Japan Story

by Christopher Harding

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  ‘You cannot be asked to apologize every day, can you? It isn’t good for a nation to feel constantly guilty.’ Such were the sentiments of many a Japanese conservative in the 1990s, when faced yet again with talk of the war. But they were the words of Mao Zedong back in the mid-1950s, speaking to a visiting delegation from the Japanese Diet. Zhou Enlai offered similarly soothing noises: ‘We should let go,’ he said, ‘and ensure that history is never repeated.’

  Okinawans protest against the rape of a schoolgirl in 1995 and its roots in post-war US–Japan relations This wasn’t absolution, of course. This was politics. Mao and Zhou hoped to peel Japan away from the United States and its Asian allies – South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines – while easing their country’s isolation through bilateral trade and investment. Opinion within Japan’s ruling LDP was divided at this point, as it was within the Chinese Communist Party. But the next thirty years saw more cooperation than conflict. Deals were signed boosting economic ties and allowing thousands of captured Japanese soldiers to at last return home. Chinese authorities placed limits on the investigation and public discussion of Japanese wartime violence. Even when a UN survey in the late 1960s hinted that a group of disputed islands – ‘Senkaku’ to the Japanese; ‘Diaoyu’ to the Chinese – might be home to huge reserves of oil, the issue was dismissed as something for another day.

  Finally, in September 1972, just a few months after President Nixon’s epoch-making trip to China, Japan’s Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei boarded his own plane for Beijing. There were difficult moments. At a banquet, Tanaka apologized for the war using a turn of phrase in Japanese that his hosts deemed more appropriate for a spilled drink than a brutal and tragic conflict (Zhou Enlai later told him that his remark had ‘bought the animosity of the Chinese people’). But an agreement was signed nonetheless, establishing diplomatic relations between Japan and the People’s Republic of China and putting an end to a state of war which, on paper at least, had persisted up to that point.

  Tanaka and Mao talked, when they met, about Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and the Soviet Union. But they also discussed Buddhism, Confucius, incense and prayer. It was a reminder that their two countries were bound together by very much more than the violence of recent decades. And it was part of a post-war pattern for Japan: moving back and forth in how it thought about itself and presented itself to the world between history and culture – between time-bound stories, fraught with politics and freighted with difficult memories, and purer, putatively timeless ones.

  Culture had its attractions right across the modern era. While Meiji-era thinkers reworked their national inheritance into a unique and globally competitive ‘Japan’, for reassurance at home and for retail abroad – land of the gods, way of the warrior, art of tea – foreign enthusiasts and critics embarked on a century and a half of trying to tease out the country’s essentials. The writer and Japanophile Lafcadio Hearn encountered ‘kindly’ and ‘fairy-like’ people in the 1890s, living in a slightly miniaturized landscape. The Victorian designer Christopher Dresser found the Meiji Japanese ‘genial’ and ‘loving’, but saw an undercurrent of ‘barbaric cruelty’ revealed in their cuisine – in particular ikizukuri: a live fish sliced into quivering, edible chunks.

  Decades later, the United States government employed the British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer and his American colleague Ruth Benedict to unpick the supposedly alien psychology of a people with whom they had ended up at war. Gorer traced a speculative path from harsh toilet training through repression and guilt, ending at a disconcerting battlefield combination of extreme discipline and wild violence. Benedict described a broader ‘shame’ culture, by no means utterly and irredeemably evil, but powered by concern for appearances, approbation and mutual indebtedness rather than unshakeable principles or a sense of inner freedom – these were characteristics of ‘guilt’ cultures, to be found largely in the West.

  Benedict’s book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), which contained these thoughts and many more besides on what made Japanese tick (in contrast to Americans) was criticized inside and outside Japan for its spectacular generalizations. The country’s diversity – across time and region, war and peace, wealth and poverty, age and gender, ethnicity and personality – had, it seemed, been all but ignored. The result, both here and in similar works across subsequent decades, was a portrait of an improbably homogenous place, to which its painters were forced to add dashes of ‘puzzling’ and ‘paradoxical’ in order to explain away evidence of plurality.

