Dear Korean,
A question on Quora reads: How do the Japanese think about World War II? I was wondering if this answer to the question is something that you would agree with. How would you respond?
Joel B.
Before reading this post, the Korean will highly recommending reading the answer provided by Ms. Makiko Itoh, which is linked above. August 15 is the V-J Day, when World War II ended in 1945 with Imperial Japan's unconditional surrender. On this important date, the Korean found it appropriate to address this question.
But first, a quick detour. Ta-nehisi Coates, likely the best contemporary American writer when it comes to discussing race relations, recently wrote a terrific New York Times op-ed entitled The Good, Racist People. The message that Coates delivered through the op-ed is simple and devastating: even good people with sincerely good intentions contribute to, and perpetuate, racism in America. When it comes to dealing with large-scale, historical evil, it is not enough for one simply live with good intentions--because road to hell is paved with such good intentions.
The same is true with the way the Japanese approach World War II. I have said this before, and I will say it again: Japan, as a whole, think that it did nothing wrong during World War II. The steady stream of outrageous statements made by prominent Japanese politicians and intellectuals can only continue in an environment in which such worldview is tolerated. (Just two of the latest hits: (1) Japan's Deputy Prime Minister said Japan should amend its Peace Constitution like the way Nazis amended the Weimar Constitution; (2) Japanese navy built the largest ship since WWII and named it "Izumo", one of the ships that were used to invade China.)
When news of such outrageous statements hit the wire, a common response is to attribute it simply to a small faction of right-wing, nationalist Japanese people, implying that the vast majority of the Japanese ought to be spared from the responsibility of such historical amnesia. This is incorrect on several levels. First, the Japanese right-wing is anything but small. The Japanese nationalists are currently dominating the political scene, winning the last two parliamentary elections in a landslide. Their leader, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, proclaimed that he would withdraw Japan's apology to former Comfort Women and denied that Imperial Japan forcibly recruited the Comfort Women to serve as sex slaves. Right-wing thugs roam the streets freely in broad daylight, waving the "Rising Sun" flag, blaring propaganda from their infamous "black vans" and engage in harassment campaigns against Koreans living in Japan.
Nationalist black van, commonly seen
in the streets of Japan
(source)
For those who will predictably chime in about how Abe's election was more about the sagging Japanese economy: so was Hitler's election. In a normal country, a candidate's penchant for denying war atrocities would be met with swift termination of the candidate's political career, regardless of his views on economic policies. That did not happen with Abe, which speaks volumes. The mindset of the good, moral Japanese people that elected a man like Shinzo Abe is equally responsible for Japan's collective denial of history.
(More after the jump.)
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A recent interview by Hayao Miyazaki reveals the epitome of such mindset. Miyazaki, of course, is a legendary anime filmmaker, creating such masterpieces as Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Castle in the Sky, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away. More importantly for the purpose of this post, Miyazaki is hardly an apologist for Imperial Japan. A staunch leftist, Miyazaki pointedly criticized Abe administration's attempt to re-write history: "Japan should have properly apologized to Korea and China, and settle the debt of the past." One can fairly say that, among mainstream Japanese people, Miyazaki is about as good as they come when it comes to recognizing Japan's responsibility for World War II.
Poster of Kaze Tachinu, showing
Jiro Horikoshi and his Zero Fighter
(source)
So it may be slightly surprising that Miyazaki's latest work, Kaze Tachinu ("The Wind Blows"), is a movie depicting the life of Jiro Horikoshi, the engineer who designed the infamous Zero Fighters, the mainstay of the Japanese Air Force during World War II that was used to bomb the Pearl Harbor, among other missions. In a revealing interview with Asahi Shimbun, Miyazaki explained the thought process behind making a movie about the face of the Japanese war machine during World War II. The relevant portions of the interview is worth quoting at length:
Q: In the movie, there is a scene that shows Jiro Horikoshi standing before a destroyed airplane after the war ended.
A: I think his heart was destroyed. He worked toward his dream of making a beautiful airplane, and his effort hit the peak as he was designing the 96 Fighter and the Zero Fighter. But during the war, he was directed to come up with a new model or improve the Zero, because of the lack of engineers during the war. It is like ordering Studio Gibli [Miyazaki's studio] to make five new movies each year without hiring anyone new. He did his best, but most failed. But he had his own pride that told him, "I did not lose." He wrote, "they say we are responsible for the war, but I don't think I am."
Q: Yoshitoshi Sone, one of the engineers who assisted Jiro Horikoshi, reportedly said: "This is terrible. If this many people were going to die, we should not have built this. We should not have designed this," upon seeing that the Zero Fighters were used in kamikaze missions. Was Horikoshi thinking differently?
