China, Japan and parts of Southeast Asia by storm. Japanese manga, anime and TV dramas arewidely disseminated throughout the Asia Pacific. [37] Similarly, Chinese pop music and TV
dramas also span the region, particularly, but not exclusively, where overseas Chinese are
numerous. In addition, Pan-Asian collaborations in film, anime, and music are widespread. Suchcultural interpenetration has not waited for political accommodation. Indeed, it has proceeded
apace even during times when Japan-Korea and Japan-China tensions over territorial andhistorical memory issues are high. And for the first time, we can see in the six-party talks on
North Korean nuclear weapons and the possibility of an end to Cold War divisions, possibilities
for the emergence of a regional framework.
It has been widely recognized that a major obstacle to the emergence of a harmonious order inthe Asia Pacific is the politics of denial of atrocities associated with war and empire. China,
Korea and other former victims of Japanese invasion and colonization have repeatedly criticizedJapan. [38] Largely ignored in debates over the future of the Asia Pacific has been the
responsibility of the US to recognize and provide reparations for its own numerous war atrocities
as detailed above, notably in the bombing of Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Iraqi civilians.
Such responsible actions by the world’s most powerful nation would make it possible to bring toclosure unresolved war issues both for the many individual victims of US bombing and otheratrocities, and the continued hostilities between states, above all the US-North Korea conflict andthe division of the two Koreas. It would also pave the way for a Japan that remains within theAmerican embrace to acknowledge and recompense victims of its own war crimes. Might it not
help pave the way for an end to US wars without end across the Asia Pacific and beyond?
Mark Selden is a coordinator of Japan Focus and a research associate in the East Asia Programat Cornell University.
Notes[*] I am indebted to Herbert Bix, Richard Falk, and especially Laura Hein for criticism andsuggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. This is a revised and expanded version of a talkdelivered on December 15, 2007 at the Tokyo International Symposium to Commemorate theSeventieth Anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre.
[1] Most discussion of historical memory issues has centered on the Japan-China and the JapanKorea relationships. However, the controversy that erupted in 2007 over the US congressional
resolution calling on Japan to formally apologize and provide compensation for the former
comfort women illustrates the ways in which the US-Japan relationship is also at stake. Kinue
Tokudome, “Passage of H.Res. 121 on ‘Comfort Women’, the US Congress and Historical
Memory in Japan,” Japan Focus. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Japan’s ‘Comfort Women’: It's time forthe truth (in the ordinary, everyday sense of the word),” Japan Focus.
[2] Fierce debate continues among historians, activists and nations over the number of victims.
The issue involves differences over both the temporal and spatial definition of the massacre. The

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official Chinese claim inscribed on the Nanjing Massacre Memorial is that 300,000 were killed.
The most careful attempts to record the numbers by Japanese historians, which include deaths ofcivilians and soldiers during the march from Shanghai to Nanjing as well as deaths following thecapture of the capital suggest numbers in the 80,000 to 200,000 range. In recent years, the firstserious Chinese research examining the massacre, built on 55 volumes of documents, has begun
to appear. See Kasahara Tokushi, Nankin Jiken Ronsoshi. Nihonjin wa shijitsu o do ninshiki shite
kita ka? (The Nanjing Incident Debate. How Have Japanese Understood the Historical
Evidence?) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2007) for the changing contours of the Japanese debate over the
decades. Kasahara Tokushi and Daqing Yang explore “The Nanjing Incident in World History,”(Sekaishi no naka no Nankin Jiken) in a discussion in Ronza, January, 2008, 184-95, ranging
widely across international and joint research and the importance of new documentation from the1970s to the present. Reiji Yoshida and Jun Hongo, “Nanjing Massacre: Toll will elude certitude.
Casualty counts mirror nations' extremes, and flexibility by both sides in middle,” Japan Times,
Dec 13, 2007.
[3] I first addressed these issues in Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds., Censoring History:
Citizenship and Memory in Japan, China and the United States (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2000).
[4] For discussion of the international legal issues and definition of state terrorism see theintroduction and chapter two of Mark Selden and Alvin So, eds., War and State Terrorism: The
United States, Japan and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century (Lanham: Rowman &Littlefield, 2004), pp. 1-40. See also Richard Falk’s chapter in that volume, “State Terror versus
Humanitarian Law,” pp. 41-62.
[5] The following discussion of the Nanjing Massacre and its antecedents draws heavily on thediverse contributions to Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, ed., The Nanking Atrocity 1937-38:
Complicating the Picture (New York and London: Berghahn Books, 2007) and particularly thechapter by the late Fujiwara Akira, “The Nanking Atrocity: An Interpretive Overview,” available
in a revised version at Japan Focus. Wakabayashi, dates the start of the “Nanjing atrocity”, as hestyles it, to Japanese bombing of Nanjing by the imperial navy on August 15. “The Messiness ofHistorical Reality”, p. 15. Chapters in the Wakabayashi volume closely examine and refute theexaggerated claims not only of official Chinese historiography and Japanese deniers, but also of
progressive critics of the massacre. While recognizing legitimate points in the arguments of all ofthese, the work is devastating toward the deniers who hew to their mantra in the face ofoverwhelming evidence, e.g. p. 143.
[6] Utsumi Aiko, “Japanese Racism, War, and the POW Experience,” in Mark Selden and AlvinSo, eds., War and State Terrorism, pp. 119-42.
[7] Presentation at the Tokyo International Symposium to Commemorate the Seventieth
Anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre, December 15, 2007.
[8] Yang Daqing, “Atrocities in Nanjing: Searching for Explanations,” in Diana Lary andStephen MacKinnon, eds., Scars of War. The Impact of Warfare on Modern China (Vancouver:UBC Press, 2001), pp. 76-97.
[9] The signature statement was that of George W. Bush on March 19, 2003: “My fellow
citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations
to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger… My fellow

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citizens, the dangers to our country and the world will be overcome. We will pass through thistime of peril and carry on the work of peace. We will defend our freedom. We will bring
freedom to others and we will prevail."[10] Timothy Brook, Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China(Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2005).
[11] Tsuneishi Keiichi, “Unit 731 and the Japanese Imperial Army’s Biological Warfare
Program,” John Junkerman trans., Japan Focus.
[12] Mark Selden, China in Revolution: The Yenan Way Revisited (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1995);
Chen Yung-fa, Making Revolution: The Chinese Communist Revolution in Eastern and Central
China, 1937-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Edward Friedman, Paul G.
Pickowicz and Mark Selden, Chinese Village, Socialist State (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1991); Chalmers Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence ofRevolutionary China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962). In carrying out a reign ofterror in resistance base areas Japanese forces anticipated many of the strategic approaches that
the US would later apply in Vietnam. For example, Japanese forces pioneered in constructing“strategic hamlets” involving relocation of rural people, torching of entire resistance villages,
terrorizing the local population, and imposing heavy taxation and labor burdens.
[13] Yuki Tanaka, Japan’s comfort women: sexual slavery and prostitution during World War II
and the US occupation (London ; New York : Routledge, 2002). This systematic atrocity against
women has haunted Japan since the 1980s when the first former comfort women broke silenceand began public testimony. The Japanese government eventually responded to international
protest by recognizing the atrocities committed under the comfort woman system, while denying
official and military responsibility. It established a government-supported but ostensibly private
Asian Women’s Fund to apologize and pay reparations to former comfort women, many ofwhom rejected the terms of a private settlement. See Alexis Dudden and Kozo Yamaguchi,“Abe’s Violent Denial: Japan’s Prime Minister and the ‘Comfort Women,'” Japan Focus. See
Wada Haruki, “The Comfort Women, the Asian Women’s Fund and the Digital Museum,” Japan
Focus
for Japanese and English discussion and documents archived at the website.
[14] Peter J. Kuznick, “The Decision to Risk the Future: Harry Truman, the Atomic Bomb andthe Apocalyptic Narrative,” Japan Focus.
[15] Early works that drew attention to US war atrocities often centered on the torture, killingand desecration of the remains of captured Japanese soldiers are Peter Schrijvers, The GI War
Against Japan. American Soldiers in Asia and the Pacific During World War II (New York:NYU Press, 2002) and John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War(New York: Pantheon, 1986). The Wartime Journals of Charles Lindbergh (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1970) is seminal in disclosing atrocities committed against Japanese POWs. A
growing literature has begun to examine U.S. bombing policies. A. C. Grayling, Among the Dead
Cities, provides a thorough assessment of US and British strategic bombing (including atomic
bombing) through the lenses of ethics and international law. Grayling concludes that the US andBritish killing of noncombatants “did in fact involve the commission of wrongs” on a very large

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scale. Pp. 5-6; 276-77. See Herbert P. Bix, "War Crimes Law and American Wars in 20th
Century Asia," Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1 (July 2001), pp. 119-132.
[16] Quoted in Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (New York: New Press, 2000), p. 81. The
US debate over the bombing of cities is detailed in Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air
Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 23-28, pp.
57-59. Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 20-30, I08-9; and Sahr Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage,
Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and Atrocity After World War II (London: Routledge,
2006). p. 10. For a more detailed account of US bombing see Mark Selden, A Forgotten
Holocaust: US Bombing Strategy, the Destruction of Japanese Cities and the American Way of
War from the Pacific War to Iraq,” Japan Focus.
[17] Sherry, Air Power, p. 260. With much U.S. bombing already relying on radar, thedistinction between tactical and strategic bombing had long been violated in practice. The top
brass, from George Marshall to Air Force chief Henry Arnold to Dwight Eisenhower, had all
earlier given tacit approval for area bombing, yet no orders from on high spelled out a newbombing strategy.
[18] The Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic bombs
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical and Social Effectsof the Atomic Bombing (New York: Basic Books, 1991), pp. 420-21; Cf. U.S. Strategic
Bombing Survey, Field Report Covering Air Raid Protection and Allied Subjects Tokyo (n.p.
1946), pp. 3, 79; The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey study of Effects of Air Attack on Urban
Complex Tokyo-Kawasaki-Yokohama (n.p. 1947). In contrast to the vast survivor testimony on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in addition to poems, short stories, novels, manga, anime and film
documenting the atomic bombing, the testimony for the firebombing of Tokyo and other cities issparse. Max Hastings provides valuable first person accounts of the Tokyo bombing based on
survivor recollection. Retribution. The Battle for Japan 1944-45 (New York: Knopf, 2008), pp.
297-306.
[19] All but five cities of any size were destroyed. Of these cities, four were designated atomic
bomb targets, while Kyoto, was spared. John W. Dower, “Sensational Rumors, Seditious
Graffiti, and the Nightmares of the Thought Police,” in Japan in War and Peace (New York: The
New Press, 1993), p. 117. United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Summary Report, Vol I, pp.
16-20.
[20] Retribution, pp. 296-97. Hastings, p. 318, makes a compelling case that the Japanesesurrender owed most to the naval blockade which isolated Japan and denied it access to the oil,steel and much more in severing the links to the empire.
[21] The horror felt round the world at the German bombing at Guernica, Japanese bombing of
Shanghai and Chongqing, and the British bombing of Dresden would not be felt so intensely anduniversally ever again, regardless of the scale of bombing in Korea, Vietnam or Iraq . . . with thepossible exception of the outpouring of sympathy for the 2,800 victims of the 9/11 terror
bombing of the New York World Trade Center.
[22] “Postwar Narrative,” quoted in Hastings, Retribution, p. 317.

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176[23] Another important factor is the difference in the character of the two wars. Japan’s invasionof China involved very different dynamics from the US-Japan conflict between two expansionist
powers. The present article does not explore this issue.
[24] In practice. Sahr Conway-Lanz provides the definitive study of the “collateral damage”
argument that has been repeatedly used to deny deliberate killing of civilians in US bombing.
Collateral Damage, Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and Atrocity After World War II.
[25] Marilyn Young, “Total War,” forthcoming chapter in Bombing Civilians, Marilyn Youngand Yuki Tanaka eds. (New York: The New Press).
[26] Elizabeth Becker, “Kissinger Tapes Describe Crises, War and Stark Photos of Abuse,” The
New York Times, May 27, 2004.
[27] Seymour Hersh, Chemical and Biological Warfare (New York: Anchor Books,1969), pp.
131-33. Hersh notes that the $60 million worth of defoliants and herbicides in the 1967 Pentagon
budget would have been sufficient to defoliate 3.6 million acres if all were used optimally.
[28] In contrast to the Vietnam War in particular, in which critical journalism in major media
eventually played a powerful role in fueling and reinforcing the antiwar movement, the major
print and broadcasting media in the Iraq War have dutifully averted their eyes from the air war indeference to the Bush administration’s wishes. On the air war, see, for example, Seymour Hersh,“Up in the Air. Where is the Iraq war headed next?” The New Yorker, Dec 5, 2005; Dahr Jamail,“Living Under the Bombs,” TomDispatch, February 2, 2005; Michael Schwartz, “A Formula for
Slaughter. The American Rules of Engagement from the Air,” TomDispatch, January 14, 2005;
Nick Turse, America’s Secret Air War in Iraq, TomDispatch, February 7, 2007; Tom Engelhardt,“9 Propositions on the U.S. Air War for Terror,” TomDispatch, April 8, 2008. The invisibility of
the air war is nicely revealed in conducting a Google search for “Iraq War” and “Air War inIraq”. The former produces numerous references to the New York Times, the Washington Post,
CNN, Wikipedia and a wide range of powerful media. The latter produces references almost
exclusively to blogs and critical sources such as those cited in this note.
[29] Sabrina Tavernese, “For Iraqis, Exodus to Syria, Jordan Continues,” New York Times, June
14, 2006. Michael Schwartz, “Iraq's Tidal Wave of Misery. The First History of the Planet's
Worst Refugee Crisis”, TomDispatch, February 10, 2008. The UN estimates that there are 1.25
million Iraqi refugees in Syria and 500,000 in Jordan, 200,000 throughout the Gulf states,
100,000 more in Europe. The United States accepted 463 refugees between the start of the war in
2003 and mid-2007. The International Organization for Migration estimated the displacement
rate throughout 2006-07 at 60,000 per month, with the American “surge” accelerating
displacement, already more than one in seven Iraqis a nation of 28 million people have been
displaced.
[30] Anthony Arnove, “Four Years Later... And Counting. Billboarding the Iraqi Disaster”,
TomDispatch, March 18, 2007. Seymour Hersh, “The Redirection. Is the Administration’s newpolicy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” The New Yorker March 3, 2007. Michael
Schwartz, “Baghdad Surges into Hell. First Results from the President’s Offensive”,
TomDispatch, February 12, 2007.
[31] Mark Selden, “Nationalism, Historical Memory and Contemporary Conflicts in the Asia
Pacific: the Yasukuni Phenomenon, Japan, and the United States” Japan Focus; Yoshiko Nozaki

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and Mark Selden, “Historical Memory, International Conflict and Japanese Textbook
Controversies in Three Epochs,” forthcoming Contexts: The Journal of Educational Media,
Memory, and Society, Vol I, Number 1; Takashi Yoshida, “Revising the Past, Complicating the
Future: The Yushukan War Museum in Modern Japanese History,” Japan Focus; Laura Hein
and Akiko Takenaka, “Exhibiting World War II in Japan and the United States,” Japan Focus;
Aniya Masaaki, “Compulsory Mass Suicide, the Battle of Okinawa, and Japan's Textbook
Controversy,” Japan Focus.
[32] Thanks to Laura Hein for suggesting the framing of this issue. On the Reagan decision,
reparations and the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, see
Mitchell T Maki, Harry H Kitano, and S Megan Berthold, Achieving the Impossible Dream:
How Japanese Americans Obtained Redress (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999); seealso the following and Clinton’s apology to Hawaiians took the form of Public Law 103-150.
The formal apology recognized the devastating effects of subsequent social changes on the
Hawaiian people and looked to reconciliation. But offered no reparations or other specificmeasures to alleviate the sufferings caused by US actions.
[33] Emily Rosenberg drew my attention to the Guatemala quasi-apology. Clinton’s remarks
were prompted by the February 1999 publication of the findings of the independent Historical
Clarification Commission which concluded that the US was responsible for most of the humanrights abuses committed during the 36-year war in which 200,000 died. Martin Kettle andJeremy Lennard, “Clinton Apology to Guatemala,” The Guardian, March 12, 1999. Mark
Weisbrot, “Clinton’s Apology to Guatemala is a Necessary First Step,” March 15, 1999, KnightRidder/Tribune Media Services.
[34] How are we to define power? If no nation remotely rivals American military power,
particularly in the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union, if the United States military budget in2008 is larger than that of all other nations combined — before counting the special
appropriations for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the striking fact is that the US has fought tostalemate or defeat in each of the major wars it has entered since World War II.
[35] Kerry’s testimony, ignored by the mass media but made available through film and othermedia, is available here.
[36] See the testimony and the historical record here and here .
[37] Nissim Kadosh Otmazgin, “Japanese Popular Culture in East and Southeast Asia: Time fora Regional Paradigm?”[38] We have underlined the deleterious effects of Japanese nationalism in preventing
recognition and apology for atrocities. Reconciliation is made more difficult by exaggerated
claims with respect to the Nanjing Massacre by nationalists in China and the Chinese diaspora.

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The “Comfort Women” Controversy: History and Testimony*
Yoshiko Nozaki[A] conference of historians, psychoanalysts, and artists, gathered to reflect on the relation of
education to the Holocaust, watched the videotaped testimony of the woman in an attempt tobetter understand the era. A lively debate ensued. The testimony was not accurate, historians
claimed. The number of chimneys was misrepresented. Historically, only one chimney was
blown up, not all four. Since the memory of the testifying woman turned out to be, in this way,
fallible, one could not accept--nor give credence to--her account of the events. It was utterly
important to remain accurate, [lest] the revisionists in history discredit everything. A
psychoanalyst . . . profoundly disagreed. “The woman was testifying,” he insisted, “not to thenumber of the chimneys blown up, but to something else, more radical, more crucial: the realityof an unimaginable occurrence.”—Dori Laub[1]Introduction
In recent years, women’s testimonies have provided crucial evidence for challenging normative
views of history. Testimony as such has been “an act of memory situated in time,” “vital” tohistorical knowledge, as it “dislocate[d] established frameworks and shift[ed] paradigms” of thediscipline.[2] The power of words has also been evident in current educational practices.
Teachers working at different levels of education--from a classroom where twelfth gradestudents read I, Rigoberta Menchu[3] to a classroom at Yale where college students watchedfilms of Holocaust survivors[4]-- have reported that the testimonial narratives of previously
marginalized voices have powerful transformative effects upon the consciousness and actions ofstudents.
The use of testimony in history, however, often brings with it tension, uncertainty, and conflict-be it epistemological, methodological, ethical, or otherwise--with respect to research andteaching practices. As one critic observes, I, Rigoberta Menchu “played a conspicuous role in theideological conflicts that burst out in the field of education in the United States” in the late 1980s
and early 1990s.[5] Clearly, history involves social and cultural struggles over interpretations of
the past. Feminist historian Joan Scott has called this the “politics of history,” as historicalinterpretations are “not fixed . . . but are rather dynamic, always in flux.” It is important that
historians to attend to the “conflictual processes that establish meanings . . . [and] the play offorce involved in any society’s construction and implementation of meanings.”[6]This article examines the Japanese controversy over the “comfort women” (ianfu) system during
Japan’s Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945) and attempts to include that history in school
textbooks.[7] The testimonies given by former comfort women in the 1990s forever changed theparadigm of historical research on the subject and became the focus of charged debate among
intellectuals of different disciplinary and ideological backgrounds, as well as the target ofJapanese neonationalist attacks.[8]The existence of comfort women was ubiquitous knowledge in Japan from the late 1930s,
despite censorship. In the 1990s, feminist movements inside and outside Japan, and above all thevictims who broke silence and gave testimonies,[9] showed the direct role of the Japanese stateand military in creating and maintaining a system of forced prostitution and systematic rape of
women from colonized and occupied territories. When the voices of victims were reinforced by

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the research findings of Japanese scholars who unearthed documents proving the role of theJapanese military in maintaining the system, official denials melted away. By examining theprocess, through which the challenges to the normative interpretation were posed and the ways
they were countered, this article provides a comparative perspective for understanding
contemporary controversies over women’s voices, testimony, and history generally.[10]Challenges to the Meaning of Comfort Women in Postwar Japan
A number of reports, diaries, and memoirs published in Japan during and after World War II
mentioned military comfort facilities on various war fronts and throughout territories occupied
by Japanese imperial forces.[11] In these writings, the term ianfu (comfort women) was aeuphemism for prostitutes who provided sex to men in service. Although the story had no placein Japan’s official war history, it was told and retold privately as a nostalgic (and sometimes
romantic) episode in men’s memoirs and novels.
In the 1970s and 1980s, several publications appeared that took somewhat more critical views of
the comfort women issue. One of the first was a book written by the non-fiction writer Senda
Kako in 1973.[12] Senda, a former journalist, conducted extensive research and interviews, andfrom these he concluded that the women's situations had been “pitiful.”[13] Senda's work was
based almost wholly on sources and recollections of Japanese men who had served in the war-only a few Japanese former comfort women spoke of their experiences, and the two Korean
former comfort women he interviewed remained silent. Senda’s book became a best seller. The
term he used for the women jugun-ianfu (comfort women serving in the war), would later
become contentious, came to have a wide circulation.
Feminist approaches began to appear after the Japanese journalist and feminist Matsui Yayori(1934-2003) took up the issue. In 1984, Matsui published a short article in Asahi Shinbun, whichmarked the first time for any major newspaper to address the issue. Matsui’s interviewee, aformer comfort woman whose name was not disclosed, was a Korean living in Thailand. She
spoke of her experience this way:
The life of comfort women was this--during the day doing laundry of soldiers’ clothes,cleaning the barracks, and some heavy labor such as carrying ammunition, and at night
being the plaything for the soldiers. There were days when I was made to serve scores ofmen beginning in the morning. When I resisted--even just a little--I was beaten by thesupervisor, pulled by my hair, and dragged around half-naked. It was a subhuman
life.[14]Matsui’s article triggered no significant public reaction. It was only after the successes of South
Korean democratic and feminist movements in the late 1980s, freeing former comfort women to
speak of their experiences for the first time, that the issue became international, forcing theJapanese government to recognize the comfort women as a significant part of Japan’s unresolved
war issues. Yun Chung-ok, a professor at Korea's Ewha Womans University, was an important
catalyst in this development. In the late 1980's she met with Matsui to exchange information
about the comfort women, and in 1990 she wrote a series of reports on the issue for a Korean
newspaper.[15] Yun’s reports ignited and enraged the South Korean public, prompting calls for
redress from the Japanese government. They also catalyzed Japanese women’s groups andpolitical parties, many of which began to call for a governmental inquiry into the issue as a war
atrocity.

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In a Diet session in June 1991, the Japanese government denied the involvement of the wartime
state and its military in the matter--further enraging South Koreans. Former comfort woman Kim
Hak-soon was so angry that she decided to “come out” as a way of forcing the Japanese
government to confront the issue. She was the first Korean woman residing in South Korea toreveal herself in public as a former comfort woman.[16] In the fall of 1991, Kim testified before
the Japanese public. Her testimony, translated, recorded, and later published, began with her half
century of silence and the decision eventually to break that silence:
For these fifty years, I have lived, by bearing and again bearing [the unbearable]. For fifty
years, I have had a heavy, painful feeling, but kept thinking in my heart about telling myexperience some day. . . As I try to speak now, my heart pounds against my chest,
because what happened in the past was something extremely unconscionable . . . Why
does [the Japanese government] tell such a lie [to deny its knowledge of comfort womensystem]? Actually, I was made into a comfort woman, and I’m here alive.[17]Kim’s testimony was the most significant event in establishing a new interpretation of the
comfort women system. Hearing her story on Japanese television, historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki
went straight to the archives of the Self-Defense Agency (Boeicho), where he found evidence
that conclusively demonstrated the involvement of the Japanese Imperial Army in organizing the
comfort women system for its soldiers (though the nature of the comfort women system and thestate/military involvement, including the use of force and coercion, still required further study).
In 1992, he published his findings in major Japanese newspapers. Faced with documentary
evidence from its own archives, the Japanese government had no choice but to acknowledge
military involvement, and Prime Minister Miyazawa Kiichi officially apologized to South Korea.
In 1993, a Japanese government hearing for fifteen former comfort women in Seoul revealed thatmany women had been made to serve as comfort women involuntarily. Later that year, Chief
Cabinet Secretary Kono Yohei made an official statement (danwa), essentially admitting that theJapanese Imperial Army had been directly and indirectly involved in the establishment andadministration of comfort facilities. The government also acknowledged that coercion had beenused in the recruitment and retention of the women, and called for historical research andeducation aimed at remembering the fact. The Kono statement became the basis for addressing
the issue of comfort women in education, and by 1997 almost all school history textbooks andthose in related subjects included a brief reference to comfort women.[18] One history textbook
for junior high school read, “[M]any women, such as Korean women, were sent to the front as
comfort women serving in the war.”[19] Such statements, however bland, served as a legitimate
window through which teachers and students could address the issue in classrooms.
Subsequent historical research has uncovered more disturbing details about the comfort womensystem.[20] Scholars estimate that between fifty thousand and two hundred thousand women
were enslaved to provide sexual service to Japanese officers and soldiers. The majority of these
women were Korean and Chinese (there were also some Japanese), but they included womenfrom many other countries, including Thailand, Taiwan, Indonesia, East Timor, Malaya, andHolland. Many non-Japanese women were minors, rounded up by deception or under conditionsof debt slavery, and some were violently abducted.[21]Prostitution for military personnel in war zones and occupied territories was widely practiced
during and prior to World War II,[22] but Japan’s comfort women system was unusual in theextreme forms of coercion and oppression imposed on women, including teenage girls broughtNozaki: The “Comfort Women” Controversy

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from Korea and Taiwan. The evidence reveals that state and military authorities at the highest
levels were extensively involved in the policymaking, establishment, and maintenance of thesystem, and in recruiting and transporting women across international borders.[23]One result of both the Japanese government's apologies and of recent scholarship on comfort
women was backlash from neonationalist groups. In particular, neonationalists objected strongly
to both the government’s admission of state involvement in the matter and to the inclusion of theissue in school textbooks. They have attacked politicians who support the government’s
apologies as well as historians' findings about comfort women. They have also targeted
contradictions in the testimonies of comfort women in an effort to discredit their accounts.
Historical Debates: Neonationalists vs. Progressive and Feminist Historians
Making and keeping the issue of comfort women controversial has been one of the mosteffective strategies pursued by neonationalists. In particular, they have focused on minor or
technical details of the facts presented by women’s testimonies and historical research, pointing
out errors and the impossibility of verification.[24] For example, in the early 1990s, some school
textbooks referred to the women in question as jugun-ianfu (comfort women serving in the war).
Neonationalists, however, argued that jugun-ianfu was not the “historical term,” meaning that itwas not the term that was used officially (and unofficially) during the war. Therefore, they haveinsisted, the term must be deleted from school textbooks.[25]There is a modicum of truth in the nationalist claim: the term jugun-ianfu was a postwar
invention, gaining a wide currency with Senda’s work. During the war, the military officiallycalled the comfort facilities ianjo or ianshisetsu (ian means “comfort”), designating for the mostpart the military comfort facilities but sometimes referring to private brothels. For example, oneof the key documents Yoshimi discovered in 1991 (one that led to Prime Minister Miyazawa’s
official apology in 1992) was subject indexed as “Gun Ianjo Jugyofu-to Boshu ni kansuru Ken”
(Matters concerning the recruitment of women to work in military comfort stations).[26] The
women were variously called as ianfu (comfort women), shugyofu (women of indecent
occupation), shakufu (women serving sake), and tokushu-ianfu (special kind of comfort women),but not jugun-ianfu.[27]Semantic issues aside, however, neonationalist efforts to undermine the history of the comfort
women--and to erase it from school textbooks--seem manipulative at best. They argue, forexample, that the term jugun, as part of a compound noun (e.g., jugun-kisha, the term for war
correspondents; and jugun-kangofu, the term for war nurses), indicates the status of gunzoku, orcivilian war workers (those officially on the payroll of the army and/or navy). The comfort
women, they argue, were not in that category. Historians such as Yoshimi have refuted thisargument by pointing out that the term jugun was (and is) commonly used to mean “going to thefront,” or “serving in the war,” and as such it was not used in the same way as gunzoku. For
example, most war correspondents were not employed by the Japanese military (the army only
came to have its own correspondents after 1942), but regardless of their employment status, they
were (and are) usually called jugun-kisha.
Moreover, Yoshimi and others have pointed out the obvious fact that terms used in historicalresearch (and education) are not necessarily the precise terms that were used during the period
under study. (For example, people in the medieval period never called their time medieval.) In
their view, the real problem with the use of the term jugun-ianfu in school textbooks is not that it

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was not officially used in wartime since the term became commonplace in recent years. Rather itthat it is euphemistic. “Comfort” (ian) hardly convey a situation of the women that was, in fact,
enslavement. The point is well taken. Although many scholars at present prefer using the term
gun-ianfu (military comfort women) or Nihongun-ianfu (Japanese military comfort women) for
its preciseness, what is critical, whatever term is used, is that explanation be provided.[28]Another point of dispute has been over the types, agents, and extent of coercion. Neonationalists
have made an issue of the term kyosei-renko (taking by force), a compound noun commonlyused to refer to the Korean and Chinese men brought to Japan to labor in places such as
coalmines and factories during the war. Neonationlists has made an issue of it since attacking the1997 edition junior high school textbooks for their use of the term kyosei-renko in relation to the
comfort women. By defining the term as an act of “something like slave hunting by the military
and /or government authorities” (a narrower definition than most historians’ usage signifying the
involuntary nature on the part of the workers), they argue that no (documentary) evidence has
been found to suggest that kyosei-renko took place in recruiting comfort women. They also
argue that official documents indicate that the military and police instructed traffickers to follow
the law and regulations in their recruitment of comfort women (procuring women for prostitution
was legal, but regulated), and that the testimony of Yoshida Seiji, the only person who publicly
acknowledged the violent means he and his co-workers used to recruit comfort women, lacks
credibility in several key issues such as dates and places.[29]The neonationalist arguments were (and are) misleading. First, no 1997 edition junior highhistory textbooks used the term kyosei-renko in describing the comfort women. The termkyoseiteki (forcibly) appeared in one text and the term renkoshite (took) appeared in another, but
not kyosei-renko.[30]Second, it is illogical to suggest that no state or military force was used because no written
official order has been discovered. While admitting that they have found no official documentsthat ordered the use of military or police force for the recruitment of women--in particular, incolonized regions such as Korea and Taiwan--Yoshimi and others emphasize the fact that many
wartime official records were destroyed by the military at Japan’s surrender. Besides, the stateand its military had no need to use so explicit a language as “use force to round up women andsend them to comfort facilities” to achieve its goals.[31]In the absence of official document(s) sanctioning the use of force, progressive and feminist
historians have presented other evidence to document the fact that the military and government
authorities were directly involved in the procurement, shipping, and management of the comfort
women, and were aware of traffickers’ use of violence and deceptive tactics. Overwhelmng
evidence shows that colonial authorities in essence condoned such traffickers’ behavior as wellas their trading very young girls in Korea and Taiwan.
In addition, detailed testimonies by former comfort women document cases in occupied
territories, such as China and Southeast Asia, where government and military authorities
themselves took women by force. Finally, coercion was widespread not only in the recruitmentof women, but also in forcing them to stay and work in the comfort facilities.[32] Yoshimi andothers suggest that the neonationalist focus on the term kyosei-renko is simply a smokescreen to
divert (public) attention from the main issue: the coercive nature of the military comfort womensystem.

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Progressive and feminist historians seem to be winning the empirical and analytical debate. But
if the neonationalists have lost many points, they continue to circulate their views not only
through that part of the media that they dominate such as the Sankei Shimbun, but throughout themainstream mass media. And if progressive and feminist historians dominate the discussion inhistorical circles, neonationalists exhibit formidable strength in the popular arena where thecontroversy has attracted a large audience. For example, Kobayashi Yoshinori, a popularcartoonist who had once fought on behalf of some AIDS victims, has published a series of bestselling comics in magazines and volumes, promoting neonationalist arguments on the war. The
ability of neonationalists to keep the issue controversial has led the public to feel that the issues
remain unresolved.
Right-wing political pressures led a number of textbook publishers to remove references to
comfort women from their 2002 edition junior high history textbooks. Out of eight texts, only
one included the phrase comfort women (ianfu) and two others included the phrase comfort
facility (ianshisetsu).[33] This trend continues as none of the 2006 edition textbook drafts refers
to comfort women. One text mentions the issue, but only in a footnote touching on the recent
development by which the unresolved issues of war have been brought to the Japanese court.[34]
A “Poststructuralist” Feminist Critique of “Positivism” in History
In the battles between neo nationalists and progressive/feminist historians, some critics havelooked to “postmodern” approaches to replace empirical approaches to the issue of comfort
women. In a provocative essay, noted Japanese feminist Ueno Chizuko criticizes as “positivist”(jissho-shugi) the arguments of both neonationalists and progressive/feminist historians.[35]Citing “poststructuralist” theories, Ueno maintains that the issue of comfort women is linked tofundamental questions about the methodology of historical studies. She asks: “[I]s a historical‘fact’ such a simple thing that it looks the same to whoever looks at it?”[36]
According to Ueno, the positivist approach accepts written documents as the first and only
legitimate source for the study of history (bunshoshiryo shijo-shugi). This has allowed
neonationalists to discredit the testimonies of former comfort women on the grounds that no
official documents have been found showing that the state and the military took women by force.
In her view, progressive and feminist historians have erred in attempting to refute the nationalists
by advancing the positivist study of history. Commenting on a televised debate on the issue,
Ueno charges that:
Yoshimi Yoshiaki, a conscientious historian who has contributed most vigorously indiscovering the historical materials concerning the issue of comfort women, driven into a
corner by the questioning of nationalists such as Kobayashi Yoshinori, finally admitted
that no written historical materials exist that prove in due form the involvement of theJapanese military. If one stands on the doctrine of the written historical material as thefirst and only source, one has no choice but to admit “no.” It became more or less ashared understanding that the documents Yoshimi found and reported in 1992 can be
indirect evidence for kyosei-renko (taking by force), but not the historical source that
substantiates it as a fact.[37]At the heart of Ueno's interpretation is the suggestion that positivism “denies the ‘evidentiary
power’ of the victims’ testimonies,” and, thus, discredits “the ‘reality’ [experienced and told by]
the victims.” Ueno holds that to negate the testimonies of the former comfort women is toThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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trample their dignity underfoot. Instead, she argues for the importance of recognizing “a varietyof histories,” or “pluralistic histories,” which would represent history from individuals' differing
realities. This means that there is no necessity to choose just one history from the variety.[38]Progressive Historians’ Reply to Ueno
Ueno’s argument created a stir among progressive and feminist historians. For example, Yoshimi
responded that no serious Japanese historian today holds that written historical material is thefirst and only source for the study of history, still less that official state documents are the only
legitimate historical sources. He also noted that it is common sense among historians that “thepicture of history is not unitary even in cases where [historians] address the same object.”Yoshimi cited the difference between two versions of a life history told by the same former
comfort woman (a Resident Korean living in Okinawa). That difference, he suggested, is basedon the differences between the interviewers’ social locations and positions--one a Japanese
feminist, and the other a Korean support group.[39]Yoshimi maintains that historical facts need to be reconstructed utilizing diverse sources such as
official and unofficial documents, testimonies, and other kinds of evidence; and that theories andmethods of history are tools for historical analysis and reconstruction. In his view, areconstructed history needs to be evaluated in terms of its persuasiveness and logical coherence-which for him is “verification.”[40] Yoshimi questions whether Ueno’s position that there are no“facts” or “truths” in history, only “realities reconstructed from given perspectives” ultimately
suggests that one’s viewpoint is the only thing that matters in studies of history. This, for
Yoshimi, is highly problematic. As he puts it:
If so, . . . which “reality” to choose would be decided by determining which [viewpoint]
to choose from the [various] “viewpoints” that construct it [history]. This would result ineither agnosticism, or the situation of [choosing based on] beliefs and tastes, i.e., which
viewpoint one believes or prefers.[41]“At least, if it’s scholarship,” Yoshimi argues, “it should be questioned which reality, fromamong various ‘realities’ reconstructed, has persuasive power and which has a basis.”
Yoshimi rejects Ueno’s view that pointing out the exaggerations and mistakes in the victims’
testimonies is to deny the power of testimonial evidence. It is natural that mistakes orinconsistencies occur in testimony concerning events half a century earlier, just as mistakes andinconsistencies, not to mention deliberate falsehoods and obfuscation sometimes found in official
war documents, may be found in documentary evidence. For example, a woman testified that she
had been forced to work in a military comfort facility in the late 1930s in Japan, but since no
military comfort facilities are known to have existed inside Japan at that time, Yoshimi holds that
it is difficult to take this particular testimony at face value.[42] In another example, a former
comfort woman gave contradictory accounts—on one occasion, she stated that she had beentaken by force, but on another occasion, she stated she had accepted the job to earn money.
Yoshimi reminds us that the fact that the woman consented to be sent to the front (in this caseBurma) does not absolve the military from responsibility for its brutal treatment of her within the
comfort women system, leading her to attempt to commit suicide by drowning. He states, “Iwould like [Ueno] to consider this kind of effort [required] for the reconstruction of thereality.”[43]Nozaki: The “Comfort Women” Controversy

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Yoshimi’s point highlights the fact that oral history involves careful piecing together andassessment of information given in multiple testimonies. This is all the more true when theevidence pertains to events of half a century earlier. While Yoshimi acknowledges the possibilityof a (postmodernist) examination of testimonies as (contemporary) discursive practices, heinsists that the current controversy over the comfort women issue is principally over thehistorical facts. Therefore, his efforts have been geared towards the reconstruction of those facts.
Other historians have joined the debate. I would like to consider the insights of one of them,
Yasumaru Yoshio, a specialist on the history of Japanese thought. While finding some value in
Ueno’s argument, Yasumaru disagrees with her assessment of Yoshimi as a positivist. Yasumaru
points out that Yoshimi began his study because he was deeply moved by the testimony of Kim
Hak-soon, meaning that at the heart of his study are his sensibility and ethics. Having taken up
the subject, Yoshimi has brought to bears his skills and knowledge as an historian.[44]One important issue to Yasumaru is the activities of traffickers in the colonies who were active
agents and mediators between the women and the military, and who played a major part in theeveryday violence, including taking women by force or kidnapping them. Without their existence
and systematic operations, Yasumaru argues, it would have been impossible for the state tocollect such a large number of women. Extending Yasumaru’s arguments, it is clear that
historians and educators need to examine critically not only the direct role of the imperial stateand military but also the dynamics of class, gender, race, and ethnicity that shaped the ideologies
and praxis of colonial relations in order to grasp the milieu within which the traffickers
committed everyday violence.
The Nationalist Appropriation of Postmodern Vocabulary
While the debate over the appropriate paradigm for historical research has continued within the
progressive/feminist camp, some neonationalists have begun to speak a kind of postmodern
discourse, with their own particular twist. They are calling for the construction of a Japanese
history from “the Japanese perspective,” stressing unity and coherence.
For example, Sakamoto Takao, a historian of Japanese political thought, has argued that no
education is value-neutral and that the purpose of education, especially history education, is tofoster “national consciousness.” In his view, “history is a story,” and the Japanese history taught
in schools should be “a story of the formation of a nation, a people,” which aims at theconstruction of a sense of national unity.[45]Sakamoto here employs the discourse of a national history that is not necessarily based onverified facts drawn from studies of history, but one in which facts are “fittingly woven into thestory” in order to enhance its reality. In Sakamoto’s view, concepts such as “state” and “nation”
are, in some sense, fictions. “However,” he contends, human beings “cannot live without
fictions,” and “efforts” by human beings “to maintain the fictions” are needed. The vocabularyused here may have been borrowed from recent postmodern literature, but it curiously (andironically) serves modernist ends, specifically the construction of a national unity by[re]instituting and privileging national history.[46]Sakamoto's neonationalist postmodern discourse finds echoes among those in mass media and on
the lecture circuit, indicating that it has gained some currency in the public arena. In the fall of
1996, for example, Sakurai Yoshiko, a former television news anchor woman and current

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freelance journalist, gave a lecture at an in-service teacher training program held by the
Yokohama Education Board for the promotion of international understanding.[47] Sakurai spokeon the comfort women issue and textbook questions. She began by stating that “all the textbooks. . . assume ‘taken by force’ as a major premise; however, . . it is my conviction that [the women]
were not ‘taken by force.’”[48]The problem, in her view, was the “structure of the Japanese psyche,” which was “selftormenting.” She then proceeded to argue for the concept of history as a story (monogatari) of anation.
What I’d like to say is that history is a story…It is a story of individuals, and at the same time itshould be a story of the respective nation. Therefore, … it should be natural that Japan has its
own way of viewing [history]. It is natural that . . . China has its own view and Korea has its own
view, and it is natural and reasonable that all three are separate [and different].[49]For Sakurai, Japan’s (hi)story needs to be told from the Japanese perspective, that is, aperspective through which the younger generation come to love the nation.
The new postmodern line put forth by the nationalists also seems to blur the line between “fact”
and “fiction.” In fact, Fujioka Nobukatsu, an educational scholar and long a central figure in the
neonationalist attack on history textbooks, has even argued that the inclusion of “lies” in history
books (and, by implication, textbooks) is acceptable for certain purposes, for instance, to makethe story “colorful.” Fujioka has disclosed that in the 1990s, when he was involved in authoring
Takasugi Shinsaku, a series of history books for children (intended to aid their understanding of
history lessons in schools),[50] he included some fictitious stories. As he puts it:
To write [a history] based only on verified historical truths makes . . . [it] insipid and dry.
I changed my policy for the lack of an alternative--I had no choice but to write from my
own imagination to a great extent.[51]It seems that neonationalists are in the process of reformulating their discursive strategy toappropriate (selectively) certain postmodern concepts such as “history as story” to serve thepurpose of creating an idealized history of a pure Japanese nation. It is a project that resonateswith dominant wartime ideologies of empire.
As we have seen, one of the primary nationalist strategies has been to focus on the details ofhistorical findings on comfort women, to point out errors or the impossibility of verifying certain
claims, and on that basis suggest the impossibility of verifying any part of the history of comfort
women. At the same time, they seek to relativize the epistemological status of any claim
concerning historical facts and argue for a choice of stories from any number of “equally valid”
stories. The notion of “history as story” serves as a license to construct any kind of story ashistory, including fictive stories with real names. This is a clever move for neonationalists, onethat is worrisome for progressive/feminist historians. For, if neonationalists are unable to win thebattle over empirical research and testimony, perhaps they can win with fictional narratives
appealing to the national pride and patriotic spirit.
Conclusion
The testimonies of former comfort women that appeared in the early 1990s spurred intense
controversy over the representation of wartime Japan's military comfort women system. The

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controversy has been intense and prolonged, not only because it reflects the political andideological struggle(s) between progressives and neonationalists in Japan and the geopolitics anddiplomacy involving Japan and its neighbors,[52] but also because of the intellectual and moral
challenges posed to the societies involved in general, and historians and educators
specifically.[53]In the conventional legal context, “testimony is provided, and is called for, when the facts uponwhich justice must pronounce its verdict are not clear, when historical accuracy is in doubt, andwhen both the truth and its supporting elements of evidence are called into question.”[54] Inother words, it settles the dispute. In contemporary society, testimony given by victims and theoppressed has been used in research and education to provide crucial evidence to document
traumatic events, including the Second World War, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, anddiverse war atrocities. In so doing, it has acquired another function—unsettling the (dominant,normative) truth.
Indeed, the testimonies of former comfort women have changed the interpretive framework forresearch on the issue and for what counts as truth. As a result, a much richer, detailed, and morecritical understanding of the events and processes that defined the comfort women system
becomes possible. At the same time, however, the emphasis placed by some proponents of the
comfort women on the truth of their testimonies has backfired. Japanese neonationalists, by
focusing on minor details and contradictions, have effectively made (and kept) controversial both
the women's testimonies and historians’ findings that draw both on testimonies and archival
research. Progressive and feminist historians have fought back and won a number of empiricaldebates on the basis of expert knowledge, but neonationalists have succeeded in confusing publicaudiences, including many school teachers.
How should historians and educators use the voices and testimonies of comfort women, as wellas those of other marginalized groups? It seems to me that we should strive for a sensitive,
sensible, and critical approach to them. First, we should understand that oral testimony is an
important and unique source of information, one that is particularly important if we are to gain
access to the experience of victims, but that it is only one of many types of sources that
historians and educators should consult. Like any other source, its value needs to be assessed
rigorously, its internal consistency examined closely, and, when used as part of the factual
narratives that historians construct, it should be used in conjunction with multiple official andunofficial documents—print or otherwise—to create a wider and deeper understanding ofcomplex phenomena of the past. The testimony of the comfort women, where it can be verified
and reinforced, is among the most compelling and important kinds of evidence available fordocumenting the women’s experience and the interplay between official policies and the peoples
of colonized and occupied territories under wartime conditions.
Second, gender is a critically important category for understanding what took place more thanhalf a century ago and for grasping how it has been represented since.[55] In my view, theforemost significance of testimony lies in its power to provide a lived perspective, a lens throughwhich historians and educators can (and should) reexamine and reinterpret every historicalsource available. We should look at history of the war through the eyes of comfort women.[56] It
can change the meanings and interpretations of events by shedding a different light on otherhistorical materials, and so it can yield new knowledge. In this case, the research illuminates how
gender relations and ideology, embedded in nationalism, militarism, colonialism, andThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

188

ethnocentrism, shaped history, and how statist and male perspectives on that history can bechallenged. The women’s testimonies help visualize a new, counter history of war andcolonialism, providing rare insight into a range of issues as experienced and remembered by animportant group of women whose voices had been silenced for more than half a century.
Third, we should not conflate the problem of method with that of perspective. The evidence
produced by a testimony, while often powerful and compelling, is by its nature partial andlimited.[57] It is the historians’ task to probe the relationship between “fragmentary evidence”
and the lived perspective (or “holistic truth”) to comprehend the full experience of comfort
women and the role of the state in crafting the comfort women system.[58] To be sure, sometestimony is difficult--or virtually impossible--to verify given the fact that the Japanese
government and military deliberately destroyed the key documents at Japan’s defeat.[59]However, the value of the perspective is not undermined by discrepancies and inconsistencies inindividual accounts. Rather, taken as a group, the testimonies of comfort women from many
countries constitute a powerful and coherent set of lenses to examine the nature of the comfort
women system and the war. Incorporating the perspective(s) of the victims into historicalresearch and education is not only a profoundly important intellectual act, it is also among themost important ethical and political responsibilities of historians and educators.
Finally, it is urgent to educate students and the public about the complex issues involved in therelationship between history and testimony, so that they can meet the intellectual and moral
challenges that the history of comfort women and other sensitive historical issues pose for later
generations. Postmodern debates can help to sensitize students and the public to become
informed listeners and readers of testimonies and to effectively engage the controversies
surrounding them. Those who hold classic, commonsensical notions of historical objectivity, andwho emphasize teaching only “the facts”, may remain vulnerable in contemporary debates overhistory and testimony, if only because they are less equipped to deal with attacks employing
postmodern language as in the case of “history as story.” Today’s effective citizenship requires
understanding of the nature, power, and limits of testimonies in constructing historicalknowledge, as such knowledge is a major source of national identity.
*I would like to thank Hiro Inokuchi, Richard Minear, and Mark Selden for comments andsuggestions.
Yoshiko Nozaki is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership & Policy,
the University at Buffalo (SUNY-Buffalo) and an Asia-Pacific Journal Associate. She is theauthor of War Memory, Nationalism, and Education in Postwar Japan, 1945-2007: The Japanese
history textbook controversy and Ienaga Saburo’s court challenges and numerous works on
education and historical memory. She is co-author with Hiromitsu Inokuchi of What U.S. Middle
School Students Bring to Global Education: Discourses on Japan, Formation of American
Identities, and the Sociology of Knowledge and Curriculum.
Notes[1] Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” in Shoshana Felman andDori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London:
Routledge, 1992), 59-60.

Nozaki: The “Comfort Women” Controversy

189[2] Allen Carey-Webb, "Transformative Voices," in Allen Carey-Webb and Stephen Benz, eds.,
Teaching and testimony: Rigoberta Menchu and the North American Classroom (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1996), 7.
[3] See, for example, June Kuzmeskus, "Writing Their Way to Compassionate Citizenship:
Rigoberta Menchu and Activating High School Learners," in Carey-Webb and Benz, Teaching
and Testimony, 123-131.
[4] Shoshana Felman, "Education and Crisis, Or the Vicissitudes of Teaching," in Felman andLaub, Testimony, 1-56.
[5] Mary Louise Pratt, “I, Rigoberta Menshu and the ‘Culture Wars,’” in Arturo Arias, ed. The
Rigoberta Menchu Controversy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 30.
[6] Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (NY: Columbia University Press, 1988), 5.
[7] In this article, I employ the term “comfort women” (hereafter without quotation marks)
because it has been the term most widely used, though I am aware that the term was (and is) a
euphemism. Scores of volumes and articles on the topic (written in Japanese, Korean, andEnglish) have been published since the early 1990s. This article discusses the most importantworks comprising that literature.
[8] Historical controversy is not new in Japan. Since 1945, Japan has been the setting of a hardfought struggle over the official history of World War II. See Yoshiko Nozaki and Hiromitsu
Inokuchi, "Japanese Education, Nationalism, and Ienaga Saburo’s Textbook Lawsuits," in Laura
Hein and Mark Selden, eds., Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany,and the United States (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 2000), 96-126; and Yoshiko Nozaki, “Japanese
Politics and the History Textbook Controversy, 1945-2001,” in Edward Vickers and Alisa Jones,
eds., History Education and National Identity in East Asia (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2005),
275-305.
[9] For testimonies and accounts by former comfort women, see, for example, Maria Rosa
Henson, A Filipina’s Story of Prostitution and Slavery under the Japanese Military (Lanham:
Rowan & Littlefield, 1999); and Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery
by Japan, True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women, ed. Keith Howard (London: Cassell
Academic, 1996).
[10] For other aspects of the controversy, see Yoshiko Nozaki, "Feminism, Nationalism, and theJapanese Textbook Controversy over 'Comfort Women,'" in France Winddance Twine andKathleen M. Blee, eds., Feminism & Antiracism: International Struggles for Justice (NY: NewYork University Press, 2001), 170-189. See also Laura Hein, "Savage Irony: The Imaginative
Power of the 'Military Comfort Women'" in the 1990s, Gender & History (1999), 11(2): 336372.
[11] See, for example, Hyakusatsu ga Kataru “Ianjyo” Otoko no Honne: Ajia-zeniki ni “Inanjyo”
ga Atta [The “comfort facility” and men’s confessions told in one hundred books: There were
“comfort facilities” all over Asia], ed. Takasaki Ryuji (Tokyo: Nashinokisha, 1994). Takasaki
finds approximately one hundred diaries and memoirs that referred to having directly witnessed
the comfort facilities and/or comfort women. Those published during the war were censored sothat their references were oblique.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

190[12] Japanese and Korean names in this article follow East Asian name order (except author
information for English publications).
[13] The first writer to take up the issue was Senda Kako, who published Jugun Ianfu [Military
comfort women] (Tokyo: Futabasha, 1973). Senda also wrote several bestsellers on the topic in
the 1970s. In Korea, several publications appeared in the 1970s. For further discussion, see
Takasaki Soji, Hannichi Kanjyo [Anti-Japanese sentiments] (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1993), 128-129;
and Kasahara Tokushi et al. eds. Rekishi no Jijitsu o do Ninteishi do Oshieruka [How to verify
and teach the historical facts] (Tokyo: Kyoiku Shuppankai, 1997), 160-161.
[14] Matsui Yayori, "Kankoku-fujin no Ikita Michi" [The road a Korean woman took to live],
Asahi Shinbun, evening edition (November 2, 1984), 5. At the time of Matsui’s interview, thewoman lived in Thailand. The article included a photo of her visiting her family in Korea in
1984, but did not mention her name.
[15] For Yun’s activities, see George Hicks, The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of
Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War (NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994), 173178.
[16] In the next few years, approximately two hundred Korean former comfort women followedin Kim’s footsteps.
[17] Kaiho Shuppansha ed., Kim Hakusun-san no Shogen: “Jugun Ianfu Mondai” o Tou [Thetestimony of Kim Hak-soon: An inquiry into the issue of military comfort women] (Osaka:
Kaiho Shuppansha, 1993), 3-4.
[18] For further discussion, see Nozaki, "Feminism, Nationalism, and the Japanese Textbook
Controversy over 'Comfort Women.'"[19] Haruo Sasayama et al., Chugaku Shakai: Rekishi [Junior High School Social Studies:
History] (Tokyo: Kyoikushuppan, 1997), 261.
[20] Two excellent book length historical studies on comfort women have been published in
English: Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military during
World War II, S. O’Brien, Translator (NY: Columbia University Press, 2000) (Original work
published 1995); and Yuki Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution
during World War II and the US Occupation (London: Routledge, 2002).
[21] Yoshimi, Comfort Women, 29. No documents discovered to date reveal the proportions ofnationalities or ethnic groups among comfort women.
[22] See, for example, Louise White, "Prostitution in Nairobi during World War II, 1939-45," in
The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1990), 147-184. See also Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women, 84-132.
[23] Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women, 180-181.
[24] In several cases, their criticisms of historical research turned out to be flawed due to theirown lack of expert knowledge. Right-wing nationalists published numerous volumes and articles
on the comfort women issue in the 1990s. For example, Uesugi Chitoshi, Kensho “Jugun Ianfu”:
Jugun Ianfu Mondai Nyumon [The verification of the “military comfort women”: Introduction to
the issue of military comfort women], revised and enlarged edition (Tokyo: Zenbosha, 1996).

Nozaki: The “Comfort Women” Controversy

191[25] Neonationalists continue to employ this discourse. For example, in June 2005, Minister of
Education and Science Nakayama Nariaki stated that the term jugun-ianfu did not exist at thetime of the war, so it was good to see the school textbooks have eliminated the term.
[26] For the translation of the document, see Yoshimi, Comfort Women, 58.
[27] For the issue of the terms, see also Yoshiaki Yoshimi and Hiroshi Hayashi (eds.) Kyodo
Kenkyu Nihongun-Ianfu [Joint research on Japanese military comfort women] (Tokyo:
Otsukishoten, 1995).
[28] Yoshimi Yoshiaki and Kawada Fumiko, eds.,“Jugun ianfu” o meguru sanju no uso toshinjitsu [Thirty lies and truths surrounding “military comfort women”] (Tokyo: Otsuki Shoten,1997), 9-10.
[29] For example, Yoshida Seiji, Chosenjin Ianfu to Nihonjin: Moto Shimonoseki Rohodoin
Bucho no Shuki [Korean comfort women and the Japanese: Former Shimonoseki labor
conscription manager’s memoir] (Tokyo: Shin Jinbutsu Oraisha, 1977) and Watashi no Senso
Hanzai: Chosenjin Kyosei Renko [My war crimes: Taking Koreans by force] (Tokyo: San’ichi
Shobo, 1983). In these volumes, Yoshida described his use of deception and coercion in
recruitment of Korean women for the comfort system as an officer at an employment bureau in
Shimonoseki, Japan. Employment bureau offices during the war were involved in local labor
conscription.
[30] Hiroshi Tanabe, Shinpen Atarashii Shakai: Rekishi [New social studies new edition:
History] (Tokyo: Tokyoshoseki, 1997), 263; and Ko Atsuta et al., Chugaku Shakai: Rekishiteki
Bunya [Junior high social studies: Hisorical area] (Osaka: Osakashosei, 1997), 261. See
alsoYoshimi and Kawada, "Jugun ianfu," 63-65. Some high school textbooks published inprevious years used the term in describing the comfort women; it appears that neonationalists
targeted the junior high texts without reading them closely. See, for example, Shozo Sakamoto etal., Koto Gakko Nihonshi: B [Senior high Japanese history: B] (Tokyo: Daiichigakushusha,
1995), 322.
[31] Yoshimi and Kawada, "Jugun ianfu," 22-24. Yoshimi notes that some non-Japanese official
documents (the U.S. military documents in the case of Korea and the Dutch military documentsin the case of Indonesia) refer to the fact that the women were taken forcibly by the Japanese
authorities. See Yoshimi Yoshiaki, "'Jyugun Ianfu' Mondai to Rekishizo: Ueno Chizuko-shi ni
Kotaeru” [The issue of “comfort women” and the view on history: Responding to Ueno
Chizuko], in Nihon no Senso Sekinin Shiryo Senta, Simpozium Nashonarizumu, 125.
[32] Yoshimi and Kawada, "Jugun ianfu," 20-31.
[33] Kota Kodama et al., Watashitachi no Chugakushakai: Rekishiteki Bunya [Our social
studies: historical area] (Tokyo: Nihonshoseki, 2002), 180; Hideo Kuroda et al., Shakaika
Chugakko no Rekishi: Nihon no Ayumi to Sekai no Ugoki [Social studies history: Japan’s steps
and the world currents] (Tokyo: Teikokushoin, 2002), 221; and Yujiro Oguchi et al., Shin
Chugakko Rekishi: Nihon no Rekishi to Sekai [New junior high history: Japanese history and theworld] (Tokyo: Shimizushoin, 2002), 189. The textbooks also eliminated references to otherJapanese war atrocities. See Nozaki, “Japanese Politics and History Textbook Controversy,” 295.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

192[34] Controversy has erupted since mid 2004 over the 2006 edition textbooks to be published in
the spring of 2006. For a brief report on the drafts, see Ishii Tateo, “Subete no Kyokasho kara
‘Ianfu’ ga Kieta [Comfort women disappeared from all the textbooks], Shukan Kinyobi, (April
22, 2005), 554: 12-13.
[35] Ueno Chizuko, “Kioku no Seijigaku: Kokumin, Kojin, Watashi” [The politics of memory:
Nation, individuals, and I], Impaction, (1997), 103: 154-174. In Japan, jissho-shugi is a historicalresearch paradigm that stresses verification by empirical evidence (historical sources), which
may not be exactly the same thing as positivism in Western historical studies. The article is one
of Ueno's first on the topic. In my view, while Ueno has a point, her characterization ofprogressive/feminist historians as bunshoshiryo shijo-shugi here is wrong, since they also stressthe legitimacy and importance of oral testimony. In subsequent publications on the same topic,
Ueno revised her description of the progressive and feminist historians slightly to present them ina more positive light. See also Chizuko Ueno, Nationalism and Gender, Beverley Yamamoto,Translator (Sydney: Trans Pacific Press, 2005).
[36] Ueno "Kioku no Seijigaku,” 159.
[37] Ueno, "Kioku no Seijigaku," 159. Ueno's commentary lacks the precise knowledge
exemplified by Yoshimi’s research that proved “military involvement,” but not “kyosei-renko”(taking by force). The issue of military involvement cannot be reduced to the question of kyoseirenko.
[38] Ueno, "Kioku no Seijigaku," 159-166. Ueno Chizuko, "Jenda-shi to Rekishigaku no Hoho"[Gender history and the methods of history], in Nihon no Senso Sekinin Shiryo Senta, ed.,
Simpozium Nashonarizumu to “Ianfu” Mondai (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1998), 30.
[39] Yoshimi, "'Jyugun Ianfu' Mondai," 128-130.
[40] Ibid., 130.
[41] Ibid., 131.
[42] The first Japanese military comfort facility was built in Shanghai in 1931. The number
increased after 1937 as the Japanese invasion expanded to other areas. Comfort facilities inside
Japan developed in places such as Okinawa and Hokkaido in later years. See Yoshimi, Comfort
Women, 44-57, 88-91.
[43] Yoshimi, "'Jyugun Ianfu' Mondai," 133.
[44] Yasumaru Yoshio, "'Ianfu' mondai to rekishigaku: Yasumaru Yoshio ni kiku” [The issue of“comfort women” and the studies of history: Interview with Yoshio Yasumaru], in Nihon no
Senso Sekinin Shiryo Senta, Simpozium Nashonarizumu, 209.
[45] Sakamoto Takao, "Rekishi Kyokasho wa Ikani Kakarerubekika” [How should history
textbooks be written?], Seiron (1997), 297:50. The nationalist effort to produce and sell theirown history textbook to high schools was unsuccessful in the 1980s, but it was intensified in the
1990s. Sakamoto’s argument was made in the context of the debates among neonationalists overtheir history textbook project of the 1990s. Against some prominent nationalists who argued that
history teaching in schools should be abolished altogether since it cannot be neutral, Sakamoto
rearticulated the need for (nationalist) history with postmodern discourses.

Nozaki: The “Comfort Women” Controversy

193[46] For a good analysis of Sakamoto’s argument, see Iwasaki Minoru "Bokyaku no tameno'kokumin no monogatari': 'Rairekiron' no raireki o kangaeru" [“A story for a nation” for the
purpose of oblivion: Thoughts on the origin of the “origin” theory], in Komori Yoichi and
Takahashi Tetsuya, eds., Nashonaru Hisutori o Koete (Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1998), 175193.
[47] Sakurai, who was previously involved in some progressive causes, has positioned herself inthe neonationalist camp in the comfort women .
[48] Sakurai Yoshiko, "Janarisuto Sakurai Yoshiko ga Mita Nihon, Gakko, Kodomo" [Japan,
schools and children in the eyes of journalist Yoshiko Sakurai], lecture given at the Heisei 8nendo Kyoiku Kadai Kenshukai, the Yokohama City School Board (October 3, 1996).
[49] Ibid., 13.
[50] The book title is the name of a Japanese samurai hero in the Meiji Restoration of 1968.
[51] See also Shinji Takashima, “Kingendaishi Kyoiku ‘Kaikaku’ Undo no Mondaiten 4 [Theproblems of the ‘reform’ movement of teaching modern and contemporary history], Senso
Sekinin Kenkyu, (1998), 19: 92. Fujioka argues that the “lies” should be within a limit of“common sense.” It follows that the real question might be what kinds of “lies” are actuallyinserted. Interestingly, one lie he included was very phallocentric. The (hi)story states that when
the hero was born, his parents and grandparents were extremely happy to see the baby was a boy,a successor of the family, and included the line that “[his father] made really sure that the baby inthe bath water…had a penis.” See Fujioka Nobukatsu, "Ronso kingendaishi kyoiku no kaikaku,
21: Rekishi jinbutsu shirizu ‘Takasugi Shinsaku’ o kaite, Meiji-ishin to buhsi 2" [The debate on
the reform of modern and contemporary history education, no. 21: On writing about ‘Takasugi
Shinsaku’ for the historical figure series, the Meiji Restoration and samurai, no. 2], Gendai
Kyoiku Kagaku (1997), 494: 112-113. For a discussion of masculinist tendency of Fujioka andhis followers, see also Hein, "Savage Irony," 360-364.
[52] For analysis of the politics of the controversy, see Nozaki, "Feminism, Nationalism, and theJapanese Textbook Controversy over 'Comfort Women'"; and Nozaki, “Japanese politics and thehistory textbook controversy, 1945-2001.”[53] See also Daqing Yang, “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre: Reflections on HistoricalInquiry,” in Joshua A. Fogel, ed., The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, 133-179.
[54] Felman, "Education and Crisis," 6.
[55] See also Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 28-50.
[56] Long ago, feminist historian Gerda Lerner asserted that “The central question raised by
women’s history is: what would history be like if it were seen through the eyes of women andordered by values they define?” Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History,(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 162.
[57] See Elizabeth Ellsworth, Teaching Positions: Difference, Pedagogy, and the Power of
Address (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997). It is also important to understand that thevictims themselves may have difficulties making sense of what happened to them. See Lawrence

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

194

L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1991).
[58] Yang, “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre,” 144.
[59] In addition, the Japanese government has not yet declassified a large volume of wartime
documents.

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The Japanese Apology on the “Comfort Women” Cannot Be Considered Official:
Interview with Congressman Michael Honda
Kinue Tokudome[Japan Focus introduction: Prime Minister Abe Shinzo recently added another entry to the long,sorry chapter of official Japanese war-crime denials when he said that there was no coercion of
the so-called comfort-women by the imperial military “in the narrow sense of the word.” On
March 1, an historic day in the history of Korean resistance to Japanese colonial rule,he said:“The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion.”
Liberal Democratic Party power broker Nakayama Nariaki further insulted the dwindling groupof surviving women when he compared government involvement in the brothels that enslaved
them to college canteens. “Some say it is useful to compare the brothels to college cafeterias run
by private companies,” he said.
In the furor that followed and in the lead-up to a potentially booby-trapped visit to Washington,
Abe backpedaled and issued a series of unsatisfying but politically expedient mea culpas, saying
he stood by the famous1993 statement by Kono Yohei, acknowledging state involvement in thebrothels and culminating in an expression of sympathy during his stateside trip that sought to lay
the matter to rest.
In a one-hour meeting with US politicians arranged by Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and hosted
by Sen. Nancy Pelosi, Abe was reported to have expressed sympathy for the victims: “As an
individual, and the prime minister, I sympathize from the bottom of my heart with the former
comfort women who experienced this extreme hardship. I'm deeply sorry about the situation inwhich they were placed.”
Calling such remarks an apology—to the US President not the comfort women—George Bushsought to lay the issue to rest in order to get on to the important issues of redefining the USJapan military relationship. But the problem is unlikely to end there. On close analysis, the Abestatement is a model of the equivocation that has long characterized many official
pronouncements on Japanese war crimes. It managed, for example, to douse the fires in
Washington caused by his original denial while still conceding nothing on the key issue of
coercion.
The man at the center of this storm in the US is Japanese-American Congressman Mike Honda,
who reignited the comfort women debate by tabling House Resolution 121 on January 31,
2007.The nonbinding resolution, which presently has 129 cosponsors, calls on Tokyo to“formally acknowledge, apologize, and accept historical responsibility in a clear andunequivocal manner, refute any claims that the issue of comfort women never occurred, andeducate current and future generations about this horrible crime.” See Honda’s statement at the
Hearing on Protecting the Human Rights of Comfort Women.
Honda has since been attacked and smeared in the conservative Japanese press, especially in the
Sankei and Yomiuri newspapers, which have accused him of pandering to his Chinese- andKorean-American constituents and undermining the US-Japan alliance. Throughout, Honda has
stood firm, denying charges of Japan-bashing and pleading with Japan to finally come clean
about this sordid episode from its past.

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Here he answers his critics.]
T: Your “Comfort Women” resolution is getting much attention in Japan. Why did you introduce
this resolution?
H: The purpose is to bring about public discussion and debate and to challenge Japanesepoliticians, not Japanese people, to address these issues in a forthright way.

Congressman Honda and Kinue Tokudome

I passed the resolution AJR 27 in California Assembly in 1999 and it caused quite a bit of stirwith the Consulate General (of Japan) in San Francisco. They said, “Why California? This is anational and international issue, not a state issue.” But it still passed. Then I went to Congressand said, “I am in Congress now. I will introduce this resolution again and it will be on a national
and international level.”
We did that (addressing historical injustice) here in this country as Nikkeis for the 1942
internment. They took our rights away. We challenged our own community first saying, “We
have to sue our government to have them apologize properly by reparations.” It took ten years. In
1988, HR 442 (The Civil Liberties Act of 1988) was passed and President signed it. That is aformal, unambiguous and unequivocal government apology.
What Japan has done to now is to offer individual apologies. Individually, they may have been
sincere except for maybe Prime Minister Abe. I don’t think Prime Minister Abe is sincere
because he changed his mind so often. It was not a formal governmental apology that was anopen and transparent apology. I think we have been very polite. They know what we are saying
and they know what the women victims are asking for. They understand that.
The primary effort now is to educate the public, the Japanese public and the US public, because I
believe that the public is a very open minded, compassionate and educated group. It is just thatthey have to be moved to action.
It puzzles me why that is not happening in Japan. Here in this country, we have newspaper
editorials writing about it. Australia has its editorials. Canada has its editorials. The Canadiansjust passed a resolution. (On the Comfort women issue.) So it’s catching fire, except in Japan.
T: The first official Japanese reaction to your resolution was Foreign Minister Aso Taro’s
statement in the Diet. He said, "It is extremely regrettable that the resolution is definitely notbased on facts or the efforts that have been made by the Japanese government on this issue.”
How would you respond?

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197

H: I got the facts from historians in Japan. Certainly the Japanese military after the war destroyed
a lot of information. But some information was unearthed. We have eyewitnesses and we have
victims. If their testimony were untrue, then all the major countries would be hesitant to support
this issue.
So I don’t know what they (Japanese officials) are talking about. I wish they would point out onwhat piece of information I am inaccurate. Am I inaccurate that there was not a formal apology?
In this country, a formal apology from the government is from Congress and then the president.
An institution must be judged by its behavior. Individual Prime Ministers have offered their“heartfelt apology.” They were all individual apologies.
T: Prime Minister Abe Shinzo stated that he would stick to the Kono Statement of 1993 while
insisting that there has been no evidence to directly establish the involvement of Japan's military
authorities or government officials.
H: He can make his case here. I want to respect his opportunity to talk to our president and tolobby any other Congressman if he so desires. So I will do it (pass the resolution) after he leaves.
If he talks about it there (in Japan) he should talk about it here.
But I must ask, “How can anyone say that coercion and recruitment did not happen the way these
women say it happened?” Instead, some people in Japan are saying that it was like any college
campus where you have a cafeteria that was run by private companies, who recruit their own
staff, procure food, and set prices. That was how comfort women were recruited and provided
their services. That is so offensive. I don’t know how you can make comments like that and stillwalk down the street without being criticized.
T: What is the US government’s position on the “Comfort Women” resolution?
H: Our State Department has been silent. All they have said after Prime Minister Abe said in theDiet that he was apologizing as Prime Minister is that “We certainly want to see the Japanesecontinue to address this and to deal with it in a forthright and responsible manner that
acknowledges the gravity of the crimes that were committed.”
T: Sankei Shimbun published articles on the political contributions you received from ChineseAmerican activist groups and accused you of being influenced by groups that have a connection
to the Chinese authorities.
H: I get contributions from Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, Mexican Americans, African
Americans, Japanese Americans and White Americans. And I raise a lot of money for our party.
It’s against the law to receive money from a foreign government. If people who are saying thishad any guts, they would ask me straight. They don’t have any guts. They would rather lie orgive disinformation to smear my character through the media.
T: Some people in Japan say, “What about the United States? Its bombing of civilian populations
in major Japanese cities and dropping of the two Atomic bombs were clearly war crimes also.
H: If you want to debate the dropping of the Atomic bombs, let’s debate. My wife was a survivorof the Hiroshima Atomic bomb. She was 3 years old when the bomb was dropped. I joined thePeace Movement in Hiroshima that was started by the Mayor. If you want to debate the Tokyo
fire bombing, let’s talk about it.

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T: There are also those in Japan who would say that the United States has engaged in many wars
such as the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. So how can such a nation pass a resolution
concerning a Japanese historical issue arising out of events that occurred more than 60 yearsago?
H: Yes, we have a trigger-happy Texan as our president who got us into the war. I was not a partof it.
T: You voted no for Bush’s war in Iraq did you not?
H: Yes. I was disappointed but respected their decision according to the Constitution. So we are
not perfect.
But the Japanese people also must know that when Japanese Parliamentarians came to the UnitedStates with the parents of the girl who had been kidnapped, I said that I would support them incriticizing North Korea. I also said that I would do so with the same vigor that I was exhibitingfor POWs and Comfort Women. That was the right thing to do.
T: Prime Minister Abe said that the abductions and the Comfort Women are totally separate
issues. He said, “The abduction issue concerns the ongoing infringement of human rights. The
comfort women issue is not a matter which is continuing."
H: But the women are still alive.
T: Prime Minister Abe restored Sino-Japan relations by visiting China immediately after he took
his office. Now a joint historical study project has been started. There are people who wonder
why you take actions that could become a hindrance to such positive developments.
H: My answer to that for Japan is, “Just come clean, come up with a clean apology that would
satisfy the former Comfort Women.” I would say that probably the Korean government and theChinese government would then have to say, “Thank you” and they could not raise this issue
again. That would put the issue into rest.
T: Doesn’t passing of this resolution have a negative impact on US-Japan relations?
H: I always preface by saying that the purpose of this resolution is not to bash or humiliate
Japan.
T: But the Japanese media say that the passage of this resolution may create anti-Japan sentiment
within the US.
H: They should do their research into what I say. Also, before we introduced this resolution, we
let the Japanese Embassy know. We notified them. So it was not a sneak attack.
Why would I be anti-Japan? My relatives live there. We fight. For example, “Save whales.” But
don’t call Japanese names.
I fight for balanced and accurate dialogue and debate. I am against racial profiling in this country
and I am against racial profiling in international politics.
When I appeared on a Japanese TV program, I was asked, “You have a face like ours. Why are
you doing this?” My answer is still the same. I can have a black face or a brown face or a whiteface. This comes from my heart.

Tokudome: The Japanese Apology on the “Comfort Women” Cannot be Considered Official

199

Even some Japanese Americans are asking why I am doing this. I tell them, “If you accepted thereparation check, you have nothing to say.”
T: Are you aware that there are people in Japan who have been trying hard for many years toresolve the Comfort Women issue? For example, opposition parties in the Diet have introduced abill several times since 2000, without success, seeking a government apology and compensation
to the victims.
H: I know of those people. I am aware that they have several times introduced a resolution or billto acknowledge, apologize and compensate Comfort Women. But the fact remains that they are
the minority parties and the LDP is the ruling party. Just like the Republican Party was the rulingparty in Congress for 12 years. We changed that last year. We went to the people and we madean issue of Iraq, that we were lied to and that it was the wrong thing to do. We made an issue of
Katrina. We told the country that the Republicans do not deserve to govern. And people voted
the Republicans out and voted us back in. That’s why we are doing this now.
I hope that those politicians who are working for resolution of the “Comfort Women” issue canfigure out the way to get it passed. I understand that this is a frustrating struggle for them. But
they have to have 51% to succeed. I think that’s why my attention is towards the public, asking
them to look at this and tell their politicians to do something. It’s important, so importantbecause these women are going to die and they should not die without being satisfied by anapology. The Japanese people understand honor more than anybody else, don’t they?
T: Would you like to go to Japan after your resolution is passed?
H: I wouldn’t mind going before it passes. I will debate.
T: When I first met you in 2000, you said to me that you were an educator. Do you think yourbeing an educator still affects your work as a politician?
H: Yes, if I were a politician, I would drop this. I have to continue to put it out so that eventuallypeople will get it. A teacher believes every child can learn. A teacher also understands every
child learns differently and some take more time than others. It seems that members of the LDP
need more time to learn while others who want to do something understand.
Afterword
T: Congressman Honda also serves as Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee. A
senior staff member of a US Senator from California describes Congressman Honda as follows:“I have known Mike at least 15 years. I have seen how politics changes people and for
Mike, he was always in touch with his constituents and more. National leadership has notchanged that. He stands tall among his constituents for responsiveness and accountability.
He represents his district well and is not beholden to special interest groups. The Comfort
Women issue is not a special interest group. The Party recognizes Mike’s ability to raisemoney because of the loyalty of his supporters and they are not all Asian, most are nonAsian.”
Congressman Honda has also been working for former POWs of the Japanese. In 2001, together
with Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, he introduced a bill that would allow former
POWs of the Japanese, who sued Japanese companies for WWII forced labor, to have their day

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in court. (The bill was not seeking compensation from Japanese companies.) Although it gained
many co-sponsors from both parties, because of the political climate of post-9/11 in the US, it
did not pass and all of the POW lawsuits against Japanese companies were dismissed.
However, Congressman Honda is not forgetting the POW issue because from the standpoint of“justice” and “honor” it is the same with the “Comfort Women” issue. When I met him this time,
the first thing he said to me was, “The POW issue will be next.”
Kinue Tokudome is the founder and executive director of a California non-profit organization“U.S.-Japan Dialogue on POWs" that maintains a bilingual website.
This interview appeared in Japanese in the June issue of Ronza. Posted at Japan Focus on May
31, 2007.

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Biohazard: Unit 731 in Postwar Japanese Politics of National “Forgetfulness”
Frederick R. Dickinson
Abstract
Fueled by perennial controversies over official Japanese regulation of textbooks, Western media
and academics thrive on claims of a peculiar Japanese “forgetfulness” of wartime atrocities. But
the postwar record of Japanese discussions of wartime biological warfare experiments reveals
an impressive level of public exposure that, in some ways, surpasses American discussions of its
own wartime past. To stress Japanese “forgetfulness” tells only half the story and obscures thetale of postwar political polarization that has greatly facilitated exposure of war crimes inJapan.
Japan and its citizens have an international reputation for historical amnesia. The battle by the
Ministry of Education, Science and Technology to tame references to wartime atrocities inJapanese textbooks has made the headlines in Western, as well as Asian, capitals over the lastquarter century. These controversies have been accentuated in recent years by Prime Minister
Koizumi Junichiro’s highly public annual pilgrimages to the main Japanese war memorial,
Yasukuni Shrine, where the spirits of Japanese war criminals remain enshrined. Western
fascination with Japanese historical “amnesia” is manifest in a spate of English-language studies
highlighting a peculiar Japanese brand of “forgetfulness.”[1]Among the most dramatic examples of Japanese amnesia is the failure to come to terms withJapan’s history of wartime medical experiments. Between 1932 and 1945, special Japanese units
in China subjected thousands of Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, Russian, and American prisonersof war to a range of experimentation aimed at developing new techniques in medical treatment
and biological warfare. Word of these experiments was slow to emerge after 1945 and, together
with Japan’s record of wartime forced labor and “comfort” women, and with specific events suchas the Nanjing Massacre and the Bataan Death March, became the object of Japanese
government censorship of textbooks. A dearth of English-language analyses of Japanese wartime
experiments relative to investigations of the holocaust and of the activities of Dr. Mengele
reinforces the impression that the Japanese record remains under tight wraps. According to one
recent English-language title from the popular press, “until the 1990s, almost nothing at all was
written or discussed publicly about the Japanese bio-war crimes.”[2]What is the actual record of postwar Japanese discussions of wartime biological warfare (BW)experiments? How does that record shed light upon the larger pattern of Japanese debate over thewartime past? Although most analyses of this debate highlight the peculiar magnitude ofJapanese “forgetfulness,” Japanese discussions of the past might most profitably be viewed lessin terms of a singular Japanese “amnesia” than as a reflection of the particular atlas of politics inpost–1945 Japan. In fact, the political polarization in post–1945 Japan may be said to havefacilitated, rather than hindered, exposure of highly sensitive information.
Exposing the Unthinkable in Japan
Contrary to the impression imparted by much of the discussion over Japanese textbooks,
evidence of Japanese wartime atrocities did not emerge in just the last two decades. Rather, thefifty-three-count indictment of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East specificallyhighlighted such crimes as the “Rape of Nanking,” the “Bataan Death March,” and the massacre

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of Chinese civilians at Canton in 1938.[3] Like questions about the role of the Japanese emperor
in the prosecution of the war, information about Japanese wartime bacteriological experiments
was purposely suppressed by occupation authorities during the tribunal.[4] But the issue was byno means unknown to the Japanese public.
There were hints of wartime medical experimentation on the continent even before the start of
the Tokyo trials in May 1946.[5] In January 1946, Tokyo papers quoted Japanese communist
leaders’ allegations that a “Japanese Medical Corps” had inoculated American and Chinese
prisoners-of-war with bubonic plague virus. Less than four years later, formal word from
Moscow that twelve Japanese soldiers had been tried and convicted in a six-day war crimes
tribunal in Khabarovsk in December 1949 generated greater discussion. All twelve men had been
members of Unit 731, the most notorious Japanese BW unit, which had been established in
Manchuria in 1939, and were charged with “preparing and applying bacteriological weapons.”
Both national dailies, the Asahi shinbun and the Mainichi shinbun reported on the surprising
Soviet announcement in late December. And a variety of local and specialty papers picked up thestory.[6] The trials became the subject of the first two Japanese publications on Unit 731,
Shimamura Kyo’s Sanzennin no seitai jikken (3,000 Human Experiments; Hara shobo, 1967)
and Yamada Seizaburo’s Saikinsen gunji saiban (Military Tribunal on Biological Warfare; Toho
shuppansha, 1974).
One year after the appearance of Yamada’s study of the Khabarovsk trials, a television
documentary produced the first revelations of Unit 731 from Japanese sources. On the eve of thethirtieth anniversary of V-J Day, the largest Japanese commercial network, Tokyo Broadcasting
System (TBS), aired a prime-time half hour segment on Unit 731 based upon three years of
research and interviews of twenty former Unit 731 employees by documentary filmmakerYoshinaga Haruko. Although the first installment of “Akuma no 731 butai” (The Devil’s Unit
731) offered mostly tantalizing images of respected doctors clamming up or running from thecamera, two one-hour prime-time follow-ups in August and November of 1976 sparked aninternational sensation. These segments not only recorded the testimony of four former Unit 731
employees but included their allegations that they had escaped indictment by the International
Military Tribunal in return for divulging their research to American authorities.[7] The
November 1976 piece was highlighted in both the Washington Post and on “Sixty Minutes.”[8]The TBS documentary opened the floodgates in Japan for research on Japanese wartime BW
experimentation. Five years later, a wave of scholarly books on BW experimentation appeared,
marking the 1980s as the heyday of Japanese research on the subject. Mystery writer MorimuraSei-ichi began the surge with a serialized story about Unit 731, titled “Shi no utsuwa” (Death
Receptacle; Kadokawa, 1981). Just several months later, Morimura published an analytic workon the subject, replete with photographs and charts obtained from former unit members andprewar medical journals. Akuma no hoshoku (The Devil’s Insatiability) was produced by arespected mainstream publishing house (Kobunsha) and became a best-seller. It inspired a fourth
TBS documentary on Unit 731 in 1982 and was the source of a 90-minute movie about Japanesewartime BW produced in Hong Kong and later reintroduced into Japan.[9] Morimura’s impact
was accentuated by a second analytical work that appeared in the same year—Tsuneishi Keiichi’s Kieta saikinsen butai (The Biological Warfare Unit That Disappeared; Kaisosha, 1981),
which was based upon wartime research reports of the second in command at Unit 731, Kitano
Masaji.

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Together, Morimura and Tsuneishi seized the leadership of the scholarly treatment of Japanese
BW experimentation. In 1982, both men published sequels to their original treatises. Morimura
added new material from American archives to produce Zoku akuma no hoshoku (The Devil’s
Insatiability—Supplement; Kobunsha, 1982). And Tsuneishi produced further evidence of
postwar medical research based upon wartime human experiments in Saikinsen butai to jiketsu
shita futari no igakusha (The Biological Warfare Unit and Two Physicians Who Committed
Suicide; Shinchosha, 1982). In 1983, Morimura published the third installment of his study, thistime including materials from China (Akuma no hoshoku, dai-sanbu, Kakugawa, 1983).
The 1980s also witnessed a flood of testimonials by former Unit 731 employees. In 1982, aformer female member of the Unit 731 staff offered memories and photographs in “Shogen” 731
Ishii butai (Eyewitness: Unit 731).[10] On the thirty-eighth anniversary of V-J Day in 1983, aformer driver for Unit 731, Koshi Sadao, produced Hi no maru wa akai namida ni (Red Tears of
the Red Sun; Kyoiku shiryo shuppankai, 1983). In 1989, a freelance journalist published acollection of testimonials by four former employees, which he had discovered in the Chinese
memorial hall to Unit 731 outside of Harbin (Takitani Jiro, Satsuriku kojo: 731 butai,
Shinshinshobo, 1989). In the same year, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nomonhan Incident,
the Asahi shinbun carried testimonials of three former members identifying the incident as thefirst Japanese battlefield use of biological agents.[11]If the 1980s marked the appearance of the first substantive Japanese research on Japanese BW
experimentation, the 1990s ushered in a new era of public consciousness of the issue. In 1992,
the story emerged from the realm of private programming to the Japanese national network,
NHK. In April of that year, NHK aired a two-part documentary on Japanese BW mastermind
Ishii Shiro. Based upon newly discovered records of the Khabarovsk Trial from KGB files andmaterials from the Dugway, Utah, Proving Grounds, the main American testing ground forbiological warfare, “731 saikinsen butai” (731 Biological Warfare Unit) revealed how Japaneseexperiments were actually conducted and highlighted the Soviet–American rivalry overrecords.[12] In July 1995, a team of researchers released more evidence of the effect of Japaneseexperimentation in a collection of translated Chinese documents.[13] Several months later, theAsahi shinbun reported the first joint Sino-Japanese symposium on wartime Japaneseexperimentation. Convening over five days in the city of Harbin, Manchuria, the symposium
drew together approximately one hundred participants from both countries, including former
members of Unit 731.[14]Three important new discoveries in the Japanese record fueled the growing public consciousnessof the 1990s. In 1989, the bones of suspected victims of Japanese wartime experimentation were
unearthed from the grounds of the former Army Medical College in Tokyo.[15] Four years later,in January 1993, Tsuneishi Kei-ichi uncovered from military records in the Japanese National
Archives the first documentary evidence of Japanese preparations for use of biological weaponson the battlefield.[16] In August of the same year, a team of Japanese researchers affiliated with
the Nihon no senso sekinin shiryo senta (Center for Japanese War Responsibility) discovered in
the administrative journal of the Army General Staff in the National Defense Agency Library
documentary evidence of the use of biological weapons throughout China. The finding madefront page news on the forty-eighth anniversary of V-J Day.[17]Both the discovery of bones and Tsuneishi’s disclosure of documentary evidence of Japanese
preparations for biological warfare inspired the organization of an unprecedented national

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exposition of Japanese wartime experimentation between July 1993 and December 1994. The“731 butai ten” (Unit 731 Exhibit) displayed 80-some odd implements and described wartime
experiments with models constructed from the testimonies of former Unit 731 employees.
Although originally scheduled for one year, the exhibition ultimately ran for 18 months, toured
64 Japanese cities and attracted 240,000 visitors.[18]Meanwhile, the administrative journal of the Army General Staff that had been unearthed in thelibrary of the National Defense Agency spurred fact-finding missions to China and a new
publication. In 1994, following evidence from the journal, a private citizens’ group visited
Manchuria and obtained corroborating testimony from Chinese citizens of Japanese use ofcholera and plague-carrying fleas.[19] In 1995, two prominent members of the group that had
discovered the General Staff evidence published their findings in a booklet produced by one ofJapan’s most powerful publishing houses, Iwanami.[20]Hiding the Unthinkable in the U.S.
Non-Japanese audiences are less likely to be familiar with this history of revelations of Japanese
BW than with the record of struggle over inclusion of such material in Japanese primary andsecondary textbooks. Japanese textbook screening became a focus of intense international
interest particularly after highly public political debates in the Japanese Diet in the early
1980s.[21] The series of long and protracted lawsuits brought against the Japanese government
by celebrated textbook author Ienaga Saburo between 1965 and 1997 ensured an almost
permanent association of the Japanese state with censorship in the Western press.[22] The very
visible recent initiative led by Tokyo University professor Fujioka Nobukatsu to fashion a “New
Education,” which purges Japanese textbooks of references to the “dark” past (covered in moredetail below), has persuaded many Western observers of the intractable nature of intellectual
debate generally in Japan.[23]Central review of textbook content certainly distinguishes Japan from most Westernindustrialized states. But in the context of the above record of postwar revelations of wartime
BW experimentation, the notion of Japanese historical “amnesia” seems overblown. In light ofAmerica’s postwar record of revelation concerning wartime BW experimentation, it appears
irrelevant.
The scale of Japanese wartime BW experimentation was certainly striking. At the peak of his
power, Ishii Shiro directed over 5,000 soldiers and scientists. Ping Fan (Unit 731) alone
comprised over 150 buildings, including a 1,000-seat auditorium, athletic field and otheramenities for the three thousand employees stationed there.[24] But American wartime facilities
were, at their height, just as impressive. The principal American BW facility, Camp Detrick, an
old army base in rural Maryland, expanded between April and December 1943 from a rural
outpost to a metropolis of 250 buildings and living quarters for 5,000 people.[25]Dickinson: Biohazard

205

Pingfan

The known record of American experimentation on human subjects pales, of course, bycomparison with the estimates of those killed in north China through willful Japaneseextermination between 1932 and 1945.[26] Yet the virtual absence of academic discussion on
American wartime efforts is remarkable. Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh weighed in withthe first important glimpse of the American program in a 1968 volume titled Chemical andBiological Warfare: America’s Hidden Arsenal (Doubleday, 1969). But unlike the Japanese case,this initial revelation did not mark the beginning of a wave of scholarship on American wartime
experimentation.[27] Rather, we know more today from Japanese and American scholars about
postwar American efforts to extract information about Japanese wartime experimentation than
we do about American wartime programs themselves. There is, of course, plenty of critical
literature on indiscriminate American violence in World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam and
Iraq. And increasing interest has been generated in recent years in the tale of possible American
use of biological agents in the Korean War.[28] But the American appetite for suchinvestigations is so low that the publishers of a celebrated British study of Unit 731 saw fit toexcise the Korean War chapter highlighting U.S. collaboration with Japanese BW experts in
Korea in the American edition of their work.[29]Politics of Exposure in Japan
Observers are correct to pinpoint a clear record of official Japanese textbook censorship after
1945. But the notion that “the late 1950s and 1960s saw the textbook production and adoption
system becoming more and more like the state-authored textbook system that was in place during
World War II”[30] is overstated. In post-1945 Japan, final selection of school texts remains in
the hands of local school boards, not the state. Thus, even the most notorious recent “revisionist”
text by Atarashii rekishi kyokasho o tsukuru kai (The Society for History Textbook Reform),
which won government approval in 2001, was blocked from local adoption in that year by acoalition of grassroots organizations.[31] Unable to obtain even a one percent adoption rate after
publisher Fusosha had aimed for ten, Tsukurukai in September 2007 announced a new contract
with publisher Jiyusha.[32]Far from evidence of a collective national “amnesia” regarding Japanese wartime atrocities, therecord of struggles over school texts seems more indicative of what may be considered the mostThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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salient context of the post–1945 debate over wartime BW experimentation: turbulent Japanesepolitics. Postwar battles over historical memory have been part and parcel of the tumultuous
political conflicts spurred by the wrenching debate over national identity after 1945.
Although celebrated as the first Asian power to industrialize and shed the trappings of Westernimperialism, modern Japan has confronted the monumental challenge of fashioning a newnational trajectory four times in the span of one hundred years. The founders of modern Japan
shaped from the remains of a feudal realm a modern nation–state upon a German model.
Following the destruction of Imperial Germany in 1918, party politicians led Japan upon a new
trajectory of democracy and internationalism.[33] Enemies of 1920s liberalism steered the nation
toward a “Greater East Asian” world order in the 1930s. And when the “Asian” order collapsed
in 1945, Japanese citizens confronted once more the question of what it meant to be Japanese.
Unlike the first three attempts, the post–1945 effort to redefine the nation proceeded under theartificial auspices of military occupation. As students of postwar Japan have observed, theoverwhelming military, political, and economic presence of the United States in Japan after 1945
guaranteed an unprecedented polarization of Japanese politics.[34] On one side stood theconservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its political and bureaucratic allies. With thedirect political and financial backing of the United States, these forces seized a monopoly of
power and pursued rapid economic development at home and pledged allegiance to aninternational coalition of states led by the United States abroad. On the other side stood a diverse
assortment of forces on the left (the Socialist and Communist Parties, militant unions, student,
teacher, and intellectual associations), who rejected both the LDP monopoly of power andunbridled pursuit of economic growth at home and Japan’s military alliance with the UnitedStates.
Revelations about Japanese wartime BW experimentation, like many intellectual debates inpostwar Japan, were a direct consequence of early political battles between Left and Right.
Japanese socialists, communists, union organizers, students and liberal intellectuals hadoriginally viewed the United States as a liberating force for destroying Japanese militarism andreleasing Japanese political prisoners. But as American occupation policy took a conservative
turn after 1947-48 (the so-called reverse course), the Japanese Left staked a position that would
define the intellectual mainstream for over two decades. In a series of statements on the “Peace
Problem,” over fifty of Japan’s most respected academics in 1950 challenged the conservative
Japanese administration, rejected the prospect of a “separate peace” with the United States, andchampioned, instead, a policy of equal distribution of wealth at home and “neutrality” abroad.
Printed in the left-leaning monthly journal Sekai, the policy statements were widely popularamong the public.[35]If the Japanese Left after 1947 became concerned with the conservative turn of Japanese politics
and the overwhelming American political, economic and military power behind it, that concern
increasingly defined their intellectual pursuits. As already noted, initial word of wartime
Japanese experimentation on Chinese and American POWs was circulated by members of theJapanese Communist Party in January 1946. That was the month that Japanese communist leader
Nozaka Sanzo returned to Japan after having spent nine years in the Soviet Union and five years
in the Chinese Communist stronghold, Yenan, in northern China. At the Seventh Congress of theCommunist Party of China in the spring of 1945, Nozaka had declared that it was he and the“progressive forces” of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) in Japan, not the “pro–Anglo–

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American faction” dominated by financial magnates, members of the Imperial Household,bureaucrats, generals, and leaders of the Seiyukai and Minseito parties, that constituted the mostreliable basis for democracy in Japan.[36] Revelations of Japanese wartime BW experimentationin January 1946 were, in other words, one step in the larger attempt by the Japanese Communist
Party to reconstruct its base of support in postwar Japan.
Having recognized the political potential of the BW issue in 1946, the JCP would become themost energetic early champion of “historical truth” about Japanese wartime experimentation. The
Khabarovsk trials of late 1949 caused a minor sensation in Japan, but nowhere more so than in
the principal organ of the Japanese Communist Party, Akahata. Among the mainstream national
dailies, the Khabarovsk affair ran on the front page of the Mainichi shinbun morning edition next
to a United Press dispatch on MacArthur’s request for an investigation of Japanese internees
under Soviet control, but did not run at all in the Yomiuri shinbun.[37] The story gained
increasing momentum in the left-leaning Asahi shinbun, which ran it the entire week, first on thethird page, then with four consecutive days of front-page billing.[38] But Akahata provided themost detailed coverage of all, spending a week, first to print the indictment of the twelve
prisoners in full, then to feature interviews with men with purported connections to Unit 731.[39]Among those interviewed by Akahata was Takeyama Hideo, who had been a staff writer for the
Nippon shinbun. The Soviet Army had founded this newspaper in Khabarovsk thirteen days after
the Japanese surrender to distribute to Japanese prisoners of war. Among its editorial staff was
Aikawa Haruki who, upon returning to Japan, joined the editorial board of Akahata.[40] Given
that Soviet exposure of Japanese BW experimentation ran directly counter to American policy tomaintain silence upon the matter, contemporaries and historians have stressed the political natureof the trials.[41] Likewise, the high-profile Akahata coverage of the tribunal may be interpreted
in the largest sense as a JCP challenge to the American-dominated occupation and theconservative turn of politics in Japan. Indeed, American authorities aggressively countered thenews emerging from Khabarovsk as Soviet propaganda.[42] Mirroring the effort to shield theemperor from criminal prosecution after the war, General MacArthur himself publicly denied
any evidence of Japanese experimentation on human beings in December 1950.[43]The late 1960s and early 1970s were characterized by increasing volatility in Japanese national
discourse, principally spurred by growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Journalists such as
Honda Katsuichi became national heroes through trenchant criticism of American “imperialism”
and its devastating effects upon Vietnam.[44] But even more problematic from the perspective of
the Japanese Left became the complicity of the Japanese government in American atrocities.
According to one participant in the student movement of the era, in contrast to the Korean Warera, Japan seemed to possess “independent political and economic power and seemed to take theinitiative to commit itself to the Vietnam War.” Increasingly, the anti–Vietnam War movement
considered the greatest problem facing Japan to be “the structure of Japanese society itself.”[45]It was no coincidence that Honda Katsuichi turned his attention in the early 1970s from the taleof Vietnamese suffering to the story of Japanese wartime atrocities. Disturbed by American
actions in Vietnam, but also increasingly by official Japanese support, he envisioned the as-yethidden record of Japanese wartime behavior as another critical front in the intensifying battle forpolitical balance in post–1945 Japan. In 1971, Honda traveled to China to begin a series ofarticles in Japan’s most widely read national daily, Asahi shinbun, on the Nanjing Massacre. The
series was based upon interviews with survivors and other data collected in the mainland andThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

208

was ultimately reissued in volume form in Chugoku no tabi (Journey to China; Asahi
shinbunsha, 1972) and Tenno no guntai (The Emperor’s Military; Asahi shinbunsha,1975).

Honda Katsuichi. The Nanjing Massacre

At the same time that Honda began reporting on American atrocities in Vietnam in Japan’slargest-circulation daily, historian Ienaga Saburo published a highly critical account of Japanese
involvement in the Second World War with Japan’s most influential popular publishing house,
Iwanami shoten. Taiheiyo senso (The Pacific War; 1968), like Ienaga’s high school history
textbook, Shin Nihonshi (A New Japanese History; 1952), focused upon the “dark side” ofJapan’s wartime experience, and even included references to Japanese wartime BW
experimentation. Given Ienaga’s battles with the Japanese Ministry of Education since 1952 overapproval for his history textbook, The Pacific War may be viewed, like Honda’s exposé of the
Nanjing Massacre, as a direct challenge to the conservative politics of post–1945 Japan. Indeed,
Ienaga filed his first lawsuit over his history text against the national government in 1965, justthree years before the appearance of The Pacific War. And the text of The Pacific War left no
doubt about Ienaga’s political aims: “The Japan–U.S. military alliance revives prewar roles,
albeit with different stars. America has assumed the Japanese mantle of anti-Communist crusader
in Asia and helpmate Japan functions as a strategic base. This arrangement again projects
internal security laws outward across Asia and employs lethal force against radical ideas.”[46]The conservative establishment clearly viewed the wide dissemination of sordid tales of Japan’s
wartime past and direct criticism of postwar U.S.–Japan relations in such popular venues as the
Asahi shinbun and in books by Iwanami shoten with alarm. Honda Katsuichi’s revelations on
Nanjing were roundly criticized in the conservative monthly Bungei shunju.[47] And thenational government would continue to resist Ienaga’s challenges until 1997, when the JapaneseSupreme Court passed final judgment on Ienaga’s third lawsuit.[48]The heyday of Japanese research on wartime BW experimentation corresponded with thegrowing volatility of the national discourse in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Private
broadcasting network TBS aired the first three Unit 731 documentaries at the height of public
discussion over Honda’s exposé of the Nanjing Massacre. And the wave of published research
on Japanese BW experimentation that marked the early 1980s came in the wake of a new LDP
initiative to crack down on “progressive” historians following impressive victories at the polls.
The 1980 general election had given the LDP a large majority in both houses of the Diet andspurred a vigorous new challenge of textbook writers considered to have ties with the Japan
Teachers Union, the Communist Party, or various democratic education movements.[49] The
pivotal work by Morimura Sei-ichi and Tsuneishi Kei-ichi emerged within the context of thisheightened conflict between Left and Right in Japan.

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The JCP continued to play a critical role in the intensifying battle between liberal intellectuals
and conservative politicians in the early 1980s. Both of Morimura’s first two books, the fictional
treatment of Unit 731, Death Receptacle, and the analytical work The Devil’s Insatiability, wereoriginally serialized in the Communist Party journal Akahata. “Death Receptacle” ran throughthe May 1981 Sunday issues of the magazine and “The Devil’s Insatiability” trickled out inseventy-four installments between July and October 1981.[50] Through Morimura’s
introduction, one of the more dramatic American investigations of the Japanese BW issue, aseminal article by former editor of the China Monthly Review John W. Powell, in the Bulletin ofAtomic Scientists, was also published in Akahata in October 1981.[51] In the wave of discussionthat followed the initial publication of The Devil’s Insatiability, Morimura noted that much of
the cooperation that he had received from former staff members of Unit 731 had come fromthose who, following Japan’s defeat, had become members of the Japanese Communist
Party.[52]By the 1980s, however, the JCP no longer played the central role in disseminating information
about wartime Japanese BW experimentation. The work of both Morimura and Tsuneishi was
ultimately distributed in the Japanese popular press.[53] Morimura’s The Devil’s Insatiability
eventually sold more than 1.5 million copies.[54] And new revelations appeared in a variety ofsources. After first running in Japanese in Akahata, the seminal Powell article of 1981 reemergedin the June 1982 issue of Bunka hyoron.[55] In the same month, TBS aired a fourth documentaryon Unit 731. A flood of testimonials by former Unit 731 employees appeared in new publications
and the national print media. And by 1992, the story of Ishii and Unit 731 came to the national
network, NHK.
The 1990s witnessed a new level of participation by ordinary citizens in the effort to expose thehistory of Japanese wartime BW experimentation. In 1993, a private group in Shizuoka City
released a 90-minute film based upon the testimonials of victims of Japanese experimentation.
Organized in 1980 and dedicated to exposing the history of Japanese aggression in film, the one
thousand-member Eiga “shinryaku” joei zenkoku renrakukai (National Liaison Association for
Showing “Aggression” in Film) sent fifty of its members on nine fact-finding tours of China andKorea over a five-year span to produce “Saikinsen butai, 731” (Biological Warfare Unit
731).[56]As recently noted by Tsuneishi Kei-ichi, the 1989 unearthing of bones on the grounds of the
Army Medical College spurred the formation of the Gun’i gakko de hakken sareta jinkotsu
mondai o kyumei suru kai (Association to Investigate the Problem of Human Remains
Discovered at the Army Medical College).[57] In August 1991, this group, too, sent a delegationof high school teachers and citizens to China on an investigative tour. Inspired by a suggestion
from their Chinese hosts, the same group began planning for the Unit 731 exhibit that toured
Japan’s major cities between July 1993 and December 1994. Organizing committees were
established in each prospective exhibit spot, largely in the hands of enterprising twentysomethings. Parallel exhibits were planned by nonaffiliated youth. Students from Tokyo
Women’s College, Sophia University, and Toritsu High School created their own exhibits attheir schools’ culture festivals (bunka matsuri) in the spring of 1994. And by setting up a Unit
731 emergency number (110–ban), the organizers of the national exhibit solicited theparticipation of an unprecedented number of former Unit 731 members.

