What has made it fester
Japanese vlogger Hayato Kato’s 1.9 million followers are used to his funny clips about exploring China, where he has been living for several years.
But on 26 July he surprised them with a sombre one.
“I just watched a movie about the Nanjing Massacre,” he said, referring to the Japanese army’s six-week rampage through Nanjing in late 1937, which, by some estimates, killed more than 300,000 civilians and Chinese soldiers. Around 20,000 women were reportedly raped.
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For China, Japan’s brutal military campaign and occupation are among the darkest chapters of its past – and the massacre in Nanjing, then the capital, an even deeper wound.
What has made it fester is the belief that Japan has never fully owned up to its atrocities in places it occupied – not just China, but also Korea, what was then Malaya, Philippines, Indonesia. One of the most painful points of contention involves “comfort women” – the approximately 200,000 women who were raped and forced to work in Japanese military brothels. To this day, the survivors are still fighting for an apology and compensation.
Of course in a sense Japan can’t really own up, because the people of contemporary Japan aren’t the perpetrators. Once enough time has passed it becomes impossible to get justice in the sense of accountability from the people responsible.
Human history must be full of such horrors, that can never be apologized for or forgiven because the perps are long gone.
Further evidence of the preposterous nature of the god hypothesis.
Even if the perpetrators are dead, the victims (and their descendants) still deserve some recognition from those who inherited power and prestige from the original abusers. History must be told truthfully, or else it’s properly called ‘fiction’.
It’s ironic, in a way, that Germany is about the only major perpetrator of crimes against humanity to really grapple with that history and be honest about what happened. I can think of genocides and atrocities from all over the world (including, of course, the US) that rarely get so much as a muted mutter from their current governments.
I have no issue with touting the good stuff–it’s important to remember the advances we’ve made. But you can’t even properly appreciate the struggles to become better without understanding all the horrors that came before.
But surely a country can recognize the atrocities it committed, and if there are still people suffering from the effects of those atrocities do something to compensate them.
It’s often horribly complicated, of course. Israel/Palestine comes to mind—it strikes me that both, or rather all, sides have legitimate grievances, and there’s no easy way to sort them out—but surely the path to peace starts with each side recognizing that they’ve done horrible things.
I dunno, thought. I’m a mess of idealism and pessimism. Does it even make sense to be an idealistic pessimist, or a pessimistic idealist?
I stayed once in Malaya (in 1958) with an Indian merchant, who had been sent by the underground Indian National Army to pre-WW2 Japan to do an officer training course in the Japanese Army. Then Pearl Harbour and its consequences prevented him from returning to India, and at war’s end he was captured and did time in a British POW camp. But he told an interesting story. Prior to the fall of Singapore, he and all those he knew believed the European colonial powers to be unbeatable. But the Japanese invasion and occupation of a great part of the Europeans’ SE Asian empires, broke their mystique. After the Japanese occupations were over, the returning European colonial powers found that they could not simply take up again where the Japanese had so discourteously forced them to leave off. Pretty soon, they were fighting colonial wars from what became Indonesia to what became West Pakistan, and northwards to what became Korea. And in no time, the ‘neo-colonialist’ regimes they tried to install as gap-fillers in their previous colonies were facing a multitude of local armies of national-liberation, and their efforts to counter them in bloody wars such as Vietnam (5 million dead, maybe 15 million injured) did much to create such movements as the 1960s counterculture in the West.
My Indian merchant friend also told me an interesting, yet gob-smacking story. As a mere trainee, he had to wait until everyone else had departed before he was allowed to use the onsen, or hot-spring bath. One night, he was in there alone, and at peace with the world, when he was interrupted by a group of young men, who were most apologetic for intruding on his allocated time in the hot spring. But he assured them that they were welcome. (He was fluent in Japanese.)
One of them offered him a cigarette, and lit it for him. He straight away became alarmed. The cigarette bore the Emperor’s monogram, and to be caught in possession of anything carrying that symbol was a capital offence.! The donor straight away saw his distress, and assured him that it was perfectly legitimate. The Emperor had granted them all an audience that afternoon, and had personally given each one of them the honour of a whole packet of his monogrammed cigarettes.
So my friend most courteously enquired: what had they had done to deserve such an honour? Their spokesman replied: “We are kamikaze pilots. We leave on our mission at first light tomorrow.” Which they all did, and he never saw any of them again.
To that generation of Japanese, to be defeated and taken prisoner in war was a massive disgrace, and justification for committing suicide (seppuku or harakiri.) Consequently, they treated those they had taken prisoner with near-total contempt. Also for that reason, General MacArthur urged the US forces post-Hiroshima to do nothing that might endanger the life of the Emperor, because without him in overall control, post-WW2 Japan would become ungovernable.
