The Wages of Guilt

by Ian Buruma

  “Japanese are the most barbaric people in the world!” wrote a man in his thirties. “I feel deeply sorry as a Japanese.” He had heard about the Incident from his parents. Another visitor, a woman in her sixties, who had known about it from the time it happened, wrote: “I feel shame as a person from Hanaoka, and as a Japanese. It might be a small thing compared to the Incident, but I would like people to know that my own father used Chinese workers to manufacture things for him, while hiding behind his superiors by pretending that they had issued the orders.” Public confession—or, as the Chinese Communists called it, “self-criticism”—is not confined to Christian cultures.

  Yachita had grown up as a Christian, but said he was “embarrassed” to say so. He regarded himself as a secular man, a socialist. Christians are not rare in northeastern towns. As they did everywhere else, the missionaries attracted the poor. Yachita’s wife and children were neither Christians nor interested in his work on the Chinese. His wife nagged him about his frequent trips to China. She wanted him to take her on holiday to Europe. His daughter had helped him distribute leaflets for the trade union when she was small, but drifted away from her father’s activities as soon as she grew older. His son had never shown any interest. Yachita smiled as he told me this.

  Socialists from Christian backgrounds often have a religious bent, however secular they think they are. I did not detect this in Yachita. There was nothing zealous about him—or, indeed, about Nozoe. Why had Yachita become so involved in the Hanaoka Incident? Why did history have him in its grip? Like Nozoe’s, his answers were vague when I asked him, but later in the conversation, after I thought my question had been forgotten, he came back to it. When he was still in his twenties, he had spent some years in Kyoto, working in a post office. He had been shocked when he was told not to drink from a particular cup, because that cup was only for burakumin, the descendants of former outcasts, who did polluting work, such as animal slaughter and leather tanning. Social discrimination against such people is especially strong in the central and southern regions. In the north, perhaps because it was settled more recently, the problem hardly exists. Yachita didn’t stay in Kyoto, but the experience had marked him: “I decided I would always be on the side of those who are discriminated against. That is why I am interested in finding out what happened in Hanaoka. It is not just about getting financial compensation for the survivors. It is more than that. I want the Japanese to admit the truth and restore the pride of their victims.”

  Yachita drove me to the place where the old community hall had been, where the Chinese, tied up in the yard, had been spat on and beaten, and where some of them were tortured to death. There were some handsome trees in the yard. The ground was dark and flinty. “That pine tree,” said Yachita, pointing at the oldest-looking tree, “must have witnessed the murders.” Facing the new community center were three prominent sculptures: a bronze bust of a man and beside him a large stone whose polished surface was inscribed with a song. Next to the bust was a sculpture of a nude woman leading a flock of ducks to the edge of a bronze platform. Tucked behind the trees, virtually invisible if you weren’t looking for it, was a tiny plaque inscribed with the history of the Hanaoka Incident.

  Yachita said the nude woman leading her ducks marked the spot where the old community hall used to be. There was no text to indicate this. There was no inscription on the sculpture at all. I found out from a pamphlet, entitled Peace City Odate, distributed by the city of Odate, that the sculpture was called Peace Sculpture: Pledge to the Friendship Between China and Japan. The same pamphlet explained (in English and Japanese): “Based on the idea that PEACE is the root principle of good living, Odate became the first city in Akita to declare itself an ‘Antinuclear Peace City’ on December 12, 1983, and has promoted the goal of a peaceful city for each and every resident.” Not everyone wanted the peace sculpture, nor was the antinuclear policy entirely to everybody’s liking. But these were the products of a socialist city administration.

  The bust of the man caught my attention, but not because it was in any way unusual; such busts of prominent local figures can be seen everywhere in Japan. This one, however, was particularly grandiose. Smiling across the yard, with a look of deep satisfaction over his many achievements, was Hatazawa Kyoichi. His various functions and titles were inscribed below his bust. He had been an important provincial bureaucrat, a pillar of the sumo wrestling establishment, a member of various Olympic committees, and the recipient of some of the highest honors in Japan. The song engraved on the smooth stone was composed in praise of his rich life. There was just one small gap in Hatazawa’s life story as related on his monument: the years from 1941 to 1945 were missing. Yet he had not been idle then, for he was the man in charge of labor at the Hanaoka mines.