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The national exhibit spawned a series of smaller expositions throughout the nation. Tokyo’s
Nakano Ward sponsored a “Rikugun Nakano gakko to 731 butai ten” (Nakano Army Academy
and Unit 731 Exhibit) at Nakano train station in September 1994. Among the attractions was a
picture-story show of Japanese wartime experimentation created and performed by second-year
students from Ishikawa Middle School in Hachioji.[58] In 1995, students of Showa High Schoolin Saitama Prefecture attended the first joint Sino-Japanese symposium on wartime Japaneseexperimentation at Harbin. There they delivered the preliminary conclusions of their independent
research on the mouse-breeding industry of their native Saitama. The mice, it was discovered,
were sent to Manchuria during the war as agents in spreading the plague. After two years ofinterviews of over one thousand Saitama households, the students displayed their final results ina three-day exhibit at Kasukabu City Culture Hall.[59] Their research was also published as
Kokosei ga ou nezumi mura to 731 butai (High Schoolers in Search of the Mouse Village andUnit 731; Kyoiku shiryo shuppankai, 1996).
In June of the same year, an assembly of 220 professors, lawyers, doctors and private citizens
gathered in Tokyo to found the Nihongun ni yoru saikinsen no rekishi jijitsu o akiraka ni suru kai(Association to Expose the Historical Facts about the Japanese Military’s Biological
Warfare).[60] Among the members was thirty-year old Mizutani Naoko, whose great uncle had,on his deathbed three years earlier, presented 300 pages of material documenting his
involvement with the Japanese biological warfare unit in Nanjing, China—Unit 1644.[61] In July
1996, Mizutani accompanied other members of the group to Manchuria in a preliminary step
toward aiding Chinese victims of Japanese biological warfare to bring suit against the Japanese
government.[62]Shifting Framework of Japanese Academic Debate
The erosion of the LDP monopoly of power and reconstitution of the Japanese Socialist Party
after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 has shifted the reference of academic debate in Japan inrecent years. But it has not, by any means, mitigated the polarization of that debate. If the battlelines following the end of the Cold War are no longer drawn as starkly between intellectual Leftand political Right, they have intensified within the intellectual establishment itself. If postwar
history reveals the steady diffusion of Japanese wartime BW experimentation into mainstream
discourse, it also discloses a growing conservative backlash within academe to the“mainstreaming” of Japanese wartime atrocities. Although novelist Hayashi Fusao had, as early
as 1961, attracted notable attention by describing the “Greater East Asia War” as a war of“liberation” in the pages of the popular monthly Chuo koron,[63] it has only been more recently
that respected members of Japanese academe have been able to marshal forces for a concerted
challenge of the intellectual Left.
Japanese military historian Hata Ikuhiko jumped into the high-profile debate between Ienaga
Saburo and the Japanese government in 1987 and 1991, when he testified in the Tokyo High
Court on behalf of the Japanese Ministry of Education. Hata, in fact, appeared expressly to refute
Ienaga’s references to Japanese wartime BW experimentation.[64] Hata would ultimately joinTokyo University professor Fujioka Nobukatsu and Electro-Communications University
professor Nishio Kanji in the new national organization, The Society for History Textbook
Reform, formed in 1996 to counter the “masochistic” (jigyakuteki) view of history purportedly
promoted by the intellectual Left. The organization represents an impressive coalition of literary,
media, academic, and business figures that has already achieved a level of mass exposure andDickinson: Biohazard

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support. The revisionist cartoons validating the “Greater East Asia War” produced by one of themost celebrated figures of the coalition, Kobayashi Yoshinori, were run-away bestsellers
between 1998 and 2003.[65] And, although they were blocked for adoption by local schoolboards in 2001, the revisionist history and civics texts produced by The Society for History
Textbook Reform have, since that time, slowly made inroads into the classroom. Added toregular over-the-counter figures, they have sold nearly one million copies.[66]Conclusion
To the Japanese scholars who have labored to unearth the facts of Japanese wartime BW
experimentation and to American observers of contemporary Japanese society, the “New
Education” movement represented by Fujioka is understandably cause for concern. But, contrary
to the impression imparted by many Western analyses of this initiative, it is less a reflection of aunilateral “Japanese movement to ‘correct’ history”[67] than a glimpse of one side of a turbulent
debate over Japan’s wartime past that has raged since the imperial declaration of surrender inAugust 1945. That debate is a direct product of the deep political polarization that has
characterized Japan since military defeat and foreign occupation. Although the polarization has,on the one hand, spurred efforts to obscure the “darkest” aspects of the Japanese wartime record,
it has served just as readily as a powerful catalyst for greater disclosure. The Japanese Left,particularly the Communist Party, looked to revelations of Japanese wartime BW
experimentation, in part, to help reinvigorate its political base after 1945. And the great wave ofJapanese scholarship on Japanese wartime experimentation in the 1980s sprang from theincreasingly volatile intellectual debates surrounding the Vietnam War. By contrast, revelationsof American BW experimentation have been slow in coming, in part due to the absence of an
equally polarized debate over national identity in the United States.
The increasing prominence of conservative intellectuals in the Japanese national discourse is anunmistakable reflection of the post-Cold War decline of the Left in Japan. But it is also, in part, aproduct of the continuing vitality of the “critical” vision that marked mainstream Japanesescholarship on modern Japanese history through the 1970s. Professor Fujioka was inspired tomobilize in 1996 not from a position of strength. He was appalled to learn that all seven history
textbooks approved by the Ministry of Education at that point for use in junior high schools
contained references to wartime “comfort women.” Fujioka and his cohorts were, in other words,
reacting against the clear advance of the plight of Japan’s “comfort women” in Japanese national
consciousness.
Although national debates continue to rage around both the story of Japanese wartime BW
experimentation and of Japan’s “comfort women,” contrary to the experience of the UnitedStates, one can plot a clear record of progress in postwar Japanese revelation and consciousnessof wartime BW experimentation, on a par with the advance symbolized by the tale of comfort
women. Western laments about Japanese “historical amnesia” invariably focus upon official
Japanese government policies and the actions and pronouncements of conservative politicians
and intellectuals. The cluster of history textbooks approved by the Ministry of Education,
Science and Technology in the spring of 2005 was clearly more conservative than those given
the green light in the previous round of evaluations in 2001. And the continuing official refusal
to countenance appeals for legal restitution for wartime acts, whether it be to Chinese victims of
biological warfare, to former “comfort women” or to ex-POW’s impressed into slave labor, areobvious setbacks for history, as well as for the plaintiffs.

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But a spotlight on official policy reveals only part of the story of public memory. As theAmerican expert on Unit 731, John W. Powell, has observed, the Japanese government is notalone in its attempt to conceal dark aspects of the wartime past. To do so is the hallmark ofalmost any government.[68] And when it comes to legal restitution, the question of official
recognition of wartime sins is vastly complicated by formal treaties and international law.
Pressures on national governments to maintain a lid on a Pandora’s box of legal demands against
the state are, understandably, substantial.[69]Despite official Japanese resistance to restitution, the widespread Japanese public exposure to anincreasingly tangible record of wartime BW experimentation in the 1990s marks a genie thatcannot be returned to its bottle. The latest laments over Japanese “historical amnesia” ironicallyconfirm the advances in Japanese public awareness. Japanese courts continue to resist
compensation to Chinese victims. But lawsuits raised against the Japanese government since
1993 have been possible only because of new documentation unearthed in Japan and theassistance of Japanese private citizens. Problems in the evaluation of history textbooks in 2005,
moreover, were of a fundamentally different character than those in the 1980s. Whereas twenty
years ago the Ministry of Education actively excised references to Japanese “aggression,”
biological warfare and “comfort women,” by 2005, critics lamented not government action, but
inaction—namely, failure to vigorously insert references to wartime atrocities into texts.
This change of emphasis symbolizes the most substantial advance in official policy vis-à-vis
wartime atrocities over the last twenty years. In the contentious debate over textbook content,
Tokyo now officially recognizes the historical reality of most Japanese war crimes: the Nanjing
massacre, comfort women, mass suicide in the Battle of Okinawa, etc.[70] On the issue of
biological warfare, the Ministry of Health and Welfare confirmed the existence of Unit 731 in
the cabinet committee of the National Diet in April 1982.[71] And the Japanese Supreme Court
recognized the legality of references to Unit 731 in textbooks in the final ruling of Ienaga
Saburo’s third lawsuit in 1997.[72]Ienaga Saburo’s The pacific War.

A study of the postwar politics of revelation of Japanese wartime medical experiments does notengage the issues of the causes of those initiatives and cannot predict the degree to which wemight see questionable medical practices surfacing again in Japan’s future. But by shifting the

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focus from the purported “culture” to the politics of Japanese “forgetfulness” after 1945, it doessuggest that an important indicator of future developments may be found less in certain Japanesecultural practices (as is often stressed in the literature on Japanese bioethics),[73] than in thepolitical lay of the land. The politics of exposure of wartime Japanese BW experimentation
remains as vital as ever and continues to enrich Japanese public consciousness regarding thisdark chapter of national history. Likewise, critical issues of bioethics (brain death, stem cellresearch, etc.) have become the focus of heated political debate.
One might even argue that the substantial exposure of Japanese citizens by the 1990s to thehistory of wartime BW experimentation has facilitated Japanese sensitivity to contemporary
issues of bioethics. It is clearly difficult in today’s Japan to ponder weighty issues of medical
ethics without being reminded of the disturbing history of wartime experimentation. Thus, theAug. 3, 1991 Asahi shinbun carried, side-by-side, an article questioning the all-too-convenient
new standard of “brain death” for purposes of organ donation[74] with one describing efforts by
the national legislature and private citizens to obtain information about the Army War Collegebones belonging to suspected victims of Japanese wartime experimentation.[75] An eighteenyear-old preparatory student who attended the national Unit 731 exhibit observed in 1994: “Thatwar is bad goes without saying. But as someone intending to go to medical school, [this exhibit]
made me think hard about what we consider today medical ethics.”[76]In 1998, Japanese moviegoers flocked to a charming and delightfully humorous film about arural family doctor that also pointedly asked, in the context of the history of wartime BW
experimentation, how far physicians should go to preserve public health. Beautifully crafted by
the award-winning veteran director Imamura Shohei, “Kanzo sensei” (Dr. Liver) follows thefrenetic efforts of Dr. Akagi (known to neighbors as Dr. Liver) to contain the spread of hepatitis
in wartime Kyushu, Japan. Obsessed with finding a cure, Dr. Akagi at one point contemplates
extracting the liver of a live Dutch POW for experimentation. But he suspects that his son, a
medical doctor in Manchuria, has access to the most advanced knowledge on liver diseasebecause of tests on live subjects. Unable to countenance the horrors of an ambitious research
agenda, the trusted doctor ultimately abandons his search for a general cure to return to thesimple, if frenzied, life of catching each new flare-up of hepatitis through house calls.
The candid reference in a major Japanese feature film to wartime BW experimentation and aserious ethical dilemma that continues to plague medical practitioners is enough to belie thenotion of a “forgetful” Japan. It is, moreover, a tantalizing hint of the rich philosophical terrain
from which the active Japanese debates on medical ethics emerged in the 1990s. As William
LaFleur notes in his introduction to Dark Medicine: Rationalizing Unethical Medical Research(Indiana University Press, 2007), the origins of the pioneering volume lie in this widespread
discussion of Unit 731 and contemporary medical ethics in 1990s Japan. We would all do well toheed Gernot Bohme’s compelling point in Dark Medicine that we do not yet have the proper
philosophical safeguards in place to avoid a repetition of history.[77] But one might argue thatthe horrible reality of Japanese wartime experimentation in “dark medicine” and the clear
postwar record of exposure of those crimes, at the very least, make Japanese professionals
currently debating weighty issues of bioethics all the wiser.
Frederick R. Dickinson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is
the author of War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914-1919 (Cambridge:
Harvard East Asia Monograph Series, 1999) and, most recently, of “Dai-ichiji sekai taisengo no

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

214

Nihon no koso: Nihon ni okeru Uirusonshugi no juyo.” In Ito Yukio, Kawada Minoru, eds. Niju
seiki Nihon to Higashi Ajia no keisei. Tokyo: Minerva, 2007. pp. 133-149.
This is a revised version of an essay of the same title that originally appeared in William R.
LaFleur, Gernot Böhme, and Susumu Shimazono, eds. Dark Medicine: Rationalizing Unethical
Medical Research. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007. pp. 85-104.
Posted at Japan Focus on October 12, 2007.
Notes[1] Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan. NY: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 1994; George L. Hicks, Japan’s War Memories: Amnesia or Concealment?
UK: Ashgate, 1997; Laura Hein and Mark Selden, Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory
in Japan, Germany, and the United States. NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000. Norma Field asks, “Why didthese impulses for a self-critical renewal fail to flourish?” Norma Field. “War and Apology:
Japan, Asia, the Fiftieth, and After.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 5, no. 1 (1997). p. 13.
This view is not confined to Western commentators. See Wakamiya Yoshibumi, Postwar
Conservative View of Asia: How the Political Right Has Delayed Japan’s Coming to Terms withIts History of Aggression in Asia. NY: Free Press, 1999.
[2] Daniel Barenblatt. A Plague on Humanity: The Hidden History of Japan’s Biological Warfare
Program. NY: HarperCollins, 2004. p. xx.
[3] For a quick overview of the fifty-three counts, see Higurashi Yoshinobu. Tokyo saiban no
kokusai kankei. Tokyo: Bokutakusha, 2002. pp. 286-87.
[4] Peter Williams and David Wallace, Unit 731: Japan’s Secret Biological Warfare in WorldWar II. NY: Free Press, 1989. pp. 176-79.
[5] Information in this paragraph is based upon ibid., pp. 141, 220-3.
[6] For example, the Gifu Times, the Chugoku shinbun and the Japanese Communist Party daily,
Akahata. See ibid. pp. 226-27.
[7] “Shishashitsu: akuma no 731 butai.” Asahi shinbun. Aug. 10, 1975. p. 20; “Shishashitsu:
zoku akuma no 731 butai.” Asahi shinbun. Aug. 15, 1976. p. 20; “Akuma no 731 butai: futatabi
rupo hoei.” Asahi shinbun. June 21, 1982. Evening edition. p. 9. Yoshinaga had already made aname for herself and TBS with other documentaries on such controversial issues as the story ofright-wing sponsorship of the leftist student group, Zengakuren (titled “Yuganda seishun”[Twisted Youth]). Kawatani Tadao. Review of Yoshinaga Haruko, Nazo no dokuyaku. Asahi
shinbun. Apr. 28, 1996. p. 12.
[8] John Saar. “Japan Accused of WW II Germ Deaths.” Washington Post. Nov. 19, 1976. pp. 1,
19. Reference to “Sixty Minutes” in “Akuma no 731 butai: futatabi rupo hoei.” p. 9.
[9] The new TBS documentary was titled “Soko ga shiritai: Akuma no 731 butai” (This is What
I’d Like to Know: The Devil’s Unit 731) and introduced an American survivor of the camp.
“Akuma no 731 butai: futatabi rupo hoei.” p. 9; “Shishashitsu: Soko ga shiritai, akuma no 731
butai.” Asahi shinbun. June 29, 1982. p. 24. The Hong Kong film, titled “Kuroi taiyo 731 butai”(Black sun, Unit 731), was translated into Japanese and given four public showings a day at

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Nitchu gakuin in Tokyo on Oct. 7 and 8, 1992. “Kantogun saikinsen butai no jittai egaita eiga
kokai.” Asahi shinbun. Oct. 7, 1992. p. 26).
[10] Gunji Yoko. “Shogen:” 731 Ishii butai. Tokyo: Tokuma shoten, 1982.
[11] “Nomonhan jiken ni ‘saikinsen’no shogen.” Asahi shinbun. Aug. 24, 1989. p. 3.
[12] Sheldon H. Harris. Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45 and theAmerican Cover-up. NY: Routledge, 1994. p. 224. The two-part series was produced by Inoue
Takashi and aired on two consecutive nights, Apr. 13 and 14, at 10 p.m. “NHK dokyumento ‘731
saikinsen butai.’ ” Asahi shinbun. Apr. 13, 1992. Evening edition. p. 19. Similar to the BBC in
Britain, NHK is a publicly owned radio and television broadcasting agency, which means that it
is both independent and linked to the government in a way commercial broadcasters are not.
[13] Mori Masataka and Kasukawa Yoshiya. Chugoku shinryaku to 731 butai no saikinsen.
Tokyo: Asahi shobo, 1995.
[14] “731 butai kyumei e Nitchu kyodo shinpo.” Asahi shinbun. Sept. 16, 1995. Evening edition.
p. 9.
[15] The discovery was even highlighted in the New York Times. David Sanger, “Skulls Found:
Japan Doesn’t Want to Know Whose.” New York Times. Aug. 13, 1990. pp. 1, 5; “Gun’i gakko
ato no jinkotsu Chugoku mo chushi.” Asahi shinbun. Aug. 3, 1991. Evening edition. p. 19.
Although it was originally reported that the bones came from 35 bodies, that number was
eventually revised to over 100. See Tsuneishi Kei-ichi. “Unit 731 and the Human Skulls
Discovered in 1989: Physicians Carrying Out Organized Crimes.” In William R. LaFleur, Gernot
Böhme, and Susumu Shimazono, eds. Dark Medicine: Rationalizing Unethical Medical
Research. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. pp. 73-84.
[16] Significantly, Japanese historian Hata Ikuhiko, who had earlier aided the Japanese Ministryof Education’s legal case against Ienaga Saburo’s inclusion of references to Japanese BW
experimentation in high school history textbooks, confirmed the authenticity of these documents
in 1994. See “731 butai kyokumitsu bunsho: zenkoku 40 kasho de junkaiten.” Asahi shinbun.
July 2, 1993. Evening edition. p. 10.
[17] “731 butai no saikinsen: Nihongawa shiryo de urazuke.” Asahi shinbun. Aug. 14, 1993. p.
1; “‘Pesuto moi’ to hokoku.” Asahi shinbun. Aug. 14, 1993. p. 27.
[18] Kasahara Tokushi, et al., eds. Rekishi no jijitsu o do kakutei shi do oshieru ka. Tokyo:
Kyoiku shiryo shuppankai, 1997. p. 16; “Jibun ni muen no hora ja nai.” Asahi shinbun. June 13,
1994. p. 15; “Seitai jikken o mokei de saigen.” Asahi shinbun. July 11, 1993. p. 24.
[19] “Mochi o tabe, zenshin ga aokuroku nari, shinda.” Asahi shinbun. Sept. 6, 1994. p. 30.
[20] Yoshimi Yoshiaki and Iko Toshiya. 731 butai to tenno, rikugun chuo. Tokyo: Iwanami
shoten, 1995; “731 butai no saikinsen kensho.” Asahi shinbun. Dec. 18, 1995. p. 14.
[21] Nozaki Yoshiko and Inokuchi Hiromitsu. “Japanese Education, Nationalism, and Ienaga’s
Textbook Lawsuits.” In Hein and Selden. Censoring History. p. 113. Nozaki and Inokuchi note
that, from July through September 1980, more than two thousand reports on Japanese textbook
screening appeared in the press in nineteen Asian countries.

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216[22] For sustained analysis of the Ienaga textbook controversy, see Hicks. Japan’s War
Memories. chp. 7.
[23] Gavan McCormack sees Fujioka as epitomizing a “troubling” current situation in Japan inwhich “liberalism and rationalism are used to conceal a mode of reasoning that is both antiliberaland antirational.” Gavan McCormack. “The Japanese Movement to ‘Correct’ History.” In Heinand Selden. Censoring History. pp. 70-71.
[24] Harris. Factories of Death. pp. 47, 52.
[25] Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad. Germs: Biological Weapons andAmerica’s Secret War. NY: Simon and Schuster, 2001. p. 39. It should be noted that the official
history of Fort Detrick places the wartime high of employees at the facility at only 2,300.
Richard M. Clendenin. Science and Technology at Fort Detrick, 1943-1968. Fort Detrick, Md.:
Fort Detrick, Historian, Technical Information Division, 1968. p. 26.
[26] For a summary of those estimates, see Harris. Factories of Death. pp. 66-67. The two mostcelebrated cases of American experimentation on human subjects during the war are theTuskegee Syphilis Study (1932-72) and the Chicago Malaria Study. Neither of these projects,
however, was related to the principal U.S. experimentation in BW agents conducted by theUnited States Army Chemical Warfare Service.
[27] The one notable follow-up to Hersh was the 1988 piece by Stanford University historian
Barton Bernstein. Barton J. Bernstein. “America’s Biological Warfare Program in the Second
World War.” Journal of Strategic Studies 2, no. 3 (1988). pp. 292-317.
[28] See Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagermann. The United States and Biological Warfare:
Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Also,
G. Cameron Hurst III, “Biological Weapons: The United States and the Korean War.” In
LaFleur, et al., eds. Dark Medicine. pp. 105-20.
[29] Namely, chp 17 of the British edition of Williams and Wallace, Unit 731, titled, “Korean
War,” pp. 235-85, is missing in the American edition published by the Free Press. Williams andWallace. Unit 731; Harris. Factories of Death. p. 283, n. 36.
[30] Nozaki and Inokuchi. “Japanese Education, Nationalism, and Ienaga’s Textbook Lawsuits.”
p. 105.
[31] David McNeill and Mark Selden. “Asia Battles over War History: The Legacy of the Pacific
War Looms over Tokyo’s Plans for the Future.” Japan Focus. Apr. 13, 2005.
Japanfocus.org/257.html.
[32] “Jiki no kyokasho, jiyusha kara shuppan: Tsukurukai ga happyo.” Asahi shinbun. Sept. 18,
2007; “Tsukurukai, Fusosha to kankei danzetsu, betsu no shuppansha o kobo.” Asahi shinbun.
June 1, 2007.
[33] For a description of this era as more than a feeble gesture toward liberalism, see Fred
Dickinson. “Dai-ichiji sekai taisengo no Nihon no koso.” In Ito Yukio, Kawada Minoru, eds.
Niju seiki Nihon to higashi Ajia no keisei. Tokyo: Minerva, 2007. pp. 133-49.

Dickinson: Biohazard

217[34] John W. Dower. “Peace and Democracy in Two Systems: External Policy and Internal
Conflict.” Andrew Gordon. ed. Postwar Japan as History. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993. pp. 3-33.
[35] Following soon after the outbreak of the Korea War, the December 1950 issue of Sekai, in
which the third Peace Problems Symposium statement was printed, doubled its circulation. Ibid.
p. 9.
[36] Roger Swearingen and Paul Langer. Red Flag in Japan: International Communism in Action
1919-1951. NY: Greenwood Press, 1968. pp. 81-82.
[37] Williams and Wallace. Unit 731. pp. 226-27.
[38] See Asahi shinbun. Dec. 25, 27-30, 1949.
[39] By contrast, the full eighteen volumes of raw data used by Soviet prosecutors to make theircase have yet to be made available to researchers. Harris, Factories of Death. p. 229.
[40] Swearingen and Langer. Red Flag in Japan. p. 233.
[41] According to the most authoritative account, the U.S.S.R. conducted the tribunal in an effort
to justify the large numbers of Japanese POWs yet to be repatriated to Japan from Siberia.
Harris, Factories of Death. pp. 226-28.
[42] The December 27, 1949, United Press quoted the American representative to the Allied
Council for Japan and Acting U.S. Political Advisor to Douglas MacArthur, William Sebald,
describing the Khabarovsk trials as a likely “fiction” designed as a “smoke screen” to deflectattention from the thousands of Japanese POWs in Soviet custody still unaccounted for. See
Kasahara, et al., eds. Rekishi no jijitsu o do kakutei shi do oshieru ka. p. 23, n. 14; John W.
Powell. Japan’s Germ Warfare: The U.S. Cover-up of a War Crime.” Bulletin of Concerned
Asian Scholars. vol. 12, no. 4 (1980). p. 15, n. 1.
[43] New York Times. Dec. 27, 1949. Cited in Williams and Wallace. Unit 731. p. 231. For theeffort to shield the emperor, see Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. NY:
HarperCollins, 2000. Chp. 15.
[44] Honda wrote a series of articles on Vietnam, “Senso to hito” (War and People), that ran forfive months in the Asahi shinbun in the mid-1960s. Published in one volume in 1968, Senba nomura (The Villages of War) became a best seller in Japan, and over 50,000 English-language
copies were shipped overseas. See John Lie, ed. The Impoverished Spirit in Contemporary
Japan: Selected Essays of Honda Katsuichi. NY: Monthly Review Press, 1993. p. 16.
[45] Field. “War and Apology.” p. 15.
[46] Saburo Ienaga. The Pacific War, 1931-1945: A Critical Perspective on Japan’s Role in
World War II. NY: Random House, 1978. p. 244.
[47] Lie, ed. The Impoverished Spirit in Contemporary Japan. p. 22.
[48] Although the final ruling rejected Ienaga’s most fundamental contention that government
textbook screening was unconstitutional, it did accept the legality of his references to Unit 731.

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Nozaki and Inokuchi. “Japanese Education, Nationalism, and Ienaga’s Textbook Lawsuits.” p.
119; “Dai-sanji Ienaga sosho: 4 kasho no iho kakutei.” Asahi shinbun. Aug. 30, 1997. p. 1.
[49] For a discussion of this initiative, see Nozaki and Inokuchi. “Japanese Education,
Nationalism, and Ienaga’s Textbook Lawsuits.” p. 113.
[50] Morimura Seiichi. “Akuma no hoshoku” noto. Tokyo: Banseisha, 1982. pp. 54, 188.
[51] John W. Powell. “Japan’s Biological Weapons, 1930-45.” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
vol. 37, no. 8; for a discussion of the publication in Japanese of the article, see Morimura.
“Akuma no hoshoku” noto. pp. 188-97.
[52] Morimura. “Akuma no hoshoku” noto. p. 95.
[53] Morimura published with Kobunsha and Kakugawa. Tsuneishi’s research appeared with
Shinchosha.
[54] Arnold Brackman. The Other Nuremberg: The Untold Story of the Tokyo War Crimes
Trials. NY: Quill, 1987. p. 198.
[55] Morimura. “Akuma no hoshoku” noto. p. 235.
[56] The film became the fifth in a series, titled, “Katararenakatta senso—shinryaku” (The War
that Could Not be Told—Aggression). “Kyu Nihongun saikinsen butai, eiga ni.” Asahi shinbun.
June 28, 1996. p. 3.
[57] Tsuneishi. “Unit 731 and the Human Skulls Discovered in 1989.”[58] “731 butai no jittai, kami shibai ni.” Asahi shinbun. Sept. 16, 1994. p. 29.
[59] The display was titled “731 butai ten in Kasukabu” (Unit 731 Exhibit in Kasukabu).
Yonezawa Nobuyoshi. “Saitama no kokosei, 731 butai shirabeta. Asahi shinbun. Aug. 1, 1996. p.
31.
[60] “Kyu Nihongun no saikinsen, asu jittai kyumei suru kai.” Asahi shinbun. June 28, 1996. p.
26.
[61] “Tekishutsu shita zoki, suketchi shita.” Asahi shinbun. Nov. 20, 1995. p. 14.
[62] “Saikinsen butai o tsuikyu suru Mizutani Naoko san.” Asahi shinbun. July 12, 1996. p. 3.
[63] Later published as Daitoa senso kotei ron (In Affirmation of the Greater East Asia War,
Bancho shobo, 1964).
[64] Kasahara, et al., eds. Rekishi no jijitsu o do kakutei shi do oshieru ka. pp. 17-19.
[65] Kobayashi Yoshinori. Sensoron I, II, III. Tokyo: Gentosha, 1998, 2001, 2003.
[66] McNeill and Selden. “Asia Battles over War History.”[67] This is the title of Gavan McCormack’s article on the movement; McCormack. “TheJapanese Movement to ‘Correct’ History.”[68] Morimura. “Akuma no hoshoku” noto. p. 128.

Dickinson: Biohazard

219[69] For a detailed study of legal demands surrounding wartime forced Korean labor, see
William Underwood. “Names, Bones and Unpaid Wages, 1, 2.” Japan Focus. Sept. 10, 17, 2006.
japanfocus.org/products/details/2219, japanfocus.org/products/details/2225.
[70] Hicks. Japan’s War Memories. p. 106.
[71] “731 butai kyokumitsu bunsho” p. 10.
[72] “Dai-sanji Ienaga sosho: 4 kasho no iho kakutei.” p. 1.
[73] See, most recently, H. Tristram Engelhardt and Lisa M. Rasmussen, eds. Bioethics andMoral Content: National Traditions of Health Care Morality: Papers Dedicated in Tribute to
Kazumasa Hoshino. Boston: Kluwer, 2002.
[74] For an echo of this argument, see Yamaori Tetsuo. “Strategies for Survival versus
Accepting Impermanence: Rationalizing Brain Death and Organ Transplantation Today.” In
LaFleur, et al., eds. Dark Medicine. pp. 165-79.
[75] “Gun’i gakko ato no jinkotsu Chugoku mo chushi.” p. 19; “Jinken mushi no noshi ishoku.”
Asahi shinbun. Aug. 3, 1991. Evening edition. p. 19.
[76] “Jibun ni muen no hora ja nai.” p. 15.
[77] Gernot Bohme. “Rationalizing Unethical Medical Research: Taking Seriously the Case ofVictor von Weizsacker.” In LaFleur, et al., eds. Dark Medicine. pp. 15-29.

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The Hundred Head Contest: Reassessing the Nanjing Massacre
Suzuki Chieko
Translated by James Orr
Japan Focus introduction: In late 1937, a Tokyo newspaper reported on a "hundred head
contest" in which two Japanese imperial army officers competed to see who could lop off one
hundred Chinese heads first during the campaign to take the Chinese capital city of Nanjing. The
contest is symbolic of the perversion and loss of military discipline during the Japanese capture
and occupation of the city that has come to be known variously as the Nanjing Massacre, theRape of Nanjing, or simply the Nanjing Incident. The event belongs to a long list of 20th century
atrocities, and is emblematic of Chinese suffering at the hands of a barbarous Japanese military
as well as of Japanese predations across wartime Asia and the Pacific.
As part of what one might call a "canon" of horror, various groups have interests in how theevent is remembered not only in China and Japan, but also internationally. Estimates of thenumbers killed at Nanjiing vary from several thousand to over 300,000, depending on national
and political persuasion and the parameters one puts in terms of time, place, and ethnicity ofvictim. (See David Askew, "New Research on the Nanjing Incident," available at
http://www.japanfocus.org/109.html).
The essay by Suzuki Chieko is a self-conscious part of Japanese discourse over how
remembrance of Japan's wartime past will structure current and future Japanese state policy. In
this polarized discourse, wartime predations abroad are linked to a potential return of an
oppressive domestic order in the present, so those who seek to defend postwar Japanese
democratic as well as pacifist ideals, as Suzuki does, fear denial of Japanese atrocities in the
past.
Although Japan's postwar Constitution was drafted by Gen. Douglas MacArthur's Occupation
staff, most Japanese welcomed its guarantees of civil liberties and its renunciation of war as an
instrument of foreign policy. As Suzuki notes, however, the ban on the dispatch of troops
overseas has weakened since the first Gulf war in the early 1990s, when many Japanese felt
unfairly criticized for failing to contribute more than money to that international effort. With
attitudes toward the postwar pacifist settlement shifting, conservative political forces led byPrime Minister Koizumi have succeeded in gradually legitimizing the dispatch of Self Defense
Forces abroad. As in the post 9/11 United States, under the rubric of special counter-terrorism
measures the government has steadily expanded the range of activity in the name of national
security. And, for only the second time in the postwar era there are concrete measures being
taken to revise the constitution. The first effort at constitutional revision in the late 1950s andearly 1960s failed. Conditions now make revision seem more likely.]
Shukan Kinyobi editor's introduction: When the Japanese army occupied Nanjing in December
1937, the Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun newspaper (the present-day Mainichi Shinbun) carried four
reports -- printed November 30 and December 4, 6, and 13 -- on a "hundred head contest"
between two army lieutenants to see who could first kill one hundred Chinese with their swords.
After Honda Katsuichi mentioned this "hundred head contest" in his 1971 Chugoku no tabi
(Travels in China), a debate arose in the journals between Honda and Hora Tomio (then aprofessor at Waseda University) on one side, and Yamamoto Shichihei (aka Isaiah Ben Dasan)Suzuki: The Hundred Head Contest

221

and Suzuki Akira, who challenged the account. This debate more or less came to an end with the1977 publication of Honda's edited volume, Pen no inbo (Conspiracy of the Pen), but recently
Sankei shinbun, Seiron and like newspapers and journals have once again taken up the issue
charging that the "hundred head contest" was a fabrication.
This is the background against which the two lieutenants' surviving families have lodged an
appeal in court. Specifically, theirs is a libel suit calling for an injunction on publication, lodged
against the Mainichi Newspapers Company (successor to the Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun) thatreported on the competition, the Asahi Shinbun Publishing Company that published Honda's
Chugoku no tabi and Nankin e no michi (Road to Nanjing), Kashiwa Shobo, publisher of"Suemono kiri ya horyo gyakusatsu wa nichijo sahanji datta" (Using corpses for sword practiceand prisoner atrocities were an everyday event) and the essay collection Nankin daigyakusatsu
hiteiron 13 no uso (13 Lies in Denials of the Nanjing Massacre), and against author Honda.
On April 10, 2003 the Tokyo Supreme Court issued a verdict in favor of Nanjing Massacre
survivor Li Xiuying in her defamation suit against claims that she was a fraud. But immediately
afterward, on April 28, the "hundred head" suit was brought.
Why was a suit like this, one that challenges the existence of the hundred head contest, brought
immediately after the court ruling in Li Xiuying's favor? It was not brought simply out of spite
for the lost litigation, nor due to a stubborn refusal to admit defeat. To begin with, 11 of the 17
lawyers who jointly filed for plaintiffs had given support to those who had accused Li of being afraud. Next, during the first two days of the trial, supporters for the plaintiffs jammed into theconfined courtroom in numbers double those normally allowed. And, although other news organs
carried only short reports on details of the suit, the Sankei shinbun, known for its narrowly
nationalistic editorial policy, allotted extensive coverage amenable to the plaintiff's point ofview. Accordingly, we can consider the "hundred head" litigation to have been systematicallyplanned.
So why are reports from 66 years ago being litigated now? The attack on reporting about the"hundred head contest" isn't new; it has been going on for 30 years.
30 Years of Rhetoric
Attack began with Honda Katsuichi's 1971 Asahi shinbun series "Travels in China." "Travels in
China" was a revolutionary series, revealing to wide numbers of Japanese the reality of wartime
predations that he learned about during his travels, heard from survivors of atrocities committed
by Japanese military in China. Although before then history texts might have described wartime
sufferings of the Japanese people, they hadn't touched on Japanese predations in Asia. These
reports had a great impact on Japanese who learned the truth about the past from them.
In reaction, a sense of crisis arose among those seeking to glorify the war of aggression andrevise the postwar constitution. The attacks on Honda began with the immediate target being the"hundred head contest,' what one might call the "overture" of the incident most representative ofJapan's war of aggression, the Nanjing Massacre.
The first to act was Yamamoto Shichihei (Isaiah Ben Dasan), who persisted in attacking Honda
for over three years in the journal Shokun!, beginning in 1972. Considering the influence suchattacks might have, Honda engaged in a public debate with Yamamoto in Shokun!'s pages. But

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this so-called "hundred head debate" ended with Yamamoto's complete defeat as so many of his
assertions were slipshod and ripped apart by Honda.
Next was Yamamoto's pinch hitter, Suzuki Akira. Suzuki also reported on the "hundred head"problem in the pages of Shokun!, later bringing his findings out in a book titled "Nankin
daigyakusatsu" no maboroshi (Illusion of the "Nanjing Massacre"). As it turned out, this book
was awarded Bungei Shunjusha's Oya Soichi prize in nonfiction. Based on a visit to thepresiding judge of the Nanjing military tribunal, and on their prison writings and defense
memoranda, Suzuki argued that the two officers had been unjustly executed on the basis of false
reports. The prize selection committee swallowed his argument that the "hundred head contest"
was a ruse. However, this book was part of a scheme to cast doubt on the truth of the whole of
the Nanjing Massacre.
In reaction to such attacks, Honda dug up and thoroughly refuted their claims with testimonials
that: showed the "hundred head" contest to have been an atrocity committed against prisoners ofwar (not battle killings) ("Shishime testimony") [1]; undercut the blunt Japanese sword theory
that held that swords would not hold their edge through so many decapitations (Uno testimony)[2]; and made clear that the contest was not just a war correspondent's fabrication (Satotestimony). [3] Then Hora Tomio wrote Nankin daigyakusatsu: "maboroshi" ka kosaku hihan(The Nanjing Massacre: Criticism of the Making of an Illusion) [4], which refuted Suzuki point
by point. In particular, Hora used the testimonies to thoroughly lay bare a false "alibi" report thatthe two officers had met war correspondents at the foot of Nanjing's Zhongshan mountain.
Activities of the Study Group on the Nanjing Incident
Afterwards, unsubstantiated denials of the Nanjing Massacre continued unabated, in places likethe Sankei shinbun and Seiron in addition to the Bungei shunju and Shokun!. The Study Groupon the Nanjing Incident (Nankin Jiken Chosakai), founded in 1984 in response to these activities
denying the Massacre, has contributed greatly to illuminating the Nanjing Massacre.
The denial thesis became increasingly bankrupt in the late 1980s. First, it came to light that
Tanaka Masaaki had altered the text in as many as 300 places when he published the field diaryof General Matsui Iwane, [the officer in charge of Japanese troops in Nanjing]. [5] Second, theeditors of Kaiko, the publication of Kaikosha, the fraternal organization of former Imperial Army
cadets, recognized in print that "the Japanese army committed illegal murders in Nanjing." And
third, a decision in the Ienaga Saburo textbook suit recognized the existence of the "Nanjing
Massacre."In this way the theories denying the Nanjing Massacre were totally discredited, but they wereprominently touted again in the late 1990s. That is, by repeatedly emphasizing the denial
theories, proponents hoped to persuade people that no massacre had occurred, or if it had, it
wasn't so bad. Treating surviving witness Li Xiuying as a fake and filing the current "hundred
heads" libel suit can be seen as part of this effort. These developments are deeply connected tothe intensification of reactionary attacks since the beginning of the 1990s.
Japan has become increasingly reactionary since the passage of the PKO International Peace
Cooperation Law [1992] and the dispatch of troops abroad at the time of the first Iraq War (GulfWar) in 1991. As if in parallel with these currents, there has arisen a camp aiming to remake
Japan into a country capable of waging war, with the formation of Fujioka Nobukatsu's Liberal

Suzuki: The Hundred Head Contest

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View of History Association [sic] (Jiyushugishikan Kenkyukai) and the Japanese Society for
History Textbook Reform (Atarashii Rekishikyokasho wo Tsukuru Kai). Also, 1999 saw
preparation of the infrastructure for war in earnest with the passage of laws making Kimigayo
and the hinomaru the official national anthem and flag, and laws related to establishing new
guidelines for Japan-U.S. Defense Cooperation.
Reverse Course in Popular Opinion
Nowadays not just the Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP) but also the major opposition
Democratic Party is advocating constitutional revision in its party manifesto, under the rubric of"constitution creation". And, if the dispatch of the SDF to Iraq becomes a reality, it will be thefirst time since defeat in World War Two that Japan has sent troops into a battle zone. [Trans.
note: SDF units were dispatched to Iraq to provide "reconstruction assistance" in January 2004.]
The current "hundred heads" libel suit is one prong of an attack that ought to worry the
democratic forces that have resisted the militarization of the Japanese state. By rehashing the"hundred head" issue that ought to have been settled, they are trying to plant among the people aview of history that glorifies and affirms aggression in Asia.
We ought to lay bare the truth that most of the victims who lost their heads in this "hundred head
contest" were unresisting prisoners in an atrocity that was a murderous game to see who could
kill the most. But rather than condemn the two officers who wielded swords in this atrocity, we
should reveal and broadcast the truth that the core problem was in the Japanese militarist
education that fashioned this kind of soldier. Doing so will also serve to foster trust and friendly
relations for Japan in Asia and the world.
Suzuki Chieko is a member of the Nanjing Research Association (Nankin chosa kenkyukai). This
article appeared in Shukan Kinyobi 488, 12 December 2003): 50-51.
Translated for Japan Focus by James Orr, Associate Professor and Chair of the East AsianStudies Department at Bucknell University. His research interests center on communal memory
and political identity. He is the author of The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National
Identity in Postwar Japan.
Notes
1. Shishime Akira, "Nitchu senso no tsuioku -- 'hyakunin giri kyoso'" (Remembering the SinoJapanese War -- the "Hundred Head Contest"). Chugoku (Tokuma Shoten: December 1971).
2. Uno Shintaro, "Nihonken enkonbu" (Japanese Sword Record on Hate). In Pen no inbo,(Conspiracy of the Pen), edited by Honda Katsuichi. Ushio Shuppan, 1977.
3. Suzuki Jiro, "Watashi wa ano 'Nankin no higeki' wo mokugeki shita" (I Witnessed that
Nanjing Tragedy). Maru (November 1977).
4. Gendaishi Shuppankai, 1975.
5. Tanaka Masaaki, ed., Matsui Iwane taisho no jinchu nisshi (Field Diary of General Matsui
Iwane). Fuyo Shobo, 1985.

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Topics of Historical Memory in Japan
War Apologies“Memory, Apology and International Reconciliation”
Jennifer Lind
November 21, 2008
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Jennifer-Lind/2957“Memories and Aporias in the Japan-Korea Relationship”
Alexis Dudden
April 5, 2010
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Alexis-Dudden/3337“The Comfort Women, the Asian Women’s Fund and the Digital Museum”
Wada Haruki
February 1, 2008
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Wada-Haruki/2653“Neo-Nationalist Interpretations of Japan’s Annexation of Korea: The Colonization
Debate in Japan and South Korea”
Mark Caprio
November 1, 2010
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Mark-Caprio/3438
In demanding apologies for specific war crimes, many are often seeking a larger
admission: an apology for starting and conducting a misguided war of aggression.
Nevertheless, in media all over the world, we often encounter the claim that Japan “has not
apologized” for its war and war crimes. Although this is not entirely correct, there aresound reasons why Japanese apologies have been dismissed as “insincere.” The articles inthis section look at the rising significance of apologies in international relations in generaland, in the words of Jennifer Lind, the “relationship between historical memory andinternational reconciliation.” Alexis Dudden focuses directly on the issue of apology inrecent Japanese-Korean relations while Wada Haruki examines debate over an apology
specifically to the comfort women. He also introduces the Asian Women’s Fund (AWF),
which was founded by the Japanese government as a way to manage the disagreement overthe politics of reconciliation in Japan. Through the AWF, the Japanese government
indirectly apologized to the former comfort women and offered reparation, although theactual funds came from the private sector rather than the government. Many comfort
women considered the Japanese government’s decision to work through a semi-publicorganization an insincere scheme to evade direct apology and compensation. In the end,
most comfort women refused to accept any money from the AWF. Mark Caprio addresses
later debates in Japan concerning an apology for colonizing Korea, an issue that received
renewed attention in 2010, the 100th anniversary of the annexation of Korea to Japan. At
this time, many neonationalists rejected the need to apologize and instead emphasized theachievements of Japanese colonial rule. The colonization of Korea, they also stress, wasaccepted by other nations at the time.

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Memory, Apology and International Reconciliation
Jennifer Lind
What is the role of apologies in international reconciliation? Jennifer Lind finds that while
denying or glorifying past violence is indeed inimical to reconciliation, apologies that prove to
be domestically polarizing may be diplomatically counterproductive. Moreover, apologies were
not necessary in many cases of successful reconciliation. What then is the relationship between
historical memory and international reconciliation?

Japan, many people argue, has a “history problem.” Observers lament Japan’s half-hearted orcontradicted apologies for its World War II atrocities, arguing that Tokyo’s failure to atone is amajor cause of lingering tensions in East Asia. [1] In Western Europe, by contrast, Germany’s
willingness to atone for its World War II aggression and war crimes is said to have promoted
European rapprochement. But is this interpretation correct, and more broadly, what is therelationship between apologies and international reconciliation? A close examination of Japan’sand Germany’s postwar international relations suggests that observers are correct that denying or
glorifying past violence inhibits international reconciliation. But it turns out that apologies are arisky tool for peacemaking: they can do more harm than good.
Why might apologies matter in international politics—that is, why are they not merely dismissed
as “cheap talk”? Apologies—or more broadly, national remembrance—matter because the way
countries represent their pasts conveys information about foreign policy intentions. As countries
remember, they define their heroes and villains, delineate the lines of acceptable foreign policy,
and send signals about their future behavior.

How will their countries remember them? How will their adversaries remember them? Left, American GIs
celebrating Japan’s surrender, 1945; Right, Japanese POWs in Guam (U.S. National Archives)

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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National remembrance can be observed in both official policies and in debates within wider
society. Official remembrance would include leaders’ statements about the past (e.g. apologies).
Governments might offer reparations to former victims, and may hold perpetrators of pastviolence accountable in legal trials. Governments educate their societies about the past throughtheir education systems (i.e., textbooks) and through commemoration: monuments, museums,
ceremonies, and holidays. [2] Through these policies, national governments can strongly
influence—but cannot fully control—the way the wider society remembers the past. Thus otherimportant indicators of national remembrance are societal ones: such as the statements andactivities of mainstream opinion leaders (e.g. members of the political opposition, the press, andpublic intellectuals).
National remembrance might be more or less apologetic. Social psychologists have identified
core components of apologies that transcend cultural differences: at a minimum, an apology
requires admitting past misdeeds, and expressing regret for them. [3] Thus, “apologetic
remembrance” is that which conveys both admission and remorse. At the other extreme,“unapologetic remembrance” either fails to admit past violence, or fails to express remorse for it.
Unapologetic remembrance comes in many varieties; a country may justify, deny, glorify—or
simply forget—past violence.
A country’s remembrance should send the strongest positive signal about its intentions when it
engages in a broad range of official apologetic policies—statements, reparations, trials,
commemoration, and education—and when wider society endorses these policies. Remembrance
should be less reassuring if government policy is apologetic, but wider society exhibits denials
and glorifications. At the negative extreme, a country’s intentions should appear hostile if it
pursues a broad range of policies that deny or glorify past violence—and if society endorses suchpolicies.
I test this theory about the link between remembrance and intentions in the cases of Japanese andGerman foreign relations after World War II. Below I summarize three major findings.
Pernicious Denials
The Japanese and German cases provide strong support for the view that unapologetic
remembrance (denials, glorifications, or justifications of past violence) fuels distrust and elevatesfear among former adversaries. In Japan, frequent denials by influential leaders and omissions
from Japan’s history textbooks have repeatedly poisoned relations with South Korea, China, andAustralia. Throughout the postwar era, South Koreans expressed cautious optimism when aJapanese Prime Minister apologized for Japan’s colonial record in Korea. But as Japanesecontrition triggered backlash—in which prominent politicians and intellectuals justified ordenied Japan’s past atrocities—South Koreans concluded that Japanese contrition was insincere
and that Tokyo continued to harbor hostile intentions. As expressed by South Korean president
Kim Dae-jung in 2001: “How can we make good friends with people who try to forget andignore the many pains they inflicted on us? How can we deal with them in the future with any
degree of trust?” [4] Chinese and Australian observers also monitored Japanese remembrance inthe postwar years, expressed anger and dismay at Japanese denials, and linked their distrust ofJapan to its failure to admit its past atrocities.
In Europe, West German acknowledgment of the nation’s wartime aggression and atrocities
facilitated reconciliation between West Germany and the Allies. During the occupation, theLind: Memory, Apology and International Reconciliation

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Allies encouraged German admission of its atrocities (particularly within education policy). Thiswas seen as critical to preventing the return of German hyper-nationalism, and to the creation ofa peace-loving West German state. Later, France and Britain continued to monitor West
Germany’s remembrance: they praised its willingness to explore its past, and they expressed
anxiety about any perceived signs of revisionism. Both the Japanese and German cases thus
suggest that avoidance of denials and glorification of past violence is a key step in international
reconciliation.
Necessary Apologies?
Although denials and glorifications appear very harmful to international reconciliation, it is clearthat many bitter enemies—including Germany and France—have reconciled with very little
atonement. Early after the war, Bonn expressed modest contrition. Although it offered alukewarm apology and paid reparations to Israel, West German commemoration, education, andpublic discourse ignored the atrocities Germany had committed, and instead emphasized German
suffering during and after the war. Nevertheless, during this era of minimal contrition West
Germany and France transformed their relations. By the early 1960s, both French elites and thegeneral public saw West Germany as their closest friend and security partner. Bonn’s remarkable
expressions of atonement—wrenching apologies, candid history textbooks, memorials toGermany’s victims and the largest reparations to victims—had not yet occurred.
Other World War II enemies reconciled with even less remorse. Both the British and Americans
established close and even friendly relations with West Germany without apologizing for firebombing German cities, a campaign that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. Japan and theUnited States built a warm relationship and solid security alliance in spite of the fact that neither
government has apologized for its wartime atrocities. Furthermore, the European partners of Italy
and Austria ignored the blatant dodging of culpability in these former Axis countries. Althoughdenying or celebrating past atrocities will inhibit the reestablishment of good relations, countries
frequently reconcile with very little contrition in the form of apologies and reparations.
Beware the Backlash
In 1970 West German Chancellor Willy Brandt fell to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto, andrecently South Korean President Lee Myung-bak has urged the Japanese emperor to follow suitby apologizing to the Korean ‘comfort women’. Although many analysts argue that Japan andother countries should adopt the German model of atonement, such recommendations neglect toconsider the risks of such policies. As evident in Japan and elsewhere, official expressions ofcontrition often prompt a backlash. Conservatives in particular are likely to offer a competingnarrative that celebrates—rather than condemns—the country’s past and justifies or even denies
its atrocities. Thus contrition can be counterproductive: foreign observers will be angered andalarmed by what the backlash suggests about the country’s intentions. The great irony is thatwell-meaning efforts to soothe relations between former enemies can actually inflame them.

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Willy Brandt at Warsaw, 1970

Comparison of the Japanese and German cases thus raises a puzzle. Japan’s modest efforts tooffer contrition repeatedly triggered sharp outcry among conservatives, who justified and evendenied past atrocities. Because of backlash, Japanese contrition ended up alarming Japan’s
neighbors. In Germany, by contrast, far more ambitious efforts at contrition did not provoke asimilar backlash. Though some West German conservatives preferred to emphasize a morepositive national history, they did not deny or glorify Nazi crimes. The French thus viewed West
German debates about the past as healthy, cathartic experiences for the country’s democratic
development—and as a reassuring signal about its intentions.
Whether or not contrition is likely to heal or hurt thus seems to depend on the occurrence of
backlash. Though more research is needed about the conditions under which backlash will occur,
there are powerful reasons to believe that contrition will be very controversial. First, the absenceof backlash in the West German case can be explained by its unusual strategic circumstances
after the war. During the Cold War, West German conservatives—those most likely to oppose
contrition—had powerful reasons to keep quiet. Their key foreign policy goals –German
reunification and protection from the Soviet Union—all required reassuring NATO, which
required a clear denunciation of the Nazi past. West Germany thus faced constraints that are
unlikely to be so severe elsewhere.
Indeed, evidence from around the world shows that backlash to contrition is a common
occurrence. In Austria, Jörg Haider’s vocal criticism of apologies and stalwart defense of theLind: Memory, Apology and International Reconciliation

229

wartime generation resonated with voters, who catapulted him and his party from the fringe into
national leadership. Conservatives in France, Switzerland, Italy, and Belgium mobilized against
attempts to confront their World War II collaboration. In Britain, proposed apologies for British
policies in Ireland, and for complicity in the slave trade, both sparked outcry. In the UnitedStates, a proposed Smithsonian exhibit that discussed the horrors of Hiroshima and questioned
the necessity of the bombing triggered immense protest, including statements of justificationfrom Congress, veterans’ groups, and the media.

The Enola Gay: No Apologies (U.S. National Archives)

The frequency of backlash is predictable from the standpoint of domestic politics. Many
conservatives are ideologically opposed to contrition, seeing it as anti-patriotic. Opportunistic
politicians will also notice that many of their constituents strenuously object to contrition: it
impugns wartime leaders, veterans, and the war dead. To be sure, the German case shows thatbacklash to contrition is not inevitable, and scholars should investigate the conditions underwhich it is more or less likely. However, all of these reasons suggest that backlash will becommon.

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Resolving the Dilemma
If denying and glorifying the past fuels distrust and fear, yet apologies risk triggeringcounterproductive backlash, how should peacemakers deal with the legacy of the past? One
strategy, used successfully by West Germany and France, is to construct a shared and nonaccusatory narrative between nations. Rather than frame the past as one actor’s brutalization ofanother, leaders can structure commemoration to cast events––as much as possible––as sharedcatastrophes. Countries can remember past suffering as specific examples of the tragic
phenomena that afflict all countries, such as war, militarism, or aggression. For example, rather
than lament German brutality, the settings and tone of Franco-German commemoration at Reims
cathedral (1962) and Verdun cemetery (1984) highlighted the suffering that militarism andEuropean anarchy had brought to both peoples, thus underscoring the need for European unity.
Another strategy is multilateral. East Asian leaders and activists who want to raise awarenessabout the World War II “comfort women,” for example, might organize a multinational inquiry
about violence against women in wartime: widening the focus beyond Japan’s crimes to consider
similar atrocities committed by many countries in many wars. Multilateral textbook
commissions––used extensively in Europe and also recently in East Asia–– are anotherpromising approach. Because such multilateral settings do not wag a finger at one country
uniquely, conservatives are less likely to mobilize against them.
These approaches do have significant drawbacks. If justice is the policy goal, such approaches
may be flawed. They downplay the heinous acts that occurred and divert attention from thepeople and governments who committed them. But, as John Kenneth Galbraith famously
commented, “Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.” These
strategies are unpalatable in many ways––yet are wise from the standpoint of international
reconciliation.
Jennifer Lind is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. This essay is based onher book Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2008). An abbreviated version of this essay was previously published by the Foreign Policy
Research Institute, www.fpri.org.
Notes[1] Economist, May 13, 2006; Thomas J. Christensen, “China, the U.S.-Japan Alliance, and the
Security Dilemma in East Asia,” International Security Vol. 23, No. 4 (Spring 1999), 49-80;
Nicholas D. Kristof, “The Problem of Memory,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 77, no. 6(November/December 1998); Thomas U. Berger, “The Construction of Antagonism: the History
Problem in Japan’s Foreign Relations,” in G. John Ikenberry and Takashi Inoguchi, eds.,
Reinventing the Alliance: US-Japan Security Partnership in an Era of Change (New York:
Palgrave. 2003), 63-90.
[2] On education see Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 26-35;
Boyd Shafer, Faces of Nationalism: New Realities and Old Myths (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
Jovanovich, 1972), 198. On commemoration see John Bodnar, “Public Memory in an American
City,” in John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1994), 74-89.

Lind: Memory, Apology and International Reconciliation

231[3] Aaron Lazare, “Go Ahead, Say You're Sorry,” Psychology Today Vol. 28, No. 1 (1995), 40;
Michael E. McCullough, Everett Worthington, and Kenneth C. Rachal, “Interpersonal Forgivingin Close Relationships,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Vol. 73 (1997); Nicholas
Tavuchis, Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1991).
[4] “ROK President Addresses Liberation Day Ceremony,” SeoulKorea.net, in Foreign
Broadcast Information Service, South Korea, August 15, 2001.

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Memories and Aporias in the Japan-Korea Relationship
Alexis Dudden2010 is the centennial year of Japan's takeover of Korea. The history of this event is of enormous
significance to the 20th century, and not simply because it garnered Japan a foothold on
mainland Asia. Although Koreans see it very differently, for Japan, the 1910 annexation of
Korea established Japan's entry as a power on
the world stage.
This condition collapsed, of course, in total
defeat in 1945. With the end of American
occupation in 1952, however, Japan was
supposed to have regained its independence, or
so the national story goes, as do rather
significant supporting international frameworks
such as the United Nations and the International
Monetary Fund. Yet despite the phoenix ofJapan's postwar rise from the ashes, the renewed
1960 security pact with the United States — andits substantial 1990s readjustments — blatantly
compromised Japan's sovereignty and extended
Japan's occupation-era dependence on the UnitedStates in open and hidden ways. Many have longcontended this, especially in Okinawa. Today,
however, the voices questioning the nature ofJapanese sovereignty come from wildly
divergent corners and point in radicallycompeting ways. The mounting crisis
surrounding the relocation of American bases
Map showing events of Russo-Japanese War of 1905
and marines in Okinawa as well as therevelations about the security pact's so-called
secret deals between Washington and Tokyo allowing the US to bring nuclear weapons into
Japan, have made all of this more salient. The problem becomes more complicated still when thequestion of Japan's role in Asia gets factored in, largely because of the ways in which Japan's
place in Asia's twentieth century has come to be nationally remembered, rather than historicallylearned.
The question of how history fits in to current conditions and what to do with it is primary,despite efforts by those who manage the region's affairs to make it secondary to immediateconcerns of security and economics. The success today of the US-Japan-South Korea vilificationof North Korea campaign reveals this most clearly: even to suggest historical context or reason
for any of North Korea's behavior makes one out as an apologist for the brutal regime. To be
sure, in 2010 North Korea the leadership sustains horrendous living conditions for many of its
people. Individual rights and freedoms are absent for almost all, its generals fire missiles rightand left, and the country's nuclear program steals funds that should be spent feeding hungry
people and fostering development. That Washington continues, however, to demand that
Pyeongyang do what it wants before it will even discuss a peace treaty to end the war in lieu ofDudden: Memories and Aporias in the Japan-Korea Relationship233

the 1953 armistice means that American officials are dogmatically refusing to see the UnitedStates' place in the problem. Washington's willfully ahistorical approach to complicated issues
comes at the cost of unnecessarily high security risks for the region as well as the immediateneed to get food to starving people. Moreover, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak'salignment with Washington vis-à-vis relations with North Korea requires by default that Seoul atleast appear to pretend to support Tokyo's refusal to engage with North Korea until the matter of
the Japanese citizens kidnapped in the 1970s and 1980s by North Korean agents is cleared toJapan's satisfaction. This is the issue that has "kidnapped" Japanese politics since its 2002 public
disclosure. [1] The question remains: how has a country with the immense problems that
confront North Korea checkmated the nation with the most powerful military in world history
and makes the descendants of Imperial Japan run to Washington to ensure that the United States
bolster its myopic mantra that before all else North Korea come clean about a handful ofJapanese missing to the 20th century?
Although Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio's administration has signaled shifts from the"abductees above all" approach that Japan's Liberal Democratic Party pursued from 2002-2009,
to the continued bewilderment of many in Washington, Beijing, and Seoul, Japan's regional
policy still champions the abductee issue in the same breath as nuclear weapons, indicative of thefact that the LDP's stance succeeded in abducting Japanese society and blinding it to the nation's
past actions in the Korean peninsula. In the wake of Japan's collapsed empire, the founders ofNorth Korea held purge trials against those among them most complicit with Japanese control.
[2] "Bad Japan" stories wove North Korea together from the nation's inception in markedly
different ways from the South, where, as is well known, many of those most complicit withJapanese rule glided into American-approved positions of power, the physical andphenomenological tendrils of which exist very much to this day. The centrality then, and in many
respects truth of North Korea's "bad Japan" thesis rests on the stark fact that Japan kidnapped andenslaved millions of Koreans during the colonial era.
This, of course, is the deep divide between Japan and its Asian neighbors that Japan's politicaland business leaders have long chosen to ignore in charting the nation's place in the region. In
simplest terms, the abduction story failed to impress Asians because of the still oozing humanwounds of empire, war, and decades of official denial. Japan found itself isolated because of its
deep and deeply-layered history with stolen bodies, giving it no choice but to take the abduction
story to Washington — imploring the United States to take up its cause in the name of humanrights and international security, all made easy through soft channels paid for by Japanese
taxpayers via their Foreign Ministry such as the international distribution and screening of theanimated "Megumi" movie. [3] Championing Japan's stance on the abduction matter against
North Korea continues of course to necessitate Washington's ignoring the region's disinterest in
the story, which of course only makes sense to a United States complicit in sustaining Japan's
official silence on pre-1945 history as the deep structure of America's post-1945 use of Japan, its
soil, its people, its wealth.
Memories of Abduction
On February 3, 2010, a United Nations' special rapporteur on Enforced or Involuntary
Disappearances visited Niigata, Japan to investigate the site where the most internationallyknown of Japan's abductees, 13 year-old Yokota Megumi, tragically disappeared on November
5, 1977 on her way home from badminton practice. At a time when the United Nations has

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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authorized economic sanctions against North Korea for its nuclear and conventional weapons
testing, it is unsurprising that the abductee issue — especially through the lens of Megumi’s
story — has found such a place of prominence. At the same time, however, the Japanese
government's urging resolution of this history stands in such stark contrast to its official
obduracy at the UN regarding discussion of its record of involvement in the comfort women's
history — Japan's state-sponsored sexual enslavement of up to 200,000 women and girls fromthroughout Asia between 1938 and 1945 — that it makes troubled meaning for all of this and inparticular for Japan's international leadership regarding human rights among other things. What
the UN abductee report will determine remains open-ended, and the introduction of aninternational monitoring committee may, in fact, not end up entirely to Japan's liking. This iswhat happened with the debacle surrounding Megumi's purported DNA evidence, thecontroversy which produced an extremely rare publication: a scathing editorial in the respectedinternational science journal, Nature (which almost never has editorials), condemning theJapanese government for interfering in scientific investigation for crass political ends. [4]International monitoring committees becoming involved in the abductee history — especially in
Niigata — introduce echoes, however, of a separate yet overlapping history from the late 1950s.
The reverberations stem from when members of the International Committee of the Red Cross
visited Japan to help organize and legitimate the planned removal of Koreans in Japan to North
Korea. At that time, as a result of efforts between ICRC officials and a small number of Japaneseand North Korean politicians, over 93,000 people left Japan from Niigata and travelled to
Wonsan, North Korea to take part in the "Great Patriation of the Fatherland" scheme that lasted
from 1959 to 1984. [5]They were never able to leave North Korea, and only today have the inner workings of thishistory begun to come to light, raising questions from "who knew what when?" to "did ethnic
cleansing really take place in postwar Japan?" And, most pressingly, with stories from recent
North Korean refugees in Japan "can anything be done to help those still alive and wanting to get
out?" In short, everything about this history makes even the word "Niigata" resonate strangely in
the Korean community in Japan.
When the "Patriation" program ceased in 1984, the Niigata ferry service continued as a passenger
and light cargo ship. Today, however, the berth where the ship moored in Niigata sits empty.
There is no tangible evidence that the ferry and the abducted Japanese are of a piece, yet when
the abductee story broke in 2002 in Japan, the surrounding maelstrom swept the boat and its
history into its midst. Many of the kidnap victims disappeared along the Japan Sea coast, and,moreover, Megumi disappeared within the city itself where a banner flies at all times on city hallpromising never to forget her. In 2002, overnight the Niigata ferry became one with the
kidnapping of Japanese, its separately sad history moot, and in this context, the city's nameresonates hard now everywhere in Japan.
On December 14, 2009 in a relentless rain, about seventy people gathered at the end of a nondescript pier at the city's major downtown port to mark 50 years since the departure of the firstferryboat leaving Japan for North Korea. In 1959, 975 people boarded a Soviet-flagged ship thatday and sailed from Niigata to great fanfare and publicity. 92,365 others would follow, with mostleaving Japan during the program's first few years. After the program ended, the service
continued regularly, and throughout – first with the Soviet "Kurilion" and then the North Korean"Mangyonbong" — the ships coursed a well-known route.

Dudden: Memories and Aporias in the Japan-Korea Relationship

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Niigata was, after all, the main exit port forJapanese settlers and soldiers to Manchuria, the"Gateway to Asia" as it became known. Many
followed the Joetsu trunk line from Tokyo intheir travels, a new route which opened forbusiness on September 1, 1931 two weeks before
the Mukden incident. Hundreds of thousands
would follow its path from Tokyo to Niigata andon to Wonsan, Ch'ongjin, or Najin on thenortheastern Korean coast and then move inland.
Niigata's ferry routes thus became the vitalconnection between the empire's center (Tokyo)and "Shinkyo" (New Capital) of Manchukuo, as
The ferry Mangyongbon lying idle in the North
Changchun was expectantly renamed, and, in
Korean port of Wonsan, May 2009
1938 when a Japanese joint commercial venture
launched the "Gassan" liner from Niigata harbor,
it was the largest ship on the Sea of Japan, moving thousands
upon thousands back and forth.
After August 1945, some Japanese fleeing the continent arrived
in Japan via Niigata, but most Koreans leaving Japan travelledfrom Shimonoseki in the south to Busan. The Americans ran theshow, after all, and Busan was under their command, while
Wonsan was not. The first regular service to resume between
Japan and northern Korea was the 1959 repatriation ferry,
meaning that it began a month before the revised US-Japan
Security Treaty was signed, the terms of which gripped Japan in
America's anti-communist embrace even more tightly than theearlier version. As a result, the Niigata boat to North Korea wasa perpetual question mark coursing back and forth atop water
effectively owned by the United States Navy with American andSoviet submarines chasing each other underneath. Throughout
most of this time, the ship to North Korea itself drew little
reaction in Japan — negative or otherwise — although theSailing to Manchukuo (poster)
Niigata-Japanese North Korean Return Assistance Association
tried hard to give it a place of pride, regularly touring the city's schoolchildren and ladies'
associations aboard the ship, holding festive and well-documented parties for those leaving Japan(recording the restaurant, the menu, who attended, whether they wore traditional Korean dress orWestern fashions), and marking the ship's commemorative moments (10,000th passenger,
50,000th, 15th year) with banners and posters hung throughout the city's downtown area. In
short, no one in Niigata appeared to feel that there was anything to hide or fear about any of it.
Noticeably, conditions changed as superpower tensions escalated regional alarms during the
1980s which helped terminate the exodus scheme, meaning also that the ferry then became thesole means by which people of Korean ethnicity in Japan could visit North Korea or send wordor money to relatives there. Gradually, the ship itself drew more notice, often unwelcome, and at
the end of the 1990s when Kim Jong-il launched a series of missile tests in the Sea of Japan, theThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

236

ferry, its passengers, and its supporters became targets of open attack, including the face-slashingassault of Niigata Governor Hirayama Ikuo in December 1998. [6] The abduction revelations
upped the ante even further, and extremist-backed or led protests frequently interrupted theferry's service, which finally shut down after North Korea's July 2006 missile test. Today, a boldfaced sign at the immigration bureau at Niigata's airport states that ballistic missiles are
responsible for discontinued passage between the countries, although popular perception
throughout Japan would add a large dose of the abductee story, making any remembrance of theferry's history difficult to carry off.
We Won’t Forget the Day
At December 2009's "We Won't Forget the Day" ferry commemoration, almost all of this history
was absent. In contrast to the citywide celebrations that launched the first ship in 1959, a somber
resolve prevailed at its 50th anniversary with the ceremony's registered participants filingthrough the dock's security gate for an ID check. Only a handful of locals were there, most of theparticipants having traveled together from Tokyo that morning by train (on the Joetsu line). They
would return there immediately afterwards. Things began with a small woman in her 60s
speaking eloquently through angry tears in the slanting rain about her lost family and her lost
existence. The event's organizer read from a letter he had delivered to the cabinet minister
responsible for abduction matters, Nakai Hiroshi (born, incidentally, in Changchun), who would
hand it to Prime Minister Hatoyama. Three large and powerfully voiced monks intoned the deadand missing, standing at the edge of the pier to get closer to North Korea to do so, and a famous
dancer from South Korea exorcised the space, accompanied by plaintive drums and flutes.
Everyone threw white carnations into the sea, and I prayed alongside a friend for his father'sbrother who might still be alive but no one really knew.
The simplicity of the hour-long event notwithstanding, the group's letter to Prime Minister
Hatoyama tells a history that departs so radically from the only narrative in play today — theabductees as the sum total of Japan's relations with North Korea — that it will be difficult if not
impossible for it to gain the social traction its contents require. The letter nonethelessdemonstrates sharp political acumen, honed by profound worry and daily ostracism. It reveals,
too, how official Japan has long failed its people:
To: Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio
Subject: Japanese-North Korean Diplomacy for the Return of "Japanese Wives"
On December 14, 1959, the first repatriation ship departed Niigata harbor for Wonsan,
North Korea carrying 975 Korean residents of Japan and their Japanese wives. From thatday until 1984, a total of 93,340 people crossed the Sea of Japan as part of the North
Korean Repatriation Plan. 50 years have passed, and those who have returned are
involved in helping others come to Japan. At present, about 200 have fled North Korea
and have entered Japan, including 6 Japanese wives...For the most part, the 1831
Japanese wives, who were never allowed back to Japan and were forced to become North
Korean comrades despite having Japanese citizenship, have died meaningless deaths
without having their wish fulfilled to return to their ancestral land.
...We seek the release of all those trapped in North Korea as a result of the repatriation
program. At present, over 100 "Japanese wives" are thought to be alive in North Korea.

Dudden: Memories and Aporias in the Japan-Korea Relationship

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They are in their 70s and 80s and believe that, "While we are alive, the Japanese
government will surely help us." ...For Japan to proceed successfully in steps tonormalize with North Korea it must first guarantee the safe departure of all Japanese
there. Once North Korea has guaranteed the departure of all Japanese, then we will
resolve the Japanese abductee problem together with the "Japanese wives" problem.
The world is outraged by the North Korean abduction of Japanese. The international
community's concern would only heighten if it were made aware of the "Japanese wives"
whom North Korea has refused to let leave for 50 years. There is but a little time left for
those who are still alive...This is an urgent matter of protecting Japanese people.
Sakanaka Hidenori, ChairJapan Immigration Policy InstituteSakanaka and those who gathered with him in Niigata could have sent a very different letter toHatoyama. They could have demanded, for example, full disclosure from the Japanese
government about its role in the repatriation scheme which worked to shed Japan of roughly one
hundred thousand people of Korean origin that officials saw as socially undesirable. Or, they
could have demanded a full accounting of how those who went to North Korea from Japan got toJapan in the first place. They could have alluded to promises that returnees would be allowed totravel freely to Japan after three years. They could also have asked the government to investigate
the ongoing attacks against their members.
All these demands would have fallen flat, however, and would have further marked thosedetermined to remember the ferry's history as not Japanese. Tellingly, the group can bring its
history into the open by focusing on the unquestionably Japanese victims — and elderly female
ones at that — of what any United Nations investigating committee would surely determine to be
numerous and repeated violations of individual rights involving the governments of North Korea
and Japan (and perhaps the International Committee of the Red Cross which supported therepatriation), mentioning also a desire to "seek the release of all those trapped." The problem, ofcourse, is that should the government of Japan address this fact of its 20th century experience ashistory, it would simultaneously have to address the very demands that the group did not
mention, those pertaining to the rights of Koreans repatriated from Japan. On top of that, it
would find itself doing what history does: leading from one story to another until a radicallydifferent 20th century came into being as the nation's modern past in which, among other things,
Japan's post-1945 economic prowess cannot be severed from its pre-1945 history of slave labor.
The only language spoken at the ferry's memorial event was Japanese, several "aigos" from the
Korean shaman dancer notwithstanding. The people, however, were remarkably diverse by
Japanese standards bringing much of the problem of being Japanese to the fore, made all themore poignant by the group's pleading for their collective past through the bodies of the Japanese
wives caught in its midst, women who were mothers to several participants. Gathered on
Niigata's cold pier were resident Koreans of Japan naturalized as Japanese, resident Koreans ofJapan with well-known ties to South Korea, and resident Koreans of Japan with well-known ties
to North Korea, as well as resident Koreans of Japan with ties to both who could be described
only, however, as apolitical, making it clear why many Koreans in Japan prefer now to be called"Corean" rather than "resident" this or that. There were some very prominent Japanese activists,and professors, and the very big monks as well. I was there, and there were also some shy young

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women who stood out because they were much more conservatively dressed than others their age
in the mix. Finally I understood. These women had escaped North Korea; some were the childrenof returnees, and others were their friends.
Likely this all is part of the genius of the memorial event's organizer, Sakanaka Hidenori. Long arenegade within the Ministry of Justice, Sakanaka retired in 2005 after 35 years of distinguishedgovernment service during which he worked extensively with Japan's Korean community. This,he maintained in the letter to Hatoyama, gave him the authority to speak for the group, especiallywhen combined with his current efforts on behalf of North Korean refugees in Japan. His
preference for inclusive action and for keeping things focused on the present is one with his 2005
book: Immigration Battle Diary. [7] In that, his answer to today's "whither Japan?" question is
simple: it is either a "small" or "big" country, depending entirely on what its leaders decide
immediately for the meaning of being Japanese which they must decide solely throughimmigration policy. Labeled "Doomsday" by some, Sakanaka's explanation is clear: a "small"
Japan is a pleasant if inward-looking country 50 years hence that leaders have allowed to decline
along current reproduction rates from its present 127 million to 80 million people: readsomething sort of Scandinavian with miso soup and yakizakana for supper, helping out withvictims of the occasional earthquake. "Big" Japan is equally unambiguous: 50 years from now it
is a growing and vibrant nation of 180 million with a solid and forward-looking global posture.
To achieve the latter (which is, of course, how many who advocate a "strong" Japan alreadydescribe it) Japan must radically change the country's immigration and naturalization policies
and accept no fewer than 20 million people from outside and make it socially possible for them
to be Japanese (which is, of course, not at all how anyone already describes Japan). In short,
Sakanaka argues that Japan's leaders must make social integration possible for those who differ
from pre-conceived and widely fostered ideas of Japanese-ness and reorganize what Japanesesociety has come to believe about being a national body. This, in no small part, rests on knowing
and coming to grips with Japan's recent past.
The Japanese Emperor and Korea
In September 2009, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak marked the Japanese Democratic
Party's history-making win by inviting Emperor Akihito to Korea during the 2010 centennial aswell as extending his congratulations to Hatoyama Yukio. Lee was reiterating many earlier
invitations to Akihito — begun first in 1986 when he was crown prince reciprocating his hosting
then-President Chun Doo-hwan — as well as trying to plumb the meaning of recently elected
Prime Minister Hatoyama's much vaunted East Asian Community.
Two things are pretty clear as far as Korea and the emperor of Japan go: first, Korean officials
see no reason why Korea should be second string to China in terms of hosting an imperial visit,
which has remained the case since 1992. Second, it has been pretty clear to all Koreans since thejoint World Cup soccer games where the emperor stands vis-à-vis the prime minister regardlessof the constitution, making the emperor's place in the reconciliation problem clear. I'm not a
rabid soccer fan, but the late spring day in 1996 when the success of Japan and Korea's joint bid
for the World Cup hit the newsstands remains a strong memory. Walking through the Ikebukuro
train station in Tokyo after six or seven hours in the Rikkyo University archives, I was besieged
by a swirl of characters crossing the evening papers:"Japan/Korea/Emperor/Ceremony/Assassination." I had to stop walking to decide whether I wasin 1910 or the then present and then read to understand that local elation over "winning" theDudden: Memories and Aporias in the Japan-Korea Relationship239

soccer bid for Japan was tempered by the "what to do with the emperor?" problem in its mix.
How could the emperor attend the head of state functions in Korea given the countries' open
animosities? In 2002, Japan's Foreign Ministry finally said no to the emperor attending the
opening ceremonies in Seoul — what with then Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro's love of
Yasukuni derailing Japan and South Korea's expensively planned "Year of Friendship."
Nevertheless, during the closing ceremonies outside Tokyo the emperor and empress joinedSouth Korean President and Mrs. Kim Dae-jung in the head of state box while Prime Minister
Koizumi sat several rows back with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder (whom Koizumi
asked at the last minute to join him lest he appear so hopelessly second fiddle and dateless to theglobal viewing audience).
The 100th anniversary of Japan's failed colonization of Korea brings to the fore numerous
problems of Japanese national definition wrapped into histories of wasted lives and uncertainty
over whom to describe as Japanese. It is important to recall that an argument over the Japaneseemperor launched the modern history of involvement between Japan and Korea, and, arguably,
Japan's imperialist expansion writ large. The 1873 political turmoil in Japan — splendidly
known as the "Conquer Korea Debates" — revolved around competing Japanese views over how
to respond to Korea's refusal to accept Japan's claim that the newly installed Emperor Meiji was
now on a par with China's Son of Heaven and was, therefore, above the lesser Korean king (whohad been the Tokugawa shogun's equal until Meiji's emissaries arrived with all this information).
The 1910 annexation of Korea came about as a result of how this debate played out over the next
few decades, bringing us to the centennial today.
In January 2010, a low-budget theater production in Tokyo gave new life to the late 19th andearly 20th century decades. Before heading into the terrain occupied today by people wanting totake Japan backwards, it is important to notice how a very different small minority in Japanbegan this anniversary year thinking about rulers and ruled and the history of Japan and Korea.
From January 20-24, the long-established Corean troupe, Shinjuku Ryozanpaku, staged aperformance of Korean playwright O T'aesok's 1994, "Toraji" (Bellflower) in a basement blackbox in Shinjuku called the Tiny Iris. The play tracks Japan's takeover of Korea between an
incident in 1882 which brought Japanese and Chinese troops into the Korean court right up
through the 1910 annexation, centering its action on the court and especially the assassination of
Queen Min and the forced abdication of Korean Emperor Kojong, and, ultimately the surrenderof the royal seals to the victorious Japanese colonizers. In short, for Koreans it is a play-by-playof schoolchildren's required history. The sheer ingenuity of the Ryozanpaku performance lay indoing it in Japan, in Japanese. The troupe's customary pyrotechnics and more-naked-than-Hairscenes were great, but in many ways, the real marvel was telling the story at all. The audiencehung on every turn.
Shinjuku Ryozanpaku's Director Kim Sujin has long produced avant-garde stories of theinterwoven realities of Japanese and Korean modern lives. The spectacle's final thrust made real
the two parts of today's whole with simple brilliance. The increasingly feckless and increasingly
paranoid Kojong despairing of his disappearing powers in Japanese in a cramped, Shinjuku
basement blended the history that brought down Korea in 1910 into Japan in 1945 when Hirohito
grasped at his own throne even as advisers urged him to abdicate. [8]The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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The Neonationalist response to Koreans in Japan: The Zaitokukai
Cartoonist/pundit/self-aggrandizer Kobayashi Yoshinori is not news, nor is he the intellectual
lynchpin of those who want a "strong" emperor in Japan today. Yet he has mass appeal, and hehas now raised a generation in his wake who have either learned history from him, or, worse,
have learned to tell history the way he does because it works and it sells. Kobayashi in January2010 joined today's "Strong" emperor/"No emperor to Korea!" moment with a vengeance in a
special series for the self-described "International Intelligence" magazine, Sapio, whose
circulation of roughly 200,000 copies for the January 2010 issue was, it is safe to say, manytimes greater than the 200-300 people who saw "Toraji" that same week. [9] Only several frames
in to a 25-page spread, Kobayashi makes his Tea Party for a King pitch, sliding his selfportraited image into the middle of a tirade over the unprecedented (in Kobayashi's eyes)
political use of the emperor in December 2009 with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, demanding, "Arewe going to put up with this?" No, of course "we" aren't! "Someone who doesn't know his
history and feels no shame would make the emperor his private possession out of pure lust for
power. And this deranged person, (DPJ party leader) Ozawa Ichiro, is now trying to get theemperor to go to Korea! We must put a stop to this!"More worrisome than Kobayashi, however, is a young man named Sakurai Makoto (nom deguerre, Doronpa). Sakurai grew up under Kobayashi's cloud, and emerged on his own bycapitalizing on Yamamoto Sharin's "Hating Korea" manga series (2005-present), publishing aseparate "Hating Korea" comic. [10] Its drawings and text aim for an even lower common
denominator than Kobayashi and Sharin combined, yet Sakurai/Doronpa aspires higher off thepage. [11] On June 9, 2007, he established the Citizens League to Deny Resident Foreigners
Special Rights (the Zaitokukai). Among other things, the Zaitokukai urges open violence against
Koreans in Japan (and to a lesser degree Chinese and others) in an extensive set of YouTube
postings and regular demonstrations in front of government buildings, newspaper offices, theKorean embassy and consulates, as well as through neighborhoods and in front of schools. The
group and its leader's significance must not be measured by the several thousand who countthemselves as contributing members throughout Japan but rather in their publicly issued orders
for violent insurrection and/or military action (depending on whether the enemy is within orwithout), which together define the "Zaitokukai" as Japan's fiercest and most dangerous hategroup today.
As the group's self-posted videos on YouTube demonstrate to anyone with access to the internet(the police, for example), Zaitokukai members openly threaten those they view as impediments
to their vision of Japan. Unsurprisingly, they target individuals and groups who are weak within
the Japanese legal system by stalking and harassing them, and trying customary bullying tactics
of getting the victim to throw the first punch. Today, they most viciously zero on a small groupof elderly ethnic Koreans living in an enclave north of Kyoto, called Utoro. The 200 or soremaining residents of Utoro descend from more than 1300 Koreans brought there in 1940 by theJapanese government to build a military air strip that was abandoned in 1945. The forsaken
Koreans turned to the land first to sustain themselves, which the auto giant Nissan technicallyowned, first as a wartime airplane manufacturer then refashioned for car manufacture, where
many of Utoro's residents also worked. The company sold the land in 1987, and the new owner
demanded the residents' eviction from the 5 acre plot where they had long lived, filing a series oflawsuits that wound up in 2000 in Japan's supreme court which declared Utoro's inhabitants

Dudden: Memories and Aporias in the Japan-Korea Relationship

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illegal squatters without rights or papers. The aging Koreans stayed on, vowing to honor theirparents' hardship and to "die under their houses" if needbe. [12]For Zaitokukai members, many of whom were not bornwhen the lawsuits began in 1987, Utoro's residents are
obvious prey, and in a December 2009 video clip, theyshow others what to do: to the tune of "Clap for the
Killers," local Zaitokukai leaders block out the area on a
map and distribute threatening leaflets into residents'
mailboxes in ways shockingly evocative of the Hitler
Youth brigades or the American Ku Klux Klan. Thisapparently proud display of what to do with the internet
only builds, however, on a series of videos posted in
December 2008 in which Doronpa leads his followers as Kim Kyo-il, leader of the Utoro protesters,
reads a petitition to South Koreanwell as some of their very young children through the
President Roh Moo-hyun in Seoul in 2007
residents' neighborhood armed with their constitutionally
guaranteed rights to wave the now national flag and speak freely, even hate speech yelled
through megaphones. [13]Consistent with the group's general belief that Koreans are toblame for all things wrong in Japan, the Zaitokukai stands
ardently opposed today to any talk of the Japanese emperor
visiting Korea. Their "No emperor to Korea!" rallying cry is,moreover, tightly wound into the most provocative area ofrelations with Korea, at least for Koreans: the territorial dispute
between the countries about islands known in Japanese as
Takeshima and in Korean as Dokdo. The Zaitokukai's call was
loudly proclaimed at its February 2010 demonstrations
throughout Japan: "No emperor to Korea! Take back Takeshimafrom Korea by force! Protest now! The Japanese government
must take back Takeshima by force and even military power!
The emperor will go to Korea only when Takeshima isreturned!" One immediately noticeable feature of the Zaitokukai
cry is tying the emperor of Japan to the mundane world of
territory. Across time in the place now called Japan, the term
Doronpa"tenno" noticeably differed from other rulers (especially,
eventually from European counterparts) in never having specific lands attached to the title.
Conditioning an imperial visit to Korea today on Japan's assured control of the disputed islands
blends together the broader passion in current Japanese nationalism to expand its borders and tohave Japan take proactive military action. Combined, this would bring the emperor and Japanback to the Prussian model so helpful in the 1870s.
Defining the National SpaceThe most potent feature across a wide spectrum of Japanese discussions about the nation today
is, however, neither the emperor nor who or what is Japanese. The strongest binding force is afocus on space, on the shape of Japan. A century ago, Japanese leaders engaged Japan with

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

242

imperialism's "Great Game" and conquered overseas territories to expand the island nation into a
continental empire. Now, however, Japan's definers seek instead to emphasize the nation's reachin terms of the oceans that surround it. In 1952, the American-drawn San Francisco Treaty atonce redefined Japan as a sovereign nation (contingent, of course, on the presence of American
troops and bases) and redrew the country's limits to roughly the same dimensions that had
appeared on maps when Admiral Perry set sail in 1852, save for the sure addition of Hokkaido.
During the following decades of economic rebirth, for many the country's island nature became
useful for explaining Japan's catastrophic defeat in 1945, the nation's inherent weakness.
Recently, however, the idea of island Japan as a source of strength has re-emerged, the trick now
being to secure solid and maximized definitions for the oceans around it, odd as it is thatinternational law defines water as territory. A preoccupation with national space thus has
surfaced, with some taking pride that Japan's territorial oceans make it the world's 6th or 7thlargest country, and others pleased that a stretched out measurement of the coastline would makeJapan one and a half times bigger than America and twice as large as China. [14]Interesting as all of this is conceptually, at once it produces two immediate and difficult side
effects during this centennial year of Korea's annexation: first, time, that other all-importantcomponent in defining a nation, has fallen to a distant second place, compounding problems in
exploring Japan's past productively for the present. Second, the volatile territorial dispute overthe islands contested with Korea lands right in the middle of this condition, meaning that those
who champion the islands' cause for Japan make their arguments through the lens of the nation's
currently perceived boundaries, regardless of the history involved. Simply put, the islands are a
speck of territory that the American architects of the San Francisco Treaty intentionally left
undesignated — being useful to America's then-present interests in the middle of the Korean
War — and although the methods of South Korea's 1952 occupation of them was of a piece withits dictatorial practices, Japan's claim now that they became Japan's in 1905 and therefore are
Japan's today is bizarre, given to the disposition of the rest of the empire. [15]On December 25, 2009, Japan's Ministry of Education presented its high school curricular
guidelines for history and geography. It was easy for reporters to know where to look for a hookbecause Tokyo's middle school guidelines had generated substantial fracas with Seoul when they
were released in 2008, firmly declaring for the first time that the islands are "under Japanesesovereignty." For all the widely touted era of new politics that Hatoyama's victory ushered in,
how would his government handle this matter? Surely it would have to differ from the LDP's
position which had hardened perceptibly beginning in 2005 with then-education minister
Narayama Nariaki's provocations and the leadership's open approval of a holiday
commemorating the islets’ incorporation into the long-vanished Japanese empire. What would
the DJP do?
In an act of brazen avoidance, Japan's new high school curricular outline was blank on thishottest of all topics between Japan and Korea. On December 25, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirano
Hirofumi worked to dispel notions that Japan's new leadership based its decision to write nothing
on fears of Korean reaction: "These are textbooks for Japan," he said, "Diplomatic considerations
are irrelevant." [16] Education Minister Kawabata Tatsuo denied that there was anything to
notice, adding, however, that, "Takeshima is our territory," while his Vice Minister Suzuki Kan
gave the eyebrow raising explanation that the word "Takeshima" (a two character Chinesecompound) was not included in the published guidelines to make it shorter and more open toteachers' discretion. Kan's assertion is transparently disingenuous as the "Hoppo Ryodo," theDudden: Memories and Aporias in the Japan-Korea Relationship

243

islands disputed with Russia that are four characters long are included, and, moreover, theguidelines instruct teachers to "continue teaching the same content that students learn in middle
school" whose curriculum describes the islands as Japan's. Editorials flowed in the following
days, with the Yomiuri dropping the gauntlet, "Do it, call it Takeshima," and the Asahi
demurring, "Let's hope for good teachers". [17] Meanwhile, Mizoguchi Zembe, the fiery
governor of Shimane Prefecture which claims the islands, repeatedly shook his head to reporters,
growling into television cameras that it was "extremely regrettable" to fail to mention
Takeshima's name, and South Korea's Foreign Ministry summoned the Japanese ambassador fora reprimand over the islands' lack of mention as Korean territory. [18]On February 22, 2010, the city of Matsue on the Japan Sea coast in southwestern Japancelebrated the 5th anniversary of "Takeshima Day." Matsue is the capital of Shimane Prefecture,
one of Japan's poorest and traditionally most parochial regions. Regardless of national orinternational maps or realities, Shimane has continued to claim the islands in Japan's namethroughout the post-1945 era based on their 1905 incorporation into Japan's then-growing
empire. Never mind how the war turned out. During the past decade or so, Shimane's calls thatTokyo assert itself more proactively over the question of these islands have continued tointensify, and to celebrate the 1905 centennial, the regional assembly launched a holiday in its
name. Like various Dokdo counterparts in South Korea, it also set up an archive in a government
office building and established a research group to gather materials to prove the islands Japanese.
On "Takeshima Day" 2010, in revealing parallels to December's din over the high school
guidelines, Governor Mizoguchi gave a thumping speech urging Japanese all over the country to
pay as much attention to the islands as Koreans: "We cannot let our consciousness of the islands
fail us!!" while the Tokyo headquarters of the LDP, out for blood in the July 2010 elections,dispatched a record ten of its parliamentarians to promise that the islands were "Japan's." Thepointed-tongued politicians stood on top of a little white LDP van covered with the party's losing
2009 slogan, "First things first: the economy!" and complained about Hatoyama's handling of
Korean affairs and Okinawa in the same breath. For its part, the ruling DJP steered clear of townthat day, even though party leader Ozawa Ichiro had been there the day before, and the Foreign
Ministry declined invitations to various ceremonies. The same South Korean parliamentarian
who several years ago tried to cut off his finger in protest of the Shimane holiday arrived withseveral friends and his finger intact and a banner to proclaim that "Dokdo has always been
Korean territory and always will be!" while a resident Korean group organized a teach-in at a
nearby school, and a joint group of Japanese and Korean pacifists prayed for peace at nearby
Izumo Shrine.
Japan's national, regional, and local newspapers and television reported all of this while making
little or no mention of the most obvious feature of "Takeshima Day" on the ground: theappearance of 6 or 7 far-right political parties and splinter groups circling town in their hatetrucks for two days, snarling traffic and making lots of unpleasant, noisy demands. Whitehelmeted policemen had not been prepared to greet their arrival on February 21st but werepositioned early in the morning of the 22nd at each corner of the historic castle town's outer moat
traffic loop. When the little red tourist trolley bus that my son and I rode to sightsee that day
rounded the corner in front of the prefectural assembly building, the 20 or so other passengers letout a collective, "Ahhhh." Seeing the large white and blue police bus with flashing red lights
surrounded by riot police, I thought, "Good. People do care about this," only immediately tounderstand that the group's "Ahhhh" came from seeing the beautiful 1611 castle in the distance.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

244

Meanwhile, my 4 year-old was clearly and loudly exclaiming, "Mom, look at all the cops! Lookat the bus! Mom! MAMA! Look at the cops! Why are they here?" Why indeed and how was it
possible for everyone else on the bus to look silently through the present and acknowledge only aperfectly manicured past?
Later that day, the Tokugawa-era costumed tour boat driver gave me some hope. Our boat went
under the town's main bridge just as one of the hate group's trucks cruised overhead in fullshriek. Their noise drowned him out, and good former school teacher that he was, he paused to
let them finish. When our boat and their truck were free of each other, he said simply, "Well, it is
Shimane Prefecture's Takeshima Day. The right wing guys show up because they can," and hewent back to his stories and songs. Later on, however, a deeper meaning of this problem revealed
itself. My son and I were looking at exhibits and buying books at the Takeshima Archive Officewhen an unusually loud hate truck slowed to a menacing crawl in front of the building andbellowed, "YOU IDIOTS! YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED! YOU SELL AWAY JAPANWITH YOUR INCOMPETENCE! YOU IDIOTS!" The archive staff was visibly shaken, withsome jumping up from their desks and rushing to the room's back windows. Two young
employees walked around the counter to stand next to my son, who excitedly watched theunmarked, all-black bus through the office window. They told me they had children the same age
and just wanted to hold his hand.
On March 29, 2010, Japan's Ministry of
Education issued the nation's elementary school
guidelines which named the islands Japanese.
[19] South Korea's Foreign Minister protested
again, while Prime Minister Hatoyama remained
silent. It is doubtful that Hatoyama is planning asurprise 100th anniversary present comeAugust's centennial day as polls indicate that his
popularity has fallen sharply. His transparent
anxiety over naming the nation's territorialboundaries with regard to Korea, however, doesnothing but lay bare the problem that a leader of
Asia's most powerful democracy cannot utter a
Rightists marchword about these empty rocks because they are
now such perilous markers in the contest to tell
the region's 20th century, on which the stability and potential of the 21st century would appear torest. Any mention in Korea's favor would call Hatoyama's Japanese-ness into question and likely
cost his party the summer's upper house elections needed to make many of his plans bear fruit —especially the social-economic and environmental ones — while any definitive claim of them forJapan would derail the nervous calm in place this centennial year which is vital to make his
hoped-for East Asian Community take form. Problems with Washington moreover make many
openly question whether he is even running the country. At the same time, from the other side ofJapan, Shimane prefecture has discovered value for itself by trying to give national meaning to a
prideful fight with Korea in conjunction with a small number of extremists seeking to secure
Japan's boundaries through an imaginary past in which they stand together with the emperor into
the future. Again, the extremists' numbers are small, yet when helmeted police spend publicmoney to protect democratically elected officials who agree with them over a common cause —Dudden: Memories and Aporias in the Japan-Korea Relationship

245"Takeshima is Japan's!" — things are openly out of sorts in Japan today and, arguably,
dangerously so.
The author wishes to thank Mark Selden, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Kimie Hara, Mark Caprio, andRobert Palm for their careful readings and thoughtful suggestions.
Alexis Dudden is Associate Professor of History and Director, Foundations of Humanitarism
Program, University of Connecticut and a Japan Focus Associate. She is the author of Troubled
Apologies Among Japan, Korea, and the United States and Japan's Colonization of Korea:
Discourse and Power.
Notes[1] Richard Samuels, "Kidnapping Politics in East Asia," Working Paper, Center forInternational Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Spring 2010; also essential, Gavan
McCormack, "History Too Long Denied: Japan's Unresolved Past and Today's North Korea
Problem".
[2] Charles Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950, New York: Columbia
University, 2004.
[3] "Megumi" on YouTube.
[4] Nature, March 17, 2005.
[5] Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Exodus to North Korea: Shadow's From Japan's Cold War, 2008; also,
The Forgotten Japanese in North Korea: Beyond the Politics of Abduction.
[6] Hirayama Ikuo, Watashi wa Konna Shiji ni Naritakatta, Tokyo: Asahi, 2009[7] For a partial translation, see this link.
[8] Herbert Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, New York: Harper Collins, 2000.
[9] Sapio, January 27, 2010.
[10] Rumi Sakamoto and Matthew Allen, "Hating ‘The Korean Wave'’’ Comic Books: A sign of
New Nationalism in Japan?
[11] See Itagaki Ryuta's articles in Asahi Shimbun, March 15-17, 2010; also, Nikkan Aratana
Hajimari no 20sho, Tokyo: Iwanami, 2007.
[12] See, Japan Times, July 12, 2005. ; “Koreans in Utoro Call for Home Country’s Help” Korea
Times, July 27, 2007.
[13] Link 1; Link 2.
[14] Funabashi Yoichi, Asahi Shimbun, July 2006; Matsumoto Kenichi, Kaigansen no Rekishi,Tokyo: Mishimasha, 2009.
[15] See Kimie Hara, Northern Territories, Asia-Pacific Regional Conflicts and the AlandExperience: Untying the Kurillian Knot, New York: Routledge, 2009.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

246[16] Asahi Shimbun, December 25, 2009, evening edition; also Asahi Shimbun, December 26,
2009.
[17] Yomiuri Shimbun, December 28, 2009; Asahi Shimbun, December 27, 2009.
[18] Asahi Shimbun, December 26 and 27, 2009; Hankyoreh, December 26 and 27, 2009.
[19] Asahi Shimbun, March 30, 2010.

Haruki: The Comfort Women, the Asian Women’s Fund and the Digital Museum

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The Comfort Women, the Asian Women’s Fund and the Digital Museum
Wada Haruki
Translated and introduced by Gavan McCormack
Introduction
Six decades have passed since the end of the Pacific and East Asian War and the collapse of theJapanese colonial empire, but responsibility for colonialism, war, and their accompanying
atrocities, continues to agitate Japan and East Asia. It is widely believed that Japan refuses toapologize or face the truth of history, much less compensate victims. Such a belief is, however
mistaken, although it is true that it took five decades before any such steps were taken and theadequacy of the steps taken has been debated and continues to be debated.
In 1995, the Murayama government expressed its “deep remorse” over colonialism andaggression, apologized in particular to the victims of the imperial Japanese forces so-called“Comfort Women” system of sexual slavery, and set up a fund, the Asian Women’s Fund,through which between then and 2007 it offered apologies, monetary compensation, and healthand welfare support by way of atonement to the surviving victims, now elderly women in their
70s and 80s. The Asian Women’s Fund formula did involve apology and compensation, but it did
not satisfy those who insisted that the Japanese state had to admit its criminality, apologize
unequivocally, and provide compensation direct from the Japanese state. The Fund was a joint
project of the “people of Japan” and the Government, and it assumed moral, but not legal
responsibility. Many therefore denounced it as a devious attempt to evade full and proper legal
responsibility, and rejected the solatium or “sympathy” payments as an inadequate substitute forfull compensation by way of legal right.
Proponents of the Fund, prominent among them the author of the following introduction to thedigital archives, Wada Haruki, did not disagree with the principle of the criticism, but made a
two-pronged response. First, they argued that an imperfect resolution was all that was possible
under the political circumstances. Far better to provide compensation and apology while thesurviving comfort women were still alive, than to fail to act. Second, they insisted that
responsibility should anyway, in principle, be shared between government and people, since theimperial Japanese Army soldiers could not escape or shift their personal responsibility for thecrime onto the state. Wada stresses the unique character of the Fund as a joint act by state andpeople. In response to a national appeal, substantial funds were contributed by ordinary people,
former soldiers undoubtedly among them, and the payments to individual victims were madefrom those funds, while administrative costs and the costs of the welfare and health support fundwere paid from government coffers.
Within Japan, Wada and his associates were the butt of anger on the part of many of their
hitherto allies among progressives in general, feminists in particular, for the inadequacy of theirefforts, and simultaneously on the part of many right-wingers for whom it was outrageous thatany responsibility at all was conceded, many of them continuing to insist that there never was
any state-run “Comfort Women” system. In the region, especially South Korea, criticism on theformer of these grounds forced the Comfort Women support groups to reject the Fund and thegovernment to establish its own support fund instead.

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In 2007, with the winding-up of the Fund, its resources were preserved in the form of the Digital
Museum introduced in the following note by Wada Haruki, its original proponent and executive
managing-director. By gathering, translating, and publishing the key documents, Fundorganizers have opened their work to scrutiny while making available a valuable resource forthe study of the comfort women and Japan’s wartime military. (GMcC)
The term “Comfort Women” refers to the women who, during the last war, were rounded up into
Japanese military Comfort Stations by the Japanese army and forced to provide sexual services
for soldiers. The problem of these women, ignored or forgotten for long after the war, was taken
up in South Korea in the 1990s after the democratic revolution had been carried out. Underpressure from the victims themselves who “came out” in public, the Japanese government
investigated Japanese and other materials, and by the “Kono Statement” issued by Chief Cabinet
Secretary Kono in 1993 expressed regret and apology, recognizing that the Japanese army had
been directly involved in inflicting deep wounds on the dignity of the women, leaving them withphysical and mental scars that were hard to heal. When the Murayama government was formed
in 1994, the question of redress began to be considered, based on this understanding, and in July
1995 the Asian Women’s Fund was established. A “letter of apology” signed by the Prime
Minister and a letter from the Chief Director of the Fund was handed to each and every one ofthe victims who would accept it and they were given a solatium payment of two million yen
contributed by the public together with between 1.2 and 3 million yen in medical and welfare
support paid from government funds. This was done until 2002 for victims in the Philippines,
South Korea, and Holland. In Indonesia, the project took the form of construction of welfare
facilities for the aged [rather than individual apology and compensation], and with the winding
up of those activities the Asian Women’s Fund was dissolved on 31 March 2007.1
The Asian Women’s Fund was a Foundation set up in accord with a decision of the governmentof Japan but managed by volunteers who were private citizens. Because all its operating
expenses were paid out of public funds, it was a quasi-public organization, whose activities were
under the direct supervision of the Cabinet Office and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and wereconducted in accord with government policy. The Board of Directors and Management Council,
made up of private citizens, tried at all times to conduct the operation out of a concern toaccomplish apology, solatium, and reconciliation.
However, from the time it was launched the Fund was severely criticized by the victims
themselves and by victims’ support groups in the victim countries who insisted on state redress,
and also by domestic groups in Japan that took the same position. Support groups and victims in
the Philippines and Holland agreed to deal with the Asian Women’s Fund, though maintaining
their critical stance, but South Korean and Taiwanese movement groups maintained to the end
their opposition to the activities of the Fund, and involved their governments too in that
opposition. The Asian Women’s Fund was eventually dissolved without having been able toengage in any activities whatever on behalf of victims in China, with whose government it was
unable to reach any agreement, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, with which Japan
has no diplomatic relations.

