Japan: Sunday 6 April at 2pm on ABC Radio National's Hindsight
The shadow of the past continues to haunt contemporary Japan, through the complex and often conflicting interplay of history, politics and national identity.
The enduring legacies of Japan's imperial history lay at the heart of simmering tensions with its Asian neighbours, South Korea and China, and the debate over the recent 70th anniversary of the 1937 invasion of Nanjing demonstrated how the wounds of the past are still palpably borne out in the present day.
And the bitter memory of the Second World War still casts a shadow over contemporary Japan. Those demanding retrospective justice for war crimes perpetrated by the Japanese military refuse to disappear.
Adding to the noisy jostle of conflicting positions over history in Japan are a powerful group of neo-nationalists, who claim that the country's post-war incarnation, including its pacifist constitution, has led to a sense of national self-loathing and a crisis in identity. The struggle over interpretation of the country's 20th century history has become the battleground for these differing ideologies of nationhood.
Program transcript
[montage...]
The war really has never ended for the so-called comfort women…we were called comfort women.
The Japanese has got this kind of self-image of the victims of war, and therefore their peace ideology is weak.
Having found the atomic bomb, we have used it…
From zero point the same complete levelling is evident…
…cast a shadow over Hiroshima and over the land of the Rising Sun.
We have to teach the objective past, both dark side and sunny side.
This is what Japan has never done, they have never taken responsibility for their war crimes.
What is lacking here is the moral imagination, learning from this war experience, victimisation, and extend the moral imagination to the people we victimise.
We announce the guilty of the Emperor Hirohito which was a big taboo in Japan.
I feel very much ashamed that the Japanese of my father’s generation committed such an appalling crime against innocent young women.
Michelle Rayner: My visit to Japan in 2007 to survey debates and tensions over history and memory, coincided with the 70th anniversary of one of the most contested events in 20th century history, the Japanese invasion of the Chinese city of Nanjing, or Nanking, in1937. This history has been a running sore between contemporary China and Japan, and Nanjing stands out now as emblematic of all of the sensitivities over the past which still exist between Japan and its Asian neighbours.
Although Japanese historians had led the way in uncovering and documenting this early chapter of the nation’s dark history, there still appears to be today a pervasive unwillingness, particularly at a state level, to really acknowledge the truth of the Nanjing invasion in 1937. Indeed, inside Japan today there is a group of defiant neo-nationalists who want to counter what they claim is Chinese exaggeration and wilful fabrication over the history of Nanjing.
Excerpt from The Battle of China: These scenes were photographed by an American missionary and smuggled out of China after the rape of Nanking. In one of the bloodiest massacres of recorded history, they murdered 40,000 men, women, children. But those who lived might better have died, for the horror of their twisted and torn bodies was worse than death.
Michelle Rayner: That's from the 1944 film The Battle of China, made by celebrated American director Frank Capra. It portrayed the events at Nanjing 1937, and was used to rouse anti-Japanese sentiment during the Second World War.
And the recent 70th anniversary of Nanking, or Nanjing, had put debates about history very squarely back on the table. Nowhere was this more evident than in the spate of documentary and feature films about this history underway in several countries around the world. Even Oliver Stone was rumoured to have taken an interest in the Nanjing invasion, with a view to make a Hollywood epic out of it. But it was the domestic Japanese film interpretations of this history which had got most of the attention and raised the eyebrows of historians and scholars inside Japan and abroad.
David McNeill is a journalist based in Japan, where he teaches at Sophia University in Tokyo. He's taken a close look at the documentaries being produced in Japan about this history for their take on what the Japanese themselves for a long time would only ever describe as ‘the Nanjing incident’.