A: Sone may have felt that way, but at the same time he must have felt: "That is not my area to be concerned about." Of course, Horikoshi carries the responsibility of the war as a Japanese citizen; but one engineer need not be responsible for the entire history. I think it is pointless to talk about responsibility.
I understand Sone's sentiment that he should not have built the plane. But I think it would have been a less rewarding life if he did not build the plane. I communicated this in the movie too, but the plane is a beautiful but cursed dream. One builds what one wants to build, gets cursed by it and gets injured by it. But Sone must have thought later that it couldn't be helped. It was better to live that era, giving his all. At the time, no one could arrogantly claim that this was good, and this was bad.
Q: Your father owned a military supplies factory and manufactured Zero Fighter components; he reportedly became nihilistic as he experienced the earthquake and the air raids.
A: Nihilism sounds cold, deviant and vulgar; that was not my father. He merely thought his family came first. Through his terrible experience of the apocalypse, he gave up on the big talks like "this value is important" or "this is how humans ought to be." He tried to protect his family, his friends and whom he could, but thought he could not be responsible for the entire country or the society. He always said: "Don't lose out."
Q: Do you also feel that way, at this point?
A: Maybe a radius of 30 meters, or 100 meters? That is the limit of the area that I can affect, and I have no choice but to accept that that is all I can do. Before, I thought I had to do something for the world or the mankind, but I changed a great deal now. ...
. . .
Q: Although you say you can only be responsible for those around you, you are affecting a lot of people through your movies.
A: Movies is my job, not some cultural project. They just happened to find commercial success. Without the viewers, they will all go away in an instant. The people who joined Gibli think it is a stable company, but that's laughable.
Interview with Hayao Miyazaki, the Zero Fighter Designer's Dream [Asahi Shimbun]
Reading this interview, a theme emerges: a small individual who can not do much to the overwhelming forces of the world. Because the individual, at best, can only do so much, the best course of the individual is to simply do what he wants to do with all his heart. All Horikoshi wanted to do was to build beautiful flying machines; all Miyazaki wants to do is to make movies that sell. It is better that they keep building the most beautiful flying machines, the best selling movies, without thinking too much about what those machines and movies may do. After all, they cannot control how their machines will be used, how their movies will be interpreted.
Such view may be somewhat defensible. It is certainly a big step up from the odious views of the Japanese right-wing, who denies all of Japan's responsibility for World War II wholesale. There is enough room in this worldview for one to feel sympathetic. The Japanese during World War II certainly were not the first ones who committed acts of horror by getting swept up into the roaring currents of history.
Nonetheless, it is deeply disappointing that this is the best that the well-meaning Japanese people can muster up, because in this worldview, there exists its own version of history denial and responsibility evasion. The good history deniers of Japan may acknowledge that terrible things happened during World War II. Yet those terrible things are nobody's fault. It was certainly not the fault of the ordinary Japanese people, who were simply living their lives. In this story, Japan may be the country that invaded Korea, Manchuria and China, bombed Pearl Harbor, brutalized Nanking and POWs in the Philippines, conscripted hundreds of thousands of women to serve as sex slaves and performed live human experimentation--but no Japanese person committed those horrible things. Those things just kind of happened.
Note the selective obliviousness in which Miyazaki engages to maintain his worldview. Miyazaki laments that he can do no more than affect a "100 meter radius" from himself. This is an absurd claim. Miyazaki is easily one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century. Contrary to his assertion, Miyazaki's movies are much more than money-making ventures that randomly found success; they are canonical works of art in the history of animated movies, which are revered by millions of people worldwide. Yet Miyazaki must abdicate from that lofty perch if he is to maintain that individuals cannot affect the world in which they live. Otherwise, Jiro Horikoshi--the man who designed the symbol of the Japanese war efforts--cannot remain an innocent boy who only wanted to make beautiful flying machines. He becomes a full participant of the war that Imperial Japan caused.
Such selective obliviousness is likewise evident in Ms. Itoh's answer on the Quora question. Ms. Itoh wrote: "The general feeling was that the military government was doing whatever they wanted, without the knowledge or consent of the regular citizens of Japan." This claim is equally absurd as Miyazaki's claim of powerlessness. World War II was an unmissable event for Japan. It was the polar opposite of the American war in Iraq, in which regular American citizens rarely felt the impact of the war because it was fought by a small group of Americans with only a fraction of the national economy dedicated to the war. In contrast, the Japanese war effort during World War II required the mobilization of the entire country.
