Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

by Pilling, David

  In 1946, a new book, The Course of Our Country, was published, the first since 1881, as Buruma points out, that started not with Japan’s imperial creation myths but with the Stone Age. A new law on education stated that schools would be free to select their own textbooks, which would be published privately. Ienaga’s was one of those. After the war, he wrote a series of widely used history textbooks with sections on, among other things, Japanese atrocities in Nanjing, routine use of rape by soldiers and medical experiments on human guinea pigs in Manchuria. During the years of the US occupation, in spite of heavy censorship, many Japanese wanted to understand how their society had been captured by a military establishment bent on fighting an unwinnable war. As well as his exposure of Japanese aggression, Ienaga exhibited a pacifist and leftwing leaning that was typical of many in society who entirely rejected the pre-war dogmas that had led Japan down such a disastrous path. Ienaga’s politics, however, enraged the conservative education ministry, which considered him a Marxist. In a 1962 textbook, he included photographs of students being sent to the front and young girls working in armament factories with the caption, ‘The destruction of people’s lives’. He attributed the defeat of the Imperial Army in China to the ‘democratic power of the Red armies’ and referred, controversially, to the military brothels stocked by women from throughout the Japanese empire.

  Ienaga was requested to rewrite dozens of items and to delete whole passages on the grounds that they were historically unproven or undermining of youthful patriotism. One examiner appointed by the ministry objected to Ienaga’s use of the term ‘aggression’ – much as Yuko Tojo had done – to describe Japan’s wartime actions. ‘Aggression is a term that contains negative ethical connotations,’ the examiner wrote, bemoaning its potential discouraging effect on members of the next generation. ‘Therefore an expression such as “military advance” should be used.’ A separate report judged that Ienaga had strayed from the proper teaching of Japanese history, whose aim should be ‘to acknowledge the historical achievements of our ancestors, to raise awareness of being Japanese, and to foster a rich feeling of love for our people’. Ienaga’s intention, by contrast, was to foster a disgust for imperial war and a love of Japan’s new pacifist constitution – albeit one imposed by the occupying Americans. He became so frustrated with the ministry’s requests that in 1965 he launched the first of three lawsuits against the government for acting unconstitutionally in curbing his free speech, a battle he was still waging into his late seventies. Though there were many legal defeats and setbacks – not to mention intimidation from rightwing thugs – in 1993, the Tokyo High Court ruled that the education ministry had overstepped its bounds by censoring his textbook.

  Similar fights were still going on at the time I met Yuko Tojo. These days the battleground had shifted from publication of ‘Marxist’ textbooks to the attempted distribution of ones produced by revisionists presenting a whitewashed view of history. These books often contained no reference to Nanjing or treatment of the POWs. Although such textbooks were adopted by only a tiny minority of schools, their appearance was seized upon by the Chinese media, provoking widespread anger in the country.

  Some Japanese teachers were alarmed about what they saw as the further encroachment of revisionist propaganda. A number of school authorities had, for instance, started demanding that teachers attending school ceremonies stand before the Japanese flag and sing the national anthem. In Tokyo, the school board had ruled that, ideally, one teacher should learn to play the Kimigayo, ‘His Majesty’s Reign’, on the piano. Outside the classroom, these symbols had begun to shed their taboo status. In the 2002 soccer World Cup, co-hosted by Japan and South Korea, crowds had good-humouredly waved the flag and sung the anthem at home games. But some teachers remained intensely wary of attempts to instil – or enforce – patriotism in schools. They still regarded both the Hinomaru flag and Kimigayo anthem – with its entreaty for ‘eight thousand generations’ of imperial rule – as symbols of the cult that had led Japanese unthinkingly into war. Kozo Kaifu, a lawyer acting for the rebellious teachers, put it in terms that Yukichi Fukuzawa, the nineteenth-century liberal thinker who had stressed the importance of individualism, would have understood. ‘Post-war education is intended to raise children not for the emperor but for themselves, so they can be the best people they can be,’ he told me.

