Owning up to World War II actions

By Michael Hill, Baltimore Sun Staff

Originally published April 24, 2005


In the past few weeks, China has brought new passion to an old argument
with Japan, journeying to the past for evidence that its Asian rival is
not worthy of international leadership in the future.

The issue is six decades old -- Japan's not accepting responsibility
for its actions in what turned into World War II. Demonstrators
throughout China have once again expressed their displeasure at
Japanese high school history textbooks that they say do not adequately
depict Japanese atrocities during that war.

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi attempted to cool the crisis
on Friday by offering an unexpected but carefully couched "heartfelt
apology" for the "tremendous damage and suffering" inflicted by Japan
during World War II."

But China was in no hurry to accept.

The subtext is China's attempt to thwart Japanese ambitions, including
its move for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

As their more-than-a-millennium rivalry for dominance in Asia moves
into the 21st century, the Chinese have found history and memory to be
one of their most potent weapons.

Scholars agree that compared with Germany, Japan has botched the issue
of acknowledging its guilt in World War II, giving the Chinese and
others an opening for these attacks.

But the comparison is not one of clear contrast, as German apologies
were motivated by much more than altruism, while Japan faced a
different set of circumstances when it confronted the issue of owning
up to its past after the war.

When Americans think of World War II in the Pacific, there is the
outrage of Pearl Harbor, the savagery of Bataan and Iwo Jima, and, for
many, the guilt of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the years after the Japanese surrender, an American occupation led
by Gen. Douglas MacArthur seemed to remake Japan as an Asian United
States. The former combatants shook hands and admired each other's
courage and honor. The history was agreed upon. The war was in the
past.

The view is different in Asia -- where many countries were conquered
and became parts of an empire held together by brutal oppression.

There, many say they are still awaiting signs of humble contrition and
apology of the type that has come from Germany over its role in that
war.

"Certainly the Japanese tried to avoid facing up to the past in the way
that the Germans did," says Thomas Berger, a professor of political
science at Boston University who wrote Cultures of Antimilitarism:
National Security in Germany and Japan, considered the definitive study
comparing the postwar attitudes of the two countries.

Jeffrey Herf, a historian of Germany at the University of Maryland says
the United States has no real complaint in this matter.

"Germany reconciled with the United States no more nor less than Japan
reconciled with the United States," he says. "... The dramatic
difference is between the way Germany dealt with Eastern Europe, the
Soviet Union and Jews, and the way the Japanese dealt with the rest of
Asia."

But the Germans had little choice. Unlike the Japanese, they did not
live on an island, but cheek by jowl with the countries they had
invaded. Germany was also facing universal denunciation for its murder
of 6 million Jews.

Though Berger says German apologies -- which took the concrete form of
extensive aid for the new country of Israel -- were undoubtedly
sincere, the Germans recognized that they were in their self-interest.

"There were very hard-nosed calculations of self-interest on both
sides," he says.

Germany had similar reconciliation programs with Holland and France in
the immediate postwar years, going so far as to appoint a commission
with the French to write the history of the war and occupation, to
avoid the kind of squabbles going on between Japan and China.

It was the 1970s -- the era of detente between the United States and
the Soviet Union and so-called ostpolitik in Germany -- that saw German
leaders apologizing to countries to its east that had suffered the
worst of Nazi atrocities. This has gone on to this day -- reparations
paid to war slaves six decades later as German businesses move into
former communist countries.

In December 1970, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt went to Warsaw,
Poland, and sent an unmistakable image out to the world when he fell to
his knees before the monument at the site of the Jewish ghetto.

"Some of his German constituents hit the roof," Herf says. "It was very
unpopular in some circles. But it was a very important breakthrough
because Brandt sent out a signal to people who didn't speak German --
who might not have known the ins and outs of this history -- that this
is a different Germany. This is a new Germany."

There have been carefully worded acceptances of responsibility by the
Japanese that usually use a word translated as "reflect upon" rather
than "apologize for." There has been acknowledgement of the use of
"comfort women," essentially sex slaves for Japanese soldiers taken
from the occupied countries, particularly Korea.

