Misplaced  Loyalty  With  Racism

         The Denial  and  Its Cost of Nanking Massacre

 

 

 Retired Minister

 

 

Humans are killers not because of any biological imperative, but because of our capacity for misplaced loyalty.  We have done and will do in the name of a wider allegiance what we would shirk to do in our own nature.  Our massive, organized killings (which distinguish us from all other animals) are often done in “good faith.”  We kill others because we are loyal to our gods.  We have been obedient for so long to our tribal gods that we have made them our idols.

 

 

 

She started the lecture with her own life experience of hearing and learning of the war crimes in Nanking, and proceeded to how she collected the data by conducting numerous interviews with the victims and their descendants in writing her book.  As she heard the witnesses and looked at the numerous detailed pictures of an orgy of violence that included looting, burning, raping, torturing and murdering, she spent many sleepless nights and lost considerable weight.  I was deeply moved by her capacity to suffer with the victims and her passion for justice.

 

Iris Chang was invited as a keynote speaker to the fifth Biennial Conference of Global Alliance for Preserving the History of WW II in Asia (GA) which took place in San Diego in November of 2002.  That was when I met Chang for the second time.  Participating in that conference was an eye-opening experience for me and I decided to join the local chapter of GA.  The officers and members of Association for Preserving Historical Accuracy of Foreign Invasion in China, APHAFIC, have welcomed me and I too have shared in the pains, frustrations and passions for justice with the group as the sole native Japanese member.  Through the activities of this group I was able to meet Iris Chang for the third time face to face.  I was privileged to give a speech at Chang’s Memorial Dinner Party sponsored by APHAFIC.

 

 

“Banzai!  Banzai!  Banzai!”  Whenever a young man was recruited by the military authority, all the neighbors gathered in front of his house and shouted these cheers with great pride.  “I will fight for the Emperor to the ultimate limit of my capacity and will not regret to die for the honor of him if necessary,” the young recruit would respond in oath.  I had witnessed many “sending off” parties in Osaka during the World War II.  Even my father, who was a Christian minister and was engaged in social work in the poor district of the same city, was cheered three times as he recited the routine oath to get ready to go to the front near the end of the W.W.II.

 

 

My father taught his children to honor both the Emperor and the Christian God.  The main reason that we honored the Emperor was to avoid neighbors’ suspicious eyes and ears towards our Christianity, then considered an enemy’s religion.  We sang two songs out loud before meals.  One was a Christian song that says, “Praised be the gracious God who gives us daily food.  Amen” and the other was a popular military song which meant, “When we proceed to the sea, there are a lot of corpses in the water.  When we walk on the mountains, we see many corpses rotten in the grass.  We will, however, never regret of our death, for we die for the honor of the Emperor.”  During the War, one’s ultimate proof of loyalty meant to die for the Emperor, the divine being.

 

The military government tightly monopolized all the media in Japan under its authority.  This, in effect, was to brainwash and to have total thought control over its citizens.  I recall some of the wartime posters posted on electricity poles, street corners and bathhouse bulletin boards.  “Devilish Animals = Americans and Britons.”  “Attack and Destroy the Enemies Without Ceasing.”  “Don’t Spread any Demagoguery.”  “100 Millions Shall Die for Honor.”  The Emperor Hirohito’s voice was only heard for the first time on the radio by the most Japanese when he announced the unconditional surrender of Japan to the United States on August 15, 1945.  During his short radio broadcast, men and women went down on their knees and cried and cried bitterly.  Why?  They blamed themselves for putting the Emperor to the shame of that unbearable defeat.  “We failed to be loyal to Your Majesty till our death.”

 

Although his “divinity” was completely deprived of any real power after W.W.II,  recent right-wing loyalists and conservative politicians have tried to raise up the Emperor’s divine status whenever possible.  The modern media has assisted in this trend by calling the Emperor’s family members, even a newborn baby boy, with the title of honor, “sama”.   My friend in Tokyo, a professor emeritus, just recently remarked, “we can no longer talk about the Emperor System freely as we used to.  It has become a taboo.”  Being awarded an order by the Emperor means to receive the highest honor for one’s achievement.  Those that are awarded this honor are the leaders of society.  The Emperor has now taken to calling them, “My Subjects.”   Ominously it seems, Emperor worship has gradually come back to Japan.

 

 

 

 

I must confess that I too had been one of the vicious racists while in Japan and, worse, I didn’t even know it.  I was made aware of the humiliating and embarrassing effects of racism as my family and I experienced and suffered racism, mostly subtle and institutional, here in the United States.