  “That is how much the Japanese care about the past,” said Yachita. “I couldn’t bring myself to show this to our Chinese visitors. I was too ashamed.” He had no need to feel that, though I could understand his embarrassment. But to me the bust of Hatazawa Kyoichi signified more than public indifference to painful truths. I looked again at the smug smile of this successful local boss and I understood what drove the likes of Nozoe and Yachita to live the lives they do.

  CLEARING UP THE RUINS

  IF The Tin Drum is the world’s most famous fictional chronicle of World War II, then its main character, Oskar Matzerath, the boy who stopped growing when he was three, is the war’s most famous literary witness. Oskar Matzerath, with his tin drum and his glass-shattering voice, is the ideal memorialist. He has the magical wonder of a precocious child. Nothing, however embarrassing to adults, escapes his gaze. And the beat of his drum bears witness to the horrors he has seen. At the same time, Oskar embodies adult fears and longings, above all the longing for shelter in the dark, warm, womblike world under the voluminous skirts of his grandmother, Anna Bronski, sitting at the edge of a potato field in Kashubia. There, under the “wide skirt,” the child is in a world where there is nothing yet to remember, and the adult can forget that anything ever happened.

  Günter Grass’s magisterial novel is the most famous child’s view of the past, but by no means the only one. Since few German adults who lived through the Third Reich cared to dwell on their experiences, many novels on the period were written by men and women who were children at the time. Just as in Japan, there were military accounts, written mostly by veterans. But for daily life under the Nazi dictatorship, we must turn, for the most part, to the sometimes magical, sometimes tortured perspectives of the child.

  Daily life in wartime Japan has been described much less often. Even so, some of the best novels on the last stages of the war—when the war arrived, so to speak, in Japan—are about children, or written from the child’s point of view. Ibuse Masuji’s masterpiece about Hiroshima, Black Rain, is about an innocent young girl. And Oe Kenzaburo’s early novel Me-mushiri, Ko-uchi (Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids) is about a group of children evacuated to a remote village. The story is a kind of Lord of the Flies in reverse: the children are gentle and innocent victims in a cruel and barbarous adult world. Innocence versus evil is indeed what most books about children in war, in Japan as well as in Germany, have in common.

  Such novels offer a sentimental and often moralistic view of a static universe, of an adult world that is intrinsically evil. And although most of them are political, the stories they tell are drained of politics. Because the adult world is wicked, it cannot really change, except perhaps in some distant utopia. This is not really a child’s perception, but an adult’s longing for childhood innocence, for a grandmother’s protective skirts.

  When the war is lost, Oskar decides to grow. He buries his tin drum in the sand, and grows, but he cannot grow naturally; so he grows into a humpbacked monster. And although he lives to be thirty, he never outgrows his enchanted childhood world, where demons continue to haunt him: “Always somewhere behind me, the Black Witch. Now ahead of me, too, facing me, Black …”

  In a small town in the north
east of Japan there is a stone monument, two meters high, one meter wide, erected by members of a veterans’ association in 1961, just as the Japanese Economic Miracle began. They were not just ordinary veterans, however, for they had all been purged as war criminals during the American occupation. There is an inscription on the face of the monument which reads: “Monument to the Stupid.” It is not clear whom this refers to. The officers themselves? Or their judges from the victorious Allies, who purged and prosecuted at random and sometimes unfairly? Or mankind for its orgies of self-destruction? Probably all three; everyone is stupid, except, of course, the innocent child.

  On the fiftieth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the mayor of Honolulu asked President Bush to invite Japanese officials to the ceremony only on condition that they apologize for the war. Then, he said, “a new era” could begin. The Japanese government refused. Instead, the deputy chief cabinet secretary, Ishihara Nobuo, said that “the entire world is responsible for the war.” The United States should apologize too, he said. “Because war could not be avoided, all those involved should reflect … It will take tens or hundreds of years before the correct judgment is delivered on who is responsible for the war.”

