Asia Ex-Japan
More than six decades after the end of the Second World War and some 120 years since Japan set out on its ruinous attempt to conquer Asia, history continues to stalk Japan’s relations with its neighbours and former enemies. Unlike Germany, which has dealt with its Nazi history and reconciled with the rest of Europe, Japan has never been able to put the past behind it. That is partly because it suits its neighbours to play the ‘history card’ by keeping the past alive. Governments in China and South Korea have become adept at switching on old hatreds when it suits them. But Japan’s patchy record on facing up to its past has given them plenty of ammunition.
Many younger Japanese, with scant knowledge of what went on in the war, are bemused at the hatred still harboured by some Chinese and South Koreans towards them. Some attribute it to brainwashing by the Communist Party, but this is a less useful explanation when it comes to democratic South Korea, where it is still common to refer to the Japanese by pejorative terms such as ‘dwarves’. Nor, though less spoken about, has Japan’s wartime conduct been forgotten in places such as the Philippines, whose people also suffered massacres and rapes on a horrifying scale. The writer F. Sionil José once told me he had shocked his Japanese hosts – at a convention to discuss Hiroshima – by proclaiming that the Americans should have nuclear-bombed every Japanese city they could find. He was not invited again.1
It is true that in China, since the military crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989, education has placed more emphasis on Japan’s wartime atrocities, stoking a sometimes frighteningly virulent nationalism among Chinese youth. It is true too that anti-Japanese demonstrations in China can sometimes be cover for broader dissatisfaction with an authoritarian system that usually does not permit protests. Still, the common view in China is that the Japanese have never honestly repented for their wartime aggression and that Japan remains an unpredictable country in which militarism lies dangerously close to the surface.
This idea of Japan as dangerous aggressor – so far removed from the pacifist image the Japanese harbour of themselves – was not such a problem twenty or thirty years ago. Then, Japan was at the height of its economic resurgence and China was an impoverished nation only beginning to emerge from the ruinous decades of Mao Zedong’s rule. Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who uncorked reform in the late 1970s, took a pragmatic view towards Japan, preferring to downplay history in the interests of a more practically useful relationship. Then, the chance of conflict between a weak China and a demilitarized Japan was almost non-existent. Not so today. Now, to borrow Mao’s phrase, China has ‘stood up’. In 2010, as we have seen, its economy surpassed that of Japan, making China once again the strongest power in Asia. Although China continues to benefit from Japanese technology and investment, with each passing year the balance tips further in China’s favour: Japan, in short, is more economically dependent on China than the other way around. With each year, too, China becomes stronger militarily. In 2012, Hu Jintao, the outgoing president, declared that China intended to become a ‘maritime power’, serving notice that it wanted a blue-water navy capable of projecting power in the Pacific. By most reckoning, China has already become the world’s second-highest spender on its military. China’s economic and military ascendancy has sparked fears in Japan, helping those on the right who have long argued the country should become more ‘normal’ through the restoration of its ‘sovereign right’ to wage war. History, in short, has become ever more pressing as the balance of economic and military power shifts within the region. For Japan, which would prefer to forget, history is an unattended corpse at the bottom of its diplomatic garden.
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In 1970, Willy Brandt, chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, fell to his knees before a monument to victims of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The gesture, apparently spontaneous, was such a convincing demonstration of German contrition that the word ‘Kniefall’ entered the lexicon and Brandt went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Japan has never had a Willy Brandt moment. A constant refrain in Asia is that, unlike Germany, it has never properly owned up to its history – to itself or to others. Over the years, Tokyo has paid billions of dollars in lieu of war reparations and its leaders have issued innumerable formal apologies. Rightly or wrongly, these have never been taken as sincere. In 2001, for example, Junichiro Koizumi, then prime minister, said in a typical and oft-repeated statement of regret at Japan’s wartime actions, ‘We conducted colonization and aggressive acts based on a mistaken national policy and caused immeasurable pain and suffering. I wish, in the light of our country’s regrettable history, to take this to heart, to express my deepest regret and remorse.’ Such statements belie the claim, so often heard, that Japan has never apologized, though readers will judge whether it is a ‘proper apology’ or not.
