It’s almost as if there’s a pattern
A different style of silencing in a different part of the world –
Sueko Urasaki, 82, who came forward as the “trembling girl” in an image from the Battle of Okinawa, was, according to sources contacted on June 25, visited by a man who made accusatory remarks doubting her story. Urasaki has been avoiding contact with the outside for the past year. There have been other similar incidents involving the individuals who testified to the mass forced suicides in Zamami during the battle. The lasting inheritance of the Battle of Okinawa has become a topic of late, and someone familiar with the effort to suppress the testimonials of survivors raised the alarm bell, saying, “We cannot allow survivors to become hesitant, hindering the lessons to be passed down from the battle.”
That is, Urasaki was photographed by the US military during or after the Battle of Okinawa, and she has been a source of accounts of forced suicides in that battle. I know little or nothing about those forced suicides, and now want to know more. It’s all part of the giant notebook of Appalling Things Humans Do.
An unknown man showed up at her door one day to intimidate her.
Terrified, she began refusing visitors and refrained from going outside. Her relatives reflected, “Reliving the Battle of Okinawa was painful. She felt that the man’s intention was to prevent her from spreading her story.”
There were also incidents of people trying to suppress stories about the Battle of Okinawa in the past as well. Harumi Miyagi, 70, an Okinawan women’s history researcher who compiled her mother’s notes about the compulsory suicides in Zamami, has received hate mail, threatening phone calls and unwanted visitors to her home.
Miyagi’s book was used as evidence when Japanese commanding officers from the battle filed a lawsuit against author Kenzaburo Oe and Iwanami Publishing for his descriptions of the compulsory suicides detailed in his book, Okinawa Notes, supporting their claim that, “They had given no such order.” Miyagi did not intend her writing to be supportive of the officers’ case, and released a new edition of her book that indicated “military orders” and the “compulsory nature” of the suicides.
So she received a lot of intimidation too, as did others.
In September of 2007, when a citizens committee was held to demand that the Japanese government retract their decision to downplay the Japanese military’s role in mass suicides, a survivor of the suicides in Zamami was visited at home by two men clad entirely in black who demanded to know “Were you really there?” The survivor reflected, “I was unable to speak,” but the fear stuck with them. They said of that time, “They meant to scare me to keep me silent. I have not forgiven them, but I refrained from making the incident public so as not to further incite them.”
But the war ended 75 years ago. The people responsible for the mass suicides are all or mostly gone. Why are people defending them with menaces now?
Well. Why are people defending Confederate generals with menaces now?
There’s a lot of evidence that Japan has an effort going on to re-write the history of their conduct during WWII that the Daughters of the Confederacy tried to re-write the true nature of the Civil War. As always, it’s stoked by a combination of nationalism and conservativism, by people who would really like to not believe that granddad was a piece of shit in human form.
It’s been true all along I think. The suicide of Yukio Mishima was one milestone.
There is a very unpleasant right-wing in Japan, (I have lived here for nearly 50 years) who, like those Serbs who deny the massacres of Muslims in Bosnia & elsewhere, deny Japanese atrocities in China and elsewhere when they know full well those atrocities occurred, and had they been living at the time would have welcomed them and, had they been able to, participated gleefully in them or cheerfully supported them. It is not a specifically Japanese failing: it seems to be common those everywhere who suffer from chauvinism.
And Mishima is a writer for whom I have an absolute loathing. He was a sadistic narcissist. I have never been able to get through the short story in which he lovingly recounts the suicide of an army lieutenant & his wife after the ni-ni-roku incident in the thirties (a kind of literary dry-run for his own suicide), nor, after the delighted description of the torture and killing of a kitten by a group of boys, ‘The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea’. I was once invited to the Kabuki-za, in the programme of which there was a short kabuki play by Mishima, in which a samurai who was the enemy of some household was captured and tied to an external pillar of the house, and every so often a woman from the house (a different one each time) would come out and stab him, not too seriously, until he eventually, lingeringly, he died. Mishima was putting the audience into position of voyeurs (like Edward II’s wife at the long-lingered-out death of the younger Despenser, who was first hanged – but cut down while still alive – then tied to a ladder and had his genitals cut off and thrown into a fire before him, and then was killed by having his entrails torn out, while all the time, apparently, Isabella ate sweetmeats). I wanted to walk out, and still reproach myself for not doing so, but it would have disturbed rows of cheerfully munching (you can eat as you watch at the Kabuki-za) members of the audience, mostly elderly women. And I cannot forgive him for getting for involving the silly boys of the right-wing Shield Society in his suicide. His lover, Morita (whose semen was found in Mishima’s stomach in the autopsy – it was also a lovers’ suicide in good traditional fashion), was so blinded with tears at Mishima’s pain that he couldn’t deliver the coup-de-grace properly and added to Mishima’s pain, and finally one of the other boys did it. And then Morita killed himself – again agonising seppuku, and his head was struck off by the same boy who had struck Mishima’s head off. All the boys were in tears – they had been seduced into a fantasy of nobility, and it wasn’t noble at all.