1thStatement by then Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi, on the occasion of the 50 anniversary of the end of thewar, launching the Fund. You can view the texts in Japanese by clicking here, and in English translation, here.

Haruki: The Comfort Women, the Asian Women’s Fund and the Digital Museum249

On the other hand, from 1996 when the Asian Women’s Fund began, within Japanese society
there was a counter-current of opposition to the Kono statement and denial of the existence of the
Comfort Women problem, and a movement grew to ignore the activities of the Asian Women’s
Fund and to neutralize its influence. Some ruling party politicians participated actively in it, andat times that led to serious situations. It is well known that even in 2006 a movement toreconsider the Kono statement flared up in real earnest.
Looking back over these events, the Asian Women’s Fund decided to set up a digital museum,“The Comfort Women Issue and the Asian Women’s Fund.” The first purpose was to have theunderstanding arrived at by the government of Japan and the Asian Women’s Fund on the
Comfort Women question preserved permanently and become the basis for the way the Japanesepeople understand the matter. The government has released the materials it had collected on the
Comfort Women problem. The second purpose was to clarify the way in which the Asian
Women’s Fund was initiated, how it conducted its business, and what it accomplished. To that
end, by providing detailed explanation of the Fund, and preserving and publishing as much as
possible of related materials, we have made it possible for them to be subjected to critical study.
This digital museum was set up fully funded by the government of Japan, and its contents havebeen settled on the responsibility of the Asian Women’s Fund in consultation with relevant
government agencies. In that sense, this digital museum can be said to have been set up in 2007
by the cooperation of government and people, just as all the activities of the Asian Women’s
Fund were carried out “in cooperation between the government and the people.”
As well as having its Asian Women’s Fund address, www.awf.or.jp, with its own server, it isalso incorporated in the National Diet Library’s WARP project (click here to access.)
How to Visit
Upon entering www.awf.or.jp in the internet address column, the main page of the digital
museum opens. Clicking on “continue” brings up the welcome from Asian Women’s Fund’s
Chief Director, Murayama Tomiichi. The opening is a quote from the Murayama Statement.
Then, clicking “proceed” opens the Entrance Hall. You can then access any section by clicking
on the appropriate catalogue entry, and by clicking at the right hand entry where it says
“English” the entry will appear in English.
In the Guide at the top of Room 1 are to be found “reference materials.” Clicking on this, a list ofreference materials for the entries in Room 1 appears. Representative materials are displayed in
Room 1 but those wishing to see the whole can refer to the number of volumes or pages of eachsource in the library’s “Historical Materials on the Comfort Women” section. If you click on theword “English” attached to the item in question, the material on display can be read in English.
In the Guide that heads Room 2 appears the cover of a pamphlet issued by the Fund in 1997. If
you click on this, you can refer to representative pamphlets introducing the Fund’s activities.
You might want to move from browsing through the pamphlets to reading the exhibits in Room
2. Following Room 2, there is an entry “Full Text here” and if you click on that, documents heldin the library’s “Documents of the Government of Japan and the Asian Women’s Fund” appear.
Here and there in Room 3 appears the sign “Images here.” Clicking on this, you can see shortvideo clips. (Click The section “Voices of the Victims” contains the tragic words of some of thevictims, which you can hear while seeing the images. In the explanation to the section on

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

250

“Recollections of those Connected to the Running of the Fund” there is a list of Fund officebearers. In this section you can read the recollections of those connected with the recording of
the “Oral History – Asian Women’s Fund.” You can also read here in English the memoirs of
women victims from Holland and the Philippines.
Room 4 displays documents of the United Nations’ Human Rights Committee, its sub-committee
for the promotion and protection of human rights, the ILO, the government of Holland, and the
US Congressional Research Service, either in the English original or with English translation
attached. Then are displayed materials concerning the suits launched by Korean, Filipino, andTaiwanese victims in the various “Comfort Women” claims. Finally, materials concerning the“Draft Law for promotion of a solution to the problem of wartime sexual forced victims
problem” presented to the Diet are contained in full and the proceedings of the debates
conducted in July and December 2002 are introduced.
Room 5 introduces the Fund’s “Women’s Dignity Promotion Project.” If you follow directions
and click on any of the four posters in the directory, an enlarged version appears which can be
downloaded.
In the “library stacks” under “Historical Materials related to the Comfort Women,” are contained
first the full five volumes of “Government Investigation – Compilation of Materials related to the‘Comfort Women’ that were published jointly by the Fund and Ryukei Shobo publishingcompany. In the section of government and Fund documents, there are 38 documents. The
Korean text of the Prime Minister’s letter of apology is also included. The Memorandum ofUnderstanding with the Philippines, Indonesia, and Holland, and the final report, are also
included. In the section of the proceedings and materials of the Asian Women’s Fund, relatedmaterials and newspaper cuttings collected over the period of the 98 meetings of the Board of
Directors are included. Some have not before been published. We believe the materials will be
useful for any investigation into the activities of the Fund, and in order to understand the debate
over the Comfort Women issue in Japan and elsewhere during the period of existence of theFund.
Finally, there is the section on the publications and videos of the Fund, where you can consultand download issues from No 1 to No 28 of the “Fund News,” and all periodical publications of
the Fund. You can watch part 1 of the 2000 video “Our Problem Now – Women, War, andViolence, from the Asian Women’s Fund” which introduces for about 30 minutes the Comfort
Women problem and the activities of the Asian Women’s Fund.
It might help to better understand the whole if you were to look at this video as the last thing,after seeing the museum.
Wada Haruki is professor emeritus, Institute of Social Science, Tokyo University and a specialist
on Russia, Korea, and the Korean War. He served as chief director of the Comfort Women Fund.

Caprio: Neo-Nationalist Interpretations of Japan’s Annexation of Korea

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Neo-Nationalist Interpretations of Japan’s Annexation of Korea: The Colonization Debate
in Japan and South Korea
Mark Caprio1
Did in Meiji 43 [1910] Japan annex Korea, the Empire of Korea (J. Daikan teikoku,
K.Taehan cheguk)? Do you call this Japan’s colonizing the Empire of Korea? If so, [Mr.
Education Minister], I would like to ask, is Scotland an English colony? Please, could
you answer this question for me? Are Northern Ireland and Wales English colonies?
Please let me know. Before World War I, was Hungary an Austrian colony?
….
Japan did not want to annex Korea. Koreans came to Japan and asked to be annexed.
This was expressed in the Korean Emperor [Sunjong]’s last Imperial Rescript, where it is
written, “From now we have no choice but to request the Emperor of Imperial Japan’s
protection.” Also, in 1910 a demonstration took place in Seoul, the capital. Thoseleading this demonstration were from the Advance in Unity Society (J. Isshinkai, K.
Ilchinhoe). Do you know what kind of demonstration this was? It was one that requested
Japan to merge with (J. gappei), or annex (J. heigō) Korea.
Why Murata Haruki, a salaryman active in a number of conservative causes,2 chose August 7,
2009 and the offices of Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology(Monbukagakushō) as the time and place to deliver his speech is not clear. His posting of arecording of his monologue on YouTube, however, has drawn him an audience—as of October28, 2010, close to 17,300 viewers—that far exceeds that of his live presentation.3 The Internet,
and particularly YouTube, is one of a number of popular venues that neo-conservative groups
have used to more efficiently disseminate their messages, which frequently address such JapanKorea issues as the Dokto/Takeshima controversy, North Korea-Japan relations, and Japan-based
Koreans.4 Their agenda is consistent: to “correct” interpretations of recent Japanese history thatthey deem to be unpatriotic. These presentations thus supplement other efforts by Japanese
determined to write a “new history” that instills national pride to replace the shame-ridden
interpretations of Japan’s colonial and wartime history.5

Murata discussing his views opposing foreigner
voting rights.

Murata’s presentation, which on this occasion
targeted Japan’s annexation of the Korean
peninsula, is simple, low cost, and easily
accessed. Unlike his other YouTube uploads that
capture him lecturing before an audience, neither
he nor anyone else appears in this presentation.
Instead, viewers are offered only the audio
portion of Murata’s speech, with his key points
summarized in white Japanese text against a
black background. Choruses of gruff jeers fromhis cohort enliven his rather bland diatribe. His
message on this particular day, centering on thenature of Japan’s occupation of Korea, was firstthat it represented a case of annexation (asopposed to colonization), and that it was the
Koreans who requested a reluctant Japanese to

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

252

annex their country.
Close geographic proximity, a history of checkered diplomatic relations, and an active Korean
voice that protests attempts by Japanese to revise this history have encouraged neoconservatives. Japan’s incorporation of the Korean peninsula in 1910 occupies a central part ofits agenda. Arguments such as those put forth by Murata demonstrate that differences of opinion
stubbornly persist even after six decades of Korean liberation from Japanese rule. These
differences exist primarily, but not exclusively, between Japanese and Koreans. Murata’s choiceof venue—a Japanese rather than a Korean government building—suggests such differences also
exist among Japanese groups. His views on Japan’s occupation closely resemble those frequently
expressed in Japan’s conservative circles: 1) the equal status of Koreans and Japanese within theempire; 2) Japanese benevolent contributions to Korea and the Korean people; and 3) Korean
support for Japan’s annexation of their country. Additionally, Murata joins others in rejecting
charges that Japan committed crimes against the Korean people, such as its campaign toencourage Koreans to adopt Japanese names, its labor mobilization policies (including comfort
women and forced laborers), and its ambition to “erase” Korean identity.6
The existence of a strong conservative voice is hardly unique to Japan, as witnessed at thegathering of European and Japanese extremist groups held in Tokyo this past August. The
existence of groups jealously seeking to guard and guide the national narrative, particularly torepulse external or internal criticism of it, can be found in all modern nations. The United States,
Germany and China, for example, illustrate some of the different ways in which this is manifest.
Japan’s case is interesting in that outside forces have joined internal pressures to criticize its
attempts to “revise” its colonial and wartime history. This criticism has encouraged conservative
groups to address areas of its imperial past that the histories of other former colonial powers have
either omitted or glossed over. If, for example, Filipinos actively protest United Statesinterpretations of its pre-World War II colonial occupation of their country, their demands hardly
receive the attention that Koreans and Chinese gain by attacking Japan’s attempts to “normalize”
its historical interpretations of the less attractive areas of their past relations.7 Criticism ofJapan’s perceptions of this past, in turn, has reawakened a conservative voice in Japan that
believes sovereign states reserve the right to script a national narrative that elicits pride rather
than shame among its people.8 The resulting conflict creates a divide at a time when China,
South Korea, and Japan grope for ways to promote closer ties. Questions that Murata raises in his
diatribe strike at the heart of Japan’s thirty-six year occupation of the Korean peninsula, and thus
are too important to leave unattended. They leave us wondering why Japan finds more
problematic than other former colonial powers the shedding of this history, a question which thispaper will examine in it conclusion.
Was Korea Annexed or Colonized Territory?
Murata Haruki’s primary goal is clear. By challenging the idea that Japan greedily colonized
Korea, he aims to narrate Japan’s occupation of Korea as an act of benevolent annexation, one
similar to England’s unions with Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland rather than its aggressive
incorporation of colonies such as India and Burma (Myanmar). Drawing this distinction thus
distances Japan from Europe’s late-nineteenth century land grabbing activities in Africa andAsia, and defends its stated mission of freeing these enslaved peoples from oppressive Westerncolonial rule. Japan annexed Korea to unite Japanese and Koreans as fellow national subjects.
Indeed, this “union” was welcomed by the Korean people themselves, as called for inCaprio: Neo-Nationalist Interpretations of Japan’s Annexation of Korea

253

demonstrations organized by the Advance in Unity Society (Ilchinhoe), and indicated in the
Korean Emperor Sunjong’s final Imperial Rescript. One additional justification, that thismarriage delivered peace to an East Asia region that had recently endured a series of wars
centered on the Korean peninsula, was heard both at the time of annexation and in more recent
arguments put forth by the Association to Create New History Textbooks (J. Atarashi rekishi
kyōkasho o tsukurukai).9
Murata’s arguments simplify rather complex issues in an extreme way and thus offer a skewed
narrative of Japan’s colonial history. Japanese debates on the wording of this expansionist
activity, as Hilary Conroy’s groundbreaking study in 1960 revealed, resulted in the creation of a
new word, “heigō,” one that Japanese saw as a softer derivation of heidon—to “annex, devour,[or] swallow up.”10 Most Japanese writing in 1895 and 1910 would have agreed with Murata’s
characterization of Japan’s absorption of Korea as an act of annexation. To them, the close
cultural and geographic proximity that Koreans shared with Japanese required the two peoples
forming a much more intimate relationship than that advanced by colonizers in distant colonies,
such as between the British and Indians or Burmese.11 This discourse further advised theJapanese administration to follow what Japanese perceived to be a fraternal English-Scot/Welsh
example, but avoid the estranged English-Irish one. The University of Tokyo’s inaugural holderof the chair in colonial studies, Nitobe Inazō, for example, wrote in December 1919, months
after the Japanese battled a major challenge to their rule, that “to an English student ofcolonization it will be highly interesting to watch the development of Korea to a Wales or – to an
Ireland.”12
Nitobe’s use of “colonization” to represent both
English and Japanese incorporation of peripheral
territories reflects the scholar’s views on theterm “shokuminchishugi” (colonialism). Thisterm, he argued, could be rendered as either “toplant people” or “to increase people,” dependingon the initial Chinese character. In Nitobe’s
mind, the former more closely reflected Japan’s
assimilation policy, to develop the Korean
people as imperial subjects.13 His explanationsuggests that one century ago colonization andannexation shared a more synonymous meaning
than Murata may be willing to accept.
植民 (plant)

vs.

Nitobe Inazō, Educator, appeared on Japan’s 5000
yen bill

殖民 (increase)

Others, such as the future prime minister, Hara Takashi, contrasted the English example that
permitted self-rule (“colonization”), against the French (Algeria) and German (Alsace andLorraine) examples that adopted assimilation (annexation). He advised Japan to adopt the latter
policy in Taiwan.14 One of Japan’s most passionate supporters of assimilation, Hara repeated thisargument after Japan incorporated Korea into its empire, advising that its success hinged on the
degree to which it successfully incorporated the peninsula into the archipelago’s existing
political, cultural, and economic institutions.15 Hara’s argument followed those frequently heard
at this time that divided colonial policies into the English (association) and French (assimilation)
approaches, a division Murata correctly suggests to be simplistic.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

254

As suggested in Murata’s monologue, the English pursued two
distinct policies: an inclusive policy that it introduced inWales, Scotland, and Ireland, and segregative policies that itpracticed in overseas colonies such as India and Burma. While
the English government granted peoples in both cases selfrule, only its United Kingdom possessions sent representatives
to the British Parliament. Hara apparently considered theUnited Kingdom examples to be limited in the English
offering their subjects only political rights. Japan’s possessions
required a more comprehensive assimilation policy that
integrated people politically, but also culturally andeconomically.
Though seen as “annexed” (J. heigō sareta) territory in 1910,
Korea is today regarded as “colonized” (J. shokuminchika)
territory, with some adding the qualifier that Japan’s action
was “unique” when compared to other colonizing powers.
Only Japan incorporated territories at its periphery that wereHara Takeshi, Japanese Prime
inhabited by peoples who were racially similar to the
Minister (1918-1921)
colonizers.16 Similar to Murata’s reasoning, this expansionist
activity held little in common with Western colonial activities on the African continent or inpresent-day Southeast Asia. Rather, it better resembled a more intense form of occupation wherestates absorbed territories on their periphery to strengthen national security. This expansion may
have been unique in its time, but not within the broader history of territorial expansion. A
primary concern in such cases, which included the examples of French Algeria, German Alsace
and Lorraine, and England’s formation of the United Kingdom, was fear over an enemy, or
potential enemy, getting there first. Conroy, for one, argues that Japan’s ambitions to annex
Korea were driven by this realist thinking.17 The same argument could be made for its
incorporation of Ezo (present-day Hokkaido) and the Kingdom of Ryukyu (present-day Okinawa
Prefecture), which acted to buffer Japan’s two extremes, and later Taiwan, incorporated in part toprotect Okinawa.18
Contemporary historiography on expansion appears to have drawn a rather consistent line toseparate “colonized” states from “annexed” territories based on their present status, rather thantheir historical development. Annexed territories tend to be those that remain under thejurisdiction of the expanding entity, colonized territories being those that have for the most partsuccessfully gained their independence. Murata’s omission of Ireland, which gained its
independence from England in July 1920, and his inclusion of Wales, Scotland, and Northern
Ireland, which have retained their United Kingdom membership, suggests his understanding of
this distinction. His attempt to depict the Korean peninsula as an annexed territory reflects anattempt to break from it.
Perceptions on Korea’s status appear to have shifted just prior to its liberation. Visitors to Korea
under Japanese rule recognized the peninsula as annexed territory. California Representative
Henry Z. Osborne, who led a Congressional tour in 1920 through Northeast Asia, characterized
Korea in his report as “now as fixedly a part [of the Japanese Empire] as California, Arizona, andNew Mexico are a part of the United States.”19 Stanley K. Hornbeck, then a professor but during
World War II a key advisor to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, suggested as much in 1924 when

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he wrote that with Korea’s incorporation into the Japanese empire it “passed” or “disappeared asa state.”20
Attitudes change with circumstances. Following the outbreak of the Pacific War the UnitedStates altered its thinking toward Japan’s possessions. We see this revised attitude in the
December 1943 Cairo Communiqué drafted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill,
and Chiang Kai-shek, which suggested Korea was now being seen as territory that had beencolonized by force. Here the Allies vowed to expel Japan “from all…territories which [it] hadtaken by violence and greed” while seeking to protect their own, or add new, colonial territories.
This, of course, included the Korean peninsula, which was to be granted its independence “in due
course,” after an undetermined period of Allied occupation. May we conclude that from this time
Korea’s status, as viewed by outsiders, changed from being “annexed” to “colonized” territory?
“Korean People became Japanese National subjects”
I have another question. Are you familiar with what is written in the Imperial Rescript ofShowa (sic) 43 [1910]? It said, “From today all Korean people of the Empire of Korea
have become national subjects of Imperial Japan.” From this day the 13 million poorand starving people in Korea became Japanese Imperial subjects (shinmin). From thenext day they received Japanese passports. Did Indians and Burmese receive British
passports? Please let me know.
[Background calls] Answer! Answer now!
….
In other words, they were the same national subjects (as Japanese).
Murata continued his diatribe by addressing an important point, that the expanding entity’s
image of the people it incorporated is critical to determining the territory’s status as either
colonized or annexed. But is his interpretation of Japanese images of Koreans correct? Did thecolonizers truly view the “13 million poor and starving people of Korea” as the “same national
subjects” (J. kokumin, K. kungmin) from August 1910? Murata cites the Meiji Emperor’s
Imperial Rescript on Annexation that, he informs, identified the Korean people as such, asevidence that Japanese viewed Koreans as such. This view reflects the idea that Koreans werepermitted Japanese nationality with annexation, and had it taken from them in 1946, when they
were excluded from participating in Japan’s first postwar election. Both views, however, require
further investigation. Murata’s claim does not coincide with the published version of thisdocument, or any other document drafted for this occasion. Nor does it reflect any of the active
discussions that took place in the Japanese media around this time.
Most problematic is his claim that the colonizers regarded Koreans as “kokumin,” in other words,
as Japanese. The closest the Meiji Emperor’s Rescript comes to using this word is in paragraphfour, where it declared that the “people of Korea will enjoy enhanced blessings under Our
immediate guardianship…” However, here the Japanese text renders “people” as minshū, and the
Korean text minchung (both translatable as “people” or “masses,” but—unless qualified assuch—distinct from “[Japanese] national”). Resident General Terauchi Masataka’s statement
comes closer. He declared, “As for the people of Korea, in general, all of them shall become
subjects of the Empire of Japan…” “Subjects” is rendered here as shinmin in the Japanese text
and sinmin in the Korean. Indeed, the word kokumin in reference to Koreans does not appear in
the official government texts carried by the media on this day.21

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

国民 (kokumin)

vs.

256

臣民 (shinmin)

Murata later refers to Koreans as shinmin. Only he can reveal whether this shift was intentionalor accidental. Unlike Murata, during Japan’s tenure in Korea most Japanese writers maintained astrict distinction that separated the Japanese as kokumin from the Korean as shinmin. They
included Koreans as kokumin only when both peoples acted as the subject of their thought, andthen in the context of both peoples “becoming national subjects” (kokuminka). The Japaneselanguage media on at least one occasion explained the necessity of maintaining a distinction
between the two peoples. Within a month after annexation the Keijō shinpō, a private Japanesenewspaper in the Korean capital, argued the following:
Korea, in fact, has become Japanese territory. Koreans have become subjects of imperial Japan(teikoku no shinmin). But we cannot accept that the Korean, in becoming an imperial subject, hasalso directly become a Japanese (Nihonjin). Today, those who are entitled to claim the [status of]Japanese are the 50 million or so people of the homeland (naichijin). This does not include
Koreans, who have yet to fulfill the conditions required of this status. Their ethnicity, language,
and customs history (fūzoku rekishi) may share the same lineage, but there still remain huge gaps
[between the two people]. Even if both are subjects of imperial Japan, a distinction must be
maintained between Japanese and Korean.
The editorial next cited the British example. England, it claimed, did not incorporate the Irish,
the Scots, or the Welsh into the United Kingdom as “English.” It coined the term “British” tomaintain distinction between Anglo and Celt. Japanese must also follow this example byintegrating Koreans as shinmin, but not as Nihonjin.22 Other discussions carried by the Japanese
media appeared to justify this distinction by arguing that while the Korean and Japanese peoples
shared similar roots of origin, the separation of the two peoples over the past several centuries
required that Koreans catch up to their Japanese cousins to prepare for their assimilation. Before
1938, when Korean cooperation in the war effort became critical, many writers added that the“catching up” process should not be hurried. For the foreseeable future, gradual assimilation
would suffice.23
Japan’s administrative practices reflected the division of Japanese and Korean identities rather
than both being considered as Japanese nationals. From the 1930s Japan-based Koreans were
given voting rights in accordance with Japanese suffrage laws (males over 25 years of age), andwere allowed to volunteer for military service from 1938. Military conscription began from1944. However, those residing in Japan were not permitted to transfer their residency papers toJapan, and had to return to Korea whenever they needed to amend this document or obtain acopy of it, such as when Korean boys applied for voluntary military service. Socially, there aremany examples that demonstrate the fact that Japanese considered Koreans as foreign rather thanfellow countrymen and women.
Indicative of this lower status is the segregated education system in Korea. A state’s education
system provides a useful gauge to measure colonizer intentions due to the institution’s
importance in nation building, as well as in creating the level playing field needed to provide its
recipients with equal opportunity in employment and social status. The structure of Japan’s
education policy offers a telltale sign as to the extent to which Japanese believed their own
assimilation rhetoric. Required of the Government-General was a bold statement indicating its
intention to provide for Koreans an education system of equal quality to the Japanese system,

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257

followed by an education policy that developed this intention. The Government-General’sstatement would necessarily have included Japan’s ambition to enforce compulsory education.
To draw links with Meiji Restoration education policy, the administration might also havequoted the ambitious vow that Japan included in its 1872 Fundamental Code of Education, that“there shall, in the future, be no community with an illiterate family, or a family with an illiterate
person.”24 Laying the infrastructure to accomplish this goal would, as the pledge suggested, taketime. Even by the turn of the century, Japanese elementary schools enrolled by world standards ahigh percentage of its people (91 percent of males and 72 percent of females) but still less thanits total population.25 However, compulsory education remained its goal. Another institution—
universal military conscription initiated in 1873—further encouraged education development as
the Japanese government realized the need to fill its military’s ranks with literate and patriotic
men from all prefectures across the archipelago. Educating females provided children withcapable instructors to direct their home education (J. katei kyōiku) that eased their transition intoelementary school education.
Japanese articulation of Korean education policy fell far short of this intention. Like Japan’s
education institutions in Hokkaido, Okinawa, and Taiwan, in Korea the administration initiallyestablished a dual education system that instructed Japanese and indigenous children in separate
school facilities under unequal conditions. The first Education Act, which the GovernmentGeneral introduced in 1911, made no mention of this education as compulsory. Indeed, we findno such mention until 1938, the same year that the Japanese military began to accept Korean
volunteer soldiers (J. shiganhei, K. chiwǒnbyǒng). At this time, the Government-Generalannounced that it would advance compulsory education in Korea, but only after another decade.
The administration later expedited this plan by two years, to commence in 1946, after it began
drafting Korean boys into its military from 1944. Even then it estimated that the schools would
be able to accommodate but 90 percent of Korean males and 50 percent of Korean females.26
Different from Japan, where compulsory education was instituted prior to universal military
conscription legislation, Japan promised Koreans compulsory education after it began drafting
Korean youth into its military.
We see differences between Japan’s peninsula and archipelago education policies in the
Government-General’s dual education policy that segregated the peninsula’s Japanese andKorean residents,27 with schools for the latter being decidedly inferior. The first Education Act
limited Korean elementary school education to four years, two less than their Japanesecounterparts. Korean children wishing to advance to higher education had to complete a two-year
preparatory course to make up for this deficiency. Also, the Korean school curriculum, with its
high concentration on Japanese language classes, offered Korean students less training inscience, math, and history. The fact that most of their instruction was conducted in Japanese, aforeign language, and in classrooms holding far more students than Japanese classrooms, further
inhibited Korean scholastic development.28 The administration could correctly claim that timeand resources prevented its providing space for all Korean children to study. The operative word
here is intention. Unlike Japan’s 1872 education legislation, prior to the outbreak of war in 1938
the Government-General spoke of, but did little to implement, a system equal to that enjoyed by
Japanese kokumin, both those residing in Japan and on the peninsula. Without equality in
education, the thought that Japanese regarded Koreans as their equals, regardless of whether they
indeed issued them Japanese passports, remains remote.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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Systemic inequalities between Japanese and Koreans, which appeared throughout their daily
lives, did not go unnoticed. The most important critique of these inequalities appeared in an
opinion paper (J. ikensho) submitted by Hara Takashi (Japan’s Prime Minister from 1918 to1921) in 1920. Here the statesman attacked the generally negative attitude that Japanese held
toward “inferior” Koreans, as reflected in the Government-General policies that nurtured
segregation. Administering a people as fools, he warned, would hardly encourage them to change
their attitudes toward Japanese. Hara advised the Government-General to seek a comprehensive
Japanese-Korean unity that integrated the classrooms, but also the home (through intermarriage),
the neighborhood, and the work place.29 His influence is reflected in the reforms that ushered in
the period of “cultural rule” (J. bunka seiji) that characterized the 1920s, particularly thosereforms that allowed Koreans to study in schools for Japanese and eased the regulations for
miscegenation.
The Government-General regularly increased the number of schools on the peninsula. But, as
one Korean complained, it placed higher priority on control than education. How else, ChuYosŭp challenged, could Japan justify employing over three times as many spies as teachers(30,000 to 8,111)?30 Japanese assimilation rhetoric often demonstrated its limitations, as seen in
the discussion surrounding the failed efforts in 1929 to increase Korean political participation.31
Even as Japan prepared to initiate its most ambitious effort to unify the two peoples, the Naisen
ittai (Japan-Korea, one body) strengthening plan of 1938, Japan’s most passionate Korean
supporters found room to criticize Japanese failure to follow their assimilation slogans with
policies that encouraged integration.32 As Yi Sǔngu, a Korean attendee of meetings convened toevaluate the Naisen ittai plan, complained Japanese repeatedly advertise Naisen ittai but thenrespond to Korean efforts to identify themselves as Japanese by refusing to accept them as suchthen people.33“Korea Squeezed Japan”
One more thing, Mr. Education Minister. I need for you to tell me one more thing. Afterannexation, Imperial Korea’s royal family remained. Japan gave to that royal family
Prince Nashimoto’s oldest daughter as a bride. What does this mean? Can you tell me?
What does it mean for a country to give a princess to another country?
How about the Burmese? Did they ever offer a princess to the English royal family? Did
the British Empire ever provide Burma with a princess?
…..
The taxes that Japan charged Koreans or this Regional Financial Grant system (chihōkōfukinsei), which amounted to more?…. Japan contributed much more through theRegional Financial Grant system than it took from Koreans in taxes. How can you callthis a colony? It was Korea that squeezed (sakushu) Japan.
(Background calls) Return it! Give it back!
Japanese conservatives often cite the benefits that Japanese rule contributed to Korea and wonder
why Koreans to this day refuse to acknowledge the more benevolent side of Japanese rule.
Murata’s statements reflect the disappointment that many Japanese feel when Koreanscharacterize this period as harsh and cruel. His attempts to counter Korean criticisms, however,
either neglect entirely or offer a positive spin to the more oppressive elements of Japanese rule.
What, Murata might consider, did the Korean people gain by their last crown prince beingCaprio: Neo-Nationalist Interpretations of Japan’s Annexation of Korea

259

provided with a Japanese bride? To what extent did Japan’s financial assistance directly assist
the Korean people under Japanese rule? To what extent did it contribute to Japanese control ofland and industry in Korea?
Messages appearing on another YouTube, titled in English as “The Korean File of Korea Under
Japanese Rule” and in Japanese as “Nikkan heigō no shinjutsu” (The Truth Behind the JapanKorea Annexation”),34 advertise this benevolent side of Japanese rule more directly. Its
anonymous authors borrow a technique often employed by the Government-General thatcompared pictures purported to have been taken before and after Japan’s arrival to document
Korea’s progress under Japanese rule. One example placed pictures of a one-room Korean
schoolroom alongside a grand school building erected by the Japanese. This example displayed
student seating arrangements, the apparently random seating arrangement of Korean students
against the orderly seating patterns in Japanese schools, to illustrate progress.35
Its contemporary YouTube counterpart used street scenes in a similar way. It featured a precolonial Korean dirt road lined with quaint traditional one-story “mushroom-roofed” houses36
against the modern paved road lined with multi-storied shops of the Japanese era. Rather thanoral commentary, this presentation offers bilingual (Japanese and English) text explanations toaugment the pictorial essay’s intended message. Scenes from pre-annexation Seoul are followed
by a passage from Isabella Bird’s 1897 travelogue, Korea and Its Neighbors, in which she
describes Korea’s capital as “the dirtiest city in the world.” Similarly, the post-annexation
pictorial essay is interlaced with captions advertising Japan’s successes: Japanese policy
lengthened the average Korean lifespan, and doubled its population; Japan’s education system
greatly improved Korean literacy rates; Koreans in China requested permission to use Japanesenames to escape discrimination; there were no so-called “sex slaves” but “mere prostitutes” whoanswered help-wanted advertisements.
As with Murata’s presentation, arguments presented in “Korean File” are misleading. Its only
presenting Japanese rule as positive encourages viewers to accept their messages as the complete
truth, which of course they are not. We have little reason to doubt the authenticity of thephotographs themselves, for they do not appear to have been doctored. Likewise, the data that
supports the presentation’s messages regarding literacy, name changes, and the comfort women
can also be substantiated. Verification of authenticity, however, does not necessarily eliminate
questions of accuracy.
The before-and-after pictorial sequences raise several suspicions. First, the undated pictures
prevent us from verifying the temporal and spatial accuracy of the comparison being made.
While it is clear that the pictures depicted traditional Korean scenes, we cannot determine, forexample, whether they were taken before or after Japan’s arrival. Nor do they tell us whether the
Korean situation improved under Japanese rule. These photos also reveal little about
representation. Did they properly represent the entire system of pre- and post-annexation schools
and streets, or were they simply exceptional examples of the two? Finally, displaying in
simplistic terms the sequence of traditional Korean and modern Japanese aims encourages—butfalls short of earning—the viewer’s conclusion that Japanese annexation was essential for
Korean modernization.
A more careful reading (and a more accurate citation) of Bird’s travelogue, from which “KoreanFile” quotes to demonstrate Korean backwardness, suggests a contrary argument—that Koreans
were capable of modernizing without direct Japanese rule. Her actual impressions of Seoul inThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

260

1895 read as follows: “I shrink from describing intra-mural Seoul. I thought it the foulest city onearth till I saw Peking, and its smell the most odious, until I encountered those of Shao-shing!
For a great city and a capital its meanness is indescribable.”37 Compliments did not easily flowfrom Bird’s pen, but impressions of Seoul that she registered during her visit to the Korean
capital in 1897 suggest the city’s remarkable advance.
Seoul in many parts, specially in the direction of the south and west gates, was literally
unrecognizable. Streets, with a minimum width of 55 feet, with deep stone-lined channels on
both sides, bridged by stone slabs, had replaced the foul alleys, which were breeding-grounds ofcholera. Narrow lanes had been widened, slimy runlets had been paved, roadways were nolonger “free coups” for refuse, bicyclists “scorched” along broad, level streets, “express wagons”
were looming in the future, preparations were being made for the building of a fine French hotel
in a fine situation…. Seoul, from having been the foulest is now on its way to being the cleanest
city in the Far East.38
Angus Hamilton offered similar observations in1905, thus suggesting that progress continued up
through the time when Japan forced aprotectorate relationship upon Korea.39 South
Korean scholars such as Yi T’aejin argue that it
was Japanese interference that squelched Koreanefforts to modernize.40
The argument could be made that these
improvements were only possible with foreign,
including Japanese, assistance. Much of Seoul’scommunication and transportation infrastructuredeveloped from the concessions that the Korean
government sold to foreigners. Yet, the same
argument applies to other cases of modern
development, including that of Japan. Tokyo,
Isabella Bird, World Traveler
which bloomed from the late 1880s, received
healthy assistance from foreign experts recruited
41
by the Japanese government. Assistance in this case did not presuppose occupation as acondition.
The pictorial essay also tells us little about accessibility. Who benefitted from the modern
facilities that the Japanese administration introduced to Korea? “Korean File” trusts that its
viewers will accept the photo and text display as evidence of Japan’s direct contribution to the
Korean people. Reports on this progress, however, suggest that the Government-General favoredJapanese neighborhoods over Korean neighborhoods. As discussed above, Koreans eventually
did gain access to Japanese schools after 1920. Likewise, the shops situated along the modern
street did solicit (and were probably dependent upon) Korean patronage. Travel literature andfiction, however, described the uncomfortable psychological effect that the two peoples
experienced when crossing into the other’s zone.42 Koreans who crossed into modern zones did
so as a minority entering a foreign culture within the borders of their own land. The Korean
people may have inherited an advanced infrastructure after its August 1945 liberation fromJapanese rule. But the reality of the colonial period more closely resembled a two-tier societyCaprio: Neo-Nationalist Interpretations of Japan’s Annexation of Korea

261

that segregated the majority of Koreans and Japanese both physically and psychologically, asHara Takashi criticized in 1920. Save for the small percentage of affluent Koreans, it was
Japan’s sudden defeat in 1945 rather than its benevolent rule that allowed the majority of
Koreans access to the advancements introduced by Japan’s colonial administration during thisperiod.
Many Koreans recognized Japanese strengths and the potential value they held for assisting
Korea’s modern development. The scholar Yun Ch’iho, for example, frequently noted thesestrengths in his criticism of Korean shortcomings. His diary entry for May 14, 1920, is
illustrative: “One of the material benefits of the Japanese rule in Korea is the good roads. Theyshow they have brains. Yet most Koreans haven’t brains enough to appreciate good roads when
they see them.” Yun, however, also criticized Japanese duplicity in that their policy ofsegregation often contradicted their rhetoric of unity. Public works projects provided one
illustrative example, as Yun noted in his July 21, 1923, diary entry:
So far as Korean residents…are concerned, there is neither more nor less reasons today to havethe electric car lines between Chongno and the Angukdong square, than there were say, 3 years
ago. But no sooner [than] the Industrial Bank…built its official residences in Angukdong thanthe line is laid. Thus in every sort of improvement, the first and last question with the Japanese
authorities is “Will it benefit the Japanese” and not “Will it benefit the Koreans.” ….The
Japanese and foreign apologists point to the introduction of modern facilities of transportationand of communication as the great blessings Japan have conferred on the Koreans. The neglect
or absence of these improvements will hurt the Japanese infinitely more than the Koreans.43
The “Korean File” also includes a picture of an electric car as an example of Japan’s contribution
to Korean modernity. Yet, Yun’s observations remind us of the limitations in relying solely on
photographs to depict advancements in Korea under Japanese rule.
Another important aspect emphasized in the neo-conservative agenda is the correction ofnegative charges levied against Japan’s rule in Korea, particularly the policy decisions thatsought to assimilate Koreans as Japanese.44 This agenda could justifiably cite the failure ofJapan’s critics to contextualize their more negative claims against the Government-General. Its
harsher measures, rather than being characteristic of the entire period, reflect the total war
atmosphere that Japan sought to create from the late 1930s. They might also argue that thesepolicies were hardly as total as they are often depicted. The Government-General downgraded
Korean language instruction to an elective class in 1938, and banned it from the school
curriculum in 1943. However, it continued to permit publication of periodicals in Korean up
through Japan’s defeat.45 The campaign to pressure Koreans to Japanize their names, begun in
1940, encompassed the majority, but not the entire Korean population.46
Attempts by Japanese to argue that these administrative measures were benevolent, that they
were policies advanced by Koreans, misrepresent aspirations of the minority as the will of the
majority. Among Koreans there were some who, for various reasons, considered it advantageous
to adopt a Japanese name. Ken C. Kawashima, for example, discovered Japan-based Koreansusing Japanese pseudonyms in order to hide their Korean identity when dealing with landlords
who refused to rent to foreigners.47 The example presented in “Korean File” reveals a similar
need: Korean peasants hoping to assume a Japanese identity to escape discrimination, here at thehands of the Chinese. It is also conceivable that pro-Japanese Koreans requested that theJapanese adopt such a policy to expedite assimilation. Korean literacy rates no doubt improved

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as Japanese increased the number of schools on the peninsula. Likewise, among the “comfort
women,” while the vast majority were kidnapped or deceived into service, there apparently were“prostitutes” recruited through advertisements.48
While acknowledging that Japanese policy benefited pockets of Korean society,49 a responsible
argument must also acknowledge that Japan’s colonial policies systematically excluded the
majority of Koreans from these institutions of modernity. Reliance on a minority sample toexplain the entirety of Japan’s colonial rule grossly neglects the fact that Japan’s administrativedecisions forced a large number of participants to act against their volition.50 It turns a blind eye
to the many people who were harshly punished for opposing Japan’s occupation of their country.
As Michael Robinson has shown, Japanese media policy that allowed the Korean people accessto indigenous newspapers and radio broadcasting ultimately strengthened Korean national
identity, suggesting a will by many Koreans to resist the colonizers’ assimilation overtures.51
Finally, neo-conservatives neglect to consider that Japan’s history of expansion in East Asia did
not end with the emperor’s declaration on August 15, 1945, nor did it end with treaties ofnormalization. This history lives within the people it affected. Denial and beautification of thishistory disturbs the efforts of its surviving victims to distance themselves from this past, andserves as a painful reminder of Japan’s unwillingness to accept responsibility for the injustices
that Japanese rule inflicted upon them.
“Normalcy” and the Neo-Conservative Agenda
I learned a completely different history [from Murata’s presentation] than that which I
studied in school. Young people definitely need to watch this.
As a Japanese who didn’t know this history, I was shocked.
I hope that young Koreans definitely understand this reality.
The above comments, all written in Japanese, demonstrate the impact that such YouTube
presentations have had on their Japanese viewers, thus suggesting the need to examineconservative messages more closely.52 This analysis has concluded that this conservative agenda,
rather than disseminating false information, produces a misleading narrative that exploits
examples supporting its claim that Japan crafted expansionist policies beneficial to the Korean
people. Indeed, it contends, Koreans encouraged Japan’s actions. The Korean-Japaneserelationship thus resembled that enjoyed by territories annexed by England that remain a part of
the United Kingdom, rather than those colonized by force into the British Empire. If there was acolonizer in this relationship, Murata further argues, it was the Koreans who from after 1930
migrated to Japan in greater numbers than Japanese migrating to Korea. As with many points
made in his presentation, Murata here neglects the power dimension of the colonizer-colonized
relationship that influenced their migration to Japan, but also to Manchuria, and which controlled
their movements upon arrival.53
Understanding the passion behind Japanese conservative efforts, and the influence it has on
Japanese people, requires an understanding of Japan’s postwar conflicts over how to write its
modern history. These conflicts date back to the early years following its defeat, when the UnitedStates occupation administration instructed Japanese to black out textbook information that it
deemed militaristic. The primary question facing Japanese at this time, as put forth by Ienaga
Saburō, remains the essential question facing Japanese at the core of their present conflict with

Caprio: Neo-Nationalist Interpretations of Japan’s Annexation of Korea

263

Koreans and Chinese over textbook content: “How do we search for the correct knowledge ofJapanese history that should be the content of correct teaching of the national history?”54
Post-World War II geopolitics have left Japan between a rock and a hard place in terms of thegoal of becoming a “normal state” (futsū no kuni). The term is generally used by Japanese ofconservative persuasion to argue the need for Japan to abolish Article 9 and expand its global
military responsibilities. Here I extend it to mean a state also capable of defending its national
narrative. The victors in the war, and particularly the United States and Great Britain but also
France and Russia, quickly established as “normal” the omission or beautification of national
narratives by either changing or omitting the less attractive aspects of their colonial and wartime
histories. On the other hand, the economic and military influence wielded by these states over the
postwar period has prevented the vanquished from challenging the victors’ colonial and wartime
historical narratives. This influence requires, for example, Japan to not only compensate atomic
bomb victims, but also to remain silent with respect to the bomb in the dominant US World War
II narrative: that they were ‘necessary’ for ending the war and saving (American) lives.
The 1980s saw Japan reach a pinnacle in economic strength and national self-confidence, which
encouraged it to seek to revise its colonial and wartime histories at the very time when thenational sentiments and economies of its victims, notably China and South Korea, blossomed.
Japanese attempts to develop a heroic national narrative centered on colonialism and war faced
criticism that the victors have escaped. These are the very examples of “normalcy” that Japansought to emulate. The frustration provoked by this predicament has encouraged neoconservatives like Murata Haruki and the authors of “Korean File” to address, and attempt tojustify—albeit in a rather skewed way—historical events that “normal countries” have succeededin ignoring.
This article has sought to understand and critique messages promoted by Japanese conservatives
by examining their treatment of Japan’s annexation of the Korean peninsula and the history of
Korea under Japanese authority. Their dilution of truth in the name of national pride and honor
scars Japan’s relations with its neighbors at a time when more productive voices call for regional
unity, calls that will only grow louder as the influence of China grows. Should the two Koreas
resolve the issues separating them, Japan could find itself the odd state out, a hostage to a“normal” historical perspective that denies its historical responsibilities, amid a tighter East
Asian community.
Mark E. Caprio is a professor of history at Rikkyo University in Tokyo and a Japan Focus
associate. He is the author of Japanese Assimilation Policy in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945.
Notes
1

This is a revised version of my presentation, “Reexamining Japan’s Annexation of Korea:
Extending the Parameters of Colonial Histories” delivered on March 27, 2010, at the Association
for Asian Studies conference held in Philadelphia, PA. An earlier version appeared as “NewInterpretations of Japan’s Annexation of Korea: A Conservative Agenda Groping for‘Normalcy,’” Acta Koreana 13 (1) (June 2010), 113-34. It benefited from comments by Jay
Lewis, Kenneth Robinson, and Mark Selden.
2

Murata Haruki is an executive committee member of the Deliberation Committee for the
Rescue of Japanese Kidnapped by North Koreans (Kita Chōsen ni rachi sareta Nihonjin oThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

264

kyūshutsu suru tame no zenkoku kyōgikai) and the Conference against Foreigner Voting Rights(Gaikokujin sanseiken ni hantai suru kai), among other organizations. Many of his lecturesappear on YouTube. See, for example, his lecture expressing concerns over foreigner voting
rights in local elections here. (Accessed October 9, 2010).
3

Murata Haruki, “The Annexation of Korea was Decidedly not a Case of Colonial Rule,”(accessed October 9, 2010).
4

See also Kaya University professor Ch’oe Kiho’s three-part lecture on why he supported
Japan’s decision to annex Korea in his book Nikkan heigō: Kanminzoku o sukutta “Nittei 36nen” no shinjutsu (Japan-Korea Annexation: The Truth Behind the 36 Years of Imperial
Japanese Rule), (Tokyo: Shodensha, 2004). The video version of Ch’oe’s lectures has proven to
be very popular, drawing close to 120,000 viewers. (last accessed March 17, 2010).
5

In addition to textbooks such as Atarashii rekishi kyōkasho (The New History Textbook),(Tokyo: Fusōsha, 2001), conservative groups have published a large number of monographs, aswell as a comic book series Kenkanryū (Hate Korea Wave), dedicated to “correcting” liberal
Japanese and Korean views on issues involving Japanese and Korean history. For a critique of
this series see Rumi Sakamoto and Matthew Allen, “Hating ‘The Korean Wave’ Comic Books:
A Sign of New Nationalism in Japan?” Japan Focus (October 4, 2007). On the Korean side, see
the bilingual (Korean and English) Hanguk ŭi yǒksa munhwa (Korean History and Culture)series, particularly volume 3 titled Hanguk chŏnjaeng kwa kŭndaesa (The Korean War andModern History), which covers the period from late Chosǒn to the present. Nakano Toshio labels
such debates “Wars of Memory” (kioku no sensō) in his “Tōhoku Ajia de ‘sensō’ o tou koto”(Questioning “War” in Northeast Asia), in Keizoku suru shokuminchishugi: Jendā, minzoku,
jinshu, kaikyū (Colonialism without End: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Class), ed. Iwasaki
Minoru, Ōkawa Masahiko, Nakano Toshio, and Yi Hyodǒk, (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2005), 13.
6

As we shall see below, this last point is addressed more comprehensibly in another YouTube
video, “The Korean File of Korea Under Japanese Rule,” (last accessed October 9, 2010).
7

The coverage of the American “annexation” of the Philippines in one American textbook
resembles that offered in Japan’s Atarashii rekishi kyōkasho. This textbook details the debate
over the decision to annex, but provides little information on the bloody battles that the U.S.
fought to crush Philippines insurgents and secure control over the colony. Its coverage ends withdiscussion of the U.S. development of Filipino schools, the literacy rates it improved, and U.S.
guidance to lead the islanders to independence. Winthrop D. Jordon, Miriam Green Watt, andJohn S. Bowes, The Americas: A History, (Evanston, IL: McDougal, Littell and Co., 1994), 518519, 523.
8

One example is the U.S. handling of the atomic bombings during World War II, which it
justifies as being necessary to end the war and save lives. Conservative elements in the U.S. hadlittle reason to be active on this issue until it was challenged by the Smithsonian Museum’s plans
to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Enola Gay’s mission by displaying the aircraftalong with scenes from below the mushroom cloud, in other words, pictures and artifacts of thedestruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Edward T. Linenthal describes the conflicts that arose
over this plan in his “Anatomy of a Controversy,” in History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other
Battles for the American Past, ed. Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, (New York:
Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 1996), 9-62.

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9

See Nishio Kanji and the Atarashi rekishi kyōkasho o tsukurukai, eds., Kokumin no rekishi(The People’s History), (Tokyo: Sankei Shinbunsha, 2000). This group has also authored thehistory books that have caused anger among Koreans and Chinese. Many Japanese writers in1910 cited the peace dividend as justification for Korea’s annexation. See, for example, Prime
Minister Katsura Tarō’s announcement of Korea’s annexation as carried in the August 30, 1910,
edition of the Japan Times.
10

Another word, gappō (merger), as popularized by the Kokuryūkai (Black Dragon Society)’s
Nikkan gappō hisshi (The Secret History of the Merger of Japan and Korea), was deemed too
intimate to represent the Japan-Korea relationship imagined by the Japanese government at thistime. See Hilary Conroy, The Japanese Seizure of Korea, 1868-1910: A Study of Realism and
Idealism in International Relations, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), 415417.
11

Much conservative Japanese writing on the Korea-Japan colonial relationship in 1910 filled
their essays with examples of what I call peripheral colonization—territories having close
geographical and cultural proximity to the colonizers, but avoided examples of the more distantexternal colonization. Their images of the Koreans as lazy and dirty, and the Korean (Chosǒn)government as inept, mirrored those that the British, and others, held toward colonized peoples.
See Mark E. Caprio, Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945, (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2009), 82-92.
12

Nitobe Inazō, “Japanese Colonization,” in Nitobe Inazō zenshū (The complete works of Nitobe
Inazō), vol. 23, edited by Yanaihara Tetsuō, (Tokyo: Kyōbunkan, 1983-1987), 120. Ukita
Kazutani made a similar comparison earlier using Scotland and Ireland as examples in his“Kankoku heigō no kōka ikan” (What Are the Effects of Korean Annexation?), Taiyō (October
1, 1910), 2.
13

Alexis Dudden, Japan’s Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power, (Honolulu: Universityof Hawai‘i Press, 2005), 136-137. Nitobe Inazō’s article, published in 1911, was titled “On the
Term ‘Colony’” (Shokumin naru meiji ni tsuite).
14

Hara Takashi, “Taiwan mondai futa an” (Two Proposals for the Taiwan Problem), in Hisho
ruisan, Taiwan shiryō (Classified Collection of Private Documents, Taiwan Materials), ed. Itō
Hirobumi, in Meiji hyakunenshi sōshi (Meiji Centennial History Collection), vol. 127, (Tokyo:
Hara Shobō, 1970), 32-34.
15

Hara Takashi, Hara Takashi nikki (Hara Takashi Diaries), edited by Hara Keiichirō, vol. 4,
May 31, 1911, (Tokyo: Kengensha, 1950), 276.
16

See Gregory Henderson, Korea: The Politics of the Vortex, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1968), 72; Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War: Liberation and theEmergence of Separate Regimes, 1945–1947, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981),
7; and Carter J. Eckert, Ki-baik Lee, Young Ick Lew, Michael Robinson, and Edward W.
Wagner, Korea Old and New: A History, (Seoul: Ilchokak, 1990), 256. Among Japanese
historians, see Eguchi Keiichi, Nihon teikokushugishi kenkyū (Research in the History ofJapanese Imperialism), (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1998), 31, 122. Bruce Cumings later suggested
similarity with the England-Ireland relationship in his Korea’s Place in the Sun: A History, (NewYork: W. W. Norton, 1997), 140.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia
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266

Conroy, The Japanese Seizure of Korea.

18

Frederick R. Dickinson suggests that Japan also sought to control China’s Fujian province
soon after it annexed Taiwan to protect its new colonial acquisition. See his War and National
Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914-1919, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia
Center, 1999), 89.
19

Congress (House), 66th Congress, third session, Congressional Record 60 (December 23,
1920), 707-728.
20

Stanley K. Hornbeck, Contemporary Politics in the Far East, (New York: D. Appleton, 1924),
214, 215. Hornbeck also contributed to one of the first reports accessing Korea’s capacity for
self-rule after Japan’s defeat. The Joint U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, “Recognition of a‘Free Korea’ Organization,” in Haebang chŏnhusa charyojip I: Mi kukchŏng chunbi charyo(Collection of Historical Documents before and after Liberation I: Materials of United States
Administration Preparation), ed. Yi Kilsang, (Seoul: Wŏnju Munhwasa, 1992), 7-13.
21

Translations taken from the August 30, 1910, editions of the Tokyo Asahi shinbun (Japanese),the Seoul Press (English) and the Maeil sinbo (Korean).
22“Nihonjin to Nihon shinmin to no kubetsu” (Differentiating between Japanese Nationals andJapanese Subjects), Keijō shinpō (September 13, 1910). We see a similar distinction maintainedby the French in their West African colonies, where they referred to the assimilated indigenes as“native” rather than “French,” citizens. See Raymond L. Buell, The Native Problem in Africa,
vol. 1, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1928), 946.
23

See Caprio, Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 86-92, for discussion by
Japanese, and 100-105 for discussion by Koreans.
24

Quoted in Kenneth B. Pyle, The Making of Modern Japan, second edition, (Washington, D.C.:
D. C. Heath and Co., 1996), 91.
25

Byron K. Marshall, Learning to be Modern: Japanese Political Discourse on Education,(Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994), 62.
26

Takahashi Hamakichi, “Gimu kyōiku jisshi no igi” (The Significance of the Implementation ofCompulsory Education in Korea), Chōsen (June 1944), 2-8.
27

Schools on the peninsula were strictly segregated through 1920. The post-March First
Movement reforms altered policy to allow Koreans capable in Japanese to attend Japanese
schools. However, individual classes tended to limit the number of Koreans to approximately 10
percent, or three to four students per class. Japanese enrollees in Korean schools averaged about
three to four percent.
28

Dong Wonmo, “Japanese Colonial Policy and Practice in Korea, 1905-1945: A Study in
Assimilation,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Georgetown University, 1969.
29

Hara Takashi, “Chōsen tōchi shaken” (A Personal Opinion on Korean Administration), in
Saitō Makoto kankei monjo, reel 104 (1919), Tokyo: Japanese Diet Library, 1998.
30

Chu Yosǒp, Chosǒn kyoyuk ŭi kyǒrham (Deficiencies in Korean Education), (Keijō: SegyeSǒwǒn, 1930), 1–7.

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31

This involved a proposal to the Diet to allow Koreans suffrage and representative rights. See“Chōsen ni tai suru sanseiken jisshi ni kansuru seigansho” (A Petition Regarding theEffectuation of Political Participation Rights in Korea), Saitō Makoto kankei monjo, reel 76(February 1929). Koreans in Japan gained suffrage rights from 1931 and elected the first Japanbased Korean to the Japanese Diet the following year.
32

This was evident in the meetings convened to gather Korean and Japanese views on ways tostrengthen Japanese-Korean unity. See Caprio, Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial
Korea, 188-193. Transcripts of these meetings can be found in “Daiichi bunka kaigi jiroku”(Transcripts of the First Subcommittee), in Ilcheha chibae chǒngch’aek charyojip (Compilationof Materials on Control Policy under Imperial Japan), vol. 16, ed. Sin Chubaek, (Seoul: Koryǒ
Sǒrim, 1993), 341-483.
33

Sin Chubaek, ed., Ilcheha chibae chǒngch’aek charyojip, vol. 17 (Seoul: Koryǒ sǒim, 1993),
365-7. See also Carter J. Eckert, Offspring of Empire: The Koch’ang Kims and the Colonial
Origins of Korean Capitalism, 1876-1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 240.
34

“The Korean File of Korea Under Japanese Rule—Nikkan heigō no shinjutsu” (The Truth
Behind the Japan-Korea Annexation) link (last accessed March 10, 2010). This presentation,
which has drawn over 19,300 viewers, has also received five-star ratings from 162 people. A
longer version of this presentation has attracted over 40,000 viewers. (last accessed March 17,2010).
35

These photo-comparisons appeared often in the Government-General’s monthly magazine
Chōsen and in the annual reports it issued in Japanese and English.
36

L. H. Underwood described the streets as follows: Upon entering the gates, “we saw narrow,filthy streets, flanked by low mud houses, either thatched with straw, or tiled. It has been aptly
said that the city looks like a vast bed of mushrooms since none of the Korean houses are built
more than one story high.” L. H. Underwood, Fifteen Years Among the Top-knots or Life in
Korea, (New York: American Tract Society, 1904), 39.
37

Isabella Bird, Korea and Her Neighbors, (London: KPI, 1985 [1897]), 40.

38

Bird, Korea and Her Neighbors, 435. This tends to be a general impression of other Westernertravelers who witnessed the city’s progress.
39

Angus Hamilton, Korea, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), 25.

40

For Seoul’s development see Yi T’aejin, The Dynamics and Modernization in Korean History,(Ithaca, NY: East Asian Program, Cornell University, 2007), chapter 10.
41

Even buildings on the grounds of one of Japan’s most sacred shrines, Yasukuni Shrine,
including the original war museum (Yūshūkan), were designed by non-Japanese. T. Fujitani,
Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan, (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1998), 37.
42

We see one example in Kajiyama Toshiyuki’s novel Gei no naka (Inside the Rainbow), in
which his main character, Kaji, “refused to walk in [Koreatown],” a part of Seoul that “strangled
him in depression.” Quoted in Kawamura Minato, Sōru toshi monogatari: Rekishi, bungaku tofūkei, (The Story of Seoul: History, Literature, and Landscape), (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2000), 106.

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Kajiyama, who grew up in Seoul, often wrote about conflict in Korean-Japanese relations. For
the psychological reaction of a Korean crossing into Japantown see Peter Hyun, Man Sei! The
Making of a Korean American, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986), 62-66.
43

Yun Ch’iho, Yun Ch’iho ilgi (Yun Ch’iho diaries), July 21, 1923, (Seoul: Kuksa P’yǒnch’anWiwǒnhoe, 1973-1986).
44

For example, see Kim Sam’ung, Ch’inil chǒngch’i 100 nyǒnsa (The One Hundred Year
History of Pro-Japanese Politics), (Seoul: Tosǒ Chulp’an, 1995), 164, 176-177.
45

One example is the Government-General’s newspaper, the Maeil sinbo, which continued to
publish in Korean to August 15, 1945. A number of Korean-language magazines also managed
to continue operations throughout the duration of Japanese rule.
46

It is estimated that 80 percent of Koreans officially Japanized their names, many to allow theirchildren to enter schools. Even after this campaign had begun, Koreans who had changed theirnames used their Korean names on certain occasions, particularly when participating as
instruments of Japanese wartime propaganda, such as in the media and cinema. For discussion on
Japanization of Korean names see Miyata Setsuko, Kim Yǒngjǔl, and Yang Taeho, Sōshi kaimei(Name Changes), (Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 1994), and Mizuno Naoki, Sōshi kaimei: Nihon no
Chōsen shihai no naka de (Name Changes in the Context of Japan’s Rule Over Korea), (Tokyo:
Iwanami Shinsho, 2008).
47

Ken C. Kawashima, The Proletarian Gamble; Korean Workers in Interwar Japan, (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 106.
48

See C. Sarah Soh’s The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea
and Japan, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
49

Carter J. Eckert documents the rise of Korea’s conglomerates (K. chaebǒl) under Japanese rulein Offspring of Empire: The Koch’ang Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism,
1876–1945, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991).
50

Soh, The Comfort Women. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, describing “coercion and the comfort
women,” depicts the enormous variety of approaches to recruiting women for this job as follows:
Some were Japanese women who had worked as prostitutes previously, some were “volunteers”
in a sense, although often driven to “volunteer” through pressures of poverty, debt anddesperation. A very large number were women from Korea and China. Many had been lured
away from their homes with promises of work in factories or restaurants, only to find themselves
incarcerated in “comfort stations” in foreign lands. Other women…were rounded up at
gunpoint….
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Japan’s ‘Comfort Women’: It’s Time for the Truth (In the Ordinary,
Everyday Sense of the Word),” Japan Focus (March 8, 2007).
51

Michael E. Robinson argues this on two occasions. See his “Colonial Publication Policy and
the Korean Nationalist Movement,” in The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945, ed. Ramon H.
Myers and Mark R. Peattie, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 312-343; and“Broadcasting in Korea, 1924-1937: Colonial Modernity and Cultural Hegemony,” in Japan’sCompeting Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy, 1900-1930, ed. Sharon A.

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Minichiello, (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998), 358-378. The following two
Government-General reports, issued in the late 1920s, warned that Korean national sentiment
would continue to develop as long as the Japanese administration permitted Koreans exposure to
their culture. Chōsen Government-General, Keimu kyoku toshoka, “Ri denka no shikyo ni saishi‘shinbunshi o tōshite mitaru’ Chōsenjin no shisō keikō” (Tendencies in Korean Thought ‘as Seen
through Newspapers’ at the Time of the Death of the Yi Monarch), (Keijō: Chōsen Sōtokufu,
1926), and Chōsen Government-General, “Dokuritsu undō ni okeru minzoku undo no kōgai” (ASummary of the People’s Movement from the Cessation of the Independence Movement)(January 1927), Saitō Makoto kankei monjo (Official Papers Regarding Saitō Makoto), reel 97,(Tokyo: Japanese National Diet Library).
52

I should add that comments written in English were rather critical of Murata’s message.

53

Ken Kawashima’s The Proletarian Gamble provides one lucid example of Korean migration
to, and living conditions in, Japan.
54

Ienaga Saburō’s essay, titled “Sengo no rekishi kyōiku (The Future of National History
Education”), was published in October 1946. See Yoshiko Nozaki, “Education Reform andHistory Textbooks in Occupied Japan,” in Democracy in Occupied Japan: The U.S. Occupation
and Japanese Politics and Society, ed. Mark E. Caprio and Yoneyuki Sugita, (London:
Routledge, 2007), 127. Nozaki’s chapter provides a good review of textbook editing from thedays following the Emperor of Japan’s August 15, 1945 announcement that ended the PacificWar.

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Topics of Historical Memory in JapanThe History Textbook Controversy“Japanese Textbook Controversies, Nationalism, and Historical Memory: Intra- andInter-national Conflicts”
Yoshiko NOZAKI and Mark Selden
June 15, 2009http://www.japanfocus.org/-Yoshiko-Nozaki/3173“The Tokyo Tribunal, Justice Pal and the Revisionist Distortion of History”
Nakajima Takeshi
October 31, 2011
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Nakajima-Takeshi/3627“Myth and Fact in Northeast Asia’s History Textbook Controversies”
Mikyoung Kim
August 15, 2008
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Mikyoung-Kim/2855“The Nanjing Massacre. Changing Contours of History and Memory in Japan, China,
and the U.S.”
Takashi YOSHIDA
December 19, 2006
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Takashi-YOSHIDA/2297
Another widely discussed facet of historical memory and, in a broader sense,
national identity in postwar Japan, has been the controversies over Japanese history
textbooks. Since the 1980s, Japanese neonationalists’ attempts to erase accounts ofJapanese war atrocities from history textbooks has sparked intense criticism from Asianneighbors. On the flip-side, such attempts to whitewash the war also have faced strong
opposition from within Japanese society, including intellectuals who consider it of utmost
importance that history education preserves the memory of Japan’s wartime past andacknowledges war responsibility and war crimes.
Yoshiko Nozaki and Mark Selden begin this section by describing a series ofneonationalist attacks launched on school textbooks in postwar Japan. Prewar
imperialistic and militaristic narratives were removed from Japanese history textbooks
during the U.S. occupation (1945-52) and, since then, neonationalists have aimed atreintroducing a more affirmative interpretation of the war. Textbooks from the 1950s and1960s that were more outspoken about war and war crimes, such as the ones co-authoredby Ienaga Saburō, were later denied authorization by the Ministry of Education. The
greater involvement of foreign critics in the 1980s textbook debate has kept Japan’s history
textbook controversies in the spotlight.
As Nakajima Takeshi explains, Japanese neonationalists have developed a distorted
version of the role of Radhabinod Pal, a judge in the International Military Tribunal for the
Far East (Tokyo Trials), to champion their views that the Tokyo Trials were nothing morethan “victor’s justice.” Using this and other arguments, neonationalists have tried toThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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minimize Japanese war responsibility and beautify Japan’s war as one of “Asian liberation.”
This neonationalist narrative is on full display in several controversial textbooks that havebeen approved by the Ministry of Education but are only used in a few schools.
Mikyoung Kim takes her investigation of history textbooks one step further bycomparatively analyzing Japanese, Chinese, and Korean textbooks. History education in all
three places, she concludes, still stands in the way of reconciliation and the creation of atransnational East Asian regional community. On a similar topic, Takashi Yoshida puts thehistoriography of the Nanjing massacre in the wider perspective of debates between
progressive historians and conservative historical revisionists in Japan. Then, he
introduces a number of museums that directly and indirectly deal with Nanjing, and traces
the importance of the Nanjing Massacre in the history textbook debates.

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Japanese Textbook Controversies, Nationalism, and Historical Memory: Intra- and International Conflicts
Yoshiko Nozaki and Mark Selden
Japan’s neonationalists have launched three major attacks on school textbooks over the past half
century.1 Centered on the treatment of colonialism and war, the attacks surfaced in 1955, the late1970s, and the mid-1990s. The present study examines three moments in light of Japanese
domestic as well as regional and global political contexts to gain insight into the persistentcontention over colonialism and the Pacific War in historical memory and its refraction in
textbook treatments.
If school textbooks are important “weapons of mass instruction” as Charles Ingrao tells us,2 they
may speak not only to the youth and citizens of a nation but also, through the mass media and the
pronouncements of state leaders, to other nations and people. Indeed, although educational
policies are often judged in terms of their pedagogical value for classroom teaching and learning,
the symbolic functions and actual effects of textbook policies on domestic and international
politics are extremely important.3
Textbook controversies invite us to look beyond the nation to educational processes that might
contribute to regional and global dynamics and conceptions that could help overcome some ofthe problems inherent in national, and often nationalistic, education. In this we seek to raise
problems that apply no less to China and Korea, and to the United States, Britain, France, andGermany, than to Japan. We raise these global and comparative issues through an examination ofJapan’s textbook controversies, particularly as these apply to historical memories of colonialism
and war, that is, issues that directly impinge on China, Korea, Southeast Asia, and the UnitedStates, as well as Japan.
Before examining the three epochs, we briefly note distinctive features of the postwar Japanesesystem of textbook writing, approval, and adoption.4 The state publishes instruction guidelines(shido-yoryo) for grades one through twelve, according to which commercial publishers develop
texts. Texts need to be authorized as “school textbooks” (kyokasho) by the state to be used bypublic and even private schools. Publishers submit draft texts to the Ministry of Education,
Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (Monbusho; hereafter MOE) for approval, that is, to the
textbook screening system that was introduced in 1948.5 Textbook Screening Examiners
examine the texts and the Textbook Screening Council makes decisions.6
A screening process often takes several months, because the texts are usually conditionallyapproved, meaning that the state almost always calls for revisions.7 Over the past half century,
the state repeatedly required history textbook authors to make changes on sensitive issues
concerning the Asia Pacific War (taking place from 1931 to 1945). Each high school (grades ten
through twelve) adopts texts from among the authorized texts. For elementary and junior highschools (grades one through nine), local districts adopt texts. Teachers are required to use theauthorized texts for instruction, although they may supplement the text with other books andtheir own handouts.
In contrast to some countries (e.g. China, Taiwan, and South Korea), Japanese textbooks are notwritten under direct government supervision or published by the state. Moreover, multiple texts(with variations in terms of content) are available for a given subject in the Japanese system.

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However, in contrast to the American system, in which larger states, notably Texas andCalifornia, vet texts produced by commercial publishers, affecting the content of textbooks
available nationwide, the Japanese system has operated through a national government screening
system which constricts publisher options, notably in periods of sharp nationalist attack on
textbooks. In other words, the American system controls textbook content through state level
controls together with adoption processes and market forces; the Japanese system exercises
control primarily through state screening.8
Japanese Politics and the First Textbook Attack of 1955
Japan surrendered to the Allied Powers on 15 August 1945. Beginning in September, the US-led
occupation authorities (Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, SCAP) set in motion changes
that would profoundly transform core elements of Japanese politics, society, and education
within the framework of US power. They did so, however, on foundations of significant
continuities that included working through the Japanese government (and its bureaucraticsystems) rather than exercising direct rule.
In particular, while new educational laws passed the Diet, the administrative structure of theJapanese education system remained essentially intact. The postwar school curriculum was a
critical area of democratization reform. Though some reformers called for abolition of state
control over school textbooks, the MOE succeeded in retaining direct control over textbook
authorization by introducing a textbook screening system.9
The most significant curriculum document, however, was Japan’s new constitution, promulgatedin 1946, proclaiming its pacifist principles. The MOE had schools begin to teach about the new
constitution almost immediately. However, the new constitution and its peace provision would
soon become the most fundamental site of political and ideological battles in postwar Japan. The
first textbook attack was, indeed, derived from these battles.
Political Instability and Shifting Battlegrounds: From Constitution to Textbooks
During the occupation period, politics and ideological divisions were in the process of formation,
fluid and unstable. Among more than 350 newly formed political parties, the Liberal Party(Jiyuto, LP) triumphed in the first postwar election in 1946, winning 141 seats. However, LP
leader Hatoyama Ichiro was purged immediately after the election by SCAP for wartime
collaboration. His deputy, Yoshida Shigeru became prime minister.10 In the 1947 elections, theSocialist Party (Shakaito, SP) led in both the upper and lower houses of parliament (though far
from winning a majority in either). The SP, with two conservative parties, formed two shortlived
coalition governments. Yoshida returned as Prime Minister in 1948, recapturing the levers ofstate authority, and in 1949 his party LP won 264 seats, the majority of the Lower House.11
Yoshida wielded power for the next six years, playing a key role in crafting both the San
Francisco Peace Treaty and the US-Japan Security Pact.
In June 1951, many politicians, including Hatoyama, were depurged and returned to the politicalarena. The conflict between Hatoyama and Yoshida ruptured the ruling party LP. In the same
year, the major opposition party, SP, also split over the San Francisco Peace Treaty. Its rightfaction supported ratification while the left rejected the treaty that excluded the Soviet Union and
China. Each group claimed the name Socialist Party, so they were called the Left SP and theRight SP. In the Lower House election of 1953, the major issue was amending the 1946

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Constitution to allow the nation to remilitarize. Hatoyama, forming his own party (so called
Hatoyama’s LP), championed the constitutional amendment and remilitarization, Yoshida, whileallowing the remilitarization in practice, remained vague on the amendment, and the left andright-wing SPs were against it. Yoshida’s LP still led in the election result, and so he remained in
power.

Yoshida Shigeru

The Yoshida administration collapsed in a 1954 corruption scandal, allowing Hatoyama of the
Democratic Party (Minshuto, DP; formed in the fall of 1954) to form a temporary government(with the support of the Left and Right SPs).12 In the Lower House election of February 1955
Hatoyama again campaigned on a platform calling for the revision of the 1946 constitution, andespecially for revision of its pacifist provision, found in Article 9. National policy on textbooks
surfaced for the first time as a campaign issue, with Nakasone Yasuhiro, a young hawk of the DP
calling for a system of publishing and adopting textbooks that were tightly supervised by thestate.
The electorate was divided. Out of 467 seats, the DP won 185, the LP 112, and the SPs 156 (theleft-wing SP winning eighty-nine and the right-wing SP sixty-seven; in October 1955 the two
SPs would reunite). With one third of the lower house seats, the SPs had the votes to block
constitutional amendments – behind this victory was the unions, including Japan Teachers’
Union (JTU), emerging as a major force in electoral politics. With the revision of Article 9
foreclosed (provisionally), the battle over textbooks and education would take center stage in the

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upcoming Diet sessions. In other words, textbook struggles would substitute for the battles overthe 1946 constitution and its renunciation of war.
The Attack on Textbooks and the 1955 Regime
The first major attack on textbooks took place in June 1955, following testimony before the Diet
by Ishii Kazutomo, a former official of the JTU, who alleged that textbook publishers had bribedlocal school officials in charge of textbook adoption.13 Ishii’s main target, however, was“textbook bias,” particularly in social studies and history textbooks.14 Ishii attacked these texts,
which had been approved by the government in the occupation period, for promoting a leftwing,anti-capitalist agenda.
Ishii was soon working secretly with the DP on a series of brochures that criticized textbook
descriptions written by authors close to the JTU. The DP brochures made extreme charges. For
example, one elementary school social studies textbook was criticized for stating that between
the seventh and the ninth century “[i]n order to learn the advanced culture of China, envoys weresent,” on grounds that the line was “extremely biased” and for “praising China and subordinating
Japan.”15 Even some high-powered conservative politicians saw such charges as troublesome;however, they remained silent because behind the scenes of the textbook attack was thenegotiation to consolidate two conservative parties, DP and LP, to establish a post-occupation
political and social order that came to be known as the 1955 regime.
The textbook attack provided ideological “glue” for the DP-LP merger, which eventually took
place in November 1955 with formation of the Liberal Democratic Party (Jiyuminshuto, LDP). It
was also a symbolic action in the realm of politics, “a way of shaping public consciousness andgive meaning and direction to an entire sphere of social relations and . . . institutions.”16 Indeed,
the 1955 regime shaped Japanese politics and education to the present. In the one and a half party
system (the SP held approximately half the Diet seats of the LDP) that continued for four
decades, the LDP, with strong overt and covert US support, dominated the Lower House, while
the SP remained the leading opposition party until its steep decline in the 1990s.17
The 1955 attack lent support to MOE attempts to revise history textbooks through the screening
processes. Although screening is conducted behind closed doors, some authors have disclosed
specific demands for excision or revision made by MOE.
The MOE’s History Textbook Screening in the Late 1950s and 1960s
Although, in the early 1950s, the MOE began to reverse the course of postwar curriculum
reform, views on history among its textbook examiners were far from uniform. For example,
when Ienaga Saburo submitted his first high school history textbook manuscript in 1952, it was
rejected. One examiner, saying that “too much space” was devoted to the Pacific War, suggested
that Ienaga drop the entire discussion on the grounds that students had no need to study the war
since they had experienced it. However, Ienaga resubmitted the manuscript without revision, aprocedure that was then permitted, and this time it was approved.

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Ienaga Saburo

Following the 1955 textbook attack, the MOE increased the number of screening council
members to add conservatives to the board and created full-time textbook examiner positions,filling the social studies positions with nationalists holding the emperor-centered view of history
and eager to defend the empire and Japan’s Asia Pacific Wars. MOE also revised the screening
process regulations,18 and, in 1958, it issued a ministerial ordinance in which it declared that new
Instructional Guidelines would have legal force.
Behind closed doors, MOE examiners openly questioned the premises of “scientific”(kagakuteki) history, historical research based on empirical data and critical scrutiny ofmythology, which was the mainstay of postwar history education. During the war, such studies
were routinely suppressed when their findings contradicted official narratives written from anemperor-centered perspective. Wartime history education was also almost totally divorced from
historical research, and school textbooks served as the most important vehicles for disseminatingemperor-centered historical narratives.19 Postwar history textbook authors, having learned
negative lessons from the wartime experience, were committed to empirically-based textbooks.

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In the mid 1950s, some of the MOE comments on history texts challenged empirical researchand called for the cultivation of nationalism. For example:20[This book] is as a whole too scientific. In particular, its description of history from the
Meiji period [1868] to date is extremely lacking in [the spirit] of [Japan’s] autonomy[jishusei], to the extent that [I] sometimes took it to be the textbook of a foreign country,
and wondered whether it was a social studies textbook for Japanese junior high school
students or for certain [foreign] countries.21
Apparently, “too scientific” was a reference to critical treatments of events in Japan’s modern
history, including aggressive wars. The MOE held to the nationalist and ethnocentric perspectivethat a textbook for Japanese students must steadfastly support the actions of the Japanese stateand its leaders, regardless of their consequences. Toward this end, history textbooks werecriticized for being empirical, or “too scientific.”
While MOE comments touched on all historical periods, the twentieth century received by far
the most intense scrutiny, especially the Asia Pacific War. In attacking “scientific history,” theMOE targeted for revision texts that spelled out the costs of war and empire to Asian andJapanese people. The goal was praise for the goals and accomplishments of the empire.
For example, MOE’s comments in these years included: “Do not write bad things about Japan in[describing] the Pacific War. Even though they are facts, represent them in a romantic[romantikku] manner” —implication here was that the text should be more like a historicalnovel. “‘The Pacific War’ (Taiheiyo senso) is not a historical term. Call it the ‘Great East Asian
War’ (Dai toa senso),” an allusion to the official name of the war used in wartime Japan.
The MOE often suggested that textbooks avoid singling out Japanese war crimes and atrocities
by looking at Japanese conduct in “world history” perspective. Such comments included:22
It is not good only to see Japan’s past war(s) as imperialist war(s). It is inadequate to saythat Japan ruled China and made it miserable.
[The textbook] says, “Our country inflicted immeasurable suffering and damage on
various Asian nations, especially during the Pacific War.” . . . Eliminate this description,
since a view even exists that [Japan] provided various Asian nations the chance forindependence [from their Western colonizers] through the Pacific War.
[The textbook], in its treatment of the war, describes it as if Japan were unilaterally bad;
it is not grounded in understanding of world history such as the international situation of
the time.
In articulating this principle, the MOE censors scored important points. Japan was, of course,
hardly alone in committing war crimes and atrocities associated with colonialism and invasion.
Nor were these limited to the Axis powers. War crimes and atrocities had been and werecommitted historically by, for example, the United States in colonizing of the Philippines from1898 to 1903 and after, and by various allied powers such as the British in seeking to maintaintheir colonial stake in Asia. In this respect, the United States and Britain as well as Japan need to
be examined critically. Likewise, the US firebombing of sixty-four Japanese cities and theatomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be examined in light of the guarantees ofcivilian immunity stipulated in international law. The point of such comparison is not, however,

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as the MOE attempted, to excuse Japan’s war crimes and atrocities. Rather, it is to historicallyexplain, or understand, the roots of war atrocities and colonial violence in order to seek ways toovercome such acts. The MOE comments were in essence arguments to show that colonialism
and war were inevitable and to excuse Japanese behavior on the grounds that it merely followed
the examples of other colonial powers.
Since the MOE could not require total abandonment of “history as science,” there was –theoretically, at least – room for publishers and author(s) to fight back. Indeed, textbook writers
and publishers frequently rebutted the most extreme criticisms and at times won minor, tactical
victories.23 However, in the late 1950s and 1960s, their ability to overcome MOE revisionism,backed by conservative forces encouraged and sustained by the 1955 regime, was at best limited.
Some critics call these years “the winter for textbooks,” which continued until 1970, when
historian Ienaga Saburo won a ground-breaking victory in Tokyo District Court in his second
lawsuit against the MOE’s censorship on his history textbook.24
The Second Attack on Textbooks and the Internationalization of the History Controversy
LDP Political Strife and the Second Attack on Textbooks
Japan felt the effects of the so-called Nixon China shock in the years between 1970 and 1972,
followed almost immediately by the worldwide oil shock of 1973. In geopolitical terms, withrelative peace in the region in the wake of the US-China opening and US defeat in the Vietnam
War, Japan and its Asian neighbors entered a new era. Although Japan’s economic growthslowed from the ten percent level of the 1960s to an average of 3.6 percent during the period
from 1974 to 1979 and 4.4 percent in the 1980s,25 calculated in US dollars, it continued to growuntil the early 1990s, thus making Japan an economic superpower.26 This involved rapid
internationalization of Japanese businesses and industries and trade frictions with other countries,
notably the United States.
Following the Sato Eisaku administration (from 1964 to 1972), Tanaka Kakuei became Prime
Minister, but, in 1974 he was forced to resign for raising enormous political funds through paper
real estate companies, and, in 1976, he was arrested for accepting a bribe from Lockheed
Aircraft. Throughout the 1970s, while the ruling LDP remained in disarray, its major opponent,
SP, was unable to unseat it, in part because its left and right fractions continued to battle one
another.
At the end of 1970s, in part because of Prime Minister Ohira Masayoshi’s death, which was seen
as a casualty of the factional strife, LDP leaders became somewhat weary of the strife, and, in
this context, the textbook issue came to the fore in politics when LDP young hawks vociferously
criticized the social studies and Japanese language textbooks published in the 1970s as biased
and/or communist-inspired. Like Nakasone built his leadership reputation through his hardline
stance on school textbooks in the late 1950s and 1960s, the young hawks of 1970s choose to do
the same. The LDP weekly newspaper attacked the texts, charging that many authors supported
the JTU, the Communist Party, or various non-governmental democratic education movements.
This time, even language textbooks faced attack. One LDP critic targeted a Russian folktale,
Okina Kabu, The Enormous Turnip, a popular content in the textbooks. Originally transcribed byfolklorist Aleksandr N. Afanase’v (1826-1871), the story tells of a grandfather, grandmother,
granddaughter, a dog, a cat, and a rat joining forces to pull a giant turnip out of the ground. One

Nozaki and Selden: Japanese Textbook Controversies, Nationalism, and Historical Memory279

LDP internal document read the story as preaching that “if all [workers, peasants, students, andintellectuals] unite, [they] can topple the capitalists.”27 Other popular textbook stories targeted
included: Kasako Jizo (by Iwasaku Kyoko), Okori Jizo (by Yamaguchi Yuko), and theenormously popular Yuzuru, Twilight Crane (by Kinoshita Junji).28

Okina Kabu

The second wave attack on textbooks was propelled by a wider range of proponents, including
nationalist intellectuals, business interests, and politicians associated with the ruling LDP and
Minshato (an opposition party formed by SP’s moderate/center-right politicians in 1960). A
group of intellectuals, centered on Tsukuba University, along with business organizations, suchas Keidanren (the Federation of Economic Organizations), joined the attack, lobbying for
textbook revision. The Science and Technology Agency under the Prime Minister’s Office calledon the new junior high school civic textbooks to remove critical references to atomic power
plants. Although the texts had already been approved, the MOE successfully pressured the
publishers to revise.
MOE Textbook Screening and National and International Censure in 1982
While keeping a certain distance from the highly charged political attacks, the MOE steadily
tightened control over school curriculum and textbooks. In the 1980-1981 screening, it famously
ordered historian Ienaga Saburo to change various passages.29 The MOE examiner commentedof Ienaga’s description of the Nanjing Massacre: “[I] cannot believe that [the Japanese Force]systematically carried out the massacre as a military force. . . . [Some] phrases such as ’in thechaos during the Japanese Force’s occupation of Nanjing, numerous Chinese soldiers andcivilians became victims’ can be stated.”30 While not denying that atrocities had been committed,
the examiner insisted that the author highlight extenuating circumstances and eliminate reference
to the responsibility of the chain of command for the massacre.
The censorship of history texts attracted little attention at this time from the Japanese media, inpart due to preoccupation with textbooks for a new high school subject “Contemporary Society”(Gendai Shakai). The MOE rigorously censored their descriptions of the 1946 Constitution, theSelf-Defense Forces (Jieitai, SDF), the Northern Territories conflict with the USSR, anddiscussions of human rights and industrial pollution. For example, textbook examiners

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commented: “Give an objective description without bias. Do not lean toward the theory of
unconstitutionality [of maintaining SDF]. Provide balance by including the government’s view
and other views” (on Article 9 and renunciation of war); “Pay attention to the size [of pictures]and better keep too tragic pictures small” (referring to pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).31

Okinawan sculptor Kinjo Minoru’s relief depicting the Battle of Okinawa, during which many Okinawans
were killed or forced to commit suicide after seeking refuge in the island's caves.

In the 1981-82 screening, the MOE ordered Eguchi Keiichi and co-authors to eliminate
descriptions of Okinawan citizens’ compulsory mass suicides (shudan jiketsu) in the Battle of
Okinawa.32 The MOE particularly objected to reference to the role of the Japanese military inforcing citizens to commit suicide. One description that drew examiner ire was this: “In the battle[of Okinawa] . . . approximately 100,000 combatants and 200,000 civilians were killed . . . Also,
approximately 800 Okinawan residents were murdered at the hand of Japanese forces for reasons
such as hindering combat.” Eguchi revised the description several times; however, insisting that
Eguchi’s sources be “scholarly research texts,” the examiner rejected every revision. The
Okinawa Prefectural History, compiled by the Okinawa Prefecture government, which Eguchi
drew on, was dismissed as “a collection of personal accounts,” hence not reliable. In otherwords, the MOE used the “objectivist/empiricist” argument to uphold nationalist perspectives.
Eventually Eguchi had no choice but drop the entire discussion.33
The MOE announced the results of its 1981-1982 textbook screening in June of 1982.34 Whenmajor Japanese newspapers reported that descriptions of Japanese wartime atrocities in Asian
countries and Okinawa had been watered down, the story was quickly picked up elsewhere.35
Widespread international censure of Japanese revisionism centered on nations that had borne thebrunt of Japanese colonialism and invasion. In July 1982 both the Republic of Korea (South
Korea) and the People’s Republic of China lodged official protests with the Japanese
government, and labor unions and social action groups in Hong Kong sent a letter of complaint
to the Japanese Consulate. The official party newspaper of the Democratic People’s Republic ofKorea (North Korea) criticized the Japanese government and the Vietnamese government asked
the Japanese ambassador for corrections concerning that country.36
In July, the two major Okinawan newspapers ran series criticizing MOE censorship of accountsof the Battle of Okinawa, particularly of Japanese forces killing of Okinawan civilians.

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Okinawan citizen movements demanded restoration of the original passages.37 In September, an
extraordinary session of the Okinawan Assembly unanimously adopted “A Letter of Opinion
Concerning Textbook Screening,” which it sent to the MOE. Stating that the murder of
Okinawans by Japanese military forces was “an undeniable fact as clear as day,” the letter
demanded “restoration of the description in short order.”38 The MOE, along with rightwing
nationalists, had underestimated the changing political climate in the Asia Pacific at the verytime when the Japanese economy was becoming more deeply intertwined with Chinese, South
Korean, and other Asian economies.
The Japanese government sought to limit the diplomatic damage. In August 1982, Chief Cabinet
Secretary Miyazawa Kiichi stated that Japan would consider fully the criticisms of its Asianneighbors in order to promote friendship and referred to “making a correction on government
responsibility.”39 The Miyazawa statement did not specify what measures the government would
take, but the South Korean government nevertheless accepted it. The Chinese government
initially insisted that it was insufficient guarantee against future revisionism in textbook
screening, but eventually it too accepted Japanese pledges to make appropriate corrections.
In October, the MOE added a clause (the so-called Kinrin shokoku joko, Neighboring Countries
Clause) to the screening criteria, requiring that textbooks give “necessary consideration, in theinterest of international friendship and cooperation,” to the modern and contemporary history of
relations between Japan and its Asian neighbors. The MOE also noted that it would no longer
require authors to replace the term “aggression” with “advance” in referring to Japan’s China
war, or to add phrasing suggesting that the Nanjing Massacre occurred as a result of momentarychaos – issues that had aroused particular outrage in China. With respect to references to thenumber of victims of the Nanjing Massacre, the MOE announced it would only ask authors toprovide citations indicating the source of estimates. At this juncture, the Education Minister held
a press conference to “[officially] close the textbook controversy.”40 The settlement left theadministrative structure of the MOE and its nationalist orientation untouched.
The Nakasone Reforms and the First Postwar Nationalist Textbook
In November 1982, Nakasone Yasuhiro rose to become Prime Minster as a vigorous anticommunist politician and proponent of nationalist reform of education and the “reconstruction ofJapanese identity.” Projecting himself as the Japanese counterpart of U.S. President Ronald
Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain, he promoted a neoconservative
agenda.
Nakasone’s approach to educational reform was radical. For example, he created the Rinji kyoiku
shingikai (Special Education Council) and hand picked its members. The council was tasked
with recommending policies, shaping public opinion, and transforming the schools in line with
Nakasone’s nationalist ideas. The response was a storm of progressive opposition, indeed, evensome officials in the MOE bridled at this top-down approach to reforms.
Interestingly, although Nakasone and many MOE officials were committed to history textbook
revisionism, Nakasone as a seasoned politician understood the importance of building
harmonious relations with Japan’s Asian neighbors in order to assure economic growth. His
choice was Japan’s economic growth over its nationalist identity. Thus, while the MOE
continued censoring history textbooks during the 1980s, bound by the Miyazawa statement andMOE’s own regulation changes that followed the 1982 furor, it did so with a lighter hand. This

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resulted in an increasing number of history textbooks allocating more space for critical views on
the war and colonialism.41
This angered nationalist forces on the right, who insisted that each nation is entitled to decide thecontent of its history education without regard to the sentiments of its neighbors or others. In thefall of 1982, one of the major nationalist organizations, the National Conference to Defend Japan(Nihon o mamoru kokumin kaigi, established in 1981), announced that it would develop its own
Japanese history textbook. Its chair Kase Toshikazu was a former ambassador to the United
Nations and a member of Nakasone’s informal “brain trust.” (The group’s membership to datehas included religious organizations, business leaders such as the former CEOs of Sony and theconservative daily newspaper company Sankei Shinbunsha, and several prominent scholars.) The
nationalist text, for high school students Shinpen Nihonshi (New Edition Japanese History), wasapproved by the MOE and published in 1987, despite serious scholarly and political criticisms
from inside and outside Japan. Although the Nakasone administration publicly kept its neutral
position, it was known that Nakasone privately backed MOE’s approving the text.42
The Third Attack and the Textbook Controversies From the Mid-1990s to Present
The “Comfort Women” Issue and the End of LDP Single-Party Rule
While Japanese authors had written about the “comfort women” for decades, the issue attained
political salience for the first time in the 1990s.43 When the comfort women controversy surfacedin the Japanese Diet in 1990, Prime Minister Kaifu Toshiki rejected calls for an investigation,
maintaining that the wartime state and its military had played no role in the matter. However, in1991 the first former Korean comfort woman came out in public, telling of her experience at thehands of the military. Women in Korea, China, the Philippines and other Asian countries
followed. The combination of the end of the Cold War and democratization in South Korea andTaiwan opened new space for airing long-suppressed issues in those countries and throughout
Asia and beyond. Pioneering research by Japanese historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki unearthed thefirst official documents proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Japanese military had been
intimately involved in organizing the comfort women system. Subsequent studies showed theJapanese imperial state and military’s involvement in running the comfort stations, procuring
young women, and shipping them to bases throughout Asia and the Pacific.44 Equally important,the international feminist movement, with South Korean and Japanese activists playing leadingroles, rallied to the cause of the comfort women. The Japanese government could not continue tostonewall on the issue.
In 1993, the Japanese government under Prime Minister Miyazawa Kiichi heard testimony from
fifteen former comfort women in Seoul, and on 4 August, Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono Yohei
acknowledged that the Japanese forces were directly and indirectly involved in the establishment
and administration of comfort facilities. Although the Kono statement remained ambiguous on
several key points such as legal responsibility and compensation, it expressed “firmdetermination” to remember the facts “through historical research and education.”45 Kono’s
statement legitimated inclusion of the topic in textbooks, and within a few years most history
textbooks (and many in related areas) included a brief reference to the issue. This provokedrightwing nationalists (hereafter, neonationalists) to launch the third attack on textbooks in 1995.
1993 also marked the end of LDP single-party rule. In July, the LDP lost its majority in lower
house elections as some influential politicians and their factions broke away to establish newNozaki and Selden: Japanese Textbook Controversies, Nationalism, and Historical Memory283

parties. The same election, however, marked the demise of the SP whose seats fell from 137 toseventy in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. After nearly four decades of unbroken
LDP rule, Japanese politics entered an uncertain, tumultuous period just as the world entered thepost-Cold War era.46
Coalition Government and the Diet Resolution to Apologize for Wartime Aggression
On 6 August 1993, a few days after Kono’s statement, a seven-party coalition government
formed under an anti-LDP banner. Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro of Nihonshinto (Japan
New Party) commented of the Asia-Pacific War: “I personally recognize it as a shinryaku senso(war of aggression), an ayamatta senso (wrong or mistaken war).”47 Hosokawa subsequently
spoke of “colonial rule” (shokuminchi shihai) in Korea instead of using the conventional
euphemism “annexation” (heigo).48 These were the first such clear-cut admissions by a postwar
Japanese prime minister.
Hosokawa’s statements prompted a powerful reaction from the right. In the autumn, a group of
LDP politicians established the Committee for the Examination of History. Approximately one
hundred LDP Diet members joined, including future prime ministers Hashimoto Ryutaro andMori Yoshiro. They agreed that they would launch new textbook attacks and provide scholars
with funds in order to disseminate the view of history that affirms the “Great East Asian War.”49
Hosokawa resigned in April 1994, succeeded by Hata Tsutomu of the Shinseito, a new party
comprised of politicians having parted from the LDP. In the climate of political uncertainty,
neonationalist politicians became more vocal. For example, in May, Justice Minister Nagano
Shigeto denied the Nanjing Massacre and rejected charges that Japan had committed aggression.
Nagano was sacked for his remarks, but the Hata administration collapsed soon afterwards when
the SP left the coalition.—
In June, the LDP returned to power in a three-party coalition government with the SP and the
Sakigake (another small new party). The coalition was a compromise for both the SP and the
LDP, with both moving toward the center. Murayama Tomiichi of the SP became Prime
Minister. Murayama announced the SP’s abandonment of many long-held oppositional positions
on postwar political issues, including opposition to the US-Japan Security Treaty, to the Self
Defense Force, and to the Hinomaru flag and the Kimigayo anthem,50 both of the latterassociated with war and the emperor. For its part, the LDP agreed to co-sponsor a Diet resolution
apologizing to Asian victims of Japan’s past aggression to be issued on the fiftieth anniversary ofJapan’s surrender.51
The LDP’s right factions sharply criticized this Diet resolution and several cabinet members andinfluential politicians publicly denied wartime aggression. Neonationalist politicians, either
belonging to LDP or opposition parties, worked to block the resolution of apology, objecting toinclusion of such key terms as “Japan’s war of aggression” and “Japan’s colonial rule of Korea.”
The terms were eventually included in indirect ways. The Lower House passed the resolution inJune 1995, to the anger of the LDP right. The LDP leadership decided not to submit it to theUpper House—so now both the left and the right were left unhappy.52 On 15 August 1995, Prime
Minister Murayama issued a statement —with Cabinet backing—which is widely regarded as thefullest Japanese apology for crimes of colonialism and war.53

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In the midst of these struggles, however, the SP lost a significant number of seats in the Upper
House election in July. In January 1996, Murayama resigned, succeeded by Hashimoto Ryutaroof the LDP (a weakened SP remained in the coalition).54 Neonationalist politicians andorganizations began the offensive on history textbooks which continues today. In particular, in
1996, LDP hawks attacked textbook references to comfort women as one-sided and historicallyinaccurate, and demanded reform of the textbook screening system. Hawks in Shinshinto,another new party formed in 1994, joined the attack.
Once again, the onslaught on textbooks provided young LDP hawks visibility. In 1997, one
hundred and seven Diet members born in the postwar period formed the Group of Young Diet
Members Concerned with Japan’s Future and History Education (Nihon no Zento to Rekishi
Kyoiku o Kangaeru Wakategiin no Kai), with Nakagawa Shoichi as Representative and Abe
Shinzo as Secretary General, to study the issue of comfort women and history education.55
Pressures mounted to remove textbook references to comfort women.56
The Attack on Comfort Women in Textbooks, Self-Censorship of Publishers, and Tsukurukai’s
New History Textbook
In the mid-1990s, the neonationalist crusade attracted public and media interest. Fujioka
Nobukatsu, professor of education at the University of Tokyo, in 1995 inaugurated the “LiberalView-of-History Study Group” (Jiyushugi shikan kenkyukai). In journals for teachers as well as
in the conservative media, notably Sankei Shinbun, Fujioka and his colleagues excoriatedpostwar history education and history textbooks as “masochistic” (jigyakuteki) and lacking“pride in the history of our nation.”
In late 1996, Fujioka and others established Atarashii Rekishi Kyokasho o Tsukurukai (TheJapanese Society for History Textbook Reform, hereafter Tsukurukai), announcing plans topublish “a new history textbook” for junior high schools in 2002. Indeed, they entitled the text
Atarashii Rekishi Kyokasho (New History Textbook).57 At the same time, Tsukurukai attacked
the existing junior high-school history textbooks, with the fiercest criticisms directed towardreferences to the Nanjing Massacre and comfort women.58

Nozaki and Selden: Japanese Textbook Controversies, Nationalism, and Historical Memory285

Tsukurukai’s New History Textbook

The 2000-2001 textbook screening (and subsequent adoption) processes involved the mostopenly contentious textbook struggles in recent times—and perhaps in the entire postwar period.
Neonationalists, while divided over a range of social, political, and educational issues, joined insupport of two closely related goals: attacking existing texts to force revisions, and developing anationalist history textbook for junior high schools that would be authorized by the state andadopted by local school districts.
The first goal was achieved quickly. In the spring of 2000, when publishers submitted final draftsof the 2002 textbooks for approval to the MOE, many descriptions concerning Japanese wartime
atrocities had been cut back or removed altogether. Given the climate of neonationalist fervor,
and having been attacked publicly by politicians and civic groups such as Tsukurukai andinformally pressured by the administration, publishers exercised “self-censorship.”59
The most striking change was the near total erasure from textbooks of the comfort women issue
that had been introduced in the early 1990s. In the previous 1997 editions, all seven junior highhistory textbooks on the market mentioned the issue; in the 2002 editions, three of these texts
dropped all references and three others made very brief reference without using the controversial
term “comfort women.” Just one text retained the language and expanded discussion from theThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

286

previous edition. While the treatment of the comfort women issue best illustrates the shift, the2002 editions also altered or eliminated descriptions of other Japanese wartime atrocities.60
These changes remain more or less intact in the 2006 editions.
The second goal of securing production and adoption of the New History Textbook gave rise tonational and international controversy. First, the text was not only chauvinistic but contained
basic inaccuracies, to the chagrin of historians, educators, and the public. South Korea, China,
and other Asian nations vociferously protested. Even a member of the Textbook Screening
Council raised serious questions. However, the MOE approved the text on condition that theauthors make more than one hundred and thirty corrections. While declaring its neutrality, theMOE stated that it would be the responsibility of local school boards to decide which textbook toadopt. For the first time in postwar Japanese textbook controversies, the adoption process (i.e.
textbook market) became the site of fierce struggle.
In the end, the market share of the text was 0.039 percent (a total of 543 copies used in schools
as textbooks) in the spring of 2002. As Tsukurukai’s goal was 10 percent of market share, thiswas regarded as a failure. The group revised the text and resubmitted it to the 2004-2005
textbook screening, and the MOE approved it; still, its market share remained small, 0.39 percent(4,912 copies adopted in the spring of 2006).
Recent Developments
In recent years, with its membership in decline in the early 2000s, Tsukurukai strengthened its
ties with rightwing political and religious organizations and with LDP hawks. Prime Minister
Koizumi Jun’ichiro promoted the young nationalist Abe Shinzo to positions with increasing
responsibility. In September 2006, when Koizumi retired from office following a huge electoral
victory for the LDP, Abe succeeded him and was able to pass a number of laws that had been theagenda of the right for years, including the revision of the Fundamental Law of Education.61
The comfort women controversy continued to flare both domestically and internationally. In thespring of 2007 Abe was at the center of an international controversy following statements
negating the 1993 Kono statement on the comfort women, and specifically denying direct use offorce by Japanese military in procuring women. The international furor forced Abe to retreat, but
not before his remarks spurred passage of the resolution submitted by US Congressman Michael
Honda calling on the Japanese government to genuinely apologize to the comfort women.62
Indeed, the issue of comfort women was at the center of the Abe-Bush dialogue during his April
2007 visit to Washington. Abe apologized to the US president—but not to the comfort womenthemselves—for the wartime system. The comfort women issue thus had the effect not only of
poisoning Japan’s relations with China, South Korea and other Asian nations, but extended to the
US-Japan relationship. In the summer of 2007, MOE censorship of the Japanese military’s
compulsion of Okinawan suicides in the Battle of Okinawa in history textbooks provoked fierce
protests from Okinawans across the political spectrum leading to the largest demonstration in
Okinawa since the 1972 reversion.63
In these months, Abe’s popularity rapidly declined, primarily over missing pension funds in thestate social security system and corruption scandals in his cabinet. In August, the LDP lost
control of the Upper House to the Minshuto (Democratic Party) and in September Abe resigned
and was succeeded by Fukuda Yasuo. Fukuda's tenure again proved to be short. He was
succeeded by Aso Taro in September 2008, and the LDP now faces a general (Lower House)

Nozaki and Selden: Japanese Textbook Controversies, Nationalism, and Historical Memory

287

election by autumn 2009. The changes in LDP Prime Ministers resulted in no shift in official
position on textbook issues.64 It remains to be seen whether Minshuto will succeed in ousting the
LDP from power and bringing a new attitude toward intra- and inter-national politics on issues of
war memories.
Textbook Controversies in Comparative Perspective: Concluding Thoughts
In a 1997 statement, a leader of the LDP young hawks aptly noted, “school textbooks affectJapan’s identity.”65 Citizens of a modern nation, including students, construct identities in part byreading school textbooks—though surely in more complex and convoluted ways than the young
LDP leader seems to assume. Rightwing nationalist attacks on history textbooks in postwar
Japan have repeatedly attempted to strengthen the social, political, and moral superiority of thoseholding nationalist beliefs and to shape, or limit, the perspectives available in the texts and insociety. Struggles fought over textbooks, and more generally education, have been central to thepolitical conflicts of the postwar era.
At each moment of the three epochs examined here, the nation faced political struggles for powerand shifting international geopolitics, which were reflective of sea changes in the world order:
the early Cold War (the first attack), regional detente and peace in Asia (the second wave), andthe post-Cold War and the beginning of a new world order (the last and continuing controversy).
Japan was in the early stage of rapid economic growth in 1955, at the point of achieving
economic maturity and external expansion in the late 1970s and 1980s, and facing recession andslow recovery in the 1990s to the present.
In each epoch, nationalists launched attacks on textbooks, following political setbacks of thedominant power bloc or the ruling party. In 1955, when conservatives failed to gain enough Dietseats to amend the 1946 Constitution, the battleground shifted to school textbooks. Beginning in
1979 and continuing in the early 1980s, the LDP, experiencing disarray and factional strife,
launched the second round of textbook attacks. In the mid-1990s, after neonationalists failed tostop the Diet resolution of apology and the fullest apology for the Asia Pacific War by a Prime
Minister, they shifted the target to school textbooks by ferociously attacking references to
comfort women.
Because the issues of war memories speak directly to Japanese nationalism and to Japan’sinternational relations, the consequences of textbook controversies reach beyond local schools
and Japanese national politics to regional and global politics.66 While there are recent signs of the
global impact of some of these controversies, as indicated by the passage of the US House
resolution on the comfort women in 2007,67 the most explosive consequences of thecontroversies discussed here are regional: at a time when Japan with both China and South Korea
has embarked on dynamic economic relationships, and when talk of ASEAN +3 is in the air,textbook nationalism and the controversies it sparks directly threaten the possibilities for regional
harmony, and add fuel to other conflicts such as the territorial disputes over the
Senkaku/Diaoyutai islands and Dokdo/Takeshima.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

288

Map showing contested areas including Senkakus and Takeshima (Liancourt Rocks)

The comfort women is merely the most politically explosive of the textbook controversies thathave long articulated with, and inflamed, historical memory issues in ways that exacerbate
contemporary international conflicts involving Japan, Korea, China, and the United States.
Although it may well be the case that the forces most effectively countering Japan’s nationalist
historical revisionism have been the nationalisms of other nations,68 we would like to stress thatJapanese textbook authors and civic groups working from peace and justice perspectives haveconstantly fought against the nationalist tide for over more than half a century. There is a need,
and a possibility, for people in Japan and other nations to transcend nation-state boundaries andchauvinistic perspectives to humanely address the issues of historical memory and education.69
This article is slightly revised from the authors' “Historical Memory, International Conflict, andJapanese Textbook Controversies in Three Epochs, Contexts: The Journal of Educational Media,
Memory, and Society, 1, no. 1 (2009): 117-144. We thank Hanna Schissler, Michael Geyer,
Prasenjit Duara, David Williams, and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on earlier
versions.
Yoshiko Nozaki is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership & Policy,
the University at Buffalo (SUNY-Buffalo) and an Asia-Pacific Journal Associate. She is theauthor of War Memory, Nationalism, and Education in Postwar Japan, 1945-2007: The Japanese
history textbook controversy and Ienaga Saburo’s court challenges and numerous works on
education and historical memory. She is co-author with Hiromitsu Inokuchi of What U.S. Middle
School Students Bring to Global Education: Discourses on Japan, Formation of American
Identities, and the Sociology of Knowledge and Curriculum.

