The Wages of Guilt

by Ian Buruma

  A controversy erupted in 1992, when builders hit upon the foundations of a former prison right next to the Nagasaki Peace Park, near the epicenter of the A-bomb. (It is a modest park compared with the one in Hiroshima, an almost apologetic stretch of land, filled with monuments donated by the various People’s Republics, now mostly defunct.) Korean and Chinese prisoners had died in that prison during the war, some killed by Japanese, some by the bomb. A group of Nagasaki citizens wanted to preserve the site, to show that the Japanese were not just victims, that the bomb was dropped for a reason. Conservatives were against it: The Peace Park is a “happy place,” said one. “Why should tourists want to come and see a prison?” Motoshima came down on the side of the conservatives. He needed their support to stay in office. He had good contacts in the construction industry. The remains of the prison were buried under a new parking lot. So whatever prompted his statement about the emperor, left-wing radicalism wasn’t it.

  Both Motoshima and Jenninger were criticized less for what they actually said (though for that, too, of course) than for their tactlessness, for picking the wrong time, for being poor judges of ceremony. Jenninger chose a memorial occasion to give a history lesson; Motoshima virtually committed lèse-majesté as the emperor lay on his deathbed. The LDP Disciplinary Committee, considering Motoshima’s case, said that although private individuals were entitled to their opinions, “it was an act of extreme indiscretion for a public official to have made a public statement like that.” I even heard words to this effect from people who publicly supported the mayor. One of them worked for Motoshima in Nagasaki’s city hall.

  I met him during the week of the emperor’s funeral, on a crisp night in February 1989. We had been invited for dinner at the house of a mutual friend. The civil servant was a plump, middle-aged man with an ingratiating smile and the air of a schoolmaster used to slow learners. He removed the official badge from the lapel of his blue suit, took a sip of sake, and said: “Now I can speak to you as a private individual.” Then he shook his head vigorously to express bafflement: “To be quite frank with you, I cannot understand why the mayor made that statement. I simply cannot understand.”

  I was with an American friend. He asked the official whether the mayor’s statement was factually wrong. The man sucked his teeth, closed his eyes, as though in agony or deep thought, swiveled his short neck, and said, still with his eyes shut: “Well … no, not wrong exactly …” So he was telling the truth? “Well, yes, one could say it was correct, but I still can’t understand why he said it.” My friend, displaying more impatience than was polite, asked whether, in that case, he thought the mayor should have lied. The official’s eyes disappeared once again behind their fleshy hoods, his face a picture not of agony so much as pained resignation. “In Japan,” he said, “we all know the truth, but we remain silent. You must understand our culture …” He tugged at the collar of his shirt, which was damp at the edges, and sighed.

  Our culture … I thought of the reaction of an Australian living in Japan when he heard about Motoshima’s statement. “It’s perfectly clear,” he told me on the phone, “that Motoshima doesn’t understand Japanese culture.” I didn’t argue with him. What he said fitted neatly into Ruth Benedict’s cultural paradigm of guilt versus shame: the Germans, riddled with guilt, feel the need to confess their sins, to unburden their guilt and be forgiven; the Japanese wish to remain silent and, above all, wish others to remain silent too, for the point is not guilt in the eyes of God, but public shame, embarrassment, “face.” In sum, Jenniger had not confessed enough, and Motoshima had talked too much. This was the nature of their different forms of tactlessness. They had not played the game; they had broken the rules of their cultures.

  The case for Benedict’s paradigm is greatly helped by one important detail: Motoshima is a Christian. Which is precisely what some of his opponents held against him. In the words of one of his critics, Motoshima had not “behaved as a Japanese.”

  The mayor received a letter from a Shinto priest in which the priest pointed out that it was “un-Japanese” to demand any more moral responsibility from the emperor than he had already taken. Had the emperor not demonstrated his deep sorrow every year, on the anniversary of Japan’s surrender? Besides, he wrote, it was wrong to have spoken about the emperor in such a manner, even as the entire nation was deeply worried about his health. Then he came to the main point: “It is a common error among Christians and people with Western inclinations, including so-called intellectuals, to fail to grasp that Western societies and Japanese society are based on fundamentally different religious concepts … Forgetting this premise, they attempt to place a Western structure on a Japanese foundation. I think this kind of mistake explains the demand for the emperor to bear full responsibility.”

