The Wages of Guilt

by Ian Buruma

  Ienaga had also mentioned in his 1962 textbook that “many of the Japanese officers and soldiers violated Chinese women” during the China campaign. The ministry decided to have this deleted too. “The violation of women,” the ministry claimed, “is something that has happened on every battlefield in every era of human history. This is not an issue that needs to be taken up with respect to the Japanese Army in particular.”

  In fact, rape by the Imperial Army was so pervasive that some of the generals began to worry about the consequences—the outrages provoked Chinese resistance. So it was decided to set up military brothels (“sexual comfort facilities”) near the front lines, stocked with Chinese, Korean, Southeast Asian, and some European women, taken from villages, towns, and POW camps all over the Japanese empire. Most of these “comfort women” died, of disease, murder, or enemy fire. Ienaga mentioned them in his book The Pacific War, but they did not appear in any Japanese textbooks. Again, evidence has emerged to prove Ienaga’s case, and future history books will have to include them.

  The evidence came out in an interesting way. Until the late 1980s, South Koreans needed special government permission to travel abroad. And since the South Korean government had agreed, in 1965, to settle Japan’s war responsibility by accepting a lump sum, individual Koreans were not able to claim compensation. The history of the comfort women was embarrassing in any event, for it brought shame on the families of the survivors, and there had been a great deal of Korean collaboration. This, needless to say, was kept out of Korean textbooks. But in the more liberal climate of the late 1980s, South Koreans were able to travel to Japan, and with the encouragement of feminist groups, a number of former comfort women decided to press their claims. The Japanese government, however, denied any responsibility. It argued that wartime prostitution had been a private enterprise and that no evidence existed of any official involvement.

  And there the matter would have rested had not the historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki watched these denials on television. He remembered some documents he had seen while doing research in the Self-Defense Agency library. So he went back to the library and in a few days he found what he was after: official orders for the construction of “sexual comfort facilities,” signed by the high command of the Imperial Japanese Army. The story of the comfort women was widely reported in the Japanese press. The Japanese Prime Minister was forced to apologize to the Korean people. And when a BBC reporter asked the chief Japanese government spokesman why it had taken the government so long to admit the truth, the spokesman said that government researchers had not known about the documents. When the reporter politely expressed his surprise about this, since it had taken a lone scholar only a few days to find them, there followed a great moment of television: for a full minute, the spokesman remained silent, biting his lip, avoiding the reporter’s gaze. Finally he said it was “a very unfair question.”

  Ienaga used the term “aggression” to describe Japan’s war in China. The examiner appointed by the ministry made the following suggestion: “Aggression is a term that contains negative ethical connotations. In the education of the citizens of the next generation it is not desirable to use a term with such negative implications to describe the acts of our own country. Therefore an expression such as ‘military advance’ should be used.” The suggestion was duly taken up. The Chinese government protested against this wording on various politically opportune occasions, which only helped to sharpen the political divisions in Japan. The history of aggression blocked the Japanese from using military force, which is why the right denied it, why the left kept on bringing it up, and why the mainstream conservatives preferred not to talk about it at all. As long as the LDP remained in power, the right, some of whose older members were themselves tainted by the war, had to be appeased. In 1989 a Communist member of the Japanese parliament asked the Prime Minister, Takeshita Noboru, whether Japan had been guilty of aggression in World War II. Takeshita answered that this “should be left up to future historians to judge.”

  In 1970 Ienaga actually won his case. The judge of the Tokyo District Court, Sugimoto Ryokichi, ruled that the screening of textbooks by the ministry should not go beyond the correction of typographical and factual errors. Censorship of substantial matters was deemed unconstitutional, and so it was decided in Ienaga’s case. After the verdict, the judge told the press that the position of teachers should be respected and their freedom protected. Right-wing extremists issued death threats to the judge, the defense lawyers, and Ienaga himself. Ienaga’s house was surrounded day and night by thugs who kept him awake by shouting slogans and banging pots and pans like battle drums. The atmosphere at the Tokyo District Court was so tense that Ienaga and his counsel had to enter the building under police protection through a secret door.