  Hiroko Arai was a mild-mannered English teacher at a school in Tokyo. At fifty-nine, she was nearing retirement. One of eight siblings brought up in the intellectual ferment immediately after the war, she was among those who refused to stand. Her father had run a sento public bath in Fukui prefecture. As a child, Arai was taught by her parents to believe in what she called the sovereignty of the people. ‘My favourite phrase is “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”,’ she told me, quoting Thomas Jefferson. That meant standing up – or in her case sitting down – for what you believed in. When the Hinomaru flag was raised she remained resolutely stuck to her seat. As a punishment for her refusal to honour the national symbol, the school board forced Arai into early retirement with a reduced pension. She was also obliged to attend a ‘re-education seminar’ at which, she said, she was monitored by officials who noted her every reaction on a multi-coloured form. ‘During the Second World War, the Hinomaru flag and the Kimigayo became symbols of what we did,’ she said of Japan’s invasion of China and Southeast Asia. ‘I can’t show respect to these symbols.’14

  Shy and quietly spoken, Arai had struggled with herself to carry out her protest. Japan was not the easiest society in which to be the odd one out, she said. She thought the older teachers were more rebellious than the younger ones for whom the war was more distant. Unlike the generation after the war, younger Japanese had been taught to be more obedient. She paused. ‘I suppose it’s the fault of us teachers,’ she added, almost to herself, acknowledging her profession’s role in educating generations of what she deemed quiescent Japanese. ‘I didn’t want to educate them to be so obedient. I wanted them to be critical of authority.’ Arai was worried about the new school textbooks too. Even the old ones were bad enough, she said. Far from being masochistic, as the right claimed, they barely mentioned the suffering Japan had brought to the countries it invaded. Instead, they revelled in Japan’s own suffering. She also thought they tended to project a negative view of Asian neighbours, instilling the notion that Japan was alone in a hostile region. One textbook, she recalled, contained the sentence, ‘Look at the map. The Korean peninsula thrusts like a dagger at Japan.’

  In the same year I met Yuko Tojo, the Yomiuri newspaper, a rightwing publication with a combined morning and evening circulation of more than 13 million, launched a year-long investigation into Japan’s war record. The articles were reasonably probing, although they were careful to exonerate the emperor. One of the pieces found that Japan’s leaders had treated human life across Asia with contempt, sacrificing even Japanese soldiers as they might toss out ‘a pair of worn-out shoes’. The series was hardly revelatory for anyone with a knowledge of the war, but for its pains the newspaper’s offices were surrounded by the black vans of ultranationalists, which blared patriotic music and shouted menacing slogans. Tsuneo Watanabe, octogenarian chairman of the newspaper, said he had launched the project to counter what he deemed a lack of sincerity. ‘We committed acts of aggression in the continent and we need to study these in detail and leave the results to posterity,’ he said, speaking through a fog of pipe smoke. Political leaders had ‘failed to grasp’ the need to dig into Japan’s past and squarely face up to it, he went on. ‘Unless we do that, Chinese leaders will not be able to build favourable relations with Japan.’15

  I discussed Japan’s difficult external relations with Toshiaki Miura, a thoughtful commentator at the left-of-centre Asahi newspaper and a regular television pundit. Miura was a tall, slightly shy man with grey hair and spectacles. There was something of the academic about him, though he also had the jumpy quality of a good journalist
waiting for the next twist in the story. In a remark that neatly summed up Japan’s international isolation, yet its keen sense of wanting a place in the world order, he told me, ‘Our psyche is very insular. But we always see ourselves reflected in the mirror outside.’ That struck me as a perfect summation of the Japanese paradox – and the root of some of its tragic missteps. Because of its insularity, Japan’s only way of understanding itself has been with reference to other nations. An obvious benchmark in the nineteenth century had been Britain, an island nation just like Japan and a country that had the power and status to which Japan aspired. ‘Britain is much closer to the continent,’ said Miura, in a commonly voiced lament about Japan’s geographical – and psychological – isolation. ‘One of the tragedies of Japan’s position in international society is that we have no neighbours of the same size or the same level of industry. If Japan were placed in Europe, you would have Germany, Italy and England to get along with, and we could learn how to coexist with countries of the same strength, the same industrial level. But here in Asia we have a huge neighbour, China, a divided Korean peninsula, and a bunch of small states in Southeast Asia. It’s very difficult to develop a diplomatic sense that we are one of many countries.’

