Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

by Pilling, David

  There are several reasons why Japan has found it harder to deal with history than Germany. One is the fact that, after the war, General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, kept Emperor Hirohito on the throne. For that, Hirohito had to be absolved from all responsibility for the war on the improbable grounds that he did not know what was happening and was powerless to stop it. With US collusion, elaborate steps were taken to ensure that he was not implicated. Strict US censorship after the war made it even harder for the Japanese to assess what had gone on or come to a proper reckoning with their immediate history. Some historians still praise the decision not to try Hirohito as the foundation of Japan’s post-war economic success. Without the emperor’s unifying presence, it might indeed have been more difficult for a foreign occupying force to govern a defeated and demoralized Japan. But with their wartime leader exonerated, the Japanese found it harder to disinter the past. The emperor, in whose name soldiers had been sent to slaughter and be slaughtered, was still officially the nation’s most revered figure. As John Dower wrote, ‘If the man in whose name imperial Japan had conducted foreign and military policy for twenty years was not held accountable for the initiation of or conduct of the war, why should anyone expect ordinary people to dwell on such matters, or to think seriously about their own personal responsibility?’ The Americans’ exoneration of the emperor, he concluded, had turned the issue of ‘war responsibility’ into a joke.4

  In post-war Germany, by contrast, Nazi leaders, including Adolf Hitler, had died or been executed. They were severed from the body politic. That made it easier for Germans to blame the now destroyed fascist regime, even though they voted for it in 1933. In Japan’s case there was no such clean break with the past. Japan’s militarism was closely linked with the very idea of what ‘Japaneseness’ had meant since the Meiji Restoration, an identity that, as we have seen, required unquestioning loyalty to a god-like emperor. (At least after the war, the emperor was relieved of his divine status.) Still, there was much that stayed the same. Bureaucrats and politicians who had served during the war continued to play a prominent role after it. That was largely a consequence of the US policies of the early 1950s when, in the name of anti-Communism, the process of purging the right was reversed. When it came to it, Washington preferred continuity with a sullied Japanese past than the dangers of unleashing a more democratic, but more unpredictable, future.

  Another reason many Japanese have struggled to see themselves as aggressors is the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Radiation washed away much of the guilt from Japan’s collective memory. ‘To the majority of Japanese, Hiroshima is the supreme symbol of the Pacific War,’ writes Ian Buruma in The Wages of Guilt, his superb account of how both Japan and Germany have remembered – and forgotten – the war. ‘All the suffering of the Japanese people is encapsulated in that almost sacred word: Hiroshima.’5 If the German symbol of the war is the Holocaust – the suffering they imposed on the Jews – Japan has chosen to remember a different symbol, one that epitomizes their own suffering at the hands of others. Hiroshima has served a double function in the post-war psyche. It has obliterated the idea that the Japanese were uniquely barbaric in wartime. Whatever they did, the Americans were willing to do the same, or worse. More subtly, especially for the left, it has transformed Japan from aggressor into the sacred guardian of world peace. Hiroshima has become a global symbol. It is the pacifist people of post-war Japan, whose soldiers have not fired a shot against an enemy in more than six decades, who have been entrusted to keep the flame of peace alive.

  The lingering stereotype of the Japanese in much of the world as cruel and bloodthirsty could hardly be further removed from the typical view the Japanese have of themselves. For many, their country remains uniquely peaceful and harmonious, a supposed trait sometimes attributed to the absence of a monotheistic religion. True, they might say, Japan erred once by following the aggressive example of European nations, but it dearly paid for that mistake and will never act that way again. Typical is the view of Kazuo Inamori, a legendary businessman (and subsequently Buddhist priest) who was one of the pioneers of Japan’s electronics industry. When I asked him about it, he invoked Japan’s abundant marine resources, plentiful rainfall and geographical isolation to explain what he saw as his country’s intrinsically pacifist nature. ‘We never had to conquer others with force. Conquering with force is something European countries have done repeatedly in their history. It is in their nature to be warriors. We are not like that.’ Almost as an afterthought, he acknowledged Japan’s less-than-pacifist tendencies in the last century. ‘If you go back a hundred years, of course, Japan tried to conquer some neighbouring countries,’ was how he put it. ‘All in all, though, Japan has been leading the world as a peaceful country.’6

  Japan’s sense of victimhood was compounded by the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, Asia’s version of Nuremberg, held between 1946 and 1948. It is an article of faith on the Japanese right that the trial of twenty-eight so-called Class-A defendants was a kangaroo court, founded not in international law, but rather in the barely disguised desire of the victors to punish the vanquished. At Nuremberg, Britain had, in fact, argued that it would be better to dispense with the pretence of legality and simply hang those whom the Allies held most responsible.7 In many ways, the Tokyo Tribunal was indeed a charade. Evidence was suppressed, not least in protecting the emperor, and some of those eventually executed were less implicated in atrocities than others never put on trial. Justice Radhabinod Pal of India, the only dissenting judge, has won lasting affection among many on the right in Japan for concluding that the trial was a ‘sham’ with no legal or moral authority. He also endorsed the commonly held opinion of Japanese conservatives that, as the noose of sanctions tightened around Japan, Tokyo was left with little option but to wage all-out war.