  After the ministry appealed the verdict, Ienaga did not win his case again, or at least not so categorically. In 1974, another judge agreed that the screening process had been “excessive,” but not unconstitutional. In the 1980s, yet another bench pronounced all the screening suggestions perfectly in order. One of Ienaga’s longest-serving defense lawyers, Oyama Hiroshi, called the early 1970s the “Golden Age of Japanese justice.” I asked him what had changed. He said it was a fairly simple matter: “Judges who go against the government are not chosen to sit in the higher courts. So if you don’t care about having a successful career, you pass fair judgments.” Judge Sugimoto’s career did not prosper.

  However, much to everyone’s surprise, the Tokyo High Court ruled on October 20, 1993, that the Ministry of Education had exceeded its bounds by censoring Iena a’s textbook on several counts, including his description of the Nanking Massacre. The election defeat of the LDP might have contributed to this new mood. But a more likely reason was the mass of new evidence of Japanese atrocities furnished by young Japanese historians.

  When Japanese right-wing nationalists claim that their leftist opponents in the teaching profession are influenced by “foreign” ideas, they are, of course, right. Which is not to say that nativist ideas are pure, but they appear to have a stronger claim on tradition. Just as German conservatives once denounced the constitution of the Weimar Republic as un-German, “Jewish,” not worthy of support, Japanese rightists condemn the postwar Japanese constitution, and the educational system that supports it, as alien and thus unsuitable. One notable scholar of comparative culture, Irie Takanori, actually drew the parallel between the Weimar Republic and postwar Japan. The Japanese constitution, he said, was written by Jews who had “an antipathy toward the state.”

  German constitutional patriotism and the postwar constitution itself were the creations of German jurists and thinkers, who could, if necessary, call upon the spirit of the European Enlightenment, Goethe’s humanism, and the German resistance against Hitler to give themselves a sense of continuity. The Japanese had a harder time, since it was the American occupation, more than the Japanese themselves, that instigated constitutional and educational change. And as Ienaga said, there was no tradition of resistance to fall back on. Instead, there was Marxism, which had an intellectual history in Japan as well as in the West and which provided a ready antidote to nationalist myths.

  The textbook for high school students published in 1984 tells the whole melancholy story of Japanese wartime resistance—or rather the lack of it—in the space of one page: “In 1933, the leaders of the Japanese Communist Party publicly renounced their political creed. This had a widespread influence on socialists, most of whom followed suit. Even the very few people who adhered to socialism, such as Suzuki Mosaburo of the Japanese Proletarian Party, were put under such pressure that they discontinued their activities in 1937.”

  The complicated case of Professor Minobe Tatsukichi is briefly touched upon. Minobe was a constitutional jurist who in 1935 devised the theory of the emperor as an “organ of state.” The state, in his opinion, was sovereign and the emperor was its supreme organ. He was immediately criticized as an enemy of the national polity, for the sovereignty of
the emperor was absolute.

  The textbook goes on to say: “As a result of this controversy over Minobe’s theory, not only Marxism but also liberalism was denounced as a form of antinational thinking. And soon the ideas for domestic reform planned by the radical army factions dominated the mass media. This could be seen in cultural affairs as well. In tune with official cultural policy, militaristic and reactionary trends grew stronger and the uncritical emulation of Western civilization was reconsidered. There was an increasing tendency to reevaluate traditional Japanese culture.”

  That, so far as resistance is concerned, is it. But far from using the few that did resist—Minobe, for example—as role models, there is a marked ambivalence in these phrases. To be sure, militarism and suppression of thought are to be condemned, but “uncritical emulation” of Western civilization cannot be a good thing either. And what is so wrong about a reevaluation of “traditional Japanese culture”? To “reconsider” and a “tendency to reevaluate” are, in any case, odd words to describe straight government censorship.

