The Wages of Guilt

by Ian Buruma

  The most interesting exhibits are the official Japanese Army documents, dispatches from commanding officers on the scene. The language is more revealing than the smudged photographs of atrocities. The most common expressions for murdering large numbers of people are “tidying up” (katazukeru) and “treatment” (short), as in “special treatment.” I was shown a video of documentary footage I had seen before: the bodies being dumped into pits, the disemboweled women, the laughing executioners. The film ended with the statement that “Nanking had suffered much and had contributed greatly to the world struggle against fascism.”

  When I came out of the museum, I saw one of the young Japanese teachers. He had changed into the garb of a Buddhist priest and was praying for the dead, fingering his rosary. One of the other teachers was taking photographs of him. I was handed a pamphlet by a young woman of the same group. It was an interesting document, since it contained accounts by members of the group who had visited Nanking on a previous occasion. Again, their emotions were often quite at odds with the idea of “shame culture” versus “guilt culture.” Even where the word for shame, hazukashii, was used, its meaning was impossible to distinguish from the Western notion of guilt.

  “I knew it was going to be tough,” one of the Japanese visitors wrote, “but after we arrived on the spot, I felt haunted by the sadness and anger of the Chinese, who had suffered such unspeakable atrocities. I felt crushed by the knowledge that I was the descendant of those Japanese. I felt confused, but nonetheless I kept thinking that the dead should speak! The victims of Nanking should rise and attack us Japanese! For we, who have lived after the war without coming clean about our past, we will not be able to forge a fresh view of history without experiencing shame.”

  My last stop in Nanking was a place called Yu Hua Tai, where a battle had raged for three days. There is an ugly monument marking the spot of one of the worst massacres. It is a great phallic tower divided by trees from a monumental sculpture of proletarian Chinese heroes standing up to fascism. It was also the place where Lieutenants M. and N. were executed, after being tried by a Chinese war crimes court for their deadly game of swordsmanship.

  Lieutenant M.’s daughter published a long article in one of the nationalist magazines that are forever attacking the Tokyo Trial View of History. She thought it was shameless of Honda Katsuichi to have ruined the reputation of her father. Had he no sensitivity toward the surviving family members at all? Her father had wished for nothing more than peace and harmony between Japan and China. How could he rest in peace when lies were being spread? After speaking to her father’s spirit, Miss M. was called by her tour guide. The bus was waiting. It was time to go to the next stop. “Then,” she said, “I scooped up some of the red earth and folded it in my handkerchief. I felt as though this earth had absorbed the smell of my father.”

  In the second half of the 1980s, between the textbook affairs and Emperor Hirohito’s death, something interesting happened in Japan. A small number of Japanese Imperial Army veterans began to talk in public about their war experiences. Their testimonies were recorded on videotape and shown at privately organized exhibitions, such as the Exhibition of War for Peace held in a Catholic church in Tokyo. The men were in their seventies and eighties. Most had been privates or junior officers. Perhaps it was the proximity of death that made them want to talk, or perhaps it was because most of their superior officers were no longer alive; there was less pressure to keep quiet, less face to be preserved. The same thing happened after the death of Emperor Hirohito; it was as though forbidden subjects could suddenly be aired. As a young historian put it to me, the emperor was the highest superior officer of all.

  One of these veterans was a businessman from Kyoto Prefecture named Azuma Shiro. He first spoke in public in 1987, and caused a sensation. Television crews and newspaper reporters came down to his small town on the coast to record his testimony. Right-wing patriots threatened to kill him. He was blackballed from his veterans’ association. Yet he could no longer keep quiet. Indeed, he talked and talked, as though the rest of his life depended on it. Azuma Shiro had been in Nanking in the winter of 1937.