  If anyone epitomized the revisionist view of Japanese history, it was Yuko Tojo, granddaughter of Hideki Tojo, the wartime leader who ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor. In 2005, I arranged to meet her in a restaurant overlooking the Imperial Palace, a good choice since more than once during our encounter she pronounced the view of the vast royal grounds at the centre of Tokyo to be ‘most nourishing’. At precisely the appointed hour, a tiny woman, dressed in a green woollen suit with gold-trimmed buttons, had come charging into the restaurant. She was wearing silver-rimmed glasses and carrying a miniature suitcase in egg-shell blue, which she later informed me had cost her only Y500. Greeting me in the politest form of Japanese, delivered in a high-pitched voice, she bowed so low it seemed as though she were scouring the plush carpet for some lost trinket. Already small in stature, she was reduced to less than half my size by her near-ninety degree salutation.

  At the time, there was much controversy surrounding her grandfather’s ‘soul’ and its lack of suitability as a resident of Yasukuni shrine. Yasuhiro Nakasone, a former prime minister and a nationalist in his own right, had recently suggested that Tojo, along with the thirteen other Class-A war criminals, be dis-enshrined from Yasukuni. Since there are no bodies at the shrine, an oasis of cherry trees and simple wooden structures in central Tokyo, his plan would have entailed some kind of Shinto ritual to send the fourteen unwanted ghosts packing. Yasukuni is a curious place. The ‘souls’ of those who died fighting for the emperor are said to reside here. Most were ordinary soldiers sent off to die on the battlefields. But among them are the leaders, including Tojo, who dispatched them to their fate. Curiously, the Koreans and Taiwanese who fought alongside as subjects of the then Japanese empire are also memorialized, often to the anguish of their hapless relatives who have, so far unsuccessfully, demanded the ‘removal’ of their ancestors’ souls, on the grounds that they did not fight for Japan by choice. To one side of the grounds is the Yushukan museum where the ‘sacred relics’ of the Yasukuni deities are kept. On display is a Zero fighter aircraft; a ‘human torpedo’ of the sort used in naval suicide missions; and the first railway engine
to steam along the Burma Railroad, the ‘Death Railway’ built by forced Asian labour and prisoners of war. The museum presents a deeply revisionist view of history, glossing over atrocities and glorifying the idea of sacrificing one’s life for the emperor. The shrine itself is private since state Shinto was abolished after the war, but it remains, in Buruma’s words, ‘the holiest shrine of the militarised emperor cult’.8

  Nakasone’s suggestion to get rid of the Class-A war criminals, which he once made to me in person,9 was a response to the bitter protests from Japan’s neighbours. He hoped that the shrine could thus be rendered an acceptable place to honour Japan’s war dead. For Yuko, the former prime minister had betrayed important principles of the right. ‘I don’t know why Nakasone keeps banging on about this, talking about Class-A war criminals all the time. Japanese people should never use the expression “war criminals”,’ she said. Under Japanese law, she went on, soldiers and leaders alike had committed no crime other than serving their country. Besides, even if it were desirable to remove them, it was impossible under Yasukuni’s doctrines. ‘Once a soul is enshrined, you can’t tear them into bits and take them from the shrine. You cannot separate the souls. They are all equal whether they are generals or rank-and-file soldiers. They are all gods.’10 Yuko put the blame for the crisis over Yasukuni squarely on China, a country she told me – in a racist sideswipe – she associated with spitting and open-air defecation. ‘Nowhere else in the world, in America or the UK, have there been complaints about the people who died. It is only China who is whipping the souls of the dead.’

  Though she would have been only four or five at the war’s end, Yuko had fragmentary memories of her mother taking her to visit her grandfather in the prime minister’s office. Sometimes they would share quiet meals while war raged in Asia. When Tojo was in Sugamo prison awaiting trial following Japan’s surrender, she recalled her brother sticking his hands through the bars to touch his grandfather. After his execution, when Yuko was a little girl, her grandfather was a hated figure, blamed for pursuing an unwinnable war. The young Yuko, who had been told by her family that her grandfather had died defending the country, had only the vaguest inkling of his reputation. She recalled, as a six-year-old, being subjected to spiteful little punishments at school. ‘They used to throw stones at me and chase me around and I had no idea what the reason was.’ It was not until she turned ten that she discovered what had happened to her grandfather. Whenever one particular classmate saw her, he would climb up on a chair, grip his fingers theatrically around his neck and make choking noises, shouting, ‘Tojo hanged.’

  Yuko’s defence of her grandfather’s reputation – for that had become her mission in life – was part personal and part ideological. The two mingled so closely it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. Her starting point was that neither he, nor those he sent to war, should be seen to have died in vain. Their deaths, above all, must not have been meaningless. For that, the war they fought needed to have been honourable and their ‘defence’ of the nation, though they lost, somehow a necessary precondition for Japan’s post-war prosperity. It was a hard argument to make, even to oneself.

