Posted on 08/15/2005 7:11:35 AM PDT by Heebert
On Aug. 15, 1945, the day Japan stopped fighting in World War II, Tokyo looked like the blasted surface of the moon. Photos show a city reduced by massive U.S. airstrikes into charred expanses of rubble and concrete ruins. Arriving Allied troops were stunned by the extent of the devastation.
Today, towering skyscrapers and gleaming neon signs stand where firebombs once fell. The scorched earth has sprouted bustling business districts. Tokyo has been reborn into a vibrant metropolitan area of 33 million inhabitants, and the nerve center of the world's second-largest economy.
Japan overcame the war's physical devastation with spectacular success. But 60 years after its defeat, the Japanese are still struggling with another, less tangible legacy: their own responsibility for the conflict, which historians say killed three million in Japan and at least six times that number elsewhere in Asia.
To outsiders, the question of Japanese war responsibility might appear simple. After all, it was Japan that invaded China, erected a puppet state in Manchuria in 1932, plundered Nanjing five years later, and sprung its bombers and torpedo planes on a sleeping Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
In Japan, however, the issue has never been a simple one. For decades, a bitter fight raged between leftists, who viewed the war as an evil enterprise, and rightists, who saw it as a noble if mismanaged cause.
Emotions ran so high that most Japanese avoided talking about the war at all, focusing instead on building their country's postwar economic miracle.
In recent years, public opinion seems to be creeping toward the right. While most Japanese still seem to see World War II - known here as the Pacific War - as a colossal mistake, there is also a growing movement to find reasons to be proud of the war. A slew of movies, novels and comics have appeared extolling the bravery of Japanese soldiers and sailors. Some junior high schools now use textbooks that brush over Japanese atrocities, but credit the war with ending Western colonial domination in Asia.
This reassessment of the war runs parallel to a broader effort by Japan to shed its postwar pacifism in world affairs. Old war-rooted phobias against strengthening the military started to vanish after North Korea fired a missile over Japan in 1998 and then admitted a few years later that it had abducted Japanese citizens. The public now appears willing to support moves to raise Japan's international profile, such as the decision by the prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, to dispatch units of the country's Self-Defense Forces to occupied Iraq - the first Japanese troops to enter a conflict zone since World War II.
Some experts say it is natural for Japan to re-examine the war because a more self-assertive nation needs a stronger sense of patriotism. Critics, however, say conservatives in the government are pushing a revisionist agenda to whittle away at public support for Japan's American-written postwar Constitution, which bars Japan from having a full-fledged military.
"The conservatives are trying to wipe out antiwar sentiment so Japan can have a stronger military," said John Dower, a historian who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Embracing Defeat," published by W. W. Norton and Company, about the war and its aftermath in Japan. "There is a culture war, and the right wing is winning."
The more positive views of the war are also worsening an already yawning perception gap with much of the rest of eastern Asia, where wartime Japan is still commonly seen as a cruel invader. In April, these resentments exploded into violence in several Chinese cities, where stone-hurling protesters surrounded Japanese businesses and diplomatic missions in outrage over visits by Koizumi to the Yasukuni shrine, a Shinto religious site honoring Japan's war dead, including those hanged for war crimes.
Japan's changing view of the war is on display at the newly opened Yamato Museum, which sits among the busy dry docks and cranes in Kure, a former navy base turned commercial shipyard near Hiroshima. Inside, exhibits describe how Japan built a modern navy to fend off greedy Western powers, while omitting mention of Japan's own colonies in Asia. The museum's centerpiece is a 26.3-meter-long, or 86-foot-long, replica of the Yamato, the largest battleship ever built and the flagship of the Japanese fleet until it was sunk by U.S. warplanes in 1945.
The curator, Kazushige Todaka, said such a museum would not have been possible just a decade ago because of antiwar feelings. But as the generations who experienced the war pass away, younger Japanese want a different view.
"Schools have told us that we're bad, that our fathers and grandfathers were bad. We want to show a different side," Todaka said. "Japan wasn't all bad."
These ideas are striking a chord: museum attendance is far above expectations. Since it opened in April, it has had 430,000 visitors, more than Todaka's projections for the entire first year.
Keisuke Nakagawa, 27, an office worker from the nearby city of Mihara, leaned on a museum railing to inspect the mini-Yamato's gun turrets. "People my age think there are some things to regret, but also some things to be proud of," he said, talking about the war. "Some older women in my city lost relatives on Yamato, so they refuse to come."
One source of Japan's difficulties in dealing with the war has been a failure to reach a national consensus on the extent of the country's responsibility. The only formal attempt to pursue Japanese war guilt, the Allied-run 1946-48 Tokyo war crimes trials, is viewed here skeptically as a case of victors' vengeance. Japanese leaders have also failed to take a leading role in creating a national sense of remorse, as German leaders did to help guide their country's public opinion.
Many Japanese bristle at comparisons of their country with Germany. They say Japan did nothing as criminal as the Holocaust. Experts caution that this thinking can lead easily to denials of Japan's own atrocities like the Rape of Nanjing in 1937.
At the same time, historians say it is inaccurate to cast Japan as a nation of unrepentant revisionists. It was Japanese scholars who originally exposed many of their country's most heinous deeds.
But for most Japanese, though, the war remains long been a semi-taboo topic.
Even textbooks written by leftist educators tended to gloss over it in a few pages. The silence helped feed a widespread perception here that the war was a calamity beyond Japan's control, like a natural disaster.
One result has been that many Japanese, even leftists, have come to see themselves not as the war's perpetrators, but its victims. Visitors to the atomic bombing museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki get a gruesomely detailed recounting of the horrors of nuclear war, but hear nothing about the involvement of those cities' residents in Japan's war machine.
The diverging views of the war in Japan and the rest of Asia threaten to isolate Japan from its neighbors. Experts say that a lot of the anti-Japanese rhetoric in China is the work of the Communist government, which has been seen as using it for political gain. But much of the outrage is genuine, reflecting a deep-seated distrust of Japan, experts say.
This anger tends to take the form of endless demands for apologies from Japan. Japanese leaders have apologized, though often with only lukewarm sincerity. But experts say Japan's real failure is not an inability to apologize. Rather, it is Japan's refusal to include outside voices, particularly those of its former victims, as it discusses its own role in the war. Experts say that taking the victims' perspectives seriously is the only way Japan can convince the rest of Asia to trust it again.
"The debate has to be extended to all Asia," said Wang Zhixin, a Chinese national who has researched Japanese textbooks as an education professor at Miyazaki Municipal University in Japan. "It can't take place only within Japan."
The same way a German individual grapples with his load.
The evil begins to reemerge from the ashes of the last horror. The future may bring yet more fantastic evil straight from hell.
The parallels to Islamic fascism and terrorism are obvious.
Since today's liberals are only against white fascists, they'd probably champion a resurgent Militarist Japan as much as they do the moslems.
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