Japan, World War II, and Me

The subject of Japan and World War II is a bit nebulous to cover in a single blog posting, without making one of those long rambling blog postings for which I’m becoming famous.

It’s always been in the back of my mind to tackle this eventually, but there are a few things which have pushed it back to the front of my mind. Of course with the big anti-Japanese protests in China and Korea, Japan’s World War II legacy is back in the news. Advertisements for the movie about the new movie about Hitler’s last days have already started here, and it is interesting to see the Japanese reaction. And then there was the comment of the returning student, mentioned in the previous blog post. Of all the things about Japanese educational system, the first thing he zoomed in on was the difference between the way World War II is told.

After four years living in Japan, this is my assessment as well. I mentioned it was good to for him to hear both sides of the story, both the American side and the Japanese side. Indeed I think there are problems with both versions.

The American Side
The Americans tend to look at the war as the forces of good arrayed against the forces of pure evil. But human relations, and foreign relations, are never that simple. As long as we live in a fallen world no country has a monopoly on virtue or on evil. My East Asian studies professor at Calvin once said, “You’ve been taught to look at this war as good versus evil, but I want to challenge you to look at the war as evil on both sides.”

Of course the holocaust is something that should make us all stop and shudder. Stalin and Mao may have ultimately killed more people, but there is something chilling about the cold efficiency of the holocaust. (Stalin and Mao were both on our side during the war, but more on this later).

But nor should it be forgotten that in the years leading up to World War II anti-Semitism was so high in the U.S. that American opponents of Nazi Germany felt they had to de-emphasize the Jewish holocaust to get their fellow country men involved in the war. And that America fought World War II with a segregated army.

And of course there was the British Empire and it’s imperialistic holdings around the world. I remember another of my Calvin professors who mentioned that although Winston Churchill is regarded as a hero in the West, he is not well remembered in India. Because of Churchill’s hard-line stance against the Indian independence movement, and the massacres that resulted under his watch, the professor said many Indians regard Churchill as just as bad as Hitler.

And of course there was also Apartheid South Africa, and White-Only Australia on our side.

And Stalin and Mao. Okay, Mao might be a little unfair because he was only in command of a guerilla army at the time he fought the Japanese (and apparently the new biography challenges even that). But there is Stalin. The American history books often de-emphasize the role played by the Soviet Union, but the European war was essentially fought and won on the Russian front. By the time we invaded in Normandy, the Germans were already in retreat on the Eastern front.

So it is good to remember that the allies were not the white knights in shining armor that they are sometimes made out to be. And this is just the set up going into the war. I haven’t even talked about the way the war was conducted: the total warfare philosophy, the decision that civilians were legitimate targets, the saturation bombings of civilian cities, the fire bombing of Tokyo and Dresden, and the atomic bombs. There’s no need for me to go into detail on any of these points because they’ve been adequately covered already by writers like Howard Zinn.

In Japan, and perhaps this will come as no great revelation, no one supports the decision to drop the atomic bombs. Neither the Japanese left nor the Japanese right nor the man on the street thinks it was morally defensible to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And there is often an assumption that no one anywhere in the world could defend the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. I can shock Japanese people by saying, “look, if you go to America, there are a lot of people who still support the decision to drop the atomic bombs. It’s not universally agreed that those bombings are indefensible.” But more often than not, no one really believes me.

And in fact the longer I’ve been in Japan, the more I start to fall into the trap of the same way of thinking. It’s dangerous I think, because any debate must start out by acknowledging the opposition’s points. The result in Japan is that there is a lot of hollow anti-nuclear talk, but very little of substance added to the debate. But the longer I’ve been here, the more I forget that anti-nukes is not an agreed upon universal sentiment. I’ll find myself thinking, “Are there really people back home who defend the Hiroshima decision, or did I just dream that all up?”

Japanese Side
Much of the mythology of World War II in the US is connected to the strong emotions that are brought up by Hitler and the Nazis. But the Japanese people almost view that as a separate war entirely. I guess the comparison I would make is that they view their alliance with Hitler the same way we view ours with Stalin. They feel no more guilt over Hitler’s crimes, than we Americans feel about Stalin’s.

When the subject of the holocaust does come up, I sometimes feel like the tone is, “How can you Westerners do such terrible things to each other?”, and I will have to remind them that Hitler was their ally.

In fact I’ve learned that there isn’t even a Japanese word for “the axis powers”. Or if there is, then most Japanese people don’t know it. As a Japanese friend said, “I know what you’re talking about. Germany and Italy and Japan were all friends for a while, but I don’t think there’s a special word for it.”

There is almost a cold detachment. Movies about Hitler can open in Japan with seemingly little to no emotional connection. As I’ve written before, the swastika seems to be regarded in Japan as an historical oddity, and people will wear it or flash it around ignorant of the emotions the symbol evokes in the West.

But of course even if the association with Germany is minimalized, there is still the matter of Japan’s own war crimes, and the recent (reoccurring) textbook controversy, and the protests in China.

China’s position is hypocritical, and I think the US columnists have done a good job of pointing this out, as has Jared English on his weblog. Or, as my Japanese teacher said, “What we did during World War II was wrong, and I wish the textbooks would be more honest about it. But we’ve apologized many times since the war, and we’ve given billions in development aid to China since then, and the Chinese government doesn’t tell its people any of this. So their government can whip them into an anti-Japanese frenzy so easily, but it is not honest.”

So, it’s hard to take the Chinese side too much. But I find myself getting more upset at the Japanese. I was relating my feelings to a friend, “I think there is something about proximity that makes us angry. For instance I’m sure there are right-wing idiots in every country, but the right-wing idiots in say France and Australia don’t really bug me that much. It’s the idiots in my own country that makes my blood boil. The longer I stay in Japan, the more I feel like I’m part of this country, and the less patience I have for the right wing. Even though China may be more at fault for this dispute, I find myself just getting so angry at the Japanese. I want to scream, ‘You fucking idiots. You fucking knew this was going to happen when you published that textbook, and now you’re complaining about anti-Japanese sentiment, and whining like you’re the victim.’”

Like most ex-patriots here, I’ve read “The Rape of Nanking” by Iris Chang. It’s one of those books that everyone who comes to Japan reads sooner or later. It just gets passed around from ALT to ALT, much like “Dogs and Demons”, which is the other book every ex-pat here reads sooner or later.

I’m not sure how popular “The Rape of Nanking” is outside of ALT circles, but I would highly recommend it to anyone. Even though the massacre itself is ancient history, the failure of Japan to fully recognize what happened is still a current issue.

Of course, as I mentioned a while back in a previous blog post, one can never mention Japanese history text books without pointing out that the US does the same thing. And this is a separate problem in its own right. But one does not justify the other.