  Motoshima Hitoshi was born on a small island off Kyushu, the only part of Japan where Catholic missionaries left their mark. Early in the seventeenth century most of Nagasaki was converted by Spanish and Portuguese priests. Later on, the Christians were tortured and massacred on orders of nervous shoguns. Rather like Communists in the 1930s, Christians were forced to apostatize, by stamping on pictures of the Virgin. But Christians in southern Japan survived, even though persecution continued. Motoshima’s grandfather had his bones crushed, by being forced to kneel with slabs of stone loaded on his lap, while police officers shouted at him: “Christ or the emperor, which is more important, Christ or the emperor?”

  Motoshima himself was forced as a schoolboy in the 1930s to bow to Shinto shrines. On the emperor’s birthdays his teachers would punish him for not showing enough respect. They would torment him with the same question that nearly broke his grandfather: “Christ or the emperor, which is more important, Christ or the emperor?”

  Nagasaki is an odd city in Japan. It is proud of its history as a narrow window to the outside world. It has a large Chinatown. The names of some local dishes show their Chinese origins. During Japan’s all but complete isolation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Dutch traders were allowed to live on a tiny island in Nagasaki Bay, visited only by officials and prostitutes. (Some people in Nagasaki still have the long-nosed features of at least one of their forebears.) “Dutch learning,” culled with heroic scholarly diligence from dictionaries and medical books in Nagasaki, gave Japanese their first glimmer of European science. Nagasaki had “foreign learning” schools, a large convent, a handsome cathedral. The second A-bomb dropped on Japan (by a Roman Catholic pilot) exploded right over the cathedral and wiped out the convent. The most famous book on the bombing of Nagasaki, The Bells of Nagasaki, was written by a Christian doctor named Nagai Takashi. He believed that nothing was accidental. The bomb over the cathedral was planned by God, and the 73,884 people who died were martyrs, no less than Nagai’s ancestors, who were crucified in the mountains a few centuries before.

  For Mayor Motoshima, justice is a Christian concept. He believes—like the Australian and the Shinto priest—that this has given him a different take on life from most other Japanese. When I met him, almost a year before he was shot, he explained this view. It was important, he said, that the Japanese accept responsibility for their savage behavior during the war. And responsibility was a question of morality. And morality was a matter of religion. The problem with the Japanese was that “they worship nature. But they have no religious or philosophical moral basis.”

  As I pondered this, I glanced at Mayor Motoshima. He was dressed like a sports coach, in a track suit, a popular form of Japanese leisure wear, but unusual in the case of a mayor giving an interview. He returned my glance, looking me straight in the eye, not unkindly, but with a glint of toughness behind his glasses. His tight full lips lent a stubborn look to his lopsided mouth. There was none of the nervous diffidence or defensive arrogance that marks so many Japanese officials. Here was a man of conviction. He knew he was right.

  “In Europe,” he went on, “people’s feelings are based upon centuries of philosophy and religion, but the Japanese o
nly worship nature. This is what they have internalized. In a world ruled by nature, the question of individual responsibility doesn’t come up.”

  What, I asked, was the solution in that case? Should all Japanese become Christians? “I am a Christian, so, yes, that is what I believe.”

  He sounded like a character in a novel by Endo Shusaku, the Catholic author, much admired by Graham Greene. Endo, like the mayor, believed that his animistic countrymen lacked a bedrock of morality, a sense of good and evil, but he also thinks they will never acquire it—that is to say, they will never be Christians. All Endo’s work is marked by his despair; one famous novel, Silence (1966), is about the apostasy of a Jesuit missionary who has given up trying to convert the Japanese. In Endo’s stories West and East never meet. But although he was perhaps the only Japanese novelist to have written about individual responsibility for war crimes from a Christian point of view, not all his Japanese characters are without conscience. They simply lack the language for it; they cannot give it a name. Dr. Toda, in The Sea and Poison, assists in a murderous experiment on an American POW. He is troubled by it, returns to the operating theater, the scene of the crime, but feels no “particular pain.” “I have no conscience, I suppose. Not just me, though. None of them feel anything at all about what they did here.”