The Imperial Japanese Army boasted 10 million soldiers, vast majority of which was drafted. At least 500,000 Japanese were living in Japan's colonies (such as Korea and Manchuria.) A huge number of Japanese worked for large corporations that constructed the Japanese war machine, such as Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. The Japanese newspapers did not simply report the news of military victory; it was boasting the stories of two soldiers engaged in a contest to be the first to kill 100 people with a sword as they were marching toward Nanjing, to commit one of the worst brutalities of the 20th century.
Tokyo Mainichi Shimbun reporting the contest to cut down 100 men.
(source)
It is simply not true that the ordinary Japanese had no idea that their country was committing such horrors. On a certain level, every Japanese knew that they were invading sovereign countries and killing people. Yet the good Japanese like Ms. Itoh must insist that the regular Japanese people simply did not know, because admitting the truth--that the ordinary Japanese sincerely believed in their mission as they enslaved other countries and killed its people--would require them to face up to the responsibilities for such horrors.
This is a far cry from the way in which post-war Germans addressed their wartime legacies. With a slogan like "Collective guilt, no! Collective responsibility, yes!", Germans engaged in vigorous, decades-long debate and exploration of what that collective responsibility means, and how it applies to each individual German who lived through that era and the children of those individuals. A book like The Reader by Bernhard Schlink, which attempted to show the human aspect of the Nazi guards, would become subject to strong criticism within Germany, for insinuating that the Nazi followers were dumb, illiterate people who did not know better. Yet in Japan, this is the standard position among well-meaning people.
This difference in attitude results in meaningful difference in the way in which World War II is remembered in different theaters. The lasting image from World War II concerning Germany is the Holocaust, not the bombing of Dresden. By all rights, the lasting image from World War II concerning Japan ought to be the Rape of Nanking, Unit 731, Bataan Death March and Comfort Women. Instead, the lasting image from World War II concerning Japan is the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. To be sure, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was a horrific event. But never in Japan's memorial of Hiroshima do the Japanese acknowledge that Imperial Japan was the one responsible for invading other countries and killing more people than the Nazis. Because the good Japanese chose not to address their personal contribution to World War II, the suffering (which was indeed immense, but not greater than Germans' or any other people's) that the Japanese did undergo during World War II is not recognized as a consequence of Japan's wrongdoing. Instead, those sufferings just kind of happened for no reason, like a natural disaster. (Note that the Asahi Shimbun interviewer juxtaposes "earthquake" and "air raid" as formative experiences for Miyazaki's father.)
Of course, the flip side of this attitude means that even the war atrocities that Imperial Japan caused is also like a natural disaster that just kind of happened. Because the damage that Japan caused to others during WWII is the moral equivalent of the damage that Japan suffered during the War, the best lesson that these good Japanese can draw from the war experience is no more than the naive conclusions that war is bad, politicians lie, and the best thing to do is to just live their lives without aspiring to steer the course of their own country.
Such abdication from historical responsibility is what has guided Japan since the end of World War II. The good Japanese people removed themselves from the political process by engaging in their own, smaller distortions of history. Only the Japanese right, who still believe that the Imperial Japan did nothing wrong, remained as the active driver of Japan's political course.
Nearly as soon as Japan exited the American provisional rule, it elected as Nobusuke Kishi as the Prime Minister. Kishi, a key leader of the Japanese colony in Manchuria who was tried as a Class A war criminal. (Imagine seeing Hermann Goring as the chancellor of West Germany in 1957!) Kishi sincerely believed that the only sin committed by the Imperial Japan during World War II was to lose the war. In an infamous episode, when Kishi was imprisoned on the charges of war crime, his old teacher sent him a message: "If you consider your name that will carry for thousand years, commit suicide." Kishi replied defiantly: "Instead of my name, I will proclaim the legitimacy of the holy war [World War II] for ten thousand generations." A master politician, Kishi maneuvered to position his party--the Liberal Democratic Party--to hold the power in Japan for the entire post-war period except for two stretches of three years. Naturally, the LDP has maintained staunch historical revisionism as to Japan's role in World War II. In 2007, for example, 120 LDP members of the parliament sought to retract the Kono Statement, the Japanese government's official statement of apology to former Comfort Women. (The Kono Statement was made in 1993, when LDP briefly lost power.)
Today, yet another head of LDP serving as Japan's head of state after having won two landslide elections. Shinzo Abe, grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, is proceeding with full speed ahead to completely deny Imperial Japan's responsibility for World War II. He denied that the Japanese military kept sex slaves; proclaimed that he would revise the Kono Statement (before backing off after massive international pressure); gave a grinning thumbs-up sitting in a fighter jet numbered 731 (as in Unit 731) and; is leading the movement to amend Japan's pacifist constitution. And the good Japanese people, the well-meaning history deniers, are allowing all of this to happen, as they have for the last 50 years.
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