Japanese Denials of Responsibility for War Crimes:  

Historical Background and Continuing Implications

 

 Daniel Joseph Pearlstein
Freshman

University Laboratory High School

 

 

    Largely due to the efforts of Iris Chang, the Rape of Nanking has come to epitomize the brutality of the Japanese Imperial Army during the period 1931-1945.  To this day, the Japanese government continues to deny or minimize Japanese responsibility for a vast number of atrocities committed in East Asia.  In this essay, I discuss the consequences of these atrocities and denials for Japanese relations with its neighbors and the United States.  

    Anti-Japanese sentiment in China, Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan continues to be a problem in the relations of these countries to Japan.  While in the cases of Korea, China, and Taiwan this anger can be traced to Japanese colonialism that began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Nehmer & McCune 1962, p. 483; Latourette & Wilbur, 1962, pp. 526-528), the wartime atrocities of the Japanese Imperial Army during its invasions and occupations over the period 1931-1945 are everywhere at the heart of the issue.  Moreover, anti-Japanese sentiments in these countries are reinforced by attempts of Japanese political leaders to deny that certain atrocities and other war crimes occurred, or by denials of responsibility for atrocities whose occurrence cannot be questioned.  Combined with obvious efforts to not educate Japanese children about wartime atrocities, these efforts of denial pose a serious obstacle to the establishment of cordial relations between Japan and several of its important neighbors.  It is now clear that these issues will continue to fester until Japan makes satisfactory apologies, and possibly payments for its wartime acts.

    Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Japan became a colonial power in East Asia.  Japanese rule first came to what is now Taiwan in 1895 (Latourette & Wilbur, 1962, pp. 526-528) and to Korea in 1910 (Nehmer & McCune 1962, p. 483).  The Japanese did not treat the local people well, and this colonial experience has not been forgotten.  Beginning in 1931, the Japanese army invaded and occupied progressively larger portions of China.  Beginning in December of 1941, Japan invaded and subsequently occupied Thailand, the American-ruled Philippines, the Dutch-ruled East Indies (now Indonesia), British-ruled Burma, Malaya, and Singapore, and French Indo-China.  In each of these places, the Japanese army committed horrible crimes against the local populations and captured Allied military personnel, and in most cases against captured Western civilians.  Among the most infamous and best known of these are the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March (Shipley, 1962, p. 520), and the construction of the Burma-Thailand railway.  Beyond these few well-known atrocities, the Japanese army systematically murdered, mutilated, raped, and degraded millions of Asians and many tens of thousands of Westerners throughout all of the lands that it invaded and occupied.  

    World War II ended in Asia with what is frequently described as the "unconditional surrender" of Japan.  Unlike the truly unconditional surrender of Germany, however, the Japanese surrender was a conditional one, with the Japanese being allowed to retain the emperor system.  Also unlike the case of Germany, the occupying power (the United States in the case of Japan) did not undertake to systematically purge the country of all of the attitudes that had contributed to Japanese militarism (Jansen, 1962, p. 932).

    The differences between Japan and Germany were apparent in the war-crimes trials which took place after the war.  In Germany, these led to a thorough public accounting of the responsibility of the entire German leadership for the crimes committed in the name of the German nation (Levie, 1962, p. 348A).  Combined with effective and systematic education of German children and substantial payments to the state of Israel and to individual Jewish (and later, non-Jewish) survivors, the policies of the occupying powers (United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and France) led to a general acceptance of national responsibility among the German people.  In Japan, on the other hand, teaching about Japanese atrocities in the public schools has been spotty (Masalski, 2001, pp. 1-2), and there have been no substantial payments to nations or individuals victimized by the Japanese.  

    An example of the failure to make Japan deal with the atrocities committed was the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco, in which the United States, Japan, and 48 other countries concluded a peace in East Asia with no admission of Japanese responsibility for a vast catalogue of war crimes, with only a token payment of less than $20 million in liquidated Japanese assets to be distributed for the benefit of captured Allied military personnel and their families.  This treaty provided for no compensation to Asians or other Westerners brutalized by the Japanese (San Francisco Peace Treaty, 1951).  [Full disclosure:  my grandfather's uncle, Joseph N. Pearlstein, after whom I was named, was a U.S. marine in Shanghai during the late 1930's and until November 1941, when he was sent to Corregidor, in the Philippines.  Following his capture there in 1942, he apparently survived the Bataan Death March.  He subsequently died at the hands of the Japanese while performing slave labor in a zinc mine in the mountains of Western Japan (Pittsburgh Jewish Criterion, May 7, 1943; December 21, 1945; February 3, 1950).]  