                                

This racism stemming from the fictitious superiority complex is still alive and strong in today’s Japan.  It devours many victims who happen to be considered the “outsiders” in Japanese society.

 

 

                                                                                                                                            Recent remarks by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe regarding “The Comfort Women” revealed his real intention for the denial of war crimes committed by the Imperial Military Forces during the World War II.  His campaign slogan last year was “Beautiful Japan,” which reflects the right-wing loyalists’ hope to restore “national self-identity and self-esteem.”  Because the Japanese take great pride in their recent past history of practicing more than 60 years of pacifism and becoming the world’s second largest economy, they feel a sense of arrogance in their shallow and showy nationalism.  By the same token, the international communities cannot ignore this peculiar Japanese nationalism.  It has led to an international furor when the Japanese government’s intentional denial of historical facts of the brutal and massive war crimes has come to the world’s attention.  CBS News Correspondent Barry Petersen states: “the anger revolves around recently approved school textbooks, which whitewash Japan’s history of the first half of the 20th Century: its decades long occupation of Korea, its invasion of China, its brutal 1937 massacre in Nanjing that, by most accounts, took 300,000 lives.”(2)   300,000 victims?  Although the numbers of victims at the massacre are in dispute among historians, the obvious fact that brutal and massive killings took place under the Japanese Military Forces in Nanking should not be whitewashed in any textbook be it Japanese or otherwise.

 

Conscientious Japanese lawyers, historians and citizen activists have vigorously supported the more than two dozen lawsuits filed by Chinese victims of biological warfare, abandoned chemical weapons, the Nanking massacre, indiscriminate aerial bombing, military sexual slavery, and forced labor in Japan.  Nearly all the lawsuits have, however, failed on the ground that the Joint Communiqué signed by China and Japan in 1972 waived the right of Chinese individuals to seek redress from the Japanese government or its corporations.  This stance has become the Japanese government’s unbending position.  However, the Joint Communiqué waived only the Chinese government’s reparations claims against the Japanese government, while leaving the claim rights of private Chinese citizens intact. (3)   Morally speaking, the Supreme Court has missed many great opportunities to rule in favor of the Chinese plaintiffs who deserved to have their day in court.  Their painful stories should have been heard and they should have been compensated for their losses.  Instead, the Supreme Court upheld the government position denying the plaintiffs a just and humane ruling.

 

John Rabe who helped save hundreds of thousands of Chinese during the Rape of Nanking as the dedicated and efficient leader of the International Safety Zone found himself destitute and leading a miserable life on his return to his native land of Germany.  Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese officials offered him an apartment and a pension if he were willing to resettle in China.  “All he had to do was to be a witness for the prosecution at the Tokyo war crimes tribunal.  However, John Rabe declined.  In a message he left for his grandchildren, he explained: ‘I didn’t want to see any Japanese hang, although they deserve it. . . . There must be some atonement, some just punishment; but in my view the judgment should be spoken only by their own nation.’” (4)

 

The denial of Japan’s war crimes by the ruling conservative party and the right-wing loyalists will never instill national self identity and pride among the majority of conscientious people in Japan.  Intentional amnesia would not raise up any patriotism, either.   One simply cannot rewrite history as one pleases.    

 

The denial of wartime atrocities costs too much.  It has jeopardized international trust and respect toward Japan.  It has greatly damaged Japan’s relations with its neighbors.   The international communities again call for Japan’s sincere acknowledgment and apology of wartime atrocities and just compensation for the victims.

 

Human beings are killers because of our capacity for misplaced loyalty.   That misplaced loyalty can lead to disastrous consequences.  Loyalty to any Emperor is nothing but idolatry.

                                                                                                                                              

 

 

I welcome opportunities to give speeches and lectures on this subject at schools, churches and other organizations in Japan.

 

 

 

NOTES

 

 

1.  Crichton, Michael, “Rising Sun” New York: Knopf, Random House, 1992.        Page 219.  Also see: Page 204, pp. 260f., pp. 327f.

 

2.  Petersen, Barry, “Japan’s Nonstop Amnesia,” Tokyo, April 13, 2005.

cbsnews.com/stories/2005/04/13/listening_post/main687759.shtml  

 

 

4.  Rabe, John, “The Goodman of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe,”  translated by John Woods.  New York: A.A. Knopf, Random House, 1998.  Page 256.