The Wages of Guilt

by Ian Buruma

  “We can safely predict,” Gauck wrote, “that individual trials might go on for a long time, as was the case with trials against Nazi criminals in the old Federal Republic, and for some crimes time might even run out. But we cannot allow a general amnesty for Stasi agents, if only for the sake of their victims. And it is certain that such an event would shatter people’s faith in the rule of law.”

  So much for the legal lesson. On history he had this to say: “The West Germans already know better than the former GDR citizens how bitter it is to leave it to the next generation to face up to an evil past. They have already burnt their fingers once, so they can’t be expected to allow this German negligence to become a bad tradition. In his famous speech on May 8, 1985, the fortieth anniversary of the end of the war, Richard von Weiszäcker spoke of the importance of remembrance in the process of shaping the present as well as the future. The way we now face up to our own past offers an excellent opportunity to counter the prejudice that Germans generally turn away from their past and are ‘unable to mourn.’ ”

  The reference to the inability to mourn shows how deeply the lessons of Alexander and Margarethe Mitscherlich had sunk in. We must do it right this time. We cannot allow the second past to haunt us like the first one. It is an argument, or, more accurately perhaps, a sentiment that appealed to many West Germans too. Maybe one should say especially to West Germans, for it is they—or at least some of them—who felt guilty about tolerating Nazis in their midst. And although newspaper columnists, clerics, academics, and German opinion makers in general continued to point out distinctions between the two undigested pasts, the difference between Nazi Germany and Stasi Germany had a tendency to get blurred. Not just that, but a certain air of capitalist triumphalism among the Wessies provoked once again the accusation of victors’ justice; only this time it wasn’t Western and Soviet Allies, but western Germans who were in the victor’s seat.

  It was a situation full of irony: the Germany of the guilty, the people who felt betroffen by their own “inability to mourn,” the nation that staged the Auschwitz and Majdanek trials, that Germany was now said to stand in judgment over the other Germany—the Germany of the old antifascists, the Germany that had suffered under two dictatorships, the Germany of uniformed marches, goose-stepping drills, and a secret police network, vast beyond even the Gestapo’s dreams. And as the last Nazi war criminal was sentenced in Stuttgart, thousands of Stasi men and Communist thugs were waiting to play their parts in the second round of juridical history lessons.

  TOKYO

  The law court in Nuremberg looks solid—indestructible almost—in a city that lacks solidity. The restored medievalism of the old town center gives the city a stagey atmosphere, as though Nuremberg were a mere backdrop to a historical fancy. The other solid building in Nuremberg is Albert Speer’s only remaining work, the stadium on the Zeppelin Field, where the annual Nazi Party rallies were held. It was too massive to blow up—the men’s lavatories are as big as average cinema halls—but it has not been maintained. Thick weeds sprout from the crumbling stone grandstands.

  I asked an old man selling souvenirs (beer mugs, flags, knives) where the court building was. “You mean the place where they hanged our officers?” Yes, I said, that was the place. He gave me directions, but I lost my way. So I had to ask again at my hotel. The young woman behind the reception desk had no idea. Her supervisor, a bleached blonde in her fifties, came over to ask what I wanted. I repeated my question. Her lips curled. “What do you want to go there for?” she snapped. “There is nothing interesting to see. Why don’t you visit our Old City …” I said something about history. She turned away. “Foreigners,” she muttered.

  The building is, as I said, solid, Wilhelmine, designed to impress. It is as pompous in its way as Speer’s stadium. Former judges stand on their stone pedestals like stern gods overlooking the Fürtherstrasse. Above the main entrance is a large frieze showing the various symbols of authority: tablets engraved with Roman numerals denoting the Ten Commandments, an open law book flanked by branches, and an ax projecting from a bundle of birch rods, the Roman insignia of penal power, later adopted by the fascists.

