The Wages of Guilt

by Ian Buruma

  The discrepancy is still there today. But in hindsight, one can only conclude that instead of helping the Japanese to understand and accept their past, the trial left them with an attitude of cynicism and resentment. Political trials produce politicized histories. This is what the revisionists mean when they talk about the Tokyo Trial View of History. And they are right, even if their own conclusions are not. For to condemn the trial is not necessarily to deny Japanese guilt, which is the theme of Kinoshita’s brilliant play.

  Between God and Man is composed of two parts. Part I, entitled The Judgment, is about the Tokyo trial, using actual transcripts. It has great fun with scenes of Allied confusion when such delicate matters as the Hiroshima bomb, or the belated Soviet war declaration (two days after the bomb), are introduced. Political embarrassment is covered up in absurd legalese. The conventional reading of this part of the play would be to see it as yet another attempt to water down Japanese guilt by saying tu quoque. And by stressing, as Kinoshita does, the hypocrisy of the court, he seems to be denying the conclusions of the trial. But there are other possible interpretations. The Japanese defendants are not heard, but can be seen, sitting in the audience. So in effect it is not just these 28 men, but the (Japanese) audience that is sitting in the dock. Clearly, there is more to the play than an indictment of trial procedures. The audience is not let off the hook so lightly.

  Part II, entitled A Romance of the South Seas, is a typical story, no doubt with a firm base in reality, of a man being hanged for crimes committed by others. The story of the crimes is told by a music-hall singer. The farcical trial, which parodies grotesquely the Tokyo trial, with jabbering monkeys as witnesses, is re-created in a dream sequence. As soon as this nightmare is over, everybody wants to forget that it ever took place. Only the music-hall singer is unwilling to forget. And she is also the only one to refuse to complain about the unfairness of the trial: “If it all depended on the simple fact that the trial was a farce, who could make any sense out of it?”

  Kinoshita’s play, which appeared to be an apology for Japanese crimes, in fact goes deeper into the question of guilt and retribution than the two German plays about war crimes trials. And, ironically, it also shows a greater influence of Christianity (Kinoshita had once been a Christian) than the works of the two Europeans. Peter Weiss and Rolf Schneider wrote about the politics of Nazi crimes. Weiss tried to show what produces torturers like Boger. Neither doubted the validity of the trials. But Kinoshita’s point was a different one. His play shows that war crimes trials are not up to dealing with collective responsibility and truth. The language is simply wrong. Even the artificial banter of the music hall is more appropriate. Yet it is not enough to cry “victors’ justice,” for that won’t help people come to terms with their past. It is just another evasion. And the question of whether the 28 men in Tokyo, or the thousands of war criminals of lesser rank, were guilty or not is not the real issue either. It is we, in the audience, who have to be judges of our own guilt.

  The Tokyo trial was modeled after Nuremberg, as though the Japanese wars in Asia had been more or less the same as Hitler’s war, but even the judges recognized that the Japanese defendants were not simply Oriental Nazis. The president of the Tokyo tribunal, Sir William Webb, thought “the crimes of the German accused were far more heinous, varied and extensive than those of the Japanese accused.” Put in another way, nearly all the defendants at Nuremberg, convicted of crimes against peace, were also found guilty of crimes against humanity. But half the Japanese defendants received life sentences for political crimes only.

  Frank Tavenner, one of the attorneys for the prosecution, said: “These men were not the hoodlums who were the powerful part of the group which stood before the tribunal at Nuremberg, dregs of a criminal environment, thoroughly schooled in the ways of crime and knowing no other methods but those of crime. These men were supposed to be the elite of the nation, the honest and trusted leaders to whom the fate of the nation had been confidently entrusted …”

  But the question of responsibility is always a tricky affair in Japan, where formal responsibility is easier to identify than actual guilt. Not only were there many men, such as the hero of Kinoshita’s play, who took the blame for what their superiors had done—a common practice in Japan, in criminal gangs as well as in politics or business corporations—but the men at the top were often not at all in control of their unscrupulous subordinates. It is hardly a surprise, then, that hastily convened tribunals all over Asia, made up of men who had no knowledge of Japanese ways, were hardly up to the task of sorting out who in the Japanese chain of command had been responsible for what. As a result, many people were wrongly accused of the wrong things for the wrong reasons. This is why there was such sympathy in Japan for the men branded by foreigners as war criminals, particularly the so-called Class B and Class C criminals, the men who followed orders, or gave them at a lower level: field commanders, camp guards, and so on.