David McNeill: The latest movie which has caused all the stink is a fairly small-scale documentary, it’s only got a budget of $2 million, and it is directed by a man called Mizushima Satoru who has a long history of neo-nationalist support, neo-nationalist writings and so on. He writes for right-wing magazines in Japan. The movie essentially argues that what we know as the Nanking massacre was an entire fabrication, a fabrication by the Chinese side, by Chinese communists. When I visited the set in December they’d built a mock-up of the gallows on which seven of the leaders of the war, including Hideki Tojo the prime minister during the war of Japan…they built a mock-up and they’ve dramatised the hangings of those men. Mizushima said that while he was looking at those hangings that he was actually in tears because he believes that these figures are ‘comparable to Jesus Christ’, and that’s his words, not mine. He says that these people saved Japan, scarified their lives for Japan, then were killed.
Michelle Rayner: And, according to David McNeil, Satoru's unapologetic version of Nanjing has a significant number of sympathisers in Japan.
David McNeill: If you go to the website of this movie, the Sakura Channel, which is a movie that Mizushima-san owns which has helped produce this movie, you’ll see that there’s a list of politicians, in some cases very senior politicians who have expressed support for the work that Sakura Channel does and for the movie itself. One of them is Nakayama Nariaki who is a former…first of all he’s a member of the ruling LDP and he’s also a former education minister, so that to me is the interesting thing, it’s the sort of support that comes to these projects in the shadows, if you like, and that is quite significant in Japan.
Michelle Rayner: Were there any historians in that list of support?
David McNeill: Yes, there are, there’s a group of quite well known historians, neo-nationalist historians here. Their reputation, I have to say, I don’t think I’m stepping into controversy there, but I think their reputation is quite low. One of the them, Higashinakano, who is a professor of Asia University here, he has been successfully sued by two of the survivors of the Nanking massacre in Chinese and Japanese courts, and he refuses in fact to debate…I’ve tried to contact him many times and he refuses to come out and discuss his work and debate his work, which for me is the key test. Fujioka is another historian, another very well known historian, and he’s been saying for years that Nanking is a fabrication.
Michelle Rayner: So these two names that you mention would possibly fall into the group of historians described as the illusion school?
David McNeill: That’s right, yes, there’s sort of three schools. There’s the maboroshi-ha, which is the illusion school, as you correctly say. There are people who, against all of the evidence and despite all the facts and testimony of survivors and the testimony of people who witnessed what happened, including Americans and British and Japanese and so on, they say that nobody or a very tiny number of people were illegally killed in Nanking. Then you have a group of people in the middle who say, well, yes, people died but certainly nothing along the lines of what the Chinese say. The Chinese side argues essentially that 300,000 people were murdered in Nanking, and sometimes even the figure is 350,000.
And then you have the so-called massacre school, which is ‘daigyakusatsu’ in Japanese, who say that essentially supported the Chinese side, and there are people in Japan who would go along with that, and there’s some very famous journalists…in fact the most famous journalist in relation to the Nanking massacre is a guy called Honda Katsuichi who is a Japanese man who indeed was the first journalist outside of China to expose what happened there, and he went to China in the early 1970s and reported it in a series of very famous articles in the Asahi newspaper. It’s not that known outside of Japan that there are people of course here, especially in the academic community and the artistic community, who despise the kind of revisionism that’s going on now. But those three schools, if you like, would be where the debate falls at the moment.
Michelle Rayner: How much do you think it’s known or not known about by younger Japanese today in contemporary Japan?
David McNeill: They will say, ‘Yes, I’ve heard about the Nanking incident,’ and they won’t say ‘Nanking massacre’, which is a key point in Japan of course. And then they will say, ‘But the Chinese side has exaggerated what has gone on.’ There’s this sort of fetishisation of the figure of 300,000, and this goes across the media in Japan. There’s no attempt really to get into the arguments about what happened anymore, and I’ve noticed over the last five years in particular that many, many of my students, even students that have been educated abroad, would now argue the Chinese side has exaggerated. And from that step it’s not that far to say that the whole thing has been made up and that Japan did nothing wrong. And what’s in the centre of Tokyo, well, that’s the Yasukuni Museum which is essentially a right-wing museum arguing that Japan had no choice but to go to war.