  Although the Japanese, too, went in for Wilhelmine grandeur (perhaps more in the colonies than in Japan itself), there is nothing in Tokyo like the Nuremberg law court. There were more than 2,000 war crimes trials held by Allied tribunals in Japan, Southeast Asia, and other Asian and Pacific locales. But the building where the International Military Tribunal of the Far East sat in judgment of the 28 Japanese wartime leaders from 1946 until the end of 1948, the so-called Class A defendants, was a former military academy, which had served as the Japanese Army headquarters at the end of the war. The auditorium had been hastily transformed into a wood-paneled courtroom, lit by blinding klieg lights, which reminded Joseph Keenan, the chief prosecutor, of a Hollywood film studio. Later, the building was demolished to make way for a new town hall.

  There was, however, another, more poignant building associated with the trial: Sugamo prison. Here it was, in the “death house,” that six generals and one civilian were hanged in the middle of a December night in 1948, after being sentenced by the Allied judges of the Tokyo tribunal. Sugamo prison, built in imitation of nineteenth-century European jails, was torn down in the 1970s. On its site—against the advice of astrologers and geomancers, who deemed it inauspicious—rose one of the highest skyscrapers in Asia—a glossy white building called Sunshine 60, which is part of Sunshine City, a massive complex of leisure centers, offices, and shopping arcades.

  I don’t want to read too much significance into these architectural differences. No doubt the Japanese were glad to be rid of Sugamo prison, just as the receptionist at my Nuremberg hotel would prefer that there be no more law court, or Zeppelin Field, to be visited. But I do not think there ever was a building in Japan quite like the Nuremberg court. The court with all its paraphernalia never was—unlike, say, the railway station or the government ministry—a central institution of the modern Japanese state. The law was not a means to protect the people from arbitrary rule; it was, rather, a way for the state to exercise more control over the people. Even today, there are relatively few lawyers in Japan. It is almost a form of subversion to defend a person who stands accused in court. So the idea of holding political and military leaders legally accountable for their actions was even stranger in Japan than it was in Germany. And yet, the shadows thrown by the Tokyo trial have been longer and darker in Japan than those of the Nuremberg trial in Germany.

  Nationalist revisionists talk about “the Tokyo Trial View of History,” as though the conclusions of the tribunal had been nothing but rabid anti-Japanese propaganda. The tribunal has been called a lynch mob, and Japanese leftists are blamed for undermining the morale of generations of Japanese by passing on the Tokyo Trial View of History in school textbooks and liberal publications. The Tokyo Trial View, in brief, is that Japan was guilty since 1931 of plotting and waging an aggressive war in Asia. But the revisionists argue that the war was in fact a tragic and indeed noble struggle for national survival and the liberation of Asia from Western colonialism. As long as the British and the Americans continued to be oppressors in Asia, wrote a revisionist historian named Hasegawa Michiko, who was born in 1945, “confrontation with Japan was inevitable. We did not fight for Japan alone. Our aim was to fight a Greater East Asia War. For this reason the war between Japan and China and Japan’s oppression of Korea were all the more profoundly regrettable. They were inexpressibly tragic events.”

  Revisionist worries about generations of Japanese being brainwashed by the Tokyo trial are, to say the least, exaggerated. Japanese school textbooks are the product of so many compromises that they hardly reflect any opinion at all. As with all controversial matters in Japan, the more painful, the less said. In a standard history textbook for middle school students, published in the 1980s, mention of the Tokyo trial takes up less than half a page. All it says is that the trial took place and “was criticiz
ed for being a one-sided trial by victors over the vanquished.”

  West German textbooks describe the Nuremberg trial in far more detail. And they make a clear distinction between the retroactive law on crimes against peace and the other new law, on crimes against humanity. The former “revealed the main problem of the prosecutors, and of the International Court itself: crimes against peace presupposed an international ban on offensive war, which did not exist.” The point is made that by refusing to take their own conduct during the war into account, the Allied judges created double standards. But it goes on to say that the law on crimes against humanity, though retroactive, “contributed to the further development of international law.” This difference between (West) German and Japanese textbooks is not just a matter of detail; it shows a gap in perception. To the Japanese, crimes against humanity are not associated with an equivalent to the Holocaust, but with military excesses that occur in any war. And given the shock of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese found it easier, in the case of war crimes, to turn around and say “you too.”