Koizumi followed his statement of contrition, however, with a visit to Yasukuni shrine, a religious monument to Japan’s war dead that is reviled in Asia as a symbol of its hated militarism. Among more than 2 million ordinary foot soldiers, Yasukuni contains the ‘souls’ of fourteen convicted Class-A war criminals. The Japanese like to see the shrine as their equivalent of Arlington National Cemetery, a place to show respect for those fallen in war. Many in Asia, however, regard prime ministerial visits to the shrine as the equivalent of a German chancellor laying a wreath at the tomb of Adolf Hitler. Koizumi’s pilgrimage in 2001 provoked a macabre demonstration in Seoul, where twenty male protesters each chopped off a little finger. Beijing said the visit suggested Japan had not properly ‘reflected’ – a favoured word in this debate – on its wartime conduct. Seoul lamented that a Japanese leader would show his respect to ‘war criminals who destroyed world peace and inflicted indescribable damage on neighbouring countries’.2
That, in a nutshell, captures the problem with Japanese apologies as seen from Beijing or Seoul. No sooner do the Japanese say sorry, goes the complaint, than someone on the right undermines it by denying, or even glorifying, Japan’s wartime behaviour. Part of the problem is that Japan is a democracy where people, in and out of government, are free to say what they like. Japan will never stop its wartime apologists, just as Germany cannot hope to silence its neo-Nazis. But conservatives and nationalists have tended to dominate the discourse in Japan, overshadowing the statements and actions of many Japanese who have sought to look at history more squarely. As a result, the revisionist view of history is often seen by Japan’s critics as the true sentiments of its people, normally hidden but revealed after a few glasses of sake or in the company of fellow Japanese.
The rightwing has certainly kept alive the idea that Japan’s was an honourable war of national defence and Asian liberation fought against western colonial aggression. Sure, the Imperial Army did terrible things, some will admit. But wasn’t that the nature of war? Hadn’t the Americans incinerated hundreds of thousands of civilians in Japan and didn’t they go on to commit atrocities in Vietnam? Weren’t the Chinese armies locked in their own civil war in the 1930s and 40s, every bit as murderous as the Japanese? And wasn’t it true that, after the war, as a result of Japan’s intervention, countries from Indonesia to Burma had been able to shuffle off the indignity of European colonization? Why was Japan’s attempt to build an empire any more heinous than Britain’s, a country that was not constantly hounded to apologize for its past excesses? In 2013, David Cameron, the UK’s prime minister, expressed regret for the 1919 Amritsar massacre in which British troops opened fire on unarmed protesters, killing up to 1,000 people. But he refused to apologize, saying it would be inappropriate to say sorry for events that had taken place before he was born. The Japanese, it seemed, were being held accountable to a higher standard. Still, there were those in Japan that went further, putting a positively glorifying spin on the country’s wartime record. Shintaro Ishihara, the nationalist former governor of Tokyo, once succinctly put the rightwing case to me. ‘We were proud during the war and we were proud after the war. We felt the war was not just for Japanese people but was to help the countries that had been colonized by the US and Europe,’ he said.3 Forgiveness of Germany contrasted with a continued belief that Japan was congenitally evil, he added. That was both hypocritical and racist, he said.
There are several reasons why Japan has found it harder to deal with history than Germany. One is the fact that, after the war, General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, kept Emperor Hirohito on the throne. For that, Hirohito had to be absolved from all responsibility for the war on the improbable grounds that he did not know what was happening and was powerless to stop it. With US collusion, elaborate steps were taken to ensure that he was not implicated. Strict US censorship after the war made it even harder for the Japanese to assess what had gone on or come to a proper reckoning with their immediate history. Some historians still praise the decision not to try Hirohito as the foundation of Japan’s post-war economic success. Without the emperor’s unifying presence, it might indeed have been more difficult for a foreign occupying force to govern a defeated and demoralized Japan. But with their wartime leader exonerated, the Japanese found it harder to disinter the past. The emperor, in whose name soldiers had been sent to slaughter and be slaughtered, was still officially the nation’s most revered figure. As John Dower wrote, ‘If the man in whose name imperial Japan had conducted foreign and military policy for twenty years was not held accountable for the initiation of or conduct of the war, why should anyone expect ordinary people to dwell on such matters, or to think seriously about their own personal responsibility?’ The Americans’ exoneration of the emperor, he concluded, had turned the issue of ‘war responsibility’ into a joke.4
In post-war Germany, by contrast, Nazi leaders, including Adolf Hitler, had died or been executed. They were severed from the body politic. That made it easier for Germans to blame the now destroyed fascist regime, even though they voted for it in 1933. In Japan’s case there was no such clean break with the past. Japan’s militarism was closely linked with the very idea of what ‘Japaneseness’ had meant since the Meiji Restoration, an identity that, as we have seen, required unquestioning loyalty to a god-like emperor. (At least after the war, the emperor was relieved of his divine status.) Still, there was much that stayed the same. Bureaucrats and politicians who had served during the war continued to play a prominent role after it. That was largely a consequence of the US policies of the early 1950s when, in the name of anti-Communism, the process of purging the right was reversed. When it came to it, Washington preferred continuity with a sullied Japanese past than the dangers of unleashing a more democratic, but more unpredictable, future.