Yes, that’s what I meant. The similarity to the grotesque defense of Confederate generals struck me. Also there’s Trump’s pardoning of war criminals…
Decades ago, there was a ruffle when it was exposed that standardized Japanese high school history courses would ‘run out of time’ at the end of one semester, and start again the next. Leaving a gap between the invasion of Manchuria and the bombing of Hiroshima.
More recent histories, that have exposed the Rape of Nanking, have been suppressed or discounted by vast swathes of Japanese intellectuals.
The Japanese fascists cultivated an enormous sense of cultural and racial supremacy linked to Japanese nationalism. ‘Subject peoples,’ like the Koreans, Chinese…and Okinawans, were regarded as subhuman. These influences have not been abated.
Running out of time is also not unique to the Japanese. Apparently history teachers routinely “run out of time” before they can cover Vietnam, because the kid’s parents can remember it, and have strong opinions. Science teachers all over the country “run out of time” before they can get to evolution (which should be taught early in the semester, since Biology requires it to be fully comprehensible). And my history teachers “ran out of time” right about WWII. Oops, sorry, big interesting thing that happened, important in understanding world events today, but, well, just not important enough. We had to spend too long on [insert some much more trivial event here] or we could have gotten to it.
In response to John the Drunkard. I do not think it was ‘vast swathes’ of Japanese intellectuals who suppressed or discounted the Nanking Massacre. Certainly a number of nationalists, many of whom could barely be called ‘intellectuals’, did (and do). Modern Japan had the misfortune to be re-born as a modern nation at the height of Western imperialism and racism, and was one of the only Asian nations never to be made a colony. In 1919, Japan proposed a ‘racial equality’ clause to be included in the Treaty of Versailles. This was turned down by Anglo-Saxondom – the British because of the Empire, the Australians because of the ‘White Australia’ policy, and the USA for obvious reasons (which included of course Woodrow Wilson’s appallingly racist beliefs). The Japanese certainly perpetrated terrible atrocities before and during the Second World War, particularly in China, and behaved badly wherever they went – a great mistake & misfortune, I think, for they came as new masters when they could have come as liberators: but one of the consequences of Japan’s invasions was the collapse, in Asia and subsequently elsewhere, of Western colonialism, whose own atrocities, which continued well after the Second War when they sought to recover their colonies, the ‘civilising’ Westerners chose, and choose, to forget – the Vietnam War, as well as the massacres throughout Indonesia in the sixties, aided & abetted by the USA, Australia & the UK, constituting an important part of the aftermath of colonialism. In March of this year, the Dutch finally apologised for massacres of Indonesians in 1947 when they were trying to claw back their colonies, and paid reparations to families whose ancestors has been murdered by Dutch troops.
There is a great deal of bad faith in the continued Western criticism of Japan’s behaviour, and it derives from the fact that the Japanese were the first to defeat a white West nation decisively (the Russo-Japanese war), and then defeated, tellingly though temporarily, various Western nations in colonial Asia.
Regarding history textbooks, etc, I suspect you will find little in British textbooks about British behaviour in Kenya during the Mau-Mau uprising – in 2011 the Foreign Office agreed to release a great number of carefully and illegally hidden documents concerning torture and massacre in the attempt to put down the uprising, and in mid 2013 the government agreed to pay £19.9 million in compensation to over 5,000 claimants who had suffered abuse during the Mau Mau Rebellion. Until 2015, British tax-payers were still paying off government debts incurred as a result of ‘reparations’ made to British slave-owners after the abolition of slavery – there had been of course no reparations made to the slaves themselves.
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