  And yet Chrysanthemum became an influential bestseller, read not just as a Japan primer by GHQ staff but purchased in translation by more than 2 million Japanese over the next half-century – even quoted in Japanese school textbooks. No doubt for some fans there was relief at seeing an American writer codifying Japanese culture where her wartime contemporaries had simply demonized it. But there was a broader pattern here, beyond any one book: a popular appetite, growing in Japan and abroad especially from the 1960s onwards, for work in a genre that became known as nihonjinron – ‘theories about the Japanese’.

  Claims included the importance of climate and ancestry in shaping a distinctively cooperative society and psyche; an aversion to confrontation; a preference for non-verbal communication (in contrast to Westerners’ gauche and laborious verbosity); a flinty yet quietly understated Japanese ‘spirit’; a balancing of rationality with sensuousness and deep feeling; and finally the rather circular idea that unless you were Japanese you could not hope to fully understand – or therefore convincingly refute – any of these claims. Point-by-point rebuttals by sociologists and anthropologists (including from within Japan) did little more than downgrade these ‘theories’ from shared shibboleths to quietly harboured assumptions or vague intuitions, across Japan and an increasingly Japanophile West.

  One of the explanations for the staying power of these cultural claims was that however ideologically motivated, wrongly reasoned and extravagantly expressed, there were kernels of raw observational truth to some of them. Important too, for Japanese audiences, was that culture offered a useful distraction from history. Benedict’s work had been very much concerned with the recent war and what it said about Japan. But many of its successors – the psychoanalyst Doi Takeo’s writing on the concept of amae (presuming upon another’s benevolence); the social anthropologist Nakane Chie on Japan’s ‘vertical society’; Ezra Vogel’s Japan As Number One: Lessons for America (1979) – offered Japanese a reassuringly distinct and enduring sense of themselves, in the light of which mid-century events seemed not especially characteristic.

  For Japan’s post-war leaders, there was obvious political utility in persuading the population of the rightness and beauty, stretching back into antiquity, of a society that eschewed conflict and understood that unequal social relationships hold benefits for both parties. Promoting this same image abroad was an effective way of helping it to bed down at home, so closely did the Japanese media cover foreign discussions about their country. A condensed version of Nakane’s work on Japanese society was distributed to Japanese embassies around the world for this very purpose, while the claim of harmony within hierarchy became one element in Japan’s cultural diplomatic suite – alongside tea ceremony demonstrations, portraits of Mount Fuji’s perfect contours, public displays of the art of flower arrangement (ikebana) and later the installation of talented sushi chefs in some of the more important foreign missions. Samurai swords were given an extended sabbatical, awaiting a new global generation capable of enjoying them at an aesthetic, fantastical or ironic remove.

  The broader importance of these efforts to Japan’s international fortunes was made vividly clear in 1962, when The Economist described an ‘economic miracle’ under way there – coining a welcome and influential phrase – only for French President Charles de Gaulle to be rather more disobliging, referring to Japan’s Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato as ‘that transistor salesman’. To have largely left behind – in some part
s of the world, at least – a reputation as Asia’s automaton butchers and slavers was an important achievement. But the prospect of replacing it with nothing more than a reputation for imitation, miniaturization and ruining other countries’ trade balances was philosophically underwhelming, and clearly bad for business.

  At the same time, reparations to South East Asian countries, under the terms of 1952’s San Francisco Peace Treaty, were being made largely in the form of Japanese goods and services, alongside technical cooperation and overseas volunteering. The obvious economic self-interest in much of this, and in Japan’s ‘Official Development Assistance’ generally – as a government stimulus to the domestic economy and a means of opening up overseas markets – did not go unnoticed by Japan’s former colonial subjects. Despite Japan becoming the world’s most generous contributor of overseas aid, opinion polls taken as late as the 1980s revealed that 70 per cent of the Thai population regarded Japan’s economic activities as basically ‘imperialistic’. Where Japanese capital was not universally trusted, Japanese culture, it was hoped, could step in.