Another reason many Japanese have struggled to see themselves as aggressors is the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Radiation washed away much of the guilt from Japan’s collective memory. ‘To the majority of Japanese, Hiroshima is the supreme symbol of the Pacific War,’ writes Ian Buruma in The Wages of Guilt, his superb account of how both Japan and Germany have remembered – and forgotten – the war. ‘All the suffering of the Japanese people is encapsulated in that almost sacred word: Hiroshima.’5 If the German symbol of the war is the Holocaust – the suffering they imposed on the Jews – Japan has chosen to remember a different symbol, one that epitomizes their own suffering at the hands of others. Hiroshima has served a double function in the post-war psyche. It has obliterated the idea that the Japanese were uniquely barbaric in wartime. Whatever they did, the Americans were willing to do the same, or worse. More subtly, especially for the left, it has transformed Japan from aggressor into the sacred guardian of world peace. Hiroshima has become a global symbol. It is the pacifist people of post-war Japan, whose soldiers have not fired a shot against an enemy in more than six decades, who have been entrusted to keep the flame of peace alive.
The lingering stereotype of the Japanese in much of the world as cruel and bloodthirsty could hardly be further removed from the typical view the Japanese have of themselves. For many, their country remains uniquely peaceful and harmonious, a supposed trait sometimes attributed to the absence of a monotheistic religion. True, they might say, Japan erred once by following the aggressive example of European nations, but it dearly paid for that mistake and will never act that way again. Typical is the view of Kazuo Inamori, a legendary businessman (and subsequently Buddhist priest) who was one of the pioneers of Japan’s electronics industry. When I asked him about it, he invoked Japan’s abundant marine resources, plentiful rainfall and geographical isolation to explain what he saw as his country’s intrinsically pacifist nature. ‘We never had to conquer others with force. Conquering with force is something European countries have done repeatedly in their history. It is in their nature to be warriors. We are not like that.’ Almost as an afterthought, he acknowledged Japan’s less-than-pacifist tendencies in the last century. ‘If you go back a hundred years, of course, Japan tried to conquer some neighbouring countries,’ was how he put it. ‘All in all, though, Japan has been leading the world as a peaceful country.’6
Japan’s sense of victimhood was compounded by the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, Asia’s version of Nuremberg, held between 1946 and 1948. It is an article of faith on the Japanese right that the trial of twenty-eight so-called Class-A defendants was a kangaroo court, founded not in international law, but rather in the barely disguised desire of the victors to punish the vanquished. At Nuremberg, Britain had, in fact, argued that it would be better to dispense with the pretence of legality and simply hang those whom the Allies held most responsible.7 In many ways, the Tokyo Tribunal was indeed a charade. Evidence was suppressed, not least in protecting the emperor, and some of those eventually executed were less implicated in atrocities than others never put on trial. Justice Radhabinod Pal of India, the only dissenting judge, has won lasting affection among many on the right in Japan for concluding that the trial was a ‘sham’ with no legal or moral authority. He also endorsed the commonly held opinion of Japanese conservatives that, as the noose of sanctions tightened around Japan, Tokyo was left with little option but to wage all-out war.
