by Ian Buruma
There are more oil paintings, all in the same pompous nineteenth-century manner as the picture of the emperor at Yasukuni—paintings of Japanese troops at the Great Wall of China fraternizing with grateful Mongolians and paintings of human torpedoes or cherry blossom planes engaged in their fatal missions. There is a large model, resembling a miniature garden, depicting the hopeless battles in Burma and the Philippines, with little plastic suicide tanks rolling off felt cliffs. Much attention is paid to the hard plight of Japanese soldiers captured by the Soviets after the war and imprisoned in Siberian camps. And at the end of the exhibition is a glass case displaying, among other items, a Burmese flag presented to Japan by General Ne Win, the Burmese military dictator, who was trained in Japan before the war. It was given, so the text informs, by “one who owes the liberation of his country to Japan.” And President Sukarno of Indonesia left a stuffed bird of paradise as a token of his gratitude.
The texts between the exhibits, explaining the background of the war, are straight wartime propaganda. The annexation of Manchuria in 1931 was a necessary move to protect the Asian continent from Soviet Communism and Chinese rapaciousness. The war in China was inevitable, because Chinese rebels were being spurred into anti-Japanese activities by the British and the Americans. The war with America was a matter of national survival. And the suffering of Japanese POWs, as well as millions of others, at the hands of Communist regimes proved that Japan had been on the right side all along. In short, to quote from a history booklet sold at the museum bookshop, “the Greater East Asian War was not a ‘war of invasion,’ but just the opposite: it was a holy war to liberate the world from Communism.”
It is easy to conclude from all this that the Yasukuni war museum glorifies militarism. In fact, it is more complicated than that. What it glorifies in a quasi-religious manner is not belligerence or hatred, but self-sacrifice. The tone of the museum and indeed the entire shrine is summed up by a large bronze plaque put up by the Association to Honor the Special Attack Forces (kamikazes). It was unveiled in 1985, on the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Engraved in stylish characters are the words of Takeda Tsuneyoshi, president of the association: “Some six thousand men died in suicide attacks that were incomparable in their tragic bravery and struck terror in the hearts of our foes. The entire nation shed tears of gratitude for their unstinting loyalty and selfless sacrifice.”
In a small room next to the main shrine, I spoke to a young priest whose crisp white robe denoted the purity of his office. He was no more than thirty years old. His father had been a Shinto priest before him. After exchanging name cards and pleasantries, I asked him what he thought of the Pacific War. First, he said, it was a big mistake to call World War II the Pacific War; it was the Great East Asian War. It was also a mistake to think that the Great East Asian War was a war of invasion. “We had no choice. It was purely a matter of national survival. Besides, the idea was to liberate Asia. The Asian people are still grateful …”
He must have noted signs of impatience, because he stopped and asked me what I specifically wanted to know. So I asked him about the purpose of the museum. Here he gave a perfectly honest and plausible account. It was not meant to be an educational museum, he said. As long as survivors of the war were alive, it would not be a proper museum. It was a place to preserve the relics of people enshrined at Yasukuni. But, given time, he said, it certainly should become a proper war museum.
I asked him how that should be done. How would the material be selected and explained? Would historians be appointed for the task?
He had to think about this, but not for very long. “The thing is,” he said, “as soon as you bring historians in, you run into problems, you get distortions. As a shrine, we must think of the feelings of the spirits and their families. We must keep them happy. That is why historians would cause problems. Take the so-called war of invasion, which was actually a war of survival. We wouldn’t want the families to feel that we are worshipping the spirits of men who fought a war of invasion.”
If one disregards, for a moment, the differences in style between Shinto and Christianity, the Yasukuni Shrine, with its “relics,” its “sacred ground,” its bronze paeans to noble sacrifice, is not so very different from many European memorials after World War I. By and large, World War II memorials in Europe and the United States (though not the Soviet Union) no longer glorify the sacrifice of the fallen soldier. The sacrificial cult and the romantic elevation of war to a higher spiritual plane no longer seemed appropriate after Auschwitz. The Christian knight, bearing the cross of king and country, was not resurrected. But in Japan, where the war was still truly a war (not a Holocaust), and the symbolism still redolent of religious exultation, such shrines as Yasukuni still carry the torch of nineteenth-century nationalism. Hence the image of the nation owing its restoration to the sacrifice of fallen soldiers.
