The Wages of Guilt

by Ian Buruma

  The story of the hundred heads was, in any case, soon forgotten in Japan. But it became part of the wartime lore in China. Honda Katsuichi, a famous Asahi Shimbun reporter, was told the story in Nanking. He wrote it up in a series of articles, later collected in a book entitled A Journey to China, published in 1981. This was the book that inspired Mori Masataka to take a deeper interest in the Japanese war. It also caused a stir in right-wing nationalist circles. Yamamoto Shichihei, well known for his books comparing the Japanese and the Jews, wrote a series of articles attacking Honda’s reports. The attack was joined by other intellectuals who invariably come forth when national face must be defended, and the whole thing developed into the Nankin Ronso, or Nanking Debate. In 1984, an anti-Honda book came out, by Tanaka Masaaki, entitled The Fabrication of the “Nanking Massacre.”

  The nationalist intellectuals are called goyo gakusha by their critics. It is a difficult term to translate, but the implied meaning is “official scholars,” who do the government’s bidding. These men (almost all are men) may not be highly respected by the academic establishment, particularly among historians, many of whom are still avidly Marxist, but they have considerable influence on public opinion, as television commentators, lecturers, and contributors to popular magazines. Virtually none of them are professional historians. Tanaka is a retired journalist.

  Indeed, the debate on the Japanese war is conducted almost entirely outside Japanese universities, by journalists, amateur historians, political columnists, civil rights activists, and so forth. This means that the zanier theories of the likes of Tanaka Masaaki are never seriously contested by professional historians. One reason is that there are very few modern historians in Japan. Until the end of the war, it would have been dangerously subversive, even blasphemous, for a critical scholar to write about modern history. The emperor system, after all, was sacred. The other reason was that modern history was not considered academically respectable. It was too fluid, too political, too controversial. Until 1955, there was not one modern historian on the staff of Tokyo University. History stopped around the middle of the nineteenth century. And even now, modern history is considered by senior historians to be something best left to journalists.

  The arguments against the Nanking Massacre are not very sophisticated. Tanaka and others have pointed out that it is physically impossible for one man to cut off a hundred heads with one blade, and that for the same reason Japanese troops could never have killed more than 100,000 people in a few weeks. Besides, wrote Tanaka, none of the Japanese newspapers reported any massacre at the time, so why did it suddenly come up in the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal? He admits that a few innocent people got killed in the cross fire, but these deaths were incidental. Some soldiers were doubtless a bit rough, but that was due to “the psychology of war.” In any case, so the argument invariably ends, Hiroshima, having been planned in cold blood, was a far worse crime. “Unlike in Europe or China,” writes Tanaka, “you won’t find one instance of planned, systematic murder in the entire history of Japan.” This is because the Japanese have “a different sense of values” from the Chinese or the Westerners.

  Leaving aside, for the moment, the more delicate Japanese sense of values, Tanaka’s point about systematic murder deserves attention. Since Nanking, as a symbol of atrocity, is regarded by some as the Japanese Holocaust, it is important to make distinctions. The point that it was not systematic was made by leftist opponents of the official scholars too. The historian Ienaga Saburo, for example, wrote that the Nanking Massacre, whose scale and horror he does not deny, “may have been a reaction to the fierce Chinese resistance after the Shanghai fighting.” Ienaga’s credentials as a fierce critic of orthodox conservative views are beyond reproach—something that has not necessarily helped his academic career. But even he defends an argument that all the apologists make too: “On the battlefield men face the ultimate extremes of human existence, life or death. Extreme conduct, although still ethically impermissible, may be psychologically inevitable. However, atrocities carried out far from the battlefield dangers and imperatives and according to a rational plan were acts of evil barbarism. The Auschwitz gas chambers of our ‘ally’ Germany and the atomic bombing of our enemy America are classic examples of rational atrocities.”

  Some Marxists, and not just in Japan, carry this argument even further. Heiner Müller observed—along with his remark that Auschwitz was the “last stage of the Enlightenment”—that the A-bomb was “the scientific substitute for the Last Judgment.” The answer, in Müller’s opinion, was to humanize warfare, to substitute man-to-man combat for scientific killing, for “war is contact, war is dialogue, war is free time.”