Nozaki and Selden: Japanese Textbook Controversies, Nationalism, and Historical Memory289Mark Selden is a Senior Research Associate at Cornell University and an Asia-Pacific Journal
coordinator. He is the coeditor, with Laura Hein, of Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory
in Japan, Germany and the United States.
Notes
1

In this study, we examine Japanese rightwing nationalism and nationalists with particularreference to historical memory and textbook controversies. We also use the term“neonationalism” to refer to nationalism of the political right from the mid-1990s to the presentday. The positions taken by political parties, groups, and figures in that power bloc vary frommoderate conservatism to something akin to fascism. We note that nationalism of the left has
also existed; however, it is beyond the scope of the present study. On Japanese leftwing
nationalism see, for example, Oguma Eiji, “Minshu” to “aikoku”: Sengo nihon no
nashonarizumu to kokyosei [“Democracy” and “patriotism”: Nationalism and the sense of public
in postwar Japan] (Tokyo: Shinyosha, 2002).
2

Charles Ingrao, “Weapons of Mass Instruction: How Schoolbooks and Democratization
Destroyed Multiethnic Central Europe,” (Paper presented at the Department of History
Symposium at the University of Chicago “History Textbooks and the Profession: Comparing
National Controversies in a Globalizing Age,” 2007).
3

An educational/curriculum policy has at least two important facets: instrumental rationality andvalue (e.g. its impact upon the way schools operate, including teaching and learning) andsymbolic function in the realm of politics (e.g. its political effects). Although these two facets
interact in actual events, we should not conflate them. In other words, regardless of the impact of
curriculum policy on raising students’ level of knowledge, its political function should be
examined. See Herbert Kliebard, “Vocational Education as Symbolic Action: Connecting
Schooling with the Workplace,” in Forging the American Curriculum: Essays in Curriculum
History and Theory, (New York: Routledge, 1992).
4

Note that, although its main structure has remained more or less intact, details and proceduresof the postwar textbook system have constantly evolved through ministerial announcements andregulations.
5

In 2000, the MOE became the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, andTechnology. We use the abbreviation MOE throughout this article.
6

Who actually makes decisions is not entirely clear. In the past, more often than not, the Council
acted as a rubber-stamp. MOE technically has the final say, though such cases have rarely beenreported.
7
8

The examiners are ministerial employees, and the members of the council are appointees.

For further discussion of the textbook screening system, see Yoshiko Nozaki and Hiromitsu
Inokuchi, “Japanese Education, Nationalism, and Ienaga Saburo’s Textbook Lawsuits,” in Laura
Hein and Mark Selden, eds, Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany,and the United States (Armonk: M. E. Sharp, 2000), 96-126; and Yoshiko Nozaki, War Memory,
Nationalism, and Education in Postwar Japan, 1945-2007: The Japanese History Textbook
Controversy and Ienaga Saburo’s Court Challenges (London: Routledge, 2008).

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

290

9

See also Yoshiko Nozaki, "The Defeat, Educational Reforms, and History Textbooks in
Occupied Japan, 1945-1952," in Mark E. Caprio and Yoneyuki Sugita, eds, Democracy in
Occupied Japan: The U.S. Occupation and Japanese Politics and Society (New York:
Routledge, 2007), 120-146.
10

Hatoyama was a former parliamentarian and Education Minister in the years 1931-34. Yoshida
was Ambassador to Rome and London in the 1930s, and, with Hatoyama, a member of a groupthat pressed for an end to the war in early 1945.
11

Under the 1946 constitution, the power of the lower house surpasses that of the upper house in
several important ways.
12

Hara Yoshihisa, Sengoshi no nakano shakaito [The Japan socialist party in postwar history](Tokyo: Chuokoron shinsha, 2000), 106-107.
13

Ishii, a former music teacher and JTU official, was dismissed by the JTU in 1954 when hepublicly charged JTU leaders with corruption. The JTU counterattacked that he was paid by the
MOE and LP. See Mainichi Shinbunsha Kyoiku Shuzaihan, Kyokasho senso: Seiji to bijinesu no
hazama [Textbook war: Between politics and business] (Tokyo: Sanichi Shobo, 1981), 21-25.
14“Social Studies” was a new subject created during the occupation by integrating three subject
matters of history, geography, and civics. See Nozaki, War Memory.
15

Tokutake Toshio, Kyokasho no sengoshi [History of postwar textbooks] (Tokyo: Shinihon
shuppansha.Tokutake, 1995), 90.
16

Kliebard, “Vocational Education,” 184.

17

The 1955 regime provided societal stability (and people’s consciousness) for Japan’s economic
growth in 1960. It is, however, beyond the scope of this article to examine the Japanese textbook
struggles in relation to its economy. For Japan’s postwar economic history, see Hashimoto Juro,
Sengo no nihon keizai [Japan’s postwar economy] (Tokyo: Iwanamishoten, 1995).
18

For example, Koyama Iwao became a member of the Textbook Screening Council in 1955 andMurao Jiro became a textbook examiner in 1956. Koyama, a philosopher of the Kyoto school,
played a key part in rejecting many history textbooks in the late 1950s. He held the position until
1967. He continued to serve on the MOE’s Course of Study Committee. Murao was a graduate
from the University of Tokyo and a student of Hiraizumi Kiyoshi (the most well known historianof emperor-centered view of history). Murao became the main figure rejecting Ienaga Saburo’s
history textbook. After his retirement in 1975, he served as general editor for a high school
history textbook, which, in 1987, became the first postwar rightwing text approved by the MOE.
19

Only at a limited number of institutions, such as Tokyo Imperial University (the predecessor of
the University of Tokyo), were researchers able to continue to conduct empirical research, andthey had to be extremely cautious about publishing their findings. See, for example, Ienaga
Saburo, Ichi rekishigakusha no ayumi [The way of one historian] (Tokyo: Sanshodo, 1977), 94121. Available in Richard H. Minear’s translation as Japan’s Past, Japan’s Future: One
Historian’s Odyssey (Lanham MD: Rowman Littlefield, 2001).
20

Their comments on history textbooks were compiled and recorded by the publishing industry
workers association, which later became a union Japan Federation of Publishing Workers’ Union

Nozaki and Selden: Japanese Textbook Controversies, Nationalism, and Historical Memory291(Nihon shuppan rodokumiai rengokai). The union publishes an annual report Kyoksho Repotofeaturing textbook screening results and the names of MOE’s Textbook Screening Council
members and the textbook examiners.
21

This and subsequent quotes are from Tawara Yoshifumi, "Nankin daigyakusatsu jiken to
rekishikyokasho mondai" [The Nanjing massacre and history textbook issues], in Akira Fujiwara(Ed.), Nankin jiken o do miruka (Tokyo: Aoki shoten, 1998), 116-131.
22

Tawara, “Nankin daigyakusatsu,” 120.

23

Nozaki, War Memory.

24

For further discussion on Ienaga’s court challenges, see Nozaki, War Memory.

25

Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Japan Fact Sheet, Economy: Japan’s Economy in An Era of
Globalization,” Web Japan, (accessed 5 February 2008), 2.
26

When measured in US dollars, the Japanese economy was less than one seventh the size of the
US economy in 1965, approximately one fifth in 1970, two fifths in 1980, more than half in
1990, and approximately two thirds in 1993. Hashimoto, Sengo no nihonkeizai, 36 & 213.
27

Tokutake, Kyokasho no sengoshi, 195.

28

On the Yuzuru controversy see Takashima Nobuyushi, “Literature, Ideology and Japan’s
Revised Education Law: Kinoshita Junji’s Yuzuru,” Japan Focus.
29

Eventually Ienaga brought the case to court in 1984, in his third textbook lawsuit.

30

Ienaga Saburo, “Misshitsu” kentei no kiroku [The record of textbook screening behind “closed
doors”] (Tokyo: Kyokasho Kentei Sosho o Shiensuru Zenkokurenrakukai, 1983), 61-65. Daqing
Yang offers a thoughtful assessment of the reasons for the massacre in “Atrocities in Nanjing:
Searching for Explanations,” in Diana Lary and Stephen MacKinnon, eds, Scars of Warfare on
Modern China (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2001), 76-97. See also Fujiwara Akira, “The Nanking
Atrocity: An Interpretive Overview,” in Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, ed., The Nanking Atrocity
1937-38: Complicating the Picture (London: Berghahn Books, 2007).
31

Mainichi Shinbunsha Kyoiku Shuzaihan, Kyokasho senso, 11-13.

32

For a detailed discussion of forced suicide in an Okinawan island, see Matthew Allen, “Wolves
and Tigers: Remembering the Kumejima Massacres,” in Identity and Resistance in Okinawa(London: Routledge, 2002), 27-52.
33

Eguchi Keiichi, "Kyokasho mondai to okinawasen: Nihongun niyoru kenmin satsugai ochushin ni" [The textbook controversy and the battle of Okinawa: On the description of themurder of Okinawans by Japanese forces], in Fujiwara Akira, ed., Okinawasen to tennosei(Tokyo: Rippu Shobo, 1987), 223-254. See also, Aniya Masaaki, “Compulsory Mass Suicide, theBattle of Okinawa, and Japan’s Textbook Controversy,” Japan Focus.
34
35

Nozaki and Inokuchi, “Japanese Education,” 96-126.

Although the media reported that the term “aggression” was replaced with “advance” in thesection of the textbooks treating Japanese invasion of northern China, in fact the replacement had
taken place previously in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia
36

Tokutake, Kyokasho no sengoshi, 201-203.

37

Allen, “Wolves and Tigers," 27-55.

38

Eguchi, "Kyokasho mondai," 232-233

292

39

“Seifu Kenkai: Kanbochokan danwa” [The government position: The chief cabinet secretary’s
unwritten statement], 27 August 1982, Asahi Shinbun, 1. Miyazawa’s statement appeared in theform of a danwa, an official but unwritten statement of the government position.
40“Rekishi kyokasho nitsuiteno bunso danwa” [The education minister’s unwritten statement on
history textbooks], 24 November 1982, Asahi Shinbun, 14.
41

It is somewhat ironic that history textbooks became more progressive under Nakasone’s watch.
However, he implemented other educational reforms that directly impacted schools, and scholars
are divided in their appraisals of the reform results. For further discussion, see, for example,
Leonard James Schoppa, Education Reform in Japan: A Case of Immobilist Politics (London:
Routledge, 1991); Christopher Hood, Japanese Education Reform: Nakasone’s Legacy (London:
Routledge, 2001); and Roger Goodman and David Phillips, eds, Can the Japanese Change Their
Education System (Oxford: Symposium Books).
42

See Nagano Tsuneo, “’Shinpen nihonshi’ jiken nitsuite” [On the event of the New Edition
History], in Kakinuma Masayoshi and Nagano Tsuneo eds, Kyokasho ronso o koete (Tokyo:
Hihyosha, 1998), 133-146. See also a number of articles published in Kyokasho Repoto, 31(1987).
43

In this study, we employ the term “comfort women” (hereafter without quotation marks)
because it is the term that has been most often used, though we are fully aware of inadequacy ofit (i.e., speaking of these women’s experiences as “comfort”). The nationalists made it extremely
controversial what terms should be used to name these women. See Yoshiko Nozaki, “The‘Comfort Women’ Controversy: History and Testimony,” Japan Focus.
44

Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During WorldWar II (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). See also Yuki Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort
Women. Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the US Occupation (London:
Routledge, 2002).
45“Jugun ianfu chosakekka nikansuru kanbochokan danwa” [Chief cabinet secretary’s unwritten
statement on the results of the investigation into war comfort women], 5 August 1993, Asahi
Shinbun, 2.
46

The breakdown of the 1955 regime took place against the background of the collapse ofJapan’s “bubble economy” in the late 1980s leading to a prolonged recession from which signsof recovery only became clear in the mid 2000s. During these years, the Japanese economy
experienced intensified globalization, including the shift of manufacturing production overseas,
resulting in uneven distribution of benefits and damage across the nation. Although we canassume that the economic stagnation has had some connection to the rise of neonationalism, we
would like to leave the analysis for the future study.
47“Hosokawa shusho kishakaiken no yoshi” [An outline of a press conference of Prime Minister
Hosokawa], 11 August 1993, Asahi Shinbun, 3.

Nozaki and Selden: Japanese Textbook Controversies, Nationalism, and Historical Memory

293

48

“Shusho no shoshin hyomei enzetsu” [The prime minister’s address on his positions], Asahi
Shinbun, 23 August 1993, Asahi Shinbun, 3.
49

The committee reached its conclusion and disbanded in February 1995.

50

The treatment of the Hinomaru and the Kimigayo in schools has been one of the major frontsof postwar struggles between the left and the right, or progressives and nationalists. Not until
1999 did they become the national flag and anthem respectively. Since 1999, the MOE inpractice made hoisting the flag and singing the anthem mandatory at school ceremonies. In
Spring 2004, the Tokyo Prefectural Education Board, whose members are appointed byGovernor Ishihara Shintaro, punished more than 200 teachers who acted against the policy at thegraduation ceremony. See N. Ikezoe, “Tokyoi no sessoku tairyo shobun ni hirogaru hamon” [Agrowing stir at the large scale, quick punishment by the Tokyo education board], Shukan Kinyobi
504 (16 April 2004), 22. For further discussion, Adam Lebowitz and David McNeill,“Hammering Down the Educational Nail: Abe Revises the Fundamental Law of Education,”
Japan Focus.
51

Wada Haruki, Ishizaki Koichi, and the Sengo Gojunen Kokkai Ketsugi o Motomerukai, eds,
Nihon wa shokuminchi shihai o do kangaete kitaka [How Japan has reflected on colonial
domination], (Tokyo: Nashinokisha, 1996).
52

Wada et al., Nihon wa.

53

An English translation of the Murayama statement “On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of
the war’s end” (15 August 1995) is available, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan,(accessed 5 February 2008).
54

At its convention in January 1996 immediately after Murayama’s resignation, the SP changed
its name to Shakai-minshuto (abbreviated as Shaminto; Social Democratic Party, SDP). In
September, approximately half of its lower house members left the party to join a new party
Minshuto (Democratic Party). In the lower house election in the same month, SDP gained only
15 seats, losing its position as the major opposition party to Minshuto.
55

Nihon no Zento to Rekishi Kyoiku o Kangaeru Wakategiin no Kai, ed., Rekishi kyokasho heno
gimon [Questions for history textbooks] (Tokyo: Tentensha, 1997).
56

The LDP appealed successfully to parents concerned about teaching about the sex andprostitution in schools.
57

Tsukurukai succeeded in developing a textbook entitled New History Textbook and obtaining
MOE authorization for it. For a discussion of flaws in the draft text, see “Fact Sheet Concerning
New History Textbook,” Critical Asian Studies, (accessed 5 February 2008). Interestingly, thedraft submitted to the MOE contained a line “History is not a science” (a language similar to one
used by the MOE in the 1950s and 1960s to order a history revision); however, during thescreening process, the line was dropped, apparently at MOE request.
58

For discussion of attack on textbooks in light of the comfort women controversy, see Nozaki,“The ‘Comfort Women.’”

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

294

59

Tawara Yoshifumi, "Kenpo ihan shinryaku senso kotei no ’abunai kyokasho’ no jittai" [Thereality of ideologically ’dangerous textbooks’ that affirm aggressive war and that violate theconstitution], Senso Sekinin Kenkyu 30, 37.
60

For further discussion, see Yoshiko Nozaki, “Japanese Politics and the History Textbook
Controversy, 1945-2001,” in Edward Vickers and Alisa Jones, ed.s, History Education andNational Identity in East Asia (London: Routledge, 2005), 295.
61

See Lebowitz and McNeill, “Hammering Down.” For an update on Tsukurukai, see Nozaki,
War Memory, 148-149.
62

Extensive reports on the comfort women controversy at Japan Focus include the following:
Congressional Research Service, “Japan’s Military ’Comfort Women;’"Violence Against Women in War-NET Japan, “Responsibility Denied: Japan’s Debate Over the
Comfort Women;”
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Japan’s ‘Comfort Women’: It’s time for the truth (in the ordinary,
everyday sense of the word;"
Alexis Dudden and Kozo MizoguchiI, “Abe’s Violent Denial: Japan’s Prime Minister and the‘Comfort Women;’”Norma Field, “The Courts, Japan’s ‘Military Comfort Women,’ and the Conscience of
Humanity: The Ruling in VAWW-Net Japan v. NHK;” andHayashi Hirofumi, “Government, the Military and Business in Japan’s Wartime Comfort
Woman System.”
63

Kawabata Shun’ichi and Kitazawa Yuki, “A Story That Won’t Fade Away: Compulsory Mass
Suicide in the Battle of Okinawa,” Japan Focus.
64

For example, as of December 2007, MOE’s position on the description of Okinawan suicides
in the Battle of Okinawa was to allow textbook authors to refer to “the involvement of Japaneseforces” but not “coercion by Japanese forces.” See Ishiyama Hisao, “Futatabi Okinawa o uragitta
monbukagakusho: Kyokasho kentei ’shudan jiketsu’” [MOE betray Okinawans again: Textbook
screening of “mass suicides”], Shukan Kinyobi 686, January 18, 2008, 17-19.
65

Statement by Nakagawa Shoichi at the young neonationalist Diet members’ meeting on 27
February 1997, quoted in Tawara Yoshifumi, “Ianfu” mondai to kyokasho kogeki: dokyumento[The issues of “comfort women” and the attacks on textbooks: A document] (Tokyo: Kobunken,
1997), 38.
66

Perhaps surprisingly, the Japanese textbook controversy does not appear to have tapped
directly into the related sensitive issues of minorities and migration, despite the fact that Koreans
and Chinese comprise the largest group of migrants and other controversies swirl over theirpresence in Japan.
67

Another global dimension is the continuing discussion of comfort women issues at the United
Nation’s human rights committee.
68

Comments by Prasenjit Duara at the Department of History Symposium at the University of
Chicago “History Textbooks and the Profession: Comparing National Controversies in a
Globalizing Age,” 2007.

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69

A major gap in the literature, and an important area for future research, derives from the nearlyexclusive focus on textbook content and lack of discussion of whether and how the issues of war
and empire are taken up in the classroom. To be sure, whether or not the textbook policies andstruggles have had impact upon actual classroom teaching and learning cannot be conflated with
their effects in the realm of politics. Equally important for grasping popular understanding of theissue is its treatment in manga, anime, film, literature and other expressions of popular culture(e.g. the most influential neonationalist manga such as Kobayashi Yoshinori, Sensoron [On War]
(Tokyo: Gentosha, 1998). See Rumi Sakamoto, “‘Will you go to war? Or will you stop being
Japanese?’ Nationalism and History in Kobayashi Yoshinori’s Sensoron,” in Michael Heazle andNick Knight, eds, China-Japan Relations in the Twenty-first Century. Creating a Future Past?
(Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2007); Matthew Penney, “Nationalism and Anti-Americanism inJapan – Manga Wars, Aso, Tamogami, and Progressive Alternatives,” The Asia-Pacific Journal.
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The Tokyo Tribunal, Justice Pal and the Revisionist Distortion of History
Nakajima Takeshi1
I. The Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal and Historical Revisionism in Post-War Japan
Since the mid 1990s, Japan’s neonationalist forces have made important gains: in education,
culture and politics, as manifested notably in the activation of the Japanese Society for History
Textbook Reform and the popularity of the best-selling comic book Sensōron (On War) by
cartoonist Kobayashi Yoshinori.
Japanese historical revisionists have contrasted their approach with what they term the ‘Tokyo
Trial view of history’ and the ‘masochistic view of history’. These revisionists regard as‘masochistic’ any characterisation of Japan’s military advances in Asia during the pre-WorldWar II period as an ‘invasion’. And they claim a ‘spell’ lingering from the International Military
Tribunal for the Far East (‘Tokyo Tribunal’) underlies this ‘masochistic view of history’.
Arguing that the Tokyo Tribunal created and disseminated a false perception of the Greater East
Asia War as ‘the war in which the liberal Allies defeated a fascist Japan’, the revisionists holdthat denouncing and rejecting the Tribunal is the key to shaking off this ‘masochistic view ofhistory’.
In their discourse on the denial of the Tribunal, revisionists frequently invoke the so-called ‘Pal
Judgment’. An Indian judge participating in the Tokyo Tribunal, Radhabinod Pal issued aDissenting Opinion entitled Dissentient Judgment of Justice Pal, which asserted that all JapaneseClass A defendants at the Trial were innocent of crimes. Since the Tribunal’s language
department omitted the category ‘dissentient’, the Opinion became widely known in Japan as the‘Pal Judgment’.
However, the Opinion is often presented without a thorough examination of its content. Instead,
only the decontextualised conclusion — that the Japanese suspects were not guilty — is singled
out. In 2007, I published Pāru Hanji: Tōkyō Saiban hihan to zettai heiwa-shugi (Justice Pal:
Criticism of the Tokyo Trial and Absolute Pacifism) in order to draw attention to misreadings ofthe ‘Pal Judgment’. While the book was well received, it also became a target of historicalrevisionists, such as Kobayashi Yoshinori, and was subjected to their severe bashing.
Based on this book, this article analyses Justice Pal’s theory in his Dissenting Opinion andexamines the philosophy behind it. I also introduce an overview of how Justice Pal’s Opinion
first became misinterpreted by Japanese historical revisionists, in order to explain how current
revisionist discourse on the Opinion has been shaped.

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II. Theory of Justice Pal’s Dissenting Opinion
Based on the principle of non-retroactivity of law,
Justice Pal, first of all, explicated his criticism of the
Tribunal’s ex post facto judgment in his Dissenting
Opinion. He affirmed that the alleged ‘conventional
war crimes’ by the Japanese defendants came within
the jurisdiction of the Tribunal because they werealready classified as crimes in pre-existing
international law. However, Justice Pal opposed
prosecution for ‘crimes against peace’, and ‘crimes
against humanity’, as defined in the Tribunal’sCharter,2 because these crimes had no previous
grounds in international law. If the defendants were to
be found guilty of crimes which did not exist ininternational law when the alleged acts were actually
executed, Pal said, then ‘the Tribunal will not be a
“judicial tribunal” but a mere tool for the
manifestation of power’.3 He highlighted thedistinction between justice and politics, and severely
criticised the subjection of the Trial to the politicalgoals of state leaders.

Justice Pal

Justice Pal objected to the introduction of an ex post facto law at the Tribunal because hebelieved that by ruling on ex post facto law, international society would not be bound by acommon understanding against war. Instead, it would subscribe to an understanding that the
victors of wars were entitled to judge the defeated while disregarding the rules of internationallaw. Thus, he argued that if the Tokyo Tribunal invoked an ex post facto law it would eventually
foment the expansion of wars of aggression and a breakdown of the foundation of international
order, rather than lead toward the eradication of war. He stressed the importance of genuine legal
processes and the establishment of the rule of law as follows:
Such a trial [a tribunal with ex post facto powers?] may justly create the feeling that thesetting up of a tribunal like the present is much more a political than a legal affair, anessentially political objective having thus been cloaked by a juridical appearance.
Formalized vengeance can bring only an ephemeral satisfaction, with every probability ofultimate regret; but vindication of law through genuine legal process alone may
contribute substantially to the re-establishment of order and decency in international
relations.4
He questioned the legitimacy of the Tokyo Charter, which was promulgated on 19 January 1946
and established the Tribunal. In adding to ‘conventional war crimes’, the Charter upheld newcrimes that did not have a foundation in pre-existing international law: ‘crimes against peace’and ‘crimes against humanity’. Justice Pal denounced this charter as a transgression of thefundamental rules of international law. He said a charter establishing an international court,
regardless of who sets it up or staffs it, ‘does not define the crime but only specifies the acts theauthors whereof are placed under the jurisdiction of the Tribunal’.5 He explained that the Tokyo
Charter ought to decide merely what matters would come up for trial before the Tribunal.

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Whether or not these acts constituted any crime should be left open for determination by the
Tribunal with reference to the appropriate laws. From this point of view, he strongly condemned
the Tokyo Charter as widely departing from the fundamental rule of jurisdiction.
According to Justice Pal, the victors had
the right to set up a special court, andtherefore the establishment of a charter
itself was not problematic; however, thevictors had no right to legislate thecreation of new crimes in internationallaw.

The Justices (Pal on the left)

He also said that the judges of the
Tribunal were ‘competent to investigate
the question whether any provision of theCharter is or is not ultra vires’6 in thereflection of international law, because
the Charter of the Tribunal itself derives
its authority from international law.

As a judge of the Tribunal, Justice Pal concluded that the provisions regarding ‘crimes against
peace’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ were ex post facto laws and violated the prohibition on
non-retroactivity in international law. Further, Pal examined the historical process on the ‘overall
conspiracy’ which the prosecution defined as a premise of the alleged ‘crimes against peace’,and criticised the prosecutors’ arguments. He intended to prove that so-called ‘crimes against
peace’ were invalid both from jurisprudential and historical perspectives.
Justice Pal, however, did not deny the legitimacy of the whole Tribunal. He affirmed the value of
examining the alleged acts for ‘conventional war crimes’ that would come to the court. ‘A war’,he said, ‘whether legal or illegal, whether aggressive or defensive, is still a war to be regulatedby the accepted rules of warfare. No pact, no convention has in any way abrogated jus-in-bello.’7
Justice Pal’s viewpoint on the Tokyo Tribunal was reflected in how he structured his Dissenting
Opinion. ‘Pal’s Judgment’ consists of seven chapters: Part I, Preliminary Question of Law; Part
II, What Is ‘Aggressive War’; Part III, Rules of Evidence and Procedure; Part IV, Over-all
Conspiracy; Part V, Scope of Tribunal’s Jurisdiction; Part VI, War Crimes Stricto Sensu; andPart VII, Recommendation. An important point to note here is that he placed ‘Scope of
Tribunal’s Jurisdiction’ after the chapter about the alleged ‘overall conspiracy’. In Part IV, which
occupies the largest volume in the Opinion, he explained that the ‘overall conspiracy’, which waspresented as a premise of ‘crimes against peace’ by the prosecution, was not established as acrime in international law. Therefore, the Indictment itself was invalid before the judgment on
the question of innocence or guilt.
The only alleged acts by the Japanese defendants he saw as triable by the Tribunal from agenuine judicial point of view were ‘conventional war crimes’, because these crimes were
defined in pre-existing international law at the time the alleged acts were carried out. Whether
the accused were guilty or not would be open to the Tribunal, so he found no conflict in hearing
the alleged acts at the Tribunal. This was the reason Pal clarified the scope of the Tribunal’s

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jurisdiction before the section on ‘conventional war crimes’ and defined the scope of jurisdiction
as extending back to the Sino–Japanese War of 1894-95.
In Part VI, ‘War Crimes Stricto Sensu’, he examined the establishment of criminality in what hecalled the ‘atrocities’ conducted by the Japanese Imperial Army. Regarding the Nanjing
Massacre, although he premised that wartime propaganda from hostile sources was blended inwith the evidence submitted to the Tribunal, and therefore, it may not have been safe to accept
the entire story, he concluded that the fact that atrocities were executed by the Imperial Army
was unshakable. He said as follows:
Keeping in view everything that can be said against the evidence adduced in this case inthis respect and making every possible allowance for propaganda and exaggeration, theevidence is still overwhelming that atrocities were perpetrated by the members of theJapanese armed forces against the civilian population of some of the territories occupiedby them as also against the prisoners of war.8
And further:
Whatever that be, as I have already observed, even making allowance for everything thatcan be said against the evidence, there is no doubt that the conduct of the Japanesesoldiers at Nanking [Nanjing] was atrocious and that such atrocities were intense fornearly three weeks and continued to be serious for a total of six weeks as was testified toby Dr. Bates.9
Justice Pal then continued to investigate whether the facts supporting the accusation that theClass A defendants ordered, authorised and permitted others to commit those acts, and such
persons actually committed them; and if the facts supported the conclusion that the Class A
defendants deliberately and recklessly disregarded their legal duty to take adequate steps toprevent the commission of such criminal acts.
On the first point, while characterising the alleged atrocities as ‘devilish and fiendish’, heconcluded that no evidence of any alleged order, authorisation or permission had been found. He
judged that the atrocities including the Nanjing Massacre were determined and executed by the
Army soldiers on the ground, and that by the time he wrote his book, the people who were
responsible for the acts had already been executed as Class B and Class C war criminals.
It should be remembered that in the majority of cases ‘stern justice’ has already been
meted out by the several victor nations to the persons charged with having actuallyperpetrated these atrocious acts along with their immediate superiors. We have been
given by the prosecution long lists of such convicts.10
And further:
But those who might have committed these terrible brutalities are not before us now.
Those of them who could be got hold of alive have been made to answer for theirmisdeeds mostly with their lives.11
On the issue of foul acts, for which the defendants would be found guilty if it were proven thatthe atrocities by Japan became intense and were carried out on a larger scale due to thedefendants’ ‘intention’ or ‘negligence’, Justice Pal said, ‘these commanders [the JapaneseNakajima: The Tokyo Tribunal, Justice Pal and the Revisionist Distortion of History

303

defendants] were legally bound to maintain discipline in the army and to restrain the soldiers
under their command from perpetrating these atrocities’. He continued as follows:
It is true that a commanding officer is not liable for the acts of those in his command
merely because he is their superior officer; but, because of his great control over them, heshould be responsible for such acts of theirs which he could reasonably have prevented.
He had the duty to take such appropriate measures as were in his power to control thetroops under his command.12
However, Justice Pal concluded that the evidence submitted to the Tribunal was not sufficient toprove that the accused Class A suspects were criminally responsible for the acts of these troops.
It is a fact that Justice Pal strongly condemned the atrocities by the Japanese Imperial Army,
including the Nanjing Massacre, as determined by facts. However, he concluded that the criminal
responsibility of Japanese Class A suspects for the atrocities could not be proven due to a lack ofevidence.
Justice Pal next took up Japan’s ‘maltreatment of prisoners of war’. In examining the alleged
offences, he spent many pages on the cases of the Bataan Death March in the Philippines and theconstruction of the Burma–Thai Railway. He strongly denounced acts committed by the Army inboth cases.
Regarding the Bataan Death March, he said it was ‘really an atrocious brutality’ and ‘I do notthink that the occurrence was at all justifiable’.13 Regarding the treatment of prisoners of war
employed for the Burma–Thai Railway construction, which directly related to Japanese war
operations, he said that the accused Tōjō Hideki, Japan’s Prime Minister from October 1941 to
July 1944, was ‘fully responsible’.14 He also stated that their treatment of prisoners was‘inhuman’.15
He continued, though, by saying that the March was ‘an isolated instance of cruelty’16 and thatthe employment of prisoners of war for the railway construction was a ‘mere act of state’,17 andeventually concluded that the evidence did not satisfy him that the alleged acts were conductedunder the ‘order, authorization or permission’ of the accused.18 In other words, he concluded thatthe accused could not be found criminally liable due to the lack of evidence.
A point that should be noted is the difference in his argumentations for ‘crimes against peace’and ‘conventional war crimes’. Regarding ‘crimes against peace’, he presented his view that the
charges were based on an ex post facto law. Additionally, the ‘overall conspiracy’ which theprosecution tried to establish as a premise for ‘crimes against peace’ was not found. Therefore,
the Indictment for ‘crimes against peace’ itself was fundamentally not established. On the other
hand, in the matter of the alleged offences of ‘conventional war crimes’, wherein Justice Pal
approved the grounds in international law and approved of them being heard by the Tribunal, Pal
investigated the alleged crimes in accordance with international law and eventually concluded
that the evidence presented to the Tribunal was not sufficient to establish the criminal
responsibility of the defendants for the accused acts.
III. Justice Pal’s View on History and his Opinion on Legislation
In Part IV of his Dissenting Opinion, Justice Pal examined the alleged ‘overall conspiracy’. The
prosecution claimed that the defendants had conspired, and that the accused crimes were part ofThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

304

Japan’s overall plot to occupy Manchuria, the whole of China and eventually the entire world.
While he criticised Japan’s acts allegedly executed under the ‘overall conspiracy’ — including
the Zhang Zuolin (Chang Tso-lin) Assassination Incident and Manchurian Incident in Japan’s
steps toward the Sino–Japanese War — Pal pointed out that Japan was an imitator of Western
Imperialism and argued that both Japan and the Allied countries were morally responsible for
their actions.
First, he took up the Zhang Zuolin Assassination Incident by the Japanese Kwantung Army, on 4
June 1928. The Incident was plotted by Kwantung Army officer Colonel Kawamoto Daisaku,
and the leader of the Fengtian Army, warlord Zhang, was killed. Kawamoto had planned toconquer Manchuria by taking advantage of the confusion that would have occurred after the
Incident. However, this failed as the chiefs of staff of the Kwantung Army were not informed ofhis plan. Moreover, the Fengtian Army did not respond to this provocation. In the Tokyo
Tribunal, the prosecution claimed that the Incident was the first act in the defendants’ ‘overall
conspiracy’ in which they consistently and carefully planned and prepared acts or wars of
aggression such as the Manchurian Incident, the Sino–Japanese War, up to and including theGreater East Asia War.19
Justice Pal disagreed with their claim. He said, ‘Chang Tso-lin’s murder was planned andexecuted by a certain group of Kwantung army officers. There is absolutely nothing to connect
this plan or plot with the alleged conspiracy.’20 He continued, ‘[p]lanning any murder andexecuting the same are certainly reprehensible by themselves. But we are not now trying any of
the accused for that dastardly act of murder. We are to see what connection this story has withany relevant issue before us.’21
Having described the Zhang Zuolin Assassination Incident as a ‘dastardly act of murder’, he said
that Kawamoto and others who were involved in it were ‘reprehensible’.22 However, from a legal
point of view, he stressed the necessity of proof to show the ‘dastardly act’ by the Army officers
was a part of the ‘overall conspiracy’ by the accused Japanese leaders in Tokyo. After examining
the evidence, he came to the conclusion that although it was true that many officers in the
Kwantung Army intended to ‘occupy Manchuria’ at that time, the Incident was planned andexecuted by a limited group of people and the evidence given in the Tribunal failed to establishthat there was an ‘overall conspiracy’ behind the Incident. He said the alleged ‘crimes against
peace’ could not be established simply by connecting irrelevant cases to ‘the whole story’.23
What should be confirmed here is that although he argued the Incident was not a part of a‘conspiracy’, he sharply criticised the Incident itself.
He next addressed the Manchurian Incident. He first discussed the Mukden Incident (or the
Liutiaogou Incident), which occurred at the outset of the Manchurian Incident, and argued that it
was difficult to determine from the evidence that the Mukden Incident was a conspiracy among
the Japanese defendants in the Tokyo Tribunal. He said:
Even accepting the evidence of TANAKA and OKADA that the Mukden Incident of 18
September, 1931 was planned by some young officers of the Kwantung Army, I do notfind any substantial evidence to connect any of the accused with that group or clique. The
position in my opinion still remains as was found by the Lytton Commission. The
incident might have been the result of a design on the part of some unknown army

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officers, yet those who acted on the strength of the incident might have acted quite bonafide.24
The gist of his logic here is the same as with the Zhang Zuolin Assassination Incident: although
the Mukden Incident might have been a plot by particular officers of the Kwantung Army, theconnection between them and the accused leaders was not established. As a consequence, it wasdifficult to view the Incident as part of an alleged ‘overall conspiracy’.
Again this does not mean Justice Pal was uncritical regarding the Incident or the Kwantung
Army: ‘The military developments in Manchuria after September 18, 1931, were certainly
reprehensible. Despite the unanimous opinion of the Cabinet that the operation must cease
immediately, the expansion continued.’25
He determined the Manchurian Incident was ‘reprehensible’ and saw the actions of the Army inignoring the Japanese Cabinet order and initiating the Incident as a problem. Still, he insisted thatthe circumstances did not prove a conspiracy among those accused: ‘No one would applaud sucha policy. No one would perhaps justify such a policy. Yet this need not drive us to a theory ofconspiracy’.26
In this Chapter, he further discussed the Western Powers’ political and military acts in theinternational community at that time. While presenting the view that the Kwantung Army andthe Western countries were companions in crime, he condemned the Western Powers forlaunching accusations against Japan while ignoring their own responsibility for committing actsthat were similar to those of the Japanese Army.
First, he criticised Japan’s establishment of Manchukuo, calling it an ‘elaborate political farce’,27
forced upon the Chinese people by Japan’s military occupation of Manchuria:[T]he power to play the farce of ‘Manchukuo’ on the Manchurian stage, as well as thepower to seize control over Manchuria had been acquired by the Japanese manu militari.
As has been observed in the review of International Affairs, the military conquest andoccupation of Manchuria by the Japanese Army was the real foundation of the Japaneseposition in Manchuria in 1932; and the whole world was aware that this was the fact. The
Japanese were apparently prepared to defy the world’s opinion and to risk theconsequences of the world’s disapproval in order to keep their ill-gotten gains.28
Why then, he asked, did Japan not simply proclaim the annexation of Manchuria instead of
persisting in a farce. Justice Pal saw the answer in the process of Japan’s modernisation itself,
which was a continuous imitation of the West: ‘It is considered probable that it might be
attributed in part to an anxiety to imitate Western behaviour — an anxiety had become an idee
fixe in Japanese minds since the beginning of the Meiji era’.29
Justice Pal then critically examined Western Imperialism, which, he asserted, Japan had imitated.
Quoting the Survey of International Affairs 1932, he turned the target of the criticism toward thecolonial policies of Western Powers:
Was it not Western Imperialism that had coined the word ‘protectorate’ as a euphemismfor ‘annexation’? And had not this constitutional fiction served its Western inventors ingood stead? Was not this the method by which the Government of the French Republic
had stepped into the shoes of the Sultan of Morocco, and by which the British Crown had

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transferred the possession of vast tracts of land in East Africa from native African toadventitious European hands?30
For Justice Pal, Japan’s ‘farce’ was nothing but the result of imitating Western fashions ofimperialism. From this point of view, he questioned why only Japan’s establishment ofManchukuo could be assessed as ‘aggression’. Weren’t Western countries morally guilty as wellin practicing colonialism? If the acts of aggression by Western countries were not charged as
crimes, why was the establishment of Manchukuo by Japan?
Justice Pal further quoted the Survey of International Affairs 1932:
Though the Japanese failed to make the most of these Western precedents in stating theircase for performing the farce of ‘Manchukuo’, it may legitimately be conjectured that
Western as well as Japanese precedents had in fact suggested, and commended, this lineof policy to Japanese minds.31
By saying, ‘[i]t may not be a justifiable policy, justifying one nation’s expansion in another’s
territory’,32 he emphasised that both Japan and the Western countries were morally responsible
for the colonisation of other nations. Justice Pal explained that Japan was at that time possessedwith a ‘delusion’ and believed that the country would face death and destruction if it failed inacquiring Manchuria.33 Pal regarded this as the reason for Japan’s attempts to establish interests
which it saw as necessary for its very existence. Justice Pal said that carrying out a military
operation driven by ‘delusion’ was not unique to Japan as it had been repeatedly practised on alarge scale by Western countries for many years. Saying, ‘[a]lmost every great power acquired
similar interests within the territories of the Eastern Hemisphere and, it seems, every such power
considered that interest to be very vital’, Pal argued that Japan had the ‘right’ to argue that the
Manchurian Incident was necessary for the sake of ‘self-defense’.34 Japan claiming national‘self-defense’ in regard to its territorial expansion in China was in step with international society
at the time, Pal said, and thus Japan’s actions stemmed from the ‘imitation’ of an evil practice ofWestern imperialism. Based on this premise, he concluded: ‘The action of Japan in Manchuria
would not, it is certain, be applauded by the world. At the same time it would be difficult tocondemn the same ascriminal.’35
The important thing to notice here is that Justice Pal did not conclude that Japan’s actions were
justifiable. As mentioned above, he criticised the Manchurian Incident as ‘reprehensible’, and theestablishment of Manchukuo as an ‘elaborate political farce’ based on ‘delusion’. But, at the
Tribunal Justice Pal strove to show his disapproval of the prosecution’s intention to treat Japan’s
actions as if they were carried out under an alleged ‘overall conspiracy’, by presenting thecomplexity in the reasons why Japan pushed herself forward to the occupation of Manchuria.
From his historical point of view, Justice Pal saw the fundamental cause for Japan’s acts ofaggression as rooted in colonialism by Western countries. He questioned whether the visits by
the US Navy’s Commodore Matthew Perry in the 1850s and the conclusion of unequal treaties
with Western Powers such as the US, Russia, Great Britain, France and Holland in the late Edo
Era was a fundamental cause for Japan’s imperialism, and he argued that Japan’s steps toward
imperialism were not ‘blameworthy’.
Justice Pal said:

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Then follows Japan’s struggle for getting revision of these treaties. This struggle
continued till the year 1894. During this period, Japan made every effort to master thegreat contributions of western thought and science. Perhaps Japan also realized that in theworld in which she had been thus forced to appear, right and justice were measured interms of battleships and army corps.
The Japanese effort to get these treaties revised were certainly not blameworthy.36
He argued that Japan endeavoured to achieve rapid modernisation and employed Westernmethods in order to assure the revision of unequal treaties with the Western Powers. Japan also
built up its military power during the process by ‘imitating’ the Western Powers’ imperialism.
While Justice Pal did regard the manner in which Japan proceeded with its modernisation as
problematic, he also questioned whether the Western Powers could really condemn Japan’s
imitating them if the purpose in doing so was to revise the unequal treaties imposed by theWestern Powers: ‘We cannot afford to ignore the possible effects upon Japan of this longstruggle for the revision of such treaties’.37
This observation can be seen in Justice Pal’s argument on the Sino–Japanese and Russo–
Japanese Wars. He saw these as part of a power struggle among the major powers rather thanunilateral ‘aggressions’ by Japan. For Pal, it was hypocritical for the Western countries tocriticise as criminal Japanese actions, which were merely an ‘imitation’ of their own. ‘After the
Russo–Japanese war, Japan seemed to follow closely the precedents set by Europe in its dealings
with China’,38 said Pal in reference to Japan’s steps toward expansion of colonial territories after
the Sino–Japanese and the Russo–Japanese Wars. He said that if Japan’s colonialism wasdeemed problematic, then all colonialism by the Western Powers ought to be similarly regarded.
However, he pointed out, Western Powers did not criticise Japan’s actions as ‘aggression’ while
the acts were ongoing. He said, ‘Great Britain renewed and strengthened the Anglo–Japanese
Alliance at that time and the contemporary powers did not condemn Japan’s action as
aggressive’.39
During World War I, ‘Japan, as a faithful ally, rendered valuable assistance in an hour of serious
and very critical need to the Allied Powers’.40 The Allied Powers were helped by support fromJapan. His question was how these Western countries could blame the steps taken by Japan.
Pal presented the following view of history:
Japan was a country without any material resources of her own. She started on her careerwhen ‘Western Society had come to embrace all the habitable lands and navigable season the face of the planet and the entire living generation of mankind’.
The Japanese emulated the western powers in this respect but unfortunately they began at
a time when neither of the two essential assets, ‘a free-hand’ for their ability and a worldwide field, was any longer available to them. The responsibility for what Japan was
thinking and doing during the period under our consideration really lies with those earlier
elder statesmen of Japan who had launched her upon the stream of westernization and,had done so, at a moment when the stream was sweeping towards a goal which was amystery even to the people of the west themselves.41

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Looking back at the path of Japanese modernisation, Justice Pal cast sharp criticism and a caustic
view on the Western countries. By presenting this sort of irony, he intended to criticise Westerncolonialism and to assert that the Western countries and Japan were in cahoots.
Regarding the start of the war between Japan and the US, Justice Pal blamed the direction of
diplomatic policy on the US more than the Japanese. In his view, US diplomacy, as represented
especially in the Hull Note,42 eventually cornered Japan. He said, ‘[t]he evidence [submitted to
the Tribunal] convinces me that Japan tried her utmost to avoid any clash with America, but was
driven by the circumstances that gradually developed into the fatal steps taken by her.’43
In his Dissenting Opinion, Justice Pal repeatedly quoted International Affairs by the British
Royal Institute of International Affairs, the British historian Arnold J Toynbee, and Professor ofInternational Law at the University of London Georg Schwarzenberger. He challenged the onesided accusations by the prosecution against Japan by highlighting that even some in the Westernworld had accused the Western superpowers.
Regarding the Hull Note in his Dissenting Opinion, Justice Pal quoted Memoirs of a Superfluous
Man by Albert Jay Nock, published in 1943, as follows:
Even the contemporary historians could think that ‘As for the present war, thePrincipality of Monaco, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, would have taken up arms
against the United States on receipt of such a note as the State Department sent theJapanese Government on the eve of Pearl Harbor.’44
While condemning the US move, Justice Pal also criticised Japan’s problematic diplomacy:
There I pointed out why I could not accept the prosecution charge of treacherous conductof the Japanese statesmen concerned. No doubt preparation for war was going on while
the diplomatic negotiations were being held. But such preparations were being made byboth sides. If the Japanese side ‘had little confidence that the Kurusu-Nomura
negotiations would achieve their purposes’, I do not feel that the American sideentertained any greater confidence in the diplomatic achievement.45
Japan prepared for war against the US while diplomatic talks between the two countries wereongoing. Justice Pal claimed this ‘treacherous design’ on the part of Japan was a serious matter.
But, he pointed out that a similar ‘treacherous design’ was also seen on the US side, andtherefore, both Japan and the US were equally responsible for the war. Regarding theprosecution’s accusations of a conspiracy, he argued that neither plan nor conspiracy existed
behind the start of the war. He regarded Japan’s decision to make war against the US as notmade in advance as a part of the alleged ‘overall conspiracy’, but rather made only during
Japan’s diplomatic negotiations with the US, after which it merely executed the decision.
In summarising Part IV of his Dissenting Opinion, Justice Pal said: ‘The statesmen, diplomats
and politicians of Japan were perhaps wrong, and perhaps they misled themselves. But they were
not conspirators. They did not conspire.’46
Justice Pal described Japan’s actions following the Zhang Zuolin Assassination Incident as notjustifiable. He also applied this assessment to Western colonialism. However, on the matter of analleged ‘overall conspiracy’, he argued that each ‘isolated’ act by Japan had been purposefullyNakajima: The Tokyo Tribunal, Justice Pal and the Revisionist Distortion of History309

framed by the prosecution to assert an ‘overall conspiracy’, as if Japan had managed the acts aspart of a policy of aggression.47
Also, Justice Pal stressed that Japan should not be seen in the same way as Nazi Germany.
According to his view, Tōjō and his group ‘might have done many wrong things; but, so far as
the public of Japan is concerned, certainly by their behaviour towards them they did not succeed
in reducing them to the position of terror-stricken tools without any free thinking or free
expression. The population of Japan was not enslaved as in Hitler’s Germany.’48 He claimed thatJapan did not have a dictator such as Hitler.49 The wars in the modern era were ‘not the result ofany design by any particular individual or group of individuals’,50 said Pal. He explained that the‘evil of warfare’ was transformed by a combination of factors.51
As mentioned earlier, Justice Pal criticised Japanese statesmen, diplomats and politicians with
judgmental terms such as ‘misconception’ and ‘wrong’.52 Still he argued that as long as theclaimed ‘overall conspiracy’ was not established from the evidence before the Tribunal, thealleged acts in the Indictment could not be found criminal. His argument was never ‘Japan was
innocent’ or ‘affirming the Great East Asia War’. Moreover, what should be noted here is that if
he absolved the suspects’ criminal responsibility he did not dismiss the moral responsibility ofJapan. He strongly criticised Japan’s war crimes and analysed Japan’s historical process after the
Manchurian Incident as critically as he did the colonisation of Western countries. Therefore it isobvious that the logic of neonationalists to infer ‘Japan’s innocence’ or ‘an affirmation of theGreater East Asia War’ from Justice Pal’s Dissenting Opinion is an obvious misreading as wellas an unwarranted jump in logic.
IV. Justice Pal’s Thoughts
In his Dissenting Opinion, Justice Pal repeatedly expressed the importance of and hope for theestablishment of ‘a system of international cooperation’.53
He said:
I doubt not that the need of the world is the formation of an international community
under the reign of law, or correctly, the formation of a world community under the reignof law, in which nationality or race should find no place.54
For the strict practice of international law, the establishment of international society under a ruleof law was necessary. Justice Pal strongly advocated the emergence of what he termed the ‘Super
State’, which he believed would eradicate wars and overcome racial discrimination.55
Obviously, he did not believe the idea of the world commonwealth would be realised in theimmediate future. He rather thought that the international social system ought to be transformed
toward the ideal of a world commonwealth. He regarded the first step towards the worldcommonwealth as the establishment of an international agency with national sovereignty as its
premise. He said that because such an international agency was not yet fully established, thepractice of international law faced serious difficulties. In other words, without a Super State,
there could exist no concrete executive power, and whether international law would be executedor not would after all be determined by the international affairs and power relations of the time.
This was the reason why he stressed the importance of the early introduction and establishmentof an international agency for the observance and execution of international law. And, heThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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believed that a widening sense of humanity to develop the international agency into the ideal
world commonwealth would stabilise the order of international society.
Justice Pal was a believer in humanism based on the philosophy of ‘dharma’ from ancient India.
He advocated Gandhism, and dreamt of the day that human beings would establish ideals based
ultimately on pacifism.
On his visit to Japan in 1952, Pal, asked to make speeches at different places in order tointroduce the idea of unarmed neutrality in the world. Strongly opposed to Japan’s
remilitarisation as then advocated by the US, he passionately advocated the teachings of Gandhi.
Pal showed his resentment and disappointment toward a Japan whose dependence on the US was
deepening, and he strongly criticised Japan as uncritically following the will of the US.
Visiting the Atomic Bomb Memorial in Hiroshima, he clearly expressed his bitterness toward
Japan. On seeing the memorial’s inscription, ‘Let all the souls here rest in peace. For we shall not
repeat the evil,’ Pal said:
Obviously, the subject of ‘we’ is Japanese. I do not see clearly what ‘the evil’ means
here. The souls being wished to rest here are the victims’ of the Atomic Bomb. It is clear
to me that the bomb was not dropped by Japanese and the hands of bombers remain
bloodstained. … If not repeating the mistakes means not possessing weapons in the
future, I think that is a very exemplary decision. If Japan wishes to possess military
power again, that would be a defilement against the souls of the victims we have here in
Hiroshima.56
His anger toward the mentality of Japanese people in
the post-war era was expressed in his remark. He
condemned Japan’s remilitarisation corresponding to
the will of the US, in light of US responsibility for theatomic bombing of Japan.
V. Misappropriation of Justice Pal’s Dissenting
Opinion by Historical Revisionists
As explained above, Japanese post-war historicalrevisionists have ignored the kernel of Justice Pal’s
argument and his thoughts outlined above, and instead
repeatedly invoked his Opinion to support theirpositions. They have distorted parts of Justice Pal’s
Dissenting Opinion for their own purposes,
specifically to insist on ‘Japan’s innocence’ andsupport ‘the affirmative argument on the Greater East
Asia War’ as well as their ‘criticism of the Tokyo
Tribunal’ and their ‘criticisms of the masochistic viewof history’. The serial arguments for example of
Tanaka Masaaki, who advocates a reading of Justice
The Cenotaph
Pal’s arguments as one that proves ‘Japan is not
guilty’, were especially influential and became afoundation for further misreadings of Pal which continue to the present.

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A writer and social activist, Tanaka was born in 1911, and developed his activities under the
influence of ultra-nationalists such as Shimonaka Yasaburo and Nakatani Takeyo in the pre-war
period. In 1933, Tanaka joined the newly established Greater East Asia Association that had
General Matsui Iwane (who was later executed as a Class A war criminal held responsible for the
Nanjing Massacre) as chairman. Tanaka was involved in editing the organisation’s paper,Greater East Asianism. Tanaka also served as Matsui’s secretary and was active as Matsui’s‘right arm’ until Matsui was appointed Commander of the Japanese Expeditionary Forces andsent to China in 1937.
In April 1952, soon after the lifting of media censorship by the US occupation authorities,
Tanaka published On Japan’s Innocence: The Truth on Trial, in which he offered his
interpretation of Justice Pal’s Dissenting Opinion.57 In his book, Tanaka quoted Pal’s arguments
in a generally accurate way then added his commentary. For example, on the Nanjing Massacre,
he faithfully quoted Pal’s Opinion and his conclusion, ‘it is a plain fact that the Japanese militarycommitted the atrocity’.58
However, Tanaka’s book title fundamentally distorts
Justice Pal’s argument. First, since Pal’s Opinion
criticised only ‘the criminal responsibility of Class A
accused’, the object in the book title ought to be ‘On
Class A Innocence’. It is important to note that Justice Pal
found criminal responsibility in the cases of Class B andClass C war criminals. He did not discount all of Japan’s
criminal actions.
Second, the term ‘innocence’ should be clarified. The
central point is that Justice Pal found the Japanese Tokyo
Tribunal defendants ‘innocent’ only in terms ofinternational law. As quoted above, Justice Pal said, ‘Tojo
and his group ... might have done many wrong things’,59
and ‘[t]he statesmen, diplomats and politicians of Japan
were perhaps wrong, and perhaps they misledthemselves’.60 Pal held the Japanese leaders morally
responsible for their actions even as he challenged the
Tribunal’s jurisdiction. Therefore, it is not accurate to saythat Pal found no responsibility among the Japaneseleaders for the acts committed by the Japanese Army, orthat they had no moral responsibility. From these points, at most the title should have been ‘On
Class A War Criminals’ Innocence’.
Apart from the misleading title, I believe that Tanaka was generally accurate in presenting theessence of Justice Pal’s argument. Although some problems are recognised, neither arbitrary
deletions nor distortions of Pal’s fundamental views were presented in his first book.
However, Tanaka’s next book, Justice Pal’s Discussion of Japan as Not Guilty, published in
1963 (and the best selling book of the year),61 contains obvious misreadings, falsifications,phrases that induce readers’ misunderstanding, and intentional omissions of, or obvious
deviations from, Pal’s arguments.

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For example, although in his Dissenting Opinion Justice Pal said ‘the hostility which commenced
between China and Japan on July 7, 1937 cannot be denied the name “war”’,62 and that Japan’s
acts after the Sino–Japanese War should be examined at the Tribunal, Tanaka claimed in his
book that Justice Pal’s Opinion was that the scope of the Tribunal ought to be limited to theperiod between 7 December 1941 and Japan’s surrender.63
This is an obvious misreading or falsification that seriously distorts Justice Pal’s argument.
Furthermore, Tanaka completely ignored Pal’s condemnation of the Zhang Zuolin Assassination
Incident, the Manchurian Incident, and the establishment of Manchukuo. He also ignored the factthat Pal had confirmed the Nanjing Massacre as well as Japan’s atrocities in the Philippines andstrongly criticised them. The sections in which Pal criticised these actions were among the mostimportant in the development of his argument. Therefore, omitting these severe criticisms ofJapan’s actions, which Pal termed ‘devilish and fiendish’,64 is a serious distortion.
It was at this time that Tanaka began to present his argument denying the Nanjing Massacre.
Tanaka later, in 1980, became a main polemicist of the massacre deniers. Justice Pal’s
Discussion of Japan as Not Guilty contained arbitrary interpretations, omissions and misreadingsof Justice Pal’s Opinion in favour of Tanaka’s political views, which influenced similararguments concerning Justice Pal’s Dissenting Opinion.
In 1964, a year after the publication of Justice Pal’s Discussion on Japan as Not Guilty,
literature scholar Hayashi Fusao published his book Affirming the Greater East Asia War, which
was subjected to much criticism. Hayashi presented his view of the hundred year’ war of East
Asia in the book. Hayashi re-defined the period from the end of the Edo Era (1868) to the end of
the Greater East Asia War (1945) as a ‘history of resistance’ of Japan and Asian countries
against Western Imperialism. Hayashi used a chapter of his book to introduce Justice Pal’s
Dissenting Opinion with quotations from Tanaka’s Justice Pal’s Discussion of Japan as Not
Guilty. Hayashi ended the chapter as follows:
It is unnecessary to talk about the Greater East Asia War again. Japan lost beautifully.
Future historians would write of Japan’s gallant fight, its brave spirit and its fate as aheroic chapter of the 20th century.65
Quoting Tanaka’s commentary in Justice Pal’s Discussion of Japan as Not Guilty — ‘[a]s longas Japanese people are indoctrinated in the sense of guilt that “Japan was the country which
carried out embarrassing aggressive wars to face the world,” Japan will never have its true
glory’66 — Hayashi drew on Justice Pal’s Opinion to support his thesis of the war as just. He
especially highlighted Pal’s alleged view of the outbreak of war between Japan and the US toassert that the Greater East Asia War was legitimate.
In the face of an onslaught of revisionist interpretations of Justice Pal’s argument which sought
to justify the Greater East Asia War, historian Ienaga Saburo responded in his 1967 paper, ‘The
Fifteen Years’ War and Pal’s Dissentient Judgment’.67 Pointing out the inaccuracy of the term
‘Japan’s innocence’ and criticising the superficial and arbitrary use of Pal’s Opinion, Ienaga
wrote that Pal’s Opinion was being distorted to strengthen a social atmosphere supporting theGreater East Asia War which had become increasingly dominant through the coordinated push ofpolitical power and civil forces.

Nakajima: The Tokyo Tribunal, Justice Pal and the Revisionist Distortion of History313

He also said that the Opinion was grounded on anti-communist ideology and its argument was
full of extremely distorted views. Richard Minear responded and Ienaga and Minear debated theissue. However, arguments that distorted Justice Pal’s Opinion in support of the neonationalist
discourse continued to appear, and this trend has increased, especially since the late 1990s when
Japan’s rightward drift became pronounced.
In 1997, a memorial monument to Justice Pal was erected at Kyoto Gokoku Shrine. It wasestablished by the Committee for the Establishment of Justice Pal’s Memorial Monument, whose
chairman was Sejima Ryuzo (a former Kwantung Army Staff Officer and former Supreme
Adviser of Itochu Corporation). Its members included Kyoto Governor Aranamaki Teiichi and
Kyoto City Mayor Masumoto Yorikane.
The establishment of the monument was followed by a similar statue of Pal at Yasukuni Shrine
in 2005. Nambu Toshiaki, the shrine’s Chief Priest, said at the unveiling ceremony: ‘It is myearnest wish that the drift of masochism will end, and the day when the spirits of war dead may
rest in peace comes as early as possible.’ This followed the homage to Pal beginning in 2002, atthe Yushukan, the Japanese military and war museum within Yasukuni Shrine. Pal’s photographs
and his remarks on his visit to Japan in 1952 were displayed in the context of criticising the‘Tokyo Trial view of history’ and the ‘masochistic view of history’. A 1998 movie titledPuraido: Unmei no Shunkan (Pride: The Moment of Destiny), directed by Ito Shunya, pushedcriticism of the ‘unjust’ Tokyo Tribunal to the fore. By arbitrarily invoking Justice Pal’s words
and his Dissenting Opinion, the director presented a vision wherein Tōjō Hideki kept his pride.
Fantasies and interpretations that distorted historical truth were featured in the movie, and it
became influential in right-wing discourse in contemporary Japanese society along with the
movement of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform. Pal also appeared in the comicbook Sensō Ron (On War) by Kobayashi Yoshinori in the same year. In the cartoon, Pal’s
argument was quoted as justifying Japan’s Greater East Asia War. For example, Kobayashi drewa balloon from Pal’s face, which said, ‘All defendants are not guilty!’ and included thiscommentary:
In the war / the United States / had absolutely no justice /Japan / had justice / of self-defence / furthermore of protecting the whole of Asia fromthe Western powers!
Kobayashi in his 2008 manga Pāru Shinron (The True Arguments of Pal). In this manga, again
distorted Justice Pal’s argument and criticised my book Justice Pal: Criticism of the Tokyo Trial
and Absolute Pacifism as a prelude to falsely claiming that Justice Pal’s Opinion was that ‘Japanwas not guilty’.
As explained, Justice Pal’s Opinion has been invoked in Japanese revisionist discourse to justify
the Greater East Asia War and to discredit the Tokyo Tribunal. Pal’s position has been employed
in attempts to lend legitimacy to Japanese historical revisionists in ways that distort Pal’s
thinking, writing and intention.
The revisionists ignore the fact that Justice Pal criticized Japan’s invasions of Asia following theManchurian Incident. They deliberately close their eyes to Pal’s severe condemnation of Japan’s
war crimes. Furthermore, they do not mention Pal’s passionate call for the establishment of an

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international agency, unarmed neutrality, and his opposition to Japan’s remilitarisation, while
distorting selected elements of Justice Pal’s Opinion to strengthen their claims.
It is important to free Justice Pal’s Dissenting Opinion from the false framework constructed by
the right wing, and reexamine it in light of historical evidence. This effort will strengthen theanalysis of the opponents of historical revisionism and the pervasive neonationalist tilt incontemporary Japan.
This is a revised version of a chapter from the book, Beyond Victor's Justice; The Tokyo War
Crimes Trial Revisited edited by Yuki Tanaka, Tim McCormack and Gerry Simpson andpublished with permission from Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.
Nakajima Takeshi is Associate Professor, Public Policy, Hokkaido University. He is the authorof Pāru Hanji: Tōkyō Saiban hihan to zettai heiwa-shugi (Justice Pal: Criticism of the Tokyo
Trial and Absolute Pacifism) and Bose of Nakamuraya: an Indian revolutionary in Japan.
Notes
1Translated by Kasahara Hikaru. Edited by Mark Selden.

2

Charter of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, signed in Tokyo on 19 January
1946, amended 26 April 1946, TIAS 1589, 4 Bevans 20 (‘Tokyo Charter’).
3

United States et al v Araki Sadao et al in The Tokyo Major War Crimes Trial: The Records ofthe International Military Tribunal for the Far East, with an Authoritative Commentary andComprehensive Guide (2002) Vol 105, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 36–7 (‘Tokyo Major
War Crimes Trial’).
4

Ibid Vol 105, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 37 (emphasis in original).

5

Ibid Vol 105, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 45.

6

Ibid Vol 105, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 67.

7

Ibid Vol 105, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 15.

8

Ibid Vol 108, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 1069.

9

Ibid Vol 108, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 1099.

10

Ibid Vol 108, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 1069–70.

11Ibid Vol 108, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 1089.

12

Ibid Vol 108, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 1111.

13

Ibid Vol 108, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 1171–2.

14

Ibid Vol 108, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 1180.

15

Ibid.

16

Ibid Vol 108, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 1172.

17

Ibid Vol 108, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 1180.

Nakajima: The Tokyo Tribunal, Justice Pal and the Revisionist Distortion of History
18

Ibid Vol 108, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 1090.

19

Ibid Vol 106, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 376.

20

Ibid Vol 106, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 428.

21

Ibid.

22

Ibid.

23

Ibid Vol 106, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 429–46, 460–2.

24

Ibid Vol 106, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 473.

25

Ibid Vol 106, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 513.

26

Ibid Vol 106, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 524.

27

Ibid Vol 106, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 525.

28

Ibid Vol 106, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 526.

29

Ibid Vol 106, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 527.

315

30

Arnold J Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs 1932 (1933) 465 quoted in Ibid Vol 106,
Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 527.
31

Ibid 467 quoted in Tokyo Major War Crimes Trial, above n 3, Vol 106, Dissenting Opinion of
Justice Pal, 528.
32

Ibid Vol 106, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 524.

33

Ibid Vol 106, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 547(34)–(35).

34

Ibid Vol 106, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 548.

35

Ibid Vol 106, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 483 (emphases in original).

36

Ibid Vol 107, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 785(2)–(3) (emphases in original).

37

Ibid Vol 107, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 785(3).

38Ibid Vol 107, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 785(20).

39

Ibid Vol 107, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 787.

40

Ibid Vol 107, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 785(29).

41

Ibid Vol 107, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 874–5.

42‘United States Note to Japan 26 November’ (1941) 5 Department of State Bulletin 461 (‘Hull
Note’).
43

Tokyo Major War Crimes Trial, above n 3, Vol 107, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 978.

44

Ibid Vol 107, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 963.

45

Ibid Vol 108, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 1038–9.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia
46

Ibid Vol 108, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 983.

47

See, e.g., ibid Vol 106, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 446 .

48

Ibid Vol 108, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 988.

49

Ibid Vol 107, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 692.

50

Ibid Vol 107, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 736.

51

Ibid.

52

See, eg, ibid Vol 108, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 983, 988, 1234.

53

Ibid Vol 105, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 135 (emphasis omitted).

54

Ibid Vol 105, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 146.

55

Ibid Vol 105, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 55.

56

Chūgoku Shimbun (Hiroshima, Japan), 4 November 1952.

316

57

Tanaka Masaaki, Nihon muzairon: shinri no sabaki [On Japan’s Innocence: The Truth on
Trial] (1952).
58

Ibid 28.

59

Tokyo Major War Crimes Trial, above n 3, Vol 108, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 988.

60

Ibid Vol 108, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 983.

61

Tanaka Masaaki, Pāru Hanji no Nippon Muzai-ron [Justice Pal’s Discussion of Japan as Not
Guilty] (1963).
62

Tokyo Major War Crimes Trial, above n 3, Vol 108, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 1025.

63

Tanaka, Pāru Hanji, above n 61, 165.

64

Tokyo Major War Crimes Trial, above n 3, Vol 108, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Pal, 1089.

65

Hayashi Fusao, Dai Tōa sensō kōteiron [Affirming the Greater East Asia War] (2nd ed, 2006)
341.
66
67

Tanaka, Pāru Hanji, above n 61, 342.

Ienaga Saburo, ‘15-nen Sensō to Pāru Hanketsu-sho’ [The Fifteen Years’ War and Pal’s
Dissentient Judgment] in Ienaga Saburo, Sensō to Kyōiku o Megutte [On War and Education](1973) 23–43.

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Myth and Fact in Northeast Asia’s History Textbook Controversies
Mikyoung Kim
The past is haunting Northeast Asia. The China-Japan-Korea triad has been on a repeatedcollision course over how each perceives the shared past. Bound by dense memory webs, culturalaffinity and geographical proximity, each of the three nations has made conflicting historicalclaims against the other, giving rise to conflict throughout the region and beyond.
China, Japan, and Korea constitute the core of the Northeast Asian “community.” According toRobert Nisbet, “community” encompasses “religion, work, family, and culture; it refers to social
bonds characterized by emotional cohesion, depth, continuity, and fullness."[1] No community,
however, can be totally unified; indeed, national communities can contain antagonistic elements,
and the members of a community are not necessarily content with one another. The communityof China, Japan, and Korea, like many a marriage, is charged with intense but coexisting feelingsof interdependence and conflict, of love and hate.
The triad bound by felt history engages in intense discourse for which history textbooks serve as
an important medium for mnemonic contention. This article examines the history textbook
controversies plaguing the three nations in Northeast Asia.
History Textbooks as Memory Sites
History textbooks are an important site of “memory wars.”[2] In the aftermath of 1982 history
textbook controversies involving Chinese and Korean protests over Japanese texts, the Japanese
government enacted the “Neighboring Country Clause,” proclaiming that in the interest “ofbuilding friendship and goodwill with neighboring countries, Japan will pay attention to these
criticisms and make corrections at the Government’s responsibility.” In 2001, two decade after
the conciliatory gesture, Chinese youths took to the streets protesting against Japan’s New
History Textbook (Atarashii Rekishi Kyokasho). In 2005, the South Korean Ministry of Foreign
Affairs and Trade called on Tokyo to instruct publishers of Japanese history textbooks to review
and change 51 items. Harking back to events four centuries earlier, South Korea’s commercial
market quickly cashed in on public anger by introducing a popular computer game called,“Hideyoshi’s Aggression and Chosun’s Counterattacks.” With history issues surfacing, theChinese and Korean media published a spate of stories on history textbooks and visits to
Yasukuni Shrine by Japanese leaders.

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South Korean computer game[3]History education in Northeast Asia needs to be contextualized within the context of regional andglobal expansion of mass education. With the spread of mass and compulsory education
throughout the twentieth century, governments sought to control pedagogical content witheducation ministries frequently taking the lead.[4] Education is a “system of legitimization”
wherein “schools process individuals” by instilling commonly shared values among thecitizenry.[5] Whereas school and family long functioned as important socialization units, schools
are now assuming a greater role in educating future generations.[6] Youth establishes selfidentity in relation to group membership in classes and schools, where knowledge about national
history is transmitted. Emile Durkheim led us to believe that “a man is surer of his faith when hesees to how distant a past it goes back and what great things it has inspired.”[7] Remembering
noble deeds, he said, elevates the community’s dignity and moral values. In that regard, national
history education is both a “model of” and “model for” society. The common past is the story ofa nation, and history textbooks tell the story of a nation to its citizens. Overlapping histories
make textbooks one important site where nations engage in “memory wars.”
Japan: The Price of Ambivalence
Post-Cold War Japanese history education emphasizes two main goals: 1) understanding national
history in the context of the global historical trajectory; and 2) educating citizens as members of
the international community.[8] The empirical realities have not been in sync with theKim: Myth and Fact in Northeast Asia’s History Textbook Controversies

319

educational goals: history education, instead, has been the target of domestic ideologicalcontention and international criticisms.
Political bifurcation over history textbooks is nothing new in Japan. The ideological pendulum
has been in constant flux between right and left throughout the postwar era. Textbooks approvedby the Ministry of Education after the beginning of the screening system in 1947, for instance,
were liberal enough to contain narratives on the Manchurian Incident of 1931 and the Nanjing
Massacre of 1937. Such critical self-historicism under SCAP (Supreme Command for the AlliedPowers) provoked the conservatives who deemed Japan’s aggressive wars Japan’s only viableoption to secure its own survival in the face of Western colonialism. With the pendulum
swinging to the right, the Liberal Democratic Party’s 1955 proposal to augment the screening
authority of the Ministry of Education ignited the first history textbook controversies. Textbooks
up for approval that year were criticized for such subversive actions as describing the bleak
living conditions of the working class and presenting rosy depictions of the People’s Republic ofChina and the Soviet Union.[9] With the “Red Purge” underway, the Ministry rejected more than
80 percent of the textbooks, citing “factual distortions.”[10] Tightening of the screening processcontinued for the following quarter century.[11]The pendulum swung back toward the progressive camp during the second major round of
history textbook controversies in 1982. It started with a Chinese newspaper’s allegation that the
Ministry of Education pressured textbook publishers to replace “aggression [towards China]”
with “advancement [into China],” and to replace “independence movement [in Korea]” with“riots [by the Koreans].” This allegation, which turned out to be false, was picked up by the
Korean and Japanese news media, fueling the “history” debates. With more and more media
outlets copying and embellishing each other’s accounts, history emerged as an important
diplomatic issue. The Suzuki cabinet proceeded to make accommodative gestures by enacting
the “Neighboring Country Clause,” as noted above.
Why did Japan move to placate its neighbors in spite of the factual inaccuracies andexaggerations of the media claims? I argue that it was a reflection of changing perceptual milieu:
Japan was rediscovering Asia. Japan had made a conscious decision to distance itself from Asia
at the turn of the nineteenth century. Very influential opinion leaders such Fukuzawa Yukichi
were at the forefront of advocating Japan’s de-Asianization policy.[12] In order for Japan tocatch up with the advanced West, they argued, it had to shed its backward and feudalistic Asian
identity. Asia lapsed into perceptual oblivion, as it were, until the 1982 textbook controversies,
coming at a time when both Korean and Chinese economies were rapidly developing, drove thesituation home. With Asia re-emerging on the Japanese mind map in the 1980s, more complex
and conflictual perceptions of the war emerged.
The international criticisms of Japanese history textbooks were a wake-up call for the Tokyo
government. Japan began paying attention to its former “victims” as a legitimate concern for
diplomatic relations. From the 1982 controversies through the 1990s, the Japanese government
extended an unprecedented number of apologies to China and Korea.[13] Prime Minister Suzuki(August 24, 1982) and Chief Cabinet Secretary Miyazawa (August 26, 1982) made specificreference to the textbook issues in their apologies.[14, 15] As the “comfort women” issues
emerged as a source of political and diplomatic contention in the early 1990s, more apologies
were extended to China and Korea. Prime Minister Miyazawa (January 17, 1992), Chief Cabinet
Secretary Kato (July 6, 1992), Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono (August 4, 1993), Prime Minister

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Murayama (August 31, 1994; July 1995), and Prime Minister Hashimoto (June 23, 1996; July
15, 1998) apologized for the pain and suffering endured by women.[16, 17, 18, 19] Many other
apologies on the war in general were made by a range of political leaders and even the Emperor.
Repeated apologies failed to convince the Chinese and Korean governments and people of theirsincerity. Regret and apology are two different things. Regret is a sentiment accompanying therealization of wrongdoing; apology, the communicative format through which regret isconveyed. Even today, China and Korea, remain keenly aware of the separate realms occupied
by sentiment and ritual, and of the telltale signs of inauthentic performance. Theories of Japanese
dual consciousness (tatemae-honne) fuel suspicion of performance-only insincerity in theapology rituals.[20] Repeated insults and denials by Japanese politicians confirm suspicions ofJapanese indifference and intensify demands for authentic remorse.[21] A deep perceptual
dilemma between Japan and its former victims fuels the “memory problem.”With the pendulum swinging to the left, the 1994 textbooks contained mention of Japanesewartime atrocities including the comfort women, Unit 731 and the Nanjing Massacre.[22] The
conciliatory stance provoked hostile reactions from Japanese rightists for being “masochistic”
and “biased.” This round of clashes led to the 1996 formation of “Tsukurukai,” which consists ofconservative diet members and academics critical of the new textbooks.[23] Tsukurukai authoredand published many books which reached the general public. The Research Association of
Liberal Historical Perspectives (Jiyushugi Shikan Kenkyukai) was another advocate ofconservative views which engaged in active public outreach programs such as publishing thethree-volume Manga History of Japan: What the School Textbooks Do Not Teach (Manga:
Kyokasho ga Oshienai Rekishi).[24]The saga continues in the twenty-first century. Following Education Ministry’s approval of the
New Japanese History (Atarashii Rekishi Kyoukasho) authored by Tsukurukai in April 2001,
China and Korea demanded revisions of the text, but to no avail. China Radio International, as an
example, reported on the Beijing government and the Chinese people’s strong dissatisfaction
with the new Japanese history textbook.[25] The controversies continued the following year
when a Chinese newspaper report linked Japanese corporations to Tsukurukai. Chinese
consumers launched boycotts of the companies linked to Tsukurukai. Amid the mass protests led
primarily by the youth, Asahi Breweries became the first target of boycott. The 2005 clashes
were, again, the result of Chinese and Korean protests against the New Japanese History(Atarashii Rekishi Kyoukasho), which was accused of downplaying the nature of Japan’s
militarism including its past aggression and the circumstances of World War II.

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Atarashii Rekishi Kyoukasho (upper left) and other texts in a bookstore

The Japan Teachers Union denounced the book published by Fusosha, and only 18 out of 11,102
junior high schools adopted the book, taking up only about 0.04 percent of the total market share.
Despite Beijing and Seoul’s persistent protests, the market share of “problematic” texts has been
consistently dismal.[26]South Korean protesters burn banners during 2005 demonstration over Japanese textbook distortions

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The Japanese history textbook controversies reveal two persistent patterns. First, Japan’s
domestic political divide has fueled the memory debates. A sequence of attacks andcounterattacks has led to no meaningful synthesis. The latest episode comes from Okinawa.
Hundreds of thousands of Okinawans, with the support of the prefectural government, protested
Ministry of Education instructions in June 2007 to retract descriptions of the Battle of Okinawa.
The Japanese military was known to have forced residents to commit mass suicides during thebattle. The Tomigusuku Municipal Assembly in Okinawa stated that the 2007 instructions were
to “deny the historical facts, accumulated through studies of the Battle of Okinawa that are basedon the numerous testimonies of those who experienced it.”[27] Japan as a country is still
grappling over what really happened during the war, in particular the nature of and responsibility
for war atrocities.
A second pattern is many of the international controversies began with erroneous or misleading
allegations and misunderstandings. Contrary to the widespread belief in the region, the Japanese
Ministry of Education does not directly intervene in textbook writing although it does conduct
textbook screening. Moreover, with the availability of commercialized textbooks, the process of
textbook selection is decentralized with local boards of education enjoying substantial autonomy
in the selection of textbooks from among those approved by the Ministry of Education. In 47
prefectures, some 500 Textbook Screening Committees are formed every four years under the
auspices of local boards of education. A committee usually consists of about 20 school
principals, teachers, experts and ordinary citizens who provide advice and consultations to theboard of education. After holding public textbook exhibitions and internal discussions, thecommittee selects the textbook to be adopted for the school district.[28] An analysis of thirtythree junior high school history textbooks (1950-2000) shows very little narrative change overtime.[29]Shanghai 2005 protest over Japanese textbooks

Compared to Japan, the Chinese and Korean systems of textbook writing, screening andmarketing are far less decentralized. The Ministry of Education in Korea exercises almost solesupervisory authority.[30] Since the 1980s the Chinese system has allowed private companies
and individuals to author texts, which are then subject to stringent screening process.[31]Kim: Myth and Fact in Northeast Asia’s History Textbook Controversies

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China: Narrative of Humiliation
The Chinese Communist Party censures a wide spectrum of social discourse. Dissemination of
information is closely monitored, and education is no exception. Debates on the tumultuous
internal strife (e.g., Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square Incident, etc.)
have been banned in the public forum, and few people have open access to factual
information.[32] History textbook narratives are also selective.
From the 1950s until the 1990s, noticeable changes took place in three areas: greater emphasison economy, science and culture; more descriptions on the Japanese invasion; and strengtheningof nationalistic and patriotic messages. The “Opium Wars” section of the junior high school
history textbook (1994 edition) refers to “[foreign] invasion,” “[Chinese] people,” and“[Chinese] bravery [on the battlefield]” more than five times each in a passage 600 words long.
The descriptions of humiliation suffered at the hands of foreign powers (e.g., the Opium Wars
[1839-1842 and 1856-1860], Taiping Rebellion [1850-1864] and the Boxer Rebellion [18991901] ) increased accordingly.[33] On the other hand, some narratives cast Japan in a positive
light as a country of cherry blossoms, home to Mount Fuji, and of advanced science andtechnology.
Japanese scholars have noted inaccuracies in the analysis of modern History in Chinese
textbooks. For instance, historian Kawashima Shin contests this description of post-Meiji
Restoration Japan, found in a section on the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, as follows:"Japan remained home to forces of feudalism with considerable power, and as domestic
markets were not large enough to bring economic benefits to everyone, there werenumerous popular uprisings. Japan’s rulers quickly decided that Japan’s path to continued
growth lay in taking over foreign lands, and they put together a ‘continental strategy’
aimed mainly at invading China."[34]The text notes that Japan became a modern nation through the Meiji Restoration (1868), but,
Shin contends, it exaggerates social instability amidst the rapid changes. With the major
exception of the Saga uprising staged by the remaining samurai class in 1874, popular rebellions
such as the Shimabara Uprising (1637-38) and urban riots (around 1767) took place well before
the Restoration. A conspicuous remnant of the feudal social order, the samurai class, faced a fatal
blow with the suppression of the Keian Incident (1651) and the Forty-Seven Ronin incident(1703) long before the Restoration. As for the “continental strategy,” it was the outcome ofJapan’s strategic choice to pursue its identity as a “continental country” as opposed to an“oceanic country.” Its subsequent invasion of China was a result of the doctrine rather than acause of the doctrine.[35]Regarding the Twenty-One Demands of 1915, Kawashima holds that the Chinese text narratives
exaggerate Chinese humiliations suffered due to Japan:
The European powers no longer had the energy to spend on Asian matters, and Japan
took advantage of this opportunity to accelerate its encroachment into China, plotting totake over the entire nation for itself.... Finally, offering support for Yuan Shi-kai’s bid to
become emperor of China, Japan set as its condition the Twenty-One Demands, whichwere tantamount to the very destruction of China as a nation. On May 9, 1915,...Yuan’sThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

324

government accepted these conditions. This is known as the ‘national shame of May
9’.[36]
While the narratives are not inaccurate, Kawashima finds overstated the implication that Japan
manipulated domestic Chinese politics for its own opportunistic advantage .
Kawashima’s list continues on the narratives of the 1931 Manchurian Incident: “Japan had adesperate craving for Chinese territory”; on the more open conflicts with Japanese forces in
China: “There was nothing surprising about the fact that the Japanese imperialists conducted
their war of aggression against China. This conflict was the natural outgrowth of a long-standing
policy in Japan, built up over many years, that pursued the annexation of China, the control of all
Asia, and finally world supremacy as its goals”; and on the defeat of the Japanese armed forcesin China: “China’s victory in the war against Japan was the first total victory in a war that the
Chinese people had fought against imperialism for more than a hundred years. This gave great
courage to and boosted the self-respect of all the peoples of the nation. It also formed a solid
foundation of the triumph that the people’s revolution would soon see. China’s war against Japan
was an integral part of the global war against fascism, and the Chinese people, by playing theirpart in this war made great contributions to this worldwide struggle and helped to boost China’s
position on the global stage.”[37]With “humiliation” as the underlying theme of the modern and contemporary periods, the overallnarrative emphasizes Chinese victimization at the hands of imperial powers. Japan emerges as
the “ungrateful beneficiary” of Chinese culture.[38] Kawashima thus concludes that Chineseconstruction of the history of China-Japan conflict contributes to distancing the two nations
today.
Korea: Far From Fault-FreeIn portraying Korea’s relations with Japan, two main themes run throughout Korean textbooks:
victimhood and resistance. The sense of victimization comes from deeply internalized wounds.
Korean history can be literally defined by foreign threat. According to Yoon Tae Rim (1984), thenumber of raids, incursions, and other offenses against Korea from the seas and by neighboring
peoples were no less than 1 to 1.5 times a year during the Koryo (918-1392) and Chosun (13921910) dynasties. The figures come exclusively from the official record, implying that the actual
number of aggression could be much higher.[39] The Korean sense of victimization is neither acontemporary phenomenon nor one exclusively related to Japan. The middle school textbook
states:We have suffered from many invasions by neighboring countries throughout our long
history. However, we have never provoked, exploited, or caused any pain to any of ourneighbors. In other words, we have always tried to maintain peaceful international
relations and preserve a peace-loving tradition.[40]The sense of victimization becomes stronger around the turn of the twentieth century when Japan
was the primary aggressor. The text accentuates the Chosun dynasty’s efforts to preserve its
sovereignty dignity in the whirlwind of imperialism spear-headed by the island country:
The Chosun government refused Japan’s demands for trade because of the inappropriate
terms used in the diplomatic documents. The expressions alluded to the superiority of theKim: Myth and Fact in Northeast Asia’s History Textbook Controversies

325

Japanese Emperor over the Emperor of Chosun. Furthermore, the documents included
contents that were beyond conventional diplomatic norms at that time.[41]Japan demanded talks [to open up Korea] while dispatching battleships to Kanghwa Island. The
act imposed threats on Korea. Thereupon, the Chosun government refused to meet the Japanese,
criticizing their tactics as barbaric and aggressive.[42]The above narratives juxtapose Korea and Japan: the former as a victim and the latter as anaggressor. Korea’s honorable behavior in confronting Japan’s naked belligerence is highlighted.
The moral superiority of the weak is juxtaposed against unprovoked violence unleashed by theassailant. The text emphasizes how Korea handled the threatening situation in spite of its
eventual fall into the hands of imperial Japan. The implicit pedagogical message, therefore, isthat Korea, however weak militarily, was morally superior. Korea was an honorable victim.
The theme of resistance is a relatively new one in Korean texts. In the aftermath of
democratization movements since the 1980s,[43] South Korean textbooks began placing greater
emphasis on people’s power. The middle school textbook openly acknowledges the need torewrite history from today’s standpoint. It further emphasizes the imperatives of shedding newlight on the dark past, as it declares in the following:
Our history is the record of our people’s footsteps. Past events can be re-evaluated fromthe historian’s perspectives [today], and the new meaning of the past is narrated in thehistory books. . . History is today’s lamp, and window to the future. Therefore, historicalnarratives should neither hide the dark past nor exaggerate the non-existent as if it did
exist.[44]One notable change in recent texts is the negative assessments of the Park Chung Hee regime.
The text states the regime had a “weak will for democratization,” citing “international criticism
of the dictatorship.”[45] In similar vein, the text highlights democratization movements in the
1980s and the positive changes taking place in North Korea.

Korean history textbooks

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Mnemonic democratization in South Korea meant giving a bigger voice to the previously
silenced.[46] This change is evident in the richer narratives on the mass resistance against
Japanese colonialism.[47] But this trend has also been criticized. A conservative Korean
academic stated: “Popularization of Korean history led to demoralization of our achievements.
All the modernizing forces like national leaders and capitalists were denigrated as the corrupt
power ... The section on economic growth, for instance, goes into detail about the negative
consequences of rapid growth ... The history textbooks are not really about our past. They record
resistance movements against any status quo.”[48]University textbooks, which lack a screening process, also are known to be nationalistic in tone.
Even a popular university textbook, Our History (Uri Yoksa) by the centrist historian, Han
Yongu, discusses the colonial period with chapter headings such as “The Plunder of Our Land,
Economic Resources, and Industry” and “The Japanese Imperialists’ Plan to Eliminate the
Korean Race.”[49] The legacy of Japanese colonialism is open to debate, and ideology is often
interjected. As in the case of China, Korea can hardly claim impartiality in textbook narratives.
The Korean case stands out in two ways. Korean texts devote more space than their Chinese andJapanese counterparts to the threats of western imperialism and Japanese colonialism. Theirfocus on Northeast Asian history is also the most substantial of the three, with themes ofvictimization at the hands of bigger powers and popular resistance emphasized.
Conclusion: Toward Reconciliation in the East Asian Community
World War II was and is a pivotal moment in Asian memory. Japanese wartime atrocities are
remembered throughout Northeast Asia. What we see through the so-called “history textbook
controversies” are deep historical grievances waiting to explode.
Japanese often argue that the ongoing memory wars are a mere reflection of a rising tide ofnationalism in China and Korea. Some assert that the Beijing and Seoul governments cynicallymanipulate anti-Japan sentiments as a means of diverting internal tensions to internationaltargets. During the second half of the twentieth century, Japan quickly restored its influence onfoundations of rapid economic growth under the auspices of a pacifist Constitution andAmerican protection. Japan’s neighbors, however, remember the dark years, and reject
expressions of regret for war atrocities that could mitigate Asian resentment directed against
Japan’s record of colonialism and war. [50] Here lies a deep perceptual chasm fueling thememory wars between the former aggressor and its victims. History textbooks, in the eyes ofChina and Korea, are tangible evidence of the Japanese lack of sincere remorse.
Why has there been an explosion of accusations against Japan since the 1980s? How can we
explain the cycle of protests? Four explanatory threads can be considered: rising nationalism,
increasing self-confidence, domestic situations and rising pluralism. Those who stress risingnationalism often contribute to intensifying rivalry in the region. Nakanishi Terumasa, aJapanese realist with a conspiratorial bent, for instance, asserts that the 2005 textbook
controversies were nothing but Beijing’s brainchild launched in an effort to block Japan’s bid toenter the United Nations Security Council.[51] Similar charges have been made against theprevious Roh Moo Hyun government in Seoul for its nationalistic policy stances on US-ROK
and ROK-DPRK relations.[52] More generally, with China and Korea emerging as rivals in
global markets, their voices as national actors became accordingly bigger.

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An alternative analysis is more optimistic. Seemingly anti-Japanese sentiments are notnecessarily a reflection of nationalism, but rather an expression of growing self-confidence.[53]While nationalism typically claims superiority by demeaning others, self-confidence comes fromwithin, entailing healthy pride grounded in objective achievements. Given the positive
association between economic growth and self-confidence, the ability to voice concerns overhistory is a result of decreased transaction costs. In the changed power equation, angering thepowerful (i.e., Japan) no longer entails the high costs it once did on the part of the recently
powerless (i.e., China and Korea).[54] Disagreements over the “history problem” are the natural
course of events in order to achieve mutual acceptance in an era of evolving power relationships.
Some Japanese and Western analysts claim that Beijing is exploiting popular anti-Japanesefeelings at a time of rising discontent in Chinese society. Beijing faces a wide range of problems(e.g., the widening gap between rich and poor and between coastal and interior regions, ethnic
conflict, Falun Gong, and rural migrants in search of work, environmental degradation) and mass
discontent is reaching dangerous levels. The Chinese Ministry of Public Security, acknowledged
74,000 mass incidents---demonstrations, riots and other acts of protest---in 2004, an average of
200 incidents per day.[55] Given current domestic tensions, Japan becomes a convenient target.
Finally, some theorists link rising political pluralism to historical issues. It has been suggested,
for example, that the real reasons behind the Chinese anti-Japanese sentiments lie with politicaldemocratization within the country.[56] As China and South Korea continue (at very different
paces) on their trajectories towards democracy, it is only natural that they seek to correct pastwrongs as a means to advance human rights. This line of thought frames historical wrongs as acontemporary issue of human rights, where the Japanese military violated the rights of Chineseand Koreans during the war.
Substantial efforts have been made to alleviate the discord over the Japanese history textbooks.
Joint colloquia among historians of the three countries resulted in textbooks with common
pedagogical content.[57] As Japan and Korea are currently locked in a dispute over the Japanese
Ministry of Education’s 2008 history education guidelines that claim Takeshima (Dokdo) as
Japanese territory, the textbook collaboration project’s vision of striking a balance between
nationalism and reconciliation is clearly needed.

Chinese edition of a common East Asian history textbook
prepared by Chinese, Japanese and Korean researchers

Such endeavors, however, carry only limited significance given the differences in educational
systems. Unless and until collaborative textbooks can be widely used in classrooms (a goal still
far from fruition), the works will not significantly impact on Chinese, Korean and Japanese
students. Moreover, recent actions taken by Japanese government have alarmed many in theregion. The 2007 passage of the revised Fundamental Law of Education with an inserted“Patriotism Clause” undermines the cooperative spirit.[58] Nevertheless, despite mixed signals,

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traditional hostilities are being weakened by the growing diversity and openness of Northeast
Asian societies in a rapidly changing world.
Mikyoung Kim is Assistant Professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute – Hiroshima City
University. Before assuming her current position in 2005, she taught at Portland State
University as a Fulbright Visiting Professor. She previously served with the U.S. State
Department from 2000 to 2004, specializing in U.S.-ROK-DPRK relations. Her forthcoming
book, Securitization of Human Rights: North Korean Refugees in East Asia, will be published by
Praeger in 2009.
This is a revised version of a chapter that appeared in Tsuyoshi Hasegawa and Kazuhiko Togo,
eds., East Asia’s Haunted Present (Westport and London: Praeger Security International, 2008).
Posted at Japan Focus on August 15, 2008.
Notes[1] Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New Brunswick and London: Transaction
Publishers, 2005, 7th edition), p. 6.
[2] Yoshida Takashi, “The Making of the Rape of Nanking: History and Memory” in Japan,
China, and the United States (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 129133.
[3] Source (http://www.gamania.co.kr/).
[4] Japanese compulsory education started during the Meiji period, while the Korean systembegan under US military rule after the country’s liberation from Japan in 1945. In the case of thePeople’s Republic of China, public education expanded dramatically after 1949 and compulsory
education took effect with the passage of “People’s Republic of China Compulsory Education
Law” in 1986. For more information on the global trend, see Francisco O. Ramirez and John W.
Meyer, “Comparative Education: The Social Construction of the Modern World System,”
Annual Review of Sociology, 1980, Vol. 6, pp. 369-99; Francisco O. Ramirez and John Boli,“Global Patterns of Educational Institutionalization,” in George M. Thomas, John W. Meyer,
Francisco O. Ramirez and John Boli (eds.) Institutional Structure: Constituting State, Society,and the Individual (Newbury Park and London: Sage Publications, 1986), pp. 150-172; John W.
Meyer,, Francisco O. Ramirez and Yasemin Nuhoglu Soyal, “World Expansion of Mass
Education, 1870-1980,” Sociology of Education, Vol. 65, No. 1 (1992), pp. 128-149.
[5] John W. Meyer, “The Effects of Education as an Institution,” American Journal of Sociology,
Vol. 83, No. 1(1983), p. 56.
[6] Steven Brint, Schools and Societies (Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 1998), pp. 136-170.
[7] Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1965
[1915]), p. 311.
[8] Shimanuki Manabu, “Nihon[Japan],” Tetsu Nakamura (ed.), Higashi Ajia no Rekishi
Kyoukasho wa Do Kakarete Iruka [What Have School History Textbooks Been Writing on East
Asia?: A Comparison of School History Textbooks of Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan] (Tokyo:
Nihon Hyoron-sha, 2004), pp. 13-38.

Kim: Myth and Fact in Northeast Asia’s History Textbook Controversies

329[9] The party later published three volumes of pamphlets entitled Pathetic Textbooks [Ureubeki
Kyokasho].
[10] The “Red Purge” was carried out under the auspices of SCAP. With left-wing activism wason the rise, the government began monitoring radical union activism including the Japan
Teachers Union. The purge led to the discharge of 22,000 “undesirable” citizens, and 1,200
teachers were dismissed from their schools. See, Leonard Schoppa, Education Reform in Japan(London: Routledge, 1991), p. 39.
[11] The Ministry of Education made a clear statement emphasizing the “political neutrality” ofschool teachers. See Christopher Hood, Japanese Education Reform: Nakasone’s Legacy(London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 20. In this continuum, the Hatoyama cabinet
passed a law abolishing the electoral system for municipal boards of education. Masamura
Kimimasa, Zusetsu Sengoshi [Post-War History: An Illustration] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo,1990). pp. 164-165.
[12] Okakura Kakuzo, The Awakening of Japan (New York: Century, 1904).
[13] Prior to the flurry of apologies in the 1980s and the 1990s, Prime Minister Tanaka extended
an apology which was included in the 1972 Joint Communique of the Government of Japan and
the People’s Republic of China: “The Japanese side is keenly conscious of the responsibility forthe serious damage that Japan caused in the past to the Chinese people through war, and deeply
reproaches itself.” For more details, see this.
[14] Tahara Soichiro, Nihon no Senso [Japan’s War] (Tokyo: Shogakkan, 2000), p. 161.
[15] Source.
[16] Source.
[17] Source.
[18] Source.
[19] Source; source.
[20] Yoshio Sugimoto, An Introduction to Japanese Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), pp. 28-30.
[21] “‘Hoeru Daijin’ Ooinihoeru [‘The Loose-Lip Minister’ Barks Loudly],” Sekai, October,1986. pp. 122-133.
[22] Adachi Yoshihiko, “Kodomo seinentachi ga toikakerumono: otonatachi wa ano sensokara
nanio manandanoka? [The Question that Children and Youth Ask Us---‘What Have Adults
Learned from the War?]’,” in Rekishi Kyoikusha Kyougikai [History Educator’s Conference](ed.), Ajia Taiheiyo Senso kara nani o manabu ka? [What We Learn from the Asia-Pacific War?](Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1994), pp. 4-24.
[23] Tawara Yoshifumi, “Document: Tsukurukai undo to wa nandattaka? [A Document: What
Was the ‘Tsukuru-Kai’ Movement?]” Sekai, December, 2001, pp. 105-120.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

330[24] Fujioka Nobukatsu/Jiyusyugi Shikan Kenkyukai, Manga: Kyokasho ga oshienai rekishi[Manga History of Japan: What the School Textbooks Do No Teach, 3 vols] (Tokyo: Fushosha,
1998).
[25] Text is here.
[26] Cable News Network. April 14, 2005.
[27] The Japan Times, May 15, 2007.
[28] For more details see Japan Echo, Vol. 34, No. 2, (2007), p. 11.
[29] Julian Dierkes, “The Stability of Postwar Japanese History Education amid Global
Changes,” in Edward Vickers and Alisa Jones (eds.), History Education and National Identity inEast Asia (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 255-274; Yoshida Takashi, pp. 81-101.
[30] Tae-Yol Seo, “Urinara Sahoegwa Gyoyukgwajung Gaebaleui Munjaejumgwa
Gaesunbanghyang: Jae 7 cha mit 8 cha Gyoyuk Gwajungeul Jungshimeuiro [The Problems of
Korean Social Studies Education and Suggested Solutions: With a Focus on the 7th and 8thCurricular Reform],” a paper presented at the 5th Gyogwaseo Forum (April 6, 2006): Seoul,
Korea.
[31] Supplementary learning materials in Korea are privatized, comprising a large market shareof total books sales. Chinese textbooks after liberalization are subject to stringent screening
processes. Oshiba Ryo, “National History-kara Transnational History-e [From National History
To Trans-national History]: Nihon-ni okeru rekishi kyokasho mondai o jirei-toshite [Towards
Japan’s Exemplary Acts],”in Hosoya Chihiro, Irie Akira,Oshiba Ryo (eds.), Pearl Harbor as
Memory [Kiokuto Shite no Pearl Harbor] ( Tokyo: Mineruva Shobo, 2007), pp. 400-420.
[32] Anne F. Thurston, “Community and Isolation: Memory and Forgetting: China in Search of
Itself,” in Gerrit W. Gong (ed.), Memory and History in East and Southeast Asia: Issues of
Identity in International Relations (Washington, D.C.: The Center for Strategic & International
Studies, 2001), pp. 149-172.
[33] Cho Satoshi, Ko Kenshuku and Ou Koshun, “Chugoku [China],” in Nakamura (ed.), pp. 3978.
[34] Kawashima Shin, “The History Factor in Sino-Japanese Ties,” Japan Echo, Vol. 32, No. 5(2005), p. 20.
[35] Shoji Junichiro, “Ilboneui Daeasia Jungchaekeui Yoksajuk Baegyung [The Historical
Background of Japan’s Policy Towards Asia]” Gukjaehak Nonchong (Daegu, Korea: Kemyung
University, Vol. 8 (February, 2004), pp. 344-355.
[36] Kawashima Shin, p. 20.
[37] Ibid., p. 20.
[38] Wu Xinbo, “Memory and Perception: The Chinese Thinking of Japan,” in Gong (ed.),Memory and History in East and Southeast Asia: Issues of Identity in International Relations(Washington, D.C.: The CSIS Press, 2001), pp. 65-85; En Iji, “Kindaika to Chugoku no rekishi
kyokasho mondai [Modernization and Chinese School History Book Issues],” in Chugoku no

Kim: Myth and Fact in Northeast Asia’s History Textbook Controversies

331

rekishi kyokasho mondai [Chinese History Book Issues –A Record and Introspection of the‘Hyo-Ten’ Incident] (Tokyo: Nihon Kyoho-sha, 2006), pp. 51-79.
[39] Choi Su Byon, “Hakmunjok Sadaewa Jajon [Intellectual Dependence and Self-Reliance],”
Hangukin Hangukbyong [Koreans and Korean Disease] (Seoul, Korea: Ilnyum, 1987), p. 180.
[40] Korean Ministry of Education, Junghakgyo Guksa [Middle School National History](sophomore) (Seoul: Korean Ministry of Education, 1998), pp.10-11.
[41] Guksa Pyonchan Wiwonhoe/ Gukjung Doseo Pyonchan Wiwonhoe [National History
Editorial Committee and National Publication Editorial Committee], Junghakgyo Guksa [Middle
School National History] (Seoul: Korean Ministry of Education and Human Resources, 2007), p.
194.
[42] Ibid., p. 197.
[43] For more information on the implications and commemorations of the Kwangju uprising fornationwide democratization, see Henry Scott-Stokes and Lee Jae Eui (eds.), The Kwangju
Uprising: Eyewitness Press Accounts of Korea’s Tiananmen (Armonk, NY and London: M.E.
Sharpe, 2000); Linda A. Lewis, Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980
Kwangju Uprising (Hawaii: University of Hawai’i Press and Center for Korean Studies,
University of Hawai’i, 2002).
[44] Guksa Pyonchan Wiwonhoe/ Gukjung Doseo Pyonchan Wiwonhoe [National History
Editorial Committee and National Publication Editorial Committee], p. 2.
[45] Ibid., p. 311; for critical assessment of the official textbook narratives, see Gyogwaseo
Forum (ed.), Gyungjae Gyogwaseo, Mueutsi Munjaeinga?: [What Are the Problems of
Economics Textbooks?] (Seoul: Duraesidae, 2006).
[46] See Anna M. Alonso, “The Effects of Truth: Re-presentations of the Past and the Imaginingof Community,” Journal of Historical Sociology, 1988, Vol. 1, Issue 3, pp. 33-57.
[47] Park Sopu, “Korea,” in Nakamura (ed.), pp. 79-92.
[48] Interview conducted with a leading conservative academic in Korea on February 16, 2005;
also see Gyogwaseo Forum, Hanguk Hyundaesaeui Huguwa Jinsil [Fiction and Truth about
Contemporary Korean History: Criticisms of High School Modern and Contemporary History
Textbooks] (Seoul: Duraesidae, 2004); Park Hyo Jong, Choi Mun Hyung, Kim Jae Ho and Lee
Ju Young, Paeatkin Uri Yoksa Doechatki: Gyogwaseo Forumyi Haebuhan ‘Waegok’eui Jinsang[Getting Our History Back: Truths about Historical Distortion: The Reality of ‘Distortion’
Dissected by the Gyogwaseo Forum] (Seoul: Giparang, 2006).
[49] Donald Baker, “Exacerbated Politics: The Legacy of Political Trauma in South Korea,”
paper in progress, 2007; see Han Yongu, Uri Yoksa [Our History] (Seoul: Kyongsewon, 2001).
[50] Okabe Tatsumi, “Historical Remembering and Forgetting in Sino-Japanese Relations,” inGong (ed.), Memory and History in East and Southeast Asia, pp. 47-63.
[51] Nakanishi Terumasa, “China Plays Its History Cards,” Japan Echo, Vol. 32, No. 4 (2005),
pp. 18-23.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia332[52] See Kimura Kan, “A Dangerous Current in Roh’s South Korea,” Japan Echo, Vol. 31, No. 4(2004), pp. 44-48.
[53] Kokubun Ryosei and Liu Jie, “The Danger of China’s Disaffected Masses,” Japan Echo,Vol. 31, No. 6 (2004), pp. 51-55.
[54] See Douglas North, “A Transaction Cost Theory of Politics,” Journal of Theoretical Politics,
Vol. 2, No.4 (2004), pp. 335-367.
[55] Melinda Liu, “Line of Defense,” Newsweek, October 24, 2005, pp. 26-30.
[56] See Zhu Jianrong, “The Real Reasons for the Anti-Japanese Outburst,” Japan Echo, Vol. 32,
No. 4 (2005), pp. 14-17.
[57] As an example, see Ni-Chu-Kan Sangoku Kyoutsu Rekishi Kyozai Iinkai (ed.), Mirai ohiraku rekishi: Higashi Ajia sangoku no kingendaishi [Future-Oriented History: China-JapanKorea, Three East Asian Countries’ Modern and Contemporary History] (Tokyo: Koubunken,
2005/2006).
[58] “Kawaru rekishi kyoiku: Ni-Chu-Kan-Tai saishin jijyo [Changing History Education: The
Latest Situations of Japan-China-Korea-Taiwan],” Asahi Shinbun. May 28, 2007, p.13.