  When Hellmut Becker said that few Germans wished to criticize the procedures of the Nuremberg trial because the criminality of the defendants was so plain to see, he was talking about crimes against humanity—more precisely, about the Holocaust. And it was crimes of the Holocaust that German courts judged after Nuremberg.

  There never were any Japanese war crimes trials, nor is there a Japanese Ludwigsburg. This is partly because there was no exact equivalent of the Holocaust. Even though the behavior of Japanese troops was often barbarous, and the psychological consequences of State Shinto and emperor worship were frequently as hysterical as Nazism, Japanese atrocities were part of a military campaign, not a planned genocide of a people that included the country’s own citizens. And besides, those aspects of the war that were most revolting and furthest removed from actual combat, such as the medical experiments on human guinea pigs (known as “logs”) carried out by Unit 731 in Manchuria, were passed over during the Tokyo trial. The knowledge compiled by the doctors of Unit 731—of freezing experiments, injection of deadly diseases, vivisections, among other things—was considered so valuable by the Americans in 1945 that the doctors responsible were allowed to go free in exchange for their data. Some of the doctors rose to high positions in the postwar medical establishment. Dr. Yoshimura Hisato used his expertise on extreme temperature conditions to advise a Japanese expedition to the South Pole. And Dr. Kitano Masaji, who had performed many experimental operations, became head of Green Cross, Japan’s largest blood-processing facility.

  The story of Unit 731 was not utterly unknown in Japan, for a book had appeared based on the Soviet trial of some of the Unit’s staff, and a documentary had been broadcast on Japanese television in 1976. But the first time most Japanese knew about it was in 1982, when the mystery writer Morimura Seiichi published the first book of his trilogy on the subject, entitled The Devil’s Gluttony. Although Morimura’s research was thorough, the title reflected the tone of his book, which did not help to attract scholarly attention. The books were a commercial success, however, and Morimura’s work inspired others to research the subject. He also invited menacing attention from the extreme right wing.

  Some Japanese have suggested that they should have conducted their own war crimes trials. The historian Hata Ikuhiko thought the Japanese leaders should have been tried according to existing Japanese laws, either in military or in civil courts. The Japanese judges, he believed, might well have been more severe than the Allied tribunal in Tokyo. And the consequences would have been healthier. If found guilty, the spirits of the defendants would not have ended up being enshrined at Yasukuni. The Tokyo trial, he said, “purified the ‘crimes’ of the accused and turned them into martyrs. If they had been tried in domestic courts, there is a good chance the real criminals would have been flushed out.”

  Fair enough, but on what grounds would Japanese courts have prosecuted their own former leaders? Hata’s answer: “For starting a war which they knew they would lose.” Hata used the example of General Galtieri and his colleagues in Argentina after losing the Falklands War. In short, they would have been tried for losing the war, and the intense suffering they inflicted on their own people. This is as though German courts in 1918 had put General Hindenburg or General Ludendorff on trial. It is an arresting idea, but it shows yet again the fundamental difference between the Japanese war, in memory and, I should say, in fact, and the German experience. The Germans fought a war too, but the one for which they tried their own people, the Bogers and the Schwammbergers, was a war they could not lose, unless defeat meant that some of the enemies survived.

  As with virtually everything connected with the wartime past, the Japanese left has a different view of the Tokyo trial than the revisionist right. It is comparable to the way the German left looks upon Nuremberg. This was perfectly, if somewhat long-windedly, expressed in Kobayashi Masaki’s documentary film Tokyo Trial, released in 1983. Kobayashi is anything but an apologist for the Japanese war. His most famous film, The Human Condition, released in 1959, took a highly critical view of the war. The film’s main character was a peaceful young man named Kaji, who was compelled, like Kobayashi himself, to witness the horror of war as a private soldier in China.

