The Wages of Guilt

by Ian Buruma

  The ambivalence comes in many varieties, and it emerges in conversations with very different people. The right-wing Liberal Democratic Party politician Kamei Shizuka is in almost every respect the opposite of Oda Makoto. They are roughly the same age, and both are stocky men, with broad peasant features. That is about all they have in common, however. Kamei is a hawk on defense. He wants Article Nine to be scrapped from the constitution. He wants education to be more patriotic, to instill pride in Japanese military heroes, and so on. He does not believe that Japan’s war in Asia was all that bad. He wants the emperor to be reinstated in his former status as sacred father of the family state. He wants to revive Shinto as a national cult. He thinks that the Americans after the war robbed Japan of its identity, its pride, its virility.

  I visited Kamei in his office in Tokyo, near the Diet building. His language, like Oda’s, was deliberately rough, not so much to express familiarity as to stress a kind of rugged masculinity. Our conversation was interrupted once or twice by telephone calls. Kamei never articulated a word. All I heard were grunts and growls, of affirmation, of negation, of farewell.

  I asked him what he thought of the Gulf War. He grunted and said: “We Japanese have a term, tatemae, which means official reality, the way you say things are. Then we have honne, our real feelings, the way things really are. Now, the tatemae is that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait cannot be allowed. The honne is that we Japanese were not consulted before America started the war.” The resentment was unmistakable. From the opposite perspective, Kamei was making Oda’s point: America had forced Japan to be an accomplice.

  “Then,” he went on, “there is the question of Israel. You know, we Japanese are well informed. We know what the real face of America is. People here have seen Henry Kissinger on television. He is a Jew. And we know about Jewish influence in America. We know all that. So our honne tells us that this war is fought for Israel.”

  This is fairly standard rhetoric in Japan. It is disturbing, but easy to misinterpret. The main point here is not about Jews, but about America. In ill-informed Japanese minds there is a confusion of Jewish and American interests, a confusion which exists not only in Japan. “America,” like “the eternal Jew,” is shorthand for rootless cosmopolitanism, international conspiracy, and so on. That Kamei discussed this common paranoia in such odd, Volkish terms could mean several things: that some of the worst European myths got stuck in Japan, that the history of the Holocaust had no impact, or that Japan is in some respects a deeply provincial place. I think all three explanations apply.

  “During the nineteenth century,” Kamei explained, “Japan was threatened by Western imperialism. The borders in the Middle East were all drawn by Western powers. The British were responsible for Palestine. What Iraq is doing now is no different from what Western powers did until recently. That is my personal impression. Of course, Saddam Hussein is not right. But it cannot be said that Western powers are right and other races are wrong. That cannot be said.”

  Like Oda, indeed like many people of the left, Kamei thought in racial terms. He used the word jinshu, literally race. He did not even use the more usual minzoku, which corresponds, in the parlance of Japanese right-wingers, to Volk, or the more neutral kokumin, meaning the citizens of a state.

  The Japanese government was officially in favor of the Gulf War and paid nine billion dollars toward the allied cause. The Japanese Socialist Party was absolutely opposed to it, far more adamantly so than the German Social Democrats. But the politics were never simple. Kamei explained his party’s position: “The honne of our party is about the same as that of the Socialists. We are only supporting the war to keep the Americans happy.”

  Kamei is not a mainstream conservative. He is to the right of his party. Being on the right, he was more prepared to sound anti-American or anti-Western than his government. He could bluster about new alliances in Asia and cutting loose from America. He could say that the Japanese people felt closer to Asia than to the West. I put it to him that German conservatives insisted on being part of the West, that they had made the Western alliance, so to speak, a part of German national identity. I told him about Adenauer’s concept of Asia.