  Another way of putting this is that war is sport. If the hundred-heads contest is the metaphor for the Nanking Massacre, this would make it a more humane or at least a more human atrocity than gas chambers and A-bombs. Well, perhaps. Nanking was not a supernatural apocalypse or part of an effort to annihilate an entire race. Yet the question remains whether the raping and killing of thousands of women, and the massacre of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of other unarmed people, in the course of six weeks, can still be called extreme conduct in the heat of battle. The question is pertinent, particularly when such extreme violence is justified by an ideology which teaches the aggressors that killing an inferior race is in accordance with the will of their divine emperor.

  It is this last point that right-wing nationalists are particularly loath to admit. And it is one that left-wing teachers, activists, and scholars wish to emphasize. Mori’s video starts with an image of the imperial chrysanthemum and the sound of marching military boots. The Nanking Massacre, for leftists and many liberals too, is the main symbol of Japanese militarism, supported by the imperial (and imperialist) cult. Which is why it is a keystone of postwar pacifism. Article Nine of the constitution is necessary to avoid another Nanking Massacre. The nationalist right takes the opposite view. To restore the true identity of Japan, the emperor must be reinstated as a religious head of state, and Article Nine must be revised to make Japan a legitimate military power again. For this reason, the Nanking Massacre, or any other example of extreme Japanese aggression, has to be ignored, softened, or denied.

  The politics behind the symbol are so divided and so deeply entrenched that it hinders a rational historical debate about what actually happened in 1937. The more one side insists on Japanese guilt, the more the other insists on denying it. The rhetoric in the Nanking Debate, particularly on the side of the revisionists, is both irrational and unhistorical. In his book The Fabrication of the “Nanking Massacre,” Tanaka Masaaki accuses Honda Katsuichi and his liberal newspaper of spreading “enemy propaganda.” Watanabe Shoichi, another prominent revisionist, wrote a foreword to Tanaka’s book. Like Tanaka, he is not a historian, but a professor of English literature. Watanabe attacked Honda for propagating the “Tokyo Trial View of History,” which foisted guilt “not only on the Japanese officers and men of the time, but on all Japanese, indeed on our children yet to be born.”

  Despite their somewhat second-rank intellectual status, the Nanking Massacre revisionists cannot be dismissed as unsavory crackpots, for unlike those who argue that the Holocaust never happened, they are not confined to an extremist fringe. They have a large audience and are supported by powerful right-wing politicians. Ishihara Shintaro, a popular and articulate politician and former cabinet minister, cooperated with Watanabe Shoichi on a book, entitled A Japan That Can Say “No,” which denied that anything out of the ordinary had taken place in Nanking. When Ishihara was asked in a Playboy interview what he thought of the Nanking Massacre, he said: “People say that the Japanese made a holocaust there, but that is not true. It is a story made up by the Chinese. It has tarnished the image of Japan, but it is a lie.”

  The liberal left was naturally outraged and the usual minority of activists tried to make a fuss. A group was formed called the Society of Kyoto Citizens Who Will Not Tolerate the Ishihara Statement. They
published a pamphlet which included Ishihara’s response to the society’s criticism. He tried to be accommodating: It was true, he wrote, that the Taiwanese and Koreans who had been killed by the A-bombs, after being forced to come and work in Japan, were innocent victims. But he saw no need to revise his statement on Nanking. The Japanese, he said, should see their history through their own eyes, for “if we rely on the information of aliens and alien countries, who use history for the sake of propaganda, then we are in danger of losing the sense of our own history.” Yet another variation of seeing history through the eyes of identity.

  Ishihara Shintaro’s remarks were one reason why I came to be sitting in a stuffy hotel room in Nanking during the summer of 1991. The hotel was on a busy street lined with trees, in an area where the Western embassies and hospitals used to be—known in 1937 as the Safety Zone, which was never really safe. Japanese troops would come in and round up Chinese men to find hidden soldiers. Those with callused hands were let go. They were assumed to be peasants or workers. The others were classified as soldiers and taken away for execution. Their bodies were dumped in the river.