A wooden sign outside the Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots, near Chiran on the southern tip of Kyushu, is the perfect example of what I mean: “We”—the Japanese, that is—“are grateful to receive life through their noble self-sacrifice … We are grateful our country is on the way to prosperity. And we are grateful Japan is at peace today … We believe that [the kamikaze pilots] wished for restoration of peace and prosperity.”
Quite possibly they did want peace. But as I walked toward the museum, through the garden of a small shrine dedicated to Kannon, the goddess of mercy, it was not immediately clear to me how they contributed to it. The shrine offered no answer. Amid the stone lanterns, donated by veterans’ associations to soothe the spirits of the dead, stood a silver suicide plane, used by the kamikaze pilots, who were also known as the “cherry blossoms”—beautiful and short-lived.
Shrine and museum were built on the site of a former kamikaze air base, used for suicide missions to Okinawa. The nearest city is Kagoshima, set along a lovely bay so much like Pearl Harbor that the Japanese Navy used it for practice runs in 1941. Upon entering the museum, I was handed a leaflet which told me that the museum “was founded to preserve the true facts of World War II on record and to contribute to true peace on earth.” Much of the museum—a dull modern building put up in 1985 with government money—is built around the relics of the cherry blossoms. These include sashes, embroidered by a thousand female hands to give strength to the pilots who wore them. There are also torn uniforms and bits of blown-up planes dredged from the ocean bed. But the most important relics are the letters and diaries the pilots left behind. Many are almost unbearably moving.
It was customary to write a farewell letter to one’s loved ones. The letters contain the hackneyed sentiments one would expect: patriotic phrases about the glory of dying for the emperor and his sacred land, pride in doing a soldier’s duty, and so on. But these were conventions, written because they were required, like the pathetic apologies to parents for failing to repay one’s filial debt. Many letters also include, in more or less similar phrases, a request to parents and siblings not to cry or be sad, but to raise a cup of sake and rejoice in the manner of the soldier’s honorable death.
Laughter is the essence. It is stressed not just in the letters but also in the photographs of the young men displayed on the walls. It is also a feature of contemporary press accounts. Boyish laughter in the face of certain death was as conventional and as highly praised as the patriotic sentiments. One of the photographs in the museum shows a merry group of pilots ready for takeoff. One of the pilots, a mere boy, is saying goodbye to his pet dog. The caption reads: “There is great beauty in the laughing faces of these men just before facing certain death.”
This type of youthful bravado was not peculiar to the Japanese, of course. British bomber crews laughed a lot too. Very young men have a weakness for the romance of glorious death. But it is disturbing to see how it is held up as a thing of beauty in the Peace Museum today. For the patriotic slogans and the youthful laughter cannot disguise the tragedy of wasted lives. On the contrary, they add a ghastly poignancy, for undern
eath the merriment is a feeling of despair and barely contained hysteria.
This is how an eighteen-year-old ended his final letter to his parents: “What a weakling I was not to cry out for you, Mother, with all my heart, even though I wanted to. Mother! Please forgive me. You must have felt so lonely. But now I will shout it as loudly as I can: Mother! Mother! Mother!”
Or this, from a boy named Shigeru, age unknown: “It is time to go now. The cherry blossoms boarding the sacred planes are in full bloom. I shall join them and bloom splendidly myself. Father, Mother, everyone, please don’t worry about me. Take care. I just wish you all a happy life in this world …”
The letters, as well as the photographs, have a pronounced effect on the visitors. The men fall silent, and swiftly walk on to inspect the model airplanes. The older women sob and dab their eyes with little folded handkerchiefs. “So young,” they say, “so young.” Schoolchildren, only a few years younger than the cherry blossoms, file past the displays. Some laugh, some gossip, some say nothing.