If anyone epitomized the revisionist view of Japanese history, it was Yuko Tojo, granddaughter of Hideki Tojo, the wartime leader who ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor. In 2005, I arranged to meet her in a restaurant overlooking the Imperial Palace, a good choice since more than once during our encounter she pronounced the view of the vast royal grounds at the centre of Tokyo to be ‘most nourishing’. At precisely the appointed hour, a tiny woman, dressed in a green woollen suit with gold-trimmed buttons, had come charging into the restaurant. She was wearing silver-rimmed glasses and carrying a miniature suitcase in egg-shell blue, which she later informed me had cost her only Y500. Greeting me in the politest form of Japanese, delivered in a high-pitched voice, she bowed so low it seemed as though she were scouring the plush carpet for some lost trinket. Already small in stature, she was reduced to less than half my size by her near-ninety degree salutation.
At the time, there was much controversy surrounding her grandfather’s ‘soul’ and its lack of suitability as a resident of Yasukuni shrine. Yasuhiro Nakasone, a former prime minister and a nationalist in his own right, had recently suggested that Tojo, along with the thirteen other Class-A war criminals, be dis-enshrined from Yasukuni. Since there are no bodies at the shrine, an oasis of cherry trees and simple wooden structures in central Tokyo, his plan would have entailed some kind of Shinto ritual to send the fourteen unwanted ghosts packing. Yasukuni is a curious place. The ‘souls’ of those who died fighting for the emperor are said to reside here. Most were ordinary soldiers sent off to die on the battlefields. But among them are the leaders, including Tojo, who dispatched them to their fate. Curiously, the Koreans and Taiwanese who fought alongside as subjects of the then Japanese empire are also memorialized, often to the anguish of their hapless relatives who have, so far unsuccessfully, demanded the ‘removal’ of their ancestors’ souls, on the grounds that they did not fight for Japan by choice. To one side of the grounds is the Yushukan museum where the ‘sacred relics’ of the Yasukuni deities are kept. On display is a Zero fighter aircraft; a ‘human torpedo’ of the sort used in naval suicide missions; and the first railway engine to steam along the Burma Railroad, the ‘Death Railway’ built by forced Asian labour and prisoners of war. The museum presents a deeply revisionist view of history, glossing over atrocities and glorifying the idea of sacrificing one’s life for the emperor. The shrine itself is private since state Shinto was abolished after the war, but it remains, in Buruma’s words, ‘the holiest shrine of the militarised emperor cult’.8
Nakasone’s suggestion to get rid of the Class-A war criminals, which he once made to me in person,9 was a response to the bitter protests from Japan’s neighbours. He hoped that the shrine could thus be rendered an acceptable place to honour Japan’s war dead. For Yuko, the former prime minister had betrayed important principles of the right. ‘I don’t know why Nakasone keeps banging on about this, talking about Class-A war criminals all the time. Japanese people should never use the expression “war criminals”,’ she said. Under Japanese law, she went on, soldiers and leaders alike had committed no crime other than serving their country. Besides, even if it were desirable to remove them, it was impossible under Yasukuni’s doctrines. ‘Once a soul is enshrined, you can’t tear them into bits and take them from the shrine. You cannot separate the souls. They are all equal whether they are generals or rank-and-file soldiers. They are all gods.’10 Yuko put the blame for the crisis over Yasukuni squarely on China, a country she told me – in a racist sideswipe – she associated with spitting and open-air defecation. ‘Nowhere else in the world, in America or the UK, have there been complaints about the people who died. It is only China who is whipping the souls of the dead.’
Though she would have been only four or five at the war’s end, Yuko had fragmentary memories of her mother taking her to visit her grandfather in the prime minister’s office. Sometimes they would share quiet meals while war raged in Asia. When Tojo was in Sugamo prison awaiting trial following Japan’s surrender, she recalled her brother sticking his hands through the bars to touch his grandfather. After his execution, when Yuko was a little girl, her grandfather was a hated figure, blamed for pursuing an unwinnable war. The young Yuko, who had been told by her family that her grandfather had died defending the country, had only the vaguest inkling of his reputation. She recalled, as a six-year-old, being subjected to spiteful little punishments at school. ‘They used to throw stones at me and chase me around and I had no idea what the reason was.’ It was not until she turned ten that she discovered what had happened to her grandfather. Whenever one particular classmate saw her, he would climb up on a chair, grip his fingers theatrically around his neck and make choking noises, shouting, ‘Tojo hanged.’