  So even though nobody openly supports a militarist revival, many Japanese nationalists feel the need to defend traditional Japanese culture against uncritical emulation of the West. In political terms this means a defense of Japanese sovereignty, including its right to wage war, against the influence of Marxism and pacifism. In terms of propaganda, the “culture” under siege is a vague concept of the family state whose ancient values are passed on through the supposedly unbroken imperial line. Since the postwar order was not set up by Japanese who inherited the mantle of resistance against the ancien régime, feelings about the past are bound to be more ambivalent than is the case in Germany, East or West. In effect, the defense of Japanese identity often is a defense of the old regime, not just against the Japanese left but also against foreigners, in East and West, who criticize Japan for what it did and for the way it chooses to remember.

  This is why Fujio Masayuki, a former Education Minister, once told me that “there were no shameful episodes in modern Japanese history.” He was sacked by his Prime Minister in 1986 for upsetting relations with South Korea, after stating that the Koreans had been partly to blame for their own annexation by Japan in 1910. The Tokyo trials, he said in an interview, had been a “racial revenge,” meant “to rob Japan of her power.” Fujio said these things because he wanted to “restore the Japanese spirit through history and tradition.”

  Fujio was neither eccentric nor the first to voice such thoughts after the war. In 1974, Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei, who was soon to be indicted in a corruption scandal, worried about the lack of moral development in Japanese education. He suggested that the old Imperial Rescript on Education be revived, since “much of it expresses universal moral principles.” But in 1957 the Ministry of Education had come to the crux of the matter. In its report on Ienaga Saburo’s first textbook, it said that in his “zeal to make people reflect on the past, he has strayed a long way from the proper aims of teaching Japanese history, which are to acknowledge the historical achievements of our ancestors, to raise our awareness of being Japanese, and to foster a rich feeling of love for our people.”

  In 1991, the old imperial hymn, Kimigayo, and the Rising Sun flag, despite some vehement protest from leftists and liberals, were officially declared to be the national symbols of Japan. This decision came not through legislation but in the form of a guideline issued by the Ministry of Education in approving the revised textbooks, which included, for the first time since the war, favorable passages about Japanese military heroes. And at least one school, the Nichidai Matsue High School, had unofficially revived the Imperial Rescript. Its headmaster, Okazaki Isao, insisted that the Rescript be read out loud every morning, since it was “the best text to make you Japanese with a true Japanese spirit.”

  In the autumn of 1992 I waited outside the Tokyo High Court, together with about 250 people. Space inside the courtroom was limited, so we had to draw lots to see who could attend Ienaga Saburo’s last appearance in court. Many were members of an organization of Ienaga supporters. Some had come all the way from Hokkaido and Okinawa. There were men, women, old people, students, teachers, office workers, and housewives. The mood was remarkably cheerful, despite the gloomy prospects for Ienaga’s case. Pamphlets were handed out to publicize meetings to discuss human rights, or freedom of speech, or compensation for former comfort women and other victims of Japanese militarism. There were cheers for the people who had come from farthest away, and more cheers for people who had stood as witnesses in former Ienaga trials.

  But the biggest cheer, like a great rush of feeling, was for Ienaga himself, as he entered the building ahead of his lawyers. He doffed his hat in salute and blinked behind his glasses, looking both fragile and stubborn.

  The courtroom was sober, without visual symbols of power, secular or religious. The judges wore simple black togas, in the continental European style. The walls behind them were of pale-colored marble. The lawyers’ rhetoric was delivered in a sober, even artless manner. There was one woman among Ienaga’s defense counsel. The ministry’s team had none.

  I listened to Oyama Hiroshi, who had pleaded Ienaga’s case from the very beginning, in 1965. He spoke clearly and well, about the steady reversion to prewar methods of education, about the low standards of human rights in Japan, and about Japan’s poor record, in comparison to Germany, in facing the darker pages of its past. He quoted Montesquieu on the spirit of law. And he pointed out that the constitution was there to protect people from a state monopoly on the truth. This, he said, was why writers of textbooks had to be free to express their ideas. For without freedom of thought there could be no democracy.

