As we hope the echoes of the Lebanese conflict fade away, on the other side of the world memories of another bloody war have been stirred. Japanese Premier Junichiro Koizumi has again paid his respects at a Tokyo war shrine which honors Japan’s war dead; the shrine includes the names of 14 individuals executed for war crimes after the country’s defeat. Koizumi’s continued insistence on attending this ceremony has produced renewed protests from the Chinese and South Koreans whose people suffered terribly from Japanese aggression.
Yet the Yasukuni Shrine, originally built in 1869 to commemorate the dead in a civil war, is also a memorial to the 2.4 million Japanese who died in World War II. The majority were ordinary soldiers and civilians who, all things being equal, should quite rightly have been shown a mark of respect by later generations.
But all things are not equal. Japan may have apologized for the barbarous behavior of its armies but there is enduring evidence that they have not themselves accepted that their nation was in fact guilty of terrible crimes. The controversial school textbooks, which sought to gloss over the facts of the horrific protracted 1937 massacre of possibly 300,000 Chinese in the captured city of Nanjing, are only part of the evidence of this refusal to admit the reality of what their ancestors did. Instead, largely because of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atom bombs which claimed over 214,000 lives and the equal death toll in the Tokyo firestorms caused by American bombing, the Japanese have chosen to see themselves as victims rather than aggressors.
The Germans, on the other hand, have not only admitted but accepted in their hearts the murderous depravity of the Nazis. If Chancellor Angela Merkel were to make a high profile visit to a war memorial to German dead, there would be no protest from Russians or Jews or any other victims of the Hitler regime. The Japanese, however, have been unable to look their past squarely in the face. Because of this, their former victims can take the view that the arrogant racial supremacist beliefs that informed Japan’s appalling treatment of those they conquered have not really changed.
Nevertheless, it is hard not to suspect that the Chinese and Koreans are trying to make political capital out of Koizumi’s behavior. It is notable that there have been no similar protests from other Southeast Asian countries which were also subject to Japanese occupation. Nor have Allied governments whose troops died by the thousands in POW camps raised objections. Perhaps this is because there is a wider recognition that, in the end, it is the Japanese who will suffer from this continued denial of their past. The balance of world power is swinging inexorably to Asia, following the path of economic growth that the Japanese themselves pioneered in their remarkable postwar recovery. But as long as Japan denies its own history, it will also deny itself the key role that it should play as the region’s most mature and sophisticated economy.