Excerpt 7.30 Report 2005; South Asia correspondent Shane McLeod: The war memorial in Tokyo, Yasukuni shrine, has become the symbol of everything that’s gone wrong in Japan’s relationship with its neighbours. China and Korea say visits to the shrine by Junichiro Koizumi show Japan hasn’t come to terms with its past because as well as thousands of soldiers the shrine is home to the spirits of convicted war criminals.
Michelle Rayner: This is the sound track of a Japanese wartime film that screens for visitors to the Yasukuni shrine museum in downtown Tokyo.
The Yasukuni shrine and its accompanying museum is another simmering point of tension between Japan and its neighbouring countries. The shine contains the remains of Japanese military officers, those who many Koreans, Chinese, and possibly even Australians, would regard as war criminals, and the fact that various Japanese prime ministers have, over the years, visited the shrine has outraged these countries and brought international opprobrium upon the Japanese state. Given the odour which surrounds Yasukuni, it’s not surprising to find that many historians and others inside Japan consider the war museum something of an embarrassment. And it's easy to see why, when the English language text panels in one room of the museum explained that the Japanese were forced to enter the Second World War after their country had been invaded by allied forces.
Jan Ruff-O’Hearn: The military were given the comfort women like they were given a packet of cigarettes.
Michelle Rayner: That's Jan Ruff-O’Hearn, speaking on the BBC about her experience of being forced into sex slavery, one of the so-called ‘comfort woman’, by the occupying Japanese forces in Java during the Second World War. And, like the invasion of Nanjing, the comfort women issue continues to haunt Japan. Just last year a bill was introduced into the US congress which threatened to take the Japanese to the international war crimes tribunal if it did not publicly acknowledge culpability over the forced sex slavery of women during World War Two. But inside Japan there appears to be an overwhelming silence in response to the comfort women issue, but if you look hard enough in Japan you can find those who oppose the government’s entrenched whitewashing over the comfort women history. One of these is historian Hirofumi Hayashi, who’s published a number of books exposing his country’s use of sex slavery during the war. Professor Hirofumi teaches at Kanto-Gakuin University, in Yokohama.
Hirofumi Hayashi: [translated] As for the documents, the records in Japan side is concerned, I think they did not have a sense to think this comfort women issue was a serious crime. Those documents were not hidden. Of course it took time and labour but I eventually found them in Japan and also in America, UK and Australia.
Jan Ruff-O’Hearn: In 1944 a Japanese army truck arrived at the camp with high ranking Japanese officers, and they told us that all the young girls from 17 years and up had to line up in the compound. Then a selection process started, they picked ten of the prettiest girls, we were put on this truck like sheep to the slaughter and driven away to the city of Sumarun. The truck then stopped in front of a large Dutch colonial house. When we entered the house we were told by a high ranking Japanese officer that we were in that house for the sexual pleasure of the Japanese military, so we found ourselves in a brothel. We protested, of course, loudly, that we were taken by force, that they had no right to keep us in this house, that it was against the Geneva Convention, and they said they could do with us what they liked. We were absolutely terrified. We were a very innocent generation, we knew nothing about sex. We were all virgins, and then of course opening night arrived, and the memories of that first opening night of the brothel have tortured my mind all my life. We were just systematically raped night and day by Japanese military.
Michelle Rayner: How important have been, in terms of your research and your determination to see this history as a human rights issue, how important have been the testimonies of the surviving women who were incarcerated in these stations?
Hirofumi Hayashi: [translated] In 1991 when Miss Kim Hak Soon disclosed that she had been a comfort woman, that was the first time we really got to know what sort of experience and hardship she had to go through. Those people got damaged, mentally and physically, and it remains up to now.
Michelle Rayner: Your most recent research has been the American involvement in this history, in the 40s, the post-war, and the 50s, in the occupation years I think. Can you describe the American involvement?
Hirofumi Hayashi: [translated] Talking about US army, it is known that Japanese internal affairs ministry made comfort stations for the American soldiers, after the war and those occupation period. So it was September 1945 to the March of 1946, and it was called RAA, Rest and Amusement Association. Also we find a record, they closed in March of ’46, but for this half a year American soldiers used these facilities.