  • • •

  Koizumi never stopped visiting Yasukuni, although subsequent prime ministers, including the more overtly nationalist Shinzo Abe, did refrain from doing so. In Koizumi’s case, if anything, the criticism galvanized his resolve to go. He repeated his pilgrimage during each of his six years in office, the last, defiantly, on the highly charged day of 15 August, the anniversary of Japan’s surrender. There was a sense of paranoia about a rising China in parts of the administration and a feeling that a stand had to be made. One diplomat, who tried to persuade the prime minister not to go, later told me about the encounter. ‘Koizumi’s face went completely red and he grew very angry. He said, “Don’t you understand? Unless I keep visiting the shrine, China will forever bring up the issue. By continuing to go, I can put a stop to this once and for all.”’ One close adviser was openly fearful of a resurgent Middle Kingdom. ‘We have seen nothing like this in human history, a country where massive amounts of people are geared towards profit-making and whose leaders are ready to compromise any values for an economic return,’ he told me. ‘It is like putting five or six Japans of the 1960s together. The level of enthusiasm for development is breathtaking.’ As the US historian Kenneth Pyle wrote, Japan’s post-bubble generation ‘sees China not as a war victim but as a rival’.16

  During Koizumi’s period in office, relations with Beijing became the sourest in a generation. Koizumi was not once invited to China on an official visit, an extraordinary lapse of contact between what were far and away Asia’s two biggest economies.17 (Japan was then the largest and China second.) Some brushed off the costs of the diplomatic freeze, arguing that trade between Japan and China was flourishing and that officials from both countries maintained regular contact outside the public limelight. Many Japanese business leaders did not see it that way. By 2004, China had overtaken the US as Japan’s most important trading partner and the business lobby began to worry that the official stand-off between the two countries would harm their interests. Toyota had already had to withdraw an advertisement in which Chinese stone lions had been depicted bowing to one of its vehicles. The commercial had provoked outrage in China’s internet chatrooms which saw it as a national slur. Mori Building was forced to change the design of its 101-storey skyscraper in Shanghai because the large hole at the top of it was said to resemble the Rising Sun flag. Yotaro Kobayashi, chairman of Fuji Xerox, a company with several factories in China, publicly urged that pilgrimages to Yasukuni cease. ‘Visits are rubbing against the grain of Chinese people’s sentiments,’ he said. For his pains, he was castigated by the ultraright as a salesman more interested in profits than in Japan’s dignity. Black trucks swarmed outside his house and one day Kobayashi received an anonymous letter. The envelope contained a bullet.

  China and Japan were already scrapping over gas reserves deep under the waters of the East China Sea and there were regular clashes – thankfully verbal – over fishing-boat and submarine incursions into waters administered by Japan. Long-smouldering tension escalated dramatically in 2005 when anti-Japanese demonstrations spread across China. In April, protesters in several Chinese cities targeted Japanese department stores and small businesses, hurling rocks through plate-glass windows and throwing food at Japanese restaurants and Japanese cars. In Shenzhen, up to 10,000 people surrounded the Jusco supermarket, a Japanese chain, chanting slogans and urging people to boycott Japanese goods. Young Chinese shouted insults against ‘little Japs’ and ‘Japanese pigs’. Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, said, ‘The core issue in the China–Japan relationship is that Japan needs to face up to history squarely.’18 In Japan, though, most politicians were tired of apologizing.

  13

  Abnormal Nation

  At fifty-two, Shinzo Abe was the youngest post-war prime minister and the first to be born after 1945. He was the chosen successor of Junichiro Koizumi and he came into office in September 2006, right after Koizumi had stepped down. His political heartland was Yamaguchi prefecture in western Japan. That had been the old feudal domain of Choshu, one of four that had rebelled against the shogun in the nineteenth-century Meiji Restoration in order to bring about a national modernization capable of repelling foreign imperialists. It was in Choshu that the concepts of a professional army and Japan’s national interest had been born. These were causes close to Abe’s heart. Above all, said one of his closest advisers, he sought what the Japanese call hinkaku, or dignity – ‘to be a man worthy of respect and to build a nation worthy of respect’.1