The tragedy is not just that the suicide pilots died young. Soldiers (and civilians) do that in wars everywhere. What is so awful about the memory of their deaths is the cloying sentimentality that was meant to justify their self-immolation. There is no reason to suppose they didn’t believe in the patriotic gush about cherry blossoms and sacrifice, no matter how conventional it was at the time. Which was exactly the point: they were made to rejoice in their own death. It was the exploitation of their youthful idealism that made it such a wicked enterprise. And this point is still completely missed at the Peace Museum today.
For the phony ideals and the saccharine poetics are still part of the atmosphere of the place. The street lined with cherry blossoms leading to the museum; the blurbs about “beauty in the laughing faces”; the stuff in the museum guide about this being “a hall of tears”; the ghastly oil painting, three meters by four, of a dead pilot being lifted to heaven from his burning plane by six white-robed angels; and most important of all, the denial that the suicide missions were an utter waste of life which only prolonged the war. Instead, the death of thousands is imbued with bogus significance: the young men died for peace and prosperity, their sacrifice was a noble example of patriotism.
Mr. Matsumoto, a local civil servant in charge of the museum, stood in front of the green, white, and red suicide plane inside the main hall, and spoke to about three hundred schoolchildren, sitting on the floor in their navy blue and black uniforms. Matsumoto spoke in the lilting twang of a storyteller in old magic lantern shows. He asked the children where they were from. They gave him the name of their hometown. “This, then, is your senior,” he said, as he reached for a picture of a pilot from their town. And holding up the pictures of dead men smiling at the camera, he told the stories of their fates; noble stories of sacrifice, of bravery, of pure, selfless sentiments and beautiful ideals. He concluded his account by saying that some people might criticize him for idealizing the war or promoting militarism. But nothing could be less true, he said. War is bad, very bad. We must never go to war again.
But why, I asked him later, in his office, why should children conclude that war was so bad if its protagonists were so heroic and their ideals so pure? “Because the pilots of the Special Attack Forces sincerely believed in peace.”
I knew it was pointless to argue. Matsumoto and the founders of the museum were not bloodthirsty men, nor were they apologists for the war. But their faith in the ideals upon which war propaganda has always been based—sacrifice, sincerity, the sacred cause—was too deep to shake.
Gauging change is always an imprecise business, for it goes on all the time, mostly without anybody noticing. But as far as memories of the war are concerned, the early 1990s were a time of significant change in Japan; or at least it looked that way. Since the late 1980s army veterans had started to relate their memories in public. In 1991, the former comfort women from South Korea, as well as some surviving slave workers from China, arrived to claim compensation. And two new war museums, stressing Japanese aggression, were opened in Osaka and Kyoto. All in all, it felt as though a few windows had opened, letting in a gust of fresh air. Emperor Hirohito’s death in 1989 was one explanation, and Richard von Weizsäcker’s speech to the Bundestag in 1985 was often given as another. The speech—“Anyone who closes his eyes to the past is blind to the present. Whoever refuses to remember the inhumanity is prone to risks of new infection”—was translated into Japanese and widely read. It was quoted to me by many Japanese as an example they should follow.
But there was another, more political reason, too, for the new stress on Japanese aggression. Prompted by the Gulf War, a serious debate began on the future role of Japanese armed forces. A new bill (the PKO Bill) was passed to enable Japan to send troops abroad for the first time since 1945, as part of United Nations peacekeeping forces. This was not as dramatic as it sounded, for they could only bear side arms and could not engage in any combat. But it was dramatic enough for many Japanese pacifists, who saw this as yet another sign of a militarist revival. The activist in Hiroshima who pressed for an “Aggressors’ Corner” at the Peace Museum thought so. As did Oda Makoto, the writer and former political activist. And vigorous pacifism was very much behind the two new war museums: the Osaka International Peace Center and the Kyoto Museum for World Peace. Neither was funded by the national government. The Osaka museum was established by the Osaka prefectural and municipal governments, and the museum in Kyoto is part of Ritsumeikan University.
