Time Travel: Recent Trips

by Paula Guran

  I moved here to Hokkaido to be a farmer, as far away from the heart of Japan as possible. For all these years I stayed silent to protect my friend. And I believed that I would die before him, and so take my secret to the grave.

  But my friend is now dead, and so, even though I have not said anything about what I did all these years, I will not stop speaking now.

  Lillian C. Chang-Wyeth:

  I am speaking only for myself, and perhaps for my aunt. I am the last connection between her and the living world. And I am turning into an old woman myself.

  I don't know much about politics, and don't care much for it. I have told you what I saw, and I will remember the way my aunt cried in that cell until the day I die.

  You ask me what I want. I don't know how to answer that.

  Some have said that I should demand that the surviving members of Unit 731 be brought to justice. But what does that mean? I am no longer a child. I do not want to see trials, parades, spectacles. The law does not give you real justice.

  What I really want is for what I saw to never have happened. But no one can give me that. And so I resort to wanting to have my aunt's story remembered, to have the guilt of her killers and torturers laid bare to the gaze of the world, the way that they laid her bare to their needle and scalpel.

  I do not know how to describe those acts other than as crimes against humanity. They were denials against the very idea of life itself.

  The Japanese government has never acknowledged the actions of Unit 731, and it has never apologized for them. Over the years, more and more evidence of the atrocities committed during those years have come to life, but always the answer is the same: there is not enough evidence to know what happened.

  Well, now there is. I have seen what happened with my own eyes. And I will speak about what happened, speak out against the denialists. I will tell my story as often as I can.

  The men and women of Unit 731 committed those acts in the name of Japan and the Japanese people. I demand that the government of Japan acknowledge these crimes against humanity, that it apologize for them, and that it commit to preserving the memory of the victims and condemning the guilt of those criminals so long as the word justice still has meaning.

  I am also sorry to say, Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee, that the government of the United States has also never acknowledged or apologized for its role in shielding these criminals from justice after the War, or in making use of the information bought at the expense of torture, rape, and death. I demand that the government of the United States acknowledge and apologize for these acts.

  That is all.

  Representative Hogart:

  I would like to again remind members of the public that they must maintain order and decorum during this hearing or risk being forcibly removed from this room.

  Ms. Chang-Wyeth, I am sorry for whatever it is you think you have experienced. I have no doubt that it has deeply affected you. I thank the other witnesses as well for sharing their stories.

  Mr. Chairman, and Members of the Subcommittee, I must again note for the record my objection to this hearing and to the Resolution which has been proposed by my colleague, Representative Kotler.

  The Second World War was an extraordinary time during which the ordinary rules of human conduct did not apply, and there is no doubt that terrible events occurred and terrible suffering resulted. But whatever happened—and we have no definitive proof of anything other than the results of some sensational high-energy physics that no one present, other than Dr. Kirino herself, understands—it would be a mistake for us to become slaves to history, and to subject the present to the control of the past.

  The Japan of today is the most important ally of the United States in the Pacific, if not the world, while the People's Republic of China takes daily steps to challenge our interests in the region. Japan is vital in our efforts to contain and confront the Chinese threat.

  It is ill-advised at best, and counterproductive at worst, for Representative Kotler to introduce his Resolution at this time. The Resolution will no doubt embarrass and dishearten our ally and give encouragement and comfort to our challengers at a time when we cannot afford to indulge in theatrical sentiments, premised upon stories told by emotional witnesses who may have been experiencing "illusions," and I am quoting the words of Dr. Kirino, the creator of the technology involved.

  Again, I must call upon the Subcommittee to stop this destructive, useless process.

  Representative Kotler:

  Mr. Chairman, and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for giving me the chance to respond to Representative Hogart.

  It's easy to hide behind intransitive verbal formulations like "terrible events occurred" and "suffering resulted." And I am sorry to hear my honored colleague, a member of the United States Congress, engage in the same shameful tactics of denial and evasion employed by those who denied that the Holocaust was real.

  Every successive Japanese government, with the encouragement and complicity of the successive administrations in this country, has refused to even acknowledge, let alone apologize for, the activities of Unit 731. In fact, for many years, the Unit's very existence was unacknowledged. These denials and refusals to face Japanese atrocities committed during the Second World War form a pattern of playing-down and denial of the war record, whether we are talking about the so-called "Comfort Women," the Nanjing Massacre, or the forced slave laborers of Korea and China. This pattern has harmed the relationship of Japan with its Asian neighbors.

  The issue of Unit 731 presents its unique challenges. Here, the United States is not an uninterested third party. As an ally and close friend of Japan, it is the duty of the United States to point out where our friend has erred. But more than that, the United States played an active role in helping the perpetrators of the crimes of Unit 731 escape justice. General MacArthur granted the men of Unit 731 immunity to get their experimental data. We are in part responsible for the denials and the cover-ups because we valued the tainted fruits of those atrocities more than we valued our own integrity. We have sinned as well.

