Half a lifetime ago, I moved to Japan. I was young and ignorant and keen on learning an Asian language, and I knew that I could support myself in Japan by teaching English, as I had begun to study TESOL in college.  I intended to acquire a working knowledge of Japanese, then go back to the States and complete my TESOL degree.  As it turned out, I ended up spending seventeen years in Japan.

 

When I first went to Japan, I had little knowledge of Japanese history, and even less interest in it. Although I was aware that my grandfather and a few of the older members of my family were very anti-Japanese, their attitude struck me as racist and old-fashioned.  If I had thought it through, I might have come to another conclusion: my grandfather had many Chinese friends and he raised his children to be open-minded and egalitarian.  Still, I imagined that my grandfather’s anti-Japanese stance must be due to prejudice and the war.  But the war was behind us, and though I had Korean and Chinese friends whose parents occasionally mentioned the Japanese in a less than complimentary way, I felt that it had nothing to do with my generation.  Given that, why dig into it?

 

My first year in Japan was revelatory. Like all newcomers to Japan, I quickly went from my ‘honeymoon period,’ when every new thing about the country is interesting and wonderful to my ‘marriage period,’ when all of Japan’s faults and idiosyncrasies become oppressively tedious. One of the first things I noticed about the Japanese was a tendency for many of them to both admire and look down on foreigners.  On one hand, we were seen as being worthy of emulation. Models in Japan tended to be Caucasian, and Japanese young people were keen to adopt western customs and fashions. Conversely, though, foreigners with their odd ways and brash manners were held in derision. People either loved us or hated us, and quite often they seemed to do both in equal measures. And there was an equally ambiguous attitude towards foreigners who did not look like foreigners as such:  other Asians such as Chinese, Indochinese, or Koreans. A lot of Japanese people seemed to ignore them, or to treat them very much like second-class citizens.  

 

I did not realize at the time just how much history had to do with Japanese attitudes to westerners and other Asians, and in fact, the world in general. And yet when I look back on that time, although I acknowledge that many people in Japan do try to minimize or whitewash Japanese wartime atrocities, most of the people I was fortunate enough to become friends with were quite the opposite.

 

In my wilful ignorance, I missed a hundred opportunities to discuss the events of the war. I am haunted by an experience I had one day during my first few months in Tokyo, in Kinokuniya Bookstore. I was in the history section, looking for a book for a friend, when an elderly Japanese man approached me. To this day, I do not know why he chose me to make this confession to, but in halting but passable English this man addressed me:  “Japanese people do too much cruel thing during war,” he began hesitantly. “Young people should know this:  Japanese soldier do too much very bad, cruel thing to many peoples –.”  I was in a hurry and had no interest in what he had to say, so I brushed him off. Almost three decades later, I remember this incident with shame and regret; I would do quite a bit now to hear what that man wanted to say to me.

 

If I had listened to the people around me, I know that I would have learned a lot about Japan’s past – and present. For instance, while I was attending a Japanese university as a research student, one of my professors was particularly fond of his Chinese students. He was old enough to remember, though not serve in, the war, and though his specialty was Japanese language and literature, he made it his business to study history – and he read both Chinese and Japanese history books. One day I heard him telling another foreign student that his Chinese and other Asian students were particularly dear to him because he saw their presence in Japan as a gift. “We were beastly to their parents,” he commented, “and what do they do? They send us their children to educate, their finest minds. We have a great obligation to pay them back.”  Although I remembered this, the significance of it largely sailed over my head. ‘The Rape of Nanking’ was nothing more than a phrase I remembered my parents mentioning, along with ‘The Trail of Tears’ and ‘The Battle of the Bourne.’ It meant nothing to me at all.

 

Another time, while apartment hunting in Yokohama, I was shocked to find that many of the properties for rent listed conditions for prospective tenants. While many of these were no doubt unfair, such as “No one involved in the entertainment industry” and “No self-employed people;” many were unabashedly racist: “No Europeans, Americans or Africans,” one stipulated. “No Koreans or Chinese,” another brazenly specified. Some were sneakier, but every bit as xenophobic:  “No cooking with garlic.  No clogs worn in apartment.”