  In 1953, a campaign demanding the release of all Japanese war criminals received more than fifteen million signatures. A dispatch from the West German embassy in Tokyo to the Federal Ministry of Justice in Bonn reported: “The Japanese people are of the opinion that the actual goal of the war crimes tribunals was never realized, since the judgments were reached by the victors alone and had the character of revenge. The [Japanese] war criminal is not conscious of having committed a crime, for he regards his deeds as acts of war, committed out of patriotism.”

  The year 1953 was also a rich period for movies, such as Taiheyo no Washi (Eagle of the Pacific), that painted wartime leaders as martyrs or peace-loving heroes. The eagle in the Pacific was Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, the planner and executor of the attack on Pearl Harbor, who was indeed in many ways a moderate and admirable figure. Less moderate, though certainly the victim of kangaroo-court justice, was General Yamashita Tomoyuki. He, too, was the subject of a hero-worshipping picture, Yamashita Tomoyuki. Terrible atrocities were committed under his command in the Philippines. The sacking of Manila in 1945 was about as brutal as the Nanking Massacre. So to depict him in the movie as a peaceful gentleman, while portraying the American prosecutor in Manila as one of the main villains, might seem an odd way to view the past.

  But it was not entirely wrong, for the trial was rigged. Yamashita had no doubt been a tough soldier, but in this case he had been so far removed from the troops who ran amok in Manila that he could hardly have known what was going on. Yet the American prosecutor openly talked about his desire to hang “Japs.” And General MacArthur wanted his revenge for having lost the Philippines, so he speeded up the trial, and decided to have Yamashita hanged, even before two dissenting opinions had arrived from the Supreme Court. The dissenting judges called it a “judicial lynching without due process of law.” Yamashita’s death sentence was announced on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. With this kind of precedent, few Japanese, even those who found it convenient to blame all their troubles on “the militarists,” had the stomach to carry on with war crimes trials of their own.

  The political theorist Maruyama Masao called the prewar Japanese government a “system of irresponsibilities.” He identified three types of political personalities: the portable Shrine, the Official, and the Outlaw. The Shrine ranks highest. It is the supreme symbol of authority, shouldered (like a shrine on festival days) by the Officials. The Shrine is the icon, but those who carry it, the Officials, are the ones with actual power. But the Officials—bureaucrats, politicians, admirals and generals—are often manipulated by the lowest-ranking Outlaws, the military mavericks, the hotheaded officers in the field, the mad nationalists, and other agents of violence. One result of this system of irresponsibilities is that political cause and effect disappear from view. History will seem like an endless string of faits accomplis, periods of oppressive stillness interrupted by violent storms whose source is always mysterious: foreign demons, nature, or, in the words of Hayashi Fusao, the father of Japanese revisionism, “the coldheartedness of history
.”

  The Class A war criminals in the dock in Tokyo were Officials, as well as Shrines. They were Officials, shouldering the highest Shrine of all, the emperor himself; but they, in turn, were held aloft by men further down in the hierarchy and manipulated by Outlaws. Political responsibility moves like a perpetuum mobile, round and round, up and down, without stopping at any point. When the system spins out of control, as it did during the 1930s, events are forced by violent Outlaws, reacted to by nervous Officials, and justified by the sacred status of the Shrines. Here we come to the nub of the problem, which the Tokyo trial refused to deal with, the role of the Shrine in whose name every single war crime was committed, Emperor Hirohito, now known posthumously as the Showa emperor.