  In 1992, when he picked me up at the station of a small town to the east of Kyoto, Azuma was eighty-one. A stocky man with a square face and hair dyed a purple shade of black, he looked younger than his age. He was proud of this. He asked me several times to guess his age. I said about sixty-five. While driving from the station to his house, through a pretty landscape of rice paddies surrounded by mountains, he opened the glove compartment of his car and produced a brass knuckle-duster. “In case the right-wingers try anything,” he said, fitting the metal brace on his hand.

  Azuma’s house, built in traditional Japanese style with tatami mats and papered screen doors, was filled with Chinese art. There were Chinese scrolls on the walls, and the sliding screen doors were decorated with Chinese landscapes done by a painter in Beijing. Some of these were presents, Azuma said, from a senior official in the Chinese Communist Party. Azuma had done him a favor by taking care of his son, who was studying in Japan.

  We had tea, served by Azuma’s wife. He began to talk about his life. Azuma was born in this same small town on the coast, where his father ran a successful business. He had been a spoiled child and led a dissolute schoolboy life, spending his pocket money at local brothels. When he was drafted into the army in 1937, he was suffering from a venereal disease.

  Army life was harsh, but he never questioned the reasons for going to war. It was the imperial will, and victory was justified by any means. He did, however, resent his superior officers. They were “cowards,” he said. To be a coward was the worst thing he could say about people. His platoon commander, a young man named Mori, who graduated from the military academy, was a coward. He put on airs, but had had no stomach for combat. In fact, Azuma had not felt he had much in common with any of his comrades, except one, an engineering student named Higuchi. Higuchi was the only one who read books, who didn’t “have mud on his boots.” But he died one night in China, shot in a panic by friendly fire. Azuma cradled his friend as his brains spilled onto his lap.

  Azuma had always loved books. Apart from Higuchi, he said, he had been the only one in the platoon who read books. I asked him what books he read in China. “Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf” he said. He had much enjoyed both. Even Mein Kampf? Yes, he said. He had worshipped Adolf Hitler. He was particularly impressed by a story he had heard that German soldiers were not allowed to rape foreign women, lest they sully the purity of the German race. This, he said, was not something that bothered the Japanese troops in China.

  “Sexual desire is human,” he said. “Since I suffered from a venereal disease, I never actually did it with Chinese women. But I did peep at their private parts. We’d always order them to drop their trousers. They never wore any underwear, you know. But the others did it with any woman that crossed our path. That wasn’t so bad in itself. But then they killed them. You see, rape was against military regulations, so we had to destroy the evidence. While the women were fucked, they were considered human, but when we killed them, they were just pigs. We felt no shame about it, no guilt. If we had, we couldn’t have done it.

  “Whenever we would enter a village, the first thing we’d do was steal food, then we’d take the women and rape them, and finally we’d kill all the men, women, and children to make sure they couldn’t slip away and tell the Chinese troops where we were. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night.”

  Clearly, then, the Nanking Massacre had been the culmination of countless massacres on a smaller scale. But it had been mass murder without a genocidal ideology. It was barbaric, but to Azuma and his comrades, barbarism was part of war. This is a theme mulled over by many Japanese novelists, even during the war: the transformation of normal men into savage killers. Ishikawa Tatsuzo witnessed the Nanking Massacre and wrote a novella about it in 1938, entitled Living Soldiers. It contains such sentences as this:
“Killing enemy soldiers was for Corporal Kasahara exactly the same thing as killing carp.”

  Azuma resumed his story: “One of the worst moments I can remember was the killing of an old man and his grandson. The child was bayoneted and the grandfather started to suck the boy’s blood, as though to conserve his grandson’s life a bit longer. We watched a while and then killed both. Again, I felt no guilt, but I was bothered by this kind of thing. I felt confused. So I decided to keep a diary. I thought it might help me think straight.”