  Perhaps the Shinto priest was right. Perhaps it took a Christian to break a Japanese taboo (Motoshima’s colleague in Hiroshima, Mayor Araki, not a Christian, though given to voicing noble sentiments, refused to support the Nagasaki mayor in 1988). However much right-wing nationalists and Shinto priests like to pretend that emperor worship is not a religion, but a Japanese “custom,” it surely is a religion. It seems to take one faith to attack another, an alternative emperor—Buddha, Marx, Christ—to challenge the politics of Japanese emperor worship. This may be why Christians and Marxists have always been among the most trenchant critics of the emperor system and its political uses, just as certain Buddhists were centuries ago. But in fact there is more to it than that.

  Because most Japanese were lapsed believers by the time the Showa emperor was dying, it was religion that nationalists wanted to revive. The fatal illness of the emperor was their chance. The imperial cult was their idea of Japanese “normality”—“normal” (atarimae na koto) and “natural” (shizen) were the terms they often used. Around the time of the emperor’s death, the cultural critic Eto Jun wrote an essay in one of the leading monthly magazines arguing that the Americans had imposed a false picture of the emperor on the postwar Japanese. The Japanese, he wrote, were locked up in the “playground of postwar democracy and a merely symbolic emperor system.” But when the emperor became very ill, he continued, even the liberal press, despite years of Western brainwashing, could not hide the personal grief of the Japanese people, which showed that “the sacred and solemn nature of our imperial family” had been preserved and would last forever. The right-wing LDP politician Ishihara Shintaro wrote in the same journal that the bond between the emperor and the Japanese transcended the bond between a head of state and its citizens: “It expresses the uniqueness of Japan and the Japanese …”

  And “Tony” Kase Hideaki, the son of a former ambassador to Washington and a noted political commentator, wrote a remarkable piece for the Japanese edition of Playboy magazine. He described the Shinto rite called Daijosai, whereby the new emperor, after his father’s death, would be visited by the sun goddess, enter her womb, and be reborn as a sacred ruler. “Japan’s national character,” he said, “was formed before history was recorded … When Japan was born, the emperor was already a high priest and head of state. The imperial family cannot be separated from Japanese mythology. The myths are identical to the birth of Japan. The emperor is sacred because of his blood ties with the gods that created our nation.”

  This is what the romantics wanted the Japanese people to believe. Like many intellectuals everywhere, indeed like many German conservatives, they worried about the spiritual vacuum caused by materialism and prosperity. Restoring the racial and imperial myths (which amounts to the same thing) was the Japanese revisionists’ version of restoring Japan as a normal nation. Motoshima’s statement was a challenge to their ideal of harmonious, natural bliss. It was an essentially antiliberal, antidemocratic ideal, perfect propaganda for authoritarian politics.

  As in so many clashes of mentalités, Japanese revisionism may be partly a matter of age. The most active revisionists have been men in their fifties, educated during the war, shocked by the occupation. As in Jenninger’s case, Motoshima’s support, in the form of letters, often came from the very old, born before the height of the chauvinist hysteria, and the very young, who were never affected by it. Possibly, the dreaded spiritual vacuum is felt most keenly by those who were robbed by history of the religion in which they were raised. Jenninger and Motoshima said very different things, which complicates the comparison, and might even be thought to invalidate it. Jenninger, after all, was associated with the revisionists, the whitewashers, the neo-nationalists. And yet, I think the comparison holds. For by dealing with history in secular terms, both Jenninger and Motoshima upset the utterly disparate groups that sought to fill the spiritual void: in Bonn, the confessional pacifism of leftists and Greens; in Nagasaki, the attempted revival of the imperial cult.