  Kamei laughed, revealing an even row of gold fillings. “Well,” he admitted, “the problem with the U.S.-Japan relationship is difficult. A racial problem, really. Yankees are friendly people, frank people. But, you know, it’s hard. You see, we have to be friendly …”

  Again, one felt there was a confusion here, a common one in Japan. Kamei was conflating a political problem and a cultural one, as though they were the same thing. In fact, the reason Japanese officials feel they have to be friendly to the United States has little to do with culture, even less with race, and everything with the peculiarly lopsided security arrangement between the two countries. It is possible, of course, that having different, non-Western cultural traditions has made it harder for Japan to come to terms with the Western world than it has been for West Germany. If there is indeed a border, more unbridgeable than the river Elbe, between Japan and the West, this would help to explain another idée reçue: whereas many Germans in the liberal democratic West have tried to deal honestly with their nation’s terrible past, the Japanese, being different, have been unable to do so.

  It is true that the Japanese, compared with the West Germans, have paid less attention to the suffering they inflicted on others, and shown a greater inclination to shift the blame. And liberal democracy, whatever it may look like on paper, has not been the success in Japan that it was in the German Federal Republic. Cultural differences might account for this. But one can look at these matters in a different, more political way. In his book The War Against the West, published in London in 1938, the Hungarian scholar Aurel Kolnai followed the Greeks in his definition of the West: “For the ancient Greeks ‘the West’ (or ‘Europe’) meant society with a free constitution and self-government under recognized rules, where ‘law is king,’ whereas the ‘East’ (or ‘Asia’) signified theocratic societies under godlike rulers whom their subjects serve ‘like slaves.’ ”

  According to this definition, both Hitler’s Germany and prewar Japan were of the East. As the title of Kolnai’s book implies, Germany fought a war against the West. Now, it may be so that Adenauer’s Germany found its way back to the West. In 1949 the German Basic Law was drawn up by German jurists. In 1954 West Germany formally became a sovereign nation, even though Western powers still kept troops there. An emergency law was passed enabling Germany to take control of its own defense. Except in Berlin, the occupation was formally over. In Japan, in some ways, it is not over yet.

  Japan’s godlike ruler was told by the Americans to renounce his divinity. Perhaps with a feeling of relief, the lover of rare crustaceans, Mickey Mouse watches, and English breakfasts was swift to comply. And the Americans imposed a constitution which read like translated English and which surrendered the right of Japan to defend itself. Most Japanese were so tired of war and so distrustful of their military commanders that they were happy to do so. Then, when the Cold War prompted the Americans to make the Japanese subvert their constitution by creating an army which was not supposed to exist, the worst of all worlds appeared: sovereignty was not restored, distrust remained, and resentment mounted. Kamei’s hawks are angry with the Americans for emasculating Japan; Oda’s doves hate the Americans for emasculating the “peace constitution.” Both sides dislike being forced accomplices, and both feel victimized, which is one reason Japanese have a harder time than Germans in coming to terms with their wartime past.

  If it is possible to draw lessons from history at all, this cannot really be put to the test in Japan. Without formal sovereignty, such questions as whether to appease an aggressor or not make no sense. When I asked a socialist politician in Tokyo to consider whether the German-Japanese war against the West could have been avoided had Western force been applied sooner, he replied: “Perhaps. I don’t know. But we deny any solution by military means.” When I asked Oda whet
her one country had the right to help another country defend itself against an aggressor, he said: “No.” When I put it to him that in that case the war would have been won by the Axis powers, he replied: “You think as a person educated from the point of view of the victim. I was educated from the point of view of the aggressor.”

  This was true enough, but it was he, not I, who was still convinced that the Japanese and the Germans were dangerous peoples. There was a great irony here: in their zeal to make Japan part of the West, General MacArthur and his advisers made it impossible for Japan to do so in spirit. For a forced, impotent accomplice is not really an accomplice at all. In recent years, Japan has often been called an economic giant and a political dwarf. But this has less to do with a traditional Japanese mentality—isolationism, pacifism, shyness with foreigners, or whatnot—than with the particular political circumstances after the war that the United States helped to create. To understand the complexity of Japanese memories of its Asian war, one has to understand the conditions that grew from its defeat. One has to return to 1945.