Korean protester: [translated] Because the Japanese government did wrong, what they were doing, we want them to pay reparations for us and make their formal apology to us.
Michelle Rayner: Korean women at the weekly Wednesday rally they've been holding outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul for over 15 years. Korean women made up 80% of those forced into sex slavery during the war, and the intransigence of the Japanese government over an apology and reparations is the source of a deep and lingering wound between the two countries. As well as this, Japan’s occupation of Korea for most of the first half of the 20th century adds to this ongoing tension.
Jan Ruff-O’Hearn: An apology coming from the government would give us back our dignity. We have deserved that after 60 years. And it’s no use apologising if it’s not followed by action. It’s no use if you break a window to just say ‘I’m sorry’, you have to pay for the window to be repaired.
Michelle Rayner: In May 2007, the then prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, while in the United States made the traditional Japanese deep bow of humility and expressed what appeared to be an apology on behalf of this country for the sorry story of the comfort women. But for some who've campaigned on behalf of the surviving women, Abe’s gesture proved hollow. They say that it was cynical and opportunistic, that Abe’s hand was forced as a result of Japan’s complex economic and diplomatic relationship with US. So, what did historians inside Japan make of Shinto Abe's actions? Hirofumi Hayashi.
Hirofumi Hayashi: [translated] When Prime Minster Abe met a person from the congress in America he made an apology, he made a comment about apology with the word ‘forced’, the comfort women were ‘forced’. Clearly he made that, but however in Japan domestically he never admit that they were forced to do that. So he had this double standard.
Yuki Tanaka: I don’t think he has genuinely apologised because initially he said there was no enforcement of women who became comfort women. So he tried to somehow please Americans by changing his statement. By doing that he’s actually inviting more criticism because of his hypocritical attitude. If we deny these war crimes that we committed then we create more mistrust amongst the neighbouring countries like Korea and China.
Michelle Rayner: Yuki Tanaka, who is research professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute.
Not long before Shinzo Abe made his apology to the US congress, a new museum devoted to the history of the comfort women quietly opened its doors in central Tokyo. It’s called WAM, the Women's Active Museum for War and Peace, and it owes its genesis to the pioneering Japanese woman journalist and activist, the late Matsui Yayori. WAM does not receive any funding from the Japanese government, and instead relies on membership and private donor sponsorship. And while it's currently comparatively modest in size, just several rooms inside the compound of a Christian university in Tokyo, WAM is certainly one museum in Japan that is unafraid to take a line on the still sensitive issue of the country’s responsibility for forced sex slavery.
Mina Watanabe is the secretary general and curator at WAM.
Mina Watanabe: We opened this museum in the 60th anniversary of the end of the war. War memory issue was a big issue but Japanese media didn’t cover at all about the opening of WAM, even though this comfort women issue and war memory issue is really big diplomatic and political issue. It was really the time, the year 2000 and afterwards, when Japan started denying again the facts of the comfort women issue too, so that was really the driving force to make the museum.
Korean protester: [translated] Twenty-five days before the graduation of my fourth grade in elementary school I was forced to join the comfort women because the Japanese government refused to provide me with food if I did not go.
Mina Watanabe: In the entrance we have now 155 survivors’ faces in portraits, as well as we also keep the movement’s documents. There are many newsletters who has been supporting the trials of the survivors of comfort women. There are ten lawsuits against the Japanese government by the survivors. After we started in the year 2005, every year so far we are conducting hotline to collect any information on comfort women issue. First year we received more than 80 calls from the veterans or witnesses or some grandson or granddaughter of former soldiers or…but the situation in Japan becoming worse and worse, and as you see from our exhibition that in the year 1997 all the junior high school text books had some reference on comfort women system but from 2002, 2006 they have been erasing, and now in the year 2006 text book they only have two out of seven, two text book had reference on comfort women issue. But they don’t have the words ‘comfort women’ any more, the reference is really getting much more subtle.
[montage...]
The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military…
The first one was dropped on a Japanese city this morning…
We won the race of discovery against the Germans…
Hiroshima lay in ruins. Within a few seconds the sizable city had been demolished by the atomic blast.