  We were a motley group, gathered in the hotel to attend a conference on the Massacre. The main organizers were two Chinese Americans. One was a businessman, the other a dentist living in New York. The dentist was born after the war, and the businessman was a child in 1937. They said they had become involved out of patriotism. Other participants included Chinese from various parts of the People’s Republic. Among them were a schoolteacher, a lawyer, several university professors, and, curiously, a policeman in civilian clothes. There was also an elderly American whose father had been a reporter in China during the Japanese war. He carried a large piece of cardboard around with him, on which he had pasted old newspaper photographs of Japanese atrocities. He would unveil his treasure if he thought you were worthy of a viewing, glancing over his shoulder all the while. Finally, there were various Japanese groups, men and women, many of them schoolteachers. One of them was Mori Masataka.

  It was meant to be a larger conference, with many more delegates, to be held in a proper hall at Nanking University. But the Chinese government had refused at the last minute to give permission. Or so we were told by the Chinese Americans. The assumed reason was an unexpected visit to Beijing by the Japanese Prime Minister. Since the Chinese had put in a request for favorable loans, a conference on Japanese war crimes was not opportune. But an informal gathering of enthusiasts appeared to be permissible. A small prick in the Japanese conscience was, perhaps, not entirely inopportune.

  We drank tea and waited for the arrival of some of the survivors of the Massacre, who had promised to give us their personai accounts. The Japanese took photographs of us and of one another. Most of them were in their forties. Some of the men wore their hair long. Most of the women were in jeans. None spoke English or Chinese. The interpreter was the Chinese American dentist, who had studied in Japan.

  After some delay, the survivors arrived, one woman and three men. They had the tanned, leathery skin of people who had worked outside all their lives. They wore simple blue clothes. The men wore Mao caps. One of them smiled much of the time, revealing a virtually toothless mouth. He told the first story. The Japanese, he said, had amused themselves by tossing a hand grenade in the river and making him retrieve the dead fish. Then they would “dry” him by holding torches to his skin. He was later shot into the river by a machine gun, but managed to survive. It was the duty of the Japanese government, he said, to pay him compensation money.

  Then it was the woman’s turn. She rolled up one trouser leg to reveal a long, brown scar. Some of the Japanese came closer to take photographs. The woman was two years old at the time, she said, and the Japanese had stabbed her with bayonets. She could not say more, since the memories were too painful, but she did want to stress that the Japanese government should pay her compensation.

  A small, tough-looking man spoke up. He was seventeen in 1937 when he was dragged from his house, taken to a sawmill with several others, stripped, and forced on his knees. One by one, the Chinese men were struck with an ax. Somehow he managed to get away, badly wounded in his neck, only to find that his house had been burned down. He showed us his scar and said the Japanese should pay compensation.

  Mori began to ask questions. He was interested to hear more details. Exactly when had all this taken place? At what time? Where? A map was produced. What had the weather been like? The questions may have struck some people as impertinent, or too insistent, but I admired his tenacity. Facts were more important to him than a show of emotions.

  The fourth survivor told us how he had been taken to the river with about five thousand other men. His voice sounded weary, as though he had already told the same story too many times. His eyes weren’t focused. Yet he gave a startling account. The men, he said, were lined up by Japanese officers sitting on horseback. He could remember the long samurai swords dangling from their sides. Then the shooting began. It came from a machine gun on the riverbank. He held his younger brother by the hand, and his father stood behind them. Both his father and his brother died, as did all the other men. The Japanese made sure of this by plunging their bayonets into anything that still moved. The man survived by pretending to be dead. For three hours he lay absolutely still among the bleeding corpses. When the Japanese poured gasoline over him and the other bodies, he managed to crawl free just before the corpses caught fire.