  Her second article of faith was that the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal was invalid. How could the people who dropped atomic bombs on civilians in Hiroshima judge those who had participated in what she deemed a war of self-defence? ‘The trial was unfair. It is unfair for the winner to make the judgement. My grandfather said himself that he had not violated international law, but he had made numerous violations against the Japanese people.’ She went on, ‘To deem Hideki Tojo a villain would mean the war was bad and that all the soldiers who fought in the war were bad. But their determination was respectable and they ended up protecting our lives, my life. I don’t want to think of their deaths as meaningless.’

  Isn’t that precisely the point, I ventured. Their deaths were meaningless. Tojo’s campaign was both idiotic and barbaric. In the name of some phoney notion of an Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, it led to the slaughter of millions of Asians, including Japanese. Ultimately, it resulted in the near destruction of Japan itself. ‘It’s true that precious lives were lost and that Japan lost the war. But those soldiers fought desperately hard and stood proud,’ she said, a cloud crossing her face. ‘As a result Japan is enjoying peace and an affluent life. I would be sorry to say they died in vain.’

  There followed a rather fractious discussion of the war in Asia in which she quibbled with my use of the word ‘aggression’. ‘I wish you had a deeper understanding of what happened in Manchuria,’ she said, after portraying Japan’s 1931 push into that region and later into China proper as a defence of land granted to Japan after its victory in the 1905 Russo-Japanese war.11 We took to studying our food with some intensity. She dissected her fillet of lamb with admirable precision, and the frigid silence was broken only by the noise of her knife clinking against the plate. Finally she said, ‘I think from the way you use the word “aggression” your stance is totally different from mine. You are looking at this from the standpoint that Japan was an invader. I say it was a defensive war. Japan did not have resources.’ She meant Japan’s lack of raw materials, particularly oil, and the international embargo that tightened after Japan moved into Indochina in the closing months of 1940.12 She viewed encirclement by the so-called A, B, C, D powers – the Americans, British, Chinese and Dutch – as an attempt to deprive Japan of its lifeblood and tantamount to a declaration of war. ‘This endangered the lives of 100 million people living in Japan,’ she said. ‘Japan had to make the difficult choice of going to war.’

  We briefly touched upon the Nanjing massacre of 1937–8, which has become symbolic – along with the Bataan Death March, the slaughter of civilians in Manila in 1945, and the treatment of POWs – of the barbarity of Japanese troops. Precisely what happened in Nanjing is a matter of fierce contention, especially between Chinese and Japanese scholars. But most historians, including many from Japan, agree that Japanese troops went on an orgy of killing and rape in the weeks after they took the city in December 1937. Estimates of how many people were massacred range from 40,000 to 300,000. Yuko said the numbers had been hugely exaggerated. She referred to work by Japanese revisionists who had sought to demonstrate that photographs of the massacre were doctored. ‘Most of these were altered pictures,’ she scoffed, referring to images of the Japanese bayoneting people or beheading them. ‘They were wearing short sleeves in December or using guns that the Japanese army never used, the wrong-shaped swords and bayonet models that were not used then.’

  By now, the politeness with which our conversation had begun had quite evaporated. ‘What is your motive in interviewing me today? Is it because you and I think so differently?’ Then she managed to dispel the frostiness and to retrieve an air of cordiality. She began to disinter her egg-shell blue valise and pulled out several memorabilia related to her grandfather’s last days in Sugamo before he was hanged. There was a little brown box that Tojo fashioned in prison, which was presented to Yuko’s elder brother on the day of the autumn equinox. An inscription on it read, ‘Although the cold winds are blowing throughout the world today, do not be dismayed. The dark clouds casting Japan in shadow will clear one day, and the autumn moon will be seen again.’ Then she brought out pencil stubs used by Tojo to keep the final pages of his diary and even the butt of the last cigarette he smoked. Finally, she produced a little packet from which she emptied a small clump of hair and some nail clippings – a parting gift that Tojo had prepared before a bungled suicide attempt. The relics sat there on the white tablecloth, mere inches away from the petits fours I had been eyeing.

  • • •

  There were plenty of Japanese who did not try to cover up their country’s wartime history. Over the decades, many historians, teachers, lawyers and former members of the military had gone to great lengths to unearth Japan’s wartime atrocities. One such was Saburo Ienaga, who spent much of his life before he died in 200
2, at the age of eighty-nine, fighting lawsuits against the government to defend his right to publish school textbooks critical of the war.13 Ienaga was a history professor who had been a schoolteacher during the war when he was expected to teach imperial myth presented as fact. That he did so filled him with shame. Right after 1945, there had been no new textbooks, so teachers were instructed by the Americans to black out passages promoting militarism or the emperor cult. I have spoken to those who remember whole pages of their textbooks hidden under a sea of black ink.