by Ian Buruma
He smiled, feeling that he was on safer ground. “You see, this museum was not really intended to be a museum. It was built by survivors as a place of prayer for the victims and for world peace. Mankind must build a better world. That is why Hiroshima must persist. We must go back to the basic roots. We must think of human solidarity and world peace. Otherwise we just end up arguing about history.”
The history of the war, or indeed any history, is indeed not what the Hiroshima spirit is about. This is why Auschwitz is the only comparison that is officially condoned. Anything else is too controversial, too much part of the “flow of history.” The plan to build an Auschwitz memorial in a small town between Hiroshima and Kure was proposed in the late 1980s by the mayor of Kure. The mayor of Hiroshima thought it was a good idea. And the pacifist citizens’ groups were not against it either, but they insisted that a memorial to the Nanking Massacre should form a major part of such an enterprise. The plan was quietly dropped.
There is, nonetheless, a place, not far from Hiroshima, about an hour and a half by train and forty minutes by ferryboat, that serves as a reminder that there was another side to Japanese history, not unrelated to what happened on August 6, 1945. Okunojima is a tiny island in the Inland Sea. The first things you see as you disembark from the ferry are rabbits. They run all over the neat paths and pleasant lawns, like bits of white fluff dotting the landscape. They are so tame you can stroke them. There is not much else on the island, except a large hotel, which looks like a hospital, a few ruins of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century buildings, and an old gun emplacement facing the mainland across the water. There is also a small concrete building near the jetty. It is called the Okunojima Toxic Gas Museum.
The tame bunnies are the descendants of laboratory animals used for experiments with mustard gas and other lethal substances in what was the largest toxic gas factory in the Japanese Empire. More than 5,000 people worked there during the war, many of them women and schoolchildren. About 1,600 died of exposure to hydrocyanic acid gas, nausea gas, and lewisite. Some were damaged for life. Official Chinese sources claim that more than 80,000 Chinese fell victim to gases produced at the factory. The army was so secretive about the place that the island simply disappeared from Japanese maps.
Little of this was known after the war. When the Americans arrived in 1945, they took away the data, dumped large quantities of gas into the sea, and torched the plant. The hotel now stands on the site of the main factory. You still can see the ruins of the electric generator and some of the storage buildings. Only when a young Japanese history professor named Yoshimi Yoshiaki dug up a report in American archives in the 1980s did it become known that the Japanese had stored 15,000 tons of chemical weapons on and near the island and that a 200-kilogram container of mustard gas was buried under Hiroshima.
Surviving workers from the factory, many of whom suffered from chronic lung diseases, asked for official recognition of their plight in the 1950s. But the government turned them down. If the government had compensated the workers, it would have been an official admission that the Japanese Army had engaged in an illegal enterprise. When a brief mention of chemical warfare crept into Japanese school textbooks, the Ministry of Education swiftly took it out.
Yet the memory of the toxic gas plant never completely disappeared. In 1975, survivors who could prove they had been harmed by gases were finally paid some compensation. In 1985 a small memorial was erected for the workers who died on the island during the war. And in 1988, through the efforts of survivors, the small museum was built, “to pass on,” in the words of the museum guide, “the historical truth to future generations.”
The curator of the one-room museum is a short, wiry man named Murakami Hatsuichi. He looked tough, hardened, like a former prizefighter. Murakami first started working at the factory in 1940 as a fourteen-year-old janitor. The money was good and he was “filled with a spirit of self-sacrifice” to help Japan win the war. It was also a way to gain promotion in the army. Murakami showed me around the sinister exhibits: a wooden horse wearing a gas mask; pictures of gas attack victims, their skins disfigured by festering scars and boils; old gas canisters; drawings of schoolgirls practicing swordsmanship in the factory yard; group photographs of army officers grinning in the sun.