Yuko’s defence of her grandfather’s reputation – for that had become her mission in life – was part personal and part ideological. The two mingled so closely it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. Her starting point was that neither he, nor those he sent to war, should be seen to have died in vain. Their deaths, above all, must not have been meaningless. For that, the war they fought needed to have been honourable and their ‘defence’ of the nation, though they lost, somehow a necessary precondition for Japan’s post-war prosperity. It was a hard argument to make, even to oneself.
Her second article of faith was that the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal was invalid. How could the people who dropped atomic bombs on civilians in Hiroshima judge those who had participated in what she deemed a war of self-defence? ‘The trial was unfair. It is unfair for the winner to make the judgement. My grandfather said himself that he had not violated international law, but he had made numerous violations against the Japanese people.’ She went on, ‘To deem Hideki Tojo a villain would mean the war was bad and that all the soldiers who fought in the war were bad. But their determination was respectable and they ended up protecting our lives, my life. I don’t want to think of their deaths as meaningless.’
Isn’t that precisely the point, I ventured. Their deaths were meaningless. Tojo’s campaign was both idiotic and barbaric. In the name of some phoney notion of an Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, it led to the slaughter of millions of Asians, including Japanese. Ultimately, it resulted in the near destruction of Japan itself. ‘It’s true that precious lives were lost and that Japan lost the war. But those soldiers fought desperately hard and stood proud,’ she said, a cloud crossing her face. ‘As a result Japan is enjoying peace and an affluent life. I would be sorry to say they died in vain.’
There followed a rather fractious discussion of the war in Asia in which she quibbled with my use of the word ‘aggression’. ‘I wish you had a deeper understanding of what happened in Manchuria,’ she said, after portraying Japan’s 1931 push into that region and later into China proper as a defence of land granted to Japan after its victory in the 1905 Russo-Japanese war.11 We took to studying our food with some intensity. She dissected her fillet of lamb with admirable precision, and the frigid silence was broken only by the noise of her knife clinking against the plate. Finally she said, ‘I think from the way you use the word “aggression” your stance is totally different from mine. You are looking at this from the standpoint that Japan was an invader. I say it was a defensive war. Japan did not have resources.’ She meant Japan’s lack of raw materials, particularly oil, and the international embargo that tightened after Japan moved into Indochina in the closing months of 1940.12 She viewed encirclement by the so-called A, B, C, D powers – the Americans, British, Chinese and Dutch – as an attempt to deprive Japan of its lifeblood and tantamount to a declaration of war. ‘This endangered the lives of 100 million people living in Japan,’ she said. ‘Japan had to make the difficult choice of going to war.’
We briefly touched upon the Nanjing massacre of 1937–8, which has become symbolic – along with the Bataan Death March, the slaughter of civilians in Manila in 1945, and the treatment of POWs – of the barbarity of Japanese troops. Precisely what happened in Nanjing is a matter of fierce contention, especially between Chinese and Japanese scholars. But most historians, including many from Japan, agree that Japanese troops went on an orgy of killing and rape in the weeks after they took the city in December 1937. Estimates of how many people were massacred range from 40,000 to 300,000. Yuko said the numbers had been hugely exaggerated. She referred to work by Japanese revisionists who had sought to demonstrate that photographs of the massacre were doctored. ‘Most of these were altered pictures,’ she scoffed, referring to images of the Japanese bayoneting people or beheading them. ‘They were wearing short sleeves in December or using guns that the Japanese army never used, the wrong-shaped swords and bayonet models that were not used then.’
By now, the politeness with which our conversation had begun had quite evaporated. ‘What is your motive in interviewing me today? Is it because you and I think so differently?’ Then she managed to dispel the frostiness and to retrieve an air of cordiality. She began to disinter her egg-shell blue valise and pulled out several memorabilia related to her grandfather’s last days in Sugamo before he was hanged. There was a little brown box that Tojo fashioned in prison, which was presented to Yuko’s elder brother on the day of the autumn equinox. An inscription on it read, ‘Although the cold winds are blowing throughout the world today, do not be dismayed. The dark clouds casting Japan in shadow will clear one day, and the autumn moon will be seen again.’ Then she brought out pencil stubs used by Tojo to keep the final pages of his diary and even the butt of the last cigarette he smoked. Finally, she produced a little packet from which she emptied a small clump of hair and some nail clippings – a parting gift that Tojo had prepared before a bungled suicide attempt. The relics sat there on the white tablecloth, mere inches away from the petits fours I had been eyeing.