  The Japanese had flunked the test. They were not invited. They were still a dangerous people. Which is what the president of the Pearl Harbor Survivors’ Association had thought all along. When told about the plan to invite Japanese veterans, he said: “Would you expect the Jews to invite the Nazis to an event where they were talking about the Holocaust?”

  The comparison between Pearl Harbor and the Holocaust is of course absurd, and the old survivors of the Imperial Japanese Navy are far from being Nazis. But the question in American minds was understandable: could one trust a nation whose official spokesmen still refused to admit that their country had been responsible for starting a war? In these Japanese evasions there was something of the petulant child, stamping its foot, shouting that it had done nothing wrong, because everybody did it. This claim to be like everybody else was particularly odd, since one is so used to Japanese describing themselves as unique, culturally, ethnically, politically, historically.

  It is tempting to see this childishness as a cultural trait, not a unique one perhaps, but nonetheless conspicuous in Japan. There is something intensely irritating about the infantilism of postwar Japanese culture: the ubiquitous chirping voices of women pretending to be girls; the Disneylandish architecture of Japanese main streets, where everything is reduced to a sugary cuteness; the screeching “television talents” rolling about and carrying on like kindergarten clowns; the armies of blue-suited salarymen straphanging on the subway trains, reading boys’ comics, the maudlin love for old school songs and cuddly mama-sans.

  Japan seems at times not so much a nation of twelve-year-olds, to repeat General MacArthur’s phrase, as a nation of people longing to be twelve-year-olds, or even younger, to be at that golden age when everything was secure and responsibility and conformity were not yet required. There they sit, the Japanese, in their pachinko halls, in long straight rows, glassy-eyed in front of pinball machines, oblivious to both past and present, watching the cascade of little silver balls, while listening to the din of the Battleship March beating away in the background.

  Yet I do not believe that the Japanese are congenitally a childish people, any more than I believe they are an intrinsically dangerous people. There are no dangerous peoples; there are only dangerous situations, which are the result, not of laws of nature or history, or of national character, but of political arrangements. To be sure, these arrangements are affected by cultural and historical circumstances, but they are never determined by them. If one injects politics into the enchanted Disney world of postwar Japan, things come into sharper focus. For General MacArthur was right: in 1945, the Japanese people were political children. Until then, they had been forced into a position of complete submission to a state run by authoritarian bureaucrats and military men, and to a religious cult whose high priest was also formally chief of the armed forces and supreme monarch of the empire.

  The situation has changed since then, but not enough. Judged to be a dangerous people, the Japanese were forced, not least by MacArthur himself, to retreat from the evil world and hide under America’s skirts. In effect, Japan has been subject to a generous version of the Versailles Treaty: loss of sovereignty without financial squeeze. Japanese were encouraged to get rich, while matters of war were taken out of their dangerous hands. The state was run by virtually the same bureaucracy that ran the Japanese empire, and the electoral system was rigged to help the same corrupt conservative party to stay in power for almost forty years. This arrangement suited the United States, as well as Japanese bureaucrats, LDP politicians, and the large industrial combines, for it ensured that Japan remained a rich and stable ally against Communism. But it also helped to stifle public debate and stopped the Japanese from growing up politically. As far as the history of World War II was concerned, the debate got stuck in the late 1940s, around the beginning of the Cold War: bureaucrats and conservative politicians continued to legitimize their grip on power by justifying or at least ignoring the past, while the small and largely leftist opposition tilted its spears at the ghosts of militarism and the wickedness of man.