The new museums were secular institutions without obligations to anyone’s sacred spirit; there were no “relics,” no “sacred grounds,” and certainly no paeans to sacrifice. And yet, pacifism is not without its own air of religiosity. In the entrance hall of the Kyoto Museum for World Peace were two large murals by the cartoonist Tezuka Osamu. Both showed cranes in full flight—one flying in terror from the dark and cruel past, the other making its way toward the radiant future. The artist has contrived, in the words of the brochure, to “sing a hymn to the cosmos, brimming with life, and to Providence, which allows all living creatures to live their lives to the full.”
And the final exhibition room of the Osaka International Peace Center, on the third floor of the handsome modern building, showed the dangers that still confront us: nuclear, ecological, social. Ethereal music, of the kind one associates with New Age cults, filled the air, as people from all over the world expressed their views on peace on video disks. One American woman argued that wars were masculine, and only the healing powers of women would bring peace, because women weave and nurture.
Otherwise, the conception of the two museums was as simple as it was clear: to change the image of wartime Japan from that of a victim to that of an aggressor. Japanese suffering was not neglected; one section of the Osaka museum showed in great detail how Osaka was destroyed by incendiary bombs, and how it felt to be on the receiving end, particularly from the point of view of a child. One colorful drawing by a child at the time showed people fleeing across a bridge in terror, as bombs explode and the severed head of a baby jets through the air, trailing blood. But unlike at the Hiroshima museum, care was taken to show that this happened as the result of a war that Japan had started.
The room filled with artifacts, documents, and photographs of the “Fifteen-Year War” made that quite clear. Nothing was glossed over; the Nanking Massacre, the chemical warfare unit, and the comfort women were all there. But not a great deal was explained, except in the simplest terms. The idea, evidently, was not to go deeply into the nature of wartime propaganda—State Shinto was barely mentioned—but to impress youthful visitors (mostly middle school students, I was told, since high school students are too busy with exams) with the cruelty of war.
The museum in Kyoto was more illuminating, since it paid more attention to the regimentation of daily life, the suppression of free speech, and nationalist propaganda. It was more political, and in its brief summary of the postwar period it drew the usual leftist conc
lusions. An illustrated booklet for schoolchildren explained, for example, that the Vietnam War was a “war of invasion” by the United States. But “the Vietnamese people, thirsting for freedom and independence, struggled hard and were victorious.”
The point, however, was not to foster anti-Americanism so much as to demonstrate that all wars are bad. In the words of the Osaka International Peace Center’s brochure: “We live in a free and prosperous Japan, but the dark clouds of war are still hovering over us. The Fifteen-Year War taught us many things. The most important thing is that there is no such thing as a good war.”
In a leaflet written by one of the founders of the Osaka museum, Professor Katsube Hajime, the political background of this pacifism was made more specific. It was entitled The Role of Japan. Katsube discussed the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty and the PKO Bill. In his view, the government was deliberately distorting or suppressing Japan’s wartime history to justify Japan’s revival as a military power. He wants Japan to break off “the current hegemonic global partnership with the United States and become a member of the democratic zone of peace …” And “if it is to choose this alternative, Japan must admit its war crimes in the Fifteen-Year War and compensate war victims.”
Professor Katsube is a man of integrity. It seems he always was. He spent two years in prison during the war, from 1943 till the end, for casting doubt on the war effort in a private research group. He pointed out that, like all political prisoners, he had been liberated from jail not by his own government but by the American Army. This experience left him scarred, and he has expected the worst of any Japanese government ever since. He was dressed in the casual manner of elderly progressives: a gray sports shirt, a string tie, and slacks. He explained the symbol of the Osaka International Peace Center, a green dot in a purple band. The green dot, he said, was Osaka, spreading its message of peace. The purple ring was the rest of the world.