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There were plenty of Japanese who did not try to cover up their country’s wartime history. Over the decades, many historians, teachers, lawyers and former members of the military had gone to great lengths to unearth Japan’s wartime atrocities. One such was Saburo Ienaga, who spent much of his life before he died in 2002, at the age of eighty-nine, fighting lawsuits against the government to defend his right to publish school textbooks critical of the war.13 Ienaga was a history professor who had been a schoolteacher during the war when he was expected to teach imperial myth presented as fact. That he did so filled him with shame. Right after 1945, there had been no new textbooks, so teachers were instructed by the Americans to black out passages promoting militarism or the emperor cult. I have spoken to those who remember whole pages of their textbooks hidden under a sea of black ink.
In 1946, a new book, The Course of Our Country, was published, the first since 1881, as Buruma points out, that started not with Japan’s imperial creation myths but with the Stone Age. A new law on education stated that schools would be free to select their own textbooks, which would be published privately. Ienaga’s was one of those. After the war, he wrote a series of widely used history textbooks with sections on, among other things, Japanese atrocities in Nanjing, routine use of rape by soldiers and medical experiments on human guinea pigs in Manchuria. During the years of the US occupation, in spite of heavy censorship, many Japanese wanted to understand how their society had been captured by a military establishment bent on fighting an unwinnable war. As well as his exposure of Japanese aggression, Ienaga exhibited a pacifist and leftwing leaning that was typical of many in society who entirely rejected the pre-war dogmas that had led Japan down such a disastrous path. Ienaga’s politics, however, enraged the conservative education ministry, which considered him a Marxist. In a 1962 textbook, he included photographs of students being sent to the front and young girls working in armament factories with the caption, ‘The destruction of people’s lives’. He attributed the defeat of the Imperial Army in China to the ‘democratic power of the Red armies’ and referred, controversially, to the military brothels stocked by women from throughout the Japanese empire.
Ienaga was requested to rewrite dozens of items and to delete whole passages on the grounds that they were historically unproven or undermining of youthful patriotism. One examiner appointed by the ministry objected to Ienaga’s use of the term ‘aggression’ – much as Yuko Tojo had done – to describe Japan’s wartime actions. ‘Aggression is a term that contains negative ethical connotations,’ the examiner wrote, bemoaning its potential discouraging effect on members of the next generation. ‘Therefore an expression such as “military advance” should be used.’ A separate report judged that Ienaga had strayed from the proper teaching of Japanese history, whose aim should be ‘to acknowledge the historical achievements of our ancestors, to raise awareness of being Japanese, and to foster a rich feeling of love for our people’. Ienaga’s intention, by contrast, was to foster a disgust for imperial war and a love of Japan’s new pacifist constitution – albeit one imposed by the occupying Americans. He became so frustrated with the ministry’s requests that in 1965 he launched the first of three lawsuits against the government for acting unconstitutionally in curbing his free speech, a battle he was still waging into his late seventies. Though there were many legal defeats and setbacks – not to mention intimidation from rightwing thugs – in 1993, the Tokyo High Court ruled that the education ministry had overstepped its bounds by censoring his textbook.
Similar fights were still going on at the time I met Yuko Tojo. These days the battleground had shifted from publication of ‘Marxist’ textbooks to the attempted distribution of ones produced by revisionists presenting a whitewashed view of history. These books often contained no reference to Nanjing or treatment of the POWs. Although such textbooks were adopted by only a tiny minority of schools, their appearance was seized upon by the Chinese media, provoking widespread anger in the country.