  Japan’s cultural diplomacy proved phenomenally successful well into the twenty-first century, renewing itself as times changed so that each new generation of Japanophiles fell in love with a slightly different country. But culture could not hold the past at bay. By 1995 history seemed to be returning with a vengeance: in schools and bookshops, in the newspapers and in the Diet – above all in Japan’s international relations. East Asia was entering an era of apologies and apologetics.

  Japanese leaders had long worried about what went on in the country’s classrooms. Having encountered graduates of Japan’s highly ethnocentric pre-war and wartime education system on the battlefield, the Americans had resolved to dismantle it. From the summer of 1945, Japanese children were treated to the sight of some of their teachers being hauled away, while others were put to work – assisted by pupils – inking out sections of textbooks that were deemed ‘undemocratic’. The teaching of moral education, Japanese history and geography was suspended completely, on the basis that these had been the principal means by which the indoctrination of the nation’s youth had been effected.

  New measures including a Fundamental Law of Education did away with the old Imperial Rescript on Education (to which pupils had bowed daily) and established a single-track education for girls and boys of all abilities: six years of elementary school and three of junior high school (chūgakkō), with an optional three more of senior high school (kōtōgakkō). Elected local education boards were given the power to oversee staffing and curricula. Classroom questions and debates were now vigorously encouraged.

  Japan’s remaining teachers, many of them grieving for students lost in the war, found themselves largely sympathetic to the new regime. Acting through the Japan Teachers’ Union (JTU), allied with the Socialist Party, they became one of the country’s most staunchly left-wing professional constituencies. They consistently opposed conservative critics of the new system, who claimed that an education stripped of its old pride in the nation was yet another debilitating legacy of the faulty, foreign post-war settlement imposed upon Japan. Teachers pushed back, too, against efforts to reinstate Japan’s pre-war flag and national anthem.

  Some battles were lost. Elections to local education boards were done away with in the mid-1950s, in favour of appointments by prefectural governors and local mayors. Around the same time, schools were instructed to set aside one hour per week for moral education, to be rooted in the country’s ‘unique culture’. A standard curriculum was reintroduced, and Ministry of Education (MoE) bureaucrats began reviewing the textbooks from amongst which boards could select.

  This last mattered greatly to those in Japan who thought that inordinate and one-sided attention had been paid in early post-war textbooks to the wartime behaviour of Japanese soldiers. It had begun, they said, with a perfect storm of Occupation-era Americans seeking to paralyse the Japanese with guilt (or possibly shame), left-wing teachers uninterested in distinguishing patriotism from fascism and publishers intent on pandering to the teachers who used their books. Now, with MoE staff able to withhold approval of draft texts until desired changes were made, publishers could be advised to avoid undesirable usages and even entire topics. The use of the word ‘invasion’ in regard to China was discouraged. Talk of the Nanjing Massacre disappeared entirely until the 1970s. Historians including Ienaga Saburō took to the courts to challenge the constitutionality of this screening process. But though Ienaga won arguments over particular revisions, the legitimacy of the process itself was upheld.

  Japan’s textbook controversies became international news from the early 1980s onwards, attracting a degree of attention that was out of all proportion to the number of schools actually using any of the offending literature. This became part of a wider pattern to emerge from the 1990s onwards. There had long been a deep reticence in Japan, bordering on a taboo, about discussing the late 1930s and early 1940s in depth and in public. It remained a difficult, painful topic, and critics no doubt had a point when they suggested that avoidance was unhealthy in the long term. But by focusing heavily on neo-nationalist and revisionist commentary on that era – from Ishihara Shintarō’s denial of the Nanjing Massacre in Playboy magazine to Kobayashi Yoshinori’s Gōmanism and Neo-Gōmanism manga, satirizing modern Japan’s capitulation to Western ideologies – the global media risked portraying the Japanese as a whole as somehow allergic to the taking of serious historical or moral inventories, in contrast to the exemplary process of self-examination through which West Germany had put itself.