  In the summer of 1990, after visiting Nanking, I met Saeki Yuko, an attractive woman in her early forties, who wrote traditional Japanese poetry. Her poems, in the tanka style, are minimalist laments about a family in disgrace:

  My father was drunk, like a pomegranate

  the day after grandfather’s execution.

  All of us together, one family

  with tightened throats since the time of father’s father.

  Mrs. Saeki was the granddaughter of General Doihara Kenji, also known as “Lawrence of Manchuria.” Doihara was hanged at Sugamo prison in 1948 for crimes against humanity, crimes against peace, and conventional war crimes. He was a colorful figure and, though of high rank, a typical Outlaw, involved in terrorism, drug trafficking, and the running of concentration camps. As commander of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria, he was one of the men who pushed along the war in China.

  Mrs. Saeki’s father buckled under the strain of being Doihara’s son; he couldn’t hold a job, drank too much, and died young. Mrs. Saeki herself was bullied at her primary school (though not at her elite high school). She had hoped that the emperor would come to her rescue, since she had been taught that he was “the father of us all.” But her parents told her she could not expect the emperor’s help anymore, because Japan had lost the war. “We have to live on our own now,” her mother said. Nonetheless his portrait hung on the wall of the family house until she went to high school in the 1950s. Only then was it replaced—by a poster of James Dean.

  Mrs. Saeki felt she was part of a tragic family. As a result of what had happened, she also felt bitter about the fickleness of authority. She had always had very mixed feelings about the emperor. The emperor, she said, allowed the question of guilt to be evaded at the Tokyo trial: “The defendents were his children. There wasn’t much sympathy among the Japanese people for the Class A war criminals, such as my grandfather, it is true, but the Class B and Class C war criminals were seen as victims. They had only carried out the emperor’s orders.” Mrs. Saeki felt less angry now that the emperor was dead.

  She was not proud of being Doihara’s granddaughter. Indeed, she had disliked the idea as a child. But her teenaged son had a different perspective. He was fascinated by his great-grandfather and everything to do with the war. Mrs. Saeki said he was intelligent but very nationalistic. He rejected the Tokyo Trial View. When he watched Kobayashi’s Tokyo Trial with his friends, he boasted of being Doihara’s great-grandson. That, said Mrs. Saeki, is when she realized how much times had changed.

  Emperor Hirohito was not Hitler; Hitler was no mere Shrine. But the lethal consequences of the emperor-worshipping system of irresponsibilities did emerge during the Tokyo trial. The savagery of Japanese troops was legitimized, if not driven, by an ideology that did not include a Final Solution but was as racialist as Hitler’s National Socialism. The Japanese were the Asian Herrenvolk, descended from the gods. The historian Ienaga Saburo tells a story about a Japanese schoolchild in the 1930s who was squeamish about having to dissect a live frog. The teacher rapped him hard on the head with his knuckles and said: “Why are you crying about one lousy frog? When you grow up you’ll have to kill a hundred, two hundred Chinks.”

  A veteran of the war in China said in a television interview that he was able to kill Chinese without qualms only because he didn’t regard them as human. There was even religious merit in the killing, for it was part of a “holy war.” Captain Francis P. Scott, the chaplain at Sugamo prison, questioned Japanese camp commandants about their reasons for mistreating POWs. This is how he summed up their answers: “They had a belief that any enemy of the emperor could not be right, so the more brutally they treated their prisoners, the more loyal to their emperor they were being.”

  Emperor Hirohito, the shadowy figure who changed after the war from navy uniforms to gray suits, was not personally comparable to Hitler, but his psychological role was remarkably similar. The Mitscherlichs described Hitler as “an object on which Germans depended, to which they transferred responsibility, and he was thus an internal object. As such, he represented and revived the ideas of omnipotence that we all cherish about ourselves from infancy. The same was true of the Japanese imperial institution, no matter who sat on the throne, a ruthless war criminal or a gentle marine biologist.