It was designed for a detonation equal to 20,000 tonnes of high explosives.
I realise the tragic significance of the atomic bomb…
Michelle Rayner: In trying to understand contemporary Japan's complex and ambivalent relationship with its 20th century history, a visit to the city of Hiroshima is instructive. Today, walking through the city’s glossy shopping arcades and from the windows of the trams which trundle along tree-lined boulevards that are so clean and painfully neat, it's difficult to imagine that this place was also that other Hiroshima, the site for the dropping of the atomic bomb, loaded with all that weight of history. After the events of 1945 it's not surprising that Hiroshima was the site for Japan’s emerging peace movement, and if Japan hosts other museums like the Yasukuni in Tokyo, which appears to glorify its military past, then Hiroshima, with its well known peace memorials and its world heritage listed A-bomb dome, offers a fairly powerful counter-story of the nation.
It's impossible to visit the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Museum and not be moved. The full horror of what happened to the city's civilian population is laid out in graphic imagery and in testimonial. Whatever the wartime justification for the dropping of the A-bomb, a visit to this museum leaves one unequivocal about the cost it exacted on the people of Hiroshima. And like other war memorials around the world, the Hiroshima Peace Museum is a mandatory school excursion for children in Japan. But the peace museum does have its critics. Yuki Tanaka from the Hiroshima Peace Institute is one of them.
Yuki Tanaka: The museum is pathetic in a way because, you see, they don’t have even a single photo of Nagasaki, it’s only Hiroshima. When I came here six years ago I was invited to give a public lecture, and the first thing I said, museum had to be changed. And that was a shock to the people in Hiroshima. For example, we talk about the victims of radiation and there is hardly talk about the victims of the nuclear test. None, no single photo of, say, Aborigines who were exposed to radiation…
Michelle Rayner: Maralinga…
Yuki Tanaka: …or South West Pacific islanders who were exposed to radiation, or the Asians exposed to Russian and Chinese nuclear tests. There’s none. So they pretend that we are the only victims of the nuclear war, radiation. That’s not good. It’s not surprising that the people are forgetting this Hiroshima issue. I’m not denying the huge impact on the people who visit the museum. Nonetheless I think it’s very narrowly focused. Somehow if we really want to maintain the Hiroshima issue and the spirit of the Hiroshima, we have to somehow introduce the major change to the division of the museum.
Michelle Rayner: While Yuki Tanaka believes the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was an inhumane and unnecessary act, he is also critical of the way in which the event has been absorbed into a strange post-war consciousness in Japan. He argues that the historical experience of the A-bomb has given licence to a sensibility that only ever sees one great victim of the Second World War, the Japanese, and that this sense of victimhood obviates any ability to recognise the country’s role as a perpetrator of violence during the war.
Yuki Tanaka: The anti-nuclear movement and peace movement here in Hiroshima is very narrowly focused on their own experience. So they highlight the victimisation of the citizens of Hiroshima, especially Hibakusha. I don’t blame them, and of course it’s symbolically important to have the voices of the Hibakusha, and they I think contributed enormously to the anti-nuclear movement. Nonetheless, because they are narrowly focused on their own experience they tend to see their own experience as very unique and there is no common elements to share with other victims of war. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a typical example of the indiscriminate bombing of civilians. Although the bomb used is very unique, atom bombs, but people in Tokyo, Dresden, London, you name it, large numbers of other civilians also became the victims of the indiscriminate bombings. If we don’t try to extend our view and try to establish the solidarity between Hiroshima people and the victims of other war, our movement becomes very weak, especially when the Hibakusha pass away, then we have no one to tell the story.
