[第12回]A new solution to Japan’s history problems
Jennifer Lind
While researching my book about war memory in international politics, I conducted many interviews in Tokyo. I had no idea that the most important conversation I would have was over breakfast one morning with my Japanese hosts. I was staying with the parents of a Japanese friend: after years of friendship and several visits to each other's homes, her parents were now so dear to me that I called them "Mama" and "Papa."
I was drawn to my book topic because of East Asia's frequent history disputes. Chinese and Koreans protested Japan's history textbooks, statements made by high-level Japanese officials, and visits to Yasukuni Shrine by Japanese prime ministers. Along with these disputes grew a conventional wisdom, expressed on op-ed pages across the world. After World War II, Germany offered extensive contrition for its crimes. Today, Western Europe was successfully reconciled. Thus, in order for East Asia to reconcile, Japan had to emulate Germany: Tokyo should apologize and pay reparations to its victims. In my book I sought to test this common argument, and, more broadly, to examine the link between memory and international reconciliation.
As I began my research, holes began to appear in the conventional wisdom about East Asia's struggles with memory. Commentators argued that Japan's history problem would go away if Japan apologized "once and for all." But I found that Japanese leaders had apologized many times. Some apologies were rather evasive, such as one by Foreign Minister Etsusaburo Shiina in 1965 and another by Emperor Hirohito, posthumously called Emperor Showa, in 1984. But others, such as Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa's 1993 apology to South Korea, or Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama's landmark statement in 1995, were very impressive.
In contrast to the conventional view, I realized that Japan's history problem stemmed not from a failure to apologize, but from the domestic controversy that such apologies provoked. Each time a leader would offer an apology, some politicians or intellectuals would denounce it, sometimes even denying Japan's past atrocities. Similarly, the release of more self-critical history textbooks prompted conservatives to mobilize to write their own books, which glossed over Japanese atrocities. When I told my friends, family and colleagues about the backlash pattern I had observed, they would ask me, "What's wrong with Japan?"
The question would be answered in that chance conversation with Mama and Papa. As we sat at the breakfast table, Papa's eyes crinkled warmly at me as he asked, "Who are you interviewing today?" I told him I had a meeting at Atarashii Kyokasho o Tsukurukai, the organization that had authored a controversial history textbook. According to what I had read, they were a group of right-wing fanatics who lied about history and wanted to invigorate Japanese nationalism. When I said where I was going, Mama (who does most of the talking) said, "Oh, Papa admires them very much." Papa nodded stoutly.
I stared at him. The gears in my brain clunked as I struggled to make sense of how one of the kindest, gentlest and most decent human beings I had ever met could possibly support what I assumed to be an evil organization. After this conversation, I would never think about my research in the same way.
Japan's debates about its past are often caricatured in the Western press as a struggle between right-wing deniers who oppose apologies, and a few gallant liberals who favor them. Analysts, myself included, ignored the vast political space between. We had ignored Papa: the mainstream conservative view. We had ignored how, after a terrible war, people naturally focus on their own suffering. Remembering their dead loved ones as heroes, people are reluctant to support policies that cast the war dead as criminals. In democracies, this reluctance translates into policy because politicians have electoral incentives to represent their constituents' views.
I began thinking about people like Papa in the United States: the deeply proud, so-called "greatest generation." Along with most other Americans, they believe that they liberated Europe and Asia. They would probably say that the killing of perhaps 1 million German and Japanese civilians in incendiary bombings was a regrettable but necessary price to pay to win a war that those countries started. Many Americans would be outraged at the notion that Washington should apologize for those actions. Indeed, veterans' groups and the U.S. Congress denounced a proposed 1995 Smithsonian Museum exhibition that displayed the horrors of the Hiroshima attack and questioned the necessity of the bombing.
I saw "Papa" in many other countries as well. I saw the reluctance of many Austrians to confront their country's culpability in World War II and the Holocaust. Many of them lent their support to the far-right politician Joerg Haider in part because he offered a prideful vision of the Austrian past. I saw the anger of many British people when some of their countrymen proposed apologies to Ireland, or apologies for the slave trade. In sum, at that breakfast conversation, Papa showed me that nothing is "wrong" with Japan. A backlash to contrition is predictable. It occurs not only in Japan, but all over the world.