  ROMANCE OF THE RUINS

  IT IS DIFFICULT TO SAY when the war actually began for the Germans and the Japanese. I cannot think of a single image that fixed the beginning of either war in the public mind. There is the famous picture of German soldiers lifting the barrier on the Polish border in 1939, but was that really the beginning? Or did it actually start with the advance into the Rhineland in 1936, or was it the annexation of the Sudetenland, or Austria, or Czechoslovakia? As far as the war against the Jews is concerned, one might go back to 1933, when Hitler came to power. Or at the latest to 1935, when the race laws were promulgated in Nuremberg. Or perhaps those photographs of burning synagogues on the night of November 9, 1938, truly marked the first stage of the Holocaust. Possibly to avoid these confusions, many Germans prefer to talk about the Hitlerzeit (Hitler era) instead of “the war.” When people do refer to “the war,” they think of soldiers freezing on the eastern front and German cities smashed by bombs.

  In Japan, the establishment of a puppet state in Manchuria in 1931 was a hostile harbinger of much to come. But the invasion of China proper began in 1937 with a shoot-out near Beijing, and the Pacific War started with the attack on Pearl Harbor four years later. Incidentally, only Japanese of a liberal disposition call World War II the Pacific War. People who stick to the idea that Japan was fighting a war to liberate Asia from Bolshevism and white colonialism call it the Great East Asian War (Daitowa Senso), as in the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. People of this opinion separate the world war of 1941–45 from the war in China, which they still insist on calling the China Incident. Liberals and leftists, on the other hand, tend to splice these wars together and call them the Fifteen-Year War (1931–45). Hayashi Fusao, the author of In Affirmation of the Great East Asian War and definitely not a liberal, argued that the struggle against Western imperialism actually began in 1853, with the arrival in Japan of Commodore Perry’s ships, and spoke of the Hundred-Year War.

  If the beginning of the wars is hard to identify, images marking the end are more obvious. The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, so impressively recorded on film by the American Air Force photographers, and the scratchy radio speech by the Japanese emperor on August 15, telling his sobbing subjects in barely intelligible court language to “bear the unbearable,” are described in countless Japanese novels and shown in many films. These are among the great clichés of postwar Japan: shorthand for national defeat, suffering, and humiliation.

  The German equivalent, I suppose, would be the picture of Soviet soldiers raising their flag on the roof of the gutted Reichstag in Berlin. An East German once told me that one of the soldiers in the photograph was wearing looted watches on his arm, like a stack of bracelets. Liberation, he remarked wisely, is often mixed with injustice, for the liberators are often no better than the conquered. I looked at the picture again and could not see any watches. Forty years of Soviet rule must have played tricks with his memory, but his instincts were probably right.

  If there had been a photograph of Hitler’s charred corpse, it, no doubt, would be among the icons of 1945. Instead, we have the photograph of Goebbels and his poisoned family. The contours of his oversized skull, like a misshapen gourd, are still recognizable. Then there is the famous picture of Hitler taking a last melancholy (or was it merely peeved) peek from the exit of his bunker at the destruction of his capital. This photograph has a romantic, even operatic appeal: the evil genius meeting his doom.

  Hitler’s doom and the emperor’s speech, the end of one symbol and the odd continuity of another. Whatever their symbolic differences, both would be associated forever with ruins—ruined cities, ruined people, ruined ideals. The most extraordinary images of 1945 are the silent films of Hiroshima, Berlin, and Tokyo: acres and acres of burnt-out, bombed-out landscape; Berlin a city of ruined nineteenth-century façades, Tokyo a city of charred wood and flooded craters.

  In the summer of 1945, a month before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stephen Spender was sent on a British government mission to Germany to find out what remained of its intellectual life. All he found was ruins. Here he is in Cologne: “The ruin of the city is reflected in the internal ruin of its inhabitants who, instead of being lives that can form a scar over the city’s wounds, are parasites sucking at a dead carcase, digging among the ruins for hidden food, doing business at their black market near the cathedral—the commerce of destruction instead of production … The destruction of the city itself, with all its past as well as its present, is like a reproach to the people who go on living there. The sermons in the stones of Germany preach nihilism.”