  What I want to emphasize is that Representative Hogart has misunderstood the Resolution. What the witnesses and I are asking for, Mr. Chairman, is not some admission of guilt by the present government of Japan or its people. What we are asking for is a declaration from this body that it is the belief of the United States Congress that the victims of Unit 731 should be honored and remembered, and that the perpetrators of these heinous crimes be condemned. There is no Bill of Attainder here, no corruption of blood. We are not calling on Japan to pay compensation. All we are asking for is a commitment to truth, a commitment to remember.

  Like memorials to the Holocaust, the value of such a declaration is simply a public affirmation of our common bond of humanity with the victims, and our unity in standing against the ideology of evil and barbarity of the Unit 731 butchers and the Japanese militarist society that permitted and ordered such evil.

  Now, I want to make it clear that "Japan" is not a monolithic thing, and it is not just the Japanese government. Individual Japanese citizens have done heroic work in bringing these atrocities to light throughout the years, almost always against government resistance and against the public's wish to forget and move on. And I offer them my heartfelt thanks.

  The truth cannot be brushed away, and the families of the victims and the people of China should not be told that justice is not possible, that because their present government is repugnant to the government of the United States, that a great injustice should be covered up and hidden from the judgment of the world. Is there any doubt that this non-binding Resolution, or even much more stringent versions of it, would have passed without trouble if the victims were a people whose government has the favor of the United States? If we, for "strategic" reasons, sacrifice the truth in the name of gaining something of value for short-term advantage, then we will have simply repeated the errors of our forefathers at the end of the War.

  I
t is not who we are. Dr. Wei has offered us a way to speak the truth about the past, and we must ask the government of Japan and our government to stand up and take up our collective responsibility to history.

  Li Ruming, Director of the Department of History, Zhejiang University, The People's Republic of China:

  When I was finishing my doctorate in Boston, Evan and Akemi often had my wife and me over to their place. They were very friendly and helpful, and made us feel the enthusiasm and warmth that America is rightly famous for. Unlike many Chinese-Americans I met, Evan did not give off a sense that he felt he was superior to the Chinese from the mainland. It was wonderful to have him and Akemi as life-long friends, and not have every interaction between us filtered through the lens of the politics between our two countries, as is so often the case between Chinese and American scholars.

  Because I am his friend and I am also Chinese, it is difficult for me to speak about Evan's work with objectivity, but I will try my best.

  When Evan first announced his intention to go to Harbin and try to travel to the past, the Chinese government was cautiously supportive. As none of it had been tried before, the full implications of Evan's destructive process for time travel were not yet clear. Due to destruction of evidence at the end of the War and continuing stonewalling by the Japanese government, we do not have access to large archives of documentary evidence and artifacts from Unit 731, and it was felt that Evan's work would help fill in the gap by providing first-hand accounts of what happened. The Chinese government granted Evan and Akemi visas under the assumption that their work would help promote Western understanding of China's historical disputes with Japan.

  But they wanted to monitor his work. The War is deeply emotional for my compatriots, its unhealed wounds exacerbated by years of post-War disputes with Japan, and as such, it was not politically feasible for the government to not be involved. World War Two was not the distant past, involving ancient peoples, and China could not permit two foreigners to go traipsing through that recent history like adventurers through ancient tombs.

  But from Evan's point of view—and I think he was justified in his belief— any support, monitoring, or affiliation with the Chinese government would have destroyed all credibility for his work in Western eyes.

  He thus rejected all offers of Chinese involvement and even called for intervention by American diplomats. This angered many Chinese and alienated him from them. Later, when the Chinese government finally shut down his work after the storm of negative publicity, very few Chinese would speak up for him because they felt that he and Akemi had—perhaps even intentionally—done more damage to China's history and her people. The accusations were unfair, and I'm sorry to say that I do not feel that I did enough to defend his reputation.

  Evan's focus throughout his project was both more universal and more atomistic than the people of China. On the one hand, he had an American devotion to the idea of the individual, and his commitment was first and foremost to the individual voice and memory of each victim. On the other hand, he was also trying to transcend nations, to make people all over the world empathize with these victims, condemn their torturers, and affirm the common humanity of us all.

  But in that process, he was forced to distance his effort from the Chinese people in order to preserve the political credibility of his project in the West. He sacrificed their goodwill in a bid to make the West care. Evan tried to appease the West and Western prejudices against China. Was it cowardly? Should he have challenged them more? I do not know.

  History is not merely a private matter. Even the family members of the victims understand that there is a communitarian aspect to history. The War of Resistance Against the Japanese Invasion is the founding story of modern China, much as the Holocaust is the founding story of Israel and the Revolution and the Civil War are the founding stories of America. Perhaps this is difficult to understand for a Westerner, but to many Chinese, Evan, because he feared and rejected their involvement, was stealing and erasing their history. He sacrificed the history of the Chinese people, without their consent, for a Western ideal. I understand why he did it, but I cannot agree that his choice was right.