Michelle Rayner: In 2006, a group of Japanese peace scholars, including Yuki Tanaka, organised an event called the International People's Tribunal on the Dropping of the Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over two days in the July of that year, defendants of the dropping of the bomb, including presidents Roosevelt and Truman, US miliary chiefs and nuclear scientists such a Robert Oppenheimer, argued their case to a panel of three real-life judges. The judges included American professor of international and criminal law, Lennox Hinds from Rutgers University, as well as Carlos Vargas who teaches international law at Costa Rica University. The plaintiffs in the tribunal were made up by the Hibakusha, the living A-bomb survivors, as well as citizens of both Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
The event was open to the public who could witness the enactment of a trial which might have, under different historical circumstances, taken place 60 years previously. And while the People's Tribunal had no real legal power, it did have symbolic clout and a clear purpose, to promote the idea of peace and also to demonstrate that it is possible to redress historic wrongdoings.
Yuki Tanaka: I thought, okay, we have to emphasise the criminality of the bombing of civilians. No nation has done it, so I thought we’ll bring this People’s Tribunal in Hiroshima, but at the same time we are emphasising the fact that the bombing of civilians is a crime against humanity, no matter where it was conducted.
[montage...]
I urge Japanese civilians to leave industrial cities immediately and save themselves from destruction.
Looking west from zero point, the same complete levelling is evident, the same inability of structures to withstand atomic power.
I realise the tragic significance of the atomic bomb…
Outlined in the surface of the bridge is the shadow of a pedestrian which tells its own meaningful story.
Mitsuo Okamoto: My parents died because all the sons of the family went to Manchuria and came back with tuberculosis…toward the end of the war our parents contracted the tuberculosis. In those days there was no medicine, and they died one after the other; the brother died and mother died and then father died. So when I was 15 years old I had no parents, but when I came to Hiroshima and realised the much worse situation Hiroshima citizens had to go through because of the atomic bombing, I realise that the suffering I had to go through was nothing.
Michelle Rayner: Like many Japanese of his generation, the life of Dr Mitsuo Okamoto has been directly shaped by the Second World War. An emeritus professor at Hiroshima Shudo University, he pioneered the development of peace studies in Japan and has taught in universities around the world. In the last few years Dr Okamoto's interest has been keenly trained on the public campaign in Japan to stop the government from changing the Article 9 clause in the country’s constitution. This clause effectively limits Japan from entering combat troops in international conflicts. Article 9 has been a legal thorn in the side of various Japanese governments, from the first Gulf war, to the current conflict in Iraq. For peace activists such as Dr Okamoto, the constitution itself holds great symbolic weight. Created in 1946 during the American post-war occupation, the constitution signified the end of old Imperial Japan and laid the foundation for the modern democracy in place today.
Mitsuo Okamoto: I’m a child of Article 9. When I became a junior high school student immediately after the war we were introduced to this new constitution, and we were excited because it was an atmosphere where we hated war, partly because we lost the war. I don’t know how we would have felt if we had won a war, but the reality was the defeat, and democracy was introduced and we had more freedom, we had joy to study and…I think those years were truly years of the burgeoning democracy in this country, after a long time of the militarism and authoritarian system. Yes, that’s why I said I am a child of the Article 9.
Michelle Rayner: Can you remember as a young man when you were studying Japanese history at high school whether the more sensitive aspects of Japan’s modern history, perhaps Korea, China, or even the Second World War…can you remember they way it was taught?
Seishi Hinada: You see, it is already 24 years since I became a teacher. When I was a student I was in the middle of the post-war so-called democratic education, and I was born in Hiroshima prefecture and brought up here. Hiroshima used to be…well, still I hope is centre of peace education in Japan. So in addition to the A-bomb experiences we were taught about how Japanese aggression into Asian countries affected their lives, and also we were taught about the post-war compensation issues, war victims and all the rest of it. But ever since the 1990s the history revisionists found post-war democratic education, including peace education, a great obstacle for what they want to achieve. So they started to attack the democratic education and peace education.
Michelle Rayner: Seishi Hinada teaches at a local state high school in Hiroshima, and he's also involved in peace and pro-democracy groups, including his local chapter of the Article 9 association. He's experienced first-hand the impact of a group of conservative neo-nationalists who’ve targeted education as the source of a perceived decline in national standards. The group have made it their mission to revise the content and tone of Japanese history textbooks.