    This failure to clearly assign responsibility immediately after World War II has led, over the years, to the development of a "revisionist" movement in Japanese politics, led by right-wing politicians who seek to use denial of Japanese war crimes as an issue to highlight their "nationalist" approach, particularly with respect to relations with other East Asian countries (French, 2006).  These denials include recent assertions that the Japanese army played no role in the forcible procurement into sexual slavery of tens or hundreds of thousands of mostly Asian women (Onishi, 2007), as well as claims that few if any civilians were killed by the Japanese army in Nanking in 1937 and 1938 (Shibuichi, 2005, p. 203).  Those who deny that these atrocities occurred are not people on the margins of Japanese society, but rather members of Parliament and more recently government ministers, including the prime minister (Onishi, 2007).  

    In China, the communists used revulsion against Japanese atrocities to their benefit before coming to power in 1949.  For many years following the 1949 revolution, the communist government made relatively little effort to encourage public protests against Japan, and largely confined its efforts to the educational sphere.  In recent years, however, the Chinese government has openly encouraged public demonstrations and other displays of anger at Japanese denials of responsibility, and many observers think that building popular feeling against Japan has been used to distract the Chinese people from the shortcomings of their own government.  Regardless of the underlying purpose of this encouragement, its effect has been to create a broad-based antipathy to Japan (Reilly, 2004).  

    In Korea, anti-Japanese sentiment goes back to the malevolent occupation that began in 1910, and that went from bad to worse during World War II.  A key issue has been the failure of successive Japanese governments to accept Japanese responsibility for the sexual enslavement of large numbers of Korean women during World War II (Onishi, 2007).  In the case of South Korea, there is no evidence that the government uses the issue to deliberately inflame the population.  However, continued Japanese denials make it impossible for South Korean politicians to ignore the issue.  

    While it might have been possible in the immediate post-war period to have imposed on Japan the same level of acceptance of responsibility as was imposed on Germany, that was not done, and the conditions now are so different from what they were in the late 1940's that such an approach is no longer feasible.  Since the requirements imposed on Germany (clear assignment of responsibility, effective public education, and significant payments to the state of Israel and to surviving individual victims) has worked relatively well, it is important to understand why present conditions in Japan and the countries where Japanese war crimes were committed are so different.  

    First, West Germany accepted responsibility for its crimes in the late 1940's and early 1950's while it was under the occupation and guidance of the Americans, British, and French.  West Germany was led by enlightened politicians who wanted a clear break with the Nazi regime and its crimes, and who saw no political advantage in denying those crimes.  Modern Japan, on the other hand, has been free of U.S. military occupation for over 55 years and is led by politicians who, in some cases see considerable political advantage in denying Japanese responsibility for war crimes as part of a broader "nationalist" appeal (Onishi, 2007).  

    Second, in the early 1950's, Germany was trying to rebuild its economy following devastating damage to its industrial base, infrastructure, and housing.  The U.S., as the only major power to have emerged undamaged from World War II, played the major role in this reconstruction, and had considerable influence on the German government beyond the large number of Allied troops stationed there until the collapse of the communist system in 1989-1991.  Modern-day Japan, on the other hand, is a prosperous, industrialized country in which U.S. influence is largely limited to providing a nuclear "umbrella."  

    Finally, Germany accepted responsibility at a time when memories of its atrocities were very fresh, and when hundreds of thousands of surviving victims were young and vigorous.  In contrast, the passage of over 60 years has reduced the number of living victims and witnesses of Japanese atrocities to a small fraction of their original number.  Descendants of Japanese involved in wartime atrocities are reluctant to label their elderly relatives war criminals (Shibuichi, 2005, p. 200).  It is much easier for Japanese to deny the facts in 2007 than it was for the West Germans in 1949.  

    Since the countries central to these disputes (Japan, China, and Korea) are all independent and relatively prosperous, the German model is not applicable.  Rather, it is clear that any settlement of the disputes between Japan and its neighbors regarding Japanese war crimes will have to come from mutual agreements among the parties.  

    Elements of a settlement might include Japanese apologies for crimes committed during the first half of the twentieth century, passage of laws requiring accurate treatment of Japanese war crimes in Japanese textbooks [without intermittent political interference (Masalski, 2001, pp. 1-2)], payments to survivors of these crimes, and discontinuing symbolic visits to the Yasukuni Shrine which houses the remains of notorious Japanese war criminals (Shibuichi, 2005, p. 198).  The idea of limiting direct payments to survivors, while excluding the relatives of victims who perished at the hands of the Japanese or who died later, has precedence in the German model (German Embassy, undated) as well as from the program by which the U.S. government compensated, in the late 1980's, Japanese-Americans interned during World War II (Associated Press, 1988).

    Whatever its approach, the Japanese government must act quickly to acknowledge and apologize for Japan's war crimes, educate its people about them, and compensate the victims.  To do otherwise would allow this wound to fester indefinitely.  

 

 

 

 

 

Burress, Charles.  "Wars of Memory."  SFGate.com (San Francisco Chronicle online)     Sunday, July 26, 1998

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

San Francisco Peace Treaty, September 8, 1951.  Retrieved from:  

on 4/22/2007.  

 

 

 

 

 

Pittsburgh Jewish Critrion,

February 3, 1950