  As a Chinese, I do not share Evan's utter devotion to the idea of a personalized sense of history. Telling the individual stories of all the victims, as Evan sought to do, is not possible and in any event would not solve all problems.

  Because of our limited capacity for empathy for mass suffering, I think there's a risk that his approach would result in sentimentality and only selective memory. More than sixteen million civilians died in China from the Japanese invasion. The great bulk of this suffering did not occur in death factories like Pingfang or killing fields like Nanjing, which grab headlines and shout for our attention; rather, it occurred in the countless quiet villages, towns, remote outposts, where men and women were slaughtered and raped and slaughtered again, their screams fading with the chill wind, until even their names became blanks and forgotten. But they also deserve to be remembered.

  It is not possible that every atrocity would find a spokesperson as eloquent as Anne Frank, and I do not believe that we should seek to reduce all of history to a collection of such narratives.

  But Evan always told me that an American would rather work on the problem that he could solve rather than wring his hands over the vast realm of problems that he could not.

  It was not an easy choice that he made, and I would not have chosen the same way. But Evan was always true to his American ideals.

  Bill Pacer, Professor of Modern Chinese Language and Culture, University of Hawaii at Manoa:

  It has often been said that since everybody in China knew about Unit 731, Dr. Wei had nothing useful to teach the Chinese, and was only an activist campaigning against Japan. That's not quite right. One of the more tragic aspects of the dispute between China and Japan over history is how much their responses have mirrored each other. Wei's goal was to rescue history from both.

  In the early days of the People's Republic, between 1945 and 1956, the Communists' overall ideological approach was to treat the Japanese invasion as just another historical stage in mankind's unstoppable march towards socialism. While Japanese militarism was condemned and the Resistance celebrated, the Communists also sought to forgive the Japanese individually if they showed contrition—a surprisingly Christian/Confucian approach for an atheistic regime. In this atmosphere of revolutionary zeal, the Japanese prisoners were treated, for the most part, humanely. They were given Marxist classes and told to write confessions of their crimes. (These classes became the basis for the Japanese public's belief that any man who would confess to horrible crimes during the War must have been brainwashed by the Communists.) Once they were deemed sufficiently reformed through "re-education," they were released back to Japan. Memories of the War were then suppressed in China as the country feverishly moved to build a Socialist utopia, with well-known disastrous consequences.

  Yet, this generosity towards the Japanese was matched by Stalinist harsh treatment of landowners, capitalists, intellectuals, and the Chinese who collaborated with the Japanese. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, often on little evidence and with no effort given to observe legal forms.

  Later, during the 1990s, the government of the People's Republic began to invoke memories of the War in the context of patriotism to legitimize itself in the wake of the collapse of Communism. Ironically, this obvious ploy prevented large segments of the populace from being able to come to terms with the War—distrust of the government infected everything it touched.

  And so the People's Republic's approach to historical memory created a series of connected problems. First, the leniency they showed the prisoners became the ground for denialists to later question the veracity of confessions by Japanese soldiers. Second, yoking patriotism to the memory of the War invited charges that any effort to remember was politically motivated. And lastly, individual victims of the atrocities became symbols, anonymized to serve the needs of
the State.

  However, it has rarely been acknowledged that behind Japan's post-War silence regarding wartime atrocities lay the same impulses that drove the Chinese responses. On the left, the peace movement attributed all suffering during the War to the concept of war itself, and advocated universal forgiveness and peace among all nations without a sense of blame. In the center, focus was placed on material development as a bandage to cover the wounds of the War. On the right, the question of wartime guilt became inextricably yoked to patriotism. In contrast to Germany, which could rely on Nazism—distinct from the nation itself—to absorb the blame, it was impossible to acknowledge the atrocities committed by the Japanese during the War without implicating a sense that Japan itself was under attack.

  And so, across a narrow sea, China and Japan unwittingly converged on the same set of responses to the barbarities of World War Two: forgetting in the name of universal ideals like "peace" and "socialism"; welding memories of the War to patriotism; abstracting victims and perpetrators alike into symbols to serve the State. Seen in this light, the abstract, incomplete, fragmentary memories in China and the silence in Japan are flip sides of the same coin.

  The core of Wei's belief is that without real memory, there can be no real reconciliation. Without real memory, the individual persons of each nation have not been able to empathize with and remember and experience the suffering of the victims. An individualized story that each of us can tell ourselves about what happened is required before we can move beyond the trap of history. That, all along, was what Wei's project was about.

  "Cross-Talk," January 21, 20__, courtesy of FXNN

  Amy Rowe: Thank you, Ambassador Yoshida and Dr. Wei, for agreeing to come on to Cross-Talk tonight. Our viewers want to have their questions answered, and I want to see some fireworks!

  Ambassador Yoshida, let's start with you. Why won't Japan apologize?

  Yoshida: Amy, Japan has apologized. This is the whole point. Japan has apologized many many times for World War Two. Every few years we have to go through this spectacle where it's said that Japan needs to apologize for its actions during World War Two. But Japan has done so, repeatedly. Let me read you a few quotes.