Like Australia, Japan has seen its own history war around teaching and school history textbooks. And the rhetoric coming from the conservative history warriors in Japan is also strangely familiar; they claim that the accepted post-war interpretation of Japanese history is far too apologetic, too masochistic, gloomy, and full of self-loathing. And it seems that this group of conservative neo-nationalists, founded by education academic Nobukatsu Fujioka, has garnered support in some powerful quarters in Japan.
Seishi Hinada: You see, the group, like Professor Fujioka, insists that post-war Japanese democratic education of peace movement sees Japanese history in a so-called self-flagellant way.
Michelle Rayner: Masochistic.
Seishi Hinada: Yes, punishing ourselves for the sin we have, depriving younger population of their national pride. But it sounds really weird to our generation, we see we have to face the history. But for younger generation those ideologies go straight into their mind because they were not taught enough about the history of anything. So I think it is really dangerous to dismiss their influence because they have very strong social and political networks among the Japanese business world, Japanese political world and even the mass media. What happens in, for example, here in Japan, when they attack peace education in Hiroshima I find very strong tripartite alliance among those groups and local conservative politicians and also the local conservative media. They have a very strong impact upon the public population.
Michelle Rayner: Professor Fujioka's group went ahead and wrote their own history textbook. Their book skews the motives which led to Japan’s entry in the Second World War. For example, there's no specific reference to Japan having invaded other countries. Rather these acts are described as ‘advancement’.
Mitsuo Okamoto: The basic thinking is to depict Japanese past history as beautiful as possible so that the young people can have a positive view of Japanese past history so that they can have confidence in the integrity of Japanese people in the past. You know, this is ridiculous, this is a ridiculous view of education. We have to teach the objective past, both dark side and sunny side, so that the young people will not have doubts. If they are taught only on the sunny side, positive side, one day they will have doubts; well, we learn so much about the dark side, about American history, dark side of British, don’t we have dark side of history in Japan?
Yuki Tanaka: If you have a look the Japanese text book, it covers from ancient Japan to the modern time, including the war time period. But because they start from ancient time, by the time that the third year of the high school, they are not covering the whole text book. So towards the end of the text book, that is contemporary history, including war issues, are totally ignored. But they are concentrating on, say, culture in Edo period as a marvellous theatre, No, Kabuki, yes, flower arrangement, that’s important too, but by the time they come to the contemporary issues the schooling is finished. At the, for example, entrance exams at the universities, the questions on the contemporary history hardly comes up. So this is the problem. And I’m sure that the Japanese government is very happy with this arrangement, so they don’t try to change this.
Kimijima Kazuhiko: [translated] The first study group aim for to pointing out issue and problems in Japanese history text books. However the second study group tried to make text book which could be used in both countries.
Michelle Rayner: That’s Professor Kimijima Kazuhiko. He’s on the front line of an important counter-offensive to the conservative historical revisionists like Nobukatsu Fujioka. Professor Kimijima has been part of a joint Japanese/South Korean study group who came together to try and write a history textbook which could accommodate both a Korean and Japanese interpretation of their shared history. It was no simple undertaking as this is a history which involves the invasion, colonisation and sometimes brutal repression of the Koreans by the Japanese during the first 30 years of the 20th century. It would take more than ten years and two separate joint study projects before the two countries could even begin to think about the idea of a shared history textbook.
Kimijima Kazuhiko: [translated] The issue that we had in the study group was different from our generally considered issue of conflicts. For example, when the Japanese side writes about colonial rule of Korea, if we write how cruel it was, Korean side was not always happy about it because that could make less description about how Korean people had independence or they had dignity. Maybe some of them reacted with arms. As a result I would say this text book has a lot of areas covering the Korean people’s movement they seek for independence. So this book writes this cruel rule by Japanese side and at the same time Korean people had dignity and try very hard to keep their independence in mind. So Korean and Japanese people have more interest gradually in history as they have more communication and understating culturally. However, Japanese government and Japanese politicians still goes to Yasukuni shrine and they make very discriminatory comments, so they still have this old concept. And the Korean side, I think they think to develop that communication in more real meaning between two countries, these political issues to be solved.