  Abe (pronounced Ah-bay) was a nationalist, the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, a wartime cabinet minister and one-time economic tsar of the puppet state of Manchukuo. After the war, Kishi was arrested, but he was never convicted of war crimes, though he was accused of being responsible for the enslavement of thousands of Chinese forced labourers.2 Kishi re-entered politics after the American ‘reverse course’ – which strengthened the Japanese right as Washington grew more wary of Communism – and completed his return to respectability by becoming prime minister in 1957. Three years later, he sacrificed his premiership in order to renew the unpopular US–Japan Security Treaty, whose ratification prompted massive street protests in which one woman, a 22-year-old student at Tokyo University, was killed. Nearly half a century after these events – the high-point of post-war radical expression – in September 2006, Abe, who vividly remembered sitting on his grandfather’s knee as protesters surrounded the house, formed his own ‘cabinet for the creation of a beautiful country’. Beautiful Country was the title Abe gave his book, a political manifesto in which he had argued that Japan should stop apologizing for itself, learn to appreciate its culture and stand on its own two feet. In one of his first newspaper interviews as prime minister, he told me emphatically that he would rewrite the constitution within six years.3 ‘The current constitution was written before Japan became independent after the war,’ he said, referring to the period of US occupation. ‘With 60 years past, there are provisions within the constitution that no longer befit the reality of the day.’4 Among the changes he sought was a revision of the pacifist Article 9, which obliged Japan to renounce its sovereign right of war. The article, Abe said, was incompatible with the new, proactive international role he envisaged for the country. He also sought to revamp education, to make it more ‘moral’ with less liberal parsing of Japan’s history. ‘The time has come for us to step forward, with quiet pride in our hearts, to create a new country,’ he told parliament in his wooden style. ‘A beautiful country, Japan is a country that values culture, tradition, history and nature . . . A beautiful country, Japan is a country that is trusted, respected, and loved in the world.’ Abe had obviously not been reading the Chinese press.

  One of his closest foreign policy advisers, once
described to me as Abe’s ‘brain’, was Hisahiko Okazaki, an oleaginous man who had been ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Thailand and who now devoted himself to several of Japan’s rightwing causes. He worked in an office hung with Japanese scrolls off Toranomon, Tiger’s Gate, a busy intersection near the heart of political power at Nagatacho, Tokyo’s Capitol Hill. He liked to describe himself as an intelligence officer, something still nominally illegal in Japan, and he read voraciously to keep abreast of world affairs. Okazaki had standard rightwing views. He denied the worst atrocities of the war – he said perhaps a thousand civilians had been killed in Nanjing – and still quietly fumed at the American imposition of ‘victors’ justice’ after the war. He thought Japanese schools had been hijacked by Communist labour unions and that they taught children a peculiarly self-flagellating view of history. He wanted children to marvel at their ancient heroes, including some of their enlightened emperors. ‘For the Marxists, they’re all feudal, and feudal was bad,’ he said.5 Like Abe, he rejected any notion that schoolchildren should be taught more comprehensively about the war. Far from it, he said, it was time Japanese youth stopped wallowing in national guilt and learned a little pride.

  Okazaki was one of those urging Abe to ‘normalize’ Japan by reviving its right to possess, and if necessary use, its armed forces in the service of its allies. He wanted to override what he said was a self-imposed ban on ‘collective self-defence’. This meant that, although the country’s defence was solely in the hands of the US, Japan was not allowed to come to America’s rescue even if, say, a US ship were attacked off the Japanese coast. Shedding this restriction was necessary to balance the precipitous military rise of China, Okazaki said. ‘Having a navy and an army might be a breach of the constitution. But they already exist, so the question is how to use them,’ he argued, using the circular logic that pervades constitutional discussion in Japan. If Tokyo could drop its ban, the balance of power in East Asia would be altered overnight. With one stroke of a pen, Japan’s battleship and supersonic jet-owning ‘police force’ could admit that it was actually a fully fledged fighting force. ‘If you calculate the joint strengths of America and Japan, it will take the Chinese ten or twenty years to catch up,’ he said.