  This is why I think Motoshima’s Christianity was less important than it might seem, and his challenge more than a clash of faiths. His personal motives were no doubt religious. Justice may well be a Christian concept to him. But his statement was secular, and so was its effect. Some of his supporters were Marxists and some were Christians, but all of them, to judge from their letters, grasped the main point, which was political, not religious.

  Two weeks after his statement, Motoshima had received more than 10,000 letters supporting his case. A few months later there were more than 300,000—from housewives, old-age pensioners, army veterans, high school students, office clerks, peace activists, film directors, university professors, etc. Although liberal intellectuals, with a few exceptions, remained oddly silent in public—no Japanese Zola writing a J’Accuse—the letter columns in the liberal Asahi Shimbun were alive with debate. I shall quote just one letter, for being typical rather than the exception. It was written by a seventy-three-year-old retired mechanic:

  “The emperor system led to military rule and caused the worst tragedy in Japanese history. The conservative authorities are once again turning to traditional monarchy to attack democratic rights … It is our responsibility to history to analyze scientifically the mechanism which has shaped popular consciousness since the Meiji period and led to war … only then can the question of our leaders’ war responsibility be fully resolved, not by ‘Victors’ justice,’ but by the Japanese people themselves.”

  This was not the voice of God, Marx, or sacred ancestors. It was the voice of reason.

  The question of political responsibility is, of course, a tricky one in the case of regimes that have effectively abolished politics, or indeed individual responsibility for anything, except to obey orders. As we have seen before, even the responsibility of Japanese leaders was complicated by the murky role of the emperor—part constitutional monarch, part divine priest-king. And by the time they led their country into a suicidal war, it was of course too late. Karl Jaspers, in his essay on war guilt, wrote that people should be held responsible, collectively, for the way they are governed. If their country is ruled by a criminal regime, the people cannot escape responsibility. He may have been thinking of German town squares in the 1930s filled with frenzied mobs screaming for their Führer. Yet there are problems with Jaspers’s notion. For what constitutes a criminal regime? Criminal according to whose laws? And can a people be held responsible for a state of affairs in which they had no choice?

  In fact, the Germans had more choice than the Japanese. Hitler and his bands of brownshirts did not bring down the Weimar Republic alone. Many Germans voted for the Nazi Party in 1932. But after the war, with Hitler safely gon
e, he could be blamed for everything. And the more he was blamed, the more the German people could feel absolved. It was him; they had only been mesmerized, understandably in the circumstances. It is a perception which Jenninger never seriously challenged. Which is why his speech was read as an apologia.

  Motoshima’s remark about the emperor, on the other hand, had the opposite effect. In Japan, there was no Nazi Party to vote for, and the emperor never ran for election. The emperor didn’t go away, nor was he demonized—except in very few circles. By changing from his military uniform into a businessman’s suit after the defeat in 1945, and by escaping blame in the Tokyo trial, he became, quite literally, a symbol of his nation. His innocence was the innocence of the Japanese people; like their emperor, they had been “deceived” by the military leaders. They had never been told what was going on. All they had ever wanted was peace. They had been tricked into going to war.

  In fact, the emperor knew a great deal of what went on, even though his political influence might have been limited. And a large proportion of the Japanese people had been keener to be duped by belligerent propaganda, at various times since the turn of the century, than many would admit after the war. But the image of a deceived, innocent, peace-loving emperor had to be maintained, for it was one of the unifying factors in postwar Japan—that and pacifism; once the generals and admirals were purged, the Japanese people, with their emperor as the ever-changing, almost amoeba-like national symbol, could prosper innocently together.

  Some criticized this charade. The filmmaker Itami Mansaku wrote an article in 1946 about the question of war guilt. He ridiculed the notion that everyone had been deceived or that those who were deceived were necessarily innocent. He argued that the deceived had to share the blame with the deceivers, and so “responsibility for the war—in varying degrees—lay on both sides.” Those who were deceived, he wrote, were not guilty just because they let themselves be duped; no, the entire people was to blame for its lack of criticism, its slavishness, its incapacity to think. Like many leftist intellectuals, Itami was disgusted that “the Japanese hadn’t been able to free themselves from feudalism and national isolation, and were not able to gain basic human rights without the help of foreign powers.”