[montage...]
A life of bare essentials is the lot of the little men who dreamed of world rule and ended up as hosts to Uncle Sam’s occupation army.
Mr Abe himself was born into a proud political dynasty, and his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi was a post-war prime minister.
…cherished a dream of revising Japan’s pacifist constitution, the one imposed by the occupying Americans.
Michelle Rayner: Like other governments around the world, the Japanese government has also been invoking history in order to serve present-day policies and interests. For the past decade or so, various Japanese governments have expressed their interest in abolishing the pacifist Clause 9 of the Japanese constitution, and they’ve looked to history for justification.
Former prime ministers Junichiro Koizumi and his successor Shinzo Abe have both argued that the constitution, which came into being in 1946 during the allied occupation of Japan, was the work of the Americans alone, and that from the outset it was therefore not created with the interests of future Japanese in mind.
The most contentious clause, Article 9, renounces war and forbids the country to have a fully fledged military. And, it’s something of an historical irony that the US government has expressed support for the Japanese government’s desire to re-write the constitution. Those in Japan who want to hold on to Article 9 in the constitution are also invoking history in their defence. Self described ‘child of Article 9’, Dr Mitsuo Okamoto.
Mitsuo Okamoto: The constitution we think is not just American gift but it was a collaboration of the occupation forces and the progressive Japanese constitution scholars who had been imprisoned during the war because they did not consider the imperial rule was just, but that the more democratic or republican system of government was modern. So these progressive constitutional scholars conceived…actually written down the draft of the new constitution. They had original ideas which coincided with the ideas of the progressive American constitutional scholars who were in the GHQ. So it was, in my view, a collaboration. Many conservative people, ordinary people say it was MacArthur’s invention and they drafted it in just one or two weeks and just enforced to Japanese people. That’s not true.
Yuki Tanaka: Article 9 was created not only because we Japanese were victimised by war but also we perpetrated the war crimes and we committed war crimes against large numbers of Chinese, Koreans, Taiwanese, South East Asians. So based on the victimisation of other Asians committed by our own men and the political leaders, Article 9 was created and accepted by Japanese. This historical meaning was somehow forgotten and only seen as the protection of our life, and now even this meaning is also fading away because of the lack of education. So Article 9 is becoming irrelevant to younger generations.
Michelle Rayner: Before leaving this journey through the minefield of the history wars in Japan, a final word from some of those on the front line. With a new prime minister, 71-year-old Yasuo Fukuda, presiding over an LDP led coalition government, what direction now for the ways in which the past constantly pushes its way, noisily and angrily, into the present-day issues in Japan? First, some strategic manoeuvres in the campaign for recognition of the comfort women history. Here’s Mina Watanabe, director of WAM, the Women's Active Museum for War and Peace, in Tokyo.
Mina Watanabe: We are going to invite all the minister members, parliamentarians to WAM because it’s a call for women A to Z, so I want them to know, what was the purpose, who obeyed it and what kind of suffering there.
David McNeill: You know the revisionist school has gone in waves over the years depending on the political context in Japan. The late 1960s and early 1970s, because of the Vietnam War and because of a general upsurge of I guess you would call it anti-government sentiment here, was a very important period in terms of openness about history and there were a lot of challenges to the dominant perspective of how Japan saw the war. I think what’s scary for people like me who would view themselves as being on the sort of liberal end of the spectrum is that we have moved away from that now, we are moving very fast away from that now, and we are into a period of neo-nationalist hegemony, I think, or growing neo-nationalist hegemony in Japan.
Yuki Tanaka It’s a dark history because my father’s generation committed crimes. So we are capable of doing the same things if the situation changes, so somehow we have to think about our possibility, the danger to commit the similar crimes. But not only is this a Japanese possibility but the Americans’ possibility too. As I said, we have to learn from the Japanese experience and apply to the universal, but what is lacking here is the moral imagination, learning from the war experience, victimisation, and extend the moral imagination to the people we victimise. This kind of lack of imagination is clear here in Japan. So somehow we need to nurture this moral imagination.