Asia.view

The ghost of wartimes past

Nov 5th 2008
From Economist.com

Japan’s history wars erupt again


THE farce has some distinctly Japanese elements, not all of them necessarily clarified in the retelling. The first is that a hotel and condominium developer would think to sponsor a tasty ¥3m ($30,000) prize for an essay competition on the subject of “The True Outlook for Modern and Contemporary History”.

A bland enough title, perhaps. Except that in Japan “true” is a code word among right-wing nuts for a revisionist interpretation of the wartime past which denies that Japan was an aggressor or that it committed atrocities. For most adherents of the “true” view, the conflict in which Japan was responsible for the deaths of 20m Asians was above all a war of liberation, while the Nanjing massacre of December 1937, in which countless thousands of Chinese citizens died (Asia.view will not get into a numbers game), is a phantasm of left-wing axe-grinders. The head of the competition jury is one of the chief nuts, Shoichi Watanabe, an elderly professor of exquisite manners and chairman of the Japan Bibliophile Society who has been accused of plagiarism.

AP Tamogami the denier

A second and curious element is that among the 230-odd contestants, it turns out, some 50 were officers of Japan’s self-defence forces (SDF). Japan’s pacifist constitution, written by Americans after the country’s defeat, severely curtails what the SDF may do. Some officers may chafe at the limitations—the United States certainly does, since it cannot count on its ally for really meaningful help in international operations such as in Iraq or Afghanistan. Thanks to the constitution’s interpretation, America cannot even count on Japan to help defend it, say, against a nuclear missile attack from North Korea. But for so many SDF members to feel authorised to echo a lot of the revisionist nonsense is rum indeed.

Quite astounding is that the competition winner, Toshio Tamogami, was the head of Japan’s air force. His offering is a barely warm hash of thrice-cooked revisionism. Japan’s was a war of self-defence, protecting its perfectly legal territories of Manchuria (North-East China) and Korea against Communist conspirators. Pearl Harbour was a trap laid by the Americans. Japan’s colonial rule was more than benevolent; it was a liberation of Asia from the yoke of Western imperialism—indeed, neighbours look upon wartime Japan with affection. Japan must “reclaim its glorious history”, General Tamogami concluded, with a barrel-rolling flourish and a glorious lack of irony, “for a country that denies its own history is destined to fall.”

On October 31st General Tamogami was promptly sacked by Taro Aso, Japan’s prime minister for all of five weeks. China and South Korea expressed shock, but accepted that such views were not government policy.

End of story? Not quite. The revelation (since the sacking) of the 50-odd other essay-scribbling servicemen gives the unavoidable impression of those radicalised officers’ messes of the 1930s, out of which the Japanese military grabbed control of civilian rule; the rest was, well, history. So the prime minister has some explaining to do, and the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, seeking to bring down the coalition led by his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), will make all the hay it can. It wants General Tamogami soon to testify before the Diet.

Then there is the prime minister himself. In the past, Mr Aso, in a shoot-from-the-hip way, has echoed many of the same right-wing views. He has, for instance, praised Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea from 1910-45—though the Aso mining company from which the family’s fortunes derive used Korean slave labour during the second world war. Since he became prime minister, however, Mr Aso has been on his best behaviour. His government, like its predecessors, endorses fulsome apologies, first formulated in the mid-1990s, accepting Japanese guilt and remorse.

But the day he sacked the general, Mr Aso could not resist picking up a volume of similar views from a Tokyo bookstore. Few people would deny that Mr Aso is doing his bit to improve tricky relations with neighbours, China and South Korea in particular. But just as with his predecessor-but-one, Shinzo Abe—who while in office claimed, despite copious evidence and depositions from the victims themselves, that Japan’s military had not forced women into prostitution—few doubt that at an emotional if not intellectual level, Mr Aso holds views very similar to the general’s.

General Tamogami does himself no favours by complaining about his sacking, which involves him keeping a ¥6m retirement bonus (he compared Japan’s freedom of speech to North Korea’s). Jeffrey Kingston, a history professor at Temple University in Tokyo, underlines that the general’s “extreme views are rejected by most Japanese and lampooned by many.”

But for Mr Aso, Mr Kingston says, the incident has swiftly turned into a high-wire act in which he must reassure Japan’s neighbours without destroying his own conservative base. The furious complaints against the prize winner by a former minister of his and another essayist, Nariaki Nakayama, hardly help Mr Aso: Mr Nakamaya rants that the victory of General Tamogami’s weak-kneed essay instead of his own is proof that the jury was hijacked by the pacifists and Commies in Japan’s teacher’s union.


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