But there have also been hard-nosed agreements with Asian countries
seeking a relationship with Japan and its powerful economy that
specifically renounced any call for war reparations. And every few
years since China first raised the issue in 1982, there are the
textbooks.

Japanese textbooks are privately written but approved by a government
board for use in schools. The dispute is that some of those approved
have passages that are worded in a way that leaves them open to
criticism. These books are an apparent sop to the right-wing
nationalist movement in Japan.

Constantine N. Vaporis, a historian of Japan at the University of
Maryland, Baltimore County, says it should be noted that the last time
a controversial textbook was approved, three schools in Japan chose to
use it.

"That speaks volumes about how much acknowledgement of responsibility
has gone on in the country," he says. "You have to look at it on two
levels -- the government policy level and what is happening at the
ground level.

"There, I think in general terms, people have come to a reckoning and
acknowledge Japan's wrongs in China," Vaporis says. "... There are some
right-wing elements in there that find sympathetic ears in some
quarters of the ruling party."

Andrew Oros, a political scientist at Washington College, points out
that there are similar battles in the United States.

"In Japan, these books should be understood in the broader context of
the rise of nationalism," he says. "It is like some allegations made by
people on the right, some Republicans in this country, about textbooks
that have too many women or minorities, or spend too much time on the
pillage of Indians or the plight of black slaves and not enough on
American accomplishments."

The main issue is the depiction of the so-called Rape of Nanjing. As
many as 300,000 civilians died in this centerpiece of Japan's brutal
occupation of China. Oros says this might be one paragraph or sentence
in a textbook covering the whole of Japanese history.

Berger says one reason for the Japanese stubbornness is that they are
adamant that whatever they did, they were not as bad as the Nazis.

"While the Japanese pacification program was extraordinarily brutal and
killed millions of Asian civilians, no matter how horrible it was, it
was different in terms of scale and intent to what happened in Europe
at Auschwitz," he says. "The Japanese did not want to exterminate the
Chinese. They wanted to subjugate them."

Berger also points out that the postwar narrative Japan faced differed
from that of the Germans. After the war, the Asia that Japan had sought
to subjugate -- in its mind, free from European domination -- was
mostly communist and sealed off. Without anything like an Israel --
which forced the Germans to face up to what it did in countries behind
the Iron Curtain -- the Japanese did not have to confront its
atrocities.

And their American occupiers did not force the issue. Berger says the
Tokyo war crimes trials were "poorly handled," and, unlike Nuremberg,
did not implant a sense of guilt in the country. The Americans did not
even bring some of the worst offenders to justice -- for instance
making a deal with Shiro Ishii, who used humans as subjects of his germ
warfare experiments, giving him immunity in return for his research.

Then there is the fact that the Japanese emperor, the head of state,
was not held accountable for what his nation did. The decision by the
U.S. authorities to let Japan retain its emperor was made to help
ensure stability in the occupied country, but many think it enabled the
Japanese to think that their nation was not at fault, that only a few
militaristic leaders were.

Berger also says the lack of suitable opposition figures to staff a new
government meant that too many members of the wartime regime remained
in positions of power, another contrast with Germany.

Shu Guang Zhang, an expert on Chinese foreign policy at the University
of Maryland, also blames the lack of tradition of critical scholarship
in Japan.

"Japanese historians have been accustomed to doing only textual
research," he says. "That is very, very different than critical,
analytical history."

The result, Zhang says, is that intellectual arguments in Japan about,
say, the Rape of Nanjing often focus on details -- exactly how many
were killed, if the rapes were systematic or individual, if it fits the
definition of an atrocity -- ignoring larger questions about morality
and responsibility.

Oros says that, whatever the missteps on the textbook issue, Japanese
leaders in the past decade have issued statements that were celebrated
as apologies in China. He says the English translation of statements
made by Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama on the 50th anniversary of the
end of the war included the words "my feelings of deep remorse" and
"heartfelt apology."

"I really don't know what it is that the Japanese could do that they
would be quite sure the Chinese would accept," he says.

They might get an idea from Willy Brandt's gesture in Warsaw.

"That's the major reason he got the Nobel Peace Prize" in 1971, says
the University of Maryland's Herf. "As far as I know, no Japanese
political leader has won the Nobel Peace Prize."

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