[Column] The true way to honor Japan’s war dead is to face the facts

Posted on : 2019-08-19 17:41 KST Modified on : 2019-08-19 17:41 KST
We must soberly face the lessons to be learned from past wars and casualties  
Yamaguchi Jiro
Yamaguchi Jiro

It has been 74 years since Japan’s defeat in World War II. The day that Emperor Hirohito assented to the surrender terms outlined in the Potsdam Declaration, Aug. 15, also happens to be the Ghost Festival, a day that Buddhists devote to thinking about the dead. In Japan, this is the time of year when people pray for peace and for the comfort of the victims of war. But the ruthless efforts of historical revisionists in Japan to justify their past wars are straining relations with its neighboring countries. This isn’t a time when the dead can be quietly honored. Those of us who are alive face the sober question of what lesson should be learned from the tremendous casualties suffered by Japan and the rest of Asia.

Various opinions have been expressed about the victims of war. One important lesson can be taken from the book “Requiem for Battleship Yamato,” by Mitsuru Yoshida. While still a student, Yoshida was made an officer in the navy and assigned to the Yamato (72,800 tons), a massive Japanese battleship. At Okinawa, he took part in a “special operation” — that is, a suicide mission — but against all odds, he survived to return home. The book records his experiences from that mission.

The night before the hopeless operation, when Japan’s defeat was all but certain, the young naval officers discussed what they were dying for. “Victory is impossible without progress. The best outcome is for defeat to open our eyes. We stand in the vanguard,” said a captain named Iwaora Usubuchi, the oldest officer present. Everyone found Usubuchi’s words persuasive, Yoshida wrote.

Since World War II, have the Japanese opened their eyes and realized the progress of which Usubuchi spoke? There’s no doubt that, for around 50 years after Japan’s defeat, the country forged a model of an economic power without the ability to wage war, focusing on economic development under Article 9 of its constitution and the slogan of a peaceful state. At ceremonies honoring the fallen, Japanese emperors and prime ministers have echoed the official position that Japan’s peace and wealth was built on the sacrifice made by those lost in the war.

But Japan’s economy has been stagnant for a quarter century and its population has started to decline, enabling a groundless ethnocentrism and contempt for its neighboring countries to spread through society. Japanese politics has lacked intellectual sincerity, the desire to find honest answers for difficult questions, such as how much suffering Japan inflicted upon the people of Asia during the war, why Japan began a war with the US that it was sure to lose, and why it took so long to acknowledge its defeat.

As long as those who had lived through the war were still alive, the Japanese public as a whole shared their hatred for war. And what the Japanese army did in China and Southeast Asia was widely known, even if not explicitly discussed. But after the Japanese lost their pride in their economy and the buffer of personal experience with the war disappeared, Japan’s identity as a peaceful state began to waver.

The inclusion of “Statue of a Girl of Peace,” which symbolizes the comfort women, in “After ‘Freedom of Expression?’” an exhibition in the Aichi Triennale 2019 art festival was stridently criticized not only by the mayor of Nagoya and the governor of Osaka Prefecture, who are both regarded as historical revisionists, but also by some lawmakers in the Diet. After the festival’s secretariat was inundated by threats, the exhibition was finally canceled. In short, politicians were able to stir up the public by exploiting the worsening relations between Japan and South Korea, which are in a row over the issues of forced labor and export controls.

Takashi Kawamura, the Nagoya mayor who was a leading instigator of this controversy, said that the comfort woman statue “tramples on the feelings of the Japanese.” That contradicts the official position of the Japanese government itself, which has admitted that the Japanese military was involved in recruiting and managing the comfort women.

I don’t think that Kawamura’s rejection of the very existence of the comfort women is a view shared by the majority of Japanese. The problem is that even politicians in the ruling party are supporting such false claims and that more Japanese are being incited to threaten violence. There’s a tendency to stigmatize those who want Japan to face up to its past crimes as being “anti-Japanese” and to silence them by force. That represents the very delusional and regressive mindset that Usubuchi risked his life to change. The way we can honor the victims of the war is to be humble before the facts and to respect freedom.

By Jiro Yamaguchi, professor of politics and law at Hosei University

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