  Nanking itself—although he later referred to it as a “theater of hell”—was not particularly eventful for Azuma. He said he spent most of the time playing cards. Once in a while his platoon would have to go in search of hidden Chinese soldiers, but he never took part in any executions. I asked him why not. I wanted to know why some Japanese were involved in mass arrests and killings and others were not. He said it depended on the platoon commander. His commander, Mori, was a coward. Did he mean that Mori was too squeamish for executions? This surely was a good thing. Azuma grunted. “Well, maybe so …”

  He did have friends, however, who took part in the killings. One of them, Masuda Rokusuke, killed five hundred men by the Yangtze River with his machine gun. Azuma visited his friend in the hospital just before he died in the late 1980s. Masuda was worried about going to hell. Azuma tried to reassure him that he was only following orders. But Masuda remained convinced that he was going to hell.

  Not long after his spell in Nanking, Azuma fell ill and was repatriated. He managed to keep his diary with him, even though such diaries were usually confiscated by the military police. During his stay in Japan, he transcribed his notes into a more coherent account, which he wanted to leave to his future children. He still had no doubt that the war was just and that it had to be won at all costs, but he wanted to put on record what violence ordinary men were capable of.

  The account was wrapped up and stored in a cupboard, where it stayed until 1987. He eventually had five children, but none of them had shown the slightest interest in their father’s war experiences. “It was never discussed,” Azuma said. He did have a brother, who also served in China, but he took to drink and died in a car crash the week before I saw Azuma. His brother never talked about the war either. What about his old comrades? I asked. How did they discuss the war?

  “Oh,” said Azuma, “we wouldn’t talk about it much. When we did, it was to justify it. The Chinese resisted us, so we had to do what we did, and so on. None of us felt any remorse. And I include myself.”

  Azuma showed me some photographs of his veterans’ association. They were taken on annual outings to various country hotels. The men would stand or sit in strict hierarchical order. Mori, a small, delicate-looking man, sat in the middle of the front row. The earliest picture was taken in the late 1940s. The men looked young and, with their coarse features, short-cropped hair, and tight military expressions, rather menacing. The latest one was taken in 1984. Some of the faces had dropped out. The survivors looked like retired bank managers.

  Azuma’s memories, his diaries, everything about his past would no doubt have been forgotten if there had not been a plan to build a new war museum in Kyoto. The curators of the new museum at Ritsumeikan University were looking for wartime diaries and had been told about Azuma. The diary was removed from the cupboard, dusted off, and sent to the university. The curators were so impressed by the material that they asked Azuma to give a press conference. He agreed, and it changed his life. The press conference, held in his house, was not in the form of a confession—there is no evidence that Azuma feared the prospect of hell. Nor did it contain a political message—Azuma is not a pacifist. He just spoke about what he had seen and done during the war in China.

  The reaction was swift. Accused of hurting the pride of his old regiment, he was threatened with “punishment” by his veterans’ association. Letters arrived through the mail—anonymous letters, or signed “A Japanese Patriot”—threatening him with death. But there were other letters, signed by individual citizens, expressing support. He was encouraged by the support, but fired up by the threats. “I always believed it had been a just war. But the threats, the abusive phone calls, the letters, they made me furious. I was just telling the truth. And they wanted to stop me. I was damned if I couldn’t tell the truth!”

  Azuma began to write ferociously about the war, about military education, about the emperor’s responsibility, about the Tokyo war crimes tribunal. The trials had been a good thing, he said, but the Japanese ought to have held their own tribunal. The emperor was a coward, the greatest coward of all, he said, for ducking his responsibility. Azuma had been particularly upset when a document known as the “Emperor’s Monologue,” recorded in 1946, was published in 1991. It showed the emperor to have been well informed, belligerent, and self-serving. Azuma said, “We went to war for him, my friends died for him, and he never even apologized.”

  It was getting late. We had our supper sitting on the tatami floor. The landscape outside—the pine trees, the rice paddies, the distant mountains—was screened by darkness. Azuma poured hot sake into my cup. He got more and more agitated. “They turned the emperor into a living god, a false idol, like the Ayatollah in Iran or like Kim II Sung. Because we believed in the divine emperor, we were prepared to do anything, anything at all, kill, rape, anything. But I know he fucked his wife every night, just like we do …”

  He paused and lowered his voice. “But you know we cannot say this in Japan, even today. It is impossible in this country to tell the truth.”