  In one of the first German feature films made after the war—Wolfgang Staudte’s The Murderers Are Among Us (1946)—we see the embittered figure of Dr. Mertens scurrying through the broken streets of Berlin. He is drunk. His eyes look deranged; a man haunted by terrible visions of the recent past. Rats appear from the piles of rubble and spurt across his shoes. “Rats,” he whispers, “rats, rats, everywhere.”

  The Germans called it Zusammenbruch (the collapse) or Stunde Null (Zero Hour): everything seemed to have come to an end, everything had to start all over. The Japanese called it haisen (defeat) or shusen (termination of the war). This last term cushioned the blow of failure. The U.S. Army occupation was often called “stationing of U.S. forces,” for the same reason. All they had been told to believe in, the Germans and the Japanese, everything from the Führerprinzip to the emperor cult, from the samurai spirit to the Herrenvolk, from Lebensraum to the whole world under one (Japanese) roof, all that lay in ruins too. The only thing that glittered in the burnt remains of Osaka, wrote the novelist Nosaka Akiyuki, was the trail of silver chewing-gum wrappers left by the American Army.

  Spender interviewed Konrad Adenauer, who was then the mayor of Cologne. The German people are spiritually starved, Adenauer told him. “The imagination has to be provided for.” This was no simple matter, especially in the German language, which had been so thoroughly infected by the jargon of mass murder. How to fashion poetry out of the language of murderers? How to purge this language from what a famous German philologist called the Lingua Tertii Imperii? “… the language is no longer lived,” wrote George Steiner in 1958, “it is merely spoken.”

  The Japanese did not really have this problem. The Japanese language itself survived the wreckage relatively unscathed, even though some of the more sensitive members of the wartime generation could no longer hear certain phrases without wincing. The philosopher Yoshimoto Takaaki wrote (in the early 1960s) that “hearing such words as nation, or race, just after our defeat, was like feeling a fresh wound.” Still, kokka (nation, state) and minzoku (race, people) are not quite of the same order as Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) or Einsatzgruppe (special action squad). The jargon of Japanese imperialism was racist and overblown, but it did not carry the stench of death camps.

  There was a problem with Japanese culture, however, which was comparab
le to but not quite the same as the German predicament. The German problem was Nazism. Although some people believed that the roots of Hitlerism, the peculiar and uniquely German course of history, the Sonderweg, went back to Luther, or at least to Herder or Wagner, neither Herder nor Wagner, let alone the writings of Luther, was ever forbidden. In Germany there was a tradition to fall back on. In the Soviet sector, the left-wing culture of the Weimar Republic was actively revived. In the Western sectors, writers escaped the rats and the ruins by dreaming of Goethe. His name was often invoked to prove that Germany, too, belonged to the humanist, enlightened strain of European civilization.

  But in Japan, which never had a Goethe, so far as the occupation authorities knew, and where traditional culture had been bent badly out of shape by many years of chauvinist propaganda, the Americans (and many Japanese leftists) distrusted anything associated with “feudalism,” which they took to include much of Japan’s premodern past. Feudalism was the enemy of democracy. So not only did the American censors, in their effort to teach the Japanese democracy, forbid sword-fight films and samurai dramas, but at one point ninety-eight Kabuki plays were banned too. Medieval-poetry anthologies were scrutinized for signs of ultranationalist sentiments. Even Mount Fuji, long the object of Shintoist nature worship, was not allowed to be depicted. Nature worship had too often slipped into worship of the Japanese state. So a scene of farmers working on the slopes of Fuji was cut from a feature film in 1946. It was as though Germany—Sonderweg or no Sonderweg—needed only to be purged of Nazism, while Japan’s entire cultural tradition had to be overhauled.