Murakami’s explanation was matter-of-fact. He did not sermonize or moralize. Nor was he interested in explaining the Japanese national character. He struck me as an honest man. He told me that he would not have remembered the place in such detail if he had not been shown the documents returned from America. I asked him about the purpose of the museum. He said: “Before shouting ‘no more war,’ I want people to see what it was really like. To simply look at the past from the point of view of the victim is to encourage hatred.”
What did he think of the Peace Museum in Hiroshima? “At the Hiroshima museum it is easy to feel victimized,” he said. “But we must realize that we were aggressors too. We were educated to fight for our country. We made toxic gas for our country. We lived to fight the war. To win the war was our only goal.” Murakami looked more and more like a prizefighter, narrowing his eyes and punching his fist into his palm. “Look,” he said, “when you fight another man, and hit him and kick him, he will hit and kick back. One side will win. How will this be remembered? Do we recall that we were kicked, or that we started the kicking ourselves? Without considering this question, we cannot have peace.”
I thought of Murakami’s words when I walked around Hiroshima again the next day. They didn’t make me feel any less awkward when asked by the schoolkids what I thought of peace. The fact that Japanese had buried poison gas under Hiroshima did not lessen the horror of the A-bomb. But it put Peace Park, with all its shrines, in a more historical perspective. It took the past away from God and put it in the fallible hands of man.
NANKING
THE RAPE OF NANKING, or the Nanking Massacre, took place after the Japanese Imperial Army captured the city in the middle of December 1937. This was less than half a year after Japanese troops invaded China proper. Nanking, as the capital of the Nationalist government, was the greatest prize in the attempted conquest of China. Its fall was greeted in Japan with banner headlines and nationwide celebration. For six weeks Japanese Army officers allowed their men to run amok. The figures are imprecise, but tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands (the Chinese say 300,000) of Chinese soldiers and civilians, many of them refugees from other towns, were killed. And thousands of women between the ages of about nine and seventy-five were raped, mutilated, and often murdered.
But the numbers don’t convey the savagery of what happened in Nanking, and in many other Chinese villages, towns, and cities as well. Nor do they explain why it was allowed to happen. Was it a deliberate policy to terrorize the Chinese into submission? The complicity of the officers suggests there was something to this. But it might also have been a kind of payoff to the Japanese troops for slogging through China in the freezing winter without decent pay or rations. Or was it largely a matter of a peasant army running out of control? Or just the inevitable consequence of war, as many Japanese maintain?
I was given a booklet in Japan entitled Nanking Atrocities. Although the booklet was in Japanese, the English word “atrocities,” transcribed as aturoshitees, was used in the title, as though there was no corresponding Japanese word. There are, in fact, many Japanese expressions for cruelty, violence, murder, or massacre. But the word “atrocity” conveys more than the inevitable cruelty of war. An atrocity is a willful act of criminal brutality, an act that violates the law as well as any code of human decency. It isn’t that the Japanese lack such codes or are morally incapable of grasping the concept. But “atrocity,” like “human rights,” is part of a modern terminology which came from the West, along with “feminism,” say, or “war crimes.” To right-wing nationalists it has a leftist ring, something subversive, something almost anti-Japanese.
The booklet was edited and published by a group of high school t
eachers who had visited Nanking to find out more about the Massacre. It contains Chinese witness accounts, maps of the main execution grounds, and some of the photographs displayed at the memorial museum in Nanking. The Japanese did not leave a copious visual record of their atrocities, even though they were keen photographers. Censorship was tight. But there is enough in the way of photographs and even film footage (mostly taken by Western missionaries) to give an impression. There are pictures, some taken by Japanese photographers and some by Chinese or foreign witnesses, of Chinese men being used for bayonet practice, of people being machine-gunned into open pits, of terrified women, huddling naked in rice paddies, trying to shield their private parts, of Japanese soldiers chopping off heads with their long swords, of corpses piled high on the banks of the Yangtze River, and of dead women with bamboo sticks rammed up their vaginas.
