The Trouble With Japanese Nationalism

markwu

The trouble with Japanese nationalism
by Francis Fukuyama

Barely half a year into his premiership, Japan's Shinzo Abe is provoking anger across Asia and mixed feelings in his country's key ally, the United States.


But will the Bush administration use its influence to nudge Abe away from inflammatory behavior? Abe's predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, was a mould-breaking leader, reviving Japan's economy, reforming the postal savings system, and smashing the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party's faction system.  But Koizumi also legitimised a new Japanese nationalism, antagonising China and South Korea by his annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine.  If anything, Abe is even more committed to building an assertive and unapologetic Japan.


Anyone who believes that the Yasukuni controversy is an obscure historical matter that Chinese and Koreans use to badger Japan for political advantage has probably never spent much time there. The problem is not the 12 Class-A war criminals interred at the shrine; the real problem is the Yushukan military museum next door.  


Walking past the Mitsubishi Zero, tanks and machine guns on display in the museum, one finds a history of the Pacific War that restores "the Truth of Modern Japanese History".   It follows the nationalist narrative: Japan, a victim of the European colonial powers, sought only to protect the rest of Asia from them. Japan's colonial occupation of Korea, for example, is described as a "partnership"; one looks in vain for any account of the victims of Japanese militarism in Nanjing or Manila.  One might be able to defend the museum as one viewpoint among many in a pluralist democracy.  But there is no other museum in Japan that gives an alternative view of Japan's twentieth-century history.  Successive Japanese governments have hidden behind the Yushukan museum's operation by a private religious organisation to deny responsibility for the views expressed there.  That is an unconvincing stance. In fact, unlike Germany, Japan has never come to terms with its own responsibility for the Pacific War.  Although socialist prime minister Tomiichi Murayama officially apologised to China in 1995 for the war, Japan has never had a genuine internal debate over its degree of responsibility, and has never made a determined effort to propagate an alternative account to that of Yushukan.


My exposure to the Japanese right came in the early 1990s, when I was on a couple of panels in Japan with Watanabe Soichi, who was selected by my Japanese publisher (unbeknownst to me) to translate my book "The End of History and the Last Man" into Japanese. Watanabe, a professor at Sophia University, was a collaborator of Shintaro Ishihara, the nationalist politician who wrote "The Japan That Can Say No" and is now the governor of Tokyo.  In the course of a couple of encounters, I heard him explain in front of public audiences how the people of Manchuria had tears in their eyes when the occupying Kwantung Army left China, so grateful were they to Japan. According to Watanabe, the Pacific War boiled down to race, as the US was determined to keep a non-white people down. Watanabe is the equivalent of a Holocaust denier, but, unlike his German counterparts, he draws large and sympathetic audiences. (I am regularly sent books by Japanese writers that "explain" how the Nanjing Massacre was a big fraud.)


Moreover, there have been several disturbing recent incidents in which physical intimidation has been used by nationalists against critics of Koizumi's Yasukuni visits, such as the firebombing of former prime ministerial candidate Kato Koichi's home. (On the other hand, the publisher of the normally conservative Yomiuri Shimbun attacked Koizumi's Yasukuni visits and published a fascinating series of articles on responsibility for the war.)  This leaves the US in a difficult position.  A number of American strategists are eager to ring China with a Nato-like defensive barrier, building outward from the US-Japan Security Treaty.  Since the final days of the Cold War, the US has been pushing Japan to re-arm, and has officially supported a proposed revision of Article 9 of the post-war constitution, which bans Japan from having a military or waging war. But America should be careful about what it wishes for.  The legitimacy of the entire American military position in the Far East is built around the US exercising Japan's sovereign function of self-defence. Japan's unilateral revision of Article 9, viewed against the backdrop of its new nationalism, would isolate Japan from virtually the whole of Asia.  Revising Article 9 has long been part of Abe's agenda, but whether he pushes ahead with it will depend in large part on the kind of advice he gets from close friends in the US.   President Bush was unwilling to say anything about Japan's new nationalism to his "good friend Junichiro" out of gratitude for Japanese support in Iraq.  Now that Japan has withdrawn its small contingent of troops, perhaps Bush will speak plainly to Abe.