Some Japanese teachers were alarmed about what they saw as the further encroachment of revisionist propaganda. A number of school authorities had, for instance, started demanding that teachers attending school ceremonies stand before the Japanese flag and sing the national anthem. In Tokyo, the school board had ruled that, ideally, one teacher should learn to play the Kimigayo, ‘His Majesty’s Reign’, on the piano. Outside the classroom, these symbols had begun to shed their taboo status. In the 2002 soccer World Cup, co-hosted by Japan and South Korea, crowds had good-humouredly waved the flag and sung the anthem at home games. But some teachers remained intensely wary of attempts to instil – or enforce – patriotism in schools. They still regarded both the Hinomaru flag and Kimigayo anthem – with its entreaty for ‘eight thousand generations’ of imperial rule – as symbols of the cult that had led Japanese unthinkingly into war. Kozo Kaifu, a lawyer acting for the rebellious teachers, put it in terms that Yukichi Fukuzawa, the nineteenth-century liberal thinker who had stressed the importance of individualism, would have understood. ‘Post-war education is intended to raise children not for the emperor but for themselves, so they can be the best people they can be,’ he told me.
Hiroko Arai was a mild-mannered English teacher at a school in Tokyo. At fifty-nine, she was nearing retirement. One of eight siblings brought up in the intellectual ferment immediately after the war, she was among those who refused to stand. Her father had run a sento public bath in Fukui prefecture. As a child, Arai was taught by her parents to believe in what she called the sovereignty of the people. ‘My favourite phrase is “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”,’ she told me, quoting Thomas Jefferson. That meant standing up – or in her case sitting down – for what you believed in. When the Hinomaru flag was raised she remained resolutely stuck to her seat. As a punishment for her refusal to honour the national symbol, the school board forced Arai into early retirement with a reduced pension. She was also obliged to attend a ‘re-education seminar’ at which, she said, she was monitored by officials who noted her every reaction on a multi-coloured form. ‘During the Second World War, the Hinomaru flag and the Kimigayo became symbols of what we did,’ she said of Japan’s invasion of China and Southeast Asia. ‘I can’t show respect to these symbols.’14
Shy and quietly spoken, Arai had struggled with herself to carry out her protest. Japan was not the easiest society in which to be the odd one out, she said. She thought the older teachers were more rebellious than the younger ones for whom the war was more distant. Unlike the generation after the war, younger Japanese had been taught to be more obedient. She paused. ‘I suppose it’s the fault of us teachers,’ she added, almost to herself, acknowledging her profession’s role in educating generations of what she deemed quiescent Japanese. ‘I didn’t want to educate them to be so obedient. I wanted them to be critical of authority.’ Arai was worried about the new school textbooks too. Even the old ones were bad enough, she said. Far from being masochistic, as the right claimed, they barely mentioned the suffering Japan had brought to the countries it invaded. Instead, they revelled in Japan’s own suffering. She also thought they tended to project a negative view of Asian neighbours, instilling the notion that Japan was alone in a hostile region. One textbook, she recalled, contained the sentence, ‘Look at the map. The Korean peninsula thrusts like a dagger at Japan.’
In the same year I met Yuko Tojo, the Yomiuri newspaper, a rightwing publication with a combined morning and evening circulation of more than 13 million, launched a year-long investigation into Japan’s war record. The articles were reasonably probing, although they were careful to exonerate the emperor. One of the pieces found that Japan’s leaders had treated human life across Asia with contempt, sacrificing even Japanese soldiers as they might toss out ‘a pair of worn-out shoes’. The series was hardly revelatory for anyone with a knowledge of the war, but for its pains the newspaper’s offices were surrounded by the black vans of ultranationalists, which blared patriotic music and shouted menacing slogans. Tsuneo Watanabe, octogenarian chairman of the newspaper, said he had launched the project to counter what he deemed a lack of sincerity. ‘We committed acts of aggression in the continent and we need to study these in detail and leave the results to posterity,’ he said, speaking through a fog of pipe smoke. Political leaders had ‘failed to grasp’ the need to dig into Japan’s past and squarely face up to it, he went on. ‘Unless we do that, Chinese leaders will not be able to build favourable relations with Japan.’15
I discussed Japan’s difficult external relations with Toshiaki Miura, a thoughtful commentator at the left-of-centre Asahi newspaper and a regular television pundit. Miura was a tall, slightly shy man with grey hair and spectacles. There was something of the academic about him, though he also had the jumpy quality of a good journalist waiting for the next twist in the story. In a remark that neatly summed up Japan’s international isolation, yet its keen sense of wanting a place in the world order, he told me, ‘Our psyche is very insular. But we always see ourselves reflected in the mirror outside.’ That struck me as a perfect summation of the Japanese paradox – and the root of some of its tragic missteps. Because of its insularity, Japan’s only way of understanding itself has been with reference to other nations. An obvious benchmark in the nineteenth century had been Britain, an island nation just like Japan and a country that had the power and status to which Japan aspired. ‘Britain is much closer to the continent,’ said Miura, in a commonly voiced lament about Japan’s geographical – and psychological – isolation. ‘One of the tragedies of Japan’s position in international society is that we have no neighbours of the same size or the same level of industry. If Japan were placed in Europe, you would have Germany, Italy and England to get along with, and we could learn how to coexist with countries of the same strength, the same industrial level. But here in Asia we have a huge neighbour, China, a divided Korean peninsula, and a bunch of small states in Southeast Asia. It’s very difficult to develop a diplomatic sense that we are one of many countries.’