  Again, he told me the story of his friend Higuchi. He had forgotten that he had already told it once. He described what he had felt when his only friend died, his brains spilling out. Azuma dabbed his eyes with the back of his hand. “That damned emperor …!” he said.

  We repaired to the inn where I was to stay the night. It was a traditional country inn near the small harbor. We had both had too much to drink and staggered in. The innkeeper, a large, rather lugubrious man, led us to my room. But first he wanted to show us something. His brother-in-law had just finished painting the screen walls. We simply had to see this. So there we stood, unsteady on our feet, in the middle of a large Japanese room, surrounded by the local landscape in Japanese ink. There was the harbor and there the mountains and there the rocks in the bay, sprouting pine trees.

  “Now let me show you something interesting,” said the innkeeper. “See that rock?” We nodded. “Looks large, doesn’t it?” We nodded again. “Now walk to the opposite corner of the room—go on …” We did. “Suddenly looks small now, doesn’t it?” he said. “It’s called perspective.”

  PART THREE

  HISTORY ON TRIAL

  STUTTGART

  THERE WAS NOTHING in the physical appearance of Josef Schwammberger that marked him as a mass murderer. He had the pale, mottled skin of an old man who had spent too much time indoors—an elderly concierge of an apartment building perhaps. He wore brown slacks and a beige leisure jacket. He tended to shuffle, as though wearing a pair of old slippers. His eyes were a dull shade of gray. He was eighty years old in the spring of 1992, when he was sentenced to life in prison.

  The trial of Josef Schwammberger, conducted in the state court at Stuttgart, was probably the last Nazi trial to be held in Germany. Schwammberger was accused of being responsible for the murder of at least 3,000 Jews. But the surviving witnesses were few and the evidence often vague, so he was convicted of personally killing 25 people and of being an accessory to the murder of at least 641.

  The Israeli ambassador to Bonn visited the court and took the opportunity to remind the German people of their collective responsibility for the past. He told the German press that one could not separate the cultural heritage of Goethe, Schiller, Bach, and Beethoven from the terror of the Nazi regime. Schwammberger, in other words, was part of the national heritage, one more stone in the mosaic of German identity. Neo-Nazi youths staged a demonstration outside the court, claiming that Germ
an war guilt was all a Jewish lie.

  Schwammberger’s Nazi career could be described as a modest success. Born in South Tirol in 1912, he became a party member in 1933, which put him in the class of opportunistic joiners rather than early believers. Sent to Cracow in 1939 as a low-ranking SS officer, he became Kommandant of a slave-labor camp, which was closed in 1942. The 200 surviving slaves were shot. He was promoted to the rank of Oberscharrführer and became ruler of the ghetto in Przemysl, whose inhabitants were transported at regular intervals to Belzec and Auschwitz. His cruelty and sense of fun were not unusual for a man of his position: his favorite Alsatian, Prinz, was often set upon the Jewish prisoners and he was fond of killing people in front of their families.

  His postwar life was not untypical either, for a man of his ilk: he was helped by Catholic priests to escape to Argentina, where he lived in peace, devoting his time to beekeeping. He was only brought back to Germany in 1990; his trial began the following year.

  Schwammberger’s presence in the court was oddly ephemeral; he was there, yet he seemed not to be there. Everybody—the judges, the lawyers, the witnesses, the public—talked about him, yet he remained absolutely still. Once in a while, he would work his mouth, like a lizard. He hardly spoke at all. It was impossible to tell whether he even heard anything. His thin-lipped face remained blank, even when one of the witnesses, an eighty-one-year-old man, told the court how he and several others had been treated after trying to escape from the ghetto. They were ordered to lie on their backs and open their mouths for Ukrainian guards to piss in. Schwammberger, said the witness, had found this terribly amusing.