Yoshida: The Nanjing Massacre

333

The Nanjing Massacre. Changing Contours of History and Memory in Japan, China, andthe U.S.
Takashi Yoshida
In Japan, China, the United States and beyond, arguably no Japanese wartime atrocity against
China is more widely known than the Nanjing Massacre. [1] Whatever the significance of mere
name recognition, however, the history and memory of the Nanjing Massacre are profoundly
complex. Indeed, even the phrase “Nanjing Massacre” (hereafter NM) remains contested, and to
this day there are circles within which the words cannot be spoken without stirring deep feelingand disagreement.
To make matters still more complicated, the definition and the meaning of the NM havecontinually changed over time. When the NM occurred in 1937, the duration of the atrocities
considered was a week or less, and the scope of the atrocities was limited to the area inside andaround the walled city. [2] In addition, the line between acts of war against combatants andunlawful acts of violence against civilians was not very clear.
Since 1937, however, commentators in Japan, China, and the United States have wrestled with
the NM, and, in each country, every passing generation has offered new interpretations. Not
altogether surprisingly, the accepted meanings of the NM have changed in accordance with theshifting international and domestic political climates of the times. From 1937 to 1945 the SinoJapanese War and the Pacific War shaped the history and memory of Nanjing in the threenations. From 1945 to 1971 Japan’s defeat, the civil war in China, and the cold war triggered
successive revisions of the understanding of the NM in Japan, China (both the People’s Republic
and the Republic of China), and the United States. During the period between 1971 and 1989, theVietnam War, U.S. and Japanese recognition of the People’s Republic of China, and the dispute
over Japanese history textbooks provoked further revisions. From 1989 to the present, the end of
the cold war, the death of Hirohito, and the rise of ethnocentrism not only in Japan, but also in
China and the United States prompted yet more altering in international understandings of the
NM. The present article focuses primarily on the changing perspectives and contentious debatesover the NM in Japan.
In presenting this fourfold periodization of the history and memory of the NM, I do not wish tofoster the impression that the changes have been linear or progressive. Nor do I wish to suggestthat the changes in the interpretations of Nanjing within the three nations have always been
consciously orchestrated. For example, the dispute over the NM was rather contained, the issues
little discussed, in Japan prior to the early 1980s. Since the death of Emperor Hirohito in 1989,
however, the dispute over Nanjing has become vituperative across national boundaries as well as
among Japanese intellectuals. In all three nations, numerous authors and commentators on thesubject have emerged, ranging well beyond academe to include journalists, former soldiers andpoliticians. Frequently, the chief objective in the intensifying debate seems not to have beenreaching consensus as to truth, but the assertion and preservation of national pride and a positive
sense of ethnic identity. Given the insistence of Japanese revisionists that the NM is essentially a
lie concocted to disparage Japan, it is impossible for Chinese or American participants in thedebate to find significant common ground. Since the 1990s, accounts of NM that grossly
simplify the history of the atrocities and tend to provoke animosity toward the perceived Other
have flourished in all three nations.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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Tracing the history and memory of the NM in Japan, China, and the United States not only
reveals the impact of social and political contexts of the time on the accounts of Nanjing, but also
reveals how these narratives have placed differing values on human lives according to nationality
and perceived ethnicity. The contested history and memory of the NM in Japan from 1989 to thepresent illustrates how and why the dispute has become so passionate and poignant.
By the mid-1990s, awareness of wartime Japanese atrocities, including the NM, may havereached its peak. The sharp rise in interest was reflected in public discussions, politics, museums,
textbook treatments, and court cases. Two historical events particularly amplified public
consciousness regarding Japan’s wartime past: the illness and death of Emperor Showa(Hirohito) and the emergence of non-Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) Prime Minister Hosokawa
Morihiro. These events contributed to an unprecedented rift between those who hoped to include
the sufferings of non-Japanese in Japan’s national history and those who believed that Imperial
Japan fought for good and there was no basis for highlighting atrocities.

Hosokawa Morihiro

The end of Hirohito’s reign offered an opportunity for many to reconsider Japan’s role during theFifteen-Year War (1931-45) and the emperor’s responsibility for the war. As the emperor lay ill,
citizen groups and academic institutions organized public meetings and lectures to examine
Japanese wartime atrocities in Asia. In municipal assemblies in such cities as Tokyo andNagasaki, critics raised questions concerning not only Japanese atrocities but also Hirohito’s war
responsibility. When Hirohito died in January 1989, the public gatherings and debates overJapan’s responsibility for the war were far from over.
For example, in August 1993, when Hosokawa Morihiro became the first non-Liberal
Democratic Party prime minister since 1955, he was asked about his view of the war. He
responded by calling the conflict an aggressive war (shinryaku senso). In August 1995,

Yoshida: The Nanjing Massacre335

Murayama Tomiichi, a Socialist prime minister, expressed his “deep remorse” (tsusetsu na
hansei) and “heartfelt apology” (kokoro kara no owabi) for Japan’s colonial rule and wartime
aggression. Lawmakers who believe that Imperial Japan liberated Asia and that postwar
education unfairly demonized Imperial Japan fiercely attacked Hosokawa and Murayama, andthe members of the Diet found themselves divided by their understandings of the past war. Yet
Hosokawa’s and Murayama’s remarks probably expressed a large share of popular opinion,
emblematic of the progressive tenor of the time.
Many public local museums as well as private museums, both large and small, were opened orrenovated from the late 1980s on. They commemorate not only the sufferings of Japanese war
victims, but also the losses and hardships of non-Japanese. These museums include the
Okunoshima Poison Gas Museum in Hiroshima prefecture(1988), the Osaka International Peace
Center (1991), the Kyoto Museum for World Peace at Ritsumeikan University (1992), theKawasaki Peace Museum (1992), the Peace Museum of Saitama (1993), the Hiroshima Peace
Memorial Museum (1994), Oka Masaharu Memorial Nagasaki Peace Museum (1995), and theNagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum (1996). In addition, a number of “mobile peace museums” —that is, special exhibitions that underscore Japanese wartime atrocities—traveled across Japanand attracted tens of thousands of visitors.

Okunoshima Poison Gas Museum, site of poison gas production during the Pacific War

These museum exhibits reflected the trend of the historical academy of the time. [3] Local
historians and teachers examined the effects of the war on ordinary people in the region. They
not only discussed the experience of American fire bombings and atomic bombings that took soheavy a toll on Japanese civilians, but also explored how ordinary Japanese cooperated with thestate and military to victimize other Asians during the war. They published numerous studies
which challenged through documentation the notion that ordinary Japanese were merely victimsof the war. Studies of local sites relating to the war, such as abandoned underground tunnels andmilitary factories and mines where Chinese and Korean laborers were enslaved, became common
during this period. [4]Meanwhile, lawyers filed actions on behalf of victims of Japan’s wartime atrocities. Between
1991 and 1995, more than twenty-seven such cases were brought in Japanese courts. Since themid-1990s, more than 200 lawyers nationwide have participated in war-related lawsuits against
the government and private companies, nearly all working without fees. Although these lawyers
obviously hope to recover damages for their clients, they also wish the Japanese government toformally acknowledge the nation’s responsibility for the alleged crimes. Onodera Toshitaka, oneof the leading members of the plaintiffs’ legal team, is one of many who believe that publicizing
the suffering of the survivors of Japanese atrocities and securing long overdue payment of wages
and reparations is a key to promoting reconciliation between Japan and its neighboring countries,
bringing to an end the poisonous legacy of war and colonialism that continues to roil the watersof the diplomacy of East Asia. [5]The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

336

In the 1990s, history textbooks became more inclusive of sufferings of non-Japanese victims of
the war and discussed Japan’s wartime atrocities in greater detail than previously. This is also
true of the NM. Six out of seven junior history textbooks available in 1997 stated that theJapanese military killed between 100,000 and 200,000 Chinese during and after the Battle of
Nanjing. Four of them also gave the Chinese official estimate of 300,000. Estimates of thevictims of Nanjing, as well as the treatment of the event, in junior high and high school
textbooks have fluctuated throughout the postwar era, but compared to the previous and later
editions, the 1997 editions tended to provide the most detailed discussion of the event andpresent the highest death totals.
Some Japanese appreciated the openness of the social and political environment that produced
such textbook descriptions in the 1990s. But others were far from welcoming it, indeed, theyfiercely challenged the notion that Imperial Japan was an aggressor, still less that it perpetrated
war crimes. In their eyes, Japan fought a just war and liberated Asia from Western imperialism.
The proponents of this view have powerful allies in Japan, and even some abroad. Many of therepresentatives of the other Asian governments, who participated in “Celebration of Pan-Asian
Unity” (Ajia kyosei no saiten), held in Tokyo in 1995 by the National Committee for the Fiftieth
Anniversary of the End of World War II (Shusen gojusshunen kokumin iinkai) openly expressedgratitude for Japan’s contribution to Asian independence. They include the former Deputy Prime
Minister and Foreign Minister of Thailand, Vice Chancellor of the National University of
Malaya, and Ambassador at Large to Africa from Indonesia. These were social and politicalelites who did not remember Japanese wartime occupation as being particularly cruel. Between
1993 and 1995, the committee waged a nationwide campaign to protest Premier Hosokawa’s
characterization of the war and prevent the Diet from issuing apologies for Japan’s aggression
and colonialism.
This revisionist movement, whose evident goal was to challenge the negative characterization ofImperial Japan and to tone down, if not whitewash, Japan’s wartime atrocities and colonialism,
was not new in the 1990s. It has existed throughout postwar Japanese society, but the magnitudeand collaborations among different leading professionals was a new phenomenon in the 1990s.
In 1995, Fujioka Nobukatsu, a professor at the University of Tokyo, and his supporters
established the Association for the Advancement of the Liberal View of History. They soon
founded the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform (Atarashii rekishi kyokasho otsukuru kai) in order to combat the junior and senior high school history textbooks that detailed
Japan’s wartime colonialism and atrocities such as the NM. Fujioka staunchly resisted a view ofthe era that detailed such war crimes, considering it damaging to the self-esteem and patriotism
of Japanese youth and producing a mindset that was masochistic and self-derogatory.
Fujioka and some of his colleagues in the Society claimed that no ordinary citizen in Nanjing
was killed illegally. They argued that the chaotic situation that occurred in Nanjing was not thefault of the Japanese army, but resulted from the fact that Chinese leaders deserted the city
leaving chaos in their wake. He claimed that the NM—that is, the event defined as the killing of
200,000- 300,000 civilians—was a fabrication and lashed out at school textbooks that provided
such baseless casualty estimates. To him, Japan was engaging in a battle, in which killings of theenemy were justified, and slaughtering prisoners of war was also acceptable as keeping them
alive could have endangered lives of the Japanese troops. Therefore, in contrast to theconclusions drawn by many historians, including Japanese historians, Fujioka concluded
Japanese troops had committed no “massacre.” In response to what Fujioka deemed theYoshida: The Nanjing Massacre337

masochistic message of the educational mainstream, the Japanese Society for Textbook Reform
proceeded to author their own alternative text, titled New History Textbook (Atarashii rekishi
kyokasho). While the authors were required to include a brief statement regarding the Japanesekilling of civilians in Nanjing in order to secure government approval of their textbook, they
tried to offset this compromise by stressing that the dispute over the Nanjing incident is ongoing
and that various views exist on the subject. [6]The New History Textbook

Both sides of the argument rightly regard the stakes in the debate as enormous for Japan’s future.
The on-going battle over Nanjing can be seen not only in history textbooks, but also in films,
courts, in the academy and in political debate. Don’t Cry, Nanjing (1995), made by Chinese andHong Kong filmmakers, that depicted atrocities in Nanjing, traveled across Japan in 1997 and1998. A Japanese response to Don’t Cry Nanjing was Pride: The Moment of Destiny (Puraido:
unmei no toki; 1998), a film that suggested that the chief prosecutor of the Tokyo Trialfabricated the atrocities in Nanjing. Legal battles have also been waged by both sides. On the one
hand, the Li Xiuying case was brought to recover the honor of a Chinese woman who was
stabbed nearly forty times by three Japanese soldiers during the atrocities. Simultaneously,
another action was filed to restore the reputations of two Japanese officers who, in 1937, werereported to have engaged in a contest to see who could kill more Chinese in what came to be
known as the 100-man beheading contest. The divisions are not only those between nations.
They are also played out within Japan. Since its foundation in 1984, the Research Committee on
the Nanjing Incident (Nankin jiken chosa kenkyukai) has published in-depth studies
documenting the atrocities in Nanjing. In contrast, the Japan Association for “Nanjing” Studies(Nihon “Nankin” gakkai) has zealously published revisionist accounts denying the NM since its
founding in 2000.

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338

Yushukan war history exhibits at Yasukuni Shrine

While most revisionist accounts are available only in Japanese, some have also appeared in
English since the 1990s. As the history and memory of the NM became internationalized, theJapanese revisionists have attempted to convince the world that what is known as the NM has
been falsified. The spirit of these revisionist versions has much in common with some equallyemotional, nationalistic, and ethnocentric statements about Nanjing that have emanated from
China and the United States. Indeed, each has fed off the others. In China, many accounts andmuseum exhibits dealing with Nanjing have fostered a self-congratulatory nationalism,
calculated to strengthen loyalty to the government while paying scant attention to the facts, as
opposed to reiterating an iconic position such as the 300,000 deaths. The same may be said, fromacross the ideological barricades, of the Yasukuni Shrine’s museum presentation of the Pacific
War with its complete lack of reference to Japanese atrocities. Moreover, some American works
on Nanjing have ascribed the atrocities to an alleged Japanese racial character or unique cultural
behavior, ignoring the widely shared racist thought that lay behind the war’s savagery. [7]
In my view, such approaches in their failure to engage the evidence, whether through denial orexaggeration, are every bit as harmful as the Japanese revisionist accounts. Grounded in
xenophobic hatred and enduring suspicion, they are no less tendentious than the wartime
propaganda that preceded them. It seems doubtful that any useful assessment of the NM will ever
emerge from assumptions that begin and end with reifications of national stereotypes, anapproach which makes it impossible to clarify why the NM occurred and how it fits into thelarger pattern of Japanese military behavior in China. To the contrary, such responses serve only
to marginalize carefully researched and more complex historical analyses of the NM. Because
their definitions of “massacre,” “victim,” and “perpetrator” differ in fundamentals, it is unlikelythat Japanese revisionists and their counterparts abroad can ever reach a consensus on what
happened at Nanjing. In such an environment, the dispute over the NM will never achieve

Yoshida: The Nanjing Massacre339

closure, and nationalistic and ethnocentric narratives will continue to attract a popular audience.
The consequences of such an outcome can only be to further poison relations between China andJapan.
In my book, I portray the NM as an event that has been severely politicized and distorted fromseveral directions. I show how the subsequent treatments of an historical event across nationalboundaries can reveal more about the anxieties, prejudices, and political agendas of its
commentators than about the event itself. In exploring this ongoing instance of uses and abusesof history and memory, I hope to provide an antidote to the poisonous tendency of the NM
literature to provoke hatred rather than reasoned analysis, understanding rather than mutual
recrimination, and make it possible to approach a truer understanding of one of the great
tragedies of the twentieth century.
Takashi Yoshida is assistant professor of history at Western Michigan University and author of
The Making of the “Rape of Nanking”: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the UnitedStates.
Notes[1] This essay summarizes Chapter 10 (“War Over History and Memory”) of my The Making of
the “Rape of Nanking”: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States (Oxford;
Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 129-153.
[2] Tilman Durdin, for example, reported that at least 33,000 Chinese were killed during theBattle of Nanjing. See “Japanese Atrocities Marked Fall of Nanking After Chinese Command
Fled,” New York Times, 9 January 1938, p. 38. In contrast, in The Nanjing Incident (Nankinjiken), published in 1997, Kasahara Tokushi defined the NM as the atrocities which occurred
during both the Battle of Nanjing and the ensuing occupation, namely from December 4, 1937,
until March 28, 1938. He estimated that the Japanese Army and Navy killed between 100,000
and 200,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians in Nanjing and its six counties. See Kasahara
Tokushi, The Nanjing Incident (Nankin jiken), (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1997), pp. 214-28.
[3] These numerous “masochistic” museums provoked the neonationalist backlash in many
spheres including the call for textbook revision and the decision by the Yasukuni Shrine torenovate its war museum, the Yushukan. Until the first national war museum, the Showakan was
built, these museums highlighting Japanese atrocities had few competitors.
[4] Kasahara, The Nanjing Incident, p. 224, n46 and n47.
[5] Onodera Toshitaka, Sengo hosho saiban toso no kadai to tenbo (Problems and Prospects in
Postwar Legal Struggles over Compensation), pp. 13-15.
[6] Nishio Kanji, et al., eds., New History Textbook (Atarashii rekishi kyokasho), (Tokyo:
Fusosha, 2001), pp. 270, 296.
[7] See, particularly, Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War
II (New York: Basic Books, 1997). For a more detailed analysis of Chang’s volume, see Takashi
Yoshida “Refighting the Nanjing Massacre: The Continuing Struggle over Memory,” in Nanking
1937: Memory and Healing, eds. Fei Fei Li, Robert Sabella, and David Liu (M.E. Sharpe, 2002),
pp. 166-71. On the role of racism in wartime Japan and the United States, see John Dower, War
without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986).

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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Sites of Japanese Memory: Museums, Memorials, Commemoration
Yasukuni Shrine, its War Museum, and other World War II Museums“The National Politics of the Yasukuni Shrine”
Takahashi Tetsuya
N.D.
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Takahashi-Tetsuya/2272“Yasukuni Shrine: Ritual and Memory”
John Breen
June 3, 2005
http://www.japanfocus.org/-John-Breen/2060“Japan, the United States and Yasukuni Nationalism: War, Historical Memory and the
Future of the Asia Pacific”
Mark Selden
September 10, 2008
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Mark-Selden/2892“Yomiuri and Asahi Editors Call for a National Memorial to Replace Yasukuni”
Wakamiya Yoshibumi and Watanabe Tsuneo
February 14, 2006
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Watanabe-Tsuneo/2124“Revising the Past, Complicating the Future: The Yushukan War Museum in Modern
Japanese History”
Takashi YOSHIDA
December 2, 2007
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Takashi-YOSHIDA/2594“Heroic Resistance and Victims of Atrocity: Negotiating the Memory of JapaneseImperialism in Chinese Museums”
Kirk A. Denton
October 17, 2007
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Kirk_A_-Denton/2547“Nanjing’s Massacre Memorial: Renovating War Memory in Nanjing and Tokyo”
Jeff Kingston
August 22, 2008
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Jeff-Kingston/2859
In the absence of a “national war memorial” designated by the Japanese state, theYasukuni Shrine, an institution founded to commemorate the fallen of Japan’s civil wars
from 1853 to 1877 and Japan’s wars abroad in later years, is receiving growing attention asa site of memory and commemoration. Since it was once a pillar of prewar militarism, theshrine was legally detached from the state and re-established as an “independent religious

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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body” immediately after World War II. Nevertheless, politicians continue to blur the line
between religion and state and convey support for the idea that the war had divine
qualities by paying official visits to the shrine. The essays in this section detail further justhow controversial the Yasukuni Shrine remains.
Takahashi Tetsuya, author of a best-selling book on the role of the shrine, forexample, notes that active politicians “worshipping” the “Gods of Yasukuni” at the shrine
violates articles 20 and 89 of the Constitution, which stipulate a separation of state andreligion. Moreover, he argues that worship at the shrine, where not only soldiers, but alsoClass-A war criminals are venerated as Gods, contradicts the government’s official
acknowledgement of the war as one of aggression. The shrine’s wartime role, Takahashi
stresses, stands in stark contrast to postwar Japan’s ideology of pacifism. The basic
problem with the Shrine, Takahashi argues, is that it is not a place of mourning, but a place
to honor the military war dead—an act that contradicts a critical and reflective approach toJapan’s wartime past.
John Breen disagrees with Takahashi. He introduces the various sites within the
Shrine and interprets it as a place of “intimate personal memory.” Breen also emphasizes
that “praying for peace” by remembering the war dead is an integral part of the activities ofthis institution.
Mark Selden’s article adds another dimension to the arguments by putting the“Yasukuni Problem” in an international perspective, including Japan’s relations with theUnited States and “competing nationalisms” in the Asia-Pacific. Urging readers to set aside
images of a monolithic Japan when talking about war-related issues, Selden emphasizes
deep fissures in “Japanese” attitudes towards the Yasukuni Shrine. In order to underline
this claim, he introduces memorials with different approaches, such as the “Cornerstone ofPeace” in Okinawa. The next text features the chief editors and the publishers of Japan’s
two largest newspapers, who strongly criticized Prime Minister Koizumi Junichirō’s
controversial visits to the Shrine, and is an example of how discussions around the shrine
escalated in the early 2000s. The fact that they both did so was striking: the Yomiuri, which
is usually considered rather conservative, had supported politicians’ visits to the Shrine in
the past, while the Asahi had considered them a violation of the constitutional provision of
separation of state and religion. But, in the early twenty-first century, a consensus
emerged that visits to the controversial Shrine harmed Japan’s reputation abroad,especially its relations with China and Korea, and so should stop.
Takashi Yoshida’s article then takes us inside the grounds of Yasukuni by analyzing
the Yûshûkan war museum. Yoshida concludes that the museum clearly advocatesconservative, revisionist ideas that beautify the war. In contrast to the Yûshûkan, the next
two essays show that the war is portrayed very differently in memorials and museums in
two of the countries that were victims of Japanese military aggression: Korea (South) andChina. Kirk Denton explores representations of Japanese imperialism and war in museumsof the People’s Republic of China (PRC), including the Northeast Martyrs Memorial Hall(celebrating the sacrifices of those who lost their lives in the northeastern region of China,also known as Manchuria), the Memorial Hall of the People’s War of Resistance Against theJapanese in Beijing (commemorating the 1937 incident that formally began full-scale war
between China and Japan), the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, the Unit 731 Museum, andthe September 18 History Museum (commemorating the outbreak of the Manchurian

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Incident 1931). Last, Jeff Kingston provides a more detailed look at the Nanjing Massacre
Memorial in Nanjing, China, including the reactions of visitors to the memorial.

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The National Politics of the Yasukuni Shrine
Takahashi Tetsuya
Translated by Philip Seaton
Takahashi Tetsuya’s “The National Politics of the Yasukuni Shrine,” is among the mostimportant statements to emerge from the debate over Yasukuni Shrine, historical memory andwar nationalism.
Japan Focus is pleased to present chapter seven of Naoko Shimazu, ed., Nationalisms in Japan.
Philip Seaton is the translator.
Takahashi Tetsuya is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the
University of Tokyo. A philosopher and the author of the best-selling Yasukuni Mondai (TheYasukuni Problem). His current research interests center on problems of deconstruction, history
and memory, and the Showa era.
Philip Seaton is Associate Professor, Institute of Language and Culture Studies, Hokkaido
University. He is currently researching war-related commemorative programmes on Japanese
television and undertaking an oral history project focusing on how members of the postwar
generations have reacted to knowledge of relatives’ war experiences.
We thank Takahashi, Shimazu, Seaton and Routledge for their cooperation in publishing thisarticle.
Find a podcast of Takahashi Tetsuya’s lecture of March 6, 2007 on
Postwar Japan on the Brink: Militarism, Colonialism, Yasukuni Shrine. This was the inaugurallecture of The Tetsuo Najita Distinguished Lecture Series in Japanese Studies at the Universityof Chicago.
Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō and Tokyo Mayor Ishihara Shintarō have repeatedly
worshipped at Yasukuni Shrine since 13 August 2001 and 15 August 2000 respectively, andhave expressed their intentions to continue worshipping in the future. In the face of this worship,
there has been bitter criticism from inside and outside Japan. There are doubts over whether
worship by public ﬁgures at Yasukuni Shrine, which is an autonomous religious institution(shūkyō hōjin), contravenes Articles 20 and 89 of the Constitution, the provisions concerning theseparation of religion and the state. Furthermore, worship at the shrine where Class A war
criminals, those found guilty as the leading war criminals by the International Military Tribunal
for the Far East, are enshrined, is seen as Japanese political leaders’ neglect of Japan’s war
responsibility and causes distrust among the people of Asia, including China and South Korea.
Elsewhere I have criticized the prime minister’s and others’ Yasukuni Shrine worship both fromthe perspective of the constitutional issue of the separation of religion and the state, and from theperspective of war responsibility.1 The aim of this chapter is to argue that the essential meaningof Yasukuni Shrine worship is to oppose the constitutional separation of religion and the state, by
clarifying, from a philosophical and historical perspective, the political objectives held by theprime minister and others who repeatedly worship at the Shrine.

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The political nature of Prime Minister Koizumi and Mayor Ishihara’s Yasukuni
worship
In terms of the political objectives of Yasukuni Shrine worship, one aspect that has been widely
examined is the inﬂuence of the Izokukai (War Bereaved Association), which has been politically
active in demanding the ofﬁcial worship of the prime minister and emperor. If the prime minister
worships at Yasukuni Shrine, the ruling party can obtain the votes of the Izokukai, whichamounts to hundreds of thousands. During the Liberal Democratic Party (hereafter LDP)
leadership contest in 2001, Koizumi used the promise to worship at the Shrine against
Hashimoto Ryūtarō, a former prime minister and former chairman of the Izokukai. This study,
however, is concerned with political objectives which exist above domestic politics, namely
national objectives. ‘National politics’ (nashonaru poritikkusu), that is, an attempt to lead thecountry or the entire nation in a specific direction, merits a philosophical and intellectual analysis
and is the focus of this chapter.
Prime Minister Koizumi attempts to give the impression that his Yasukuni Shrine worship is notpolitical in nature, but that it stems from natural feelings of commemoration or mourning for the
war dead. For example, in a statement made by Koizumi on the occasion of his ﬁrst visit to
Yasukuni since becoming prime minister, he commented as follows:
When I stand before the souls of the people who, believing in the future of their country,
fell in battle during that difﬁcult period, I think again how the peace and prosperity of
today’s Japan is built upon their precious sacriﬁce, and I have come here to renew myyearly pledge for peace.2
Furthermore, at a press conference following his fourth visit on 1 January 2004, he said:
I worshipped with many thoughts in mind: the thought that the Japan of today is built
upon the precious sacriﬁce of the people who lived in a time of war and unwillingly had
to give up their lives, with gratitude for peace, and the hope that from now on Japan willprosper in peace.3
From these comments, it seems at a glance as if Koizumi is simply expressing apoliticalsentiments of commemoration or mourning and desire for peace. But the problem is that this actof ‘commemoration’ or ‘mourning’ is nothing more than the political act of state recognition of
the souls enshrined at Yasukuni, hence, a political act with a national objective.
In the prime minister’s statements above, he repeatedly used the phrase ‘precious sacriﬁce’ (tōtoi
gisei). Saying that the ‘the peace and prosperity of today’s Japan’ or ‘the Japan of today’ is built
upon the ‘precious sacriﬁce’ of the Japanese soldiers and civilian employees of the military(gunzoku) enshrined at Yasukuni, is to praise, beautify and honour the soldiers and civilian
employees who built ‘the peace and prosperity of today’s Japan’ or ‘the Japan of today’.
Whether the ‘Japan of today’ is ‘prospering’ in ‘peace’ is not necessarily self-evident as
witnessed, for example, in the Okinawan situation. There is a logical inconsistency with theproposition that the ‘Japan of today’ is only possible thanks to the war dead enshrined at
Yasukuni.
Even without making this clear leap of logic, the prime minister’s attitude of honouring the‘precious sacrifice’ of those enshrined at Yasukuni further indicates the political nature of the actof his worship. Why cannot Koizumi Jun’ichirō and Ishihara Shintarō leave the commemoration

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and mourning of the souls enshrined at Yasukuni up to the priests at the shrine? And if the prime
minister and mayor of Tokyo want to commemorate and mourn for the enshrined, why do they
not choose to worship quietly on their own as ‘private individuals’? When Japan’s politicalleaders worship at Yasukuni as prime minister and mayor of Tokyo and praise the ‘precious
sacriﬁce’ of the enshrined, they send the strongest message to the Japanese people that ‘dying for
one’s country’ is a ‘precious’ act and an act worthy of national honour.
In contemporary Japan, a political movement to make the Japanese state once again into an agent
capable of prosecuting war (sensō suikō shutai) is gaining strength. While for the ﬁrst time since
the end of World War II, heavy armour from the Self-Defense Forces (hereafter SDF) is being
sent to Iraq, a state of emergency is gradually being put in place. There is talk of the enactmentof a permanent law to allow the overseas deployment of maritime SDF, and debates about
revision of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution.
In democratic states, even if the constitution makes military action possible, that on its own is notenough for the prosecution of a full-scale war. For the state to undertake a full-scale war, thestrong support, cooperation and participation of the people are necessary. On top of theinevitability of casualties, including soldiers and civilian employees in the military, it isnecessary for the people to accept the sacriﬁce necessary ‘for one’s country’ (okuni no tame) inorder to protect the ‘national interest’ (kokueki). The people must support war as a national
policy, and in time, the ‘heart’ (kokoro) and ‘national spirit’ (kokumin seishin) of the people will
come to accept sacriﬁces ‘for their country’.
In order for the people to accept the above sacriﬁce and support war, their sacriﬁce must be
praised by political leaders as ‘precious sacriﬁce’. ‘Sacrifice’ must be praised, beautified (bika)
and made the object of ‘respect and gratitude’ (kansha to keii). Even if the people remain
unmoved by the suffering of the enemy, if they come to feel their own suffering and the sufferingof family, friends and fellow countrymen as painful, empty and something that should not have
happened, they will no longer be able to accept the sacrifice that accompanies war. The people
will then lose their desire to support, cooperate and participate in wars that bring new sacrifice.
While accepting the inevitability of death in war, if political leaders do not acknowledge death as‘precious’ or express ‘thanks and respect’ in public, the state will ultimately be unable tomobilize the people for war.
Prime Minister Nakasone articulated this idea in 1985, arguing that
In America they have the Arlington Cemetery. If you go to the Soviet Union and otherforeign countries they have Tombs of the Unknown Warriors. They have places where
the people can express their thanks to those who have fallen in battle. This is perfectly
natural. Otherwise, who is going to give their life for the country?4
Prime Minister Koizumi has repeatedly expressed his ‘respect and thanks’ to those enshrined at
Yasukuni: ‘With feelings of respect and gratitude to the war dead, I expressed my feelings ofmourning’.5 If political leaders repeatedly express their ‘gratitude and respect’ to the fallen, thedeaths of those who fell in war will be praised, beautiﬁed and honoured at the level of national
politics as ‘deaths worthy of respect’ and ‘model deaths that should be learned from’. Therefore,‘gratitude and respect’ became the most politically effective words for achieving the state’s
political objective of being a war-prosecuting agent, stirring the ‘heart’ of the people andcreating a ‘national spirit’.

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At a press conference following the December 2003 cabinet decision to send the SDF to Iraq,
Prime Minister Koizumi commented, ‘[t]he spirit of the Japanese people [Nippon kokumin noseishin] is being tested’.6 This use of ‘the spirit of the people’ is connected with the meaning ofthe ‘heart’ of the people and the ‘spirit of the people’ mentioned above. It is possible that there
will be casualties in action among the SDF personnel sent to Iraq. While this kind of sacriﬁce by
the people is foreseen, what ‘being tested’ means is whether or not that kind of sacriﬁce can be
accepted, whether the people can continue to support the dispatch of troops to Iraq, and whether‘the Japanese people’ have that kind of ‘spirit’ regardless of the nature of the sacrifice.
Therefore, if there is a situation in which there are casualties among the SDF personnel sent toIraq, the prime minister can simply substitute the words ‘war on terrorism’ for ‘war’, and using
exactly the same trick he has used on each occasion of his Yasukuni worship, he can honour thesacrifice of the SDF personnel. In other words, Koizumi would commemorate fallen SDF
personnel with words like ‘[w]e live in the era of war on terrorism, and the Japan of today is built
on the precious sacriﬁce of those who unwillingly gave their lives . . .’.
The role of education is important in creating the ‘heart’ and the ‘national spirit’ of a people that
supports war. The Koizumi administration’s proposal to revise the Basic Law on Education isrelated to the prime minister’s repeated worship at the Yasukuni Shrine. Former Prime Minister
Nakasone Yasuhiro, who worshipped at Yasukuni Shrine arguing that ‘if we do not extend our
gratitude to the fallen, who is going to give their life for the nation?’, stated in 2003 that ‘[n]ow,
at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the topics of Japan’s national image and the spirit of
the people are once again on the agenda’, and ‘it is necessary to start reform from a completechange to the Basic Law on Education as the mental backbone of the nation’.7
In 1999, Kawamura Tateo, then head of the LDP’s Basic Law on Education Research Group,
explained that ‘we want to debate the issues with a Heisei Imperial Rescript on Education inmind’.8 The Imperial Rescript on Education, proclaimed in Emperor Meiji’s name in 1890,
underpinned education during the era of the Japanese empire. It inculcated the following: ‘intimes of emergency, be of public service and help to support the imperial fortune in heaven andon earth’, in other words, in times of war, resolve to lay down your life for the Emperor and thenation. The Imperial Rescript converged with the doctrines of the Yasukuni Shrine to mobilize
the people for war. Since becoming Education Minister in October 2004, Kawamura Tateo has
wanted to reform the Basic Law on Education by turning it into a ‘Heisei Rescript on Education’with the aim of submitting it to the Diet in 2005.
At the February 2004 launch of the Committee for the Promotion of Reform of the Basic Law on
Education, an LDP–Democratic Party of Japan (hereafter DPJ) cross-party group, DPJ member
Nishimura announced that:
We will create Japanese people who do not mind laying down their lives for theircountry. We will teach children that where there are people who lay down their lives fortheir country there is a fatherland. This I promise.9
This sentiment precisely reﬂects the Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890, while at the sametime, it also reﬂects the nature of the political objectives of worship at the Yasukuni Shrine.
Yasukuni Shrine as a device for the ‘spiritual mobilization of the people’
What effect does the worship of Yasukuni Shrine by the emperor, prime minister and mayor of

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347Tokyo have on creating a ‘national spirit’ which supports potential future wars? In order tounderstand this, we must look into the general mobilization of the ‘national spirit’ in the era of
the Japanese empire.
At ﬁrst, the Yasukuni Shrine was a device for creating a psychology whereby soldiers fought andsacriﬁced their lives in war for the emperor and the state. According to Yokoyama Natsuki’s
Shining Yasukuni Tales, published in April 1943:
Death in war is undoubtedly a tragic thing. But, for ordinary Japanese, more than going to
war and being sent to war, death in war is giving one’s life to the nation, so it is not justany death. It is the peak of shining honour. It is a boy’s ultimate dream. In Japan, boys
are born to protect their country. They are born to create the brilliant history of Japan.
Our ancestors were all like that. And of course, our descendants must also be like that.
So, the eternal light of shining Japan is here in this shrine of Yasukuni. The passionate
will of the people is a consistent and unfailing light, and the pure act of giving one’s life
for one’s country is a light that shines in the world.11
Thus, ‘boys born in Japan’ must pursue death in battle for their country, and make being
worshipped at ‘the shrine of Yasukuni’ their ‘ultimate dream’. But the Yasukuni Shrine not only
has the function of mobilizing Japanese ‘boys’ to be Imperial soldiers. Elements of the‘Yasukuni Doctrine’ (Yasukuni shinkō) and ‘Yasukuni Spirit’ (Yasukuni seishin) not only
encompassed Japanese soldiers, they encompassed all the Japanese people, including women andchildren, and gave them equal value within the Japanese ‘national spirit’.
This was presented in an easy-to-understand form in references to the Yasukuni Shrine in the
ethics textbook, Shūshin. The ﬁfth edition of Shūshin (Elementary Second Grade) used from
1941 states:
On Kudan Hill (Kudanzaka) in Tokyo, a large bronze torii (shrine gate) stands tall. Inside
one can see a marvellous shrine. This is Yasukuni Shrine.
At Yasukuni Shrine there are many loyal people enshrined who resolved to die for theemperor and the nation.
Every spring on 30 April and every autumn on 23 October there are Commemoration
Ceremonies attended by distinguished people.
There are also special ceremonies when people who died loyally are enshrined. At thesetimes, their majesties the emperor and empress attend.
On days with commemorative events, there is a continual stream of worshippers and, ofcourse, military personnel, and the spacious courtyard becomes packed.
It is the desire of his majesty the emperor that the people who resolved to die for theemperor and for the nation are enshrined and worshipped in this way.
And in our home regions too, there are Gokoku Jinja [Nation Protecting Shrines] where
the war dead are worshipped.
While being grateful for the many blessings bestowed on us by His Majesty the Emperor,
we must learn from the loyalty of the enshrined and pledge ourselves to the emperor andthe nation. (author’s italics)

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The overwhelming majority of those who died in war and were enshrined at Yasukuni were
soldiers who were meant to have internalized the ‘spirit of Yasukuni’ through education.
However, since it was also targeted at all pupils regardless of gender, the ‘spirit of Yasukuni’
was not necessarily demanded only of male soldiers. Women, such as nurses, who were
employed by the military and who had died and were enshrined, were also presented as callingout to young girls to ‘follow us and devote yourself to the emperor and nation’.
In Women of Yasukuni, published in August 1941 by the Society to Honour the Women of
Yasukuni, the stories of the lives and deaths of forty-one women who had died while serving
with the military (and seven who died in the Meiji Restoration) were told; their deaths were
honoured and women were urged to ‘follow their example’. Ikuta Tatsuo wrote in his
Introduction:
The over 200,000 gods enshrined at Yasukuni are the ancestors, fathers, brothers, leadersand children of our people, and their achievements are truly the incarnation of theJapanese spirit (yamato damashii). Among these many gods there are a little over 50,000
female gods. These gods are in no way inferior to the male gods and are strong womenlike guardian angels (oni) protecting the country. We have established the Yasukuni
Society to Honour Japan’s Guardian Angels, and have investigated the achievements ofthese loyal and brave women. Now we have completed the investigation, we havepublished Yasukuni Retsujofu (‘Yasukuni’s Female Gods’). We give great honour to theirvirtue. This autumn, with many incidents occurring, the rise or fall of the nation depends
particularly on the readiness of women. We want them to be aware of the situation and tobe loyal servants to the cause of domestic order and security.12
In the ‘spirit of Yasukuni’, it did not matter whether people were men or women, as long as they
were Japanese, they were required to embody that spirit.
However, even more important was how to start manipulating the emotions of the bereaved
families for whom the Yasukuni Doctrine had taken away family members. Accordingly, theYasukuni Doctrine were particularly connected with the families of the war dead and had tomake the families accept the war death of their relatives and even make them welcome
bereavement. Here one can mention the way that the bereaved families, the ‘Yasukuni wives,
mothers and children’, should behave. These were the essential structural elements of the
Yasukuni Doctrine.
At this point, let us turn to Yasukuni no Seishin (The Spirit of Yasukuni) published in 1942 by
Takagami Kakushō (1894–1948). Takagami was a Buddhist scholar of the Chisan sect of
Shingon Buddhism, who published many works on Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy before
12
and during the war. After the war, he continued to attract a wide readership with works such as
Hannya shingyō kōgi. Takagami’s writings on the Yasukuni Doctrine provide an interesting
insight, because they were written from the perspective of a Buddhist scholar aimed at a generalaudience. The spirit of Yasukuni formulated in this work, as the subtitle ‘To the Families of the
War Dead’ demonstrates, was addressed to bereaved families and aimed to convince them that:
The spirit of Yasukuni is not only a spirit that soldiers have in wartime. It is a Japanesespirit that all Japanese people should adhere to identically in both war and times ofpeace. But, how can we instil this spirit of Yasukuni? Ultimately I think we should use
the following words.

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349

Spill your blood with joy for the nation.
Shed tears of joy for the people.
Gladly make yourself sweat.
For truly, it is only through that blood, those tears and that sweat that we can bring abouta spring of bright peace to heaven and earth in East Asia, and throughout the world.13
Here we can see the very same function of Yasukuni Shrine being expressed: it is a device forthe general mobilization of the ‘national spirit’. In other words, the Yasukuni spirit is nothing
more than the Japanese spirit that all Japanese people should adhere to identically in both war
and times of peace.
However, it was particularly important that mothers who had lost sons, and wives who had lost
husbands, internalized the Yasukuni spirit and became Yasukuni mothers and Yasukuni wives.
According to Takagami, this was only possible if the sadness of the bereaved families could beturned into joy:
It seems there are many people who think ‘why only my child?’ or ‘why only myhusband?’ There are also a considerable number of people who are distraught with grief
as if their own children or husbands had sacriﬁced their lives; this can also be thought ofas a somewhat mistaken way of looking at things. . . .
I think that there is a great difference between feeling joy at the wonderful service
performed by children and husbands, and feeling grief at the unfortunate death for thecountry of children who were brought up with so much care. Whether one feels joy orgrief, these are feelings for one’s own heart. However much one thinks of property as
one’s own, in reality it is not one’s own thing. Everything belongs to the state. And it is
not only property. Our bodies and lives too are all gifts from he who reigns over us. So intimes of need, we must all ceaselessly and earnestly strive to be of great service. The
bereaved families are the people who gracefully gave us the children they lovingly
brought up and husbands they looked after as shields against harm. They have returned tothe emperor what he has bestowed unto us. But, those sons and husbands are now
enshrined at Yasukuni, and for all eternity they will be worshipped by the emperor andlooked up to by the people as loyal defenders of the nation. I think there are no higher
aspirations that a boy can have.
. . . When someone dies an ordinary death, we may feel sympathy, but not necessarily
respect and gratitude.
. . . The bereaved families can receive considerable gratitude and respect from people
they have never met thanks to their sons and husbands who gave their lives for thenation.14
Prime Minister Koizumi’s repeated use of the same rhetoric of ‘respect and gratitude’ every time
he worships at Yasukuni Shrine is notable in the context of Takagami’s words. People who havedied an ordinary death might attract sympathy, but just because they have died, it does not meanthat they will be thanked or respected. However, the people who became gods at Yasukuni bygiving their lives for the nation will for all eternity receive ‘gratitude and respect’ as ‘loyal spirits
defending the nation’ (gokoku no chūrei). During the Paciﬁc War, the emperor and empress, andsuccessive prime ministers—Tōjō Hideki, Koiso Kuniaki, and Suzuki Kantarō—worshipped at

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Yasukuni Shrine, thereby expressing ‘gratitude and respect’ for the ‘loyal spirits defending thenation’. Thanks to their husbands and sons, the mothers and wives whose sons and husbands
became the objects of gratitude and respect as loyal spirits defending the nation, they themselves
became the objects of gratitude and respect from people they had never met. Accordingly, theirmisfortune did not become grief. On the contrary, they should have felt joy at the glorious
service of their sons and husbands.
The most archetypal verbal expression of the joy felt by ‘Yasukuni mothers’ at their husbands’
and sons’ glorious service, as opposed to grief over their unfortunate deaths, can be found in theJune 1936 edition of the magazine Shufu no Tomo (Housewife’s Friend) in an article entitled‘Tearful Meeting with Proud Mothers who Gave their Only Sons for the Nation’. The article
contained a transcript of a conversation with several old ladies from bereaved families who had
travelled to Tokyo from the Hokuriku region to participate in a special ceremony held at the
Yasukuni Shrine to enshrine the soldiers who had died in the early stages of the fighting. There isa transcript of a conversation with several old ladies from bereaved families who had come toTokyo all the way from the Hokuriku region to participate:
MORIKAWA: You raised him on your own from the age of seven, didn’t you?
MURAI: Yes, in between agricultural jobs, I worked hard making straw hats and mats. I
had a boy so I tried hard to at least put him through school to the second year. It was
not a very caring upbringing, but I did not want people talking about him behind hisback because he only had a mother. I did all I could.
SAITŌ: When my brother was drafted, he was saying he wanted to give his life for theemperor as soon as possible.
MORIKAWA: On the evening when that white box [containing her brother’s remains] wasplaced in Yasukuni Shrine, I couldn’t stop saying, thank you, thank you. I was just so
grateful this lowly boy was given the chance to be of use to the world.
MURAI: It is by the grace of the emperor, it is almost too much to bear.
NAKAMURA: Everyone cried, didn’t they?
TAKAI: They were tears of joy. We were just crying because we were so happy.
NAKAMURA: We are just truly grateful that people like us could have children who wereof use to the emperor. A bugle call sounded, I think it was soldiers playing. And when
the hearse arrived and the bugle sounded, I just can’t express it, I was thinking, thankyou, thank you.
MORIKAWA: It was such a beautiful sound. My son was truly happy in that beautiful
white box. Usually you cannot receive that kind of honour.
SAITŌ: And the emperor came and worshipped, didn’t he? We bowed in appreciation.
NAKAMURA: We truly appreciated it, it was too much to bear.
SAITŌ: It is just what we have been hoping for in our hearts since the beginning of thewar. We have heard that because he cares for us, the emperor has been working so
hard and eating humble food. We just thought we somehow had to pay back his

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kindness, and when we bowed down to the emperor, we could not hold back the tears.
Having worshipped at Yasukuni and bowed down to the emperor, I can have no more
regrets. When the sun goes down today I will be satisﬁed; I can die happy. As a resultof what happened today you know.
NAKAMURA: I have had the chance to see Shinjuku Gyoen [park] you know. I am so
grateful. My son will be commemorated here, I have seen some wonderful places . . .
SAITŌ: There are so many ﬂowers in bloom. Wherever you go it is a vast garden, it is likeparadise.
TAKAI: My son is going to be happy in nirvana. He died a good death. If I show tears, I
will feel bad for the emperor you know. Everything we do is for the country, so, if
you think that, you always feel cheerful.
NAKAMURA: That’s it. There’s nothing I can do about feeling sad that my son won’t
come back, but he died for his country and if we think how he has been honoured by
the emperor, I cannot think of any greater happiness and feel cheerful again.
MORIKAWA: I give thanks that my lowly boy could be of use.
This section was cited by Hashikawa Bunzō (1922–83), well known for Nippon Romanha no
Kenkyū (‘Research on Japanese Novelists’), at the beginning of his article ‘The Establishment
and Development of Yasukuni Thought’ (Chūō Kōron, October 1974) with the comment ‘I have
not read such a fine expression of the Yasukuni Doctrine as this’.15 When Hashikawa saw inthese ‘a somewhat primitive, eerie atmosphere’, he said ‘when you read the tragically sad wordsof the old women who had lost their sons in war at the prime of their lives, I feel a strange
shudder saying, don’t let me be thought of as part of that world’. And, what he loves in the‘words that showed absolutely no protest or [feminine] weakness (memeshisa)’ is reminder of
the type of woman he knew as a small child and who was brought up in the doctrines of attaining
nirvana in the Hokuriku region. In other words, these were women who ‘whatever the hardships,
made no complaint and always lived modestly’ and ‘whose strength of belief astounded the fullblooded male’.
In the period 1937–45, many special ceremonies were held when tens of thousands of war deadwere enshrined at a time. On each occasion, many bereaved families were chosen and invited toTokyo—from Sakhalin in the north to Manchuria in the west to Taiwan in the south—at the
government’s expense to participate in these special ceremonies to enshrine the war dead as‘gods’. The bereaved families ﬁlled both flanks of the approach to Yasukuni Shrine, the list of
the war dead (eireibo) was carried on a special carriage by the shrine priests to the main hall of
the shrine, and the emperor, acting as principal mourner, passed up the same path and paid his
respects. The bereaved families not only participated in this shōkonshiki ceremony, they also
visited famous spots in Tokyo—such as Shinjuku Gyoen, the Imperial Palace and Ueno zoo—
had commemorative photographs taken, and returned home as ‘honourable war bereaved
families’ (meiyo no izoku).
These people were from the lower levels of society and if there had been no war, there would
probably have been no chance of them ever leaving their home regions. But because these people
had lost sons or family in the war, they were invited to Tokyo at the government’s expense,
praised as ‘honoured bereaved families’ and even got to see the emperor, the ‘son of heaven’

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(tenshisama), at close quarters. The emotions expressed by all the old ladies of ‘gratitude’ and‘being too much to bear’ are not something to be dismissed as tatemae: they reﬂect reality.
Saitō said, ‘Having worshipped at Yasukuni and bowed down to the emperor, I can have no more
regrets. When the sun goes down today I will be satisﬁed; I can die happy as a result of what
happened today.’ Similarly, Nakamura said, ‘[my son] died for his country and if we think how
he has been honoured by the emperor, I cannot think of any greater happiness and feel cheerfulagain.’ These words reﬂect the psychological function of the ‘emperor’s shrine’ Yasukuni,
namely that Yasukuni not only functioned to motivate men to go to war and become ‘heroic
spirits defending the nation’ (gokoku no eirei), but also had the function of mobilizing womenfor the country’s wars as ‘Yasukuni mothers’ and ‘Yasukuni wives’.
The mother who lost the son she had struggled to bring up on her own did not feel grief-stricken;
on the contrary, she felt joy at his ‘honourable war death’, shed ‘tears of joy’, and gave thanks,
saying ‘I couldn’t stop saying thank you, thank you.’ Why was this kind of response possible? It
is wholly because ‘the emperor came and worshipped [her son who had died for his country]’and ‘[the son] has been honoured by the emperor’ (author’s italics). In sum, as a result ofworship at the Yasukuni Shrine where their sons were enshrined by the emperor, their sons wererevered, gloriﬁed and honoured. This made the old ladies ‘feel a sense of serene happiness’
which was ‘out of this world’.
In the 7 April 1943 edition of Shashin shūhō [Photography Weekly], there was a special reportabout the ‘Yasukuni orphans’, who came to the Yasukuni Shrine from Sakhalin in the north,
Okinawa in the south and Manchuria in the west, to worship their fathers who had become gods.
In an article following a large photograph whose caption read ‘Fathers’ Love for the Children of
Yasukuni, Prime Minister Tōjō Encourages the Proud Orphans’, we discover that:
The Manchurian Orphan’s Brigade, which had come to Tokyo from all the way over the
Kizankō, arrived in Tokyo on the 26th and on the same day visited the ofﬁcial residenceof Prime Minister Tōjō and offered their greetings. Prime Minister Tōjō made time in his
many important affairs of state specially for the orphans. The prime minister patted theirheads, placed his hand upon their shoulders and said ‘Never be ashamed of what yourfathers have done’. The orphans were deeply moved at the prime minister’s kindness andtears ran down their cheeks at Prime Minister Tōjō’s consideration and at their fathers’
deaths.
(author’s italics)
The back cover of the magazine contained a tribute to the orphans with the message ‘be like the
Yasukuni orphans’. It read:Bow your head in the direction of Yasukuni,
The endearing sight of heeding a father’s dying wish,
Resolve to meet your fathers again by giving your lives to the nation.
We pray that they will grow up healthy
With one soul and with our joint strength
We all hope to be like those fathers.
(author’s italics)
In this way, the Yasukuni orphans were destined to follow in the footsteps of the fathers who had

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been honoured for dying for their country; and similarly, those that followed the orphans werealso destined to follow the fathers’ lead.
In this way, all the Japanese people—‘the glorious dead of Yasukuni’ (Yasukuni no eirei), the‘strong women of Yasukuni’, ‘the mothers of Yasukuni’, ‘the wives of Yasukuni’, and ‘theorphans of Yasukuni’—were encompassed by the Yasukuni Doctrine. The spirit of Yasukuni
was synonymous with the spirit of the Japanese people, a vital aspect of the general mobilizationof the ‘national spirit’. Importantly, the emperor had to worship and honour the war dead, andthe prime minister, army and navy ministers and others had to worship and express their
gratitude and respect to the fallen.
Today, Prime Minister Koizumi repeatedly worships at Yasukuni Shrine because he knows that
Yasukuni Shrine is where he can continue to express his ‘gratitude and respect’ to the ‘precious
sacriﬁce’ of the enshrined. This is clearly a political act at the level of national politics with aview to making Japan once again a ‘state capable of prosecuting wars’. It is to show the people
that when new war deaths among the SDF (or a reconstituted Japanese army) occur, these deaths
will be praised as ‘precious sacriﬁce for the nation’ and the country’s top political leaders will
express their ‘gratitude and respect’. Worship by the emperor at Yasukuni Shrine has beensuspended since the enshrinement of the Class A war criminals came to light. Consequently, inorder to recreate a ‘Japanese national spirit’ which can tolerate war and the sacriﬁce it brings, theprime minister’s worship is seen as particularly important.
At this point, let us look at an important historical document to make more explicit the meaningof Yasukuni worship by political leaders and the function of Yasukuni Shrine. Why does thestate honour the war dead as the ‘glorious dead’ and make the bereaved families ‘proud bereaved
families’? On 14 November 1895, just after the Sino-Japanese War, an article entitled ‘We
Should Hold a Grand Ceremony for the War Dead’ was published in Jiji shinpō. Whether or not
Fukuzawa really penned these articles published in Jiji shinpō, as has been debated, is not the
problem which need concern us here.16 Rather, the content of the Jiji shinpō article is ofimportance to the central theme of this study. The article lists the number of war casualties:
According to the reports up to 29 September, the number of our soldiers who have fallen
in the Sino-Japanese and Taiwanese wars is: battle deaths, 851; death from wounds, 233;
death from disease, 5,385; this is a total of 6,469 and there will probably have to be quite
a few more deaths from here on.17
The Sino-Japanese war of 1894–5 was the ﬁrst major international conﬂict fought by the modern
Japanese state. Following its victory in the Sino-Japanese war, Japan and China concluded theTreaty of Shimonoseki and Japan succeeded in acquiring Taiwan as a colony. But Taiwanese
resistance was ﬁerce, and the Japanese army was dispatched to quell resistance, resulting inmany casualties on both sides. The ‘Subjugation of Taiwan’ is given a distinct identity from the
Sino-Japanese War in the Yasukuni Shrine. According to the current (17 October 2001) list ofenshrined souls, there are 13,619 souls enshrined from the Sino-Japanese War and 1,130 souls
enshrined from the Subjugation of Taiwan, a total of 14,749; so, at the time that the Jiji shinpō
article was written, less than half of the people eventually enshrined had died. So, why was
Fukuzawa taking issue with the fact that ‘there will probably have to be quite a few moredeaths’?
According to Fukuzawa, the surviving soldiers were given the highest honours and received not

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only the thanks of the people, but medals and rewards, too. But the war dead were unable toreceive medals or rewards, to be welcomed home by the people, or to be showered in glory as thetriumphant returning soldiers were. The bereaved families received meagre beneﬁts and support,
struggled to make ends meet and had already lost their fathers and brothers, whose safe return
after meritorious exploits in the war they had prayed for. When the bereaved families looked
across at the glory showered on their fallen families’ ‘comrades in arms’, all they could do wascry. In contrast to the supreme honours and glory given to the triumphal returning soldiers, thewar dead and their bereaved families had no honour and glory, and were forgotten by society.
The article argued that the war dead and their families should be given as much honour and glory
as possible.
Why so? To begin with, those who had fought and died did not make a lesser contribution to thecountry than those who had survived and returned in triumph. But it was not only this; the major
reason why the war dead and their families should be offered the highest honour and glory was
as follows:
The situation, especially in East Asia, is becoming more precarious by the day and wecannot predict when and in what way incidents will happen. In the unfortunate event thatwar breaks out, who should we rely on to defend our country? Since we have no otherchoice than to rely on the courageous, fearless souls that dare to confront death, tocultivate this spirit is the most urgent task for the defence of our country. To foster such a
spirit, as much honour as possible should be given to the war dead and bereaved families
so that people would never fail to feel a sense of happiness about falling on thebattleﬁeld.
In the case of another war, who could be relied upon to defend the country? The only solution
was to foster a martial spirit among soldiers so that they did not fear death, and fight and give
their lives. The cultivation of this spirit became vital for the defence of the country, and as aresult, the highest honour needed to be given to the war dead so that ‘people would never fail tofeel a sense of happiness about falling on the battleﬁeld’. In other words, it was necessary to
make people feel happy to die in battle.
The state was neglecting the grief of the relatives of the war dead and, therefore, was unable tofoster a martial spirit in soldiers who would ﬁght and sacriﬁce their lives for their country in thenext war. But by giving the highest state honour to the war dead and their families, mobilizing
soldiers who wanted to have an ‘honourable death’ for their country became possible.
How were the war dead and their families to be given the highest honour? The article explained:
Although commemorative ceremonies for the souls of the war dead have been held at
various locations to the present date, one should not think these are sufﬁcient. I fervently
hope that we will go a step further by building a national altar in Tokyo, at the heart ofthe empire, where relatives of the war dead are to be invited from around the nation toattend the ceremonies and feel the highest honour. His Imperial Majesty the Emperor
would be graciously asked to lead the ceremony for those bereaved relatives, withhundreds of military and civilian ofﬁcers in attendance, and to offer an imperial
proclamation to commend the meritorious deed of the fallen soldiers and console theirsouls.

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After the Sino-Japanese War and the Subjugation of Taiwan, commemorative ceremonies(shōkonsai) were held in every region, but this was not enough. Bereaved families were to be
invited from all over the country to the imperial capital Tokyo, the emperor would lead theworship, the exploits of the dead would be revered, an imperial proclamation would commend
the souls of the dead, the dead and their families would be given the highest honour, and thepeople would be ‘made to feel happy to fall in battle’:
When a commemorative ceremony was held in Sakura, there was an old man among the
war bereaved. Saying that his dead son was his only child and as he was the only
surviving parent, the father could not stop crying when he ﬁrst heard of the unfortunate
death of his son in the war. After attending the ceremony, however, he felt honoured andwent back home content in the feeling that even the loss of his child was nothing toregret. If his Imperial Majesty himself leads a special ceremony, the dead will appreciate
the grace of heaven from their graves, and the bereaved relatives will cry in honour, ﬁnd
joy in the deaths of their fathers and brothers, and the people will be willing to die for
their nation when demanded. No expense should be spared. We sincerely hope for thiskind of commemoration.
(author’s italics)
There is no simpler explanation of the logic of the state in honouring the war dead. The old man
invited to the commemorative ceremony at the barracks in Sakura was deeply moved by his
son’s death being praised as an ‘honourable death’ at the ceremony, and when he went home, he
was very satisﬁed and cherished the death of his only son.
If the emotions of the bereaved relatives were felt as simply human beings, it could only result ingrief. However, the grief became converted into joy as a result of the state ceremony. From grief
to joy, from unhappiness to happiness, in what was akin to an alchemist’s trick, the bereaved
relatives’ emotions had been turned around 180 degrees.
The author is saying that if the supreme commander of the imperial Japanese forces (theEmperor Meiji) and other leaders were the principal worshippers, and if a large commemorative
ceremony was held, the war dead from heaven (kōsen no kuni), would feel grateful to theemperor for his grace. The important point is that if there was another war, people who weremoved to tears and felt joy at the war death of a family member, and ordinary people who felt thesame way, would give their lives for the emperor. The state that had mobilized the people forwar had to prevent itself from bearing the brunt of the people’s dissatisfaction. Above all, it wasnecessary to make ‘ordinary people’ come forward of their own accord to give their lives for thestate by honouring the war dead. ‘No expense should be spared’ – in other words, the war
bereaved should be invited to Tokyo from all parts of the country, told how grateful the ‘nation’and the ‘son of heaven’ were and go back home feeling deeply moved.
This is nothing more than ‘emotional alchemy’ based on the Yasukuni Doctrine. Fukuzawa (orhis ghost writer) does not use the words ‘Yasukuni Shrine’ once throughout the entire article.
The author only says the ceremony should be held in ‘the imperial capital Tokyo’. The Yasukuni
Shrine had been built in 1869 as the Tokyo Shōkonsha (Shrine to Invoke the Spirit of the Dead)and, ten years later in 1879, it was renamed Yasukuni Shrine. After becoming a special
government shrine (kansha), it began the enshrinement of soldiers killed overseas with the 1874
Taiwan Expedition and continued into the Sino-Japanese war. However, at this stage, it is notpossible to say that the system of Yasukuni Doctrine had been established.

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About one month after the article was published in Jiji shinpō, an enshrining ceremony(shōkonshiki) was held at Yasukuni Shrine on 15 December 1895, in the presence of Major
General Ōtera Yasuzumi and 1500 people. As if in response to the arguments in the article, a
special grand ceremony (rinji taisai) for the dead of the Sino-Japanese war was held from 16
December that lasted for three days. On the ﬁrst day, an imperial messenger attended, and on thesecond day, the Supreme Commander Emperor Meiji and others worshipped at Yasukuni Shrine.
In response to this, Jiji shinpō published a further article entitled ‘The Dead are Honoured’,
which commented:
The recent special commemorative ceremony held at Yasukuni Shrine for the war dead
was a glorious occasion held in the gracious presence of His Majesty the Emperor.
People were moved to tears at the thought of becoming enshrined, and I suppose thefeelings of the families and ordinary people will continue to be so. We desire that people
recognize and reward the great service performed by the war dead and their families.18
In this way, Yasukuni Shrine gradually gained authority, and after the Russo-Japanese war, it
had attained a definitive status as the central institution for the commemoration of the war dead.
Imperial Japan gave special status to Yasukuni Shrine, and through its ceremonies, soldiers andcivilian employees who had died in battle were continually honoured as eirei (glorious spirits).
This was to soothe the grief of the bereaved families and prevent the state from bearing the bruntof any dissatisfaction, but more than anything else, by giving the highest honours to the war
dead, it was intended to draft soldiers who would ‘follow in their footsteps’ and willingly ‘die for
their country’. Fukuzawa Yukichi, as a leading intellectual at the time the Yasukuni doctrine wasbeing established, wrote about the mechanisms of Yasukuni in Jiji shinpō from the perspectiveof those who were using the doctrine. As we have already seen from the extract from the ‘Tearful
Meeting’, about forty years later, the mechanism had already become largely invisible and the‘feeling of joy at falling in battle’ had mostly replaced grief at the loss.
Yasukuni Shrine as a place to honour the war dead, not to ‘mourn’ themAt the 1936 ‘Tearful Meeting with Proud Mothers who Gave their Only Sons to the Nation’,grief at a family member’s war death had become joy, and sadness had been converted into
happiness. The ‘emotional alchemy’ of the Yasukuni Doctrine was almost complete. But if one
looks closely, one can see that it was not always necessarily the case.
Hashikawa Bunzō said that he loved the ‘words that showed absolutely no protest or [feminine]
weakness (memeshisa)’. But were they really ‘words that showed absolutely no protest or
weakness’? For example, in the last part cited above, Nakamura says, ‘[t]hat’s it. There’s nothing
I can do about feeling sad that my son won’t come back but he died for his country and if wethink how he has been honoured by the emperor, I cannot think of any greater happiness and feelcheerful again.’ Here we see that the sorrow for her son’s death brieﬂy raises its head, but is then
immediately shut out by the feelings of happiness that her son died ‘for the country’ and ‘for theemperor’.
Part of the meeting that Hashikawa did not cite reveals the conﬂict even more clearly:
MORIKAWA: I think about how my child is dead, but then when I see ﬁt and healthysoldiers I think how he could still be alive. I’m all alone, so recently I have done
nothing but complain. I’m a little embarrassed to say this but in the evening, in a

Takahashi: The National Politics of the Yasukuni Shrine357

mother’s heart there’s this feeling of affection (kawaii na, kawaii na) for her children.
Soon after I think that, I think of the honour, and I don’t know how, but I manage asmile.
It is, therefore, not that case that the women’s words ‘showed absolutely no protest or weakness’.
Hashikawa simply did not cite the section that revealed these emotions. Similarly:
TAKAI: Overall, parents don’t want that sort of thing to happen to their child. . . .
MORIKAWA: When their boys go to the front, even if people say ‘I don’t want to know
you if you come back’, in their hearts of course they feel pity and really don’t wantthem to die. But you know, we have given our son to the emperor. How could wehave held him back? I just feel glad that our son could be of use to the son of heaven.
These comments by Morikawa are effused with the feelings of pity in their hearts for an only son
lost in war. The unresolved grief for a lost son is very evident. What we see here is that as soon
as the grief is expressed, it is psychologically repressed and shut out; and although it is replacedby feelings of honour (‘giving a son to the emperor’ and ‘being of use to the emperor’), at thevery least we can detect the conﬂict in the bereaved families between grief and honour.
For families that have lost members in war, the most natural emotion is sadness. When the death
is not from old age but a violent death, and when it is a death in war where people must kill andbe killed, it is normal to have strong feelings of sadness, emptiness and detachment. In
psychological analysis, when something for which one feels a certain extent of love is suddenly
lost, it is called ushinau – hiai (loss – sorrow). When a family member dies, the family
experiences loss and sorrow; but as could be seen above when Morikawa said ‘I think about how
my child is dead, but then when I see ﬁt and healthy soldiers I think how he could still be alive’,
it is very difﬁcult to accept the reality of the loss of a family member who has been the object oflove. When bereaved relatives repeatedly have to face the reality of their loss, they graduallylearn how to bear and deal with the loss, and through the work of mourning (trauer arbeit) they
can recover from the loss and sorrow. Through feeling adequate grief at the death of a family
member, it is possible to evade excessive grief and distracted melancholy.
However, at the time when the bereaved relatives needed to be learning how to accept and face
up to the reality of the loss of an object of their love, they were forced to avoid directly facing up
to their loss. Instead of grief, they were provided with the emotion of ‘honour’, which can bethought of as an unnatural but speedy compensation for their grief. When state ceremonies
honouring the war dead were held and the national leaders expressed their ‘gratitude andrespect’, it is not surprising that through the strong authority of the state, the meanings given to
the deaths by the state suppressed and shut out the natural feelings of grief.
In pre-war and wartime Japan, the meanings given to the authority ﬁgures (zettaisha) of the‘nation’ and ‘son of heaven’ were not as strong as suggested. What Kawakami Hajime calls the‘national religion’ (kokkakyō),19 is nothing more than a system whereby ‘the state as a god =authority figure’ holds and aims to monopolize the highest authority, the meaning of Japanesepeople’s death in war, or more generally the meaning of Japanese people’s lives and deaths. But
it was not so much an act of ‘alchemy’ but an act of violence by which people had to treat thedeaths of family members with joy, honour and gratitude while natural grief was suppressed andthey were forced to shut out pain. The creation of a ‘national spirit’ to support war, and to require

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people to adhere to the spirit of Yasukuni, which makes war death a precious sacriﬁce and theobject of gratitude and respect, are forms of psychological violence.
Mourning (tsuitō) is to follow the dead (otte) and feel pain (itamu); in other words, it is to feelsadness, and as the Chinese characters for the word ‘mourning’ (tsuitō) suggest, to feel pain at
the death of the departed. Mourning and giving condolences (aitō ) are ‘the work of grieving’(hiai no sagyō). Honouring the dead is quite the opposite. The worship of the emperor, prime
minister or political leaders at Yasukuni Shrine is to honour the consecrated war dead as gods
(kami), and give gratitude and respect. As long as this is a political act which aims to create a‘national spirit’ to support war, it is completely different to the normal forms of mourning for the
war dead.
The way in which the Yasukuni Shrine completely ignores the feelings of mourning among the
bereaved families demonstrates that the shrine is an institution where the state honours rather
than mourns the war dead. This is clearly evident in the case of the demands made by bereaved
families from the former colonies of Taiwan and Korea that their relatives be removed fromenshrinement. According to ﬁgures published by Yasukuni Shrine, in October 2001 there were
28,863 Taiwanese and 21,181 Koreans enshrined at Yasukuni. The majority of these people diedafter being drafted from Taiwan and Korea into the Japanese military when the Asia–Paciﬁc War
was at its height.
This means that the Yasukuni Shrine has enshrined Taiwanese and Koreans who were victims ofcolonial rule by Japan in precisely the same way as Japanese people who died perpetrating thecolonial rule and suppression of Taiwan and Korea as ‘gods who defended the nation’ (gokoku
no kami). For the bereaved families from Taiwan and Korea who suffered colonial rule, this is an
insult.
In the summer of 1977, the Yasukuni Shrine handed over a list of 27,000 Taiwanese soldiers andauxiliary staff enshrined at Yasukuni to a group of Taiwanese visiting Japan. This had the
opposite effect to what was intended, and became the seed for the current controversy over theenshrinement of people from former colonies. The following year in February 1978, a group of
Taiwanese residents in Japan who had learned about the list held a meeting and stated: ‘Our
compatriots, who with a red slip of paper [akagami, draft papers] were rounded up and sent totheir deaths, have not received compensation; it’s unacceptable that all we got was this white slipof paper [the Shrine’s list of enshrined souls].’ The Taiwanese group then started legal
proceedings to get the Taiwanese removed from Yasukuni. In the same year, a grocer from
Kaohsiung (Takao-shi) in Taiwan came to Japan and said angrily:
My father was drafted into the auxiliary corps and never returned. They say he died in thePhilippines but I never even received ofﬁcial notiﬁcation of his death. I have received acertiﬁcate saying he was enshrined at Yasukuni in 1970. My father held a grudge forbeing semi-forcibly taken away and he is probably bitter about being arbitrarily
worshipped at Yasukuni Shrine which is part of a foreign religion. I want them to stop
this kind of insult to Taiwanese people.
In the following year in February 1979, a group of seven indigenous Taiwanese (Takasago zoku,
the name given to them under colonial rule) bereaved relatives came to Japan and, for the ﬁrst
time, demanded that their relatives be removed from enshrinement. The shrine, however,refused.

Takahashi: The National Politics of the Yasukuni Shrine359

At the time, Priest Ikeda explained the reasons for Yasukuni Shrine’s refusal to remove the soulsfrom enshrinement in the following way:
At the time when they died they were Japanese, so it is not possible for them to stop
being Japanese after they died. As Japanese soldiers, they fought and died with thefeeling that they were going to be worshipped at Yasukuni, so they will not be removed
from enshrinement as the relatives have asked. It is natural that they are worshipped at
Yasukuni because they cooperated in the war in the same way as people from Japan
proper (naichijin) and participated in the war as Japanese. In Taiwan, the vast majority of
bereaved families are grateful for their relatives’ enshrinement.20
Since then, the Yasukuni Shrine has consistently refused to consider the demands of people fromformer colonies for the removal from enshrinement of their relatives, including from Korean
bereaved relatives.
As can be seen, Yasukuni Shrine’s imperialist nature has not changed at all in the post-war era.
The excuse that ‘they were Japanese when they died’ means that the war dead from former
colonies will always remain Japanese people under colonial rule and prisoners of their former
colonial masters. There is no more self-righteous or arrogant comment than ‘they cooperated in
the war in the same way as people from Japan proper and participated in the war as Japanese’(author’s italics). This is nothing less than the sort of self-righteousness and arrogance thatcolonial rulers held towards their subjects.
In June 2001, fifty-five members of bereaved families from South Korea ﬁled a suit at the Tokyo
District Court demanding the removal from enshrinement of their relatives. In their petition to
the court, the plaintiffs said it was an unbearable insult that their relatives were worshipped as‘heroes who defended the nation’ (gokoku no eirei) alongside those who ‘plotted and actively
participated in’ the invasion and colonial rule of their own country. Yasukuni Shrine continues toenshrine the victims of colonial rule alongside the perpetrators and treat them as Japanese gods
despite the fact that the people were semi-forcibly (han-kyōseitekini) drafted into the war. For along time the bereaved relatives did not receive ofﬁcial notiﬁcations of death or have the remains
returned to them. Moreover, the Yasukuni Shrine refuses to remove the dead from enshrinement
despite the fact that they were arbitrarily enshrined without their relatives’ knowledge.
In Priest Ikeda’s comments cited above, the following section is particularly important: ‘As
Japanese soldiers, they fought and died with the feeling that they were going to be worshipped at
Yasukuni, so they will not be removed from enshrinement as the relatives have asked’ (author’s
italics). This comment reveals the true nature of the Yasukuni Shrine as an institution for thecommemoration of the war dead. Pro-Yasukuni groups say that Yasukuni Shrine is the central
institution for the mourning of the war dead. But, the people who feel the most pain at war deaths
and have the most right to mourn are the bereaved relatives. Normally, nobody can refuse therights of bereaved families to mourn their dead. There is an ongoing debate about the publicmourning of the Class A War Criminals; but even with the Class A War Criminals, nobody candeny the right of the bereaved relatives to mourn the deaths privately. In Germany, the publicmourning of Hitler is impossible; but even Hitler had relatives and nobody can stop them fromprivately mourning his death.
What should be done when the bereaved families, who have a privileged position concerning themourning of their relatives, object to their relatives becoming the subject of special public

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mourning? What happens when the bereaved relatives want to prevent their relatives becoming
the object of worship by particular groups because it hurts the families? The Yasukuni Shrine
bluntly ignores these kinds of thoughts and feelings and takes the position that ‘they will not be
removed from enshrinement as the relatives have asked’.
This is not only the case with people from former colonies. Requests for the removal fromenshrinement at Yasukuni were made by Japanese people even before people from former
colonies. In 1968, a Protestant priest, Tsunoda Saburō, became the ﬁrst bereaved relative to ask
for his two brothers to be removed from enshrinement at Yasukuni, but his request was turned
down. Following that, as part of the ‘Christian War Bereaved Association’ he requested removalfrom enshrinement again, but was again rejected.
The Yasukuni Shrine responded saying: ‘[r]eflecting the founding principles and traditions of
this Shrine, we are physically unable to respond to the requests’. When discussing the issue with
Father Tsunoda, Priest Ikeda said, ‘[t]he war dead are worshipped in accordance with the wishesof the emperor; enshrinement was carried out without concern for the wishes of the bereaved
families and therefore it cannot be undone’. In other words, according to Yasukuni Shrine’s
logic, enshrinement was carried out exclusively in accordance with the emperor’s wishes, so
once somebody has been enshrined, even if they are Class A War Criminals, former colonialsubjects or anyone else, and even if the bereaved families desire it, removal from enshrinement is
impossible. The bereaved families’ feelings are irrelevant and completely ignored.
What are the emperor’s wishes? An excerpt from a shrine memorial (saibun) written when theTokyo Shōkonsha was renamed Yasukuni Shrine and became a special rank governmental shrineon 25 June 1879 reads as follows:from the time of the Meiji Restoration to today, whenever the emperor punishes
tyrannical enemies inside and outside of Japan or subjugates rebels, you have no
individual will but only loyalty; forget your family and lay down your life, and throughthe highest distinction of pursuing death in battle we can rule over a great imperial nation,
and we invite you to think accordingly . . . from now on, let us ensure you will betirelessly worshipped.
As one can see, there is not a single hint of mourning for the war dead or sympathy and empathy
for the bereaved families. One can only see the thinking of how the great exploits of individual
soldiers in the Imperial Army who died in battle against the enemy were to be revered andpraised for eternity.
Earlier in the ‘Tearful Meeting with Proud Mothers who Gave their Only Sons for the Nation’,some mothers had said ‘I gave my son to the son of heaven’ or ‘I am just so grateful to have hada son who could be of use to the emperor’. In The Spirit of Yasukuni, Takagami Kakushō
addresses the ‘bereaved relatives of the loyal dead’ and states that they should not be sad but
happy because the bodies and lives of the Japanese people are ‘gifts from the emperor’, and thefamilies whose sons and husbands died in battle have ‘returned to the emperor what he originallygave to them’. At the heart of this way of thinking is that if the emperor grieves and mourns for
Imperial army soldiers, it is because they are his ‘children’, so the grief or feelings of the
bereaved relatives are irrelevant. If soldiers in the future really belong to the emperor (that is, thestate) and not to families, the emperor’s (the state’s) will takes priority over bereaved relatives.
Worshipping the fallen at Yasukuni Shrine becomes only natural (tōzen) and granting theTakahashi: The National Politics of the Yasukuni Shrine

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bereaved families’ requests for removal from enshrinement become unthinkable.
We must be extremely careful of Priest Ikeda’s comments that ‘it is the emperor’s wish that the
war dead are worshipped, and they are worshipped without consideration of the bereaved
relatives’. If this is the case, it is not only the feelings and views of the bereaved relatives
demanding removal from enshrinement that are being ignored. It so happens that their views andemotions are simply equated with the will of the emperor. Fundamentally, this is no different totheir views being ignored completely.
Conclusion
To conclude, the Yasukuni Shrine is an institution that ignores the feelings and views of the
bereaved relatives. It simply regards the people’s will as being the same as the emperor’s will.
What seems to be regard for the feelings of the people who are honoured by enshrinement inYasukuni Shrine actually occurs because the will of those people happens to be effectively thesame as the will of the emperor. At any rate, Yasukuni Shrine forces on people the emotions thatdying for the emperor and the country are honourable and dying in battle is a joy.
In this way, the essence of Yasukuni Shrine, which was founded as the ‘emperor’s shrine’
through an imperial proclamation of the Meiji emperor, has not changed over the sixty years of
the post-war period and continues to adhere to its founding principles. As a result, the views andfeelings of the bereaved families are fundamentally ignored, and the bereaved families who feelinsulted and pained by the enshrinement of their relatives continue to have their feelings hurt.
Worship by political leaders such as the prime minister and mayor of Tokyo, with the sort ofpolitical objectives that I have outlined at length in this chapter, is causing increasing pain andinsult not only to the bereaved relatives, but also to people who hope to develop friendly
relations with Asia by reﬂecting on Japan’s past wars, and those who, for intellectual reasons or
for reasons of conscience and belief, do not want to have the Yasukuni Doctrine forced upon
them.
Notes
1

Takahashi Tetsuya, Kokoro to sensō, Tokyo: Shōbunsha, 2003, Chapter 4.

2‘Koizumi shushō danwa of 13 August 2001’, 13 August 2003 (yūkan), Asahi shinbun.

3‘Koizumi shushō kasha kaiken of 1 January 2004’, 1 January 2004 (chyōkan), Asahi shinbun.

4

Author’s italics. ‘Nakasone Yasuhiro shushō kōen’, Jimintō Karuizawa seminā, 27 July 1985.

5

Author’s italics. ‘Koizumi shushō danwa of 14 January 2003’, 2 January 2004 (chyōkan), Asahi
shinbun.
6‘Koizumi shushō kasha kaiken of 9 December 2003’, 10 December 2003 (chyōkan), Asahi
shinbun.
7

Author’s italics. ‘Nakasone moto shushō intabyū’, 30 March 2003 (chyōkan), Asahi shinbun.

8

Kawamura Tateo, http: //www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/houdou/16/01/ 04010502.htm.

9Author’s italics. 26 February 2004, Asahi shinbun.

10

Author’s italics. Yokoyama was an elementary school teacher, army personnel ofﬁcer, anThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

362

employee of Hōchi shinbun, and ultimately, a successful children’s author. Yokoyama Natsuki,
Kagayaku Yasukuni monogatari, Tokyo: Taihei shobō, 1944, p. 226.
11

Author’s italics. Yasukuni restsujo itoku kenshōkai, ed., Yasukuni retsujo den, Tokyo:
Shuppan bunka kenkyūkai, 1941.
12

Takagami Kakushō, Takagami Kakushō zenshū, 10 vols, Tokyo: Rekishi toshosha, 1978.

13

Author’s italics. Takagami Kakushō, Yasukuni no seishin, Tokyo: Dai ichi shobō, 1942, p. 94.

14

Ibid., p. 98.

15

Ibid.

16

Hirayama Hiroshi, Fukuzawa Yukichi no shinjitsu, Tokyo: Bunshun shinsho, 2004.

17

Fukuzawa Yukichi, Fukuzawa Yukichi zenshū, vol. 15, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1970, pp.
321–2.
18

Ibid., p. 341.

19

Kawakami Hajime, ‘Nihon dokuji no kakka shugi,’ in Sugihara Shirō (ed.), Kawakami Hajime
hyōron shū, Tokyo: Iwanami, 1999.
20

16 April 1987, Asahi shinbun.

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Yasukuni Shrine: Ritual and Memory
John Breen
Yasukuni is first and foremost a site for the performance of ritual before the kami (gods), thosemen, women and some children who sacrificed their lives for the imperial cause. This article
examines the organizing of space and ritual at Tokyo's shrine to the war dead and theimplications for memory.
The most important of several ritual spaces is that within the Honden or Main sanctuary. This is
the central, elevated building located along the east-west axis that runs up from the bottom ofKudan hill. It is within the deepest darkest recesses of the Honden that the kami reside; there that
priests make them offerings every morning and evening every day of the year. The otherbuildings along the main axis are the Haiden or Worship hall and the Reijibo hoanden or Shrine
archive. The pilgrim to Yasukuni passes under the first torii at the bottom of Kudan hill, throughthe wooden gate and under the second and third torii to confront the Worship hall. It is here thatpilgrims bow their heads, clap their hands before the Yasukuni kami. On more formal occasions,the pilgrim enters the Worship hall and observes the ritual activity in the Main sanctuary acrossthe garden that separates the two buildings. The Honden was built in 1872 and the Haiden in
1901. The Repository, constructed of earthquake proof reinforced concrete directly above the
Yasukuni air raid shelter, is more recent. It was built in 1972 with a private donation from theShowa emperor, Hirohito.

The Main Sanctuary (Courtesy of Yasukuni Shrine)

On the north south axis are two other sites of significance: to the north of the Worship hall is the
Yushukan war museum, an integral part of the shrine precinct, and to the south the Chinreisha or
spirit pacifying shrine, a site of considerable controversy. In this and any discussion of Yasukuni,
it is important to acknowledge that the shrine is first and foremost a ritual site and that it is also,
for this very reason, a keeper of complex and conflicting memories. All of the sites are keepersof memory and in what follows, I explore the meaning of each in turn: the Main sanctuary, theYushukan war museum and the Chinreisha. [1]The Main Sanctuary
Of the many rites that Yasukuni priests perform during the course of the year, the most important
are the great Spring and Autumn rites. What distinguishes them above all is the presence of an

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emissary (chokushi) dispatched from the imperial court. The emissary, clad in Heian court garb,
brings from the imperial palace the emperor's offerings of silk in five colours to add to thosewhich the shrine priests place before the kami at the start of the rites: beer, cigarettes, water andrice wine. The dynamic in this and all Yasukuni rites involves an exchange: here it is the
propitiation of the kami by the emperor (in the person of his emissary) and by priests withofferings; in return, the kami bestow their blessings upon the emperor, Japan and all Japanese of
the realm. The kami demand constant propitiation lest they be distracted for a moment frombestowing their blessings; lest also their benevolence might transform itself into a malevolent
power. Rites at Yasukuni, therefore, share much in common with the genre of chinkon, or spirit
pacifying, rites. Ancestral rites are the best-known examples of the genre; the cult of angry
spirits that began in Heian Japan is another example. Shrine priests insist though that their kami
are to be thought of as ancestors of the living and not as angry spirits.
The imperial connection is absolutely fundamental to an understanding of Yasukuni and themeaning of its rites. The imperial emissary is the most striking symbol of that connection, but it
is everywhere apparent. Imperial princes regularly attend shrine rites to this day, though thepresent emperor has not visited since his enthronement and his father, emperor Showa, visitedfor the last time back in 1975. He intended to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the war, but
1985 was the year in which Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro's visit caused a major diplomatic
incident with China. It was deemed undiplomatic for the emperor to visit, and he never returned.
The shrine is marked with imperial symbols: the 16-leaf chrysanthemum embossed on thewooden gate, the chrysanthemum patterned curtains that adorn the Worship hall and the Main
sanctuary; the mirror that dominates the interior of the Sanctuary, a personal gift from the Meiji
emperor. Yasukuni is, moreover, designated chokusaisha or 'shrine for imperial offerings'.
Indeed, the Yasukuni ritual cycle incorporates rites of the imperial court: so the shrine performs
the Niiname and Kanname rites; it celebrates the anniversaries of Jinmu, Meiji, Taisho andShowa. Finally, the Shrine archive was built by the Showa emperor, and symbolizes the fact thatthe war dead are the emperor's war dead. The imperial connection constitutes a most significant
thread of continuity with pre-1945 when Yasukuni shrine rites, attended by the emperor inperson, became the vibrant centre of the imperial cult.
The imperial presence, in the person of the emissary, gives to the Great spring and autumn rites
an intriguing ambiguity. This was always the case from the moment when, in the 5th month of1869, the Meiji emperor marked the shrine's foundation with the dispatch of an emissary tohonour the 3,588 dead in the civil war. Now, as then, the emperor propitiates the war deadbringing them solace with his presence and his offerings of silk. He is doing more than this ofcourse: he is honouring the values of patriotism, bravery and self-sacrifice which all of the deadare assumed to have embodied in their deaths. These were values which were sustained andgiven meaning by the imperial institution: it was for the emperor that the dead made the ultimate
sacrifice, and by the emperor they are now being recompensed. The ambiguity concerns thequestion of who venerates whom at Yasukuni. For there is a real sense in which even as theemperor makes his offerings to the war dead, so the war dead and the living gather at Yasukuni
to venerate the imperial presence.
As a dynamic site of memory, then, Yasukuni recalls through its Great spring and autumn rites in
the Main sanctuary—and it idealises—a time when the imperial institution and imperial values
defined society; when all men were motivated by a sense of patriotism, of courage andBreen: Yasukuni Shrine

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selflessness. Yasukuni rites preserve the memory of a war in which all deaths were selfless actsof bravery on behalf of the imperial institution; of a war which was only ever noble and glorious.
The Absent Enemy
All participants to the Great spring and autumn rites are actively encouraged to visit the
Yushukan war museum, which sits to the north side of the Main sanctuary. Free tickets ensurethat crowds gather in the museum after the performance of rites. Ever since the museum was first
re-opened in post war Japan in 1985, it has always been regarded as inseparable from the shrine;
its exhibits constitute a sort of illustrated commentary on the shrine's ritual activity. This remains
the case today with the greatly expanded and refurbished Yushukan that opened its doors to the
public in 2003.
The Yushukan shares much in common with war museums of former imperialist powers
everywhere: its exhibits tend towards the glorification of sacrifice and acts of astonishingbravery on the part of soldiers who fought for the empire; they deploy technology, too, to sanitise
the horrors of war. The C56 steam engine that confronts the visitor in the reception hall is a casein point. The plaque attached says 'This engine was built in 1936; it was used on the Burmarailway, and for a decade after the war too it continued to ply the same route.' 'The building of
the railway [it adds] was difficult in the extreme'. That this 'difficulty' entailed the deaths of some
90,000 prisoners of war and local laborers, as well as many Japanese, is not referred to.
The life size models of the Oka and the Kaiten that decorate the entrance hall make the same
point. The Oka were flying contraptions packed with explosives. They were released from their'mother' plane when the enemy fleet hove into view and the pilot, with only the most primitive
steering gear, would endeavour to crash it into enemy warships. The Kaiten was a manned
torpedo equipped with a small engine and steering device designed to be steered by its pilot into
the hulls of enemy vessels. The plaques attached to these machines are full of fascinating
technological detail, but there is no encouragement to recall the destruction they caused. But thisis not unique to the Yushukan.
What is perhaps unique to the Yushukan war museum—it certainly offers a striking contrast to,say, the Imperial war museum in London—is the curious absence of the enemy. The visitor to
the galleries on the Sino-Japanese war, the Russo-Japanese war, the Manchurian 'incident' and
the Pacific war looks in vain for a sighting of the enemy. There are no representations ofChinese, Russian, Korean, American or British soldiers; no weaponry, uniforms, flags or othertrophies of war. A Yasukuni priest explained this was because the Yushukan was not really amuseum at all, but an 'archive of relics'. The Yushukan does refer to itself in its own
publications, however, as 'the oldest war museum in Japan' and, the point is that, like museums
everywhere, the Yushukan exhibits construct a narrative about Japan's modern wars; the absenceof the enemy distorts the narrative. It disguises two deeply hurtful facts about the Pacific war: thefirst is the fact of perpetration; the second the fact of defeat. Relics of Chinese, Russian, Korean,
American or British soldiers would recall the defeats suffered by the Japanese army, and mightalso bring to mind the wrongs that Japan perpetrated. By eliminating the enemy, the Yushukan
remembers a war that was only ever glorious; it obliterates the possibility that not all theJapanese war dead died glorious deaths, that lives lost (Japanese or others) were lives wasted,
and that war was brutal and squalid. The exhibits prompt reflection only on heroism, loyalty andself-sacrifice.

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The visitor reaches the end of the Yushukan gallery on the Pacific war to discover that, though
the enemy is entirely absent, there is a striking foreign presence. The gallery concludes with aphotograph, magnified perhaps ten times, of Justice Radhabinod Pal. Justice Pal was the one
Asian judge at the war crimes tribunal in Tokyo, and it was his considered view that the Japanese
were innocent of all war crimes, and that the real aggressors in Asia were British and American
imperialists. Justice Pal's views are reproduced by the side of his portrait. They make for a
striking and a dramatic end to the gallery.
The curious absence not only of the enemy but also of the peoples conquered by Japan's armies
enables the Yushukan to recall a glorious war of liberation: Japanese soldiers fighting heroicallyand successfully to liberate Asia.
Pacifying the Myriad Spirits
Visitors to the Great spring and autumn rites are not encouraged to visit the Chinreisha or Spirit
pacifying shrine. In fact, the vast majority of them are entirely ignorant of its presence. This isbecause the Chinreisha sits to the southern side of the Main sanctuary enclosed by a steel fence.
The shrine was built in 1965 and the steel fence was erected a decade later. The reason for theconstruction of the fence, as explained to this author, was that the chief priest at Yasukuni had
received intelligence that unknown persons were planning to blow the Chinreisha up. It is clear,
however, that the very existence of the Chinreisha is a matter of great controversy within the
Yasukuni priesthood. Why would anyone want to blow it up; what makes it controversial?

The Spirit Pacifying Shrine (Courtesy of Yasukuni Shrine)

The Chinreisha is a simple, inconspicuous wooden structure that contains two za or seats for thekami. One is dedicated to all of those Japanese who died in domestic wars or incidents since1853 and who are not enshrined in the Main sanctuary. So the men who fought against theBreen: Yasukuni Shrine

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imperial army in the civil wars of 1868-9 are venerated there since the Main sanctuary only
venerates the imperial dead. Enshrined in the Chinreisha too are men like Eto Shinpei and Saigo
Takamori, erstwhile government leaders who subsequently rebelled against the imperial
government and took their own lives before capture.
A second za is still more controversial since it is dedicated to all the war dead regardless ofnationality: British, US, Chinese, Korean, South East Asian. In the Main sanctuary there are also
foreign war dead enshrined: Koreans, Chinese and Taiwanese. But these men died fighting forthe imperial army. The Chinreisha dead by contrast were the enemies of imperial Japan.
Although the Chinreisha is now secluded from view, and its existence unknown even to most of
the war veterans who patronize Yasukuni, it is a key ritual site. It has an annual festival held on
July 13th. It is accommodated within the Great Spring and Autumn rites to the extent thatofferings are placed before the Chinreisha kami on these occasions—though not by the imperial
emissary. Indeed, the native and foreign kami enshrined in the Chinreisha are propitiated withrice offerings in the morning and evening every day of the year.
What is interesting about the Chinreisha in the present context is that it has the capacity to recall
a more nuanced past, a past of perpetrators and of victims, of winners and losers, of horror aswell as heroism. It is precisely this past that the shrine authorities seem anxious to bury. The lastChief priest, Yuzawa Tadashi, was known to be vigorously opposed to removing the fence andexposing the Chinreisha to the public. He was replaced at the end of 2004 by a man called Nanbu
Toshiaki. Like most Yasukuni chief priests, Nanbu never trained as a Shinto priest; like most, heis an aristocrat. Nanbu's pedigree is particularly interesting though. He is descended from the
Nanbu family who ruled Morioka domain in the Tokugawa period. Morioka, of course, was oneof the domains in the great northern coalition that fought against the Meiji government in 1868.
His ancestors are enshrined in the Chinreisha. It is early yet to know whether Nanbu will adopt a
more open attitude toward the Chinreisha, which might make it possible for Yasukuni togenerate a more complex memory of Japan's imperial past.
Conclusion
I have here addressed the question of memory through a cursory exploration of the multiple sites
within the Yasukuni precinct. It is perhaps worth finally making reference to two othercategories of memory which Yasukuni entertains. The first relates to the shrine repository (reiji
bo hoanden). It is not widely acknowledged, but the repository contains unquestionably the mostaccurate records of those who died in Japanese uniform during the Pacific war.
For every one of the kami venerated in the main sanctuary at Yasukuni, there are files, presently
being digitalized, containing personal details. The latest shrine figures for the dead are as
follows: the Manchurian 'incident' 17,176, the China war 191,250, and the Pacific war 2,133,915.
I say 'the latest figures' because those for the Pacific war change. Last year, the shrine enshrined
12 new kami. Families of the war dead inquired of the shrine whether their fathers, brothers or
uncles were venerated at Yasukuni; the shrine carried out checks and discovered that thesenames were not in the archive. The dead were duly transformed into kami through a rite ofapotheosis. [2]The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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The Repository (courtesy of Yasukuni Shrine)

A second point to make is that Yasukuni is a place of intimate personal memory. Many of thewar veterans interviewed by this author related that they went to Yasukuni every year on theanniversary of a comrade—again perhaps at the spring or autumn festival—to keep alive
personal memories, to keep the promise they made to meet again at Yasukuni—and to pray forpeace. [3]Notes[1] The best discussion of the political dimension to the Yasukuni problem, with which thisarticle does not engage, is to be found in John Nelson ( 2003), "Social Memory as Ritual
Practice: Commemorating Spirits of the Military Dead at Yasukuni Shinto Shrine," Journal of
Asian Studies 62, 2.
[2] For a fuller discussion of the rites of apotheosis, and of propitiation, see John Breen (2004),'The dead and the living in the land of peace: a sociology of Yasukuni shrine' in John Breen ed.,Death in Japan (Mortality [special issue]) 9, 1, pp. 77-82.
[3] For veterans and their views on Yasukuni, see Breen (2004), 'The dead and the living', pp.
88-90.
John Breen is Head, Japanese and Korean Department, School of Oriental and African Studies,in London. With Mark Teeuwen, he is the author of A New History of Shinto, Wiley-Blackwell,2010.

Selden: Japan, the United States and Yasukuni Nationalism

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Japan, the United States and Yasukuni Nationalism: War, Historical Memory and the
Future of the Asia PacificMark Selden
Japan’s Yasukuni problem is inseparable from the fact that nationalism is the dominant ideologyof our era. This is abundantly clear in media representations, memorials, museums and popular
consciousness during and after wars and other international conflicts. [*] This is true not only ofJapan but also of South Korea, China and the US, among many others. And it is surely
nationalism—stimulated and emboldened throughout Asia following the end of the era of USSoviet confrontation, the rise of China as a regional and world power, and aggressive US actions
associated with the “war on terror”—that constitutes the most powerful obstacle to resolution of
the issues that divide nations and inflame passions in the Asia Pacific and beyond. Throughout
the twentieth century, nationalism has everywhere been the handmaiden of war: war has
provided a powerful stimulus to nationalism; nationalism has repeatedly led nations to war; andwar memory is central to framing and fueling nationalist historical legacies. This article
considers Yasukuni Shrine and Japanese war memory and representation in relationship tocontemporary nationalism and its implications for the future of East Asia.
The contentious issues that continue to swirl around war, memory, and representation are central
to shaping nationalist thought, the future of Japan, the Asia-Pacific region, and the US-Japan
relationship. Why do issues such as the role of Yasukuni Shrine repeatedly surface six decades
after Japan’s defeat even as the generation that experienced the war is passing from the scene?
This seems all the more counterintuitive at a time when the economies and even the cultures ofChina, Japan and Korea are deeply intertwined.
The “Yasukuni problem” is at the epicenter of the complex set of issues surrounding Japanesewars in the Asia Pacific, the emperor, religion, and identity. Yasukuni issues are deeplyintertwined with China-Japan, Korea-Japan and the US-Japan relationship. Attention to
Yasukuni reveals distinctive characteristics of Japanese nationalism while allowing us to explore
a number of themes of comparative nationalism.
It is important to state clearly at the outset the reason for undertaking this analysis: it is to search
for ways that might contribute to mutual understanding among the nations and peoples of the
Asia Pacific, including Japan, China, Korea and the United States.
I will emphasize three points about the “Yasukuni Problem” and contemporary nationalisms thatseem absent in much of the discussion in Japan, Asia and internationally. The first is the need totranscend an exclusively Japanese perspective by locating the issues within the framework of theJapan-US relationship that has dominated Japanese politics for more than six decades. The
second locates war nationalism in general and “Yasukuni nationalism” in particular within the
broader purview of competing nationalisms in the Asia Pacific, including Chinese, Korean and
US nationalisms. The third deconstructs “the Japanese,” to recognize deep fissures among theJapanese people with respect to Yasukuni, nationalism, the emperor in whose name Japanfought, and memories of colonialism and war. Each of these requires breaking with a monolithic
understanding of the issues. Each has implications for moving beyond the present politicalimpasse and reflecting on approaches that could contribute toward tension reduction in the Asia
Pacific.

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Yasukuni Jinja both is and is not a “Japanese” problem. As a Shinto shrine with enduringhistorical links to the emperor—established in 1869 “to commemorate and honor theachievement of those who dedicated their precious life for their country”—and with a deep
association with every Japanese war from the Meiji era through the Asia Pacific War, it evokes
Japanese tradition linking Shinto, emperor and war. [1] Yet to see it simply as Japanese is toneglect a range of features characteristic of contemporary nationalisms. This view ignores
important regional and global forces, particularly the role of the United States, in shaping politics
and ideology from the Japanese occupation to today.

Yasukuni Shrine in a Meiji woodblock

Yasukuni shrine layout today

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Japanese neonationalists insist on the quintessential Japanese character of Yasukuni, thereby
attempting to place it beyond discussion by people in neighboring and other countries, as well as
seeking to crush debate within Japan. But they are not alone in their stress on Japaneseness. In
calling for a politics of pride, their scorn for the Tokyo Trial and other international assessmentsof Japanese war crimes, and their insistence that the era of apologies to victims of Japanese war
atrocities should end, contemporary Japanese nationalists share something with certain Japanese
progressives and pacifists. Whether praising former Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro’s highprofile visits to Yasukuni and defending the legitimacy of the Yushukan museum exhibits, which
glorify the exploits of the Japanese military in the Asia Pacific War and praise Japan forliberating Asia from European colonialism, or criticizing them as an illegitimate attempt toreverse historical verdicts and a slap in the face to Japan’s neighbors, both nationalists andprogressives routinely present Yasukuni as a uniquely Japanese phenomenon.
Yasukuni, Commemoration and the US-Japan Relationship
Yasukuni is, of course, quintessentially Japanese in its mix of Shinto and emperor lore, itsarchitecture and rituals that apotheosize the military war dead as kami (deities), and its
nationalist perspective on colonialism and war, emperor, and the souls enshrined there.