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Koizumi never stopped visiting Yasukuni, although subsequent prime ministers, including the more overtly nationalist Shinzo Abe, did refrain from doing so. In Koizumi’s case, if anything, the criticism galvanized his resolve to go. He repeated his pilgrimage during each of his six years in office, the last, defiantly, on the highly charged day of 15 August, the anniversary of Japan’s surrender. There was a sense of paranoia about a rising China in parts of the administration and a feeling that a stand had to be made. One diplomat, who tried to persuade the prime minister not to go, later told me about the encounter. ‘Koizumi’s face went completely red and he grew very angry. He said, “Don’t you understand? Unless I keep visiting the shrine, China will forever bring up the issue. By continuing to go, I can put a stop to this once and for all.”’ One close adviser was openly fearful of a resurgent Middle Kingdom. ‘We have seen nothing like this in human history, a country where massive amounts of people are geared towards profit-making and whose leaders are ready to compromise any values for an economic return,’ he told me. ‘It is like putting five or six Japans of the 1960s together. The level of enthusiasm for development is breathtaking.’ As the US historian Kenneth Pyle wrote, Japan’s post-bubble generation ‘sees China not as a war victim but as a rival’.16
During Koizumi’s period in office, relations with Beijing became the sourest in a generation. Koizumi was not once invited to China on an official visit, an extraordinary lapse of contact between what were far and away Asia’s two biggest economies.17 (Japan was then the largest and China second.) Some brushed off the costs of the diplomatic freeze, arguing that trade between Japan and China was flourishing and that officials from both countries maintained regular contact outside the public limelight. Many Japanese business leaders did not see it that way. By 2004, China had overtaken the US as Japan’s most important trading partner and the business lobby began to worry that the official stand-off between the two countries would harm their interests. Toyota had already had to withdraw an advertisement in which Chinese stone lions had been depicted bowing to one of its vehicles. The commercial had provoked outrage in China’s internet chatrooms which saw it as a national slur. Mori Building was forced to change the design of its 101-storey skyscraper in Shanghai because the large hole at the top of it was said to resemble the Rising Sun flag. Yotaro Kobayashi, chairman of Fuji Xerox, a company with several factories in China, publicly urged that pilgrimages to Yasukuni cease. ‘Visits are rubbing against the grain of Chinese people’s sentiments,’ he said. For his pains, he was castigated by the ultraright as a salesman more interested in profits than in Japan’s dignity. Black trucks swarmed outside his house and one day Kobayashi received an anonymous letter. The envelope contained a bullet.
China and Japan were already scrapping over gas reserves deep under the waters of the East China Sea and there were regular clashes – thankfully verbal – over fishing-boat and submarine incursions into waters administered by Japan. Long-smouldering tension escalated dramatically in 2005 when anti-Japanese demonstrations spread across China. In April, protesters in several Chinese cities targeted Japanese department stores and small businesses, hurling rocks through plate-glass windows and throwing food at Japanese restaurants and Japanese cars. In Shenzhen, up to 10,000 people surrounded the Jusco supermarket, a Japanese chain, chanting slogans and urging people to boycott Japanese goods. Young Chinese shouted insults against ‘little Japs’ and ‘Japanese pigs’. Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, said, ‘The core issue in the China–Japan relationship is that Japan needs to face up to history squarely.’18 In Japan, though, most politicians were tired of apologizing.