The Causes of Japan’s Disregard and Denial of its War Crimes
Adrienne Yi Ling Chuck
Student, College Undergraduate
Middlebury, Vermont, USA
Although
they occurred over half a century ago, the atrocities committed by
Japan during World War II is still a volatile issue discussed today.
Whether or not Japan has repented the crimes they committed, and
whether or not adequate reparations have been made to the victims are
the matters being debated. Unlike most other perpetrating nations,
Japan has managed to avoid a large amount of international scrutiny for
its crimes. Both the cultural traditions of Japanese society and a
series of post-war events that led the Japanese to forget their war
crimes are the cause of this. The consequences of losing WWII, the
alliance between Japan and the United States, and the Japanese
authority’s unwillingness to educate their people have created an
isolated environment for the Japanese public, leading them to disregard
and deny the WWII atrocities.
The Consequences of Losing WWII
One
of the main reasons why Japan did not feel the guilt involved with
committing an atrocity is because they felt victimized after the war.
World War II ended with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which
were largely publicized and achieved worldwide sympathy for the
victims. The bombings caused a diversion of international and domestic
attention from any injustices Japan had made during the war to the
rebuilding of the bombed cities. The
Japanese also felt victimized because of economic consequences from
losing the war. The public’s response to the Tokyo Trials was a
rejection of the validity of these sentences instead of denouncing the
behavior of the accused officials. As Richard Falk puts it, the trials
were seen as “an acknowledgement imposed by the victors in the
war, and not by the Japanese government or the Japanese people.”1
They called the accused military officials the “victims of the
War Crimes Trials,” and developed a “surge of
compassion” 2
for them. Instead of being shunned by the Japanese public, the
accused criminals were welcomed back to their nation with honor and
acceptance.
After
the Second World War, the Japanese blocked out the memory of the loss
by focusing their attention elsewhere. For the Japanese, “the end
of the war meant an end to the hardship of war and a concentrated turn
to the many, and often painful, changes accompanying
democratization.”3
Many civilians had anti-war and anti-nationalistic feelings, believing
that the government’s propaganda drove the support for the war.
So the Japanese developed a pacifist constitution and worked on
rebuilding their nation through new democratic privileges. Their change
in focus towards economic development was “based on their own
sufferings, in other words, on the memory of the Japanese people as
victims.”4
Although the nation recovered through taking a peaceful route, their
aversion from the war made them forget their crimes. The memory of the
atrocities started to fade as the nation became economically stable
during the 1960s. Later, the Japanese grew “tired of ongoing
discussions of responsibility and compensation for things that happened
more than a half-century ago. Many seem[ed] also to be seeking a
positive identity and role in the world appropriate to the global
superpower Japan had become.”5 Japan chose to turn its back on the past and to focus solely on the future.
The Alliance between Japan and the United States
The
alliance between Japan and the United States that diverted
international attention away from Japanese war crimes, leading to a
lack of guilt on Japan’s part, was a result of the Cold War and
the U.S. occupation. The Cold War affected the international
community’s scrutiny on the Japanese war crimes. The United
States was pleased that Japan adopted democratic ideals so willingly
and “valued Japan’s position as a strategic ally during the
Cold War.”6
China, one of the countries victimized by Japan, was a Communist nation
and therefore an enemy in the U.S.’s eyes. The Western nations
were not about to break the alliance they had with Japan by
antagonizing it to come to terms with its crimes. In addition, after
WWII, China was in the midst of a civil war and “both the Chinese
governments purposefully neglected the incident as they focused on
establishing their political and economic strength.”7 International focus was not on the Japan’s war crimes.