  There are many people who believe that the Japanese are incorrigible, that they are doomed to be a dangerous, inscrutable, and isolated people forever. There are Japanese who believe this too. Sakaguchi Ango wrote just after the war that the Japanese, “faced with their history, had been like children following their fate.” They would develop as human beings only if they would degenerate to a level of basic human desires, stripped of false modesty, customs, traditions, and ideals. They did indeed degenerate for a short while, he said, but human beings are not strong enough to stand this kind of freedom for long. They soon build up a new system, a new set of customs, traditions, and ideals to fence them in. This new system will inevitably be built on the ruins of the old one: “Man cannot live without … inventing a samurai code or worshipping an emperor.”

  If Ango is right, if the Japanese are indeed incorrigible, it is desirable that Japan’s capacity to use military power should be controlled by a pacifistic constitution and an outside force forever. Or, if they are corrigible, then the status quo should persist until the Japanese show a change of attitude, face their past more honestly, apologize to their former adversaries more profusely, and so on. But perhaps we have got the Japanese problem backward. Without political responsibility—precisely over matters of war and peace—Japan cannot develop a grown-up attitude toward the past. Political change must come first; the mentality will follow. A constitutional change is only part of this; a change of government is at least as important. For only a new government can break with the postwar order, whose roots are still tainted by the wartime regime. Willy Brandt went down on his knees in the Warsaw ghetto, after a functioning democracy had been established in the Federal Republic of Germany, not before. But Japan, shielded from the evil world, has grown into an Oskar Matzerath: opportunistic, stunted, and haunted by demons, which it tries to ignore by burying them in the sand, like Oskar’s drum.

  When Kim Young Sam, the first democratically elected civilian President of South Korea, was asked by Japanese journalists what the Japanese government should do to compensate the former Korean sex slaves of the Imperial Japanese Army, he answered: “It is not your money we want. It is the truth we want you to make clear. Only then will the problem be solved.”

  Barely a year later, in the summer of 1993, four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it finally happened: the monopoly of the Liberal Democratic Party was broken by a coalition of young conservatives who had left the LDP, the socialist party, and Komeito, a Buddhist party. The new Prime Minister was Hosokawa Morihiro, the grandson of Prince Konoe Fumimaro, Prime Minister at the time of the Nanking Massacre in 1937 and of the signing of the Axis Pact in 1940. Konoe committed suicide in 1945, after being charged as a Class A war cr
iminal. One of Hosokawa’s first acts, as the new Prime Minister of Japan, was to state in public that Japan’s military actions in the 1930s and 1940s amounted to “an aggressive war and a wrong war.” It was only a beginning, but the signs were good. And with a glimmer of new hope, I thought back to my last glimpse of the orthodoxy which had prevailed for forty-eight years. I caught it in, of all places, Disneyland.

  Tokyo Disneyland is located in the bleak suburban sprawl between Tokyo and Narita Airport. It is almost an exact copy of the Disneyland in California, except for one entertainment, which is unique to Tokyo. It is called Meet the World, and is sponsored by Matsushita Electric, one of the most successful corporations in postwar Japan. Meet the World is inside a large white dome, containing a revolving cinema, which smells vaguely of plastic. On display was a potted history of Japan’s relations with the outside world. The story was told by a friendly heron, with a chirpy female voice, to two small children, who were actually robots. It was a rather selective history, however: the influence of Chinese civilization was acknowledged, but only to make the point that Japan turned it into something uniquely its own. Korea, a much closer neighbor, was ignored.

  But the most interesting part, the bit that I was waiting for, was the period between 1895 and 1945, when Japan’s meetings with the world were marked by a succession of wars. It came right after the arrival on stage of Commodore Perry’s “black ship”—which in reality appeared off the Japanese coast in 1853—like a malevolent ghost. The ship faded out and a cannon was projected on the screen, followed by a bang, and then the theater went dark. “Ooh,” said the child robots, “it’s sooo dark!” Yes, said the chirpy heron, and “now let’s turn to the future.” Which led to the grand finale: a quick succession of slide photographs of kindly Japanese explaining various instruments of high technology to grateful foreigners—Malaysians, Indians, Chinese … Americans. A song swelled on the soundtrack, with a refrain that went, on and on, over and over: “We meet the world with love, ah, we meet the world with love, we meet the world with love, ah …”