Some of these images, taken from newsreels, were used in Bernardo Bertolucci’s film The Last Emperor (1987). When it was shown in Japan, the Japanese distributors, Shochiku Fuji, decided to delete these scenes without telling the director. When Bertolucci found out, the distributors claimed that the British producer of the film had asked for the cuts—probably, so the distributors presumed, because he thought the footage “would be too grisly for Japanese taste.” Bertolucci and his British producer were furious, the cuts were restored, and Shochiku Fuji apologized for the “big misunderstanding.”
There is no evidence that the distributors were pressured by the government, or anybody else, to make the cuts. The most plausible explanation for their behavior is that they wished to avoid any negative publicity. Extreme right-wing groups can be very intimidating. And since controversy in Japan is always embarrassing, and sometimes even dangerous, it takes a certain courage to delve into issues which might bring unwanted attention.
The Nanking Massacre is such an issue. It has become the prime symbol of Japanese savagery during the war in Asia. During the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, Nanking had the same resonance as Auschwitz had in Nuremberg. And being a symbol, the Nanking Massacre is as vulnerable to mythology and manipulation as Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
In Japanese schools the controversy is officially killed by silence. All it says in a typical textbook for high school students is: “In December [1937] Japanese troops occupied Nanking.” A footnote explains: “At this time Japanese troops were reported to have killed many Chinese, including civilians, and Japan was the target of international criticism.” This is all. But even this was too much for some conservative bureaucrats and politicians, who wanted the passage to be deleted altogether.
No wonder, then, that the middle school students were shocked when their teacher, Mori Masataka, one of the editors of Nanking Atrocities, showed them a documentary video about the Massacre. He asked them to write down their thoughts after seeing the film. The responses were remarkably uniform. This, for example, from a thirteen-year-old girl named Ritsuko: “I always associated the war with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the nuclear bombings happened after 1940. Before that, Japan did things which were even worse. Watching the video, it seemed almost unreal. Before this, I could only think of Japan as the loser in the war, but we Japanese must know what happened before 1940. What impressed me more than anything else, seeing this video, was the scene of Japanese soldiers laughing as they watched Chinese people being killed. How could they have done that? I cannot understand the feelings of the Japanese at that time …”
For the first time the students were made aware of the Japanese as aggressors. This was the intended shock effect. Mori, like most, if not all, teachers involved in Peace Education, has left-wing views. Although he can count on many sympathizers among the rank and file of the once powerful Japan Teachers’ Union, few are as actively engaged as he is. He told me that most of his colleagues were not so much against him as indifferent. Most shy away from controversy. His video and his booklet on wartime history are distributed privately to a small network of like-minded teachers, as an alternative to the official, evasive, summary interpretation of history presented in school textbooks vetted by the Ministry of Education.
They reflect a political view which is necessarily simplified. The Japanese were “aggressors,” they “invaded” China, their behavior was “criminal and cruel.” The Chinese were all either “brave resisters” or “innocent victims.” In one of his pamphlets Mori writes about a visit to Nanking, where he “felt the painful necessity to review history from the point of view of the aggressor.” This, then, is what the students are asked to do: to replace their sense of Japanese victimhood with the aggressors’ point of view.
Here is Yasuko, fourteen years old (in 1991): “We often hear about the terrible ways in which Nazis murdered their victims, but the Japanese were pretty bad too. What about those creepy smiles on the faces of Japanese as they cut off the heads of Chinese people? How could they laugh when they were killing people? I felt like averting my eyes when I saw those severed heads stuck on poles …”
The point of the film is not primarily historical. The militant racial chauvinism of “the emperor system” is clearly blamed for the war and its atrocities. But it was those creepy smiles that impressed Mori’s students. Official evasion about the past is challenged by a vision of evil perpetrated by “the Japanese at that time”—their fathers and grandfathers—smiling. By contemplating “the hell of Nanking,” by looking at history through the eyes of identity (the identity of the aggressor), they could, in their teacher’s words, “build the history of tomorrow and link hands with the peoples of Asia.”