Despite
the restrictions and censorship it had on Japan, the occupancy played
significant role in Japan’s denial. Trade and relations between
the U.S. and Japan flourished. Compared to the Nuremberg Trials, the
Tokyo Trials were much more lenient, perhaps because the United States
felt guilty for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Only a
few very high-ranking officials like General Matsui (responsible for
the Nanking Massacre) were prosecuted to represent the larger portion
of perpetrators. 8
And even so, others that were considerably responsible for war crimes
went free. As Kato Shuichi says, “ministers of General
Tojo’s cabinet, the equivalent of Hitler’s returned to
power quietly as political leaders in postwar Japan; ex-officers of the
tokko (Special Police), the Japanese counterpart of the Gestapo, came
to hold quite influential positions in the administration after the
war.”9 The Asian victims were not given the same media attention that the Jews were given after the war. Richard
Falk even goes so far to say that “racial, ethnic, religious, and
cultural factors made most Americans feel more affinity with European
victims than with Asian victims.”10
The
United States also hid evidence of certain atrocities. In the case of
Unit 731, General Douglas MacArthur traded the documented research from
the experiments for the international exposure of the facility. His
defense against his actions was that he was trying to protect the U.S.
from the Russians, who might have purchased the data and waged
biological warfare.11
The scientists who had conducted terrible experiments on prisoners were
integrated back into Japanese society as professors at top universities
or esteemed scientists.12
Japan’s Reluctance to Educate Its People
Japan,
as the perpetrating nation, did not go to many lengths to educate its
people of the atrocities. The government either neglected to reveal
information or destroyed the proof right after the war. It” has
never undertaken on its own initiative any trial of any person on war
crimes, a sharp contrast with the German attitudes toward Nazi
misconduct.”13
The government also placed pressure on those who knew about the
atrocities to keep quiet. Saburo Ienaga, a professor who has written
historical schoolbooks explains that despite the new freedoms of
expression from the U.S. occupation, all post-war textbooks were
reviewed and censored by the Ministry of Education. In 1983, Ienaga
wrote that Unit 731’s “cruel experiments” on
thousands of Chinese “were murder,” and the examiner
response was: “No credible scholarly research—articles or
books—have yet been published on this issue; it is premature to
discuss it in a textbook.”14
The government went to the same lengths to control the flood of
international coverage into the nation. Foreign newspapers and
magazines were confiscated before they reached Japanese readers.15
The flood of new information revealing Japan’s war crimes came
only after the death of Emperor Hirohito, the nation’s leader
during WWII, in 1989. It wasn’t until the death of the
Showa Emperor that victims could speak of their injustices.16
The
fact that very few perpetrators came forward to confess their crimes
also fueled the public’s denial of them. In many cases, the
perpetrator did not believe themselves to be criminals. As Ienaga puts
it, pre-war Japanese society was “inculcated with militarism
through the school system” and “the steady diet of
chauvinistic information encouraged jingoism.”17
Japan’s aggressive military nature helped justify the various
acts of brutality. There were also aspects of Japanese pre-war culture
that led to an intense racism towards other Asian nations. Hora Tomio,
Fujiwara Akira and Yoshida Yutaka wrote about “the oppressive
nature of Japan’s pre-war military system and the
emperor-centered nationalist ideology, which led to a contempt for the
Chinese people.”18
Concerning the rapes of the comfort women and civilians in Nanking,
Kasahara Tokushi suggests that the “sexual abuse of women”
was “deeply rooted in pre-war society.”19
The mentality of women as property rather than human beings mirrors the
underlying chauvinism in Japanese culture. The response from the
Japanese public also reinforced their mindset of not having committed
crimes by glorifying the soldiers when they came home. After the war,
there was little mea culpa for Japanese soldiers as victimizers of
other Asian nations. No one was accused for the Nanking massacre, the
biological experiments on human bodies, or for the deportation of the
Koreans to be used as forced labor in the Japanese mines, where many of
them died.20
Many
soldiers did not feel like they had done something wrong. After the
Tokyo Trials passed, there were not many accusations made until the
late 20th
century, when victims of war crimes finally spoke out. However, to
speak out was to be a traitor to Japan. Until the 1980s, when much more
information on the atrocities was revealed, many perpetrators had
gotten off free.
Journalists
contributed to Japanese amnesia because they did not think that it was
their responsibility to report such events. Despite new postwar
freedoms of speech and limited government censorship, the
“writers felt that it was neither their place nor duty to write
about issues that would denounce Japan’s reputation, and they
most likely did not have the verified information to do so.”21
Proof of the atrocities was hard to obtain, and in some cases, the
writers believed that writing about the issue was inappropriate. Most
post-war literature did not involve politics or history, perhaps
because it was an aversion to all the pre-war Japanese propaganda.