  It was precisely this symbol of authority, however, this holiest Shrine, that General MacArthur chose to preserve after 1945. This, by the way, was just what Japan had demanded as a condition of surrender. But this was turned down by the Allies, who then forced Japan to surrender unconditionally by destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The fear after 1945 was that without the emperor Japan would be impossible to govern. In fact, MacArthur behaved like a traditional Japanese strongman (and was admired for doing so by many Japanese), using the imperial symbol to enhance his own power. As a result, he hurt the chances of a working Japanese democracy and seriously distorted history. For to keep the emperor in place (he could at least have been made to resign), Hirohito’s past had to be freed from any blemish; the symbol had to be, so to speak, cleansed from what had been done in its name.

  This might or might not have made Japan easier to rule, but it also caused a great deal of ill feeling. In 1987, Hara Kazuo made an extraordinary documentary film about a veteran of the Imperial Japanese Army named Okuzaki Kenzo. It was entitled The Emperor’s Army Marches On. Okuzaki had been a private soldier in New Guinea. At the end of the war, after Okuzaki had already returned to Japan, two young soldiers in his platoon were shot by their own commander in vague circumstances. Okuzaki grew obsessed with this; he had to find out what happened. So he decided to track down all the survivors.

  Okuzaki was an eccentric figure, to say the least. He had spent time in jail for shooting pinballs at the emperor and distributing pamphlets with pornographic cartoons of the emperor. He drove around Japan in a van festooned with banners and slogans demanding the emperor’s apology for having sent millions of young men to their deaths. His search for the truth was, as he put it, his way of “consoling the spirits of those who sacrificed their lives for the emperor.”

  Okuzaki was neither a Christian nor a member of any Buddhist or Shinto sect. He believed in something he called the “Okuzaki religion,” a combination of natural law and anarchism. The literary model that comes to mind was not Japanese but German, Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, the horse trader from Brandenburg whose zeal for justice resulted in murder and mayhem.

  All the while, Hara’s handheld camera follows Okuzaki on his quest, producing jerky, gritty images. You never know what will happen next. The action is forever on the edge of chaos. In one scene, Okuzaki kicks a sickly old comrade who refuses to tell the truth. In another he wrestles a former officer to the ground. When the police try to interfere, Okuzaki tells them to mind their own business. His aversion to authority, any authority, is clear from the start. The police, he says, are just like soldiers in the war; all they can do is follow orders. But slowly, in spite of endless lies and evasions, a very unpleasant story begins to emerge. The two young men were not executed for desertion, as people had thought. The platoon commander had ordered them to be killed so they could be eaten. Cannibalizing Japanese soldiers was not normal practice. Natives or enemy soldiers were preferred. But these were not alwa
ys available, and the two privates were not popular with their commander. The commander himself never admitted this, of course. The truth had to be pieced together from the accounts of others.

  But finding out the truth was not enough. Okuzaki wanted his old commander to admit it. The lying enraged him. The commander, a plump old man, lived in a large house. Life had treated him well. Okuzaki grabbed him roughly and screamed that he should come clean and take responsibility for what he had done. The man said he didn’t see it that way. One had to realize what it was like in those days. He had only done his duty, as a Japanese soldier. Okuzaki shouted: “That’s all you have to say! I think the highest symbol of human irresponsibility is the emperor, followed by loyal officers, like you …” In the end Okuzaki tried to shoot him. He failed. He shot the commander’s son instead. This was God’s justice, he said, as he was sentenced to life in jail.

  Emperor Hirohito not only escaped prosecution at the Tokyo trial; he could not even be called as a witness. A deal was struck to keep the supreme Shrine out of the whole business. Aristides George Lazarus, the defense counsel of one of the generals on trial, was asked to arrange that “the military defendants, and their witnesses, would go out of their way during their testimony to include the fact that Hirohito was only a benign presence when military actions or programs were discussed at meetings that, by protocol, he had to attend.” No doubt the other counsel were given similar instructions.