Yasukuni Shrine festival 1895. Woodblock print by Shinohara Kiyooki.
Reproduced from M.I.T. Visualizing Cultures.

As Yomiuri Shimbun’s editor Watanabe Tsuneo commented tartly of the exhibits at the
Yushukan museum on the shrine grounds, “That facility praises militarism and children who go
through that memorial come out saying, ‘Japan actually won the last war.’” [2] More precisely,
the exhibits, centered on the devotion of the military to emperor and nation, elevate Japan’s war
making to aesthetic and spiritual heights, embracing the imperial mission and lionizing the
kamikaze pilots sent to sacrifice themselves for emperor and nation.
Throughout the war years (1931-45), indeed from the Meiji era forward, Yasukuni Shrine wasthe centerpiece of what Takahashi Tetsuya has termed the “emotional alchemy” of turning thegrief of bereaved families into the patriotic exhilaration of enshrinement of the war dead as
deities with the stamp of official recognition of personal sacrifice and honor by the emperor.

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Hirohito at Yasukuni Shrine in 1935

It is an alchemy sealed in Japanese government payments to deceased soldiers’ families that forsix decades has forged a bond between the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and a powerfulconstituency, while implicitly legitimating the aims of colonialism and war for which so many
Japanese soldiers and civilians died. [3]A festive crowd throngs the shrine in 1940

Another kind of alchemy goes hand in hand with the alchemy of exaltation. This is the alchemyof amnesia . . . forgetting atrocities and war crimes, forgetting the treatment of the military
comfort women, of forced laborers, of those whose lands were invaded, homes destroyed andfamilies slaughtered in the name of emperor and empire. While the military dead were enshrined
as kami at Yasukuni shrine and their families received state pensions, the hundreds of thousandsof civilian dead and many more injured were forgotten: neither shrine nor state commemorated
their sacrifice or attended to the needs of their families. If nationalism has everything to do withinvented tradition, as Benedict Anderson has compellingly argued, it is equally about suppressedor forgotten traditions.

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Shrine on 50 sen bill, 1943.

All nations symbolically elevate the sacrifice of the military war dead—their own dead—acompact to secure the compliance of soldiers and civilians to fight and die for goals proclaimedby the state. [4] If the symbolism of Yasukuni is distinctive in its particulars, it is but one suchmanifestation of a global phenomenon of state-sponsored war nationalism pivoting on the
military war dead. With the enshrinement of Japan’s 2.46 million military dead, the senbotsusha,that is, all who died in uniform from Meiji through the Pacific War (2.1 million in the PacificWar), Yasukuni reinforced its position as the central symbol linking emperor, war, the militaryand empire. John Breen’s sensitive analysis of the shrine’s rites of apotheosis and propitiation
well documents the nexus of power and ideology that gives the shrine its special place incontemporary Japan. [5]Chinrei-sha, Spirit-pacifying shrine

Okinawa, Japan, the United States and the War Dead
Okinawa provides another vantage point from which to assess the Yasukuni phenomenon, andnot only because the Battle of Okinawa, the only major campaign fought on Japanese soil, wasthe costliest of the Asia-Pacific War in terms of Japanese, Okinawan and American lives. The

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Battle has also played a crucial role in framing the postwar US-Japan-Okinawa relationship andthe historical memory battles that continue to this day.
The different positions of Okinawans and Japanese became patently clear in the course of theBattle, when Japanese forces compelled many Okinawans seeking shelter from the American
attack to commit collective mass suicide (shudan jiketsu) rather than surrender. [6] JapaneseOkinawan differences in perspective would also shape subsequent commemoration and memory
practices in the form of controversies over monuments, museums, films, manga, and textbook
interpretations.
With an estimated 250,000 deaths the Japanese state, including 150,000 Okinawans (more than
one-fourth of the civilian population) and 100,000 Japanese forces, as well as 12,000 US troops,
the battle turned central and southern areas of the main island into a wasteland. Even while thefighting raged, US forces sequestered large areas of central Okinawa and began constructing
airfields, roads and bases. Indeed, as early as 1947, as Takemae Eiji observes, “more than one
third of Okinawa’s arable surface lay under roads and runways or behind barbed wire.” [7] WhenUS authorities resettled residents of these areas to the south, the settlers encountered the bones of
the war dead lying scattered on the ground. [8]Immediately following resettlement, community-organized bone collection campaigns (ikotsu
shushu) were waged to make the former battlefield livable and to conciliate the spirits of thedead. Bones were washed and then cremated or placed in newly built ossuaries scatteredthroughout Southern Okinawa. The remains of 135,000 people were collected between 1946 and1955. In the most celebrated case, the 4,300 residents of Mawashi Village who were resettled in
Miwa Village, painstakingly collected the remains of 35,000 people and deposited them in an
ossuary at Konpaku-no-to, which became, and remains today, the major site for local
commemoration of the Battle, and above all for the losses of the Okinawan people civilians aswell as soldiers.

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Konpaku is not, however, Okinawa’s only major commemorative site. In July 1957, the Relief
Section of the Government of the Ryukyu Islands established a central ossuary at Shikina,transferring war remains from small ossuaries and shipping identifiable Japanese remains to themainland. The inaugural memorial service for Shikina was held on January 25, 1958. The US
authorities, with deep misgivings, permitted three representatives from Yasukuni Shrine, twoDiet members, and a representative from the Prime Minister’s Office to attend. There were also
representatives of the Okinawa Bereaved Families Federation, which, like the nationalorganization, lobbied for closer relations between the Okinawan war dead and Yasukuni Shrine,
as well as Japanese government subsidies for, and official visits to, Yasukuni. [9] In short, USefforts to sever the Ryukyus from Japan were thwarted by means of linkages between Okinawan
and mainland Japanese commemorative practices that linked the Okinawan dead to Japan, andspecifically to Yasukuni Shrine.

Monuments at Shikina

If Konpaku was the creation of Okinawan villagers, Shikina was primarily the product of GRI(that is, the US administration of the Ryukyu Islands) under pressure from Tokyo. Yet we cannot
simply conclude that Konpaku embodied Okinawan sentiment while Shikina was the expressionof Tokyo and/or the US. Both sites honored the military and the civilian dead, Japanese andOkinawan, although as we will note, with quite different emphases.
In the wake of the establishment of the Shikina commemorative site, the Japanese government
moved vigorously to consolidate its territorial claims to Okinawa, still a US military colony,through establishing prefectural memorials to the military dead. Six prefectural monuments werebuilt between 1954 and 1963, then thirty-nine more between 1963 and 1971, nearly all in thevicinity of Shikina on Mabuni Hill.
With the prefectural monuments close to those honoring Generals Ushijima Mitsuru and Cho
Isamu, commanders of the Japanese 32nd Army who committed suicide at Mabuni Hill, theJapanese military and the state placed its imprint on Okinawan soil and bid to create a unified
military-centered war memory for both Japanese and Okinawans. That memory highlighted

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loyalty to the emperor and reification of the war mission as exemplified by the choice of suicide
over surrender.
The Japanese government, displaced from Okinawa by US forces, worked to lay claim not only
to the souls of mainland Japanese soldiers who died, but also to those of Okinawan soldiers andeven civilians. USCAR documents record the fact that in January 1964 “the Japanese cabinet
decided to confer court ranks and decorations posthumously to World War II war dead, including
approximately 52,700 Ryukyuan (Okinawans).” [10]Who were the Ryukyuans chosen to receive court ranks and decorations, and did they in fact
receive them? Were Okinawan civilians among those enshrined at Yasukuni . . . hitherto
reserved for the military dead? Figal does not provide definitive answers and further research has
yet to resolve the issue. It seems likely, however, that Ryukyuan civilians, notably the 580
members of the Himeyuri (Maiden Lily) student nurse corps and the 2,000 strong Blood and Iron
Corps, comprised of junior high and high school students, called up during the Battle of Okinawa
and mythologized by the Japanese government for their loyalty, were among those who wereslated for honors. [11]In short, even while Okinawa remained a US military colony, albeit with recognition that Japanpossessed residual sovereignty, Japanese authorities moved to lay claim to the souls of the
Okinawan war dead (military and civilian), while memorializing and apotheosizing fallen
Japanese soldiers.
Following Okinawa’s reversion to Japanese administration, on May 15, 1972, the Okinawa
Battle Site Governmental Park established by GRI was renamed the Okinawa Battle Site
National Park and the entire area around Mabuni Hill became the Peace National Park.
It is widely believed that Japan has no national cemetery, or that Yasukuni Shrine functions ineffect as a national war cemetery that preserves no remains of deceased soldiers. But in 1979 theShikina Central Ossuary that housed the remains of the unknown war dead was replaced by the
National Okinawa War Dead Cemetery (NOWC) at Mabuni Hill. With the war remains
transferred from both Konpaku-no-to, the local ossuary, and from Shikina, NOWC became
Japan’s first and only national cemetery. Figal shows how the cemetery expanded beyond its
Okinawan roots to become a national sacred site that commemorates all of Japan’s Asia PacificWar dead:
Prefectures enshrined the spirits of the war dead from all south seas campaigns and in some cases
from continental Asia as well, transforming the form and function of memorial space in Okinawa
from its local roots around Komesu to a national shrine centered at the site where the Japanesecommanders committed ritual suicide on 23 June 1945.
The cemetery is a mecca for Japanese tour groups, including military groups organized by unit
and by prefecture, paying homage not only to the war dead from the Battle of Okinawa, but also
to the Asia Pacific War, one celebrating the emperor-military bond.
Following the election of Ota Masahide as Governor in 1990, Okinawa moved to create theCornerstone of Peace (Ishiji) at Mabuni Hill, inscribing in stone the names and nationality of the239,000 combatant and noncombatant dead of all nations: Japanese, American, Korean,
Taiwanese, British, and Okinawan among others. This cosmopolitan and inclusive approach,with its distinctive Okinawan roots and close attention to the civilian victims of the Battle, stands

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out among the world’s memorials. The Cornerstone contains this inscription looking beyond thenationalist passions of war: "The Cornerstone of Peace" is a place to remember and honor the
200,000 people who lost their lives in the Battle of Okinawa and other battles, to appreciate thepeace in which we live today and to pray for everlasting world peace.”

Cornerstone of Peace. More than 237,000 names of deceased civilians and soldiers are inscribed.

Yet for all its universalism, we note the continued stamp of the nation state in two importantways in the memorial spaces at Mabuni. First, the dead are arrayed in separate areas bynationality, and with Okinawans distinguished from mainland Japanese. Second, Mabuni Hill
includes not only the Okinawan representations encapsulated in the Cornerstone of Peace andKonpaku-no-to, but the NOWC and the prefectural military memorials with their intimate ties to
the Japanese military and Yasukuni Shrine. The mélange of memorials illustrates the conflicting
approaches to commemoration between the Japanese state and Okinawan prefectural authorities.
We may say that NOWC is a monument to war while the Cornerstone is a monument to peace.
The Cornerstone of Peace is notable for its inclusiveness in commemorating the dead of allnations, its honoring of civilians and military victims of the Battle, and its partially successfulattempt to transcend nationalist categories in search of universal peace. It is an achievement thathas been realized in no mainland Japanese, American, British or German nationalcommemorative site with which I am familiar. [12]Yasukuni, Nationalism and Historical Memory in Postwar Japan
The postwar period brought subtle yet crucial changes in the construction of Japanese war
memories. During the occupation, Yasukuni, like so much else, became a Japan-US construction
with implications for the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. The Yasukuni problem is mostfruitfully viewed in relation to US decisions that include the permanent positioning of US forces
in Japan, the preservation of Emperor Hirohito on the throne at the symbolic center of postwar
Japanese politics yet subordinate to American power, and the dismantling of state Shinto whileallowing the shrine to continue as an independent religious legal entity. Yasukuni’s formal
position was redefined by constitutional provisions separating church and state, yet important
ritual bonds linking emperor and shrine remained intact. Because the post-war Constitution does

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not specify a head of state, the emperor and the imperial representative was able to patronize andvisit Yasukuni, the chief priest of the shrine held regular audiences with the emperor, and theemperor’s representative played a central role in shrine rituals without raising legal issues. [13]Yasukuni Shrine was intimately associated with, and provided legitimation for, Japan’s PacificWar, enshrining those who sacrificed their lives for Japan. In the 1930s and early 1940s, visits by
the emperor and by families of deceased soldiers enshrined as kami provided ideological andspiritual foundations for war and empire.
In the postwar, with Japan at peace and occupied by US forces, the shrine has played a role instructuring how the war is remembered and presented to the Japanese people. It did so within aframework crafted by the occupation authorities who exonerated the emperor of all responsibility
for initiating or waging war. Indeed, Hirohito was credited by both the occupation authorities andthe Japanese government with bringing peace by personally intervening to end the war. Not only
would the emperor not be deposed or tried as a war criminal, he would be shielded even fromtestifying at the Tokyo Trial. [14] The verdict at Tokyo, sentencing Tojo and a small number ofprominent military and government officials to death, as well as the convictions of thousands ofsoldiers and police officials tried in B and C class tribunals, in leaving untouched Japan’s
supreme wartime leader, essentially absolved the Japanese people of the responsibility to
examine their own behavior in the era of colonialism and war. For these reasons, the US as wellas Japan ultimately shares responsibility for resolving issues of war responsibility that it helped
to create, including those associated with the emperor and with Yasukuni Shrine.

Tojo at the Tokyo Trial

During the occupation, while shorn of official ties to the state and given a ‘private’ religious
status, Yasukuni Shrine remained the central national-religious symbol for those who would
defend the memory of war and would deny calls from Chinese, Koreans and other victims,
including GI prisoners of war, for apologies and compensation for Japanese war crimes andatrocities. [15]Selden: Japan, the United States and Yasukuni Nationalism

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Whatever its official status, the link between Yasukuni and the emperor, and between Yasukuni
and the Japanese government has remained strong. Hirohito made eight postwar visits to
Yasukuni, the last in 1975, firmly nurturing the bond between emperor and shrine on the one
hand, and the souls of the military dead enshrined there on the other. Hirohito never paid apersonal visit to Yasukuni after the October 17, 1978 enshrinement of 14 Class-A war criminals
defined by the Tokyo Trial and styled “Showa martyrs” by the Shrine authorities. [16] Nor has
his successor, Akihito, who has reigned since 1989, paid a public visit to the shrine. Yasukuni
Shrine continues to highlight its imperial bond, as in this passage from its website: “twice every
year−in the spring and autumn−major rituals are conducted, on which occasion offerings fromHis Majesty the Emperor are dedicated to them, and also attended by members of the imperialfamily.’ [17]The symbolism linking emperor-Yasukuni-war-empire remains in place, a compelling example
of what Herbert Bix calls Hirohito’s apparition. That is, regardless of whether the emperor
personally visited Yasukuni, there could be no public questioning of the role and responsibilityof the emperor in war and empire, or of the nexus of power linking emperor and shrine. But if
the emperor ceases to pay homage publicly at Yasukuni, what sustains the shrine’s importance inthe public arena?
Viewing Japan as a MonolithInternational critics of Japanese neonationalism frequently present Japan as a monolithic entity, anation that is thoroughly unrepentant about, even celebratory of its record in the era ofcolonialism and war. Throughout the postwar era, however, the Japanese polity has been, andremains, deeply divided over how to remember the era of colonialism and war in general, and the
Yasukuni problem in particular. This explains the furor among Japanese provoked by Prime
Minister Koizumi Junichiro’s Yasukuni visits and by state approval of textbooks that reiterateneonationalist themes.
For more than half a century public sentiment in favor of the no-war clause in Japan’sConstitution, has helped prevent the ruling party, with US support, from eliminating Article 9 inorder to legitimate overseas military activities. Most important, sustained popular support for
Article 9 is widely recognized as one important factor that has enabled Japan, which was more orless continuously at war from 1895 to 1945, to enjoy six decades of peace and prosperity.
Popular support has not, however, been sufficient to prevent the ruling coalition from steadily
eroding the meaning of Article 9 by extending the regional and even global reach of Japanesemilitary power within the US-Japan framework and to set in motion a process of Constitutional
revision. Popular support for Article 9 goes hand in hand with substantial popular sentimentcritical of Japan’s conduct of the Asia Pacific War and Yasukuni nationalism, a finding
repeatedly confirmed in public opinion polls.
Japanese critiques of the Pacific War have not been limited to pacifists and progressives. Kaya
Okinori (1889-1977), who led the War Bereaved Families Association (Nihon Izokukai), forfifteen years beginning in 1962, was finance minister in the wartime Tojo cabinet. The
Association is a powerful political bulwark and lobby for Yasukuni Shrine, and, indeed for the
Liberal Democratic Party, which in turn continues to support family members of deceased
soldiers financially six decades after the war. Kaya served ten years of a life sentence imposedby the Tokyo Tribunal before being released and eventually taking up a post as Justice Minister.
In his memoirs, Kaya condemned Japan’s war against the US and criticized his own role in theThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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war. His most important point, no less pertinent today than when he wrote, is this: “as aJapanese, it is extremely regrettable that the people themselves could not judge the responsibilityof their leaders.” [18]Finance Minister Kaya Okinori addresses Diet Budget Committee, 1944

Despite US and Japanese policies encouraging remilitarization, significant numbers of Japanese,particularly many of the wartime generation, have long sought to make amends to Japan’s
victims, most importantly by rejecting the wartime ideology of emperor-centered nationalism,
colonialism and kokutai. For example, many Japanese scholars have displayed dedication,
resourcefulness and courage in researching and analyzing Japanese war crimes and atrocities.
Their research has made it possible to mount effective critiques of atrocities including the
Nanjing Massacre and the comfort women, and to question fundamental premises of Yasukuni
nationalism. Indeed, many Japanese citizens, deeply influenced by the lessons of the Pacific War
and Japan’s crushing defeat, resisted militarizing trends from a pacifist perspective throughout
their lives. In contrast for example to the US anti-Iraq War movement, which fizzled once thewar began despite widespread continued popular disapproval of the conduct of the war, Japanesepacifism and activism have been sustained in large and small ways over decades, notably in theanti-nuclear movements. The number of privately founded peace museums, perhaps more than in
the rest of the world combined, provides one measure of this. The fifty year effort by Chukiren
veterans (China Returnees) who were captured and re-educated in China, and have publicly
criticized their own atrocities and those committed by other members of the Japanese military
ever since, is another. [19]Critics of the revival of Japanese neonationalism have good reason to be concerned about trends
of recent years, notably Japan’s dispatch of troops and ships to the Persian Gulf in support ofUS-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. [20] At the same time, it is important to recognize,
however, that in contrast to the US, for sixty years Japan has NOT gone to war, Japanese havenot killed or been killed on battlefields in Asia and beyond, proponents of Constitutional revision
have not succeeded in eliminating Article 9 of the Constitution, and Yasukuni nationalism
appears to be far weaker than it was in wartime.

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Nevertheless, in the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Socialist Party as
the major opposition party, and the decline of social democracy in the face of a US-spearheaded
neoliberalism, a neonationalist revival has accompanied the redefinition of the US-Japan security
relationship. [21] We have suggested that Japan’s failure to adequately come to terms with its
wartime aggression and the nature of its atrocities remains an obstacle to the achievement of a
viable Pacific community.
The issues are not, of course, limited to Japanese intransigence, as our discussion of US war
conduct has made plain. Progress on this front will also require recognition on the part of both
Korea and China of the need to curb their own volatile nationalisms in the interest of a common
vision for the future of the region.
Hong Kal has examined the construction of Japanese and Korean nationalisms through Yasukuni
Shrine and the Korean War Memorial in Seoul. In both instances, the governments seek to cloak
their legitimacy in the conduct of these wars, the Asia-Pacific War for Tokyo and the Korean
War for Seoul. And in both, the presence and influence of the United States, first in its wartime
role and subsequently in its postwar construction of Japanese and Korean polities, is palpableand invisible. [22] While Yasukuni nationalism reverberates throughout the Asia Pacific, themanifestations of South Korean nationalism projected in the War Memorial center on NorthSouth rivalry.
The Political Logic of Yasukuni Nationalism and the US-Japan Alliance
For three decades, the symbolism binding the state and Yasukuni—and the heart of the Yasukuni
controversy internationally—has been intimately linked with official Prime Ministerial visits thatbegan with Nakasone Yasuhiro in 1987 and continued with Koizumi Junichiro’s annual visits inthe years 2001-2006. Also important, albeit off stage, is the continuing ritual bond solidified by
the central presence of the imperial representative in all important shrine ceremonies.
Since 1970, on a number of occasions historical issues centered on the China-Japan War,atrocities, and the Yasukuni shrine have fueled conflict. The China factor has grown inimportance and complexity for Japan in recent decades as China emerged as a major power andcompetitor in Asia and as economic relations among China, Japan, South Korea and the US
rapidly expanded. Indicative of the stakes are the fact that in spring 2008 China replaced theUnited States as Japan’s leading trade partner while Japan was China’s number three partner,with bilateral trade totals of $237 billion. [23]Prime Minister Koizumi’s annual Yasukuni pilgrimages were among the three central symbolicand practical international actions of his five-year tenure, together with his visits to North Korea
and the dispatch of Japanese ground troops [GSDF] to Iraq, as well as naval forces [MSDF] andair forces [ASDF] to the Persian Gulf. The Yasukuni visits affronted not only China and Korea,
but also the people of other Asian nations and the United States. [24] They may also have firmed
Koizumi’s political base in Japan even while sparking controversy. Paradoxically, it is precisely
because Koizumi moved so determinedly to lash Japan to US regional and global strategic
designs that Yasukuni loomed so large for him. While Koizumi’s successors have wisely
refrained from visiting Yasukuni so as to avoid provoking China and Korea, they have continued
to embrace growing Japanese subordination to US power, sought to expand Japan’s militaryreach within the US-Japan framework, and supported neonationalist calls for textbooks that elidereference to Japan’s war atrocities. This is evident in former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s

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passage of a new education law and measures setting in motion the process to amend theconstitution.
One result of Prime Minister Koizumi’s annual Yasukuni visits, and, to a lesser extent, thebattles over Japanese textbook nationalism, was that relations soured and five years passed
without a meeting at the highest levels of the Chinese and Japanese leadership between 2001 and2006. [25] This was also a period in which other Japan-China conflicts, notably the
Diaoyutai/Senkaku islands territorial and oil and gas dispute flared. Japan-South Korea relations
were similarly poisoned by the combination of Yasukuni nationalism and territorial disputes
centered on the Dokdo/Takeshima Islets, offsetting the potentially salutary influence of theshared hosting of the 2002 World Cup and a cultural boom touched off by the unprecedented
success in Japan of the Korean TV drama Winter Sonata.
The clashes in the region have gone hand in hand with challenges from a resurgent Japanesenationalism that has frequently played out around Yasukuni and related historical memory
issues. Abe regularly visited the shrine on August 15, the date of Japan’s surrender, prior toassuming office. In June 2006, he firmly rejected Beijing’s call for an end to Yasukuni visits as aprecondition for talks, saying "We cannot and will not allow Japan's freedom of religion,
freedom of conscience and our feeling in memory of the war dead to be violated in such amanner.” Abe nevertheless refrained from publicly visiting the Shrine during his tenure as Prime
Minister, as has his successor Fukuda Yasuo.
The transition from Koizumi to Abe and Fukuda, and the growing recognition in influential
sectors of Japanese business and intellectual life of the importance of China and Korea forJapan’s future, have made it possible to put aside, at least temporarily, the passionate encountersover Yasukuni and to reopen diplomatic negotiations at the highest levels. While Japaneseneonationalist book and manga authors as well as filmmakers continue to reenact the Pacific War
and defend the benevolence of Japanese colonial rule and vilify China and Korea, as Matthew
Penney has shown, in recent years the most important Japanese books published on China haveunderlined Chinese achievements and paved the way toward China-Japan rapprochement. [26]As the preceding analysis suggests, however, neonationalism remains a latent and dangerous
force in Japanese and regional politics.
Prime Minister Fukuda’s determination to extend the MSDF role in refueling US and coalition
ships in the Persian Gulf is indicative of an expansive Japanese military within the framework of
US power. The Japanese military actions in the Gulf, of course, have strategic implications bothfor guarding Japan’s oil lifeline from the Middle East, as well as for extending the reach of the
US-Japan strategic alliance.
Gavan McCormack has observed that Japan’s deepening structural dependence andsubordination requires the theatre of nationalism to make it palatable to the Japanese people. The
independence that is denied in substance must be affirmed and celebrated in ritual and rhetoric.
Indeed, for Japan to become the Great Britain of East Asia, as in its dispatch of GSDF, MSDF
and ASDF to the war zone of the Persian Gulf, Yasukuni and other rituals of bravado, andeducational efforts such as those conducted by the YÅ«shÅ«kan, are conducted to satisfy pride.
[27] Nationalist bravado may conceal an overweening reality of dependence. Precisely the
Koizumi, Abe and Fukuda administrations’ support for US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for
the Bush administration’s global “war on terror” buys tacit US acceptance of Yasukuni

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nationalism and an expansive Japanese military role while inflaming Japan’s relations with herneighbors.
At a time when many nations bridle at the Bush administration’s scorn for international norms oflaw and justice, as in its invasion of Iraq and the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and
Guantanamo, and in its unilateral claims to the right to intervene anywhere and everywhere,
Japan’s support for US military ambitions globally increases the importance of Yasukuni as astatement to strengthen the LDP’s nationalist credentials at home. Japan places ever more of its
cards on an expansive military alliance with the US, as illustrated by its extraordinary agreement
to pay $6 billion (and perhaps much more) to fund the cost of transferring 8,000 US Marines
from Okinawa to Guam. [28] As Japan commits to an enlarged regional military subordinate to
US regional and global power projections throughout the Asia Pacific, all the more it requires
more dramatic claims to nationalist credentials domestically.
The evolving character of the US-Japan alliance is well illustrated by the establishment of aforward base or regional headquarters for I Corps, the US Army’s Asia Pacific and Middle East
headquarters at Camp Zama in Kanagawa, Japan. [29]In this way, the integration of US andJapanese military planning for the entire Asia Pacific is being facilitated in flagrant violation of
Article 9. The US military’s five-day "Valiant Shield" exercise off Guam in June 2006 brought
together US and allied Navy, Air Force, Marine and Coast guard forces involving an armada ofthree aircraft carriers and 25 other ships, including the Yokosuka-based Kitty Hawk group andother Japan-based ships. [30] The 22,000 troops and 280 warplanes, including the III Marine
Expeditionary Force and 5th Air Force based in Okinawa, joined in the largest military exercise
in the Pacific since the Vietnam War, sending powerful warning signals toward both North
Korea and China. Most important, from the perspective of understanding the Yasukuni
phenomenon, is that Japan’s military subordination to US power enables it to expand its militaryreach and ignore or flout the strong feelings of Asian neighbors, even those that are importanteconomic partners.
Since the 1980s, China-Japan and Korea-Japan economic relationships have grown exponentiallyat the same time that their political relations have remained volatile. Notable are Japanese
territorial conflicts with South Korea over Dokdo/Takeshima and with China over the
Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands and Okinotorishima Island. Tensions with both China and Korea arefurther inflamed by the intertwined issues of natural gas and fishing rights, as well as by war
memory issues of which Yasukuni Shrine and the comfort women have been the mostcontentious. In June, 2008, following the visit to Japan of China’s President Hu Jintao, a ChinaJapan agreement was signed to jointly develop natural gas deposits in disputed areas in thevicinity of the Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands. [31] In the long run, however, resolution of historicalcontroversies is important to long-term stability and regional coordination.
Nationalism and War in the 21st Century
Many nations including Britain, France and Germany, maintain a sacred site that is theapotheosis of war nationalism. The American Shrine to war nationalism is Arlington National
Cemetery, the repository of official celebration of American wars. [32] Boasting no less than
260,000 individual grave markers, the site is administered by the US Army. By contrast,
Yasukuni Shrine is not a cemetery. But the names of each of the dead soldiers-turned-dieties(kami) are recorded by name in the Reijibo Hoanden (Repository for the Register of Deities).

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Reijibo Hoanden

The kami include not only Japanese soldiers, but also 50,000 Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean
soldiers of the Japanese imperial armed forces, as well as tens of thousands of Okinawan
civilians called to service in the final conflict on Okinawa. These are preserved as the shrine’s
cultural capital and its claim to centrality in the nation’s historical and religious imagination. [33]Indeed, whereas American war nationalism requires tracking down and recovery of the remainsof the dead from US combat zones, a process that continues in Korea and Vietnam decades after
the end of the war, as Utsumi Aiko points out, more than one million Japanese bodies remain
unrecovered and the Japanese state has done little to recover them from the battlefields ofSoutheast Asia and the Pacific. [34] Whereas the US has gone to extraordinary lengths and at
great cost to bring back the remains of its war dead from far-flung battlefields, Japanese
authorities have emphasized the enshrinement of the spirit at Yasukuni and the creation of war
memorials at Mabuni Hill in Okinawa. [35]The two sites of Arlington and Yasukuni, as well as the Okinawa Battlesite National Park, sharecelebratory war narratives emphasizing each nation’s just and heroic combat in all of its wars,
and prioritizing of World War II/the Asia-Pacific War as the signature war in national memory.
As Benedict Anderson puts it following a review of a number of sacred war memorial sites,“Each in a different but related way shows why, no matter what crimes a nation’s government
commits and its passing citizenry endorses, My Country is ultimately good.” [36] Arlington,
Yasukuni, and the Okinawa Battlesite Park are the sacred sites that link war and the state innations with distinctive religious and commemorative traditions but with shared needs torecognize the sacrifice that the dead have made for the nation. One can search in vain at
Arlington and at Yasukuni, for example, for any self-critical reflection on wars commemorated,
above all any understanding of the plight of the victims of those wars. One finds no explanation,or even hint, of American or Japanese economic or geostrategic interests in the locales wherewars were fought and whose victims the nation enshrines. Still less is there recognition of, orreflection on, atrocities or war crimes committed by Japanese or American forces in pursuit ofnational goals. [37] We have reviewed Japanese crimes of war above. Notable American war
crimes and atrocities include the firebombing of more than sixty Japanese cities, and the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the use of Agent Orange and napalm to bomb Vietnamese
civilians, and the systematic torture of captives in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. All were

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actions approved at the highest levels of government and formed integral parts of American war
making. In construction a new world order following its victory in World War II, the US
pioneered principles of universality of international law in the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals.
But it also wielded its hegemonic power to restrict prosecution to the defeated and to deflect
criticism of American war making and atrocities. In this way, it insists on US impunity tointernational law and international norms, including those that it helped establish and enforce.
[38]
War memorials and war rhetoric celebrate the war-making prowess of the state and link themilitary, the nation and people in a perfect union against a common profoundly evil foe: for theUS, the demonization of Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein and the Axis of Evil are but the latest in achain of American representational acts whose long pedigree runs from the Indian wars throughthe Philippines-American war of 1900 to Japan in the Pacific War years 1941-45, on to thepresent. The problem of nationalism becomes acute when the failure to come to terms with thedark side of aggressive and expansionist wars either paves the way for new military adventures,as in the US since World War II, or when symbolic state acts antagonize the victims of former
wars, impede reconciliation, or create conditions that could prove conducive to a new cycle ofconflicts, as in contemporary Japan.
We have shown a number of ways in which American and Japanese war nationalisms areintertwined as a result of US occupation policies that preserved Hirohito as emperor andpermitted continuity of the Japanese government under a US-led occupation authority, paving
the way for the subsequent forging of the US-Japan military alliance. Yet international criticismsof neonationalism have centered almost exclusively on Japan, the more vulnerable of the twonations, despite the fact that the US replaced Japan as the nation involved in a nearly unbroken
succession of wars beyond its borders in the wake of World War II. It is surely time to recognize
and analyze the character of US neonationalism rooted in structures of permanent warfare, aglobal network of military bases protecting both territorial and economic interests, and a claimthat American wars serve to liberate oppressed people according to the formula of democracy
and development. [39] In this respect, American claims resonate with long-discredited claims
during the Asia-Pacific War that Japan was liberating Asia from European colonialism. Indeed
they are simply the latest incarnation of the moral and developmentalist claims of colonialisms
across the ages and across the globe. Today, these ideological claims rest on the institutionalfoundations of a global network of more than 1,000 US overseas military bases, a financial basein a military budget that is comparable to that of the rest of the world’s military budgets
combined, and a strategic conception that defines a permanent “war on terror” as the US global
mission. [40]
In noting the close relationship between nationalism and war, I do not wish to equate allnationalisms. In particular, I distinguish anticolonial nationalisms, that is nationalisms ofresistance to invasion and colonization, such as those that took shape in China, Vietnam, andKorea in the first half of the twentieth century, from aggressive and expansionist forms ofnationalism associated with colonial and post-colonial regimes and including both Japan and theUnited States. Nevertheless, even the nationalisms of victims that gave rise to national liberationand independence movements risk degenerating into malignant chauvinisms that can pave theway for subsequent rounds of war and block the way to regional accord. Examples include
Chinese and Vietnamese nationalisms fueling the China-Vietnam border war of 1979, andcontemporary Chinese and Korean nationalisms in the form of historical memory debates overThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia386

the ancient Koguryo/Gaogouli kingdom on the China/Korean border that have inflamed tensions
between the two nations.
From Yasukuni Politics to Tension Reduction and Regional Integration in the Asia Pacific
I conclude by looking beyond Yasukuni politics, the politics of emperor-centered Shinto
nationalism and historical memories that generate confrontation politics, to reflect briefly on
more hopeful regional alternatives that could promote more equitable forms of economic
integration and cultural interplay.
The Asia-Pacific region is presently in the early stages of what could emerge as the third great
epoch of region formation of the last half millennium. This follows on the China-centric
tributary-trade order which reached its peak in the eighteenth century, an epoch of prolonged
peace and prosperity in core areas of the region (but also an era in which the reach of Chinese
power extended far into Inner Asia), and a Japan-centric Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphereof the 1930s and 1940s, a brief and violent era of permanent war, instability and massive
bloodshed. The postwar US-dominated order in Asia, like the nineteenth century Europeancentered colonial order, was predicated on regional fragmentation/division and the privileging ofbilateral security, political and economic relationships within the US zone rather than on regional
integration. It was likewise characterized by fierce military conflict, indicative of the failure of
the US, like Japan earlier, to turn military supremacy into a stable hegemonic order. [41]The US-China opening of 1970 and the resurgence of Asian economies in the final decades of
the twentieth century paved the way for the re-knitting of regional bonds, the emergence of East
Asia as one of the world’s three dynamic centers, and China’s reemergence as a regional andglobal power. This has not given rise to a regionalism of the European Union type characterized
by political, security, juridical and diplomatic integration as manifest in the European parliament,
a common currency, a NATO security regime, and a common judicial structure. [42] East Asian
regionalism, like its postwar European variant, began to take shape within the framework of
American geopolitical dominance. However, in the course of the last quarter century, regional
economic integration, pivoting on China, Japan and Korea. and measured by trade, investment,
and technology transfers, has proceeded rapidly, while signs abound of US decline. The US
retains regional and global strategic primacy and a major economic position. But its soaringbalance of payments and budget deficits, the sub-prime bubble, and the collapse of the value ofthe dollar against Asian and other currencies, and a costly permanent and unwinnable war on
terror all point to its relative, decline.
In recent years, regional integration in East Asia has been reinforced by new levels of culturalinteraction (albeit not without xenophobic reaction) involving film, TV, anime, music, sports,
and manga, with cultural exchanges among China-Japan-South Korea interchanges among themost dynamic and intense. At the same time, wider efforts at regional integration have centeredon ASEAN. ASEAN + 3 (China, Japan and Korea) and other variations have emerged, with
China playing a vigorous regional role and Japan a far more reticent one. This pattern has been
replicated in the Six-Party talks centered on the North Korea bomb and the US-North Korea
relationship in which China has played a leading role while Japan remains at best a reluctant
partner. Other regional formations have simultaneously appeared, notably including the Shanghai
Group linking Russia, China and Central Asian nations, and the South Asian Association for
Regional Cooperation (SAARC). China has led in each of these regional endeavors, while amuch more prosperous and technologically advanced Japan has been content to reaffirm its

Selden: Japan, the United States and Yasukuni Nationalism

387

subordinate ties to the US and has been slow to respond to emerging regional formations inwhich a resurgent China could play a major or even leading role.
Major obstacles continue to confront the realization of the cooperative possibilities inherent in
the economic and cultural realms of regional cooperation in East Asia. None seem more
important than the potential clash with the political and strategic dimensions of Japanesenationalism and/or the US-Japan order, both of which appear to center on curbing an ascendant
China.
A dilemma confronting East Asia in the new millennium is how to mediate nationalisms that
inflame historical antagonisms. To the extent that the critique of the chauvinism of others servesto privilege one’s own nationalism, the result can only be a deepening spiral of conflict. It isessential that critiques of nationalism begin, therefore, with close examination of one’s own
nation: the roots and consequences of its nationalism, its record as a colonial power, an invader,and an oppressor of other peoples including ethnic minorities. This applies to Japan, the US andChina, among others. This can provide a foundation for exploring the possibilities of alternative
cooperative perspectives. The postwar predominance of US power has long granted Japan
impunity from confronting its own atrocities and its aggressive and interventionist posture.
Assessment of the Yasukuni problem, in particular one by an American, must locate the issues
within the parameters of the US-Japan relationship. This requires reflection on both Japanese andAmerican war crimes and atrocities that have yet to be recognized and effectively addressed by
the Japanese or American governments in the form of apologies and compensation of victims,
and ultimately in each nation’s textbooks, museums and historical monuments.
History matters. The starting point for reconciliation in the wake of wars, as the German
experience amply demonstrates, lies with overcoming historical amnesia to recognize one’s own
war crimes and atrocities and redress victim grievances. In the absence of steps by all parties
toward overcoming the poisonous legacy of earlier wars, the Asia-Pacific region could bedestined to continue to fight anew many of the still unresolved battles of a war that ended morethan six decades ago but continues to reverberate powerfully in historical memory.
Mark Selden is a Japan Focus coordinator and a Senior Research Associate in the East Asia
Program at Cornell University. Posted at Japan Focus on September 10, 2008.
Notes[*] Thanks to John Breen and Gerald Figal for advice and information, and especially to Laura
Hein for relentless critique of an earlier draft of this article.
[1] The quotation is from the Yasukuni Shrine website.
[2] See the editorials by the Yomiuri and the Asahi about the Yasukuni Shrine on the occasion of
the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Asia-Pacific War, which framed an important debate on
the shrine. While the “conservative” Yomiuri and the “liberal” Asahi have frequently taken
different positions on such war and peace issues as the dispatch of Japan’s Self-Defense Forcesin support of the US war in Iraq, they shared a critical perspective on the question of Prime
Minister visits to the shrine. The sources cited below illustrate the depth of the Yasukuni debate
within Japanese society. Yasukuni Shrine, Nationalism and Japan's International Relations. See
the joint editorial by the Yomiuri and Asahi calling for a national memorial to replace Yasukuni
Shrine: “Yomiuri and Asahi Editors Call for a National Memorial to Replace Yasukuni” byThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

388

Wakamiya Yoshibumi and Watanabe Tsuneo. The Yomiuri also published a twenty-two partseries on “War Responsibility” that remains available at their website.
It was subsequently published as a book under the title Who Was Responsible? From Marco
Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor, available in Japanese, English and Chinese editions. For an astuteassessment of the Yomiuri project see Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Who is Responsible? The Yomiuri
Project and the Enduring Legacy of the Asia-Pacific War,”[3] Korean soldiers who were conscripted into the Japanese army were and remain enshrined in
Yasukuni, as are indigenous people of Taiwan. However, with the loss of Japanese citizenship in
1952, surviving Korean and Taiwanese veterans were deprived of pensions. On US treatment
and classification of Koreans in occupied Japan see Mark Caprio, “Resident aliens: forging thepolitical status of Koreans in occupied Japan,” in Mark E. Caprio and Yoneyuki Sugita, eds.,
Democracy in Occupied Japan. The U.S. occupation and Japanese politics and society (London:
Routledge, 2007), pp. 178-199; see also Yoshiko Nozaki, Hiromitsu Inokuchi and Kim Taeyoung, Legal Categories, Demographic Change and Japan’s Korean Residents in the Long
Twentieth Century.
[4] The same is true of groups that challenge state power through armed struggle in the name of
democracy, national independence, revolution, eternal salvation, or other goals, often en route to
the creation of new nations. The state then possesses and invokes goals and the memory of themartyred, as its own. The People’s Republic of China is a particularly interesting case. The state
has long highlighted Chinese Communist-led resistance to Japan, both that of the army and of
local guerrillas, as the central national myth, enshrined in museums and monuments. Yet there is
no Chinese national cemetery which honors the war dead. See Kirk Denton’s analysis of the shift
in Chinese museum representation of the Anti-Japanese resistance from the narrative of heroic
resistance to one highlighting atrocities and victimization in the post-Mao years. Heroic
Resistance and Victims of Atrocity: Negotiating the Memory of Japanese Imperialism in Chinese
Museums.
[5] John Breen, “The dead and the living in the land of peace: a sociology of the Yasukuni
shrine,” Mortality Vol. 9, No. 1, February 2004, pp. 76-93; John Breen, ed., Yasukuni, the War
Dead, and the Struggle for Japan’s Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
[6] Steve Rabson, Okinawan Perspectives on Japan’s Imperial Institution; Kamata Satoshi,
Shattering Jewels: 110,000 Okinawans Protest Japanese State Censorship of Compulsory Group
Suicides. Rabson’s analysis of Okinawan perspectives on the Battle and the emperor illuminates
Okinawan understanding of Yasukuni enshrinement.
[7] Inside GHQ: The Allied Occupation of Japan and Its Legacy (London: Continuum, 2002), p.
441; casualty figures, p. 35. Wikipedia offers a useful introduction to sources on the Battle andcasualties.
[8] Unless otherwise noted, this section draws on the research of Gerald Figal. “Waging Peaceon Okinawa,” in Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds., Islands of Discontent. Okinawan Responses
to Japanese and American Power (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), pp. 65-98 andespecially his “Bones of Contention: The Geopolitics of ‘Sacred Ground’ in Postwar Okinawa,”
Diplomatic History, Vol 31, No. 1, January, 2007, pp. 81-109.

Selden: Japan, the United States and Yasukuni Nationalism

389[9] Okinawa Izoku Rengo Kai, Ni ju go nen no ayumi (Naha, 1977), pp. 19-20, cited in Figal,“Bones of Contention,” p. 96.
[10] Figal cites USCAR, “JGLO no. II. Letter from Hisajiro Fujita, Chief Officer JGLO to
Colonel William Wensboro, Acting Civil Administrator, USCAR,” 7 February 1964. OPA
reference code U81100983B. See also USCAR, “Court Ranks and Decorations Will Be
Posthumously Conferred on WWII War Dead,” 18 February 1964 and USCAR “Program forConferment of Rank and Decorations to Ryukyuan War Dead,” 24 February 1965.
[11] Takemae, Inside GHQ, pp. 31-37; the photograph of two members of the Blood and Iron
Corps, p. 34, shows boys in uniforms and boots who look barely twelve years old.
[12] John Breen observes (personal correspondence August 3, 2008) that the cenotaph, by its
empty nature (emblematic of those whose remains are not there), suggests the possibility that theNovember 11 ceremony, celebrated since 1946 offers prayers for all the war dead of the two
World Wars, and not just the British. The ceremony, however, featuring the Queen and othermembers of the royal family, together with representatives of the British government andmilitary, suggests to me a strong national orientation.
[13] Breen, “The dead and the living,” pp. 83-84.
[14] See Herbert P. Bix, War Responsibility and Historical Memory: Hirohito’s Apparition,
Japan Focus. For an historical discussion of shrine politics and the war dead see Akiko
Takenaka, Enshrinement Politics: War Dead and War Criminals at Yasukuni Shrine. The case infavor of Prime Ministerial visits to Yasukuni is forcefully argued by Nitta Hitoshi, “And Why
Shouldn’t the Prime Minister Worship at Yasukuni? A Personal View,” in John Breen, ed.,Yasukuni, the War Dead and the Struggle for Japan’s Past, pp, 125-42. Cf. Breen’s chapter inthe same volume, “Yasukuni and the Loss of Historical Memory,” pp. 143-62.
[15] Kinue Tokudome, “The Bataan Death March and the 66-Year Struggle for Justice.”[16] Herbert Bix, in a personal note of August 21, 2008, points out that in his 1975 visit, at a
moment of fierce debate over state support for Yasukuni, Hirohito was greeted by protest
banners. Following the collective enshrinement of war criminals, Hirohito feared being drawn
into both domestic and international conflicts involving China and Korea, and perhaps the UnitedStates.
[17] Website[18] Wakamiya Yoshibumi, “War-bereaved Families’ Dilemma: thoughts on Japan’s war,”
Asahi Shimbun, July 8, 2005.
[19] On Chukiren’s activities see David McNeill, A Foot Soldier in the War Against Forgetting
Japanese Wartime Atrocities, and Linda Hoaglund, “Japanese Devils. The Perpetrators of
Wartime Atrocities in China Tell Their Story in a New Film,” Persimmon, Winter 2003. On
Japanese museums see Akiko Takenaka and Laura Hein, Exhibiting World War II in Japan andthe United States.
[20] Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds., Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan,
Germany and the United States (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2000).

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

390[21] Gavan McCormack, Client State. Japan in the American Embrace, espec. Chapters 5 and 6
offer useful discussion of neonationalist currents and their embrace by the Liberal Democratic
Party.
[22] “The aesthetic construction of ethnic nationalism. War memorial museums in Korea andJapan,” in Gi-Wook Shin, Soon-Won Park, and Daqing Yang, eds., Rethinking HistoricalInjustice and Reconciliation in Northeast Asia. The Korean Experience (London: Routledge,2007), pp. 133-53.
[23] Reuters, May 4, 2008.
[24] BBC, “Protests Mount Over Koizumi’s Shrine Visit,” August 14, 2001. The BBC reportnotes demonstrations in Hong Kong and the Philippines as well as in China and Korea.
[25] Yoshiko Nozaki and Mark Selden, “Historical Memory, International Conflict and Japanese
Textbook Controversies,” in press, Contexts Vol 1 No. 1.
[26] Foundations of Cooperation: Imagining the Future of Sino-Japanese Relations, Japan Focus[27] Client State. Japan in American Embrace (London: Verso, 2007). Laura Hein analyzes both
wartime and postwar Japanese nationalism as cultural nationalism predicated on the uniquenessof the Japanese spirit—a course that led the nation to disaster in the Asia- Pacific War. “TheCultural Career of the Japanese Economy: developmental and cultural nationalisms in historicalperspective,” Third World Quarterly, 29, 3 (2008), pp. 447-65.
[28] That transfer is contingent, however, on the expansion of the US Air Station at Henoko,
which has been stalled by Okinawan resistance for a decade. See Koji Taira, Okinawan
Environmentalists Put Robert Gates and DOD on Trial. The Dugong and the Fate of the Henoko
Air Station.
[29] Vince Little, “As new equipment arrives in Tokyo, I Corps begins setting up shop at CampZama,” Northwest Guardian, July 3, 2008. I Corps headquarters remains at Fort Lewis,
Washington.
[30] See the official US Pacific Command website for Valiant Shield.
[31] Eric Watkins, China, Japan agree on East China Sea E&P projects, Oil and Gas Journal,
June 20, 2008; Andre Fesyun, “China, Japan agree on East China Sea gas deposits.”[32] John Breen emphasizes important differences between Yasukuni Shrine and Britain’s
Cenotaph, France’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and Arlington Cemetery: “Yasukuni alone isa religious institution, a sacred site with its own priesthood who perform rites for the dead,propitiating them as kami. . . The Western sites are relatively ‘unencumbered’ as sites of tribute,
mourning and memory. . . Yasukuni venerates the dead as kami and in the ritual process of sodoing it tends to the glorification of self-sacrifice and the idealization of Japan’s imperial past.”“The dead and the living,” pp. 90-91. There are indeed distinctive differences in the ritual
practice of Yasukuni, in the spiritual weight of the bonds linking shrine, emperor, the military
and the nation. In the discussion that follows, I nevertheless emphasize common features in sitesthat link war, the sacrifice of dead soldiers, the state, and the national purpose, as well as the roleof the priesthood in paying tribute to the fallen heroes of each nation. In 1959 the Chidorigafuchi
National Cemetery was established to commemorate the unknown war dead. Despite various

Selden: Japan, the United States and Yasukuni Nationalism

391

proposals, attempts to shift some or all official memorialization of the military dead—including
in some instances the military dead of all countries—from Yasukuni to Chidorigafuchi havefailed.
[33] Andrew M. McGreevy, Arlington National Cemetery and Yasukuni Jinja: History, Memory,and the Sacred, Japan Focus. The shrine authorities have brushed aside demands by Korean,
Taiwanese and Okinawan families to disenshrine their family members, insisting that Yasukuni
alone decides who is to be enshrined. Taiwanese and Koreans were drafted in the final years of
the war; Okinawan youth were mobilized for “volunteer corps” as nurses or fighters to support
Japanese forces during the battle.
[34] “Japanese Racism, War, and the POW Experience,” in Mark Selden and Alvin So eds., War
and State Terrorism. The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long TwentiethCentury (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004) pp. 119-42. David McNeill, Magnificent
Obsession: Japan’s Bone Man and the World War II Dead in the Pacific, Japan Focus. The
British and the Americans chose different routes to honoring the dead in World War I, the British
maintaining cemeteries in France which consecrated more than one million Britons who died in
the war (approximately half of whom were unidentified or whose bodies had vanished). As aresult, the Cenotaph in London became the primary British memorial. The American
government, too, made efforts to keep the dead in cemeteries in France, Belgium and England, In
the end, however, more than 70 percent were repatriated, with Congress financing round-trip
tickets to Europe to visit the cemeteries for mothers of the deceased. Thomas W. Laqueur,“Memory and Naming in the Great War,” and G. Kurt Piehler, “The War Dead and the Gold
Star: American Commemoration of the First World War,” in John R. Gillis, ed., The Politics of
National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 150-67, 168-85.
[35] Japanese progressive scholars, who have written extensively and insightfully about the
Yasukuni problem, rarely write comparatively about Japan’s war nationalism, atrocities, or otheraspects of US and Japanese wars. An important exception is Tanaka Toshiyuki, Sora no sensoshi(History of Air War) (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2008); see also his Hidden Horrors. Japanese War
Crimes in World War II (Boulder: Westview, 1996).
[36] “The Goodness of Nations,” in the Spectre of Comparisons. Nationalism, Southeast Asiaand the World (Verso: London, 1998), p. 368.
[37] We have noted one important difference in Okinawa’s Cornerstone of Peace from othermemorials: its commemoration of victims of all nations. There is another important difference.
Exhibits in the Okinawan Prefectual Museum at Mabumi contain extensive information which
reveals Japanese treatment of Okinawan civilians such as the military’s impositin of compulsory
mass suicide (shudan jiketsu). The contrast to both the Yushukan and the Smithsonian Museum’s
Enola Gay exhibit on the fiftieth Anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
could not be starker. See Gerald Figal, “Waging Peace on Okinawa,” in Laura Hein and Mark
Selden, eds., Islands of Discontent. Okinawan Responses to Japanese and American Power(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), pp. 65-98; Laura Hein and Mark Selden,“Commemoration and Silence: Fifty Years of Remembering the Bomb in America and Japan,” inHein and Selden, eds., Living With the bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the
Nuclear Age (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), pp.3-36.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia392[38] The US does prosecute a small fraction of its own war crimes, in each case singling out asoldier or soldiers who committed specific atrocities without examining the pattern of warfare ofwhich it was a part, or pursuing the issue up the chain of command as required by the Nuremberg
principles.
[39] Mark Selden, Japanese and American War Atrocities, Historical Memory andReconciliation: World War II to Today.
[40] Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire. Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the
Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004) is the classic study of the US empire of bases.
See especially pp. 151-86.
[41] On the historical periodization of East Asian region formation, see Giovanni Arrighi,
Takeshi Hamashita and Mark Selden, eds., The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 Year
Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2003) and Takeshi Hamashita, China, East Asia and the
Global Economy: Regional and Historical Perspectives (Linda Grove and Mark Selden, eds.)(Routledge: London, 2008).
[42] Peter J. Katzenstein, A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

Wakamiya and Watanabe: Yomiuri and Asahi Editors Call for a National Memorial…

393

Yomiuri and Asahi Editors Call for a National Memorial to Replace Yasukuni
Wakamiya Yoshibumi and Watanabe Tsuneo
Introduced by Laura Hein and Yuki Tanaka
Many older Japanese conservatives are deeply committed to pacifism as a result of theirpersonal experiences in World War II, despite recent Japanese government efforts to assert theright to belligerence in the present and the legitimacy of Japan’s wars in the 1930s and 1940s.
Nonaka Hiromu, the former Secretary-General of the Liberal Democratic Party, retired frompolitics last year. But he still openly criticizes Prime Minister Koizumi’s visits to Yasukuni
Shrine, his foreign policy, and the LDP's planned revision of Japan’s Constitution. He lost his
cousin and uncle in the Asia-Pacific War. Gotoda Masaharu, who served as Chief Cabinet
Secretary for the Nakasone Cabinet in the 1980s and was also highly critical of both Koizumi’s
foreign and domestic policies, died last year. He was also as a staunch supporter of Article 9, the“no-war clause,” of Japan’s Constitution. Watanabe Tsuneo, the Editorial Chief of the Yomiuri
Newspaper, belongs to this same circle of conservatives whose wartime experiences prompted
strong anti-war sentiments, although he is less supportive of Article 9.
From mid-2005, Watanabe suddenly began expressing highly critical views of Koizumi’s visit to
Yasukuni Shrine, where the spirits of Japanese soldiers are enshrined. At the same time, heinitiated a series of articles on Japan’s war responsibility in the Yomiuri, the world’s largestcirculation newspaper. Yomiuri was, and is, regarded as a conservative paper, articulating
views indistinguishable from those of the Japanese government on many important issues. Its
traditional liberal rival has long been the Asahi News. It thus came as a surprise to readers tofind this series of “progressive” articles, which clearly reflect Watanabe's critical attitude
toward the national amnesia on the part of other conservatives and the Japanese government
regarding war responsibility. He argued that the Japanese Government should build a new
secular war memorial like those in other countries and cease official visits to Yasukuni, thepreminent symbol of Japan’s wartime claim that it had a divine right to dominance in Asia. The
precise center of controversy is often the fact that the individuals convicted of war crimes after
the war were later enshrined at Yasukuni. Apparently he feels that time is running out and that
he is one of the very few remaining persons in the old guard who still has power to influence
Japanese politics and popular opinion on this issue.

Watanabe Tsuneo

Watanabe may have been responding in part to the fact that recently both Yomiuri and Asahi
have lost considerable numbers of subscribers, while the readership of the Sankei News - themost conservative paper of all - has increased dramatically. Given that many younger people,
including university students, no longer read any newspaper, it is difficult to gauge the extent of
Yomiuri’s effort to raise public awareness about Japan's war responsibility. The fundamental
issue confronting the Japanese press, as well as peace activists and educators, is how tomotivate young people to become interested in reflecting on history and establishing peacefulThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

394

and productive relationships with other nations, particularly the Asian nations that suffered fromJapanese colonialism and war.
Currently Yasukuni shrine is a major flashpoint as a result of Koizumi’s visits and Foreign
Minister Aso’s provocative suggestion that the emperor should visit the shrine, both of whichhave strained diplomatic relations with China and Korea. This was the context for a discussion
between the editors of the Yomiuri and Asahi papers on Yasukuni, the war, and historicalresponsibility, published in the February 2006 issue of Ronza magazine, and presented intranslated and abridged form here. -LH and YT
As rivals, The Asahi Shimbun and The Yomiuri Shimbun often adopt different editorial
viewpoints. Yet, a recent discussion between Wakamiya Yoshibumi, chairman of The Asahi
Shimbun's editorial board, and Watanabe Tsuneo, chairman of The Yomiuri Shimbun group
found some common ground regarding Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro’s controversial visits
to Yasukuni Shrine.
Wakamiya: I was surprised by an editorial that appeared in The Yomiuri (on June 4, 2005) withthe headline, "A national memorial for the war dead should be built immediately." Although the
Yomiuri has long argued for the construction of such a secular war memorial, I believe it was thefirst time a Yomiuri editorial had clearly stated "(the prime minister) should not visit Yasukuni
Shrine, where 'Class-A war criminals' are memorialized."

Wakamiya Yoshibumi center

I had come to believe the Yomiuri was in favor of the Yasukuni visits, and, based on theeditorials of the past several years, I felt the Yomiuri had moved excessively to the right, and that
now there is very little difference between the Yomiuri and the Sankei Shimbun. So I was very
surprised by that editorial.
Around the time it appeared, you were quoted as saying that you opposed Koizumi's Yasukuni
visits. You also began arguing that the very existence of Yasukuni was the source of the
diplomatic rift in Japan's relations with China and South Korea. Since I have the opportunity totalk with you directly, I would first like to ask about this change.
Watanabe: Ever since I was in university, I have argued against war. In the last war, several
million people died in the name of the emperor. I was drafted and made to work like a slave as abuck private.

Wakamiya and Watanabe: Yomiuri and Asahi Editors Call for a National Memorial…

395

Fortunately, I survived, but what was especially cruel was the system that gave birth to kamikaze
pilots. As the war situation worsened, the pilots were made to fly in planes without sufficient fuelto return to base, forcing them into suicide missions.
It escalated further when they began using gliders. Pilots were made to sit in gliders that wereattached to planes and released to fly toward their targets. The only strategy left was suicidebombings. During the war, I truly felt that no nation should be allowed to do such things,
especially in the name of the emperor. I still cannot erase the hatred I felt toward the militaryleaders who gave such orders and to the politicians who overlooked such actions.
In 2001, when Prime Minister Koizumi said he would visit Yasukuni Shrine on Aug. 15, theanniversary of Japan’s surrender, I called him and said "I'm opposed." I told him, "You should
not go on Aug. 15. If you have to go, go on Aug. 13. Politically, it would be a bad decision to go
on Aug. 15."After that, I moved to a residence near Yasukuni Shrine. While I began taking walks to theshrine, I still have not prayed there.
The Yushukan war memorial that stands next to the main hall at Yasukuni is wrong. That facility
praises militarism and children who go through that memorial come out saying, "Japan actually
won the last war."
This means that Yasukuni Shrine operates a war museum that incites militarism and displays
exhibits in praise of militarism. It is wrong for the prime minister to visit such a place.
I subsequently looked into what the head priest at Yasukuni said about why Class-A war
criminals were memorialized there and the difficulty of removing their spirits. I came to theconclusion that it was totally wrong.
Wakamiya: The Yushukan was rebuilt in 2002. It is quite a fine-looking facility. But the contents
can in no way be considered as having a contemporary feel about them.
It is true that the letters left behind by kamikaze pilots exhibited there do move readers to tears.
But the tone of the exhibits, which cover the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-4 and the RussoJapanese War of 1904-5, as well as the events from the Manchurian Incident of 1931 to the
Pacific War, consistently describes the fighting as honorable, designed to liberate Asia, and forthe defense and survival of Japan. There is no sense of shame at all.
For example, there is a Zero fighter plane on display on the first floor. The explanation says the
Zero made its debut over Chongqing in China, and that during dogfights over Chongqing, it shot
down a large number of the Soviet-made fighters used by the Chinese, thus giving the Zeroworld renown.However, the museum does not reveal that after the Zero fighters establishedJapan's air superiority over Chongqing, bombers flew over the city, killing countless civilian
residents.
Those bombings became notorious internationally as the forerunner to indiscriminate bombings.
While displaying such items boastfully at Yasukuni Shrine, it is very inappropriate for Japan’s
leaders to insist that China has no right to criticize the prime minister's visits.
Watanabe: This is why we started a campaign in our pages from Aug. 13, 2005, to clarify where
the responsibility lies for the last war. We will continue the series for a year. After the year is up,

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia396

we plan to run a story on or around Aug. 15, 2006, summarizing the degree of responsibility byvarious military and government leaders of that time.
Of course, since we are not a judicial organization, we will not hand down death sentences or life
imprisonment. But we plan to set specific standards to assess the severity of moral responsibility
for the results of the war and in that way say who was the most responsible, who can be forgiven,
and who should never be forgiven.
Wakamiya: There has been considerable debate about the legitimacy of the Tokyo war crimes
trial. By contrast, you are planning to have the Japanese themselves clarify the responsibility for
the war. Although I believe there will be considerable overlap with those who went on trial as
Class-A war criminals at the Tokyo war crimes trial, do you have any idea of how much overlap
there will be and are you also planning to focus on the responsibility of individuals who may nothave been put on trial but had a greater responsibility than determined by the Tokyo war crimes
trial?
Watanabe: Looked at from the perspective of international law, since Japan accepted the verdictof the Tokyo war crimes trial in Article 11 of the San Francisco peace treaty, the verdict can besaid to be legally binding. However, when thinking about moral responsibility for the war,
Shigenori Togo, who was foreign minister at the start of the conflict, took action from an earlystage to end it. Perhaps people like that should not be considered in the same vein as Class-A war
criminals.
Also, while it was wrong for the Japanese to have killed people in other countries, millions ofJapanese also died. A large number of the people memorialized at Yasukuni were themselves
victims. I think a distinction has to be made between those who did the killing and those who
were killed. Once that is done, the level of responsibility of the perpetrators should be examined.
Only then can we address the issue of the kind of trouble that we caused China and South Korea.
A soul-searching on our part that will satisfy them is absolutely necessary. While the Yomiuri
will do what it can, I believe this is something that the nation-state should do at its own initiative,
for example, by setting up a historical examination committee in the Diet.
On the other hand, as a representative of the journalism sector, I feel that we have an obligation
at our newspaper to think through the issue. We may, of course, have been a little late in starting
this.
When then-Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro visited Yasukuni on Aug. 15, 1985, I told him I
was opposed. I told him, "I will never forgive him or his faction," He said, "I did not go to pray
for Tojo. My younger brother died during the war and his spirit lies there. I went to meet mybrother."At that time, I accepted his explanation. However, after thinking about the issues, I focused on
the fact that the war victims' relief bureau of the Ministry of Health and Welfare had enshrined
the Class-A war criminals at Yasukuni.
The Tokyo Shimbun recently reported that many former military officers worked in the war
victims' relief bureau, and they handed over a list of Class-A war criminals for memorialization
at Yasukuni Shrine in 1966.

Wakamiya and Watanabe: Yomiuri and Asahi Editors Call for a National Memorial…

397

Wakamiya: Yes. The head priest at the time was Tsukuba Fujimaro, a former member of the
Yamashina branch of the imperial family. During the twelve years Tsukuba was head priest, theClass-A war criminals were not included at Yasukuni.
It was said that Yasukuni Shrine backed off because the shrine officials wanted to pass a bill in
the Diet for its maintenance by the state. They wanted to avoid measures that could stimulate
negative public opinion, such as memorializing Class-A war criminals. It was also said thatconsideration was given to the feelings of the imperial family as well as the Imperial Household
Agency.
However, after Tsukuba died suddenly, he was succeeded as head priest by Matsudaira
Nagayoshi. Matsudaira was a former Imperial Japanese Navy lieutenant commander who totally
rejected the verdict of the Tokyo war crimes trial. Soon after he became head priest, Matsudaira
worked to have the Class-A war criminals memorialized and achieved that goal in 1978. But theShowa Emperor wouldn’t visit Yasukuni after that. I have argued for the construction of a new
war memorial that the emperor, who is the symbol of national unity, can visit. If it is built,
foreign leaders could also visit.
Watanabe: On that issue, I am in total agreement. I believe that in thinking about war
responsibility we have to look at everything from about the time of the Manchurian Incident in
1931. Initially, the Manchurian Incident was considered a move to build a paradise on Earth as aform of idealism on the part of Ishihara Kanji, who was a high-ranking officer in the Kwantung
Army. However, Ishihara was also involved in illegal acts, such as the bombing of a railway line
at Liutiaohu. Therefore, Ishihara cannot be forgiven, even though he subsequently argued against
expanding the war.
Wakamiya: Ishihara Kanji was not included among the Class-A war criminals, strange as that
may be.
Watanabe: That's right. He was not considered a war criminal. But we have to think about his
responsibility. An even worse case is an even higher-ranking officer in the Kwantung Army,
Itagaki Seishiro, who engineered the invasion of northern China. After that, as the nation
proceeded toward the Pacific War, I believe that Konoe Fumimaro, who was prime minister, wasup to no good.
At first, young radical army and navy officers attempted a coup on May 15, 1932, and later agroup of army officers staged the Feb. 26 coup in 1936. Terrorism seriously affected politics. As
a result, political parties became weak.
Konoe became prime minister after those developments. He should have tried to normalize thepolitical situation, but he ended up creating the Imperial Rule Assistance Association. It can besaid that there is no way to question his crimes because he committed suicide. Furthermore, it
was Kido Koichi, lord keeper of the pvivy seal, who recommended that Tojo become prime
minister. He must have known what would happen to the country if Tojo was made prime
minister. For that reason, I believe Kido bears a very grave responsibility.
Wakamiya: You said that establishing war responsibility should occur in Japan rather than on thesay-so of another nation. I agree that rather than wait until other nations speak up, we have toThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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think for ourselves. However, I slightly disagree with your editorial in the Yomiuri that othernations have no right to criticize.
Watanabe: Unless the Japanese themselves admit that crimes were committed, East Asian
nations that were victims of invasion during the war will never be convinced of Japanesesincerity.
Ronza: Moves that glorify and justify the war are becoming quite noticeable, although in limited
quarters. That leads some Japanese to question why it is wrong for the prime minister to visit
Yasukuni Shrine. What are your thoughts on these recent developments?
Watanabe: I am 79 years old. When we are gone, there will be nobody who remembers therealities of that war and I worry that there will only be debate on ideas about it rather than on
experiences. Chinese and South Koreans are building museums and taking other means topreserve extreme aspects of the war for the next generation and thereby fanning anti-Japan
movements.
I believe I should talk about what I actually experienced in the war and keep records. I should
talk and write that the Japanese military did terrible things.
Wakamiya: I don't think Prime Minister Koizumi is a rightist. And since he said in the Diet that
Class-A war criminals are indeed war criminals, I don't think he visits Yasukuni Shrine to pay
tribute to the Class-A war criminals enshrined there per se. I don't really doubt that he goes to theshrine to honor the spirits of the 3 million Japanese soldiers and to pray for peace in future. His
thoughts in this matter are probably along the same line as his shedding tears for the youths whodied as kamikaze suicide pilots.
The problem is the fact that the prime minister's visits to the shrine give joy and strength topeople who think Class-A war criminals are not bad and that they were wrongly accused, athought that is promoted in the shrine's war memorial museum Yushukan.
As a politician, Koizumi should use his imagination a little more. The more active rightists
become, the more China and South Korea will come to see Japan as a "dangerous nation" andinflame anti-Japan sentiments. Politicians with firm convictions will shift positions a little if they
think the course is headed for a diplomatic disaster, not only in Japan but also in China andSouth Korea.
This article appeared in the February 9 issue of Ronza. This abbreviated version is published inJapan Focus on February 14, 2006.

Yoshida: Revising the Past, Complicating the Future

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Revising the Past, Complicating the Future: The Yushukan War Museum in Modern
Japanese History
Takashi Yoshida
I. Introduction
In this three part series, we introduce historical museums in Japan and their role in public
education. Following this introduction to peace museums, Ms. Nishino Rumiko, a founder of the
Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM), introduces WAM’s activities and the 2000
Citizens Tribunal on the ‘comfort women’. The final article is by Mr. Kim Yeonghwan, theformer associate director of Grassroots House Peace Museum who describes the peace andreconciliation programs that the Museum sponsors.
Both museums are privately funded and modest in size. One may perhaps call them micro
museums, as their exhibition spaces are limited. What is noteworthy, however, is that bothmuseums display artifacts that preserve memories of the victims of Japan’s colonialism anddevastating atrocities during the Asia-Pacific War; that is, the war that began in 1931 when
Imperial Japan invaded Manchuria, and ended with Japan’s defeat in 1945. The Women’s Active
Museum is dedicated to the women forced into sexual slavery. The displays of the Grassroots
House Peace Museum relate not only to the so-called comfort women, but also to Japanese
atrocities in China, such as the Nanjing Massacre. Both museums often organize public forums
to educate the public about the atrocities committed by the Japanese state during the war.

Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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Grassroots House Peace Museum

The fact that these museums candidly address Japanese colonialism and wartime atrocities makes
them by no means unique in Japan. From the late 1980s until the late 1990s, Japan witnessed theestablishment of many such museums, both public and private, that more or less characterized
Imperial Japan as a perpetrator of criminal wrongs. But the opinions expressed by thesemuseums are not shared by all. Certainly, Japan has a number of war museums that either avoid
questioning Japan’s war responsibility or actually glorify the sacrifices of the soldiers whofought for the Japanese empire.
According to one study, more than 220 museums in Japan deal, in whole or in part, with the wars
that Japan fought between 1868 and 1945.[1] The majority of these museums concern the AsiaPacific War. The impressive number of diverse museums devoted to the Asia-Pacific War
suggests that Japanese society has yet to achieve a consensus on the history and memory of thewar. To put that matter more precisely, in recent years it has become more difficult and more
controversial than in the immediate postwar years to build a consensus on the war among Japan’s
residents.
In the past, the extremely strong anti-war sentiment that prevailed in Japanese society left little
room for pro-Imperial revisionists to popularize their accounts among the public. Althoughstrong anti-war sentiment still appears to be dominant, revisionist accounts that tend towhitewash wartime atrocities and colonialism have lately found a significant audience,
particularly among Japanese youth. With revisionist claims gaining popularity, the ideological
clash between museums that lament or condemn the war and those that exalt and glorify
militarism arguably merits more attention than ever before. The struggle concerns not only thebest way to expose the museum-going public to historical events; it is also, in a significant sense,
a contest to refashion the conscience of a nation.

Yoshida: Revising the Past, Complicating the Future

401

I would like to examine the changing role of the Yushukan War Museum, a symbol of Japan’s
wartime militarism, in public education both during the war and the postwar, as well as its
position within the broader context of Japanese museum culture.

Yushukan War Museum

II. Yushukan During the Asia-Pacific War
During the Asia-Pacific War, a culture of militarism prevailed in Japanese society. ManyJapanese supported the war effort in Asia and the Pacific, and the popularity of the Yasukuni
Shrine’s Yushukan War Museum reflected the social and political context of the time. The
Yushukan War Museum originally opened to the public in 1882. After a devastating earthquakein Tokyo destroyed much of the museum 1923, a newly constructed Yushukan opened in 1932.
Two years later, an additional building, the National Defense Hall, was added to the museum
complex. Whereas Yushukan proper was essentially an ordinary war museum that displayed
artifacts such as swords, military uniforms, and weapons captured from the empire’s military
adversaries, the National Defense Hall was a hands-on amusement facility that enabled visitors
to experience what modern warfare was like. The visitors were invited to sit in the cockpit of abomber, operate a miniature tank with radio controls, and fire an air rifle at a target. The
highlight of the Defense Hall was a “gas experience room” where visitors wore gas masks andwere exposed to tear gas. Boy’s Club, a popular monthly magazine for children, described the
Defense Hall as follows:
Inside the Defense Hall, new modern weapons, such as a tank, search light, machine gun
and bomber, are exhibited. The display includes a huge panoramic diorama that depicts afuture war and an impressive mechanical device that appears to drop bombs from the sky.
Among all the exhibits, a particularly unique feature is the gas experience room. The
room will be filled with a gas that irritates your eyes, causing a cascade of tears. Whenyou enter the room wearing a gas mask, you will clearly learn the power of gas and theThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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effect of a gas mask. .... Everyone enjoys the experiments in the Defense Hall, and it has
become extremely popular [among children].[2]Indeed, the Yushukan complex was popular. Following Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria, it
received more than a half million visitors annually. Its popularity further increased after the war
against China commenced in 1937. In 1938, more than 1.4 million people, including some
225,000 students, visited the museum complex, whereas in 1940 the museum welcomed nearly
1.9 million visitors, including 161,000 students.[3]III. Yushukan in the Postwar Years
After Japan’s defeat in 1945, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers ordered the closingof the Yushukan War Museum, including the National Defense Hall. Only in 1961 did a limited
number of exhibits begin to be displayed once more at the museum. In 1986, after a thoroughrestoration, the whole of the Yushukan War Museum was reopened to the public, though visitors
were no longer able to don gas masks, fire air rifles, sit in the cockpit of a bomber, or drop
simulated bombs on imagined foes. In 2002, the museum was again renovated and further
expanded.

Zero fighter displayed in the Yushukan

The changes seem intended to make the museum more visually appealing to young visitors.
Nevertheless, from its opening in July 2002 through May 2003, only 226,000 people visited themuseum.[4] The Yushukan War Museum has not regained its wartime popularity even to thisday.
In the immediate postwar years, anti-war sentiment was particularly strong. Even sixty years
after the end of war, anti-war feeling is still relatively strong in Japan. Throughout the postwar
years, anti-war museums such as the Hiroshima Peace Museum and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb
Museum achieved enormous popularity. In recent years, for example, more than 1.5 million

Yoshida: Revising the Past, Complicating the Future403

people have visited the Hiroshima Peace Museum annually, while the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb
Museum welcomes approximately 1 million people every year.[5]The Hiroshima and Nagasaki museums were among the earliest anti-war museums in postwar
Japan. In 1949 a modest exhibition of the effects of the atomic bomb opened in Hiroshima. In
1955, another atomic bomb museum opened in Nagasaki. In 1967, Maruki Iri and Toshi, artists
who lost family members in the attack on Hiroshima, opened their anti-war art gallery in
Saitama, exhibiting their murals commemorating the atomic bombings.

Maruki Gallery houses Hiroshima murals

Until the 1980s most anti-war museums focused on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Taken out ofcontext, this emphasis may not seem to illustrate clearly a broad anti-war feeling on the part of
the Japanese public. The full story is more complex, since other anti-war expressions in Japan
have long displayed a national consciousness of Imperial Japan as an aggressor. In the 1950s, forexample, the Japan-China Friendship Association (Nit-Chu Yuko Kyokai) excavated remains of
the forced laborers who died in Hanaoka, sent them to the People’s Republic of China, and built
a monument to remember the victims and atone for the atrocity.[6]The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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Monument in Hanaoka to eternal peace between Japan and China, erected 1966

In 1965, Park Kyong Sik, a Korean-born historian who moved to Japan in 1929 at the age ofseven, published a monograph that examined the forced mobilization of Koreans--the first major
study of Korean forced labor to become available in postwar Japan.[7] Nevertheless, since thedeath of fishermen exposed to nuclear fallout at Bikini atoll in 1954, anti-nuclear activism
largely prevailed in the nation. It was not until the 1970s that those who called attention to
Japan’s wartime role as a perpetrator began to receive considerable notice from the public.
America’s war in Vietnam and Japan’s normalization with the People’s Republic of China in
1972 signaled what are arguably the two major turning points in the historiography and memoryof the Asia-Pacific War. From the early 1970s, many more accounts by and about survivors ofJapanese atrocities in China and Korea became available in Japan. This trend was echoed inmuseum presentations. It was in 1970 that the Marukis, the painters of the atomic-bomb murals,came to see themselves not only as victims of Hiroshima, but also as parties to Japan’s wartime
aggression and colonialism. Although they had not enthusiastically supported the war effort in
the 1930s and the 40s, the Marukis felt that they shared responsibility with Japan’s wartime
leaders for the crimes committed by the Japanese state. In 1975, they completed “The Rape of
Nanking,” a 13 by 26 foot mural that illustrates atrocities committed by the Japanese military in
Nanjing in 1937-38. In the painting, the artists portrayed soldiers beheading a Chinese prisoner
and raping women. Dead bodies and various body parts are strewn all over the painting. Students
visit the Marukis’ gallery to learn the importance of peace, and the painting has a particularly
strong impact on many young visitors.[8]Between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s, in the run up to the fiftieth anniversary of the end of
the Asia-Pacific War, museums that displayed the sufferings inflicted by Japanese militarism on

Yoshida: Revising the Past, Complicating the Future405

peoples in Asia and the Pacific flourished. In 1988, a public museum that remembers both
Japanese and non-Japanese victims of Japan’s chemical warfare was opened on Okuno Island in
Hiroshima, where chemical weapons were produced during the war. In 1989, high school
biology teacher Nishimori Shigeo opened Grass Roots House Peace Museum in Kochi. In 1992,
Ritsumeikan University, a private university in Kyoto, erected the International Peace Museum,
whose artifacts point to the responsibility of ordinary people for the Asia Pacific War; itsfeatured displays include images of civilians on the home front reveling in the fall of Nanjing in
December 1937.

Kyoto Museum for World Peace, Ritsumeikan University

In 1993, Saitama Prefecture opened the Saitama Prefecture Peace Museum. For many years in
Nagasaki, a Protestant minister and city assembly man named Oka Masaharu advocated theimportance of remembering the victims of Japanese colonialism and atrocities. After his death in
1994, city residents who shared his views succeeded in opening the Oka Masaharu Memorial
Nagasaki Peace Museum. The displayed photographs and other materials are meant to remind
visitors of the lives of forced laborers and sex slaves from China and Korea, as well as Japanese
atrocities in China and other parts of Asia.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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Oka Masaharu Memorial Nagasaki Peace Museum

In the mid and late 1990s, pro-Imperialist revisionists became more visible in Japanese society.
The establishment of numerous peace museums was one stimulus that prompted revisionists to
speak out aggressively and to combat the trend toward national self-criticism that they branded
as masochistic and inimical to the cultivation of national pride among the youth. By the late
1990s, Japanese bookstores were stocked with revisionist accounts that glorified sacrifices madeby Japanese soldiers, denied the wholesale atrocities in Nanjing, exaggerated the beneficial
influence of Japan on its former colonies, and argued that “comfort women” were willing
prostitutes rather than sex slaves.[9]By the late 1990s, the construction of public museums that critically evaluated Japan’scolonialism and aggression noticeably slowed, and most of the new museums that were
established avoided controversies. A symbolic case was a dispute over the first national peace
memorial, which was eventually named the Showa Hall (http://www.showakan.go.jp/).

Showa Hall

The Ministry of Health and Welfare initially intended the memorial to commemorate only the
3.5 million Japanese war dead. However, the Communist and the Socialist parties urged that the
memorial should acknowledge the devastations and destructions inflicted on other Asian
countries by the Japanese empire.[10] The resulting compromise is a facility that commemorates
the suffering of all Japanese both during and immediately after the war and exhibits artifacts with

Yoshida: Revising the Past, Complicating the Future407

as few explanations as possible to avoid any controversy. The museum library carefully balances
its collection to present different perspectives of the Asia Pacific War, varying from argumentsthat the war contributed to liberating Asia to studies that detail and decry Japan’s wartime
atrocities.
IV. Conclusion
Although revisionist accounts of the war have gained popularity among youth in recent years, theYushukan has yet to regain its wartime popularity. Indeed, the museum itself is aware that its
perspective currently represents a challenge to, rather than an expression of, mainstream public
opinion. The newly renovated Yushukan that opened in 2002 has two major goals: the first is tohonor the war dead who sacrificed themselves for the state, and the second is to communicate anallegedly “true” history to counter the fact that Japanese education in the postwar era emphasized
Japan’s wartime wrongdoings.[11] The museum articulates the position that the “Greater East
Asian War” contributed to liberating Asia and that the war was not an act of imperialist
aggression.
To understand the politics of Yushukan, one needs to recognize a shared feeling among many
veterans in postwar Japan. In 1988, for example, Kawano Kiichi established a small private
museum to honor the memory of the 2,500 students at the Naval Preparatory Flying School who
died while committing suicide attacks during the war. In the eyes of Kawano, who also attended
the school, Japan’s postwar education has unfairly demonized all those who took up arms forJapan.
He has argued that many of the youth he called friends earnestly desired to serve and protect
their homeland, but Japanese society in the postwar period has largely disregarded these noble
sacrifices because Japan waged an aggressive war.[12]Perhaps the revisionist campaigns of the late 1990s were so successful because they appealed tothose frustrated with the self-critical tone of postwar history education in Japan. Yushukan will
no doubt continue to publicize its message of the revisionist perceptions through its exhibits. It
would not be surprising if museums similar to Yushukan open in Japan in the near future. But
museums that highlight Japanese colonialism and aggression could also be built in the future.
Will the myriad museums, with their profoundly different messages, contribute to reconciliationin East Asia?
I would argue that they will. In order to accomplish reconciliation, it is urgent for Japanesesociety to continue candid discussion of the meaning of the Asia-Pacific War. These museums
will continue to provide opportunities for visitors to realize that the need for building consensus
is an urgent matter for Japan. Visitors would be wise to consider that the issues concerning thehistory and memory of the Asia-Pacific War have ramifications beyond Japan. To the extent thatJapan fails to settle its history problems, it will continue to cause needless friction in its relations
with neighboring countries and the United States.
Notes:[1] Terabayashi Nobuaki, “‘Nihon no hakubutsukan ni okeru Meiji-ki iko no senso kankei shi
tenji no genkyo to kokusai kankei ninshiki no kadai ni tsuite’ ni kansuru hakubutsukan ankêto
chosa ichiran” (A Survey of Museum Exhibitions Regarding “Contemporary Exhibits of theThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

408

History of Wars Since the Meiji Period in Japanese Museums and Their Perceptions ofInternational Relations”). This report, funded by the Japanese government, was printed in 2004.
[2] “The National Defense Hall: A Newly Opened Museum in Kudan Where You Can Learn
Everything about Weapons,” Boy’s Club 21:6 (June 1934), p. 37.
[3] Yasukuni jinja Yushukan, Yushukanshi (The History of the Yushukan), 1938, p. 477.
Yasukuni jinja Yushukan, Yushukan (The Yushukan War Musuem), 1941, p. 23.
[4] Ohara Yasuo, Yasukuni jinja Yushukan no sekai (The World of Yasukuni Shrine’s Yushukan
War Museum), p. 96.
[5] Toshifumi Murakami, “The Role which Peace Museums Should Play,” in Exhibiting Peace:
The Proceedings of the Third International Conference of Peace Museums, ed. Ritsumeikan
University, 1999, p. 50.
[6] Hanaoka no chi Nit-Chu fusaisen yukohi o mamorukai (Association to Preserve the Hanaoka
Monument in the Name of Friendship and Peace with China), Hanaoka jiken goju shunen
kikanshi (A Booklet Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Hanaoka Incident, pp. 191209.
[7] Park Kyong Sik, Chosenjin kyosei renko no kiroku (Record of Forced Mobilizations of
Koreans), (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1965).
[8] See, for example, Jon Junkerman, Hellfire: A Journey from Hiroshima (First Run Features,1986), a 58 minutes DVD.
[9] See, for example, Fujioka, Nobukatsu and Nishio Kanji, Kokumin no yudan (Negligence of
the Nation), (Tokyo: PHP kenkyujo, 1996). Kobayashi Yoshinori, Sensoron (On War), (Tokyo:
Gentosha, 1998).
[10] Tanaka Nobumasa, Senso no kioku (Memory of the War), (Tokyo: Rokufu shuppan), pp.
246-95.
[11] A leaflet titled “Invitation to the Society of the Friends of the Yushukan” (Yushukan tomo
no kai no shiori), available at the Yushukan in 2003.
[12] See a statement on the museum website here.
Takashi Yoshida is assistant professor of history at Western Michigan University and author of
The Making of the “Rape of Nanking”: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the UnitedStates.

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Heroic Resistance and Victims of Atrocity: Negotiating the Memory of JapaneseImperialism in Chinese Museums
Kirk A. Denton
Abstract
This essay explores representations of Japanese imperialism and war in museums of thePeople’s Republic of China. With the post-Mao reforms, there has been a general trend in such
representations toward an emphasis on atrocity and victimization and away from the narrativesof heroic resistance that dominated in the Mao era. Yet, the museum curators in these museums
must negotiate between these two representations in trying to make the war relevant to a young
audience generally more attracted to the pleasures of popular culture than history museums.
Any historical narrative is founded as much on forgetting as it is on remembering, and thenarrative of resistance and liberation that is central to the mythology of the Chinese communist
revolution in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has forgotten much—most obviously therole of the Nationalists in resistance and, especially in light of new forms of memory that haveemerged in the post-Mao liberalization, Japanese atrocities. Even before 1949, the leftist politicalworld was uncomfortable with representations of Japanese atrocities. Ken Sekine has argued that
Ah Long’s Nanjing (completed 1939), perhaps the first novel to deal in some detail with the
Nanjing Massacre, was suppressed because its narrative did not fit neatly the heroic mode ofliterature being promoted in Chongqing during the war.[1] After 1949, in an effort to build an
image of a strong and unified nation, propaganda and party historiography emphasized the heroic
victory of the war and the subsequent revolution. War and revolutionary martyrs were
worshipped for their noble sacrifice to the nation, but victims of atrocities—the “rape of
Nanjing” or the medical experiments led by the infamous Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial
Army—did not fit well this prevailing heroic narrative.
Historiography of the Nanjing Massacre was consciously suppressed during the Maoist
period.[2] Mark Eykholt explains that in the postrevolutionary period there was an official
silence about the Nanjing Massacre and other forms of Japanese atrocities because of a desire topromote national pride and, in the later years of the Cultural Revolution, of a fear of losing muchneeded Japanese economic assistance.[3] References to the Nanjing Massacre that appeared
during the Maoist era were motivated by a desire to make the Nationalists in Taiwan look bad.
Ian Buruma suggests two reasons for this Maoist silence about Japanese atrocities.[4] First, there
were no Communists in the Nationalist capital when the massacre occurred; almost all thesoldiers who died in Nanjing were Nationalists. Second, Buruma argues that the eventual
emergence of narratives of atrocities and victimization in the post-Mao period has something to
do with generations: Those who suffer real historical trauma tend to want to forget it; it is thenext generation, removed from the actual suffering, that does the remembering and develops
what he calls a “pseudoreligion of victimhood.”[5] Finally, the United States government, which
supported the Japanese postwar regime and allowed the emperor to maintain his position, is also
implicated in the silence surrounding Japanese atrocities during the war.[6]In the PRC, Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform program and the liberalization in arts and culture
undermined the very ideology with which Chinese on the mainland had identified for three
decades, space was opened for new forms of remembering the past and new forms of social
identification.[7] In the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, the Wounds (shanghen)

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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trend in literature, film, and art initiated a general culture of victimhood in China. In the 1980s,
historians and journalists such as Dai Qing critiqued elements of the revolutionary past once
considered sacred and untouchable.[8]In more recent years, the fast-paced market economy has forged a world that is radically at odds
with the ideals embodied in standard revolutionary history. In a world in which entrepreneurshipis glorified and trendy products define one’s identity—in the urban world of “bobos” and “neotribes”[9]—the revolutionary values of self-sacrifice and national collective spirit ring hollow
and false. And yet, in a market economy in which migrant workers are treated as second-classcitizens, peasants live in abject poverty, and the division between rich and poor is gaping, theclass struggle message of revolutionary history is potentially threatening to the new stateideology. Forms of memory that downplay class struggle and emphasize national unity throughshared suffering serve the state well in a new consumer economy founded on class distinction.
Depictions of Japanese atrocities are morally unambiguous and serve to direct divisive classresentments toward an external other; national unity and shared national sentiment grow out of
this “othering” of Japan. When China’s economy and culture increasingly merged with theglobal and its “identity” became murkier, a nationalist reaction was almost inevitable. As thestate’s function shifts to facilitating transnational capital, the nation-building function falls into
other hands. Arif Dirlik puts it this way: “Where World War II is concerned, memories of thepast serve to promote nationalism that, weakened in organization by developments in capitalism,
finds in the realm of culture and past existence a means both to perpetuate and to preserve acontemporary status quo that is very much in jeopardy.”[10]Since the 1990s, the discourse surrounding the War of Resistance has shifted away from theplace of Japanese imperialism in the temporal narrative of liberation and nation-state building
toward an obsessive attention to China’s victimization at the hands of the Japanese; tragic talesof horror are displacing, though by no means replacing, the heroic narrative of resistance. Peter
Gries has detected, in popular historiography and other forms of intellectual discourse in the
PRC, a shift from a “victor narrative” to a “victim narrative” that took place from the 1980s to
the 1990s, though he is careful to show that the two can sometimes coexist uneasily.[11] Thisattention to victimization serves more than just nationalist purposes; it has ethical and economic
implications. China seeks a kind of moral upper hand in Asia in its economic and politicalcompetition with Japan; it wants to offer a model for a third kind of economic development in
Asia, and its history of Japanese imperialism, which it shares with many other Asian nations,helps legitimize its leadership. The Chinese government’s desire to assert an economic andpolitical leadership position in Asia emerged clearly in the spring 2005 conflict over Japan’s
ascension to the UN Security Council. As one commentator put it, the tensions between China
and Japan over history may have “to do more with the future than the past.”[12]Museums and memorials have played an important role in this move toward a discourse of
victimization. In this essay, I look at four important museums / memorial sites devoted toJapanese imperialism and to atrocities committed by the imperial army: Memorial Hall of thePeople’s War of Resistance Against Japan (Zhongguo renmin kangRi zhanzheng jinianguan),Memorial to Victims of the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders (QinHua Rijun Nanjing
datusha yunan tongbao jinianguan), Crime Evidence Exhibition Hall of Japanese Imperial Army
Unit 731 (QinHua Rijun di qisanyao budui zuizheng chenlieguan), and September 18 History
Museum (Jiuyiba lishi bowuguan).[13] All four museums were established in the 1980s and1990s. In their emphasis on atrocity and horror, they present something that is new in theDenton: Heroic Resistance and Victims of Atrocity

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exhibitionary representation of Japanese imperialism in China and constitute an importantdimension in the larger new remembering of World War II and the gradual shift away fromnarratives in which class struggle plays a key role. With their emphasis on atrocity, thesemuseums fit loosely into Gries’s victim narrative, and they are at least partly the product of therise of neonationalism in the PRC and particularly of the anti-Japanese strain of nationalism.[14]“Not forgetting” (wu wang) history, in particular that aspect of history that is a source of“national humiliation” (guo chi), is a theme found throughout these museums. The historical
overview section of the War of Resistance Museum, for example, ends with Zhou Enlai’s famousphrase “to not forget the past is to be master of the future” (qian shi bu wang, hou shi zhi
shi).[15] The phrase appears again at the very beginning of the Unit 731 Museum. Admonitions
to “not forget” history frame the September 18 History Museum. “Not forgetting national
humiliation” is a common theme in modern Chinese culture dating back at least to the
Republican era, when intellectuals urged others to recall the memories of humiliation,
particularly that inflicted by Japanese imperialism.[16] In the 1990s, intellectuals and the state
conspired in a similar fashion to urge average Chinese not to forget national humiliation because
people were indeed forgetting.[17]National humiliation is a powerful emotional hook with which to bring citizens back into thenationalist fold from which the experiences of their daily lives in a harsh economic climate may
be leading them away. Paul Cohen writes:
In the final decade of the twentieth century, the problem with respect to the rememberingof national humiliation assumed yet another guise. For the great majority of Chinese at
the century’s end the humiliations of the past were no longer a matter of immediate,
personal experience. Since an important source of legitimation for China’s ruling
Communist Party was its part in the vanquishing of imperialism in the 1940s—and theclosure this brought to the country’s “century of humiliation”—the challenge facing
patriotic educators, in the climate of revived nationalistic feeling and weakened faith inCommunism that characterized the 1990s, was to fill the minds of the young withnarratives of the suffering and humiliation of the imperialist interval in China’s history
and entreat them to “not forget.” Indeed, “do not forget”—wuwang—became the mantraof the guochi writing of this decade.[18]In short, the obsessive attention to “not forgetting” suggests the past’s fall into oblivion. The
heroic revolutionary past is increasingly at odds with the lives of urban residents caught up in the
struggles of the market economy. The emotionality of atrocities is one way the state can forge
national cohesion without stressing the potentially subversive message of revolutionary classstruggle that was until very recently so central to its legitimizing myths.[19]With the decline of the narrative of revolution, which dominated many museums in Maoist andearly post-Mao times, new modes of identification are taking its place. James Edward Youngwrites that memorials and monuments—museums could be easily added to this list—are used by
the state to “create a common memory, as a foundation for a unified polis.”[20] State memory
and individual memory converge, and the individual is made to feel at a deeply personal level aunity with the national community. The museums I analyze here clearly participate in thisemotionally charged state-sponsored nationalism. The emotional dimension is not entirely
missing from other kinds of museums in earlier modes of exhibitions, but it seems clear that intheir emphasis on the suffering of the Chinese body there is a shift with these museums toward

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affective response. These museums fuel nationalist sentiment, and the trauma of the past getschanneled toward an enemy and expressed in patriotic rage. The museums link together lost
territory and the physical suffering of the Chinese body politic. This specular attention to thesuffering of one’s fellow Chinese is a hook the state can use to “create a common memory, as afoundation for a unified polis.” As such, these museums are part of a larger move in museums ofmodern history in the PRC away from messages of class struggle (or the unity of class struggle
and national resistance), which can potentially be turned against the state in the context of market
reforms and the reemergence of class divisions, toward more nationalistic themes.[21] In recent
years, the idea of a common memory of resistance to Japan has been used to forge historicallinks between Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the mainland and thereby draw attention to their shared
identity and political destiny. In the fall of 2005, the National Museum of China put on the
much-publicized Exhibition on the Anti-Japanese Resistance Struggle of Our Taiwan
Compatriots (Taiwan tongbao kangri douzheng zhanlan) (fig. 1), and the place of Taiwan
resistance is much more prominent in the 2005 renovated exhibit at the War of Resistance
Memorial Hall than it was in the museum’s previous exhibit.

Sign at the entranceway of the Anti-Japanese Resistance Struggle of Our Taiwan Compatriots exhibit,
held at the National Museum of China in 2005

But victimization, emphasis on “not forgetting,” and national cohesion through sentiment areperhaps inadequate as framing devices through which to fully account for the emergence of thesemuseums and this exhibitionary mode of visualizing horror and atrocities. The memory ofJapanese imperialism and atrocities presented in these museums is more complex and theinfluences on it more multiple. Caught as they are between official (state), popular, and global
museum forces, it is not surprising that these museums sometimes present conflicted views. To
emphasize atrocity and victimization is a way to gain more legitimacy for the nation in its
continued struggle with Japan over the past, as Gries argues, as well as over present economic
might in Asia. Yet the discourse of victimization suggests a view of the Chinese people aspassive and powerless, a view that does not sit well with present Chinese pretensions to national
greatness. Moreover, overemphasizing victimization can serve to undermine CCP narratives ofnational resistance, which continue to be important parts of mainstream representations of theDenton: Heroic Resistance and Victims of Atrocity

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revolutionary past. The heroic resistance model, conversely, ties in with a view of Chinese
national character as strong, but it also suggests an outmoded ideology irrelevant to China’s
globalizing present and future. Museums devoted to Japanese imperialism must find ways tonegotiate between these discourses.
Museum curators also struggle to balance the integrity of their exhibitions with new technologies
that are also vehicles for the vibrant popular culture in the world outside the museum walls andthat bring with them new modes of spectatorship and relationships with history. From theperspective of museum curators, the emphasis on atrocities and horror in these museums isperhaps motivated as much by a need to accommodate popular culture as by victim narratives
and anti-Japanese nationalism. Atrocities make for good visual copy, allowing museums tocompete with popular culture for the minds—and yuan—of the people. Atrocities offer a kind ofvoyeuristic pleasure to visitors that may not be unlike that of watching horror films. In thesemuseums, the archival and documentary impulse, exhibited through “authentic artifacts” andphotographs, competes with newer technologies designed to popularize the message. Drawing
from Susan Sontag, we might suggest that museums of Japanese atrocities serve ultimately tonumb the senses to horror, creating a need for even greater visual stimulation.[22] The modern
Chinese writer Lu Xun (1881–1936) would no doubt concur; like the morally indifferent
spectators of the execution in the slide that changed his career, visitors to museums of horror
might derive pleasure from the viewing of suffering. Popular and visual culture would seem tohave led museums inevitably toward emphasizing visual depictions of horror and its pleasures.
The remembering and re-remembering of World War II are, of course, not something peculiar to
the PRC; it is a vast international enterprise. Ken Burns’s recently broadcast film documentary,
The War, is but the tip of the iceberg of a mammoth industry of recollecting the war in the West.
Museums and memorial sites are an important part of this remembering. There are, for instances,
hundreds of museums worldwide devoted to the Holocaust.[23] Many more offer overviews of
the war (e.g., the National World War II Museum, New Orleans), commemorate specific battles(e.g., Museum of the Battle of the Bulge, La Roche, Belgium), or offer alternative memories of
the war (e.g., Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles). The new memories of thewar in the PRC must be seen also in the larger context of the “new remembering” of the war
throughout Asia, where political changes have opened up space for new forms of representing
the war.[24] In Hong Kong, for example, perhaps both influenced by trends on the mainland andmotivated by a new-found sense of local pride, museums and memorial sites, such as theMuseum of Coastal Defence, have recently emphasized in their exhibits Hong Kong’s heroic
resistance against the Japanese, particularly that of the Hong Kong-Kowloon Independent
Company (aka Dongjiang Guerilla Force) and the Hong Kong Volunteers. In Taiwan, thequestion of resistance during the war is closely intertwined with identity politics. Exhibitions thattake a KMT Sino-centric approach (e.g., National Military Museum in Taipei) tend to emphasize
resistance activities; those that lean toward the DPP and its notions of Taiwanese identity (e.g.,
February 28 Museum in Taipei) tend to have a much more favorable view of Japanese
occupation and therefore place less stress on resistance.
Chinese atrocity museums and their exhibitions are influenced by global trends in memorializing
the past,[25] and in particular by Holocaust museums and the global rise of victimization
narratives, as well as by changes in how World War II is being remembered globally. Buruma
points out that at least some of the impetus behind recent PRC remembering of Japanese
atrocities has been spurred by efforts in the Chinese diaspora community, especially in theThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

414

United States.[26] There is certainly evidence to suggest that Chinese museum and memorial
designers and curators were highly conscious of the precedent of Holocaust museums andthought of their projects in terms of global remembering of human tragedies. Qi Kang, forinstance, compares his design of the Nanjing Massacre Museum to Holocaust museums in theWest.[27] The editor of a book about the Unit 731 Crimes Evidence Exhibition Hall links the
Nanjing Massacre, Auschwitz, and the activities of Unit 731.[28] This linking of atrocities on
Chinese soil with those committed in Nazi Germany suggests a way out of the bind that has
characterized Chinese views of Japanese atrocities.[29] That horror has occurred elsewhere andthat this horror is memorialized in museums around the world somehow makes it all right for
Chinese to make public this shameful chapter in their past. It also gives legitimacy to their
historical claims vis-à-vis Japanese denials: If it is not acceptable to deny the Holocaust, it is also
not acceptable for people to deny the Nanjing Massacre or the experiments at Unit 731.
Victimization narratives are thus not unique to China. “In a curious way,” writes Ian Buruma,“the Jewish Holocaust has been an inspiration for others. For almost every community, be it anation or a religious or ethnic or sexual minority, has a bone to pick with history. All havesuffered wrongs, and to an increasing and in my view alarming extent, all want these wrongs to
be recognized, publicly, ritually, and sometimes financially.”[30] In short, the emergence ofatrocity museums and the memory of suffering must be looked at not solely in terms of theemergence of neonationalism and victim narratives; equally significant in shaping the memory ofthis past are global trends in museology and the changing technology of museum display and its
relation to popular culture.
Mao Era Museums and Their Treatment of the War of Resistance Against JapanTo set the context for appreciating the post-Mao changes in how the War of Resistance Against
Japan is represented, it might be helpful to first see how the war was depicted in the Mao-era ingeneral and Mao-era museums in particular. The war played a key role in the narrative of thecommunist revolution propagated in the PRC. The war years have been portrayed as the pivotal
period in the revolutionary movement that allowed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) toemerge from the shadows and become a legitimate claimant to political hegemony in China. And
because Mao Zedong wrote most of his theoretical works during the war, the period (as well as
the place where the party spent most of it—Yan’an) has also been presented as the sacred origins
of Mao Zedong Thought, which dominated the ideological realm of the PRC from its founding in1949 to Mao’s death in 1976. During the war itself, rhetoric of resistance to Japan gave the CCP
legitimacy in its struggle for political control with the Nationalist Party. In the postrevolutionary
period, the war occupied a critical place in CCP narratives of modern Chinese history—as thedenouement, if you like, in the transformation from feudal darkness and imperialist humiliation
to enlightenment and national sovereignty, the war was central to shaping the party’s role in theliberational tale that was key to its legitimizing mythology.[31]The centrality of the war period is apparent in a variety of cultural forms, perhaps mostobviously films.[32] But one need go no further than the Chinese national anthem to find theimportance of the war to CCP legitimizing narratives.[33] Although written in 1935 before theoutbreak of the war, the song was something of a rallying cry for national resistance during thewar. As the national anthem in the postrevolutionary period, it expresses both “liberation”
rhetoric (“you who refuse to be slaves”) and the theme of “unity” in the struggle for national

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sovereignty (“millions of hearts with one mind”). The war becomes, in these and other examples,the pivotal period in the narrative of liberation and the establishment of a national polity.[34]In the Military Museum and the Museum of the Chinese Revolution (both developed in the late
1950s and opened to the public in 1961), the war constitutes an important stage in the larger
story of the victory of the revolution. In these representations, the war is a pivotal period in thehistory of the revolutionary movement because it led to the emergence of the CCP as thelegitimate political force on the national scene. Atrocities are displayed, but they occupy a very
minor part in the larger narrative, which is centered on the role of the CCP, battles in which its
armies engaged, and the CCP-led popular resistance.
Typical of Maoist museum and memorial representations of the war is the Northeast Martyrs
Memorial Hall.
Founded in 1948, it is perhaps the oldest suchmemorial hall in the PRC. It celebrates thesacrifices of those who lost their lives in the
Northeast theater of the struggle against theJapanese. Until its recent closing for renovation,
the museum comprised two main sections, one
devoted to the War of Resistance and the other tothe War of Liberation (i.e., civil war with the
Nationalists). To my knowledge, it did not touchon atrocities such as the medical experiments
committed by Unit 731 or biological warfare.
Rather, it emphasized the struggle of heroic
martyrs such as Yang Jingyu, Zhao Yiman, and Li
Front façade of the Northeast Martyrs Memorial
Zhaolin. When I visited in the summer of 2004,
Hall
the museum’s basic exhibit (jiben chenlie) was
closed because of a planned renovation.[35] In its
place was a temporary exhibit that gives a brief overview of the Northeast theater during the War
of Resistance. This temporary exhibit offers a sense of what the former basic exhibit must havelooked like. It strongly emphasizes the resistance narrative and the heroic sacrifices ofrevolutionary and patriotic martyrs. It ends on a celebratory note, with paintings and bronze
reliefs devoted to liberation and “turning over” (fanshen).
In the basement of the museum, however, was a new temporary exhibit called Crimes in theLight of Day: The Chemical Warfare Crimes of the Invading Japanese Army. The special exhibit
was filled with gruesome photographs of piles of dead children, severed heads, and bodies
disfigured by gas attacks.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

The language of the placards is emotional. For
example, the title of the second part of the exhibit
is Diabolical Evil, Madness Enacted (qiongxiong
ji’e, fengkuang shishi). The exhibit ends with theexhortation: “Don’t forget national humiliation,
revitalize China” (wuwang guochi, zhenxing
Zhonghua), set on a collage of images of a strong
industrial and military China.[36] The example of
the Northeast Martyrs Memorial Hall shows us
two modes of narrating Japanese imperialism: anolder narrative that stresses the glorious memoryof resistance and heroic sacrifice; and a new
narrative of horror, atrocity, and victimization thatis explicitly connected to China’s future as astrong nation.
Memorial Hall of the People’s War of
Resistance Against the Japanese416

One of many photographs depicting the horrificconsequences of Japanese chemical weapons in a
special exhibit in the Northeast Martyrs Memorial
Hall, Harbin

The Memorial Hall of the Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japan (hence, War of ResistanceMuseum) shows perhaps most prominently this same tension between the heroic resistance andhorror and victimization narratives. The museum is situated in Wanping near the famous Lugou
Bridge (referred to in English as the Marco Polo Bridge).[37] The museum was constructed inthree stages (first stage completed in 1987, second stage in 1997). A third transformation, inhonor of the sixtieth anniversary of the victory of the war, took place over the summer of 2005.
Contrary to what I expected, the new exhibit, entitled Great Victory, downplays atrocity andplaces a new emphasis on the war as a key part of the larger global anti-fascist struggle; the war
thus becomes a pivotal period in China’s emergence as a global power.[38] I focus here are on
the exhibitions during the museum’s second stage. Because it is directly under the auspices of theCentral Committee and the City of Beijing, the museum has solid financial backing and has
become something of a national center for remembering the War of Resistance as well as for thepromotion, somewhat ironically, of Sino-Japanese friendship.
In its second phase, the museum consisted of five principal exhibits. First are comprehensive
exhibits, which present a chronological history of Japanese imperialism in China and Chinese
resistance to it; these exhibits constitute the largest part of the museum and are displayed inseveral halls divided into multiple exhibition spaces. The style of display here is conventional,
with photographs, texts, and artifacts used to tell a chronological narrative of imperialism andresistance. Second is the Japanese Army Atrocities exhibit, which includes displays on the
Nanjing Massacre, use of poisonous gas, and medical experiments. Here the mode of exhibitionemphasizes dioramas and recreated scenes. Third are the People’s War exhibits, showing theheroic resistance of the Chinese people, with an actual tunnel simulating “tunnel warfare.”
Fourth is the Battle for Lugou Bridge diorama hall. And fifth is the Anti-Japanese Martyrs
exhibit. The spectator is generally expected to view the exhibits in this prescribed order.
The museum shows elements of both the victor and victim narratives, but they are generally
treated separately, suggesting the difficulty the curators faced in integrating them into a coherent
whole. The Japanese Army Atrocities exhibit is primarily in the victim mode, whereas the victor

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narrative dominates the comprehensive exhibits and the People’s War exhibit. The museum isthus fundamentally divided between a conventional emphasis on the CCP’s heroic resistance toJapanese imperialism and an attention to atrocities and to suffering of the physical body. The
comprehensive exhibits present a rather conventional view of the history of Japanese imperialism
and Chinese resistance. To be sure, as Mitter discusses in detail, these exhibits differ fromprevious representations of the war in drawing attention to the Nationalist role and the role ofoverseas Chinese, emphasizing in the process patriotism above political ideology; but the CCP’srole still dominates this representation.[39] The exhibit opens with a prefatory text set between
ceiling-to-floor size photographs, one of the raging Yellow River, the other of a misty mountainscene—signifiers, clearly, of Chinese national territory. In the exhibits proper, the main narrative
thread is that of CCP resistance, with large photos of Mao in his cave in Yan’an, oil paintings
glorifying the CCP-led Hundred Regiments Campaign, and exhibits on the “people’s resistance.”
The People’s War exhibit resonates strongly with the Maoist narrative, exemplified in Lin Biao’s
tract referred to at the beginning of this chapter. It emphasizes the primary role of the CCP inestablishing bases of resistance, as well as the unity of the party with the people. There is a large,
nearly life-size diorama of a northern village, presented as a typical setting for the “tunnel
warfare” played up so much in Mao-era films and fiction. There are life-size figures digging
tunnels as well as a model of a peasant home that leads to a secret tunnel spectators can walkthrough. Another exhibit glorifies the resistance of the CCP troops in the Baiyangdian area ofHebei. As a whole, the exhibit symbolizes the cooperation between the party and the people inresistance to the Japanese—a standard CCP representation of the war period. What is different
from earlier Maoist representations, of course, is that the museum lacks an emphasis on thefoundational influence of Mao Zedong Thought, the third of the characteristics of the war
outlined by Lin Biao in 1965. The exhibit ends, predictably, with a collage of photos showing
celebrations of “the great victory of the people’s war.”
By contrast, the Japanese Army Atrocities Exhibit is dominated by several life-size dioramas of
atrocities. One presents a three-dimensional scene of the bloodied bodies of women and children
set before a large mural depicting a battlefield strewn with bodies extending far into the distance.