  There was a moment of silence. One of the Japanese women dabbed her eyes with a pink handkerchief. A Japanese teacher, representing—according to his name card—the Forum to Reflect upon the War Victims in the Asia-Pacific Region and Engrave It in Our Minds, stood up and made a speech in Japanese, which was translated into Chinese. “We want to show,” he said, “that the past cannot be blamed only on militarism. We ourselves bear a responsibility today. That is why we have decided to visit Nanking every year on the fifteenth of August, for we feel that we can only talk about peace if we are inspired by the souls of the victims. By hearing you talk, we feel that a friendship between the Chinese and Japanese peoples can be built. By listening to your stories, we can work toward world peace.”

  A doctor from Nanking closed his eyes and sang a song, clapping his hands to the rhythm. The witnesses smiled and other Chinese joined in. It was an old song, commemorating the “September 19 Incident” of 1931, when Japan began its annexation of Manchuria. This was followed by impassioned speeches. A Chinese lawyer attacked “Japanese militarism” and professed his love of peace. The politician Ishihara Shintaro, he said, had offended the Chinese people, especially the people of Nanking: “We want the support of all peace-loving people to resist the revival of Japanese militarism.”

  The shabby room was hot and overcrowded. The air was thick with cigarette smoke. I felt squeamish about inspecting the scars, which the survivors were eager to display. And although I agreed that the Japanese government should be obliged to come clean about the past and had been ungenerous about compensation, I was irritated by the clichéd language of self-righteousness, all the talk of a Japanese militarist revival in a country whose leaders had just turned the army on its own people. The tone of the conference suggested that militarism was a continuing, perhaps even congenitally Japanese, problem.

  I asked one of the survivors when he had started to speak in public about his wartime experiences. In 1982, he said. Why only then? He mentioned the Japanese textbook scandal. After news reached China in 1982 that the Japanese Education Ministry had made changes in schoolbooks to deny Japanese responsibility for an aggressive war, survivors in Nanking had been selected by the Chinese government to come forward and tell their stories. Before that no official notice had been taken of them. There was a reason for this, which the survivors didn’t mention: Nanking had been the capital of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, far removed from the Communist struggle against Japanese fascism. “Perhaps,” said the man, “there was a political reason. But we still feel the same.”


  The schoolbook story in 1982, as reported in the Japanese newspapers, was that the word “invasion” (of China) had been changed to “advance into” (China) and that references to the Nanking Massacre had been deleted. The story was in fact wrong. Such changes had been made some years before, not without controversy in Japan. But the 1982 textbook story was baseless. The conservative Sankei newspaper apologized to its readers for the error. The Asahi did not. But the controversy came at a good time for the Chinese government. Deng Xiao-ping was being criticized by the army and by rivals in the Communist Party for being soft on the United States and Taiwan. And a Japanese trade delegation had visited Taipei just before the Japanese Prime Minister’s planned visit to Beijing. So it was in Deng’s interest to embarrass the Japanese, to twist the knife a little.

  The textbook issue afforded a useful opportunity to bring up the Nanking Massacre. The Chinese government decided to commemorate it by building a special museum. It is a sad, ill-maintained place in a poor suburb. The villages surrounding the site cannot have changed much since the Japanese were there: low houses made of brick and mud, narrow lanes filled with children playing in the dirt, people riding their bicycles to the market with squawking chickens suspended by their necks from the handlebars. Massacres were said to have taken place here. I was told there were human bones under the dusty earth.

  The museum is a concrete building surrounded by a large rock garden. The rocks, in various shapes and sizes, are inscribed with the names of massacre sites and the numbers of people killed there. Above the main entrance to the museum is a large inscription, in Chinese and English: “Victims: 300,000.” On both sides of the corridor, just inside the building, are long sandboxes protected by glass. Bones and skulls, allegedly the remains of Chinese victims, are arranged in the sand. Curtains of dust and cobwebs hang from the damp ceilings. A sign inside the main room explains that the museum was built “to commemorate the victory of the Chinese people in the anti-Japanese war.” And that its purpose is “to educate the people, to encourage them to redouble their efforts to strengthen China and support its foreign policy of peace and independence, and promote the friendship between the Japanese and Chinese peoples, and the struggle for world peace.”