Francis Fukuyama

Francis Fukuyama is Dean of the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and chairman of The American Interest.

ref:
the author
http://tinyurl.com/ytq444

the article
http://tinyurl.com/2ct8hw
http://tinyurl.com/ytl3kq

markwu

Japan's Memory Lapses
Max Boot, Senior Fellow for National Security Studies,
Council of Foreign Relations, US

.......On a recent visit to Tokyo, I stopped by the Yasukuni-jinja shrine located not far from the imperial palace. Its bland name, which translates as "for the repose of the country," conceals an incendiary content. Enshrined here are Japanese war heroes, including a number who were branded as Class A war criminals by the Allied occupation.

Every year Japanese cabinet ministers and members of the royal family make a pilgrimage here, which always causes a certain amount of international consternation. The unvarying defense of these visits— akin to a German politician visiting an SS cemetery— is that the dignitaries come in their individual capacity only, and, in any case, they come to celebrate valorous deeds, not to endorse the cause in which they were committed.

The adjoining Yushukan Military Museum shows how unconvincing these excuses are. It is, in essence, a two-story apologia for everything that Japan did between 1895 and 1945. During those years, Japan started at least four major wars and committed numerous atrocities as it attempted to annex Korea, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, and other parts of Asia. Tens of millions of people died as a result. Nothing the Japanese did compares to the systematic genocide carried out by the Nazis, but their crimes were bad enough, not the least being those carried out against helpless American, British, and Australian POWs, who were lucky if they survived captivity as emaciated shadows of their former selves.

There is no hint of any of this at Yushukan. The captions alongside tattered uniforms and rusting helmets are a study in amnesia. The museum all but blames the Chinese for the massacre carried out by Japanese troops in Nanking in 1938, though the actual atrocities (which killed more than 200,000 people) are never referred to. The caption, conveniently offered in both Japanese and English, merely mentions that the Chinese defenders were "soundly defeated, suffering heavy casualties." The result? "Inside the city, residents were once again able to live their lives in peace." The ones who were still alive, that is.

Americans may think that Japan started World War II in the Pacific (remember Pearl Harbor?), but the museum has a different view:  "It was all FDR's fault." According to another caption, the crafty American president schemed to enter the war to end his country's economic malaise, "but was hampered by American public opinion, which was strongly antiwar. The only option open to Roosevelt, who had been moving forward with his 'Plan Victory,' was to use embargoes to force resource-poor Japan into war.  The U.S. economy made a complete recovery once the Americans entered the war."

Unsettling as all this is, the creepiest exhibits are those highlighting Japan's suicidal resistance in the last days of the war.  The museum proudly displays a human aerial bomb ("Oka") and a human torpedo ("Kaiten"), replicas of those employed in attacks on American ships. There is even a giant painting depicting the "Divine Thunderbolt Corps"— aka the kamikazes— "in final attack mode at Okinawa," framed against beautifully lighted clouds. There is no hint that this fanatical failure to accept defeat— which amounted to a national religion in Japan— consigned hundreds of thousands of civilians to an early grave, and for no good purpose.

One can understand, sort of, the glorification of men who willingly gave their lives in attacks on enemy military targets.  But what about Japanese soldiers who raped Korean and Chinese women? What about those who killed liberal Japanese politicians in the 1930s?  The Yasukuni's official website makes no distinction: "All the deities worshipped here at this shrine are those who . . . sacrificed themselves as the foundation stones for the making of modern Japan." That's like saying that Confederate soldiers were the foundation stones of modern America— which they were, but only because they were defeated. If they had won, modern America would have been unthinkable. Likewise, modern Japan— peaceful and rich— would never have come about if the militarists who dictated policy until 1945 had remained triumphant.

The views expressed at the Yasukuni are hardly universally held in Japan, but neither are they confined to a lunatic fringe. Just days before I visited the shrine, the popular governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, who won reelection in a landslide this year, ignited a controversy by asserting that Korea had asked to be annexed by Japan in 1910— something that comes as news to Koreans, who still have bitter memories of the occupation that ended in 1945. Few Asians, indeed, would share the self-serving view expressed on the Yasukuni's website: "Japan's dream of building a Great East Asia was necessitated by history and it was sought after by the countries of Asia." Far from being sought, Japanese occupation was actively resisted by many Chinese, Vietnamese, Burmese, Filipinos, and other patriots who had no desire to be part of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere......

markwu

next to the Yasukuni-jinja:

markwu

that Zero which bombed villages...

markwu

the villagers didn't.

markwu

markwu