There was a trend amongst post-WWII writers in which they would
“put up a front of ignorance, on the pretext that as writers they
know nothing of politics, or just leave the pursuit of the
emperor’s war guilt to the Communist Party.”22
After the war, there were articles written on the atrocities in WWII,
but as Van C. Gessel says that in “the war writings from the
postwar perspective treat Japanese war atrocities, either to deny or
defend them or to reflect on their meaning.”23 The results of this were that the war crimes became hidden, ignored, or skewed stories in Japanese history.
Consequentially,
the Japanese public had no means of getting such information. Unlike
the Germans, who were forced by the Allied powers to witness the Jewish
concentration camps, the Japanese were not forced to realize the crimes
of their nation. They were unaware of the events that took place
overseas. Without a distribution of information from the international
community, government, or domestic journalists, the Japanese public had
no way of knowing. Kato Shuichi observes that “any sense of duty
to know the past on the part of the educated public has failed.”24
Coming from an aggressive military culture, the Japanese people
“considered Japan’s crimes of the 1930s and 1940s as merely
regrettable side effects of the war. For the Japanese people, they
were, although unfortunate, understandable and therefore
excusable.” 25 In the eyes of the Japanese, aggression was merely a battle tactic, and at most an unfortunate byproduct of war.
Disregard Escalates to Denial
During the latter part of the 20th
century, especially after the death of Emperor Hirohito and the flood
of new information covering the atrocities, various points of view on
the matter arose in Japan. Both pacifist and revisionist writers
started to pay attention to the war crimes. Although there were groups
that wanted to expose and preserve the memories of WWII such as the
Nanjing Incident Study Group, many radical revisionist groups wanted to
keep the atrocities hidden. In the 1980s, Fujioka Nobukatsu founded the
Liberal View of History Study Group and the Society for the Making of
New School Textbooks in History in the mid 1990s, groups aimed to
“correct” Japanese history.26 His motto was that if “Japanese are not proud of their own country, they will not be respected in the world.”27
He insists that the accusations of comfort women are “a grand
conspiracy for the destruction of Japan…The comfort women were
professional prostitutes, earning more than a general in the imperial
Japanese army, or as much as 100 times the pay of their soldier
customers.”28
According to the Fujioka Society, these women were driven by greed and
the desire for money. Fujioka is not the only one who takes a rightist
view. Itakura Yoshiaki, a Japanese historian stated that the actual
number of “illegally murdered” Chinese in Nanking was
between 13,000 and 19,000, a huge difference compared with
China’s official number of 300,000.29
What
worries many victim countries is that this ideology of preserving
Japan’s reputation is a popular one in Japan and particularly
appeals to the current Japanese younger generation. In 1997,
Fujioka’s first two volumes of History Not Taught in Textbooks “became two of Japan’s top ten best-sellers.”30 Kobayashi Yoshinori’s comic book Sensoron,
“On War,” “became one of the main topics of
intellectual debate in Japan in 1998 not only because of its effort to
justify Japan’s part in World War II but because it was popular
among the young.”31
The result of these history revision movements is the incorrect
education of an entire generation that will continue to deny
responsibility for their nation’s actions in future years.
Japan’s
amnesia of its war crimes is a result of its unique post-war situation:
the consequences of losing the war, the alliance between Japan and the
U.S. and the inefficient education of the Japanese public. The lack of
international scrutiny has played a large role in that it has not
placed pressure on the government to make its crimes known. The
inherent traditions in Japan also led some Japanese to view the crimes
as effects of war instead of as human injustices. Meanwhile, Japanese
citizens who have grown up without the knowledge of any war crimes
don’t know how to deal with the accusations. Japan’s denial
has placed strains on both international relations and national unity.
What can Japan do to better this situation? First of all, the
nation should have no apprehensions to issuing a formal, written
apology. Secondly, the government should make an effort to educate
their people about the truth of the matter. They cannot stifle the
viewpoints of the rightist groups aimed at revising history textbooks,
but the Ministry of Education would be smart to approve textbooks that
are internationally accepted. This in turn, would create a new identity
for the Japanese public, instead of an evasion of responsibility.
Thirdly, any artifacts that had been stolen during the Japanese
occupation should be returned to the original countries. These actions
would at least force Japan to admit its wrongdoings and gear the
country towards a more peaceful and just future.
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