  In fact, anger amongst former members of the Imperial Japanese Army at books like ‘Nankin gyakusatsu’ no kyokō (‘The Fabrication of the “Nanjing Massacre” ’) (1984), by a former secretary to General Matsui Iwane, had helped persuade some of them to come forward with diary accounts of what they and their comrades had done while in uniform. The death in 1989 of their former commander, Emperor Hirohito, made this a little easier to do. Memoirs produced by former prisoners of war of the Japanese added to the flow of new information, not least on notorious wartime episodes like the building of the Burma–Thailand ‘Death’ Railway by more than 60,000 Allied POWs and many more forced labourers from the region.

  During the 1990s, an array of lawsuits – including a number brought by non-Japanese victims of the war – resulted in the Japanese courts becoming involved in affirming some of the wartime events questioned by revisionists. There had indeed been a massacre at Nanjing. Korean and other Asian ‘comfort women’ had been forced into sexual slavery in military brothels. And experiments in biological warfare (including human vivisection) had taken place at Unit 731 in Manchukuo.

  Politicians with a gift for the gaffe or an eye to their support base helped to undermine all this. On 15 August 1995, Murayama Tomiichi – Japan’s first socialist Prime Minister in half a century – issued a statement marking the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war. His words, which carried considerable political weight thanks to unanimous Cabinet backing, left little room for interpretation:

  During a certain period in the not too distant past, Japan, following a mistaken national policy, advanced along the road to war, only to ensnare the Japanese people in a fateful crisis, and, through its colonial rule and aggression, caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations.

  In the hope that no such mistake be made in the future, I regard, in a spirit of humility, these irrefutable facts of history, and express here once again my feelings of deep remorse and state my heartfelt apology. Allow me also to express my feelings of profound mourning for all victims, both at home and abroad, of that history.

  But a few days before Murayama’s statement, the Education Minister Shimamura Yoshinobu had declared – on his first day in the job – that ‘invasion’ or ‘non-invasion’ depended on ‘how you think about it’. Then, on the day of the statement itself, no fewer than eight Cabinet members ma
de a visit to Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, deeply controversial in East Asia ever since it became known that the souls of fourteen Class A war criminals had been secretly added (in 1978) to the 2.46 million already enshrined there. Those who wished to maintain their insistence that Japan had never apologized for its past – or wasn’t truly apologetic – could claim that Murayama’s sentiments had in fact been purely personal.

  As with Mao and Zhou’s willingness to set history aside in the 1950s, so with the desire of Japan’s former adversaries to do the opposite now: much of this was about contemporary politics. By the late 1980s into the 1990s, many Americans were far less favourably disposed towards Japan than even a generation before. They had had enough of the influx of Japanese cars and capital into their country, epitomized by Sony’s purchase of Columbia Pictures and Mitsubishi’s of a controlling stake in the Rockefeller Group, both in late 1989. ‘Japan Buys the Center of New York,’ declared the New York Times, while less reputable writers took the long view: a perennially aggressive people had exchanged bayonet blades for sharp suits, and tanks for Toyota Corollas. A new form of fairground-style entertainment emerged in Detroit and elsewhere: smashing up Japanese cars with baseball bats or sledgehammers – a dollar per hit.

  US politicians enjoyed plenty of popular support in forcing trade quotas on Japan and in lambasting the country’s contribution of $13 billion to the cost of the 1991 Gulf War as late in arriving, and both monetarily and morally inadequate. ‘They pay in yen, we pay in blood,’ ran the popular refrain, forgetting for a moment who had written a peace clause into Japan’s post-war Constitution. When, after the war, the Kuwaiti government took out a large advert in the New York Times to thank the countries that had contributed to their liberation from Saddam Hussein, there was no mention at all of Japan. It was a devastating moment for the country’s leaders, who had raised taxes to help foot their considerable share of the bill. The SDF began, the next year, to contribute to UN peacekeeping operations, with its first independent deployment outside Japan since the end of the Second World War coming soon after the end of the second Gulf War: around 600 Ground Self-Defence Force troops were sent to help with reconstruction in southern Iraq between 2004 and 2006.