From this, I realized that the puzzle to be explained was not the presence of a backlash in Japan, but its absence in Germany. I believe the explanation relates to West Germany's dire strategic circumstances after the war. West German conservatives, those most likely to denounce contrition, had powerful reasons to keep quiet. Their key foreign policy goals--German reunification, rearmament, 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 were far more severe than those faced by Japan, or by most countries.
Because of the likelihood of a backlash, Japan is unlikely to solve its history problem by following Germany's model of extensive contrition. But there is another model for Japan, which also comes, interestingly enough, from Germany: the strategy pursued under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in the early years after the war.
During the 1950s, West Germany acknowledged its past crimes: no mainstream leaders denied the Holocaust or German aggression. Bonn also paid reparations to Israel and to individual victims around the world. At the same time, the country was not very contrite. Historians and textbooks glossed over the recent past. Museums and monuments remembered Germany's own suffering. Germany's legendary contrition--the profound public apologies, monuments to victims, legal trials, and increasingly vast reparations--did not begin until the 1960s and still later.
Despite its limited contrition, West Germany reconciled with France in the 1950s. As evident in poll data, government documents, and leaders' memoirs, France's deep mistrust of the Germans began to dissolve in the mid-1950s, and by the early 1960s, the French saw West Germany as their closest ally. Bonn's avoidance of denials in those years was an important step that did indeed facilitate reconciliation. But Germany's extensive contrition was clearly not necessary: It came later. Many other countries (notably the United States and Japan) have similarly reconciled without much contrition on either side for past violence.
If Japan wants to alleviate its history problem, Adenauer's model is a promising one for Tokyo to emulate. As it does so, Japan's leaders should avoid domestically polarizing gestures such as official apologies or Diet resolutions. The absence of such triggering events should reduce outbursts by conservatives, which damage Japan's foreign relations and international reputation.
At the same time, Japan must also consistently show that it rejects militarism. This means that its leaders should refrain from visiting Yasukuni Shrine, which Japan's neighbors view as an incendiary symbol because war criminals are among those honored there. As many Japanese moderates have already proposed, Japan might honor its veterans at the Chidorigafuchi cemetery or at a new secular memorial.
Similarly, Japan must establish and defend the boundaries of acceptable public debate about the past. Just as West German acknowledgment of past crimes reassured a nervous Europe, Japan's leaders and its people can show that they will not tolerate denials or glorifications of past invasions or atrocities. Alternatively, the rest of the world will conclude that Japan has not renounced the tools of its imperial-era massacres, mass rape, invasions, colonization--as tools of statecraft in the 21st century.
Japan's conservatives might protest that this prescription will deflate Japanese patriotism, but this need not be the case. Under the Adenauer model, West Germany acknowledged past violence but emphasized its postwar achievements. Like Germany, Japan has a great deal of which it can be proud. Despite its limited natural resources and small size, her hardworking people like Mama and Papa raised the country from utter devastation to be one of the wealthiest, most stable, technologically sophisticated and creative countries in the world. A model global citizen in so many ways, Japan is peaceful, generous with international aid, and a leader in environmental conservation and energy efficiency. Japanese leaders who wish to cultivate pride within their people have a great deal they can say.
Critics might protest that Adenauer's approach only worked for West Germany because its neighbors were willing partners. This is an important point: At times, authoritarian leaders in South Korea and China have fomented anti-Japanese nationalism. But South Korea's democratic leaders no longer need cultivate false legitimacy. And the Chinese government has frequently been willing to protect Sino-Japanese relations to avoid disrupting thriving bilateral trade and to advance other common interests.
Regardless of the choices made by other countries, Japan can alleviate it history problem by adopting the Adenauer model. The sooner Japan can put its past behind it, the sooner it will be able to assume a degree of regional and global leadership that will not only benefit Japan, but also the rest of the world.
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The author is assistant professor of government at Dartmouth College. This essay is based on her book, "Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics" (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). Another version of this essay appeared in the May/June 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs <http://www.foreignaffairs.com>