  The judges and some of the counsel for the ministry sat back with their eyes closed, in deep concentration, or fast asleep. Perhaps they were bored, because they had heard it all before. Perhaps they thought it was a pointless exercise, since they knew already how the case would end. But it was not a pointless exercise. For Ienaga Saburo had kept alive a vital debate for twenty-seven years. One cussed schoolteacher and several hundred supporters at the courthouse might not seem much, but it was enough to show that, this time, someone was fighting back.

  MEMORIALS, MUSEUMS, AND MONUMENTS

  STANDING AT THE southwest corner of the Marienkirche in Wittenberg, the church where Martin Luther used to preach, you can just make out a curious sculpture jutting out from the church wall, like a gargoyle, about thirty feet from the ground. It is of a sow suckling three piglets. Her hind leg is lifted by a little man wearing a pointed hat. The hat identifies the man as a Jew of the fifteenth century. Above this scene of Jew and pigs—the sow, I was told, representing “Satan’s synagogue”—is the Hebrew name for God. The ornament is called a Judensau, Jew’s pig. Many of these used to adorn German churches, as tokens of Jewish humiliation. A few still remain, though the tourist guides tend not to mention them.

  I would not have noticed the Judensau in this prettily run-down East German town, officially known as Luther City Wittenberg, if a notice board inside the church had not alerted me to the fact. The notice had been put up in 1988, after the church was renovated. During the renovation, which began in 1983, young members of the Lutheran congregation had decided something needed to be done about the Judensau; it could not just sit there unnoticed. So money was collected to commission a monument to remind people of the sculpture’s significance. It was to be a Mahnmal, a “monument of warning.” This still being the GDR, however, where antisemitism was not officially recognized as a problem, no city official turned up for the unveiling.

  The monument of warning is located on the pavement directly under the Judensau. It is made of bronze. Four square plates, rather like an oddly shaped manhole, are lifted slightly from below by probing bronze fingers. On the side is a poetic text that reads: “Under the sign of the cross, God’s own name, so sacred that Jews cannot pronounce it in front of Christians, was used as a form of abuse, and six million Jews died.” The bronze fingers sugge
st the victims of antisemitism rising from a mass grave. They also suggest something more abstract, more in keeping perhaps with a monument of warning: shameful memories which cannot be repressed, which claw their way into our conscience, like a constantly recurring nightmare. The Mahnmal of Wittenberg is one of thousands of warning monuments in Germany, but it is the only one I have seen which refers less to a particular event than to memory itself.

  Before World War II there were no warning monuments in Germany. Instead there were war memorials, to fallen soldiers, dying, like marble Christs, for the fatherland. The bonds of national community were strengthened through their sacrifice. War, in Great War monuments, is a mystical experience, a Calvary of valor, sacrifice, and regeneration. Great Gothic memorial fortresses were built in the German Reich to pluck honor from defeat. Nothing like this emerged after World War II. Instead, the Germans built monuments not to glorify but to warn; Denkmal became Mahnmal.

  Like a monumental rosary, spread mostly over western Germany, the monuments testify to a fretting over memory, a neurotic fear of amnesia, an obsession with casting the past in stone. It was not always like this. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the compulsion to forget was stronger. Reminders of the past—not just Hitler’s past—were destroyed, blown up, removed. Sites of concentration camps were used for some time to house German prisoners, by Soviets and Western Allies alike, but as soon as was possible they were either razed or abandoned. What physically remained of the Third Reich was left out of apathy or force majeure, as in the case of Speer’s indestructible Nuremberg stadium, or for political reasons, as was usually the case in East Germany. The warning monuments and memorial places (Gedenkstätte) are mostly products of the reaction, which set in during the 1960s, propelled by the postwar generation, as eager to warn and remember as their parents were to forget.