 

When I told my Japanese friends and a few of my students about these conditions, most of them were gratifyingly appalled. “You should have complained!” they told me angrily. “How dare they try to get away with that sort of thing?” One friend got particularly incensed: she actually went into one of the real estate agents, asked for the telephone number of several offending landlords, phoned them up and gave them hell. Afterwards, she was still infuriated. “We call ourselves international and yet people still have that attitude!” she spluttered.

 

 

Shortly after this, I had to go to Korea to pick up my working visa. Because there was a delay in processing, I ended up spending three weeks there, and I used the time to do some sightseeing, travelling from Pusan up to Sorak, where there is a national park. I spent over a week in Sorak, staying at the youth hostel there, and I began to feel frustrated that I could not communicate with the people as I could speak no Korean. I soon learned, however, that elderly Koreans all spoke Japanese to some degree, and I began to spend a lot of time talking with them.

 

“Do you see these scars?” one woman asked me, pointing to long, raised welts on the backs of her legs. “I got them for refusing to speak Japanese when I was eight years old!  I got them just for defying my teacher and talking to my friends in Korean!”  Shocked, I expressed my dismay.  “I hate this language we are speaking,” she told me bitterly. “I hate the people who taught it to me. I hate the things they did – so many terrible things!”  “What did they do?” I asked her.  She burst into tears. “I cannot tell you!”  I never dared to press this woman further, but I did mention what she said to some young Japanese men I had met during the course of my travels. They were all law students who were visiting Korea to learn Korean, and they were very upset, but not surprised, at what I told them. “She has a right to be angry,” said one of the young men quietly. “So many terrible things were done here, even before the war.”

 

During my seventh year in Japan, I attended a friend’s wedding in Fukuoka. A mutual friend met me at the airport and while we walked from the terminal to her car, she told me that she had learned something very sad about Fukuoka Airport and how it was built. Perhaps I had heard this too?  I had no idea what she was talking about.  “It was built with slave labor,” she confided. “Allied POWs working without machinery, with their bare hands. A lot of them were sick, and even still they were worked to death.”  I expressed my surprise. “How do you know this?” I asked her. “I met one of them,” she answered. “He and some others were walking around, trying to find the place where they were held as prisoners. I asked him if I could help them, and he told me what they were there for.”  This friend was several years younger than I, and when I think back on my experience with the elderly man in Kinokuniya, I cannot help but reflect that my friend was much better than I:  she bothered to listen, so she learned.  

 

“Do you believe that the emperor was responsible for the war?” one of my Japanese colleagues asked me in 1989, just before Hirohito died. I said that I had no idea, that he seemed an innocuous old fellow.  My colleague snorted. “I think he’s a fake. He puts on this air of being a bumbling old innocent who dabbles in marine biology, but he doesn’t fool me:  he’s as guilty as hell. And America helped him!”  That was another chance for me to learn something, but although I remembered this comment, I didn’t pursue it.

 

 

Part of what I find so troubling is the awareness that many Japanese people tried to educate me about Japanese wartime atrocities. They were open to discussing the events of the war and they were anxious to learn my opinions. Prominent Japanese figures like Saburo Ienaga spent decades pushing for textbook reforms. Yet because they are Japanese, there are people who might be prepared to hate them because of their nationality, yet be more kindly disposed towards me. And knowing how wilfully ignorant I was for so many years, I realize that I must now make amends.

 

 

 

Denying what happened in Nanking, and indeed all over Asia, is wrong for so many reasons and on so many levels. It is wrong that the deaths of so many have gone unrecognized and that the crimes committed against them have gone unpunished. It is wrong that so many of the guilty were released for a price – whether that price was gold, knowledge, or the promise of cooperation – and that my own country allowed their release. And finally, it is wrong that the young people of Japan should learn about the tragedies Japan experienced during the war, such as the firebombing of major cities and the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but not the tragedies Japan caused. 

 

 

 The novelist Rutaro Shiba said: “A country whose textbooks lie will inevitably collapse.” I happen to know that many people in Japan feel this way.  They know that if the world allows the Rape of Nanking and similar atrocities to slip out of the public consciousness, they will have missed a rare opportunity for closure. And they know that ignorance of these dreadful events is not a foundation that can be built on.