Exhibition space in the Japanese Army Atrocities Hall

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In the foreground, the diorama highlights a live child sitting up on the body of his dead mother.
A commonplace in Chinese museum representations of horror, the severing of the most basic
human bond between mother and child becomes the emotional hook to draw the spectator in. The
exhibit also has a gruesome life-size diorama of white-coated Japanese doctors performing
medical experiments on Chinese bodies that twitch mechanically. Apart from these eye-catchingand dramatic scenes, the exhibit is composed primarily of huge, blown-up photographs giving
testimony to Japanese atrocities. The displays draw attention to physical suffering and are meant
to provoke emotional responses, including pity and a sense of outrage.
The Battle for Lugou Bridge diorama hall is a small theater with stadium seating. On the curved“screen” in the background is a huge painting of the Lugou Bridge area. In the foreground is athree-dimensional battlefield scene. This is the setting for a twenty-minute show that makes useof recorded narration, lights, and sound effects to bring the battle to life. These sorts ofmultimedia scenes are increasingly popular in Chinese museums, but this was, to my knowledge,
the first. The museum curators developed it quite self-consciously as a response to the
popularity, liveliness, and emotive power of other media, particularly television and film. It
should be said that this incursion of popular cultural modes into the exhibitionary practice of thismuseum is rather limited in comparison with other museums, such as the Shanghai Municipal
History Museum or even the September 18 History Museum. Moreover, the curators have
limited this mode of exhibition to the diorama hall, the Japanese Army Atrocities Exhibit, and
the People’s War Exhibit; the comprehensive exhibits, which one could argue are the museum’s
basic exhibits, are far more conventional and academic, and the Martyrs Exhibit is vastly moresolemn.
The Martyrs Exhibit, which is visually distinct from the rest of the museum, has a religious aura
about it. It consists of one large circular room, which one enters through an open vestibule. The
vestibule presents four carved reliefs of battle scenes, two on the left and two on the right. As
Mitter notes, among the reliefs are a depiction of the five heroes of Langya Mountain, a standard
object of worship in CCP historiography, and the heroic Nationalist defense of Haibaoshan. Thisacknowledgement of Nationalist patriotism in resistance to Japan marks, argues Mitter, a “radical
departure from pre-1985 PRC interpretations of the war” and reflects an official state policy ofreconciliation toward Taiwan.[40] Yet the ideological use of martyrs for nationalism andnational unity is consistent with Maoist myth making. The circular memorial hall has at its centera bronze statue of an unknown soldier, whose fallen body is at once pulled to the great earth andstruggling to prop itself up with a gun.[41]Denton: Heroic Resistance and Victims of Atrocity

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Unknown soldier in the center of the Martyrs Memorial Hallin the War of Resistance Museum outside BeijingThis centerpiece coveys something of the ambiguity of the martyr image in Chinese
revolutionary iconography: at once a victim of oppression and a heroic resister who struggles
against that oppression, drawn toward death, the past, and the earth, but lifting himself toward
life, the sublime, and the future. Martyrs are tied to the past, a memory of that past, but they arealso guiding spirits for the future. The statue of the unknown soldier thus embodies the larger
tension in the museum’s exhibitions between the victory and victim narratives.
Surrounding this statue are fourteen red marble memorial steles (representing the fourteen years,
from 1931 to 1945, of resistance to Japan). Below a wreath in relief at the top of the stele are
written the names of martyrs—mostly soldiers who died during the war, including such CCPcanonized figures as Zhao Yiman, but also including Nationalist soldiers—along with a brief
biography. At the base of each stele is a carving in white marble of an open book containing
more names of martyrs. Its circular structure and polished marble floor, and the earthy tones ofthe steles and the central statue, give the hall a warm yet dignified feel. The carving of the namesof martyrs on the polished marble steles recalls the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington,
but the circular windowless room creates an enclosed aesthetic that is very different from theopen-ended, open-air aesthetic of Maya Lin’s memorial. As spectators enter the hall they areenveloped by the names of the martyrs and the memory of their heroic sacrifice. Despite theearthy color of the marble, the overall effect of the hall is colder than the Vietnam Veterans’
Memorial, lacking the personal dimension that has given that memorial its power. But the
memorial hall creates a very serious and somber mood that reflects the kinds of memories thecurators no doubt seek to instill in spectators. Whereas the exhibits proper present“documentation” of the past, the Martyrs Memorial Hall asks for a kind of religious reverence
and remembrance of those who have sacrificed their lives.
Significantly, the memorial hall commemorates not the victims of the Nanjing Massacre or otheratrocities but the heroic fighters against Japanese imperialism. The museum concludes not withthe victims of atrocities but with a conventional reverence for the heroes of national resistance. It
opens with a similarly heroic and threatening image: a massive bronze relief of soldiers andothers who resisted Japanese aggression tellingly titled Build Our New Great Wall with Our

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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Flesh and Blood (Ba women de xue rou zhucheng women xinde changcheng), a line from the
Chinese national anthem.

Bas relief in the entrance hall of the War of Resistance Museum

Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall: Remembering Horror
The appearance of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall should be understood in the larger
context of post-Mao liberalization and the emergence of new narratives of national identity andnationalism. The idea for a museum dedicated to the Nanjing Massacre dates back to 1983 andwas clearly the result of interest in the topic at the highest levels of state government.[42] Qi
Kang, a Nanjing-based architect who has made a name for himself designing museums andmemorials, was the principal designer of the memorial site. The first part of the museum wascompleted in 1985 and included the main exhibition hall and the “graveyard grounds.” In 1997,
the site was expanded to include a new L-shaped entranceway that created a southern-facing gate
and added several impressive sculptures to the memorial site. The site will soon undergo a $59
million expansion, to be completed in 2007.
Qi Kang sought to create what he calls a “holistic environmental design” (zhengti huanjing sheji)
rather than a conventional museum building filled with historical artifacts. His goal was to use a“solemn language” (shenchen de yuyan) to elicit emotion, and he states that the design wasmeant to create an “emotional space” (you ganjue de kongjian).[43] At the same time as he wasworking on the Nanjing Massacre Memorial, Qi Kang was designing the Yuhuatai Memorial,
also in Nanjing. Whereas the latter memorializes heroic fighters for a noble cause, the former
remembers helpless victims of atrocity and therefore required, says Qi, a very different
aesthetic.[44] The symmetry and grand design of the Yuhuatai site convey a strong tenor of theheroic and sublime, and in that sense is similar in kind, though not in design, to conventional

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Maoist memorial sites for martyrs, for which the national model is the Monument to the People’s
Heroes in Beijing.

Main hall at Yuhuatai Martyrs Park in Nanjing

By contrast, the Nanjing Massacre site is asymmetrical and earthbound: There are no toweringsteles that soar heroically to the sky; it has a more minimalist design that self-consciously seeks
to avoid grand architectural gestures of the sublime.
The memorial’s aesthetic is somber and purposefully bleak and lifeless.[45] Nearly the entire
memorial—walls, ground, steps, and the like—is done in cinderblock, presenting a uniformly
drab color. Qi says he sought to give the feeling of “entering a tomb.” Tragedy and horror are notrepresented directly but suggested subtly through the stark aesthetic. The memorial is radicallydifferent from anything done before it in the PRC. This may of course have something to do withthe topic; heroic resistance or grand sacrifice, so commonly heralded in revolutionary history
museums and memorials to martyrs, are just not appropriate for a memorial devoted to atrocity,
and Qi Kang’s strove to find an appropriate aesthetic to capture the horror.[46] There is little thatis grand or heroic in the design of the outdoor memorial space; instead, perhaps influenced by
Holocaust museums in the West, it conveys a bleak and desolate look that is powerful andmoving.
The memorial is constructed on the site of a mass grave of victims that was unearthed in theearly 1980s. It consists of three main sections: the L-shaped entranceway, the graveyard grounds,
and the history exhibit. As you enter the square, a long courtyard leads to the site’s mostimpressive work of art, “Disaster in the Ancient City” (Gucheng de zainan). In the background isan ancient city wall riddled with holes (as if from bullets and bombs). In the foreground is thehalf-buried body of a victim, his head severed from the rest of his body, of which only an armand hand are visible.

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“Disaster in the Ancient City,” a sculpture at the end of the entrance courtyardin the Nanjing Massacre memorial

Above his head looms a Japanese knife, red with the blood of the victim below. Though thefigure recalls similar sculptures at other memorial sites—for instance, the unknown soldier at theLonghua Martrys Park—it is a more despairing aesthetic. Cutting across the buried body of thestatue is the “bridge of history,” suggesting the horrors inflicted on China by history, but alsopassage out from beneath the burden of history. The bridge suggests that remembering the past
will lead to a better future, a constant theme in PRC history museums and memorial sites. The
bridge leads to a courtyard with a sculpture titled “The Footprints of Witnesses to History” (Lishi
zhengren de jiaoyin), which consists of bronze footprints of survivors of the massacre. To theright is a wall on which is inscribed in bronze a long narrative poem about the massacre titled“Crazy Snow” (Kuang xue), written by Wang Jiuxing. The sculpture and poem were added to thememorial site in 2002 and 2003, respectively.

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Unknown soldier statue, Longhua Martyrs Park, Shanghai

The most powerful part of the site is the graveyard grounds. Although the entire site has a grayand bleak look, the graveyard ground is especially so. There is no color and little in the way ofgreenery, except along the edges of the grounds (which Qi says was intended to offer hopewithin despair). There is something of a Zen garden aesthetic to the graveyard. One cannot see
the graveyard from the entrance square; it must be entered by first mounting some stairs, above
which is a sign that reads “300,000 Victims,” and walking through an elbow-shaped passageway
formed by cinderblock walls to each side. At the end of the enclosed passageway, a vista slowly
opens up to reveal a landscape of scorched pebbles interrupted only by a few leafless trees andthe statue of a mother who appears to be searching for her child.[47] Along the edge of the fieldof stones, the visitor follows a long stone relief, which forms a barrier between the graveyard andthe outside world, depicting moments of horror suffered by Nanjing residents during the
massacre. After passing by a memorial wall (labeled “The Crying Wall”) inscribed with thenames of victims, the path then leads through two separate “bones” rooms—exhibits of actualbones of massacred victims found at the site.

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Graveyard grounds at the Nanjing Massacre memorial

The third and final section of the memorial site is the historical exhibition, which is housed in a
half-underground building and gives an overview of Japanese imperialism in China and of themassacre itself. The exhibit opens with a statue titled “Mother and Child” (Mu yu zi), whichshows a mother holding the limp body of her dead child, a sacrificial victim of the slaughter, andharkens back to the Mother figure in the graveyard grounds. The mother-child union is a
powerful one, commonly used in socialist iconography. Behind the figure is a large photographic
mural of dead bodies, above which looms the number “300,000.” Clearly, the use of mother andchild as the opening image of the exhibits is meant to suggest the innocence of the victims as awhole and to reinforce the barbarity of the Japanese for severing the most fundamental of all
human relations.
The exhibition proper is presented, as are the vast majority of museum exhibitions in the PRC, inchronological order. It is framed quite clearly with the nationalist message of Chinese struggles
against imperialism, which creates an interesting tension with the aesthetic of the more humanist
graveyard outside. The historical exhibition sets the massacre in the larger context of Japaneseimperialism and Chinese resistance to it, whereas the graveyard focuses on human suffering andon instilling remembrance of that suffering. This schizophrenic quality of the memorial as awhole is expressed in the site’s name. The term yu’nanzhe (victim) gives a humanist sense ofuniversal victimization and suffering, but the use of tongbao suggests at the same time that the
memorial is still firmly within a nationalist paradigm. And although Buruma criticizes it for
demanding “piety of the Japanese and patriotism from the Chinese” and for not offering an“atmosphere in which dispassionate historical inquiry can thrive,” the memorial marks a stepaway from the kind of heroic glorification of martyrs that dominated the Maoist period andcontinues to be an important form of memorialization in the PRC.[48] Clearly, the state in China
is not willing to give up its control over memory of the past; the kind of postmodern memorial
Buruma seems to want—one that questions the very notion of representation—would threatenthat control and is unthinkable in the present political context.
Museums in China are often used as active sites for memorialization. This is especially true of
the Nanjing Massacre memorial. The day of my visit to the museum was July 7, 2004; needlessto say, special ceremonies were held, including personal oral narrations by living witnesses.
Museums freeze time and suggest ultimately the irretrievability of the past or that the past is anDenton: Heroic Resistance and Victims of Atrocity

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inert artifact; clearly, the active use to which museums are put in China attempts to overcome
these perhaps inherent weaknesses of the museum project. Although this active use of memorialsites might suggest, like the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, a kind of popular
appropriation of a state-sponsored memorial, the state maintains control over how and when thesite is used for public commemorations.[49]The Unit 731 Museum: Authenticity
The Crime Evidence Exhibition Hall of the Japanese Imperial Army Unit 731 in Pingfang,
Heilongjiang, was established in the early 1980s in a building that is part of a much larger siteused by the infamous Japanese Army Unit 731 to commit medical experiments on thousands ofChinese (as well as some Russians, Koreans, and others) from 1939 to the end of the War of
Resistance Against Japan.[50] In 1995, a new building to house the exhibits was constructed
down the road from this site. In 2001, however, the exhibit was brought back to the original site,
now renovated.

Entranceway, courtyard, and exhibition hall of the Unit 731 Museum

Why did museum officials, after expending financial capital and great effort in the constructionof a new museum, decide to return the exhibit to the original site? The new museum, I contend,
lacked the power and authenticity of a site where the atrocities described in the exhibits actually
took place. As a “site museum” (yizhi bowuguan), the present museum gives the past an “aura” itnever could gain in a less charged setting.[51]Much of the power of the museum comes even before you enter the exhibition building. Fromthe main gate, you walk through a large expanse of greenless, empty space. The emptiness seems
to offer mental space for the imagination of the horrors to be displayed in the museum exhibits.
Its emptiness and sterility recall the memorial site at Auschwitz and are an example of James
Young’s “memorialized ruins”: “As houses come to be ‘haunted’ by the ghosts (memory, really)

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of their former occupants, the sites of destruction are haunted by the phantoms of past events, nolonger visible, only remembered.”[52] Before even entering the building, the site creates a“mood of memory,” a somber mood that prepares one for the horror exhibited in the museum
proper.[53]Inside the exhibition building, which housed the administrative offices of Unit 731, this mood ismaintained by dark hallways and exposed-bricked rooms. As you enter the building, there is aprefatory hallway that sets the theme for the entire museum and memorial site. On either side of
the hallway are bronze reliefs, in which are carved large characters: to the left, qian shi bu wang;
and to the right, hou shi zhi shi (to not forget the past is to be master of the future). As discussed
previously, the recurring emphasis on recalling the past in Chinese museum is all about moving
beyond the past so as to make China a “master” in the future; recalling the horrors of the past is a
step toward leaving behind the “century of humiliation” and marching toward a more glorious
future when that remembering will longer be necessary. Implicitly, then, remembering
humiliation is connected to the emergence of China as a global economic and political power.
The “Preface” to the exhibits proper says that the experiments carried out by members of Unit
731 make them “the cruelest fascist war criminals in the history of humankind.” It gives thefigure of 3,000 killed by Unit 731 experiments, and another 300,000 killed as a result of germ
warfare technology developed at the site. “Our purpose,” says the preface, “in exposing the evil
history of Unit 731 is to use facts to warn later people, to allow history to call for human peace,
civilization, and progress, and not let historical tragedies repeat themselves.”
The exhibits themselves are presented with a dark aesthetic that creates a somber and serious
mood. The thrust of the exhibits is to present authentic artifacts so as to “let history give
testimony.” The museum generally makes less use of dioramas and multimedia than, say, theMuseum of the War of Resistance or the September 18 History Museum. Instead, it favors
photographs and material objects—things that authenticate what happened at the site—such as
hangers for human viscera, laboratory test tubes, saws, scalpels, and clamps, as well as prisoner
identity cards. Much attention is paid to the testimony of former members of Unit 731. One roomis devoted to “Confessions” (qianhui) of various Japanese military figures, who in the 1980s
began to reveal the truth of Unit 731’s activities in China.
There are graphic photographs in the museum to be sure, but for the most part the horror has tobe imagined from the artifacts. This may be a conscious choice on the part of the curators, but it
may also be because photographs and film footage do not exist. As the exhibits recountrepeatedly, the Japanese destroyed much of the Pingfang site at the end of the war in order toeliminate evidence of their crimes. The ruins, we are told in one museum catalogue, are“evidence of the Japanese army’s germ warfare crimes, and evidence of the Japanese army’s
destruction of evidence.” Graphic dioramas are few in the museum. One shows Japanese doctors
performing medical experiments; another, called the Erdaogou Plague Scene, depicts a bubonic
plague attack on the village of Erdaogou. The nearly life-size diorama is in two parts, with thespectator walkway running between them: To the left is a dead figure with two mourners by its
side, an older woman mourns from the door of their hovel of a home; to the right a corpse isbeing carried away on a stretcher. The horror is rather muted. The diorama ends with a list of thenames of those known to have died in the attack.
In comparison with many other new museums in China, multimedia is also used sparingly. Thereis, however, a small film auditorium, which continuously projects a documentary about Unit 731.

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On the wall of the auditorium is written “Do not forget national humiliation.” The film uses
fictionalized scenes as well as documentary photos and is not easy viewing. When I visited themuseum in the summer of 2004, a young woman, a Korean I believe, suddenly ran out of theviewing room and vomited in the hallway.
Like some of the other museums discussed here, the Unit 731 Museum has several exhibits
devoted to memorialization. One room is called “Remember Us,” a kind of memorial hallconsisting of a plaster structure made to look like stone with a flame cutting through it; below isa wreath and a plaque, which tells us that the victims are mostly nameless. To the left and rightof the room are the names of four known victims. The final exhibit is a long hallway, on the left
side of which is the “List of the Victims.” There are plaques (in stone, with black characters) for
those nameable victims, extending down the length of the hall, some one hundred in total. The
exhibit ends with text that echoes the preface, saying that some 3,000 died as a result of Unit 731
experiments and another 300,000 were injured in germ warfare produced from theseexperiments. The museum not only serves to help the spectator remember the past but alsoemphasizes the need to remember and the remembering itself.
Behind the exhibition building are “ruins”—the foundations of buildings that were part of thelarger Unit 731 complex.

Ruins of one of the structures on the Unit 731 complex

There are, for example, the ruins of the building used for germ research. The museum has plans
to develop these ruins into a more integral part of the site. At present, some of the ruins
surrounding the exhibition hall have plaques informing the spectator about the site, but many still
do not. As suggested above, this museum derives its power from the site and its ruins. Because of
the power of the site, the museum does not have to recreate an atmosphere, like the Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington, which seeks to recreate the feel of experiencing life in theconcentration camps.[54] This museum seems to self-consciously avoid a Disneyfication ofhorror and play up the authentic aura of its site. The exhibits are simple, the lighting is dim, andThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia428

the display is mundane, and all lack the technological sophistication now often found in Chinese
museums. Although these aspects may also be partly due to a lack of funds or of curatorial
training, I think the curators are self-consciously avoiding the aestheticization of objects thatwere used to inflict unimaginable suffering.
The September 18 History Museum: Specularity and Memory
The September 18 History Museum in Shenyang was established in 1991 on the sixtiethanniversary of September 18, 1931, when the Japanese Kwantung Army blew up a railway
bridge, accused the Chinese of doing it, and then used the incident as pretext for occupying
Shenyang and southern Manchuria. The date is conventionally seen in the PRC as the beginningof the Japanese occupation of China and of resistance to it. In its early phase, the museum
consisted of a single monument: the broken calendar monument, which I discuss below. In 1997,
the city of Shenyang approved funding for an expanded museum, and the present museum wascompleted two years later and opened on September 18, 1999. As the catalogue puts it, themuseum seeks to be a place for “patriotic and national defense education” and to teach people“not to forget national humiliation and to invigorate China” (wu wang guochi, zhenxing
Zhonghua). Like other museums in China, this museum is active in educational outreach,organizing, for instance, a mobile exhibition that travels around to schools.[55]The museum building is among the more interesting architectural designs of new museums in the
PRC.

Main exhibition hall of the September 18 History Museum

It is situated outside the central core of the city on the site of the explosion that was used by theJapanese as a pretext for attacking Shenyang and eventually occupying all of Manchuria. Unlike
the Unit 731 Museum, however, the museum’s symbolic power does not derive particularly fromthe historical site. Instead, the building’s design and the use of external space immediatelyaround the museum give it power. What first catches one’s eye as one enters the main gate is thegiant stone calendar, riddled with bullet and bomb holes and opened to the date September 18,
1931.

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Stone calendar statue in the courtyard of the September 18 History Museum

The text on the calendar reads: “Around ten o’clock at night, the Japanese army blew up the
Liutiao Lake section of the Southern Manchurian Railway. Under the pretext of blaming the
Chinese army for committing this act, they attacked and occupied the army’s north headquarters.
Under orders not to resist, our northeast army retreated in pain, disaster befell the nation, and thepeople rose up angrily in resistance.” Although it is intended to stress the historical importanceof this date in Chinese history, the calendar also suggests that time has stopped and that China issomehow stuck in the memory of this national insult. However, by commemorating this tragic
event, the museum will help China to flip the pages of history forward and leave the humiliationof that event behind.
Various pieces of sculpture appear around the plaza in front of the museum building. As at the
Nanjing Massacre memorial, there is large bell called the Awaken the World Bell (Jingshi
zhong); on one side of the bell are the words “do not forget national humiliation,” and a
description of the September 18 Incident appears on the other.[56] A bomb stele (zhadan bei)shows what looks like a cement support, an original piece of the Liaotiao Lake Bridge. On thefacade of the museum building itself is a huge relief in bronze called “National Disaster” (Guonan), created by the sculpture Department of the Shenyang Lu Xun Fine Arts Academy. The
placard informs one that the relief, which stretches along the white facade of the wall of themuseum, is inspired by traditional Chinese calligraphy.
Indeed, from a distance, the movement of the relief along the wall does suggest sweeping dark
brush strokes on white paper. Only close to the relief can one notice figures of suffering victimsof the Japanese attack embedded in the bronze.

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Close-up of relief on the front exterior walls of the September 18 History Museum

The relief thus suggests, perhaps recalling Mao’s phrase about the people being a blank slate,that the “people” emerge from writing itself; the people are the object/subject ofhistory/historiography. As in many such representations in history museums in China, bronze
represents the earth and the people are shown to be part of the earth, tied to the motherland;
territory and the body politic are inextricably joined. On the facade of the street side of thebuilding is another similar bronze relief called “Anger Rising” (Fen qi), meant to represent thespirit of resistance. It depicts soldiers heroically fighting the enemy.
Taken together, the two reliefs that cover the museum’s outer walls represent the victim andvictory narratives discussed at the beginning of this chapter. The last important artwork outside
the museum is the “Memorial Stele of the Victory of the War of Resistance,” which in its shape
hearkens back to the “bomb stele” near the entrance to the site; it restores to an upright position

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the bridge support blown down by Japanese bombs on September 18, 1931. Like the two reliefs,
these two steles (bei) convey the intertwined narratives of victimization and victory.
The major tropes of the external design of the museum and its outdoor memorials and sculptures
are presented in more narrative form in the museum exhibitions. First, the Prefatory Hall (XuTing) echoes the two modes of representing the war and sets the context for appreciating thechronological exhibits that follow.

Prefatory Hall of the September 18 History Museum

The not-quite-rectangular hall is subtly lit with ceiling floodlights; it has a polished black marble
floor and white plaster reliefs cover the four walls. There is a strong contrast between the dark
floor and lighted white reliefs. The reliefs, we are told in a museum catalogue, represent themountains of China, while the black marble floor represents its rivers, visually referring to thephrase baishan heishui (white mountains, black rivers), a surrogate term for Dongbei (i.e., theChangbai Mountains and Heilong River). Although the room thus has a local flavor, mountains
and rivers are commonly used to stand for China as a whole.[57] On the floor near the middle ofthe hall is a four-foot-high black marble pyramid capped by a red “eternal flame” (not real fire,
but some sort of electric light), representing the martyrs of the Northeast, “with their spirit ofunyielding resistance and their eternal national heroic spirit.” On the four sides of the pyramid is
text in Chinese, Japanese, English, and Russian. We are told in the text that September 18 is“etched” in the hearts of the Chinese people and that it marks the beginning of fourteen years ofJapanese occupation during which many people sacrificed their lives. Above the pyramid are
fourteen blue lights (one for each year of occupation), which cast a blue pall on the red “flame”
below. The visual contrast between the somber blue of occupation and the heroic red ofresistance embodies the tension between victimization and heroic resistance narratives.
After the memorial hall, the spectator proceeds down a long walkway to the beginning of theexhibition proper. The exhibition opens with an overtly internationalist perspective: Japaneseimperialism is portrayed as part of a larger global fascism and China’s resistance as part ofglobal resistance to it.[58] This internationalizing of the struggle can perhaps be seen as part ofChina’s present efforts to “join with the world,” but it also serves to link Japan’s evil with theglobally recognized evil of the Nazis. However, it strikes me that this is a rather token

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internationalism and that both the thrust and the details of the exhibition are solidly within thenationalist paradigm.
The exhibition is structured in six display halls: (1) Historical Background; (2) Outbreak of the
Incident and the Loss of the Northeast; (3) Japan’s Bloody Rule in the Northeast; (4) The
Resistance Struggle of the Northeast Army and People; (5) The Whole Nation Resists, theNortheast is Restored, and the Final Chapter of Japanese Imperialism; and (6) Let History Be a
Mirror, Hope for Peace, and Be on Guard Against the Return of Japanese Militarism. As isalmost universal in Chinese history museums, the material is presented chronologically. The
exhibits make conventional use of photographs, texts, and maps; but more than the othermuseums discussed in this chapter, they employ innovative exhibitionary techniques that reveal
the influences of popular and visual culture. What stand out in the museum are its numerous
models, dioramas, and multimedia displays. History and atrocity are offered as visual anddramatic spectacles for the visitor. For example, through cracks in a wall, the spectator can peer,rather voyeuristically, into a life-size scene recreating a gruesome, though somewhat campy,
Unit 731 operating room. By hiding the display behind a partial wall, the curators may beshielding it from younger visitors, but it also draws attention to the very notion of spectatorship.
A “demonstration scene” (yanshi changing), a framed scene with lights and recorded narrationthat consists of the bones of corpses murdered by the Japanese in the infamous Pingdingshan
Massacre of 1932, is also typical of the specular and visual quality of exhibits in this museum.
Music often combines with three-dimensional visuality to give many displays a highly theatricalquality. For instance, in the second exhibit hall there is a display of bronze statues of refugees
titled “Sorrow of Exile” (Liuwang hen), which shows an array of citizens fleeing the Japanese
occupation of the Northeast. The “citizens” include peasants, but also students, who appear to be
doing anti-Japanese propaganda work.

“Sorrow of Exile” sculpture depicting refugees

The sculpture is clearly drawing on conventional historical memories of the Japanese occupationin which the image of refugees from the Northeast figured prominently. On the wall behind thebronze sculptures are the music and lyrics to “On the Songhua River” (Songhua jiang shang), aDenton: Heroic Resistance and Victims of Atrocity

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morose song about September 18 and the loss of homeland. References to songs—generally
standard revolutionary songs—appear throughout the museum’s exhibits.
In the section on national resistance to Japanese occupation, there is an impressive large-scalediorama called “Camp Song” (Luying ge).

“Camp Song,” a large-scale diorama at the September 18 History Museum

The song referred to in the title of the diorama was written by Li Zhaolin, a general who wrote it
during a particularly difficult period in his troop’s struggle against the enemy. The song played
an important role in Maoist narratives and earlier museum representations of the war (e.g.,
Northeast Martyrs Memorial Hall). The diorama, designed by Wang Jihou of the Shenyang
HuaXia Exhibition Arts Engineering Company, recreates the scene described in the lyrics of thesong.[59] The three-dimensional scene brings a highly theatrical element into the exhibitionary
space. Musical and theatrical spectacle combine to form an impressive display, one that serves
little to propel the chronological narrative of the exhibition but that seeks to evoke emotional
resonances of the lost homeland and the heroic struggle to recover it. As a museum brochure puts
it: “With the ‘Camp Song’ . . . as its theme and the vast expanse of white snow and dense whitebirch forest as its background, the scene describes the unyielding struggling spirit and highrevolutionary optimism of soldiers of the United Army.”
Among the more powerful dioramas in the museum is one of life-size wax figures of Japanese
war criminals being tried in a Shenyang court in 1956. The twenty-eight wax figures are dressedin black, and their heads are bowed in recognition of their guilt; behind them is a collage ofphotographic images of Chinese victims of the war with soaring planes, exploding bombs, andhuge plumes of smoke in the background. The diorama captures guilt and contrition in a highly
emotional visual language. Coming near the end of the exhibition, it offers powerful testimony to
the Chinese nationalist take on the fair judgment of history. The exhibition ends with the bronze

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sculpture “The Monument to the Chinese Foster Parents,” a memorial donated by Japanese to theChinese parents who raised Japanese children orphaned by the war.

“The Monument to the Chinese Foster Parents,” a sculpture near the end of the basic exhibitionin the September 18 History Museum

It shows a Chinese peasant couple with a Japanese child standing between them and looking up
lovingly at his “mother.” Obviously, the sculpture echoes the many images of Chinese mothers
torn from their own children that are to be found in the museums discussed above. The sculpture
portrays the Chinese in an unmistakably positive moral light; even after being horribly
victimized by brutal occupiers, the sculpture suggests, the Chinese still had compassion for thechildren of their oppressors and raised them, with presumably superior Chinese moral standards.
The Concluding Remarks to the exhibition are rather revealing. The text reads:
As we are about to leave the exhibition room, everyone’s heart is dripping blood, andevery drop of blood seems to congeal into a question mark: How could Japaneseimperialism dare to lift a butcher’s knife against our great and vast China? Every photo
here forms a chain of ironclad facts, but how can there be people who still refuse toconfront them, or who even distort those facts, or rewrite them? [It is said that] “if you’rebackward, you will be beaten,” but why are we backward? The faces of the deceased

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presented here are all crying out [nahan]. What do their cries tell us? Do they tell us: “Apeople/nation that forgets its heroes is a degenerate one”? Do they also tell us: “If you
forget suffering, suffering may once again knock on the nation’s doors”? Do they tell us:“It begins with me, with the present”? Or do they tell us: “To revive China, everyone
bears responsibility”?
The interrogative mode here seems a rather empty nod to a more postmodern sensibility, and themuseum concludes with a bald assertion of the facts of Japanese aggression in China. Of all themuseums discussed here, the September 18 History Museum bends the most to the demands of
popular nationalism, popular culture, and the spectacle.
Conclusion
Threatened as they are by popular culture and caught between official rhetoric and the demandsof the cultural marketplace, museums try desperately to be relevant in contemporary Chinesesociety. One way they can do this is through the nationalist representation of horror and atrocity.
In their attention to victimization, atrocity, and suffering, these museums are primarily motivatedby a desire to evoke nationalist sentiments; they both appeal to a latent nationalism and help toshape it. In this chapter, I have looked at four museums devoted to Japanese imperialism andatrocities committed during Japan’s fourteen-year occupation of China. They differ in theirmodes of representation: the conventionality of the War of Resistance Memorial Hall, theminimalist humanism of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial, the “authenticity” of the Unit 731
Museum, and the spectacle of the September 18 History Museum. Despite their differences, theyshare a tension between emphasis on suffering and victimization, on the one hand, and heroic
resistance and victory, on the other.
Together, these two principal modes of representing the War of Resistance Against Japan are atodds, but they also work hand in hand and need each other. Although there is plenty of attention
in these museums to the role of the CCP in leading resistance to Japan, this is not their primary
message. Rather, they seek to involve the visitor in a shared history of national suffering and,perhaps most important, of overcoming that suffering. It goes without saying that museums are
not the only forms of remembering this national suffering (the popular histories discussed by
Gries and historical Web sites are two other important modes), but they are, with their imposing
architecture, “authentic” physical artifacts, and close association with the state, a particularly
important and powerful one.
Kirk A. Denton is associate professor of Chinese literature and culture at The Ohio State
University. He is author of The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and
Lu Ling (Stanford, 1998) and editor of Modern Chinese Literature Thought: Writings on
Literature, 1893-1945 (Stanford, 1996) and of the journal Modern Chinese Literature andCulture. He is working on a book on the politics and ideology of museums’ representation ofmodern history in Greater China.
This essay was first published, in a slightly different form, as “Horror and Atrocity: Memory ofJapanese Imperialism in Chinese Museums,” in Ching Kwan Lee and Guobin Yang, eds., Reenvisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform
China (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2007), 245–86.

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[1] See Ken Sekine, “Verbose Silence in 1939 Chongqing: Why Ah Long's Nanjing Could Not
Be Published.” MCLC Resource Center, 2004. The novel was first published as Nanjing xueji(The bloody sacrifice of Nanjing) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1987).
[2] The online China News Digest Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall has published an English
translation of a 1962 work called Japanese Imperialism and the Massacre in Nanjing. The
translator, Robert Gray, writes in the introduction that “In 1962, scholars at Nanjing University’s
Department of History (Japanese history section) wrote the book Japanese Imperialism and theMassacre in Nanjing (Riben diguozhuyi zai Nanjing de datusha) based on extensive materials
they uncovered during a two-year investigation into the Nanjing Massacre. After it was written,
the book was labeled a classified document (neibu ziliao) and could not be published openly.”[3] Mark Eykholt, “Aggression, Victimization, and Chinese Historiography of the Nanjing
Massacre,” in The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, ed. Joshua Fogel (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000), 11–69.
[4] Ian Buruma, “The Joys and Perils of Victimhood,” New York Review of Books (April 8,
1999), 4–9.
[5] The fact that the hibakusha, the victims of the atomic bombing, are at the forefront of
remembering the war and of the peace movement in Japan, would suggest that Buruma’s
remarks are not universally true.
[6] E.g., see Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–1945,
and the American Cover-Up (New York: Routledge, 2002).
[7] Mitter suggests that as the Maoist ideology and its pivotal historical moments lost resonancefor the Chinese people in the post-Mao era: “In looking for a theme to inspire unity, theleadership was forced to turn to the cataclysmic event of the century, War of Resistance toJapan.” See Mitter, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum,” 280. To highlight the point, Mittercompares the War of Resistance museum representation with that of the older Chinese MilitaryMuseum (Zhongguo Junshi Bowuguan), which stresses in its treatment of the war the struggle
between “Communist virtue and Nationalist evil” (p. 282). Mitter implies that prior to the Dengera, the War of Resistance did not play an important role in myth making and politicallegitimization, which is not the case. However, there certainly was a renewed attention to the war
and new forms of remembering it in the post-Mao era, which I take to be Mitter’s principal point.
[8] I have in mind Dai Qing’s work on the Wang Shiwei and Chu Anping incidents in Yan’an.
See Dai Qing, Wang Shiwei and “Wild Lilies”: Rectification and Purges in the Chinese
Communist Party, 1942–1944 (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994).
[9] For a discussion of the culture of “bobos” (bourgeois bohemians) and “neo-tribes” in China,
see Jing Wang, “Bourgeois Bohemians in China? Neo-Tribes and the Urban Imaginary,” China
Quarterly 183 (September 2005): 532–48.
[10] Arif Dirlik, “‘Trapped in History’ on the Way to Utopia: East Asia’s Great War Fifty Years
Later,” in Perilous Memories, in Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), ed. T. Fujitana,
Geoffrey White, and Lisa Yoneyama (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 311.
[11] Peter Gries, China’s New Nationalism: Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004), 43–52.

Denton: Heroic Resistance and Victims of Atrocity

437[12 Eric Johnston, “Political, Economic Rivalries Blamed: History Not Key Issue,” Japan Times,
April 19, 2005.
[13] There are other museums in China that deal with Japanese atrocities, e.g., the Pingdingshan
Massacre Museum (in Fushun, Liaoning), the Northeast Occupation Hall at the Manchukuo
Palace (Changchun, Jilin), and the Northeast Martyrs Memorial Hall (Harbin). The former,
established in 1972, promotes itself as the museum that represents the history of Japan’s “first”
massacre on Chinese soil. In September 1932, Japanese soldiers slaughtered 3,000 villagers at
the foot of Pingding Mountain. More recently, a private War of Resistance Museum opened
outside Chengdu. Initiated and financed by a local entrepreneur, Fan Jianchuan, the museum,
which is part of a complex of museums that includes exhibition halls devote to the Cultural
Revolution, is billed as the largest private museum in China. Interestingly, this private museum
does not construct clear historical narratives in the same explicit way that most state museums
do.
[14] A slew of scholarly books published in recent years focuses on the topic of neonationalism
in the PRC. In addition to Gries, China’s New Nationalism, see Lowell Dittmer and Samuel S.
Kim, eds., China’s Quest for National Identity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, 1993); Yingjie
Guo, Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary China: The Search for National Identity under
Reform (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004); and Jonathan Unger, ed., Chinese Nationalism(Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996).
[15] From “ZhongRi liangguo renmin yinggai shishi daidai youhao xiaqu” (The people of China
and Japan should be friends generation after generation), a speech given on September 15, 1972,
during the visit of the Japanese prime minister to China. The phrase originates from the Zhanguoce (Chronicle of the Warring States).
[16] See Paul A. Cohen, “Remembering and Forgetting: National Humiliation in TwentiethCentury China,” Twentieth-Century China 27, no. 2 (April 2002): 1–39. Karl Gerth’s study of
the relative failure of the “national products” movement in Republican China would suggest that
average urban Chinese were indeed forgetting about national humiliation and were moreconcerned with daily survival or with enjoying foreign consumer products. See Karl Gerth,
China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Asia Center, 2003).
[17] Citing a 1990s survey of a group of fourth graders, Waldron points out that only 30 percent
could identify Mao Zedong and only one could sing the entire national anthem, but all knew theHong Kong pop singer Liu Dehua (Andy Lau). See Waldron, “China’s New Remembering,”
976. I should add that the state in the PRC has aggressively developed Web sites promoting
patriotic education, many with a recurring theme of not forgetting. One such site is called
Wuwangguochi.
[18] Cohen, “Remembering and Forgetting,” 2.
[19] Haiyan Lee has suggested that “sentiment” is a key element in forging a sense of sharedhistory and national community. See Haiyan Lee, “Sympathy, Hypocrisy, and the Trauma of
Chineseness,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 16, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 76–122.
[20] James Edward Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (NewHaven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 6. For a discussion of memory sites, see also Pierre

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Nora, ed., The Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, 3 vols. (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998).
[21] For a discussion of this downplaying of class in Chinese museums, see Kirk A. Denton,“Museums, Memorial Sites and Exhibitionary Culture in the People’s Republic of China,” China
Quarterly 183 (2005): 565–86.
[22] Susan Sontag makes this argument in On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
1977). In her more recent Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
2003), she questions her original argument and asks skeptically: “What is the evidence thatphotographs have a diminishing impact, that our culture of spectatorship neutralizes the moral
force of photographs of atrocities?” p. 105).
[23] In the United States alone, there are at least four major Holocaust museums (in New York
City, Washington, Los Angeles, and Houston). For a general discussion of memorialization withregard to Holocaust museums, see Young, Texture of Memory, the opening sentence of whichreads: “The further events of World War II recede in time, the more prominent its memorials
become” (p. 1).
[24] For discussions of the new remembering of the World War II in Asia, see Arthur Waldron,“China’s New Remembering of World War II: The Case of Zhang Zizhong,” Modern AsianStudies 30, no. 4 (1996): 869–99; Sheila M. Jager, Narratives of Nation-Building in Korea: A
Genealogy of Patriotism (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2003); the special “Asia-Pacific War:History and Memory” issue of the IIAS Newsletter (September 2005); and Jui-te Chang, 2001.
“The Politics of Commemoration: A Comparative Analysis of the Fiftieth-Anniversary
Commemoration in Mainland China and Taiwan of the Victory in the Anti-Japanese War,” in
The Scars of War: The Impact of Warfare on Modern China, ed., Diana Lary and Stephen
MacKinnon (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2001), pp. 136–61. In terms ofmuseum representations, see Laura Hein and Akiko Takenaka, “Exhibiting World War II in
Japan and the United States,” in Japan Focus.
[25] For a discussion of globalization and its effects on Chinese museums, see Li Wenru, ed.,Quanqiuhua xia de Zhongguo bowuguan (Chinese museums under the condition of
globalization) (Beijing: Wenbo, 2002).
[26] Iris Chang’s Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic
Books, 1997), translated into Chinese in 1998, is but one example. The real impetus forremembering the Nanjing Massacre occurred in 1982, with the Chinese response to the textbook
controversy in Japan. See Daqing Yang, “The Malleable and the Contested: The Nanjing
Massacre in Postwar China and Japan,” in Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), ed. T.
Fujitana, Geoffrey White, and Lisa Yoneyama (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001),
50–86. For an overview of new research on the Nanjing Massacre, see David Askew, “NewResearch on the Nanjing Incident,” Japan Focus (2004). General studies of the Nanjing
Massacre include: Joshua Fogel, ed, The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Feifei Li, Robert Sabella, and David Liu,
eds., Nanjing 1937: Memory and Healing (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 2002).

Denton: Heroic Resistance and Victims of Atrocity439[27] Qi Kang, Qin Hua Ri jun Nanjing datusha yunan tongbao jinianguan (Memorial to thevictims of the massacre by Japanese invaders of China) (Shenyang: Liaoning Kexue Jishu,
1999).
[28] Wang Yiting, Baiyi e’mo (Evil in white coats) (Pingfang: Hua Ri Jun Di Qisanyi Budui
Zuizheng Chenlieguan, n.d.), 2.
[29] Iris Chang famously made this link in the subtitle to her book (The Rape of Nanking: The
Forgotten Holocaust of World War II) on the Nanjing Massacre, but Buruma suggests that thislinking goes all the way back to the 1946 Tokyo Trials. See Ian Buruma, “The Nanjing Massacre
as a Historical Symbol,” in Nanking 1937: Memory and Healing, ed. Feifei Li, Robert Sabella,
and David Liu (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2002), 1–9; the citation here is on 7. In the UnitedStates, a group of Chinese Americans has formed a museum devoted to Japanese imperialism inChina and is calling it the Chinese Holocaust Museum. See Buruma, “Joys and Perils ofVictimhood” .
[31] Lin Biao’s 1965 tract on the War of Resistance is typical of Maoist representations of thewar period. Lin tells the story of the heroic victory of a weaker nation against a much more
powerful foe. Lin explains this “miraculous” victory with three main points: (1) The war was a“genuinely people’s war” and had the support of the people, (2) Mao’s military strategy of“guerrilla warfare” was effective, and (3) the war effort was guided by Mao Zedong Thought.
See Lin Biao, Long Live the Victory of the People’s War (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press,
1965).
[32] War films were numerous in the Maoist era. Two obvious examples are Didao zhan (Tunnel
warfare; directed by Ren Xudong, 1965;) and Xiao Bing Zhang Ga (Little soldier, Zhang Ga;
directed by Cui Wei and Ouyang Hongying, 1963), the latter of which is currently being remade.
[33] “The March of the Volunteers” (Yiyongjun jinxingqu), with lyrics by the playwright Tian
Han and music by Nie Er, became the “official” national anthem only in 1982, before which it
was used unofficially in that capacity. During the Cultural Revolution, of course, because Tian
Han was denounced, “The March of the Volunteers” was replaced by “The East Is Red” (Dongfang hong). For a discussion of “The March” and other songs from the war period, see Robert
Chi, ‘“The March of the Volunteers’: From Movie Theme Song to National Anthem,” in Ching
Kwan Le and Guobin Yang, eds., Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics andPoetics of Collective Memories in Reform China (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Press,
2007), 217-44; and Chang-Tai Hung, “The Politics of Songs: Myths and Symbols in the Chinese
Communist War Music, 1937–1949,” Modern Asian Studies 30, no. 4 (October 1996): 901–29.
[34] Although my concern here is the discursive use of the war in postrevolutionary politicalrhetoric, I should point out that some Western scholars also see the war period as critical. As
David Apter and Tony Saich argue, the war period made possible Mao’s “Republic” and the“revolutionary discourse” upon which it was founded. See David E. Apter and Tony Saich,
Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1994). Of course, the war was always only a chapter in the larger narrative of liberation.
However, I take issue with Rana Mitter and Arthur Waldron, who argue that the war was not an
important part of Maoist constructions of the past. Waldron cites as evidence the absence of acentral war memorial in the Beijing cityscape, and Mitter suggests that before the 1980s the war
occupied only a minor place in historical narratives, such as that found in the Military Museum.

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Although their intention is to shed light on the new significance of memory of the war in the
post-Mao era, Mitter and Waldron give the false impression that memory of the war was a blankin the Maoist era. See Rana Mitter, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum: Nationalism, History andMemory in the Beijing War of Resistance Museum, 1987–1997,” China Quarterly 161 (2000):
278–93; and Andrew Waldron, “China’s New Remembering.”[35] Museums officials told me that funding was scarce, and they did not know when therenovation would begin, let alone be completed.
[36] More recently, in the summer of 2005, the museum put on an exhibit in commemoration of
the sixtieth anniversary of the victory of the Anti-Japanese War called “The Ruins and Crimes ofthe Harbin Police Headquarters of the Manchukuo Puppet Regime.”[37] For a discussion of this museum, see Mitter, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum.” For an
excellent discussion of the historical resonances of the site of the Lugou Bridge, see James A.
Flath, “Setting Moon and Rising Nationalism: Lugou Bridge as Monument and Memory,”
International Journal of Heritage Studies 10, no. 2 (2004): 175–92. I also used the following
museum publication: Zhongguo renmin kangri zhanzheng jinianguan (Memorial of the Chinese
People’s War of Resistance Against the Japanese) (Beijing: Zhongguo Heping, 1998).
[38] The 2005 renovation substantially transformed the museum’s exhibitions. Three special
exhibits—the Japanese Army Atrocities exhibit, People’s War exhibit, and Martyrs Hall—havebeen eliminated, though elements of each have been integrated into a single comprehensive
exhibit, now titled Great Victory (Weida shengli). Great Victory is characterized by a newemphasis on the war as a key part of the larger global anti-fascist struggle. The war is still
represented as a critical period in Chinese history, but rather than a chapter in the larger narrativeof revolution and liberation, it is now a pivotal period in China’s emergence as a global power.
As exhibition placards put it, the war marks “the great renaissance of the Chinese people,” in its
transition from “weakness” (shuaibai) to “flourishing” (zhenxing). Clearly, the ideologicalimpetus behind the exhibition’s representation of the war is connected to China’s new status in
the global economy and its pretensions to global greatness. That the emotionality of the second
stage exhibition has been muted marks perhaps a more rational approach to the war that is
consistent with China’s maturation as a member of the community of nations.
[39] See Mitter, “Behind the Scenes in the Museum.” In a September 2005 speechcommemorating the sixteith anniversary of the victory of the war, Hu Jintao made thisrecognition of Nationalist war efforts part of official party rhetoric. Moreover, the war is now
commonly framed as a dimension of the larger antifascist struggle in World War II, which I
believe is connected to the larger discursive project in the contemporary PRC of connecting
China with the world (zou xiang shijie or yu shijie tong gui).
[40] Mitter, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum,” 286.
[41] Mitter, ibid., also notes the innovate use, perhaps influenced by Western memorials, of an“unknown” soldier for the central statue in the hall. Although it may be true that “unknown”
soldiers are not generally used in Chinese war memorials, they do appear frequently in
revolutionary oil painting. For a discussion of images of martyrs in Chinese revolutionary
mythology, see Kirk A. Denton, “Visual Memory and the Construction of a Revolutionary Past:

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Paintings from the Museum of the Chinese Revolution,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture
12, no. 2 (Fall): 203–235.
[42] Buruma suggests that the idea for the memorial was Deng Xiaoping’s. See Buruma,“Nanjing Massacre as Historical Symbol,” 8. Daqing Yang asserts that the memorial was a direct
response to the textbook debates of 1982 in Japan. See his “Mirror for the Future or the History
Card? Understanding the ‘History Problem.’” In Chinese-Japanese Relations in the TwentiethFirst Century: Complementarity and Conflict, ed. Marie Soderberg (London: Routledge, 2002),
15–16.
[43] Qi Kang, Qin Hua Ri jun Nanjing datusha, 7.
[44] Ibid., 7–8.
[45] Ibid., 8. The memorial won the Liang Sicheng prize for design in 2000. This was the firstyear of the prize, and it was presented to several architects for work done as far back as 1960.
[46] Qi Kang shows awareness of the difference of doing a memorial for Yuhuatai and the
Nanjing Massacre memorial. See ibid.
[47] The sculpture is apparently based on a shot in the American missionary John Magee’s
documentary film footage of the atrocities.
[48] Buruma, “Nanjing Massacre as Historical Symbol,” 9.
[49] Ido not mean to suggest here that this and other memorial sites are not sometimes used bypeople for the expression of local and personal concerns that are sometimes at odds with official
state policy, only that these uses are ultimately circumscribed by the state.
[50] Although not exclusively responsible by any means, Ishii Shiro is considered the father ofJapanese medical and germ warfare experiments in Manchuria. In 1932, shortly after arriving in
Manchuria, Major Ishii established a factory for immune experiments in the warehouse district ofHarbin, but for human experimentation he needed a more remote spot that could not be seen by
the foreign community. He soon came upon the town of Beiyinhe, about 100 kilometers south ofHarbin, where he established the Zhong Ma Camp (Zhongma cheng). This was used as a base forexperimentation until 1937, when the camp was disbanded and destroyed after a prisoner
insurrection. In 1936, Ishii was appointed head of the Water Purification Bureau, in reality afront for his experiments. In 1936, Pingfang was selected as the new location for Unit 731. It wascompleted in 1939, having some seventy-two structures. Until the end of the war, experiments ingerm warfare were conducted on thousands of Chinese. For general information of Unit 731, see
Hal Gold, ed. Unit 731 Testimony (Tokyo: Yen Books, 1996).
[51] Although Benjamin’s notion of “aura” concerns works of art, I think it can apply to amemorial site as well. See Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York:
Schocken Books, 1968), 222–23. Holding an exhibition about horror at the site where the horror
took place gives it an “authenticity” it would lose in a different setting. And although museums
would generally be considered a form through which aura is lost, the “site museum” is an
exception. “Site museums” are one classification of museums in China, and there are evenvolumes devoted to their study. See, e.g., Yizhi bowuguan xue gailun (General discussions of thestudy of site museums) (Xian: Shanxi Renmin, 1999).

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia442[52] Young, Texture of Memory, 119.
[53] The term “mood of memory” comes from Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The
Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 168.
[54] Upon entering the museum, the spectator is given an identification card upon which is thename and life story of a real Holocaust victim. The exhibits, especially those on the second levelof the building, give a sensation of the Holocaust. Philip Gourevitch has written that “violence
and the grotesque are central to the American aesthetic, and the Holocaust Museum provides
both amply. It is impossible to take in the exhibition without becoming somewhat inured to thesheer graphic horror on display; indeed, it would be unbearable to be defenseless in such a place.
A flat response, however, is less unsettling than is the potential for excitement, for titillation, andeven seduction by the overwhelmingly powerful imagery. The museum courts the viewer’s
fascination, encouraging familiarity with the incomprehensible and the unacceptable; one isrepeatedly forced into the role of a voyeur of the prurient.” See Philip Gourevitch, “Behold Now
Behemoth: The Holocaust Memorial Museum—One More American Theme Park," Harper’s
Magazine (July 1993).
[55] See the website (http://www.918museum.org.cn/news/ReadNews.asp?NewsID=793).
[56] Bells in Chinese culture represent atonement of sins and enlightenment. Both significances
are at play here.
[57] E.g., two large photographs, one of mountains, one of a river, begin the Comprehensive
Exhibit of the War of Resistance Museum discussed above.
[58] This position on the international nature of the War of Resistance was made “official” in
September 2005 in statements by Hu Jintao commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of thevictory of the war.
[59] Wang’s work has been primarily in stage design, but his company has also been involved in
wax displays for Beijing’s China Wax Figures Museum and Dalian’s Gold Wax Figures
Museum. The former is a temporary exhibit in the National Museum of China.

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Nanjing’s Massacre Memorial: Renovating War Memory in Nanjing and Tokyo
Jeff Kingston
On a scorching July 7, 2008, officers of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces visited Nanjing for an
artillery demonstration, a visit barely mentioned in the Chinese media even though it was thefirst time Japanese soldiers had returned to the scene of the crime since Japan surrendered in
1945. Unlike in recent years, there were no special commemoration rites on this anniversary of
the 1937 Marco Polo Bridge incident. This reflected the Chinese leadership’s decision to turndown the heat on history in the wake of President Hu Jintao’s spring 2008 visit to Japan and thesubsequent inking of an agreement on gas field development in disputed maritime territory near
the contested Senkaku/Diaoyutai Islands. [1]Indeed, since Prime Minister Koizumi left office in 2005, the Chinese government has madeimprovement of bilateral ties a priority. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao visited Japan in April 2007
and made a conciliatory speech lavishing praise on Japan’s post-WWII peaceful development,
expressing gratitude for Japan’s generous assistance to China and acknowledging Japan’s
apologies for wartime aggression. Televising this speech in China indicates that the state istrying to calm widespread anti-Japanese animosity among the people. Leaders in both nations
reckon that too much is at stake to hold the bilateral state relationship hostage to the past, but thepolitical context in which war memory is contested remains fluid. Whether the Chinese
leadership can insulate contemporary relations from popular anger over the shared past remains
uncertain and depends on factors beyond its control.
In the recent past, survivors gathered at Nanjing’s Massacre Memorial (NMM) to bear witness tothe suffering of victims, tapping into and elaborating on the narrative of national humiliation thatis central to national identity in modern China, a nation that keenly recalls its bainian guochi,“one hundred years of humiliation” at the hands of foreign powers. [2] Now, as China celebrates
its debut as a major power with the staging of the Olympics and as it works to repair relations
with Japan, the state seeks to shift the national humiliation narrative to the backburner. Many
people, however, remain vigilant supporters of this narrative, constraining the leadership’s
diplomatic and reconciliation initiatives. Outbursts in 2004 at the Asia Cup soccer tournament
hosted by China and on the streets of Shanghai in 2005 suggest that anti-Japanese sentiments area potent factor keeping the state’s reconciliation initiatives on a short leash and subject to public
scrutiny and criticism. Patriotic education in China focusing on Japan’s wartime misdeeds andthe CCP’s crucial role in defeating the Japanese ensures that younger Chinese are aroused overthis history. The combination of this patriotic education and the actions and words of Japan’s
conservative elite convince many Chinese that Japan remains unrepentant and evasive about its
war responsibility, thus limiting the ability of the state to maneuver and compromise overhistory.
In light of these contemporary concerns, noncommemoration of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident
in 2008 is striking given that the exchange of shots in 1937 served as a pretext for Tokyo tolaunch the large-scale invasion that ignited the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-45. Later that year,
on December 13, 1937, Japanese troops entered Nanjing and unleashed a reign of terror,
executing POWs and civilians, raping women by the thousands while burning and looting thecity. The rampage extended over the next six weeks, leaving the once grand capital of China ashattered and smoldering husk. [3]The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

Facade of the new NMM

Bronzes in front of NMM depicting victims caught up in the Japanese maelstrom.

444

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Mother and dead child in bronze nearly as tall as the NMM.

Competing Narratives
Nationalist narratives of war memory in Japan and Çhina have recently been refurbished.
Renovation of the Yûshûkan Museum, on the grounds of Yasukuni Shrine where Japan’s war
dead are venerated, was completed at the end of 2006 and renovation of the NMM wascompleted at the end of 2007. The NMM draws attention to the horrors inflicted in ways that arebound to make Japanese visitors uncomfortable. The rapt crowds gathering around some of themore gruesome displays attest to the allure of gore, and may well tap into and inflame antiJapanese sentiments. But whether this translates into a nationalism the state can mobilize insupport of its agenda is hardly certain. While emphasizing the barbarous actions of the Japanese
invaders, the central message the NMM seeks to convey—a plaque near the beginning of theexhibit spells this out—is that China must modernize and grow powerful and rich because it isbackward countries that endure such indignities and horrors. To get rich is not only glorious, it isalso the basis for security.

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Never forget national humiliation. Group photos are a common sight at the NMM.

Based on my conversations with Chinese visitors, it would be mistaken to assume that everyone
embraces this message uncritically in its entirety. The presence of the sign signifies the concernthat visitors might ‘miss’ this message. Whether visitors take their cue from the state is hardly
certain and overlooks ways in which the narrative of war memory is contested in China within
the leadership and between the state and the people. The more than10 million visitors to the
NMM since it opened in 1985 attest to its popularity, but it would be a mistake to assume that all
visitors come to learn about and reflect on history; there are groups who pass through the facility
as casual tourists seeing the famous sights of Nanjing, stopping to pause for group photo sessions
outdoors—photos inside are prohibited—sometimes longer than they spend absorbing thedisplays. It is also possible that many diaspora Chinese, attracted to the “forgotten holocaust”
theme in Iris Chang’s book, The Rape of Nanking (1997), share the outrage she felt when she
visited the NMM in ways that may overlap, but also differ from those of Chinese residents in
China where the politics of identity resonate differently. A Taiwanese professor I met by chance
confided that even though he bears no grudges, the NMM is a welcome recognition of theatrocities committed against ‘his’ people by a regime that had long overlooked this dark chapter
in favor of trumpeting its own heroic victories against the Japanese.
Central to my argument is that monolithic views of war memory in China and Japan miss theways that these narratives are contested not only among nations, but also among the citizens ofeach nation. As Phil Deans points out for China, “ …an important distinction must be madebetween the state-sanctioned discourse on patriotism and the popular mass discourse on
nationalism. ‘Patriotism’ (aiguozhuyi) here is an official position, approved of and supported by
the CCP, whereas nationalism (minzuzhuyi) may go beyond the state’s approved and preferredboundaries of discourse.” [4]Tokyo and Nanjing are only three hours distant by plane, but in terms of public history and war
memory they are poles apart. Yet there are also forces working toward reconciliation over theKingston: Nanjing’s Massacre Memorial

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shared history of China and Japan. The 2006 establishment of a bilateral Sino-Japanese history
panel to develop a mutually acceptable narrative, sixteen years after a similar Korea-Japan panel
was launched, is a state-led gambit to shape public discourse over history. However, this panel
seems unlikely to resolve fundamental disputes over what happened and why, or to muzzle
discordant voices in either country.
Although the political leadership in both nations has decided that contemporary relations should
not be held hostage to history, and are in fence-mending overdrive, several Chinese told me that
there is little popular support in their country for such efforts. The emergence of history activists
in China from the mid-1980s means that the state is no longer able to turn down the volume on
history as effectively as it could in the past. Indeed, popular outbursts about historicalcontroversies undermine and circumscribe state initiatives. As one Nanjing-based scholar
explains, reconciliation must be based on recognition of what happened and there are too many
troubling signs that such recognition is absent among too many Japanese. Yasukuni Shrine inTokyo is ground zero for this selective amnesia and a compelling symbol of Japan’s incomplete
repentance and inadequate contrition.
The narrative of Nanjing in 1937-38 on display at the renovated Yûshûkan Museum on the
grounds of Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo is a lesson in the politics of war memory. [5] There one
can view a video of Japanese troops raising their arms while bellowing a collective “banzai”
from atop Nanjing’s city wall that abruptly cuts to a scene of a soldier ladling out soup for theelderly and young while the narrator explains that the Japanese troops entered the city andrestored peace and harmony. Throughout the exhibit, Japan’s invasion of China is portrayed as a
campaign to quell Chinese terrorism, a post-9/11 narrative that demonstrates just how much thepresent impinges on the past. At the Yûshûkan, there is no mention of invasion, aggression,
massacres or atrocities committed by Japanese troops in China, or, for that matter, of Japan’s
defeat in the war. Indeed, Japanese suffering is the only suffering on display.

Entrance of the NMM

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A family fleeing in hope of reaching safety.

Visitors confront the iconic 300,000-the number of massacre victims
claimed by the Chinese government throughout the exhibits.

Back to the Inferno
Nanjing’s new Massacre Memorial unveiled at the end of 2007 is a sleek but somber tomb-likestructure fronted by a moat and several bronze statues depicting the suffering endured by thosecaught up in the Japanese maelstrom. As one passes the turnstile—admission became free after
local protesters complained the museum was profiting from others’ trauma—eyes are drawn

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across an expanse of gravel to a long black marble wall flanked on the left by a towering cement
cross decorated with the dates of the massacre and a large bell on the right. On the wall theiconic number 300,000 is emblazoned and incised in several languages. This is a recurrent image
throughout the exhibit, one that insists on the number of victims. Inside there is a chamber wherevisitors can hear the amplified sound of a drop of water every twelve-seconds, said to be thefrequency of death during Nanjing’s six-week ordeal. My Chinese companions thought that a bit
hokey, but to me it provided a refreshingly subtle contrast to the screams of torture one hears
visiting the old Seodaemun jail in Seoul once run by Korea’s colonial masters.
Visitors descend into the museum, a mood-transforming experience as the past is exhumed andthe inferno relived. Down the walkway visitors first confront a replica of the city walls with thesounds of bombardment, air raid sirens wailing, anti-aircraft guns blazing and a video of Japan’s
attacking bombers. From this sensory assault, one proceeds to a tranquil darkened room with areflecting pond shimmering with electric “candles” over which projected images of victims’
faces float towards the visitor, beneath a ceiling glowing with the talismanic 300,000, as a bellsolemnly tolls.

Projected faces of victims float across a pond shimmering with candles
beneath a glowing reminder of the death tally.

A sign explains: “A human holocaust: An Exhibit of the Nanking Massacre Perpetrated by theJapanese Invaders.” Here, Iris Chang’s legacy resonates loudly as the NMM appropriates her
central and controversial metaphor; the subtitle of her book is: “The Forgotten Holocaust”. The
NMM ensures it is no longer forgotten. Interestingly, the holocaust theme was absent from theoriginal NMM. The displays of photographs, newspaper articles, diary excerpts and artifacts
trace the three hundred kilometer trail of sorrow and pillage from Shanghai to Nanjing, with avideo of the aerial bombing projected overhead. What happened to the citizens of Nanjing, andto captured and surrendered Chinese soldiers, are richly featured, leaving visitors in no doubt
about the scale of the destruction as the Imperial Armed Forces raped, looted and burned their

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way from the Shanghai littoral all the way to Nanjing. What happened there then is understoodhere as a culmination and concentration of the malevolence witnessed all along the invasionroute. Perhaps responding to the Yûshûkan’s post-9/11 narrative, and with far greater
justification, the NMM portrays Japanese troops as terrorists.

The massacre remembered at the NMM

Bronze attesting to a common crime committed by the Japanese troops in Nanjing and elsewhere.

Kingston: Nanjing’s Massacre Memorial

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Chinese father and son look at bronze depicting familiar sight in December 1937 of relative carrying deadand maimed relatives away.

One unexpected display shows the Kuomintang (KMT) forces that defended and then abruptly
abandoned the capital, leaving its remaining denizens to their fate. This display was not in theoriginal NMM, only appearing from the mid-1990s. Nanjing was the Nationalist capital and themassacre was, therefore, a story in which the CCP has no role. War memory during the Mao era
featured examples of heroic resistance by the CCP, so Nanjing was pushed to the margins of war
memory discourse. Nanjing based scholars recall that a study on the Nanjing Massacre by local
researchers was suppressed in the early 1970s. It is only with the emergence of a parallel
victim’s narrative in the post-Mao era that Nanjing gained greater prominence in the narrative ofwar. [6]It is striking that the newly included KMT display avoids recriminations or schadenfreude about
the KMT’s sudden abandonment of the city to the mercy of Japan’s Imperial Armed Forces. The
Taiwanese professor I met on a river cruise said he was pleasantly surprised by the impartial
inclusion, pointing out that Chinese textbooks tended to dwell almost as much on the misdeedsof the KMT as those of the Japanese. [7] Indeed, visitors learn that the leader of the KMT forces
defending Nanjing was General Tang Shengzhi, but the NMM glides over his escape to safety
while leaving his troops in the lurch. It is an ignominious story, one featured in abridged form at
the Yûshûkan, of top echelon officers abandoning their troops with no notice, leaving many
trapped by the encircling Japanese troops. Some tried to flee, many surrendered only to be
executed, while others shed their uniforms and tried to blend into the civilian population.
Subsequently, Tang enjoyed a distinguished career in the PRC, rising to Governor of Hunan
Province. Even in the Chinese translation of Iris Chang’s book, The Rape of Nanking (1997), his
reputation is protected as authorities prevailed on the translator to cut a footnote in which she
drew attention to his opportunism.

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A mass grave site excavated on the site of the NMM.

Among the unremitting gamut of displays, there is also an excavation of a mass burial site withseveral skeletons piled one upon another, helter-skelter, grisly evidence that was unearthed frombeneath the museum. [8] In this gallery of horrors there is a Shooting, Sabering, Burning andDrowning corner that graphically portrays in photographs, confessions, testimony and soldiers’
diaries the means of massacre. We also learn that many of the tens of thousands of raped women
were murdered as a standard procedure to eliminate witnesses. On display are some of thevictims humiliated as they were forced to pose for pornographic photos by their rapists.
Problematically, the NMM displays include some photographs and representations that havebeen discredited, providing ammunition for Japanese revisionists who will no doubt seek todiscredit the entire enterprise over a few mistaken attributions and misleading displays in thesame manner they tried to bamboozle much of the Japanese public about Iris Chang’s book anddivert attention away from the mountains of evidence that corroborate her main claims and thoseof the NMM.
This brings us to the numbers debate. By insisting on the iconic 300,000, the NMM risks playing
into the hands of Japan’s revisionists who would like nothing better than a sterile numbers debate
diverting attention away from how much is known about the sacking of Nanjing. Moreover,emphasizing the abacus of history diverts scrutiny away from more crucial issues such as why
the troops were allowed to run amok for so long and why the cover-up, minimizing and denial
persist to this day.

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The massacre verdict at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Tokyo Trial).

The estimates of victims vary widely and depend a great deal on the time-frame and spatial
limits. [9] The higher estimates include victims well beyond the city walls and extend before andbeyond the six weeks from Japan’s initial incursion in Nanjing on December 13, 1937. The
International Military Tribunal for the Far East sanctioned an estimate of 200,000 victims. In
Japan, estimates of Nanjing victims range from zero by those associated with the illusion school
who contend that the massacre is a fabrication, to 10,000-50,000 by those who are associatedwith what is known as the centrist school, a group of scholars who understand that there is no
credibility in denial, but some possibility to cloud the debate by minimizing and mitigating theatrocities, to those who accept higher figures. Most Japanese specialists on the Nanjing Massacre
accept figures in the range of 80,000 to 110,000 victims, depending on time and place.
The key point is that the atrocities perpetrated in Nanjing and the city environs were the savage
standard operating procedure all along the invasion routes from the Shanghai littoral. The
invading Japanese troops were forced to live off the land, in practice meaning the routine
plundering of villages, rape and murder of women, and a devastating scorched earth policy thatenveloped the entire region stretching three hundred km northwest of Shanghai to Nanjing.

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This bronze of a beheaded man lies in the courtyard of the Massacre memorial.

Politicizing History
Yang Xiamen, a professor of International Relations at the Jiangsu College of Public
Administration in Nanjing, and the translator of Iris Chang’s, The Rape of Nanking (1997), says,“Ironically, thanks to the revisionists (in Japan), the government spent lots of money and time tocollect all of this evidence and build this museum to display it.” In his view, one shared by fiveother Chinese scholars I met, Japanese efforts to minimize, downplay or obfuscate the extent ofwartime atrocities and Japan’s responsibility since the early 1980s provoked a Chinese official
response and public anger about Japan’s lack of contrition. Yang also suggests that the
globalization of human rights discourse in the 1990s sharpened bilateral debate over contentious
history issues.
The controversy over history was triggered in 1982 by Japanese media reports concerning therole of the Japanese Ministry of Education in instructing high school textbook publishers to alter
the word “invasion” to “advance” in describing Japan’s escalation of hostilities in China from
July 1937. [10] Yang acknowledges that specialists in China now know that this incident was
misreported, but at the time the textbook issue was part of what Chinese perceived as a larger
trend of whitewashing history in Japan. This example shows the power of the media ingenerating ill will and distorting public perceptions and the difficulties in undoing the damage.
Even if specialists in China do understand now that the textbook row was in some respects‘invented’ by the Japanese press, this does not stop them from citing it as the key incident in thedeterioration in relations between China and Japan in the early 1980s. [11] This is not to defend
Japanese secondary school textbooks as models of accurate and uncompromising war memory
any more than their Chinese or US counterparts, but rather to emphasize how public memory isprone to lingering distortions that resist correction or reconsideration. [12] Moreover, as Ienaga
Saburo’s lawsuits stretching from 1965-1997 reveal, even if this particular instance ofgovernment interference was inaccurate, there were systematic attempts by the JapaneseKingston: Nanjing’s Massacre Memorial

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government and powerful interest groups to downplay Japanese atrocities against a larger
backdrop of a conservative-dominated discourse seeking to promote a vindicating and valorizing
narrative of war memory that remains offensive to the people and government of China (andmany Japanese). [13 ]Did the Chinese government whip up a unifying anti-Japanese nationalism in the early 1980s to
shore up Deng Xiaoping’s legitimacy and deflect attention away from his adoption ofcontroversial market-oriented reforms? [14] At a luncheon roundtable on July 7, 2008, Chinese
specialists on the massacre all rejected this view, arguing that the government was not so savvy
or prescient to instrumentalize history in this manner. In their view, Japanese whitewashing of
the nation’s shared history forced the Chinese government to abandon its emphasis on building afuture oriented relationship as evident in Beijing’s agreement, following normalization ofrelations in 1972, to renounce compensation. They blame attempts by Japanese revisionists tobeautify war memory and shirk responsibility for igniting the ongoing bilateral battle overhistory that is impeding reconciliation.
Although unmentioned in our discussion, the textbook imbroglio did not occur in a vacuum. The
ongoing dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyutai islands flared up in 1978 when members of theJapan Youth Association erected a lighthouse on the disputed territory and conservatives eager toassert a heroic and noble narrative were prominently weighing in on public discourse concerning
war memory in Japan. This territorial dispute heated up following the reversion of Okinawa toJapanese sovereignty in 1972 involving a denial of China’s claims, an assertion that assumed
greater importance due to the provisions of the 1968 Law of the Sea. The secret enshrinement ofClass “A” war criminals in 1978 at Yasukuni Shrine, first reported in Japan in April 1979 and in
China in August 1980, also poisoned the atmosphere and undermined goodwill gestures.
Despite the consensus among the Nanjing-based scholars I met, others argue that Deng realizedthat the success of his modernization agenda in transforming China from a backward,
impoverished nation depended on large-scale infrastructure projects, technology transfer andforeign investment. Given Deng’s pragmatic inclinations, invoking history to help China getwhat it needed from Japan made sense, although this does not mean raising concerns about theshared past is merely instrumental as Japan’s revisionists contend. Clearly, China does havelegitimate grievances over the killing of at least 10 million Chinese in addition to widespreaddevastation that Japan has failed to assuage by remaining obdurate over war responsibility. [15]Using the past to serve the present meant abandoning what Reilly terms “China’s benevolent
amnesia towards Japan” and invoking wartime aggression to help pressure Japan to pay the bills
by vastly expanding its bilateral economic assistance programs.
Reilly argues that the victimization narrative that emerged in the 1980s bore a strong
resemblance to earlier propaganda campaigns. The Chinese were mobilized by the promotion of
patriotic education from the early 1980s, reinforced by government-sponsored films and history
museums such as that in Nanjing. However, unlike previous propaganda campaigns, thevictimization narrative resonated powerfully among the Chinese people for the very good reason
that they had endured tremendous suffering, not only under the Japanese, and suddenly foundpolitical space and resources to voice their pain. Reilly describes the state-sanctioned
groundswell of popular activism in China in the 1980s on history issues that tapped into deeply
ingrained memories of wartime suffering and widespread distrust of Japan. [16 ] Thus, just as the
Chinese were finding a collective identity in their shared wartime experiences, “the Japanese”

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(the Japanese image in China tends towards the monolithic with scant recognition of the deep
differences that characterize war memory there) appeared to be backtracking on history,
minimizing what happened, while failing to accept responsibility and express atonement.
In this increasingly tense atmosphere, even small gestures, omissions or slight changes in
expression carried enormous implications. Any signs of downplaying the suffering inflicted andJapan’s responsibility therefore only served to reinforce popular images of ‘perfidious’ Japanese.
The textbook and territorial controversies thus came at a critical juncture in China’s evolving war
memory while Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro’s official visit to Yasukuni on August 15,
1985, the first official visit on this politically symbolic date since the 1978 enshrinement of Class“A “ war criminals, rubbed salt in the wounds. [17]The Japanese government may be eager to declare an end to the postwar era and assert an
identity free from the baggage of the shared past— indeed this was Prime Minister Koizumi’s
aspiration in trying to make Yasukuni visits ‘normal’— but its neighbors show no signs of letting
Japan off the hook of history any time soon.
This is precisely because history issues are far too useful at home, because they box Japan in
diplomatically, and also because the Japanese state has waffled about its war responsibility. The
enormously popular NMM keeps the past alive and ensures that it is examined and that Japan’s
responsibility for crimes against humanity is remembered.
Currently, as the Chinese state tries to insulate contemporary relations from popular anger overhistory, it finds that it is not so easy to get the genie back in the bottle. Patriotic education andstate sanctioned history activism since the 1980s politicized history at the grassroots, ensuringthat the younger generations with no first hand experience of the invasion are keenly aware andaroused about their nation’s shared history with Japan. With the spread of the Internet they havea powerful tool to contest history issues and now have a social basis in China’s growing middleclass. [18]It is important to emphasize that insisting on Japan assuming responsibility for committing
atrocities is not merely playing the history card. China, after all, suffered enormously fromJapanese depredations and reactions at the elite and mass level are more than an instrumental
tactic in support of a wider foreign policy agenda. Japanese revisionists harp on how China’s
leadership instrumentalizes war atrocities such as the Nanjing massacre, but this glosses over thevery real suffering inflicted and serves to reinforce Japan’s negative image as a country unable todemonstrate remorse and contrition over horrific acts. The Japanese have handed the Chinese thehammer of history by failing to fully acknowledge and assume responsibility for what happened
so it is not surprising that the Chinese use it.

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A baby suckling at the breast of a dead mother.

Lessons of History
The NMM is much more than a gallery of horrors and does try to suggest lessons to be learned,
but it is not certain that chief among those lessons is patriotic duty. Although Buruma argues thatthe memorial at the time he visited in 1990 before the recent renovations seemed designed to
evoke Chinese patriotism, this seems an inadequate interpretation now, two renovations later,
because it fails to distinguish between state patriotism and popular nationalism. [19] The
renovated and expanded NMM is a splashy, spacious and well-maintained multi-media affair
bearing little resemblance to the ‘sad, ill-maintained” site he recalls. [20] Similarly, theYûshûkan Museum, which used to look like a neglected antique warehouse when I first visited in
the late 1980s, now is a state of the art museum. None of the Chinese who accompanied me on atour or others I questioned agreed with Buruma’s assessment. Visitors feel sadness and anger,
and seem more likely to emerge from the museum convinced that the Japanese are truly barbaric
rather than embrace a patriotism beholden to state directives.
In contrast with the Yasukuni Shrine, which has an ambiguous relationship with the state as a
private religious institution that serves as a national memorial for the war dead, the NMM isunambiguously linked with the state and reflects the government’s agenda. It was built in theearly 1980s at a time when relations with Japan were frayed over history issues. Then (and now)
Chinese believe that Japan is in denial and incompletely contrite about the consequences of its
aggression in China. The NMM fits with the state-sanctioned shift in war memory in the 1980s
towards emphasizing Chinese victimization, a counter to the noble sacrifice narrative espoused at
Yasukuni Shrine.
The most recent NMM renovation took place in 2006-2007, in the wake of Koizumi’scontroversial tenure (2001-2005) when bi-lateral relations sank to a postwar nadir due to his six
visits to Yasukuni Shrine. The renovation serves as a riposte to the Yûshûkan’s Nanking
narrative of denial, official adoption of the hinomaru flag and kimigayo anthem, the 2006

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revision of the Fundamental Law on Education emphasizing patriotic education, public discourse
about amending Article 9 of the Constitution and the retreat of Japanese textbooks in 2005 fromthe more forthright representations of the shared past that began to emerge in the 1990s. For
example, in 1997 all junior high school textbooks gave high estimates for the number of Nanjing
victims while those published in 2005 mostly avoid citing the number of victims and the“massacre” is once again referred to as an ‘incident’. [21]This sign at the NMM draws attention to the role of revisionists, here referred to as "certain forces", instirring controversy by distorting history.

The renovated NMM does attempt to challenge monolithic images of Japan by drawing attention
to the role of revisionists in provoking contemporary disputes over history, but given thesurrounding exhibits and prevailing stereotypes that is expecting a lot from one panel. Perhaps
small gestures are as far as the state risks going in modestly toning down the anti-Japanese tenorof the NMM. Chinese government officials, party leaders and intellectuals need to look overtheir shoulders lest they spark public ire by being seen to be too soft on Japan; the Internet andthe socio-political consequences of modernization endow history activists with the means,autonomy and space to pressure the state. Displays about Japanese politicians visiting Yasukuni
Shrine and Japanese textbook content update negative images of Japan and ensure that the NMM
is not just about the past. Requests in early 2008 by Japanese revisionists for changes in some of
the NMM exhibits were studiously ignored. In contrast, the Yûshûkan revised a display blaming

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FDR for provoking war with Japan to revive the US economy in response to criticisms by
George Will, a conservative columnist in the US. Subsequently, and quietly, revisions were also
made sometime in 2007 to a panel describing Nanjing, removing an offensive reference to theJapanese troops restoring order in December, 1937 which used to conclude: “Inside the city,
residents were once again able to live their lives in peace.” [22] It is intriguing that there wassignificant media attention to the changes in the FDR panel while the revisions to the Nanjing
panel were not publicized and remain overlooked.
As Reilly points out, the state has lost control of popular discourse over history and theemergence of history activists threatens the state monopoly over shaping and expressing war
memory. These activists do not determine policy, but they do constrain public debate about war
memory and Japan. As Deans argues, “While the Chinese leadership appears to want to pursue a
pragmatic policy towards Japan, the mobilization of the historical legacy in the context of
popular Chinese nationalism constantly limits the ability of the Chinese leadership to develop
and maintain a rational relationship.” [23] Thus, in assessing the NMM it is crucial to go beyond
the monolithic message the state wants to convey and explore how individuals understand thememory and meaning on display.
Cindy Zhang, a twenty-two year old Chinese undergraduate studying in Nanjing, confided that
the NMM had not aroused her patriotism at all. In the following passages excerpted from anemail, she shares her reactions following her first visit while accompanying me on July 7, 2008:“What disappointed me most about the memorial was that I had expected the exhibition
to be condensed and focused, but, as it turned out, things were just the opposite. Althoughmuch disappointed, I had to give the memorial the right to be huger than necessary –were it not so huge, it would have been “politically incorrect” in some sense.”
Here, Cindy challenges the Nanjing taboo, suggesting that the NMM is influenced by politicalcorrectness and is a bit more than it needs to be. Although she does not elaborate on whether thisis in terms of state preferences or popular sentiments, it is clear that she is aware of the wider
context in which history is being depicted, contested and possibly manipulated. She adds,“After the visit, I often wondered why I was not the least touched or moved by theexhibition. One reason is that I was already familiar with that history so that nothing on
display made me feel aghast or strike me as particularly overwhelming. I have watched
the movie Schindler’s List for over a dozen times; every time I watched it, I cried my soulout. But I never shed a tear for books or movies related to the Nanjing Massacre. I havebeen intentionally keeping myself at an emotional distance from the Massacre not only toprevent myself from being crushed by the cruel history but also to keep my mind cooland unaffected so that I can analyze the history in a rational way rather than let myperception be overwhelmed with and misled by too much emotions.
Here, Cindy refers to the contemporary context of war memory and her desire to remain aloof
from the fray, resisting the NMM’s grisly but powerful appeal to emotions.
In closing she writes:“As for the relationship between the Chinese and the Japanese, I would like to share someof my thoughts. To begin with, neither side should take the Massacre too personally.
When people take things personally, their emotions gain over their reason, giving rise to

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unjustified hatred, which often leads to calamity. In about thirty years, all people who
once lived to have any kind of personal experience about the Massacre will be dead. The
future relationship between the Chinese and the Japanese in regard to the Massacre solely
depends on how people who have no personal experience of this matter view andinterpret it. I suggest that both the Chinese and the Japanese accept the Massacre as anestablished historical fact, try to analyze it in an objective manner and draw up schemes
to prevent similar calamities from happening. I believe that the national characteristics of
the Chinese and those of the Japanese played crucial roles in the Massacre. In the light of
this, a thorough and in-depth analysis seems particularly important.
I would also suggest that China, including its government and its people, stop assuming the roleof a once scarred victim and stop [emphasizing] its old tragedy too frequently. If one indulges in
the past, no matter good or bad it is, one loses hold of the present; the past is to be learned andremembered, not to be a burden that hinders the march into the future. As for the Japanese, theirnational characteristics contain some particularly dangerous elements that are likely to result incalamities like the Massacre. Hopefully, they can face those elements with a positive attitude.”
Cindy’s detached perspective on history may not be representative, but suggests that monolithic
images of the Chinese state manipulating history and stoking patriotism are misleading,overlooking the reality of individuals assessing history on their own terms. Her point about theneed for China to turn away from the wailing wall of the past is reassuringly subversive even if
again it may not be representative.
Towards the end of a numbing array of multi-media displays, three hours in a fast-paced tour,
there is a room with a battery of eighteen video monitors that show films and documentaries
about the massacre, although not the recent Japanese film that denies it happened. Alongside,
there is a twenty-by-twenty meter archival wall with folders containing what information is
known about the documented deaths in Nanjing 1937-38. It is a wall that insists that there ismuch to answer for and overwhelming evidence that Japanese forces perpetrated extensive
crimes against humanity, much of it drawing on the testimony and eyewitness reports ofJapanese soldiers and journalists.
It is an imposing edifice that Japanese revisionists have tried to undermine by pointing to small
flaws, mistaken attributions and exaggerations. They try to discredit the victims’ “forest” ofevidence by grasping at branches on the “trees”. [24] Sadly, the discourse over Nanking hasbogged down in endless debates over exactly how many civilians, combatants and POWs were
killed by Japanese soldiers. [25]What is clear is that an inordinate number of civilians and unarmed POWs were executed in cold
blood, not in the heat of battle as apologists assert. Moreover, Japanese officers and officials at
the time systematically sought to cover up the very crimes that perpetrators, surviving victims,
officials and observers have all acknowledged. The 100-man beheading contest attributed to two
Japanese officers heading for Nanjing, and featured at the NMM, was a media invention aimed atstirring enthusiasm for the war and selling more newspapers to a hero-hungry public. [26]However, the inclusion of this concocted tale serves a purpose because it highlights what themedia thought the Japanese public craved, implicating them in the horrors that ensued.

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A copy of a Japanese newspaper article about the 100-man killing contest is on display

The final image as one emerges from the NMM is a towering obelisk inscribed with PEACE (inEnglish and Chinese) that flickers in a reflecting pool. It is a jarring juxtaposition to the violence
and mayhem featured inside, an unconvincing accessory that fails to persuade. None of theChinese who accompanied me on this tour felt the message either masked or matched themuseum’s intentions and impact. One young Chinese man bluntly confided that the museum left
him angry, reinforcing his already hostile views towards the Japanese. He said, “Yes we like
Japanese technology, gadgets and machines, but not the people. At that time they always referred
to us Chinese as pigs, but here we see who was really an animal and inhumane.”The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

The Peace tower doesn't seem to fit with the NMM's intent or impact

462

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The lessons of history at the NMM.

Monolithic Myths, Fragile Relations
In China and Japan, public discourse reproduces and reinforces monolithic images of the otherthat are broadly negative. The central problem for Japanese revisionists is the impossibility ofreconciling their narrative of noble sacrifice with the gruesome evidence of cavalier slaughterand rape as presented at the NMM. Their strategy depends on instigating and instrumentalizing
Chinese grievances over the shared past. Revisionist emphasis on denying, minimizing,
mitigating and otherwise shifting responsibility for the atrocities committed by Japan’s Imperial

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Armed Forces 1931-45 may not gain much popular support in Japan, but does cast a longshadow over relations with China and ignites anti-Japanese sentiments. Provoking the Chinese
over history naturally produces anti-Japanese outbursts in China that amplify anti-Chinese
nationalism among Japanese in ways that play into the hands of Japan’s revisionists. In short,inflaming the Chinese pays handsome dividends for revisionists, and so they act accordingly.
Thus, while leaders in both countries seek to build mutually beneficial, forward-looking
relations, their efforts remain fragile and vulnerable. In Japan, a country with numerous cases ofhome-grown food-safety problems that affect millions of consumers, tainted frozen gyoza(dumplings) imported from China that affected ten Japanese consumers in the winter of 2008
sparked an anti-Chinese, media-induced hysteria of epic proportions. Positive attitudes toward
China imploded in the wake of the gyoza hysteria and the media was still making it an issueduring the G8 Summit in July, 2008. The LDP was roundly thrashed in the national press for not
immediately disclosing all it knew about ‘gyoza-gate’ in the run-up to the Olympics, essentiallyfound guilty of placating the Chinese at the expense of Japanese consumers. Hu Jintao and
Fukuda Yasuo might have grander visions for bilateral relations, but can not ignore or escapesuch populist brushfires.
This latent grassroots hostility can easily erupt precisely because the media in both countries
sensationalizes the present and the past. In 2003, 300 Japanese businessmen were caught up in araid involving 400 prostitutes at a hotel in Guangdong for holding an alleged ‘orgy’ on
September 18, the anniversary of the Mukden Incident of 1931. While not condoning theexecutives’ conduct, enforcement of laws against prostitution in Guangdong appear to be quite
lax in general while the notion that these inebriated salarymen were trying to make a politicalstatement is ludicrous. The Chinese media, however, whipped up popular anger among an
incensed population who were led to believe that the timing of the ‘orgy’ was a calculated insult.
Where does the NMM fit into this public discourse on history? Of course there was considerable
media attention at the unveiling of the renovated NMM in December 2007 commemorating the70th anniversary of the massacre, but films, television dramas, textbooks and the Internet reachwider audiences. The NMM is more like the repository of “evidence” that buttresses otherrepresentations of the Nanjing Massacre. It is ground-zero of Japanese evil, a site that reinforces
the perception that Japanese conduct in Nanjing was emblematic of its fifteen-year war in China,
a locus of concentrated Japanese malevolence that exists to honor local suffering and counterJapanese denial. [27]The NMM draws heavily on testimony and diaries of Japanese soldiers, some of whom wereshocked by what they experienced. It also includes an exhibit on Azuma Shiro, a veteran of the
Nanjing massacre who wrote forthrightly about what he observed and did back in December
1937-January 1938. The court case he lost over whether some points he made in his accountwere plausible is seen in China to be typical of Japanese attempts to cavil rather than assume anencompassing responsibility with dignity and remorse. Thus, ambivalence in Japan about thegruesome past has burdened Japanese with the appearance of shirking, explaining why Chinese
imagine that denial is more widespread than it really is.
Conclusions
Visitors to the NMM, and the Chinese in general, never learn that a majority of Japanese people
do not embrace the valorizing and exonerating view of the war cherished and endlessly promoted

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by Japan’s revisionist conservative elite. [28] As Seraphim elucidates, the memory battles inJapan are hotly contested, exposing fundamental political cleavages that are central to debatesover the past and ensuring that Japan’s ambivalence towards its shared history with Asia draws
considerable criticism based on invidious comparisons with Germany.[29]She correctly asserts that the notion of collective amnesia in Japan regarding war responsibility
is, media representations to the contrary, grossly inaccurate, overlooking the vigorous
contestations and wide divergence of opinions concerning war memory that abound in postWWII Japan. Alas, those who espouse narratives of denial and minimization are prominent in thepolitical mainstream and in some influential media in Japan and can not be dismissed as“unsavory crackpots” to borrow Buruma’s felicitous phrase.
Chinese, however, uncritically accept Iris Chang’s monochromatic view of war memory inJapan, endlessly reinforced in the Chinese mass media, suggesting that a majority of the Japanese
are in denial about the wretched past and eager to embrace a vindicating narrative. In China there
is little recognition of the vibrant scholarship on Nanjing by Japanese researchers who havetoiled for decades to present an accurate view of what happened and why. [30] There is also little
awareness of the interest groups in Japan that have contested narratives of the wartime past up
until the present. There is far greater awareness about conservative politicians’ public denials of
the massacre and their extensive involvement in study groups aimed at rebutting the facts of themassacre. The outpouring of Japanese books, films and manga raising doubts about the massacreleads many Chinese to question the sincerity of the joint declaration of November 1998 in which
the Japanese government reiterated that, “Japan is keenly aware of its responsibility for themassive suffering and loss inflicted on the people of China resulting from its invasion of China at
one time in the past, and expresses its deep regret.“
The revisionists may be a megaphone minority in Japan, but they cast a disproportionately longshadow in China precisely because they are entrenched at the center of state power. The politicalinfluence of the revisionists is undeniable even if their views of history are not widely embracedby the Japanese public. Public opinion polls show that a majority of Japanese people rejectreactionaries’ insistence on denying and minimizing the atrocities perpetrated by the Imperial
Armed Forces, and most think the government should do more to acknowledge war
responsibility and atone for the excesses. The textbook written by the Dr. Feelgoods of Japanese
history that has garnered so much media attention because it downplays the “bad bits” has been
adopted by less than 1% of school boards around the country. Former Prime Minister Abe
Shinzo’s egregious attempts to reinterpret the history of comfort women and the battle for
Okinawa are part of the reason he is remembered as one of Japan’s most hapless leaders. PM
Koizumi’s visits to Yasukuni were criticized by a who’s who of the conservative elite, including
five former prime ministers and the conservative Yomiuri Shimbun. It is understandable why the
Chinese government refrained from summit meetings between leaders and limited other highlevel government exchanges during Koizumi’s tenure, but it is also important to recognize that
official actions and popular sentiments are often discordant in both countries, especiallyregarding issues of war memory and responsibility.
Just as Japanese have much to discover about the tensions in China between the state andgrassroots history activists over war memory, the Chinese people can learn much fromunderstanding the realities of Japanese public discourse over war memory. Chinese may besurprised to learn that they can find common ground with many Japanese over war

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responsibility. The media tends to sensationalize this discourse and generates misperceptions that
fan hostility. As a teacher I have noticed how much better informed Japanese students are now
than they used to be twenty years ago about this shared past. Thus only one of the more than one
hundred research papers on Nanjing submitted in my classes in recent years expressed anything
but condemnation and contrition. The only sign of contemporary Japanese contrition at theMassacre Memorial, however, are mute, decorative garlands of origami cranes, looking rather
forlorn, piled as they are on a shelf visitors hurry past on their way to the exit. Though it may bescant consolation to Chinese that few Japanese seek a national identity rooted in an airbrushed
history, knowing this might be a useful step towards reconciliation.

Over 200 footprints of survivors of the massacre are cast in bronze at the NMM.

The NMM serves as a barometer of the evolving discourse over history. Since opening in 1985
there have been at least three significant renovations, the last in 2006-2007 vastly expanding andmodernizing the space. Certainly the curator has an eye to drawing visitors and the new multimedia exhibits and tranquil spaces for contemplation have considerable visual and sensory
appeal. The NMM grew into a political space created by the shift towards a victims’ narrative inthe 1980s and the timing of its construction ties it with the 1982 textbook row. According tosome observers, it is also linked with Deng’s desire to raise the ante over history as a means of
opening the spigots of quasi-reparations from Japan in the form of economic and technologicalKingston: Nanjing’s Massacre Memorial

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assistance. In the mid-1990s the NMM brought the KMT into the story line, perhaps reflecting
shifting attitudes towards Taiwan and growing confidence. The holocaust theme now on display
owes much to Iris Chang’s legacy; German holocaust memorials were not part of the original
design or inspiration in the early 1980s. The recent renovation also appears to be a riposte to therenovation of the Yûshûkan Museum the previous year in which the revisionist narrative
vindicating and valorizing Japan’s ‘noble quest’ prevails. Indeed, the NMM appropriates thepost-9/11 theme of the Yûshûkan that justifies Japan’s actions in China in terms of quelling
terrorist threats, by referring to the Japanese invaders as terrorists. In addition, the NMM
renovation took place at a time when bilateral relations were in a deep freeze caused by PM
Koizumi’s six provocative visits to Yasukuni Shrine between 2001 and 2005. Since Koizumi’s
departure, leaders in both countries have emphasized thawing relations and nurturing the habits
and inclinations of cooperation, consultation and expanded exchanges, but there is no denying ahostile environment. Japan’s official adoption of the hinomaru flag and kimigayo anthem,legislation compelling patriotic education and efforts to revise the Peace Constitution are
provocations that link the current state with the wartime regime. The impact on Chineseperceptions, both official and popular, should not be underestimated and help explain why the
NMM remains relevant and why the renovations are linked to an anticipated bid for World
Heritage status. Most of the survivors will be gone by the 80th anniversary in 2017, but the NMM
will remain as a poignant reminder of the nation’s ordeal and the perils of nationalism, then andnow.
Jeff Kingston is Director of Asian Studies, Temple University (Japan Campus) and a Japan
Focus associate. He wrote and photographed this article for Japan Focus. He is the author of“Burma’s Despair, Critical Asian Studies, 40:1 (March 2008), 3-43, several recent articles on
East Timor and Japan’s Quiet Transformation: Social Change and Civil Society in the 21stCentury (Routledge, 2004). Posted on Japan Focus on August 22, 2008.
Notes[1] It is striking that on July 7, 2004, Denton writes, “... special ceremonies were held, including
personal oral narrations by living witnesses.” This of course occurred during Prime Minister
Koizumi Junichiro’s term in office (2001-2005) when he heated up the bilateral history war andfroze diplomatic exchanges by repeatedly visiting Yasukuni Shrine, six times in total. Four years
and two Japanese prime ministers later, the frenzied Chinese response to Koizumi’s provocations
has abated, and key dates in the two nations’ shared history are no longer natural opportunities topoke the wounds of history and engage in recrimination. See Kirk Denton, “Heroic Resistanceand Victims of Atrocity: Negotiating the Memory of Japanese Imperialism in Chinese
Museums”, Japan Focus, Oct. 17, 2007.
[2] On national humiliation as identity and nationalist contestations see Peter Gries, China’s New
Nationalism: Pride, Politics and Diplomacy. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2004.
[3] The documentary by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, Nanking, (Thinkfilm, 2007) evokes thehorrors and devastation of the Japanese invasion and ensuing onslaught. This documentary
focuses on the role of western residents of Nanjing in establishing an International Safety Zone
for noncombatants with readings from their letters and diaries spliced with archival footage andinterviews with survivors.