  Tokyo Trial, which lasts for four and a half hours, begins with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ends with the famous shot of the naked Vietnamese girl running in terror from a napalm bomb attack. Nothing in the film suggests that Kobayashi was against the trial in principle or disagreed with its conclusions. But scenes of the trial are interrupted by images of the nuclear test on the Bikini atoll. And footage of Japanese massacres in Nanking—rarely enough seen in Japan—is immediately followed by yet another shot of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. Just as German leftists did in the case of Nuremberg, Kobayashi used the trial to turn the tables against the judges. But not necessarily to mitigate Japanese guilt. Rather, it was his intention to show how the victors had betrayed the pacifism they themselves had imposed on Japan.

  There are other views in Japan, somewhere in between revisionist apologetics and the tu quoque principle. Yet nobody in Japan remembers the Tokyo trial without ambivalence. This has less to do with the lack of a legal tradition, or with nationalist bloody-mindedness, than with the nature of the trial itself. In 1970, one of the most distinguished Japanese playwrights, Kinoshita Junji, wrote a play which turned the Tokyo trial into a melancholy farce. The best-known Japanese book about the trial, published in 1974, and later the subject of a television drama, was a sympathetic account of the one civilian who was hanged in Sugamo: War Criminal: The Life and Death of Hirota Koki, by Shiroyama Saburo.

  Neither Kinoshita nor Shiroyama was a right-wing revisionist. Nor was Yoshimoto Takaaki, philosopher of the 1960s New Left. Yet he wrote in 1986 that “from our point of view as contemporaries and witnesses, the trial was partly plotted from the very start. It was an absurd ritual before slaughtering the sacrificial lamb.” This, from all accounts, was the way it looked to most Japanese, even if they had little sympathy for most of the “lambs.” In 1948, after three years of American occupation censorship and boosterism, people listened to the radio broadcast of the verdicts with a sad but fatalist shrug: this is what you can expect when you lose the war.

  But Yoshimoto went on to say something no revisionist would ever mention: “I also remember my fresh sense of wonder at this first encounter with the European idea of law, which was so different from the summary justice in our Asiatic courts. Instead of getting your head chopped off without a proper trial, the accused were able to defend themselves, and the careful judgment appeared to follow a public procedure.”

  Yoshimoto’s memory was both fair and devastating, for it pointed straight at the reason for the trial’s failure. The rigging of a political trial—the “absurd ritual”—undermined the value of that European idea of law. The great thing about the trial, in the words of Joseph Keenan, was that “individuals are being brou
ght to the bar of justice for the first time in history to answer personally for offenses that they have committed while acting in official capacities as chiefs of state”—an unfortunate slip of the tongue, for there was just one chief of state, the emperor, and he was absent from the proceedings. The only model for the Tokyo trial was Nuremberg. And the trial was not always conducted fairly: evidence for the defense was sometimes barred, and prosecution witnesses were favored. But, as in Nuremberg, there was the other, more overt aim of the trial: teaching the Japanese, and by extension the world, a history lesson.

  Frederick Mignone, one of the prosecutors, said a trifle histrionically that “in Japan and in the Orient in general, the trial is one of the most important phases of the occupation. It has received wide coverage in the Japanese press and revealed for the first time to millions of Japanese the scheming, duplicity, and insatiable desire for power of her entrenched militaristic leaders, writing a much-needed history of events which otherwise would not have been written.”

  It was indeed much-needed, since so little was known. The political scientist Ishida Takeshi, a student at the time, would “never forget the shock of hearing about the massacres perpetrated by the Imperial Army in China immediately after the occupation of Nanking.” Some of the information even surprised the defendants. General Itagaki Seishiro, a particularly ruthless figure, who was in command of prison camps in Southeast Asia and whose troops had massacred countless Chinese civilians, wrote in his diary: “I am learning of matters I had not known and recalling things I had forgotten.” After it was over, the Nippon Times pointed out the flaws of the trial, but added that “the Japanese people must ponder over why it is that there has been such a discrepancy between what they thought and what the rest of the world accepted almost as common knowledge. This is at the root of the tragedy which Japan brought upon herself.”