This is a political view, as I said, but Mori’s attitude also raises doubts about Ruth Benedict’s distinction between Christian “guilt culture” and Confucian “shame culture.” She made this distinction in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a book she wrote during the war to help American intelligence officers understand the Japanese mind. In her opinion, a “society that inculcates absolute standards of morality and relies on man’s developing a conscience is a guilt culture by definition …” But in “a culture where shame is a major sanction, people are chagrined about acts which we expect people to feel guilty about.” However, this “chagrin cannot be relieved, as guilt can be, by confession and atonement …” A “man does not experience relief when he makes his fault public even to a confessor. So long as his bad behaviour does not ‘get out into the world’ he need not be troubled and confession appears to him merely a way of courting trouble.”
This is a mechanistic view of human behavior, typical of the social anthropologist. It is not entirely false, yet it is a limited explanation at best: there are too many exceptions, too many Germans who don’t have the slightest wish to confess, and too many Japanese, like Mori, whose efforts to make public the “sins” of their country are definitely meant as gestures of atonement. That is why they travel to China and Southeast Asia to apologize to former victims. Guilt and shame are in any case not as easy to distinguish as Ruth Benedict suggests. Is the exaggerated philosemitism of certain Germans a matter of personal guilt, or national shame? Is it any different from the effusive behavior of elderly Japanese tourists in China who greet every Chinese they meet as a long-lost friend? And did the Mitscherlichs not argue in The Inability to Mourn that “the process of denial extended in the same way to the occasions for guilt, mourning, and shame”? If memory was admitted at all, the Mitscherlichs wrote about Germans in the 1950s, “it was only in order to balance one’s own guilt against that of others. Many horrors had been unavoidable, it was claimed, because they had been dictated by crimes committed by the adversary.” This was precisely what many Japanese claimed, and still do claim. And it is why Mori insists on making his pupils view the past from the perspective of the aggressors.
Clearly the children were shocked. The playfulness of extreme violence is always especially shocking. SS guards delighted in calling their routine torture of concentration camp inmates “sport.” Submitting old, sick men to murderous physical exercises was “sport.” Making rabbis ride eac
h other piggyback as they were beaten to death was “sport.” Playfulness enters into the business of killing when the victim must be humiliated as well as destroyed. Inventiveness in torture and murder becomes in itself a form of sport. It is probably no coincidence that the most infamous story of the Nanking Massacre should be a sporting feat. It is not the worst atrocity story, but it has all the mythical elements to appeal to the imagination. It is a story of omnipotence and epic wickedness. It became the subject of a furious “debate” in Japan more than forty years after the event allegedly took place.
Two young Japanese officers, Lieutenant N. and Lieutenant M., were on their way to Nanking and decided to test their swordsmanship: the first to cut off one hundred Chinese heads would be the winner. And thus they slashed their way through Chinese ranks, taking scalps in true samurai style. Lieutenant M. got 106, and Lieutenant N. bagged 105.
The story made a snappy headline in a major Tokyo newspaper: “Who Will Get There First! Two Lieutenants Already Claimed 80.” In the Nanking museum is a newspaper photograph of the two friends, glowing with youthful high spirits. Lieutenant N. boasted in the report that he had cut the necks off 56 men without even denting the blade of his ancestral sword. The next report carried the headline: “Fast Pitching Progress!” This was before such dangerous Americana as baseball terms were forbidden by the government censors.
Later, back in Japan, Lieutenant M. began to revise his story. Speaking at his old high school, he said that in fact he had beheaded only four or five men in actual combat. As for the rest … “After we occupied the city, I stood facing a ditch, and told the Chinese prisoners to step forward. Since Chinese soldiers are stupid, they shuffled over to the ditch, one by one, and I cleanly cut off their heads.” But even that may have been a false boast. I was told by a Japanese veteran who had fought in Nanking that such stories were commonly made up or at least exaggerated by Japanese reporters, who were ordered to entertain the home front with tales of heroism.