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[4] Phil Deans, “Diminishing Returns”: Prime Minister Koizumi’s Visits to the Yasukuni Shrinein the Context of East Asian Nationalisms”, East Asia (2007) 24, pp. 269-294 (287)[5] For a discussion of the politics of war memory in Japan see, Jeff Kingston, “Awkward
Talisman: War memory, Reconciliation and Yasukuni”, East Asia, 24 (2007), pp. 295-318. For
the politics of war memory in China, see Mark Eykholt, “Aggression, Victimization, andChinese Historiography of the Nanjing Massacre”, in Joshua Fogel, ed., The Nanjing Massacrein History and Historiography, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000, pp. 11-69.
[6] Denton, op.cit., elucidates the evolution of war memory in China from heroic resistance tovictims of atrocity. In Nanjing, for obvious reasons, it could only be about victimization. In
interviews with six Chinese scholars specializing in the Nanjing massacres, there was no support
for this analysis of evolving war memory. They see no clear dichotomy between narratives ofheroic resistance and victimization in public history as described by Denton, arguing instead thatboth perspectives are inextricably intertwined, along the lines that Gries argues.
[7] Zhu Jianrong confirms this perception, arguing that a content analysis of Chinese textbooks
indicates that there has not been any increase of anti-Japanese content in the 1990s contrary toprevailing misperceptions. Zhu Jianrong, “Japan’s Role in the Rise of Chinese Nationalism:
History and Prospects”, in Tsuyoshi Hasegawa and Kazuhiko Togo, ed., East Asia’s Haunted
Present: Historical Memories and the Resurgence of Nationalism. NY: Praeger Security
International, 2008, pp. 180-189. Zhu draws on an unpublished study of Chinese textbooks cited
on p. 183.
[8] The old museum also displayed excavated skeletons, but they had been laid out to make themmore easily recognizable. The new excavations left the skeletons undisturbed to better convey
the chaos of the mass burials and make the evidence more compelling precisely because it does
not appear “constructed”. This “hot” evidence also is aimed at creating a sense of immediacy toconvince skeptics that the museum site is indeed a mass graveyard where Japanese hoped to bury
their crimes. Interview, Yang Xiamen, July 7, 2008.
[9] For an assessment of the numbers debate see Fujiwara Akira, “The Nanking Atrocity: An
Interpretive Overview,” Japan Focus, Oct. 23, 2007.
For an intriguing discussion of atrocities and how they are remembered (or not) see Mark Selden,“Japanese and American War Atrocities, Historical Memory and Reconcilation: WWII to
Today,” Japan Focus, Apr. 15, 2008.
[10] On the idea of the museum arising from the 1982 textbook controversy see Daqing Yang,“Mirror for the Future or the History Card? Understanding the ‘History Problem’ “ in Marie
Soderberg (ed.), Chinese-Japanese Relations in the Twenty-First Century: Complementarity andConflict. (London: Routledge, 2002). The misreporting of the revision by Nippon Television andsubsequently the Asahi Shimbun is extensively analyzed by Caroline Rose, Interpreting History
in Sino-Japanese Relations, Routledge Curzon: London, 1998. For an overview of the textbook
controversy see Claudia Schneider, “The Japanese History Textbook Controversy in East Asian
Perspective”, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (May 2008),
617, pp.107-122. Also Daiki Shibuchi, Japan’s History Textbook Controversy: Social
Movements and Governments in East Asia, 1982-2006. Discussion Paper #4 (March 2008),
Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies.

Kingston: Nanjing’s Massacre Memorial469

For details and analysis of Ienaga Saburo’s pioneering lawsuits challenging state censorship of
textbooks, see Yoshiko Nozaki and Hiromitsu Inokuchi, “Japanese Education, Nationalism, andIenaga Saburo’s Textbook Lawsuits”, in Laura Hein and Mark Selden, ed., Censoring History:
Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany and the United States. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe,
2000, pp. 96-126.
[11] The textbook controversy was invoked at a luncheon roundtable with six Chinese scholars
July 7, 2008.
[12] There was a trend in the mid-1990s towards a more forthright reckoning in Japanese
secondary school textbooks, but this provoked a backlash among the “Dr. Feelgoods” ofJapanese history and the establishment of the Society for History Textbook Reform (Atarashi
Rekishi Kyokasho o Tsukurukai, hereafter referred to as Tsukurukai). This group favors an
exculpatory and valorous historical narrative. As part of Tsukurukai’s efforts to shape public
history and war memory, it published a textbook in 2001 (revised in 2005) for junior highschools. Extensive media coverage both in Japan and internationally conveys an impression that
this textbook reflects the public mood and that Japanese are seeking an identity grounded in amore assertive nationalism based on an unapologetic view of Japan’s shared history with Asia.
Moreover, as Sven Saaler concludes, the Tsukurukai text has significantly shaped public
discourse over this past to the extent that other publishers have revised their textbooks byretreating from the somewhat more critical mid-1990s narratives and have moved closer towards
the Tsukurukai narrative. The media hype translated into unusually high sales of the textbook,including large volume sales to conservative organizations, reinforcing and amplifying its
influence over public discourse. Bestowing best-seller status on this text then feeds the media
frenzy and stimulates more curiosity. Sven Saaler, Politics Memory and Public Opinion: The
History Textbook Controversy and Japanese Society. Deutsches Institut fur Japanstudien:
Munich, 2005. Also see David McNeill and Mark Selden, “Asia battles over war history: The
legacy of the Pacific War looms over Tokyo’s plans for the future,” Japan Focus, April 12,
2005.
and Yoshiko Nozaki “The Comfort Women Controversy: History and Testimony,” Japan Focus,
July 29, 2005.
[13] See Franziska Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics, 1945-2005. Cambridge, MA,
Harvard University Press, 2006. [14] For analysis of this perspective and the rise of history
activism see James Reilly, “China’s History Activism and Sino-Japanese Relations”, China: AnInternational Journal 4.2(2006), pp. 189-216. On Deng’s desire to embarrass the Japanese andprotect his back from domestic opponents see Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt : Memories of
War in Germany and Japan, NY: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1994, p. 126. This interpretation isrejected by Zhu Jianrong, op.cit., who holds that Deng sought good relations with advanced
industrialized nations including Japan and avoided making an issue of the past because he knew
China needed Japan’s assistance to modernize. He argues that Jiang Zemin played a key role inwhipping up anti-Japanese nationalism in the 1990s.
[15] Reilly, Seraphim and Deans, op.cit., all argue that China has played the history card to
extract quasi-reparations.

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[16] According to Reilly, the genie of history activism unleashed by the state morphed into anautonomous grassroots movement the state could no longer control and more recently into what
he terms oppositional activism. op.cit.
[17] The Treaty of Peace and Friendship with China was ratified in Japan on October 18, 1978, a
day after the 14 Class-A war criminals were secretly enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine.
Conservatives opposed to normalization of relations with China were also mollified by thepassage of the Gengo Law in 1978 that gave legal status to the practice of linking official dates
to the year of an Emperor’s reign, i.e. 2008 is Heisei 20. Deans, op.cit., 282.
[18] Zhu, argues that successful modernization has created a large middle class that demands,“…respect from other nations. Nationalism thus acquired a social basis.” Zhu, op.cit., p.184.
[19]Ian Buruma, “The Nanjing Massacre as a Historical Symbol,” in Nanking 1937: Memoryand Healing, ed. Feifei Li, Robert Sabella and David Liu (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), pp.
1-9.
[20] Ian Buruma (1994), op.cit., p. 185[21] Schneider, op.cit., p. 116.
[22] I am indebted to Sven Saaler regarding this point. Personal communication, 8/15/2008).
[23] Deans, op.cit. p. 288.
[24] See Daqing Yang, “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre: Reflections on HistoricalInquiry”, in Joshua Fogel, ed., The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, Berkeley,
University of California Press, 2000, pp. 133-179.
[25] See Takeshi Yoshida. “The Nanjing Massacre” Changing Contours of History and Memory
in Japan, China and the US”, Japan Focus, December 19, 2006. Also see Yoshida’s , The
Making of the “Rape of Nanking”: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States.
Oxford University Press: New York, 2006.
[26] For analysis of the alleged contest see Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, “The Nanking 100-Man
Killing Contest Debate: War Guilt amid Fabricated Illusions, 1971-75”, Journal of JapaneseStudies 26-2, Summer 2000, 307-340.
[27] For related discussion see Selden, op.cit.
[28] For a more accurate and nuanced assessment of Japanese attitudes and public opinion
regarding history see Philip Seaton, Japan’s Contested War Memories: The ‘Memory Rifts’ inHistorical Consciousness of WWII. Routledge: London, 2007.
[29] Seraphim, op.cit.
[30]For example see Bob Wakabayashi, ed., The Nanking Atrocity 1937-38: Complicating the
Picture. Bergahn Books, NY, 2007.

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Sites of Japanese Memory: Museums, Memorials, Commemoration
Kamikaze and Mass Suicide“Challenging Kamikaze Stereotypes: ‘Wings of Defeat’ on the Silver Screen”
James L. Huffman
N.D.
http://www.japanfocus.org/-James_L_-Huffman/2910“The Songs of Nippon, the Yamato Museum and the Inculcation of Japanese
Nationalism”
Yuki TANAKAMay 8, 2008
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Yuki-TANAKA/2746“Compulsory Mass Suicide, the Battle of Okinawa, and Japan's Textbook Controversy”
Aniya Masaaki, The Okinawa Times, and Asahi Shinbun
January 6, 2008
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Aniya-Masaaki/2629“The Martyrdom: Children and the Battle of Okinawa”
Mark Ealey
November 6, 2005
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Mark-Ealey/1689
Claims against the Japanese government for World War II war crimes extend tocrimes committed against the state’s own population. The pilots of “kamikaze” suicide
missions and civilians caught in regions of fierce fighting such as Okinawa in 1945 are acase in point.
James Huffman’s essay is an introduction to the award-winning documentary film
Wings of Defeat, which addresses the legacy of the kamikaze attacks in the last years of the
war and features interviews of both survivors of the kamikaze units and American sailors
who survived kamikaze attacks. Yuki Tanaka discusses war songs related to the giant
battleship Yamato, which was sunk during a “kamikaze” mission in 1945. He notes a recent
surge of war-glorifying rhetoric, seen not only in a revival of military songs among Japan’s
youth, but also the increasing popularity of rap songs with ultranationalist and warglorifying messages. He adds to the discussion an analysis of the relatively new museum topreserve the memory of the Yamato in Kure, the Kure City Maritime History and Science
Museum. The museum was designed as a technology museum, but it is generally known
rather as the “Yamato Museum,” because one of its main attractions is a model, one-tenth
the actual size of the Yamato. Even the official tourism pamphlet of Kure City speaks of “theYamato Museum” and not the official title. The museum proudly explains the sophisticatedtechnology used in the battleship and emphasizes that it paved the way to Japan’s postwar
resurgence, because much of the same technology was later applied to Japan’s postwar
automobile and electronics industries. However, Tanaka also notes that some Japanesecitizens have protested this historical interpretation.

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The next selection (three essays/editorials summarized in one reading) addresses
the forced suicide of many Okinawan civilians by Japanese soldiers during the Battle of
Okinawa in spring 1945. Okinawans were a stigmatized minority in prewar Japan and theImperial troops from mainland Japan did not trust the locals, whose dialect they could
hardly understand. In April and May 1945, when US troops landed on the island, Imperial
troops feared that local islanders would engage in “espionage” and “betray” them. In somesituations, they responded by ordering Okinawans—not only military personnel, but also
civilians, including women and children—to commit suicide. In 2007 the central
government attempted to censor references to mass suicide in history textbooks outraged
Okinawans. This anger against the government’s actions culminated in demonstrations
with more than 100,000 participants—among the largest that postwar Japan ever had seen.
The readings here, two newspaper editorials and a journal article published during
the height of the controversy, illuminate the Ministry of Education’s system of textbook
approval (or censorship) and show how the central government pressures publishers tochange the contents of history textbooks. The editorials show that although the changes
that the central government demanded from publishers were subtle, the issue was highly
sensitive for the people of Okinawa, who still feel discriminated against in contemporary
Japan. At the same time, as the last reading, a partial translation of “Typhoon of Steel: An
Okinawan Schoolboy’s Quest for Martyrdom,” acknowledges, civilians were sometimes
willing to die during the Battle of Okinawa for reasons that, in retrospect, seem to many
Japanese pitiful rather than noble. Taken together then, these articles shed light on theissues of state violence towards its own people and the idea of sacrificing civilians for the“good of the nation.” They also further underscore the politics of memory in Japan and theongoing attempts to purge the national “master narrative” of all its dark moments inhistory.

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Challenging Kamikaze Stereotypes: “Wings of Defeat” on the Silver Screen
James L. Huffman
Is there a more enduring World War image than the kamikaze pilots: those super-patriots who,
according to the stereotype, willingly, even joyfully, pledged loyalty to their beloved emperor as
they flew their doomed planes into Allied ships? The image still produces sympathetic tears andangry sneers: prime minister-to-be Koizumi Jun’ichirō weeping at the Chiran Peace Museum for
Kamikaze Pilots in 2001; an American college history textbook referring to Japan’s late-war air
force as “a band of fanatical suicide pilots called kamikazes.” [1] Indeed, Risa Morimoto began
working on her provocative new movie, “Wings of Defeat,” out of a desire to understand how
her own uncle, “a funny, kind, and gentle man,” could have been such a “crazy lunatic,” one ofthose “jumping at the chance to die for their emperor.” [2]Stereotypes such as this are problematic not just because of their inaccuracy–though that isserious enough–but also because they block our ability to think clearly about war, or about anyof what Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney calls those “human tragedies on a colossal scale.” [3] The greatstrength of “Wings of Defeat,” conversely, is the way it counters the emperor-loving, deathinviting kamikaze stereotype, humanizing both the Japanese pilots and the American GIs they
attacked. Watching the 89-minute documentary, which ran for three months in Tokyo and isscheduled for a PBS screening in the United States next spring, one is struck by the humanity ofyouthful pilot trainees as they confronted imminent death. In the film, they cry, as all people do,for lost loves and sing about spring flowers; they loved their country but hated the hypocrisy of
their leaders and the cruelty of their officers; they loathed the idea of dying; and they responded
to “duty” as most other soldiers do, with a fatalistic sense that they had no other option.
Co-produced by Morimoto and Linda Hoaglund, “Wings” uses interviews with several surviving
kamikaze pilots and two GIs, along with comments by Ohnuki-Tierney, John Dower, andMorimoto Tadao of Ryūkoku University, to tell the kamikaze story from the participants’perspective. The major historical details are included; we learn about the creation of the Special
Attack Forces (Tokkōtai) late in 1944; the drafting of 4,000 pilots as Japan’s military situation
deteriorated, and the downing of scores of American ships. But the focus is on the motives,
feelings, and memories of the men who were selected to make the attacks, as well as those whose
ships were bombed. Backed by visual footage of training camps, graduation ceremonies,
bombing raids, and life back home, the film tells a powerful story of the ordinariness of humantragedy. While it posits no claim that these interviewees represented all kamikaze pilots, it
nonetheless makes it clear that significant numbers, probably most, of the suicide pilots departed
from the stereotypes, in a narrative style designed to provoke lively discussion, both in theclassroom and around the table or bar.
On one level, the pilots belonged to Japan’s elite, since a high percentage were former college
students and a third were army and navy officers, but at the human level, the film shows them tohave been quite ordinary, reacting not as zealots but as the thoughtful, insecure, complex people
most soldiers are. Early on, for example, the Japanese survivors discuss their typically humaninability to talk about their kamikaze experiences once the war was over. One reason for thehesitance lay in the criticism they felt from many of their fellow citizens (a rejection that bears
comparison with the experience of American soldiers returning from Vietnam twenty years
later): they had lived while their compatriots had died; they had failed to secure victory; they
reminded neighbors of the great shame that the war itself had become. Another was rooted in theThe Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

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complicated, hard-to-articulate emotions triggered by the kamikaze experience itself: fear,
failure, self-doubt. While history provides evidence of more than a few pilots who saw their
mission as heroic, none of the men in “Wings” did so; theirs was the ambiguity of confused,even frightened young warriors. Survivor Nakajima Kazuo says that to this day his neighbors do
not know that he was a kamikaze pilot. “It’s nothing to boast about,” he says, adding that his
fellow pilots “mostly . . . died in vain.”Kamikaze gunner Nakajima Kazuo, as a kamikaze gunner and at the time of the filming

The stereotype of patriotic heroism is challenged too by the film’s depiction of the difficulty
military leaders experienced in securing enough recruits to fill the Tokkōtai. When air force

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pilots refused to volunteer, extensive public relations campaigns ensued. Parades were staged
and slogans propagated to encourage young men to join the Pilot Cadet Academy; local citizens
were called on to boost the morale of kamikaze-in-training by inviting them to their homes forrest and games, and sewing cloth dolls for the pilots to carry on their flights; recruits were not
only told repeatedly how badly their country needed them, they were promised that they would
become gods if they died. And pilots were prompted endlessly to sing a kamikaze anthem:
You and I are cherry blossoms in season. . . .
Every flower knows it must die.
We will die gloriously, then, for our homeland.
Even with all of this pressure and inducement, however, securing recruits never became easy. As“Wings” points out, not a single air academy officer ever volunteered for the Tokkōtai. The
result was that the air force had to turn, finally, to the drafting of poorly trained teenagers andstudents, a point made repeatedly by the interviewees.
To a person, the recruits in this film also shared a pervasive–and ordinary–fear of death. Indeed,no theme reverberates more consistently in “Wings” than that of fear. “You can see the shadowof death on my face,” says Ena Takehiko, looking at a photo of himself as a pilot; “you see, it’s
my funeral portrait.” Another recalls his guilt-ridden sense of relief on hearing about the atomic
bombing of Nagasaki, because he knew the war likely would end before he had to fly a mission.
And Nakajima recalls seeing graffiti on his barracks wall by someone recently ordered on akamikaze mission; it said that when his number was called, he thought, “Until now it wassomeone else’s problem. Now I have to go, goddammit.” “I wanted to live; I didn’t want to die,”he says at another point, giving the lie to the American newsreel, also reproduced in the film,
which assured Allied citizens that “there can be no more honorable death” for the kamikaze
pilots “than self-immolation and crashing a plane on the deck of one of our warships.”

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Navigator pilot Ena Takehiko, who survived when his plane crashed on a remote island.

Perhaps the most surprising of Morimoto’s and Hoaglund’s findings is the pilots’ antipathy, notonly toward cruel training officers but also toward the emperor. It probably should not surpriseus that the pilots held the men who trained them in contempt. These were men, after all, whobeat them, cursed them, and treated them, in Nakajima’s words, “like wastepaper.” Expressionsof anger toward the emperor, however, are unexpected. It may be that these men’s memories
have been distorted by the passage of six decades since the war, making it easier to separate
patriotism (to which all lay claim) from love of the emperor (which they deny having felt). But
their attitudes toward the Shōwa Emperor were remarkably consistent, very much in tune withthe findings of recent researchers who have studied documents left by kamikaze pilots. OhnukiTierney, for example, has found that pilots typically became “less patriotic” while in training,and Yuki Tanaka of the Hiroshima Peace Institute notes that very few pilots’ wills, diaries, orletters expressed “loyalty to the emperor.” [4]“I love Japan, but that Emperor, . . . that Emperor!” comments one of the interviewees, before
launching into a tirade about his sovereign’s failure to bring the war to an end and save "tens of
thousands of lives" once it was clear that Japan was doomed. So much for dying for a beloved
emperor; so much for faithfulness to the imperial father who had been exalted in the texts thesemen had read as youths. While the interviewees’ views may not represent those of all TokkÅ•tai(perhaps not fully of themselves sixty years ago), the fact that not one expresses any love for thatemperor is significant.

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The shadow of a plane over a Japanese ship suggests the threatening,
grim conditions in which Japan fought the last months of the war.
“Wings” is superbly suited to both the classroom and public showings. The visuals are graphic

and often gripping; the interviewees are provocative, engaging, and surprising; and theirconversations raise the kinds of fundamental, troubling questions that, handled well, ought tomake discussions easier to start than to conclude. Moreover, the film is supplemented with aforty-eight page teaching guide, prepared by Gary Mukai of Stanford University’s Program on
International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), which provides a host of practical andprovocative supplementary materials: letters from the producers and the scholars involved in thefilm, sample discussion questions, tests, and creative learning activities, along with maps and aglossary.
One reason “Wings of Defeat” merits extensive classroom use is that it is chock full of complex
questions that many students, reared in the cultures of Madison Avenue and anime, will grasp
only if encouraged to dig more deeply. The humanity of the pilots is obvious and likely will
require limited comment. Other issues deserve careful attention.
Consider, for example, the issue of comparing the suicide pilots to the suicide bombers who
populate today’s headlines. Both have undertaken self-destroying missions, reputedly out ofbelief in some higher cause. But are they really similar in anything but name? If so, what are thepoints of comparison? Today’s terrorists, at least in the popular mythology that surrounds them,choose their course freely, out of religious conviction and hatred of the enemy–who happens,
once more, to be “us”–while the kamikaze pilots were drafted, then ordered into missions theyfound it impossible to refuse. “Wings” tells us, however, that our myths about the Japanese pilots
were inaccurate. We thought them fanatics, but few were. We “knew” that almost all of themwent happily to their deaths, driven by love of their emperor, but we were wrong. What thenshould we think when we read today’s accounts of jihad-driven suicide bombers?
Any discussion certainly must take account of the clear differences between the current andformer fighters: the fact that today’s suicide bombers do the bidding of non-governmental groups
and organizations, in contrast to the state-directed military commands that impelled Tokkōtai
members; and the willingness of today’s terrorists to attack civilian targets, while the kamikaze

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bombed only military ships. But there also are clear similarities. Both resorted to extreme
measures mainly because they lacked the technology and resources to fight their enemies on
equal terms; both sought primarily to inflict psychological rather than material damage, and bothwere impelled by rhetoric with religious overtones, whether the attackers personally believedthat rhetoric or not. Both groups also were demonized as fanatics and devils by their more
powerful enemies. [5] Discussion of such issues will do more than help students understand the
kamikaze better; it should take some of the mystery and exoticism out of suicide bombers boththen and now.
Another issue, even more troubling and pertinent, is why the pilots followed the suicide orders
even when they despised the officers who issued them or questioned the emperor in whose namethey served. Wartime diaries and letters from the home front make it clear that by late 1944,
most Japanese—kamikaze pilots included—knew that, official propaganda to the contrary, theircountry’s situation was desperate, and that many shared the fatalism of letter-writing Hatano
Isoko’s husband who “says it would be a complete absurdity to die in such a war as this.” [6] So
why did many kamikaze pilots follow orders, even to the point of death? The GIs interviewed
here offer valuable insight when they comment that, had they received similar directives, “We
have people who would have done that. We were that patriotic.” Their point seems to be that,given orders, soldiers and pilots typically follow. But is that reason enough? And if so, why dosoldiers almost always follow orders, even when their intellect, or even their fear of death, tells
them not to? This film provides few explicit answers; indeed, it deals little with thecontradictions between the kamikaze pilots’ hatred of officers or fear of death and theirreluctance to disobey orders. But its content raises the question most powerfully, as will many asensitive teacher.

A fighter pilot stands in front of his plane, ready to take off

Tanaka has argued in Japan Focus that the Tokkōtai forces fought out of a combination of loyalty
to their country and family (though not their nation-state), solidarity with fellow pilots, and a fearof being irresponsible or cowardly. And Ohnuki-Tierney, one of the film’s commentators, argues
elsewhere, in a study of kamikaze pilot diaries, that one answer lay in the state’s ability to“aetheticize” the military, to make student-pilots take the fragile cherry blossom as the soldier’s
symbol and thus idealize service to their country even when they have lost faith in the emperor
and his generals. The young pilots, she says, were thus left unequipped emotionally to resist evenfatal and irrational orders. That was why they reproduced the military’s “ideology in action while
defying it in their thoughts.” [7] A similar point has been made by “Wings” producer Hoaglund,Huffman: Challenging Kamikaze Stereotypes

479

who felt “fuzzy” sympathy and wept, as a young student in Japan’s schools, whenever the
kamikaze anthem was sung. Only in doing research for this film, she says, did she realize “thatmy fuzzy notions were actually a web of fabrications designed to protect the Japanese militarists
who condemned the Kamikaze to a horrible self-inflicted death.” [8]This contradiction between sentimental acquiescence to national myths and realistic appraisal of
objective situations carried the seed of tragic consequences, for the nation as much as forindividual pilots. And it continues to do so today, in a time when the red-white-and-blue flag
resonates as loudly for many Americans of military age as the cherry blossom did for highly
educated young Japanese pilots—a time when, “nationalism is the dominant ideology of ourera.” [9] The differences between Japan in 1945 and the United States in 2008 may be striking insome respects; certainly opposition to war is more open and more widespread today than it was
in Japan then. But the tendency to accept national myths uncritically continues, largely unabated,as does the willingness of leaders to send young men and women into crusades guaranteed to end
in large numbers of deaths, both military and civilian. And that very fact suggests how essential
such a discussion is.
A final—no less weighty—issue is raised by another survivor, Ena Takehiko, at the end of“Wings.” “Unless we abolish war,” he says, “I believe this planet is doomed.” The simplicity of
his assertion is striking, almost shocking. It raises the question of how and why soldiers whofight their nations’ battles as youths (whether or not they support the war’s issues or agree with
its commanders) often become peace advocates when they near death: why Prime Minister Tōjō
Hideki allegedly came to understand that greed had led Japan to war only when he sat in Sugamo
Prison, awaiting execution as a war criminal, or why the American sailors in “Wings” spentdecades hating the kamikaze pilots, then decided after visiting Japan to let go of their hatred andwork for reconciliation and peace. [10] This question may be the most difficult of all. It also may
be the most important.
Wings of Defeat (2007), produced by Risa Morimoto and Lisa Hoaglund, can be rented orpurchased from New Day Films, PO Box 1084, Harriman, NY 10926 or from New Day Films.
For more about the film and to view the trailer, click here (http://www.wingsofdefeat.com/).
James L. Huffman, Professor of History Emeritus at Wittenberg University, has written widelyon the press of Meiji Japan, as well as on Japanese nationalism; he is currently writing a
textbook on Japanese international history and doing research on the daily lives of Japan’s poorin the late nineteenth/early twentieth century.
Notes[1] John A. Garraty, The American Nation, II (Harper and Row, 1979), 700.
[2] Morimoto letter, A Teachers Guide for “Wings of Defeat,” Stanford Program on Internationaland Cross-Cultural Education, 2008, 7.
[3] Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers(University of Chicago Press, 2006), 37.
[4] Ibid., 6; Yuki Tanaka, Japan’s Kamikaze Pilots and Contemporary Suicide Bombers: War
and Terror,” Japan Focus, November 25, 2005.

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

480[5] Tanaka’s “Japan’s Kamikaze Pilots and Contemporary Suicide Bombers” presents athoughtful discussion of similaries and differences. For Allied characterizations of the kamikaze
pilots, see John W. Dower, War Without Mercy (Pantheon Books, 1987), 52-53.
[6] Undated October 1944 letter, Isoko and Ichiro Hatano, Mother and Son: The Wartime
Correspondence of Isoko and Ichiro Hatano (Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 62.
[7] Tanaka, op. cit.; Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms(University of Chicago Press, 2002), 300.
[8] E-mail correspondence from Hoaglund, September 11, 2008.
[9] Mark Selden, “Japan, the United States and Yasukuni Nationalism: War, Historical Memory
and the Future of the Asia Pacific,” Japan Focus, September 10, 2008.
[10] The Tōjō account comes from Murakami Hyoe, Japan: The Years of Trial 1919-52 (Tokyo:
Japan Culture Institute, 1982), 213-214. The material on the GIs is found in “Wings of Defeat:Another Journey,” a 39-minutes companion film on their visit to meet the kamikaze pilots.

Tanaka: The Songs of Nippon, the Yamato Museum and the Inculcation of Japanese Nationalism 481

The Songs of Nippon, the Yamato Museum and the Inculcation of Japanese Nationalism
Yuki Tanaka
Si vis pacem para pacem
Over many years textbooks and conservative educational policies such as “moral education”
have been central to the discussion of the propagation of Japanese nationalism. These areimportant facets of the persistent efforts to raise national sentiment. In recent years, however,
new avenues for inculcating nationalism have emerged. This essay examines two such examples
to gauge the role of popular culture in creating “love of nation” among children and youth.
The Songs of Nippon and Yasukuni Shrine
In April 2006, Yasukuni Shrine ran a music competition, inviting people to submit newly
composed songs on the theme “Songs that make you love Japan,” as part of an event tocommemorate “the end of the Great East Asian War.” Two hundred and thirty one songs were
submitted in the three months before the closing date and six songs were ultimately selected by apanel of judges headed by musician Tsunoda Hiro. All six songs were written and sung by youngamateur or semi-professional musicians, who are virtually unknown in Japanese music circles.
Tsunoda is a 58 year old singer, jazz drummer, and composer. In the early 1970s he played atfamous jazz festivals in Montreuil and Newport as a member of one of Japan’s top jazz groups,
the Watanabe Sadao Quartet. In 1971, his song Mary Jane became a big hit. However, his fameas a jazz musician quickly faded and subsequent efforts to form new bands all ended in failure.
His recent songs express strong national sentiment.
Following the competition, Yasukuni Shrine produced a CD entitled Nippon no Uta (Songs ofJapan), comprise of the above mentioned six songs, together with another song, written by
Uchida Tomohiro, a relatively unknown writer of children’s songs, and arranged by Tsunoda. All
the songs on the CD, except for one, composed and sung by a group called Arei Raise, are in the
fashionable folk song style, characterized by a soft, slow melody, with sentimental, hackneyedphrases mingled with patriotic sentiments.
The following are extracts from some of these songs.
Spin your endless dream
Keep walking without looking backYour heart is unshakableEmbrace your motherland
This is the nation to which you will always return
The land of Yamato, with its gentle breeze’‘We are blessed with peaceful days
Thanks to those who endured harsh times
Those who had little food and water day after day
Yet kept a strong will and dreamt of a distant future
I pray for eternal peace and loveThat is what I wish, sitting by this little stream of pure water

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482

One of the songs entitled The Last Courage, by a group called Lily, does not include a single
reference to Japan, the nation, or subjects which imply national sentiment. Instead it is a mélangeof hackneyed phrases like these:
We live helping each other, connecting with each other
Dream, you, love and I
How long should we keep running
We do not realize even if we are running the wrong way
The more we struggle to live, the more happiness we gain
We don’t want to cry, therefore we believe in the last courage.
Riding on A Dragon, the song written by Uchida and arranged by Tsunoda, exudes Japanesesentiment, through evocation of the courage and sacrifice of the wartime generation:
No matter how times change, there are things that we must not lose
We will revitalize this nation that you loved so much
Atop a cherry tree where we aspire to be,
We find a blossom of our unchangeable oath
You protected this nation of eight islands with your own hands,
With endless dreams and ever-lasting loveThank you for your dreams, Thank you for your loveWe, too, will protect this golden country
Riding on a dragon, riding on a dragon.
Are not these songs too mediocre to attract the attention of young people and become big hits?
Indeed, few copies seem to have been sold at the Yasukuni Shrine shop.
One exception is the song entitled Kyoji (Heroic Spirits), a rap song, by the group Arei Raise[Eirei Raise], comprised of three young boys. This group was formed when one of the boys saw
a leaflet for the Yasukuni music competition shortly before the closing date. Indeed, they did noteven have time to name their group before submitting their work. When their music was selected
as one of the best pieces, Tsunoda named the group Arei Raise, a pun on a Japanese expression
meaning “departed spirits of war heroes in the next world.”
Here is a full translation of Kyoji:
Even with those two atomic bombs
You could not burn down our nation, Sir
We overcame that disasterJapan is great, after all
With few natural resources
With many descendants of talented people
Who overcame the human experiment with nuclear weapons
Let’s learn from the wisdom of our ancestors
With the full experience of the Sino-Japanese, Russo-Japanese, and Great East Asian
Holy Wars
The experience of Edo, Meiji, Taisho, Showa and Heisei
This spirit of progress cannot be replaced by anything else
That is our unauthorized intangible cultural asset

Tanaka: The Songs of Nippon, the Yamato Museum and the Inculcation of Japanese Nationalism 483

Japan’s counterattack will soon be launchedFirst we must arm our hearts with nuclear arms
People always survive, thanks to the sacrifice of others
But the important thing is what we do with that sacrifice
It has been sixty years since the war ended
It’s now time to respect the spirits of war heroes and the end of the war
Japan’s war was noble and grand, whether it was right or wrong
To fight the enemy, knowing you would be defeatedTo fight to win from time to time at the risk of your own life
Our ancestors were not wrong
We just love JapanWe are neither right nor left, we are simply bald headed
We like Japan and the Japanese a lot
Don’t forget our hopes and pride
For a start, raise your voices, you Japanese boys and girls
The spirit of Kamikaze is always with us
Let’s change the way people see “the typical Japanese”
With hip hop scenes
We really love this country
So we want to keep our hearts as gold as our nation is
We Japanese are strong minded, training ourselves day after day
Let’s make our song everlasting
We can get together here whenever we like
Our feelings echo each otherAnd become a rainbow under the sky of Yasukuni
There are things that we cannot do
Yet there are things that only we can doThings that even we can doLet’s keep singing until our voices grow hoarse
Don’t forget what we inherited from our ancestors
Keep them in mind all the time
And pass them on to the next generation
Let’s walk together towards our future
Nippon, A beautiful country
Nippon, The country where the sun rises
Nippon, A magnificent country
Nippon, Nippon, Nippon
Nippon, The country where gods live
Nippon, The country that we love so much
Nippon, Our country
Nippon, Nippon, Nippon

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484

View and listen to it here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snDrZKBZx1Y). Listen here
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41-GsLtzat4) to their song Kudan (an allusion to Yasukuni
Shrine) with photos of kamikaze pilots and texts of their letters home.
This song, particularly the last phrase with the repeated words “Nippon” (“Japan”), is so jaunty
and rhythmic that it could easily be chanted by a crowd of Japanese supporters at a World
Football Cup match. In fact, chanting “Nippon” seems to be adopted from the actual footballsupport group cheering at the World Cup games.
On August 15, 2007 - the 62nd anniversary of the end of the war - Arei Raise launched its first
CD album, entitled Kyoji, using the title of its first song selected for the Yasukuni CD. This new
CD contains eight rap songs including a rap version of the national anthem Kimigayo and theabove-mentioned title track. One of the other songs, Kudan, bears the name of the district inTokyo where Yasukuni Shrine is located. This song, dedicated to kamikaze pilots, uses extracts
from the last letter sent home by a young Kamikaze pilot - ‘Dearest Father, Dearest Mother, theonly regret I leave on this day is that I was unable to show you sufficient filial piety. I can’t
thank you enough for giving birth to me and allowing me to live a fruitful 20 plus years.’

Kamikaze pilots prior to takeoff

Rap music is extremely popular among Japanese youth, as it is among young people in many
parts of the world. Its historical origins - as an expression of rebellious sentiment by American
black and Hispanic youth - have endeared it to some Japanese minority youth, particularly thoseof Ainu and Okinawan origin, who have begun to adopt rap and integrate it with their own ethnic

Tanaka: The Songs of Nippon, the Yamato Museum and the Inculcation of Japanese Nationalism 485

melodies, thereby creating somewhat novel and appealing new music. One example is the band,
Ainu Rebels, comprised of 16 Ainu youth who recently formed a band that promotes Ainu pridethrough rap performance.

Ainu Rebels band

This enthusiasm for imported styles is not shared by some Ainu elders, however, who fear the
mixture of foreign music with their own may destroy the authenticity of Ainu culture. The leaderof the Ainu Rebels, Sakai Mina, is the 24 year old daughter of Sakai Mamoru, who was active inorganizing worker movements against the exploitation of day laborers in Sanya in the1980s, anddied mysteriously in April 1988. His body was found floating in a canal near the Tokyo Bay.
Ainu rebels perform live at Alta Space
It is ironic, however, that rap is now eagerly adopted by groups like Arei Raise, which promotenational sentiment and thus endorse the anti-minority policies adopted by Japanese stateauthorities. It is well recognized that the authorities continue to sanitize Japanese wartime
atrocities not only against neighboring Asians but also against Japanese minority groups, as isevident, for example, from the recent text book affair regarding the compulsory group suicide of
Okinawan citizens during the battle of Okinawa. There are, of course, those who think rap andhip hop music are an insult to the heroic Japanese spirits enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine.
Regardless, it seems that songs by Arei Raise have a youth following – particularly among theso-called NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training). Indeed, the members of Arei
Raise themselves belong to NEET. It is well known that some young NEETs seek identity
through patriotism, as a means of regaining self-respect. Some, for example, are fans ofnationalistic and xenophobic comics, such as those written by Kobayashi Yoshinori. There seems
to be a similar phenomenon developing in the world of Japanese rap music as well.
It is also ironic that these patriotic NEET youths, who are themselves the victims of Japanese
government policies of “economic restructuring and social reform” are unable to understand thatyoung Kamikaze pilots - who were of a similar age at the time - were exploited by the military

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486

leaders and politicians of a government on the verge of collapse. If one reads carefully Kike
Wadatsumi no Koe (Listen to the Voices from the Sea: Writings of Fallen Japanese Students), a
collection of wills and letters written by young student soldiers including Kamikaze pilots, one
can easily understand that Kamikaze pilots did not die for the “noble cause” of defending Japan.

Listen to the Voices from the Sea

Rather, through an indescribably painful psychological process, many sought justification for
their forced suicide in an effort to defend their own beloved family members.

Letter from Kaiten pilot in Naval special forces

Tanaka: The Songs of Nippon, the Yamato Museum and the Inculcation of Japanese Nationalism 487

Some professional military pilots rejected the logic of the Kamikaze. Lieutenant Seki Yukio, a
professional naval pilot, is a case in point. In October 1944, when ordered to carry out a suicidal
mission by his senior officers, Seki told a colleague shortly before departure ‘We can no longer
save Japan. It is a desperate measure that they have now decided to kill the best pilots likemyself. I can drop a 500 kilogram bomb on the deck of an enemy aircraft carrier without killingmyself’; ‘I am not going to die for the emperor, nor for Imperial Japan. I am going to carry out
this mission for my beloved wife. I cannot refuse an order, so I will die to protect my wife. I will
die for my beloved. Is that not splendid?’
In Usa city of Oita Prefecture, a Japanese restaurant called Tsukushi-Tei was frequented bymany Kamikaze pilots before departing for their last missions. The columns and lintels of theJapanese rooms of this restaurant are full of marks of sword cuts that the young Kamikaze pilots
made, heavily drunk and swinging around their swords. These marks convey the frustration
experienced by these boys and the depths of bitterness at their forced self-annihilation. If any rap
music is to be composed about Kamikaze pilots, it should convey the profound bitterness andanger of these youths. Undoubtedly, their anger, which they could not be clearly expressed in thepolitical situation at the time, was directed at the military leaders and politicians who had little
concern for the sacrifice of the lives of thousands of young men under the grand but meaninglessjustification of “defending the nation,” despite their clear knowledge of unavoidable defeat in the
war in the very near future.
In addition to the music competition, Yasukuni Shrine is trying to appeal to young people
through other new programs. For example, “ecology” is one of the issues that Yasukuni Shrine
has recently begun promoting. On November 11, the World Peace Commemoration Day of 2007,
the shrine held a public symposium on ecology and education under the title To Live. Here is the
text which advertised the symposium:
Protect the Japanese “Spirit”
Japan’s nature is unusually rich in the world
Dense forest, pure water, and mild climate have had a considerable influence on theJapanese “spirit”
Japan’s education used to be outstanding and impressed the rest of the world
It provided children with the world’s highest level of academic ability
However, now, Japan’s nature is suffering
Japan’s education is distorted
Such conditions may seriously damage the Japanese “spirit”
What is the Japanese “spirit”?
What should we do to protect the Japanese “spirit”?
Let’s think about these issues, with our guest speakers, ecological mountaineer Noguchi
Ken, and educational scholar Takahashi Shiro, who tackles education problems.
Noguchi is well known in Japan as a young and sincere mountaineer who regularly goes toMount Everest and collects garbage that other mountaineers have left at various places in themountains.

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488

Noguchi Ken

He is popular among youth and often appears on TV shows, but hardly expresses any
nationalistic opinions. He seems to be apolitical and politically naïve. He perhaps feels that heshould utilize any occasion to promote ecological issues, even an event organized by acontroversial institution like Yasukuni Shrine. Takahashi, on the other hand, a professor at
Myojo University in Tokyo, is one of the nationalist academics who belong to the Society for
History Textbook Reform, an organization promoting a revisionist history textbooks. From theabove-mentioned advertisement, it is clear that the real topic that the Yasukuni Shrine wished tohighlight at the symposium was the controversial school textbook issue, the ecological issue andthe star power of Noguchi Ken to attract an audience. Yet, it is ironic that Yasukuni Shrine,
which glorifies war – one of the most ecologically damaging human activities – exploits popular
ecological concern for the propagation of their real aim: to inculcate nationalism and patriotism
among the youth in Japan.
The Yamato Museum and Supremacy of Japanese Technology
The Japanese government and the Ministry of Defense are also utilizing ostensibly nonmilitaristic issues such as scientific technology in order to quietly infiltrate nationalistic ideas
into the minds of Japanese youth, in order to pave the way for the eventual abolishment of
Article nine of Japan’s constitution. One such example is the Yamato Museum.
On April 23, 2005, just months before the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki and the end of the Asia-Pacific War, Kure City Maritime History and Science
Museum was officially opened at the port of Kure, about 40 kilometers from Hiroshima city.
Despite its name, this four-storey museum is filled almost entirely with exhibits related to theJapanese Imperial Navy. They include a huge model of the Battleship Yamato, replicas ofartillery shells used by the Yamato and other Japanese battleships, a replica of the Kaiten (ahuman suicide torpedo) and zero fighter planes. A more accurate name would be the Kure
Military History and Science Museum,” although the museum is known throughout Japan as the
Yamato Museum. This refers to the main exhibit, which is a model, one-tenth the actual size ofthe battleship Yamato, the world’s largest, heaviest, and most powerful battleship ever

Tanaka: The Songs of Nippon, the Yamato Museum and the Inculcation of Japanese Nationalism 489

constructed with nine 460mm canons firing 1.36 tonne shells. A pamphlet produced by the Kure
City Council calls it “the Yamato Museum,” and the official title is not used at all. The
museum’s official website also uses the name “Yamato Museum”.
Visitors to the museum pass through the entrance on the ground floor to a huge hall displaying a
26.3meter long model of the Yamato, which is the centerpiece of the museum and can be viewed
from all four stories of the building.
Visitors then proceed to a separate exhibition room containing small models of many otherbattleships constructed at the Kure Naval Dockyard before and during the Asia-Pacific War. A
series of panels explains how Kure developed into a modern industrial city and prospered, thanks
to the Naval dockyard. In the center of the room is a large panel with a copy of one of theoriginal blueprints and other panels that proudly explain the sophisticated technology used at thetime to construct and assemble the world’s largest battleship. In addition, panels tracking thepath the Yamato took on its last mission against more than 1,000 US ships off Okinawa.
Diagrams and photos show how the ship was attacked and destroyed by U.S. planes and bombers
on April 7, 1945, well before reaching the sea of Okinawa. Interviews with surviving crew
members are also shown on a screen.
Yet, there is no mention of the fact that Admiral Ito Seiichi, the commander of Operation TenGo for which the Yamato and several other ships were mobilized, considered the mission
strategically absurd strongly protested to Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet, Admiral
Toyoda Soemu, up to the last moment. One panel circuitously notes that “3,056 out of 3,332
crew members met their fate alongside the ship,” avoiding the word “dead.”
The highlight of this section, however, is a large screen, which repeatedly shows a colorful 15
minute long film which explains in a very simplistic manner how post-war Japanese industrial
technology, ranging from oil tankers, to automobiles, bullet trains, electric appliances, binoculars
and more, developed as a result of the technology used to construct the Yamato.
Beyond these pre-war and war time exhibits, visitors proceed to another room displaying postwar industrial technology used by local factories in Kure. These appear almost as if they are
advertisements for private companies. As one enters the section, a small panel mentions withscant explanation “the law for transforming former naval ports,” Most visitors pass this without
really understanding the meaning of this law, which was enacted in 1950, and which applied to
the four former naval base cites – Yokosuka, Kure, Maizuru, and Sasebo. The law transferred theImperial Navy facilities of these cities to privately-owned facilities or those managed by local
communities, so as to redirect their industries to peaceful ones. Article 1 of this law stated that‘by changing former naval port cities to peaceful industrial port cities, this law aims to contributeto accomplishing the ideal of establishing a peaceful Japan.’ Ironically, however, not long after
the enactment of the law, all four cities began to provide facilities for the U.S. Naval Forces in
the Korean War. They soon became important bases for Japan’s Maritime Self Defense Forces.
In other words, the U.S Navy and the Japanese Self Defense Forces have violated this law almost
since its inception and continue to do so today.
The museum’s official website homepage states that ‘The battleship Yamato was the world’s
largest battleship, secretly constructed and completed in December 1941 at Kure NavalDockyard, as a culmination of the foremost technology of the time. On April 7, 1945, it was sunk

The Politics of Memory in Japan and East Asia

490

by American planes, while en route to a mission in Okinawa, and 3,056 out of 3,332 crew
members met their fate alongside the ship.

The Yamato moments after the explosion that sank it

Yet, the technology used in the construction of the battleship Yamato survived and was
subsequently applied, not only to the construction of large scale oil tankers, but also to manyother fields, including the production of automobiles and electric appliances, thereby supporting
Japan’s post-war rehabilitation. This model of the battleship Yamato, conveys the importance ofpeace and brilliance of scientific technology to future generations.’ (emphasis added) Despite
this grand claim, however, it is difficult to find any message about the importance of peace
among the museum exhibits celebrating Japan’s wartime navy.
In May 2006, a group of concerned citizens from Kure city lodged a request to the museum toreconsider the way the museum displays and explains its exhibits, emphasizing the following
four points.
(1) There is no explanation that arms and weapons including battleships are designed tokill large numbers of people.
(2) There is no reference to the fact that, in the 15 years of the Asia-Pacific War, during
which most items at the museum were produced and used, Japan plundered natural
resources and food in many parts of Asia and killed a large number of Asian civilians,
and that at the same time some 3 million Japanese people also died. The museum
chooses, simply, to emphasize proudly the different aspects of military technology.
(3) In the section on historical background, there is no reference to the forced labor of
Korean and Chinese workers, nor to the underground trenches in and around Kure city
made by exploiting these workers. Instead, the museum emphasizes only that the peopleof Kure enjoyed a modern life style from early in its history, thanks to the Navy, as they
were the first in Hiroshima prefecture to have train and city water services.
(4) The museum exhibits show little consideration for visitors from neighboring Asian
countries such as Korea, China and Indonesia.

Tanaka: The Songs of Nippon, the Yamato Museum and the Inculcation of Japanese Nationalism 491

In responding to this request, the director of the museum, Mr. Todaka Kazunari, stated that themuseum demonstrates to visitors that there are two aspects to technology – a good one and a bad
one. Ideally, he explained, visitors to the museum should understand that the abuse of technology
can result in tragedy. Yet nowhere in the museum exhibits is there a reference to the “twoaspects” or the “abuse of technology.”
The building of this museum was a costly exercise. Kure city spent 6.5 billion yen(approximately US$60 million), of which 1.1 billion yen was funded by the Self Defense Agency
and 1.3 billion yen by the Japanese government. Given this financial support, it would seem
likely that the museum’s basic policies have been influenced considerably by the official
Japanese government view of the Asia Pacific War and the conduct of the Japanese Imperial
Navy during the war. Yet, it is important to note that the museum does not openly express strong
patriotism or militarism. Instead, as described above, it takes an indirect approach, emphasizing
Japan’s wartime technological superiority in the production of battleships and urges visitors –particularly children on school excursions – to admire Japan’s military power. In this sense, there
is a certain similarity between the exhibition of the model battleship Yamato and that of the B-29
bomber, Enola Gay, in the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the U.S. National Air and Space
Museum in Washington D.C. The Enola Gay is presented as evidence of U.S. military might andtechnological supremacy, with no information about the devastating destruction of Hiroshima
City and the mass killing of civilians by the atomic bombing.

The Enola Gay at the National Air and Space Museum

The Yamato Museum actively encourages school excursions and school study tours from all overthe country to the museum, falsely claiming that the museum is “the establishment from whichpeace messages are dispatched.” It also runs various special events and workshops for children at
the museum on weekends and during school holidays. In order to attract children and young
adults, the museum also has a small manga library, which is filled mostly with the manga series
Uchu Senkan Yamato (The Space Battleship Yamato), one of the most popular manga which wasmade into a series of films, as well as a long-running TV animation series from the mid 1970s to
early 80s. In fact, the story of this manga has little reference to the real battleship Yamato. Set in

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the year 2199, the Earth is attacked with radioactive bombs by an alien known as the Gamilas,and as a result, becomes uninhabitable. The surviving people live in refuges deep underground,and convert the ruin of the Japanese battleship Yamato into a spaceship. The space battleshipdeparts for a long journey to the planet Iscandar, 148,000 light years away from Earth, to obtaina device called the Cosmo-Cleaner D, which can clean radiation covering the Earth. In thisjourney, the Yamato faces various crises that have to be overcome to save the Earth. The Yamato
Museum made Matsumoto Reiji, the comic artist who produced this manga series, an honorary
director of the museum. It is rather ironic that a museum located so close to the city that was thefirst target of the atomic bomb has little concern with the reality of the actual effects of radiation
upon human beings. On the contrary, it promotes the manga which creates the myth that humanbeings can still survive even when all of Earth is contaminated with radiation. Fantasizing thebattleship Yamato through the science fiction form of manga and animation also distracts
children and youth from the real issues surrounding the battleship: the horrors of war and thesacrifice of many lives for meaningless missions.
In the first 197 days after the official opening of the Yamato Museum on April 23, 2005, one
million people visited the museum. In the next 188 days, a further one million visitors viewed its
exhibits, and by May 20, 2007, three million people had visited the museum. The opening of themuseum coincided with the release of the film, Otokotachi no Yamato (Men’s Battleship
Yamato), which became a big hit in Japan. This film does not openly glorify the suicidal missionof the Yamato, but instead romanticizes the deaths of more than 3,000 crew members of the
Yamato by emphasizing the young boys’ feeling that they were sacrificing their lives in order todefend their families and lovers. Thus the film does not question the fundamental issue ofsacrificing people’s lives for war. There is no doubt that the film also contributed to the
popularization of the museum itself.
The museum shop sells not only toy models of the Yamato and other Japanese battleships,
fighter planes, submarines and tanks, but also the serial pictorial publication, Welfare Magazine,
whose cover title shows the ‘f’ of ‘Welfare’ as a pistol pointing down. The title remains aconundrum to this critic, as this glossy magazine is filled with photographs illustrating the ways
and activities of the Self Defense Forces, from haircut styles, to uniforms, equipment, weapons
and arms. It would appear to be a fascinating source of information to young boys whose
imagination is stirred by the myths of the heroism of war.
The long-term impact of the exhibits in the Yamato Museum and Yasukuni Shrine’s various
tactics for shaping the ideas of Japanese youth on war and peace cannot be underestimated.
Many people throughout Japan are currently actively involved in grass-root movements opposing
revision of the Japanese peace constitution, the militarization of Japan, revisions of school
history textbooks, relocations and expansion of the U.S military bases on Japanese soil and thelike. Some young activists are trying to use musical and visual tools to promote their campaigns.
Yet in general, Japan’s grass-root movements remain narrowly focused on “political issues,” andare not developing as wide-ranging “cultural movements.” Can these movements cultivate anddevelop a distinctive peace-oriented popular culture – music, manga, films, theatre, fine art andthe like – to reach the wider population, including children and youths. Such a popular culture
must counteract the “nationalistic sentimentality” that Yasukuni Shrine inculcates, and the
mythos of “technological superiority” that the Japanese government and the Ministry of Defense
propagate. Such a culture would help people understand the harsh reality of war (i.e., the realitythat people do not die for war, but rather, that war brutalizes and kills people), and at the same

Tanaka: The Songs of Nippon, the Yamato Museum and the Inculcation of Japanese Nationalism 493

time show the values of peace, love and friendship. There is profound truth in the proverb “Si vis
pacem para pace (If you seek peace, prepare for peace),” peace activists’ variation of “Si vis
pacem para bellum (If you seek peace, prepare for war).”Yuki Tanaka is Research Professor, Hiroshima Peace Institute, and author of Japan’s Comfort
Women. Sexual slavery and prostitution during World War II and the US Occupation, and acoordinator of Japan Focus.

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Compulsory Mass Suicide, the Battle of Okinawa, and Japan's Textbook Controversy
Aniya Masaaki, The Okinawa Times, and Asahi Shinbun
For more than three decades, historical memory controversies have been fought over Japanese
school textbook content in both the domestic and international arenas. In these controversies,
Japanese textbook contents, which are subject to Ministry of Education examination and revisionof content and language prior to approval for use in the public schools, repeatedly sparked
denunciations by Chinese and Korean authorities and citizens with respect to such issues as the
Nanjing Massacre, the comfort women, and coerced labor. In 2007, the most intense controversy
has pitted the Ministry of Education against the residents and government of the Japanese
prefecture of Okinawa. The issue exploded in March 2007 with the announcement that allreferences to military coercion in the compulsory mass suicides (shudan jiketsu) of Okinawan
residents during the Battle of Okinawa were to be eliminated. The announcement triggered awave of anger across Okinawan society leading to the mass demonstration in Ginowan City of
110,000 Okinawans addressed by the top leadership of the Prefecture. It was the largest
demonstration since the 1972 reversion of Okinawa, exceeding even the response to the 1995
rape of a twelve-year old Okinawan girl by three US GIs.
We present three articles that illuminate the controversy and the tragic events of the Battle of
Okinawa, including both the Japanese originals and English translations. Aniya Masaaki, an
Okinawan historian and emeritus professor of International University examines the issues of theBattle and the textbook controversy, showing how the Ministry of Education rejected thetestimony of Okinawan witnesses in favor of two soldiers who filed a defamation suit against
novelist Oe Kenzaburo for his work on the military-enforced mass suicides. An Okinawan Times
editorial that follows provides a detailed examination of the hair-splitting language politics thatlie behind the Ministry of Education’s rejection of the reference to military force in thecompulsory group suicide that was imposed on Okinawan citizens, and its partial retreat in theface of citizen anger. Finally, the Asahi Shinbun’s editorial offers a judicious examination of thepolitics of attempt to censor the issue from the nation’s textbooks. Together, these articles cast abrilliant light on the fraught political manipulation of the textbooks examination system. MS

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Okinawan sculptor Kinjo Minoru’s relief depicting the horror of the Battle of Okinawa, during which many
Okinawans were killed or forced to commit suicide after seeking refuge in the island's caves.

I. Compulsory Mass Suicide and the Battle of Okinawa
Aniya Masaaki
Translation by Kyoko Selden
Textbook Inspection Which Denies Historical Truth
The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (Monbukagaskusho,
hereafter Ministry of Education) on March 30, 2007 announced the selection of high school
textbooks for use beginning in 2008. With respect to the question of compulsory mass suicide(shudan jiketsu) during the Battle of Okinawa, they demanded revision of statements saying that
there was a suicide order (jiketsu meirei) or coercion (kyoyo) by the Japanese military. Thisrefers to statements in seven textbooks published by five companies.
The gist of the Ministry of Education’s comments is this: “The order to commit suicide (jiketsu
meirei) by the Japanese military cannot be verified. The suggestion that people were cornered
into compulsory suicide by the Japanese military leads to a false understanding of the Battle of
Okinawa. Okinawan prefectural citizens protested saying, “this distorts the truth of the Battle of
Okinawa.” The Okinawan Prefectural Assembly and all the municipal assemblies protested theruling by the textbook examiners concerning military involvement in compulsory suicide,
unanimously passing a resolution demanding retraction of the order to revise the texts.

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However, the Ministry of Education rejected the claim of Okinawan citizens, merely reiteratingthat “The textbook inspection counsel decided this”, and ignoring the unanimous view of
Okinawan citizens.
Concerning the disaster experienced in the Battle of Okinawa, there have been various attempts
to warp understanding and lead historical awareness astray.

Okinawa Battle map

One such move concerns the Tokashiki, Zamami, and Kerama islands of the Kerama Islandgroup. The Japanese military on the Kerama Islands had 300 suicide attack boats andapproximately 300 men in the marine advance corps, along with 600 affiliated members of a
special water-surface work corps comprised of Koreans. There was also a locally-drafted defense
corps and volunteer corps that were incorporated into the defense corps of the island.
The marine advance corps on Kerama Islands was the army’s suicide attack corps meant todestroy enemy ships with one-man suicide boats carrying 120 kilogram torpedoes. The actual
situation of this corps has been the subject of exaggerated reports, but I understand that local
people had discomforts and doubts about “the army’s marine suicide corps.”

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On March 26, 1945, the American military, with the support of artillery launched from both sea
and sky began landing on Kerama Islands, and by the 29th had seized nearly the entire area. The
fact is that the army’s attack boats did not attack even a single enemy boat.
During these battles, horrendous “mass suicide” (shudan jiketsu) of citizens occurred on Keruma,
Zamami and Tokashiki Islands. This means that the inhabitants were forced to commit suicide by
the coercion (kyosei) and inducement (yudo) of the Japanese military. But, the military leaders of
the island now claim that “there was no military order.”The family of Akamatsu Yoshitsugu, the former colonel who headed the military on Tokashiki,
and Umezawa Yutaka, the former major who headed the military on Zamami, brought suit in the
Osaka court against Oe Kenzaburo and his publisher Iwanami for his book Okinawa Notes, ongrounds of “disparaging their reputations” and demanded compensation for damages. Calling
this trial a lawsuit on false charges concerning Okinawan mass suicides “Okinawa shudan jiketsu
enzai sosho”, they criticize Oe and Iwanami.
The plaintiffs claim that “Shudan jiketsu of inhabitants on Tokashiki and Zamani Islands were
not by military order. They chose death with lofty self-sacrifice spirit.”
This is not merely an issue of reputation damage, but a revisionist scheme to justify aggressive
war and acquit the imperial army of responsibility for its atrocious deeds. Statements by former
military officers in Okinawa, who welcome field surveys by groups like the Liberal View ofHistory Group and government officials, are distorting understanding of the battle of Okinawa.
The textbook review this time concerning shudan jiketsu, adopted without verification the claims
by unit leaders who say there was no military order. The testimonies by the people of the islands
who were forced to kill close relatives were probably ignored as not credible. They are looking at.things from the perspective that testimonies by the commanders alone have credibility. It is outof the question to use the one-sided claims by Akamatsu and Umezawa, who are involved in thelawsuit, as the foundation for textbook approval.
The Battle of Okinawa on Which the Maintenance of the National Polity (Kokutai) Rests
The Battle of Okinawa, fought with the understanding that Japan’s defeat was inevitable, was thelast ground combat between Japan and the US in the Pacific War. For the Japanese imperial
government, the maintenance of the national polity was the first principle, and gaining time toprepare for the decisive battle on the mainland and negotiations for the conclusion of the war
were crucial.
Former prime minister Konoe Fumimaro, on January 14, 1945, right before the Battle of
Okinawa, memorialized to the emperor that the war situation had reached a grave situation.
Regrettably, defeat in the war has already become inevitable . . . . Defeat in the war will
constitute a great flaw for our national polity (kokutai), but the consensus of England andthe US has not yet gone so far as reforming (henkaku) the national polity . . .Therefore, if
it is just defeat in the war, I do not think that we need worry so much in terms of national
polity . . . What we have most to fear from the viewpoint of the maintenance of thenational polity, is communist revolution which could occur following defeat in the war.

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Therefore, from the perspective of preserving the national polity, I am convinced that weshould think about the way to conclude the war as soon as possible, by even a single day . .
. . (Hosokawa Morisada, Hosokawa Nikki (Hosokawa Diary))
The report by former Prime Minister Konoe is remarkable for openly explaining to the emperor
the need to conclude the war as a member of the Japanese leadership. But the main point is that
although defeat in the war was inevitable, rather than defeat itself, he was most concerned about
the disintegration of the ruling structure by the imperial system (tennosei shihai kiko) by acommunist revolution. To Konoe’s advice the emperor responded “I think it is quite difficult
unless we achieve a military result just once more.” This indicates that the Showa emperor, evenat this late point, had passion for leading the war effort.
The battle of Okinawa was “a battle on which the national polity hung,” yet one which
presupposed Japan’s defeat. It is said that Okinawa served as “a stone to discard for the sake ofthe defense of the mainland,” but in fact it was “a battle to postpone the decisive battle on themainland” and to gain some time for the preparation of that battle on the mainland and tonegotiate the end of the war, and was not a battle to protect the people (kokumin) of themainland. It was a preliminary battle before eventually taking the entire nation (kokumin subete)
to death along with the Emperor.
The Japanese imperial government, in preparation for the final battle on the mainland, reinforced
its total war system intended to mobilize the entire nation.
On May 22, 1945, the wartime education law (senji-kyoiku rei) was made public and evenelementary schools and schools for the blind, deaf and dumb were ordered to organize student
military units. On June 23, when the Okinawa defending force (32nd Battalion) was defeated andsystematic fighting ended, a volunteer soldiers law was promulgated and women, too, wereordered to serve in national volunteer combat units.
On July 8, 1945 in Tokyo, military units of the Okinawan Normal School and the Okinawan
Prefectural First Middle School were honored in a ceremony without the presence of theawardees. Minister of Education Ota Kozo told students throughout the country to follow thestudent military units of Okinawa and dedicate their lives in order to defend the national polity.
(Asahi Shinbun July 9, 1945).
When the Japanese imperial government accepted the Potsdam Declaration, maintenance of thenational polity was the central issue.
On August 6 and 9, the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroying thecities. But the Japanese leadership was preoccupied with the threat of Soviet entry into the war,
more than with the destructiveness of the atomic bomb.
On August 8, 1945, the Soviet Union renounced the Soviet Union-Japan neutrality treaty,
declared war and attacked Manchuria, Sakhalin, and North Korea. Consequently, the Japaneseleadership felt the crisis of the imperial system and decided to bring the war to conclusion.
In the middle of the night on August 9, an imperial conference was held. At 2:30 a.m. on the10th they accepted the Potsdam Declaration on condition of the maintenance of the national
polity (kokutai goji). This was called an imperial decision.
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With the understanding that the conditions stated in the three countries’ combined
declaration dated from the 26th of last month do not include the demand to change theemperor’s prerogative to rule the state, the Japanese government accepts this.
A Japanese politician has said that by dropping the atomic bombs “Japan’s defeat was madeearlier, so it can’t be helped.” [The reference is to former Defense Min. Kyuma Fumio. Tr.] But
this is a thoughtless statement by one who follows US policies while being ignorant of theaffliction of citizens.
Why did the US drop the atomic bombs? Young people who have studied in Hiroshima andNagasaki the reality of the bombing explain their findings clearly as follows.
1. The US wanted to carry out attacks on the cities to display the bomb’s power. The ability
to destroy with shock waves and ultra-high heat, the influence on human bodies and theenvironment by radioactivity. The atomic bomb is not a matter of a single moment à there
is also secondary radiation and radiation in the womb. Hibakusha are not only Japanese àthere were also Koreans and Chinese forced laborers (kyosei renko) as well as allied
POWs.

Memorial for the Korean victims of atomic bombing in Hiroshima

2. They proudly flaunted the power of the atomic bomb to the Soviet leadership, a strategy
that anticipated the US-Soviet postwar conflict.
3. The B-29 which set out from Tinian in Micronesia at 2:49 a.m. on August 9 dropped theatomic bomb on Nagasaki at 11:02. That aircraft landed at Bolo Airport in Yomitan in themain Okinawan island at 1:09 on the 9th. After refueling it returned to Tinian at 22:55 on

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the 9th. At that time, US forces in Okinawa had set up an airport with a 2,000 meterrunway that could accommodate B29s.
Compulsory Mass Suicide Forced by the Imperial Army
The Okinawa defense force issued a directive to Okinawan prefectural citizens calling for
unification of the army, government and civilians living together and dying together (kyosei
kyoshi), and stating that even a single tree or blade of grass should be a fighting power. They
mobilized for battle all people, down to young and old, women and children.
The military and paramilitary locally recruited in Okinawa numbered more than 25,000 (soldierson active duty, drafted soldiers, defense units, student units, volunteer units, etc.). We have torealize that one fourth of the Okinawa defense force were “Japanese soldiers” coming out of
Okinawa prefecture. It is a mistake to think that Japanese forces in the battle of Okinawa were
exclusively officers and men from the mainland (Yamato troops).
During the last stages of the battle of Okinawa (June-July) the American forces indiscriminately
attacked Japanese forces and residents of the area within caves and called this “Jap hunting”.
The imperial army drove residents from shelters, took their food, prohibited them fromsurrendering, tortured and slaughtered them on grounds of suspected spying. They forced people
into “mutual killing” among close relatives, and left the sick and handicapped on the battlefield.
The war dead among civilians in the battle of Okinawa is estimated at more than 150,000.
When we think about the damage to citizens in the battle of Okinawa, shudan jiketsu can beraised as the most peculiar case.
First of all we have to clarify the term shudan jiketsu.
When we say “jiketsu” (self-determination, suicide) the precondition is “spontaneity,
voluntariness of those who choose death.” It is impossible for infants and toddlers to commit“jiketsu” and there is no one who spontaneously kills close relatives.
Mutual killing of close relatives, meaning that “parents kill young children, children kill parents,
big brothers kill little brothers and sisters, and husbands kill their wives,” occurred on thebattlefield where the imperial army and citizens mingled.
In Army Strategies in the Okinawa Area compiled by the War History Office of the Ministry of
Defense, it is written: “They achieved shudan jiketsu and died for the imperial country with asacrificial spirit in order to end the trouble brought on combatants.” But this claim goes against
the facts. Citizens on the battlefield did not choose death voluntarily.
Although there are numerous interrelated factors, basically people were forced to kill close
relatives by compulsion of the imperial army and local leaders who followed the imperial army.
Enforcing the mutual killing of close relatives is of the same quality and the same root as thekilling of citizens by the imperial army.
One cannot call the death of people who “were forced” or “cornered” shudan jiketsu [if the term
indicates voluntary suicide]. It is improper to call this reality shudan jiketsu. Hindering properly
conveying reality, it invites misunderstanding and confusing.

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The term shudan jiketsu has been used since the 1950s and some say that “it walks on its own
with an established meaning,” but if one uses the term shudan jiketsu without explaining therealities behind it, that invites misunderstanding and confusion. The reality of the term shudan
jiketsu, I must reiterate, is “residents mass death by the imperial army’s coercion andinducement.”
Behind “residents mass death” in the Battle of Okinawa was imperial subject education(education to make everyone an imperial subject) which rendered dying for the emperor thesupreme national morality (kokumin dotoku). In the Battle of Okinawa, “the unification of themilitary, government, and civilians living together and dying together” was emphasized, and “asense of solidarity about death” was cultivated. At that moment, knowledgeable Okinawans
played essential roles, including those in the Association of Reservists, the Support Group of
Adult Men, and police and military affairs chiefs of local and municipal government.
When given hand grenades by the Japanese military, leaders of the islands accepted them,thinking it natural that “all residents die when the moment demands”. We cannot, however, thinkof this as “spontaneity and voluntariness” of “shudan jiketsu”. This was an era when it was
impossible to decline “death” ordered by the imperial army.
The extreme fear of “brute Americans and British” [cultivated by the Japanese military] was afactor that made people choose death. Japanese military experiences of slaughter of Chinese
people on the continent since the “Manchurian Incident” was widely discussed; and about thefate of residents at large at the time when the war turned out to be a “losing battle”, people
despaired anticipating plunder, violence, slaughter by the American military. There werereturned migrants who thought “the American military can no way be expected to kill residents”,
but returnees were regarded as suspected spies and hence were unable to speak positively. To
make such a statement was to court denunciation as a spy and slaughtered.

A Marine guards Japanese prisoners of war after the Battle of Okinawa.
More than 148,000 civilians died in the campaign.

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There are people who were driven by the perverse idea that, rather than seeing female siblings
and wives being killed cruelly and outraged by brute Americans and Brits, it was an act of loveby close relatives to kill them with their own hands.
The fear of spy hunting by the imperial army accentuated the sense of despair among residents.
The imperial army’s policy was never to hand over residents who knew military secrets. To
accept the protection of the US military was regarded as spying. Residents positioned between
the Japanese and American military were driven to “death”. Their hope to live was cut off by theshelling of the islands. Knowing that there was no escape route, they anticipated a cruel death.
That too was one cause of their “hurrying to death”.
“Mass death of residents” took place when these elements joined together, causing panic that led
to mutual killing of close relatives in local communities. Fear and madness overwhelmed village
communities.
“Mass Death” in Encircled Areas
At the time of the Battle of Okinawa, had lost the control of the sea and sky of the entire area of
the Southwest islands had passed to the US military. Communication and transportation with
Kyushu and Taiwan were cut off and the islands were surrounded. The Okinawa defending force
gave orders about matters involving the jurisdiction of the prefectural and local governments,
unifying the military, government and civilians to live together and die together. All actions ofprefectural citizens were controlled by commanders of stationed forces. Here there was no civil
government. This kind of battlefield was designated “encirclement areas” in military
terminology. These areas were designated by “martial law” as ones to be on the alert whensurrounded or attacked by the enemy.
In such areas, commanders of stationed forces wielded full power. This overrode theconstitution, and all legislation, administration and jurisprudence were under military control.
During the Battle of Okinawa, martial law was not proclaimed, but the entire Southwest islands
were virtual encirclement areas. It was for this circumstance that the administrative authority ofthe prefectural governor and mayors of villages was ignored and the stationed forces handled
everything as they pleased. Directives and orders to local residents were received as “militaryorders” even if conveyed by town and village governments and local leaders.
On Tokashiki Island of the Keremas, Col. Akamatsu Yoshitsugu wielded total authority. On
Zamami Island, Major Umezawa Yutaka held complete authority. The village administration wasplaced under the control of the military; there was no civil administration. Under military rule,
those who played an important role in communicating military orders were military affairs
directors of the village office.
These were local leaders who took charge of military affairs including coordination of the draft
list, verification of the whereabouts of people of draft age, handling of such things as draft delay
petitions, distribution of draft cards, and aid to bereft families of war dead and wounded soldiers.
The main duty of military affairs directors at the time of the Battle of Okinawa was to draft
soldiers demanded by the stationed forces, to hand them over to the army and to communicate
military orders (supply of labor power, evacuation, assembly and eviction) to the residents.
Toyama Majun, who was a chief of military affairs of the village of Tokashiki, testifies:

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On March 28 at Fijiga (katakana) in the upper reaches of the On’na river, the collective
death (shudanshi) incident of residents occurred. At that time, defense unit members
brought hand grenades and urged residents to commit “suicide”.
This testimony by the military affairs director vividly conveys the reality of residents“shudanshi”. One can see that a military affairs director, who conveys the military order inan encirclement area, bore a crucial responsibility. Japanese citizens had been taught that a
military order was “the emperor’s order”. There was also the aspect that people believedthat “choosing death” rather than become POWs was “the way of imperial subjects”. They
were, in accord with the instruction of local leaders and the imperial army, made to
implement the field service code (senjinkun), which said “Do not live to receive thehumiliation of becoming a prisoner”.
This article was published in Gunshuku mondai shiryo (Disarmament Review), December 2007.
Aniya Masaaki is Professor emeritus of Modern Japanese History at Okinawa Kokusai Daigaku,(Okinawa International University).

II. A Political Decision that Obscures Historical Reality: “Involvement” approved,“Coercion” Kyousei) disapproved in Okinawa Mass Suicide Textbook Treatment.
Okinawa Times editorial
Translation by Kyoko Selden
Regarding the high school Japanese textbook examination issue, the Textbook Approval Council(Kyoukasho-you Tosho Kentei Chousa Shingikai, Investigation Council for Examining andApproving Publications for Textbook Use) reported to Tokai Kisaburou, the Minister of
Education and Science, the results of the deliberations on wordings related to “mass suicide(compulsory mass death, shudan jiketsu)” during the Battle of Okinawa, concerning which six
textbook publishers had petitioned for revision (teisei shinsei, a petition to revise an alreadyapproved textbook).
We would like to ask all high school students within Okinawa prefecture:
Of the following three sentences, (1) was the original draft [in one of textbooks in question].
Later, at the direction of the Ministry of Education and Science and of the Textbook ApprovalCouncil at work, it was rewritten to (2) [this version was approved in March 2007]. In responseto the strong protest from many Okinawan citizens, the textbook publisher petitioned to revise
the expression. As a result, the wording changed to (3) [this has met approval]. Now, concerningthese three sentences, what changed and how? Why did these changes have to be made? What
was the aim?
(1) “There were residents, who, by the Japanese military, were driven out of shelters or driven
into mass suicide.” (Nihon-gun ni yotte goh wo oidasare, aruiwa shuudan jiketsu ni oikomareta
juumin mo atta,)(2) “There were residents, who, by the Japanese military, were driven out of shelters, orcommitted suicide.” (Nihon-gun ni goh kara oidasaretari, jiketsu shita juumin mo ita.)

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(3) “There were residents who, by the Japanese military, were driven out of shelters, or were
driven into mass suicide.” (Nihon-gun ni yotte goh wo oidasaretari, aruiwa shuudan jiketsu ni
oikomareta juumin mo atta.)
How do these sound?
Because the changes are such that they are hardly discernible without careful comparisons, wewould like you to read them slowly twice, and thrice over.
In version 1, the relationship is clear between the subject, “the Japanese military,” and thepredicate, “were driven to mass suicide.” In version 2, however, the subject and the predicate are
disconnected, leaving the relationship between the two ambiguous. Version 3 is like one of thetwo peas in a pod together with the original. One can say that it nearly restores the original, yet it
gives the impression that the connection between the subject and the predicate is somewhat
weaker.
What comes in and out of sight through this series of editing stages is the intention behind: “ifpossible we want to erase the subject, the Japanese military,” “we want to make the relation
between the Japanese military and the mass suicide ambiguous.”
The conclusion of the Textbook Approval Council can be summarized into the following threepoints.
First, the Council has not withdrawn its Approval Statement (kentei ikensho, a written opinion ora statement of one’s views). Second, it does not adopt an expression like “were coerced by theJapanese military,” which specifies military enforcement. Third, wordings like “were driven” by
the Japanese military, which indicate military involvement, were approved.
This means that they tried to settle this issue by restoring “coercion,” which had disappeared in
the approval examination process, in the form of “involvement.”
What Characterizes the Battle of Okinawa
The resolution adopted by the Okinawan protest rally of September 29 had two points,“withdrawal of the Approval Statement” and “restoration of the wording.”Aniya et al.: Compulsory Mass Suicide, the Battle of Okinawa, and Japan's Textbook…

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Thousands of protesters in Ginowan, Okinawa, demanded that Japanese government drop plans to removereferences in textbooks to the coerced mass suicides on their island in 1945.

Certainly, the Okinawans’ consensus moved the Textbook Approval Council, resulting in adegree of restoration of the wording. It is not at all the case that Okinawan efforts were fornought.
However, despite the fact that textbook publishers petitioned for approval of revision while
carefully working out the wording with the aim of restoring “coercion,” the Council judged that“the revision cannot be approved with the wording as it is,” demanding another round of
rewriting.
Why they shun the use of the term “coercion” to this extent is simply incomprehensible.
In deliberating on the petitions for revision, the Approval Council listened to the opinions ofeight specialists from inside and outside the prefecture. One specialist commented that residents
being driven into a corner by the Japanese military was the very characteristic of the Battle of
Okinawa, and that the presence of the Japanese military played a decisive role.
Another specialist pointed out that the policy that says, “those without combat ability shouldcommit suicide (jiketsu, gyokusai) before becoming prisoners of war,” was based on a strategic
principle across the entire military. It was not an issue at the level of whether or not a specificcommanding officer ordered it at a specific point in time.” We agree.
We must not confuse the issue of the existence of a commander’s order with that of coercion by
the Japanese military.
Reforms Are Necessary for the Textbook Approval System
In response to the objection from Okinawa, some said, “There should be no politicalinterference.” But, if that is the case, I would like them to answer the following question as well.
Until 2005, reference to military coercion had been approved. Why, despite the fact that there
has been no great change in academic understanding, did the issue this time receive an

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examination comment? Why is it that the Council made the claim of one party in a trial inprogress the foundation of its examination comment?
What has been exposed this time is the locked room nature of the examination system. The
contents of the deliberations of the Textbook Approval Council are private, and the proceedings
have not been made public. Details of examination comments, as I understand, are not put intowriting. The majority opinion is merely stated orally.
The Council passed the textbook investigation officials’ draft statement with no in depth
discussion. In what relation the investigation officials stand to the Council too remains veiled. [Atextbook draft first goes to Kentei chousakan (examination and approval investigation officials),
who, or one of whom, drafts an examination and approval (Kentei) statement. If necessary the
textbook goes also to a specialist committee member (sen’mon iin) or members. Then thetexbook goes to the Textbook Approval Council.]This editorial appeared in the Okinawa Times, December 27, 2007. Textbook Review Council
Report, part one of two.
III. Mass Suicides in Okinawa
Asahi Shinbun editorial
Education minister Kisaburo Tokai announced Wednesday reinstatement of history textbook
references about the Imperial Japanese Army driving civilians into committing mass suicide in
Okinawa in the closing days of World War II. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports,
Science and Technology approved revisions submitted by six publishers on passages concerning
the 1945 Battle of Okinawa for senior high school textbooks to be used from the 2008 academic
year starting in April.
As a result of the revisions, these textbooks will contain passages with the following content:
Many local residents were driven to commit mass suicides because of the Japanesemilitary's involvement.
Due to coercive circumstances over the military's prohibition on civilians becoming prisoners ofwar, many local residents felt they were driven into mass suicides and mutual killings.
In textbook screening conducted in spring this year, the education ministry ordered publishers toremove all references to the military's involvement in the mass suicides as well as statements thatpeople were forced into the gruesome acts by Japanese soldiers.
The ministry says the changes are based solely on applications from the textbook publishers anddon't represent a retraction of its original decision. Probably, it would be closer to the fact to saythat the ministry was forced into a virtual retraction of the decision in the face of strong public
criticism about it, mainly from people in Okinawa.
The blame for this fiasco clearly rests with the extraordinary instructions the ministry issued tothe publishers. The ministry had all references to the military involvement in mass suicides
removed. It argued these passages could generate the misunderstanding that all these actions
were carried out under orders from the military.

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After the publishers submitted revisions early last month, the education ministry asked the
Textbook Authorization and Research Council, a ministry-appointed panel to check the proposedchanges. The council heard from experts, including academic researchers on the Battle of
Okinawa, and then developed its own opinions as the basis for debate on the revisions.
While insisting there is no solid evidence to confirm direct orders from the military, the council
admitted that education and training by the wartime government were behind the mass suicides.
The panel also pointed out that the distribution of grenades among local residents by the army
was a key factor that created the situation responsible for the mass suicides.
The council's argument must be convincing for many people. In essence, it said people in
Okinawa were driven to mass suicides under extreme pressure from militarism, which fannedfear about the invading U.S. soldiers among local residents and prohibited them from becoming
POWs.
In its discussions on the proposed revisions, however, the council stuck to its insistence thatstraightforward expressions like "the military forced" civilians into mass suicide should not be
used. This stance should be questioned.
It is hard not to wonder why the panel didn't come up with such common sense opinions for the
textbook screening this past spring. If it had done so, the panel would not have endorsed thereviews by the education ministry's textbook inspectors. One of the panel members has concededthat they should have discussed the issue more carefully.
At that time, the government was led by former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose motto was to"break away from the postwar regime." Was the expert panel in some way influenced by the Abeadministration's political posture? Ironically, this outrageous move by the education ministrycaused the grueling wartime episode to attract unprecedented public attention.
Previously, most school history textbooks contained only brief descriptions about the mass
suicides in Okinawa. The revisions submitted by the publishers also included descriptions about
the social background for the tragedies. As a result, the textbooks offer much more information
about the bloody battle fought in Okinawa in 1945.
The public controversy over the textbook references raged for nine months. A huge protest rally
was held in Okinawa during that period, which gave many people the opportunity to learn not
only about the bloodshed in Okinawa but also about the serious flaws in the ministry's textbook
screening system.
The bitter lessons from the experience should be used for the good of the nation.
This editorial appeared in The Asahi Shinbun, Dec. 27 and the International Herald
Tribune/Asahi on December 28, 2007.
Kyoko Selden is a senior lecturer in Asian Studies, Cornell University and a Japan Focus
associate. The first two volumes of her Annotated Japanese Literary Gems have just been
published, featuring stories by Tawada Yoko, Hayashi Kyoko, Nakagami Kenji, Natsume Soseki,
Tomioka Taeko and Inoue Yashushi.

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The Martyrdom: Children and the Battle of Okinawa
Mark Ealey
While the debate about the use of children in war is relatively new, the practice is ages old. Long
before education became a right rather than a privilege it was common for boys to be recruited
into the military in roles that saw them face death at the front line. Joining the army or navy was
the accepted fate of many young lads from poorer backgrounds, and in that respect, the boys whocarried armor for Spartan hoplites or stood watch on a juggernaut at Jutland had much incommon. Nowadays, insurgents and pro-government militia groups throughout the world use
brutal coercion to recruit children. Boys and girls are forced to carry supplies, act as spies,
messengers or lookouts, and in extreme cases, even to serve as human mine detectors or to takepart in suicide missions. In addition to those who volunteered at a young age, ending up as
drummer boys at Waterloo or Gettysburg, and the contemporary boy soldiers compelled to fightby their masters in Sierra Leone, East Timor or Angola, there is a third category, a group caught
up in a whirlwind of nationalist fervor, “willingly” answering the call to face an invading enemy
portrayed by propaganda as being bent on total destruction.
Two very familiar instances of this third scenario stand out in 20th century history. As the poolof adult males available for conscription dwindled in Germany and Japan in early 1945, both ofthese beleaguered nations used children in military and paramedical roles. Powerful images
circulate of Hitler Jugend boys with panzerfausts cycling through the rubble-strewn streets of
Berlin or Japanese boys and girls training to meet the enemy with sharpened bamboo sticks. The“willingness” of these children to hurl themselves at Soviet or American tanks in no way
mitigates the tragedy of youthful patriotism being wasted in the end-game madness of amanipulative adult world.
Yoshimura Akira’s historical novel, Junkoku – Rikugun Nitõhei Higa Shin’ichi (Translated as
Typhoon of Steel. An Okinawan Schooboy's Quest for Martyrdom in the Battle of Okinawa)
looks at the Japanese and Okinawan experience of the eighty-day Battle of Okinawa through theeyes of 14-year old Higa Shin’ichi. Yoshimura graphically depicts the tragic involvement of theboys of the Blood and Iron Student Corps and the girls who attended the wounded as nurse-aidesof the Himeyuri Student Corps. Approximately 2,000 Okinawan high school students were
mobilized to support the Imperial Japanese Army in the defense of Okinawa. Only half of themsurvived.
Depending upon how one looks at this battle, it may actually be more appropriate to state that “asmany as half survived.” The odds were heavily stacked against them coming through alive. By
1945, American tactics placed greater emphasis on delivering overwhelming firepower from air,sea and land to suppress stubborn resistance by Japanese dug in in caves throughout the mainisland and to borrow a euphemism coined during the Vietnam War, “collateral damage” among
Okinawa’s civilian population reached horrific levels. In addition, at least partly because of thenature of the fanatical resistance on Saipan, Iwo-jima and Peleliu, the U.S. forces in Okinawa
fought as much to exterminate the enemy as to secure territory. When we add to this the fact that
the Imperial Japanese Army encouraged and at times forced the local inhabitants to commit
group suicide rather than be captured and that it often claimed shelters and caves from civilians,
the scene was set for the closing stages of the battle to be an enormous tragedy. Over 250,000
Japanese died, including approximately 150,000 civilians - a one quarter of the island’s
population.

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The translation of Yoshimura’s book is timely for two reasons: firstly because 2005 marks thesixtieth anniversary of the Battle of Okinawa and secondly because any literature that encourages
us to look at “zealotry” from another angle must help us come to grips with the challenges of theearly 21 st century.
Yoshimura Akira is a prolific writer of documentary-style historical fiction. Many of his works
focus upon aspects of the human condition set against a backdrop of Japan’s involvement in theSecond World War.
New Zealander Mark Ealey is a freelance translator specializing in Japan’s foreign relations.
Typhoon of Steel. An Okinawan Schooboy's Quest for Martyrdom in the Battle of Okinawa is his
sixth book-length translation and his third historical novel by Yoshimura, following on from
“Shipwrecks” (1996) and “One Man's Justice” (2001.)
Here is a portion of Chapter 3 of Typhoon describing the withdrawal from the Shuri Line.
Chapter Three
Where the order came from wasn’t clear, but it was quietly communicated among the nurses witha kind of ominous finality. It was short and to the point: “Move out, taking those who are capable

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of walking unaided.” The hidden meaning was of course: “Leave the seriously wounded where
they are.”An awful tension and growing panic started to spread amid the filth and stench of the hospitalcaves. The wounded had already been given the straightforward instruction: “All those who canwalk, get outside now.” Whether they understood what was afoot was not clear, but an eerie
atmosphere fell over the place. Those patients who, minutes earlier, had been pestering theyoung nurses for water, fresh bandages or bedpans, had gone quiet and were now lying still on
their beds.
Shin’ichi and his friends helped the girls lead the walking- wounded outside, sensing theagonizing silence of those who were unable to get up from their beds.
Everyone knew that the field service code prescribed that those unfortunate souls who were
wounded in battle should bravely take their own lives rather than be captured by the enemy.
Even so, the thought that the several thousand patients they were about to leave behind would
have no choice but to commit suicide weighed heavily on his conscience.
Those feelings were then blown away in an instant. A messenger, covered in mud, ran into their
midst from the eastern section of the cave complex, about two hundred meters away. Panting forbreath, he shouted: “You’ve gotta get out of here now. The enemy’s starting to come into thecave from the east.”
There was a frenzy of activity as Shin’ichi and his friends rushed to get the walking-wounded
out. As they helped the soldiers down the middle of the cave, the doomed on both sides stretchedout their arms imploringly like dozens of pallid tentacles. Shin’ichi knew all too well what theywanted, but he pushed his way forward as fast as he could.
“Nurse, thank you for what you did for me,” the badly wounded men called out as the young
girls made their way outside. The girls nodded, wiping away the tears rolling down their cheeks.
Once those capable of walking were all outside, a couple of medics in a corner a short distancefrom the entrance started hurriedly adding drops of something to small bottles of condensed
milk. The girls standing by sobbed uncontrollably as they watched, knowing that three of theirclassmates were being left behind among the seriously wounded. When they realized thatcyanide was being put into the milk so the patients could take their own lives, the girls had tried
to carry their friends out, but the wounded girls had refused, telling them, “Get out. Look after
yourselves.”
One of the medics screamed at the girls when he saw them standing there. “What the hell are you
doing? Get out there and help the walking-wounded!”
Outside in a field, a thin black line moved slowly through the pelting rain. In among them there
were girl students, carrying bags of medical supplies suspended from the ends of poles, or
helping wounded men walk through the mud.
To keep stragglers to a minimum, each person in the line took hold of the rope that gave the line
its form. When Shin’ichi caught up with the last people in the line, he grabbed the end of therope dragging behind them.

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The sound of machine gun fire rang out behind them. Startled, Shin’ichi looked back in the
direction of the hill, but couldn’t see any enemy soldiers.
His gaze shifted to the slope where the hospital caves were and, in the light of an illumination
shell, he caught sight of a group of people bunched closely together as they moved down theslope.
For a moment he thought that they must be the enemy, but their movement was far too slow andlabored for enemy troops. The harder he looked the more it seemed that the whole slope wascovered in moving forms.
A shiver ran down his spine. The badly-wounded were crawling down the slope after them.
These men must have dragged themselves out rather than take their own lives inside the cave - ormaybe they thought that they could still fight. Shin’ichi let go of the rope and stood still, gazing
through haunted eyes at the painstakingly slow movement back there.
The rain intensified and the dark spots on the slope became harder to make out. The line ofpeople moving in front of him was veiled in spray from the pouring rain.
The line of wounded advanced at a snail’s pace. When those capable of walking had beenordered outside, men far too badly wounded to seriously consider standing unassisted had
somehow managed to drag themselves out of their beds and join the group outside. Every
movement was agony for these men, slipping to their knees in the mud time and time again as
they struggled forward. Each time Shin’ichi saw a man slip he would run over and help him backto his feet.
The road was visible in front of them, but enemy warships were shelling it.
“Let go of the rope! We’ve got to spread out or these shells will get us all!” A shrill voice fromthe front of the line was heard above the sound of the rain.
Shin’ichi hurriedly pulled the rope out of the wounded men’s hands.
Finally, the men started moving from the field up on to the road in an extended line.
Before he knew it, Shin’ichi found himself propping up a burly, middle-aged man as he walked.
The man’s head was swathed in bandages that obviously had not been changed for some time.
The fat, white bodies of maggots could be seen moving in the gaps in the filthy cloth. Maybe themaggots moving around made his wound itchy, but every so often, the man would groan as herubbed the bandages with his fingers. Each time he did this, the foul odor of the pus from thefestering wound became more pronounced.
Trudging through knee-deep mud with the weight of the man bearing down on him madeShin’ichi feel so exhausted that he felt that his knees might give way at any moment. The man
was incredibly heavy and Shin’ichi seemed to be supporting almost every pound of him as hewalked.
Just when they came to a bend in the road, a few meters ahead of them, Shin’ichi saw anemaciated soldier topple over sideways like an old tree that has snapped at the ground. He tried
to free himself from the man he was supporting so he could run and help the wounded soldier,but the man held him in place with a surprisingly strong grip. Shin’ichi could feel the man
pulling him against his body.

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Shin’ichi twisted his neck to look up at the man’s face. The bandages hid too much to distinguish
any facial expression, but between the strips of cloth he could see a look of fierce determinationin the man’s eye not to let go of this boy who was keeping him upright.
A feeling of panic ran through his mind. This man was clearly trying to stop Shin’ichi from
helping the other wounded soldier. Judging from the strength of his grip on his shoulder, the man
had more than enough energy left to walk unaided. Nevertheless, he was clinging on to his young
helper’s shoulder, determined not to let go.
Shin’ichi was amazed. He had always believed that right from the very start of the war, every
soldier and civilian - without exception - had shared a common resolve, and that that resolve wasborn of the willingness by everyone to sacrifice themselves for the cause. But here was a man
who obviously still had the ability to walk by himself, happy to leave a comrade by the wayside.
It just didn’t make sense.
Still trapped under the man’s arm, Shin’ichi edged his way closer to the soldier lying beside theroad, stopping when they came level with him.
He was lying on his back almost submerged in the mud. Indifferent to the rain falling on his face
- his eyes were wide open and his mouth moved ever so slightly.
“That feels good. The air’s so good,” he said, a hint of a smile on his face. Released from thestench of pus and excrement that hung in the stagnant air inside the cave, the young soldier
seemed overjoyed to feel the cool rain on his face under the night sky.
The man’s head sank back into the mire, muddy water flowing across his eyes and into his mouth
until his face was completely covered.
The burly man tightened his grip on Shin’ichi to urge him forward along the road. Shin’ichi
started walking again.
An unbearable feeling of disgust towards this man welled up inside Shin’ichi. Maybe it was tostop him escaping, but the man seemed to be bearing down on him far more heavily thannecessary. This pushed his feet deeper into the mud, but when he got stuck the man would pull
Shin’ichi’s small frame up so he could move forward again.
All of a sudden two shells fired from offshore slammed into the ground and exploded on eitherside of the road ahead of them. There was a huge flash and the blast hurled Shin’ichi and his
captor into the mud. The shockwave from the explosions was such that for several seconds the
sky rained mud and dirt.
Bodies moved all over the road, as people staggered back to their feet and formed a line again,
but many remained lifeless where they had fallen.
“Come on! Get up or I’ll kill you!” screamed the young officer in charge of leading the group,
drawing his sword and striking the fallen soldiers with the back of the blade as though demented.
The line moved forward again.
The man, now covered in mud from his bandaged head to his feet, shuffled forward, holding
onto Shin’ichi’s shoulder with an even stronger grip than before. As they walked, it wasn’t long
before Shin’ichi sensed a look of naked fear in the man’s eyes.

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Shin’ichi felt like laughing in the man’s face. Wounded and weak though this man might be,someone who propped himself up on a boy half his size and was terrified of every incoming
round, was not fit to be called a soldier. No doubt, Shin’ichi thought, this man’s wounds were theresult of an act of cowardice rather than bravery in combat. Shin’ichi had been in the Student
Corps for less than two months now, but he felt no fear of the enemy and neither did any of theother boys around him.
The man wasn’t wearing any badges of rank, but Shin’ichi imagined that he must be a sergeantor a low-ranking officer. From the way he grabbed hold of Shin’ichi and controlled his
movements, he must be of a rank used to giving orders and being looked after. If that were thecase, then he should be trying to encourage the other wounded men and taking the lead in thewithdrawal.
Once they passed the Yamakawa Junction - of which he had a vague recollection - the line
quickly lost its form and every step became a struggle. Shin’ichi sensed himself losing thefeeling in his legs and shoulders and fading in and out of consciousness. The man was now
panting heavily and would occasionally stop to catch his breath. Just when Shin’ichi waswondering how far they had walked, he heard a voice above the sound of the explosions and therain.
“Put the wounded and the medical supplies on to the trucks!”“Trucks?” said the man in a thin, rasping, almost feminine voice, quite unbefitting such a largeman. It was the first time Shin’ichi had heard him utter a word. The man looked up and stillleaning heavily on Shin’ichi, started walking in the direction of the trucks.
There were two trucks parked in the lee of a hill. It was a well-chosen spot to avoid shells fired
from warships and there was a crowd of people milling around the vehicles.
Once they got a little closer, Shin’ichi could tell that most of the people were civilians. They
were covered from head to toe in mud, making it impossible to know whether they were male orfemale. Very few of them were holding any belongings, and many were squatting on the groundwith small children strapped to their backs.
They looked up despondently at the trucks, which were obviously reserved for the woundedsoldiers. The flat-decks of both vehicles were full of soldiers lying prone, exhausted from justgetting up there, and the rearmost part was literally piled up with wounded men.
The man put his hands on the tailgate and said to Shin’ichi, “Push me up!” Knowing that thismeant he would finally be free from his captor, Shin’ichi pushed with all his might against the
man’s mud-covered backside. Once up on the flat-deck the man stepped over bodies to make his
way forward and sat down behind the drivers cab, not once looking back at Shin’ichi.
Before long, the trucks pulled away, shaking their human cargo as they moved. As he wassplattered with mud from the truck’s tires, Shin’ichi allowed himself to mutter a profanity about
the despicable character he’d just seen off. All around him wounded soldiers who had been
unable to get on the trucks sat, exhausted, in the mud. The man Shin’ichi had helped was
oblivious to the plight of others, shamelessly focussing only on his own survival.
Exhauasted, the girls were sitting among the wounded soldiers in the mud - a bizarre scene,
where the mire and the people in it seemed to have melded into one.

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“We’re moving out!” shouted the young subaltern and the mud-covered human forms slowly got
to their feet. The nurse-aides lent their shoulders to the most badly wounded and picked up theremaining medical supplies.
Shin’ichi slipped under the shoulder of an emaciated soldier who had lost his right hand. The
soldier turned slightly to face Shin’ichi and bowed his head, so exhausted that even utteringwords of gratitude was beyond him. The dark forms of Yaeju-dake and Yuza-dake loomed intoview.
As the line lost its form the number of stragglers increased - some had sat down in the mud torest and others were bent over on all fours trying to catch their breath. Shin’ichi could do nothing
for them. He was now barely capable of supporting the soldier he was with.
Not far from the hamlet of Yuza the officer instructed them to take a short rest so they could thenget the line back into some semblance of order. Shin’ichi and the wounded soldier collapsed on
to the ground. Before they had even rested ten minutes, several illumination shells burst in thenight sky, closely followed by high-explosive rounds from the warships off shore. Staying
huddled together was too dangerous, so they moved off again in line. Maybe it was because they
had had a rest, but Shin’ichi felt as though his muscles were seizing up and his feet felt as if they
were encased in lead.
About 50 meters ahead of them, Shin’ichi noticed something scattered in the mud. When he got alittle closer he saw two large shell holes in the field on one side and that the road was covered
with body parts.
The line did not change its course. They trudged on past a decapitated head that had rolled to theside of the road, and a torso buried in the mud without any limbs or head attached – no doubt theremains of the soldiers and nurse-aides who had been at the front of the line.
Shin’ichi plodded on through the red-stained mud. The thought went through his mind that had
he been at the front of the line it would have been his body scattered on the ground in pieces, but
he felt no emotion.
Once through the hamlet of Yuza they came out upon a piece of higher ground. All of a sudden,
the sound of nearby explosions stopped and instead, there was a roar like that of flames being
fanned, as large caliber shells passed overheard - the target had obviously switched towards
Yaeju-dake and Yuza-dake.
They rested beside the spring at the ruins of Nanzan Castle. The rain had eased and the sound ofshells flying through the air became fainter. The wounded soldiers and the nurse-aides collapsedon their backs in the mud.
Shin’ichi had no idea how long he had been asleep, but he awoke to the shout of “We’re off!” Heshook the soldier next him awake and helped him to his feet.
The rain had stopped and the sky was starting to show the first signs of dawn.
The line moved along a raised path between two paddy fields.
Shin’ichi realized that everything around him was quiet - an eerie silence had descended upon
the scene. His eardrums no longer assailed by the relentless blasts from explosions, he could hearfrogs croaking in the paddy fields.

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He stopped. The last time that he had heard that sound seemed like a memory from his distant
past. The croaking rose from the paddy fields through the morning air with the same vitality as
the sound of waves on the rocks. The scene reminded him of time spent with his little sister.
Shin’ichi had often taken her down to the paddy fields to catch frogs with a hooked piece ofwire. She had never wanted to touch them, but Shin’ichi would adeptly remove their skin andguts and cook them over a fire before making his frail little sister eat the legs.
Born to a farming family, to Shin’ichi frogs were creatures close to his heart. The sound of somany of them croaking in the paddy field reminded him that some aspects of life were actuallyunchanged amid the devastation of war. He now found himself in a spot where there was nobombing or strafing, no shells coming in from warships offshore and seemingly no risk of dying
a wasted death. It was like a dream in which he had been transported to an altogether different
world.
They may have been safe from the enemy for the moment, but those walking in the line werealready stretched far beyond their physical limits. The girls were totally exhausted, breathing
loudly as they lay flat on their backs on the path between the paddy fields. Their faces were
black from the soot of working by candlelight in the caves and their eyebrows a grayish whitefrom clusters of lice eggs.
By the time they reached the hamlet of Makabe there were as many as 50 or 60 people in theline. Shin’ichi’s orders were to escort the wounded soldiers to Makabe, from where they were to
be divided up and sent to nearby villages before going on to Army hospital caves.
Shin’ichi and the teacher with the nurse-aide girls walked around the little village trying to findsafe haven for the wounded soldiers. There were small makeshift shelters that the locals hadbuilt, and stone tombs, but they were all full of civilians and there was nowhere that looked as
though it could accommodate the wounded soldiers. After walking around for about an hour, heheard from one of the locals that there was a good-sized natural cave just outside the village.
Shin’ichi and the teacher headed in the direction of the cave. They found the entrance on one
side of a low hill and once inside they saw 20 or 30 soldiers asleep.
When a sergeant appeared from the back of the cave the teacher explained that they had brought
wounded soldiers from the hospital at Haebaru and pleaded that they be allowed to take shelter inthe cave, even for just a short time. There seemed to be more than enough space to accommodate
another 50 or 60 men. The sergeant did not mince his words in his response.
“You must be joking! There’s no room for you in this cave. We’ve already flushed civilians out
and we’re going to make a stand against the enemy from here. This is part of the defensive line
and not a fucking hospital. Piss off and get out of here!”
The cold glint in the sergeant’s eye suggested that he would brook no argument, so Shin’ichi andthe teacher left the cave straightway.
When they got back to where the girls and the wounded soldiers were, they found them all soundasleep, but they had to wake them and start looking for shelter again. They knew that it would be
best for them to stay in this village. Wounded soldiers from other hospital caves would arrive
soon so their first priority was to follow orders and find a place for their group to shelter.

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“Let’s rest here,” said the teacher, stopping in front of a ruined house on the side of the road.
They trudged through the doorway, gingerly lying down on the floor without uttering a word.
Shin’ichi lay on his back and stared up at the ceiling. The line of holes above him was obviously
from machine gun bullets that had passed through the roof from above. As he cast his eyesaround the house, he wondered where the people who had lived there had gone. The Buddhist
altar lay on its side in a corner of the room next to an overturned table. There was no indicationthat the family had gathered their belongings and fled, so maybe they had all been killed by thesame machine gun that left the holes in the ceiling.
Only a minute or so had passed and already a loud snoring rose from among the exhausted, mudcovered bodies on the floor.
Still thinking about the family, Shin’ichi too was overwhelmed by the need to shut his eyes. “Arethey all dead?” he muttered to himself as he slipped into a deep sleep.