And in due course, the Emperor commanded that all fighting must cease. Which it did. Overnight. Not all Japanese were happy about it, but none of them disobeyed, save those incommunicado and in remote locations. Which IMHO only goes to show that one should never assume that his or her own reality is anyone else’s.
Freemage & What a Maroon, yes. I didn’t mean to say we should shrug it off, just expressing frustration with how life and time work.
I get the frustration. I know we’re not supposed to forget history, but sometimes I think more harm is done by remembering history.
In the early nineties of the last century, Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro made formal apologies to a variety of Asian nations for Japan’s having conducted wars of aggression in East and Southeast Asia, and for the brutal manner in which these wars were waged.
There are, however, strong nationalist forces in Japan, and in particular the influence of families of soldiers who died in that war is strong over the Liberal-Democratic Party, which won back power after Hosokawa’s coalition, which was difficult to hold together, and fell.
I am in no way seeking to excuse the atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese, which were appalling, but, all too often, Westerners refuse to recognise the atrocities that they themselves perpetrated in their colonial wars. The Dutch take over of Bali is a case in point, as well as its attempt to take back Indonesia after the Japanese defeat; British behaviour after the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and, subsequently, the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, not to mention the destruction of the economy of India as a whole and the numerous famines under British rule; the genocide perpetrated by the Germans in Namibia, Belgian behaviour in the Congo, American behaviour in the Philippines (about which Mark Twain was so eloquent) and American behaviour towards the indigenous people of North America… one could go and on.
Japan’s proposal to abolish racial discrimination at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 was not accepted, and this led to increasingly racist ideas about the virtues of the Japanese race within Japan – ideas that certainly persist in certain quarters (as of course they persist elsewhere, as we may see from the activities of the Trump regime). There is a lot of bad faith in Western attitudes towards Japan, and this derives from the fact that the Japanese were the first non-white people to challenge and defeat “white” powers, beginning with Russia (although, of course, they were ultimately defeated in World War II). And, as Omar rightly points out, the Japanese broke the “mystique” of the white powers.
Since Omar mentions kamikaze pilots and gives us a very good story, here is a true story from my first days in Japan, oh, hundreds of years ago, before I could speak Japanese. My wife & I were in a taxi in Tokyo, and the driver asked my wife where her husband was from. From Britain, my wife replied. “Oh,” exclaimed the taxi-driver, “I love the British! You see, I was a kamikaze pilot and we were attacking a British ship and I got shot down. The British fished me out of the ocean and looked after me. I love the British. Driving a taxi in Tokyo is far more dangerous than being a kamikaze pilot!” Indeed, in those days, taxis really did scoot around in Tokyo. They are rather more careful these days, though, still, in the southern city of Fukuoka, taxis dash madly about.
What A Maroon#6
I remember reading a history of Ireland in my teens, and growing more and more enraged as I read. The author (I suspect it was Edmund Curtis) quoted an Irishman as saying: “Irish history is for the English to remember, and the Irish to forget.” I have never forgotten that sentence.
That’s brilliant, Tim.
[…] a comment by Tim Harris on What has made it […]
The trouble is, Maroon, that most of the English not only do not remember, they don’t want to know about the peoples with whom they share their islands. All they know is that the Irish are just a load of trouble, drink too much and are best ignored; that the Welsh are close, unfriendly, and not to be trusted (“Taffy was a Welshman,/ Taffy was a thief,/ Taffy came to my house/ and stole a leg of beef” goes the nursery rhyme), and insist on speaking an incomprehensible language that should have been dead long ago; that the Scots wear kilts, play bagpipes and are tight with money. They have no idea, and take no pride in the fact, that one of the greatest poets of the the European Middle Ages, and of the British Isles, was a Welshman called Dafydd ap Gwilym; they complain – as that parochial little English poet Philip Larkin did – about the wonderful poems in Scots written by Hugh McDiarmid, and pay no attention to the poems of Duncan ban Macintyre or Sorley Maclean who wrote in Scottish Gaelic. They don’t want to know. They don’t want to remember. This, of course, and alas, is not merely an English failing — one finds it everywhere: few Japanese take an interest in Ainu poetry and culture (which was destroyed in the late 19th & early 20th century, as the Japanese government followed advice as to the ways of dealing with “primitive” peoples from an American who had fought in the Indian wars — his name I forget).
Time Harris@11:
If I ever feel like reminding myself why I’m glad the States broke from England, I listen to Sinead O’Connor’s piece on the Irish Potato Famine.
Thank you, Freemage.
But, as Karl Polanyi pointed out, the English people responsible were mostly “decent” people blinded by “science”, that is to say, blinded by what had become economic dogma — that economic matters worked in mysterious ways, and so matters should be left for the economy to somehow magically rectify situations, however
horrible, for everything would come out right in the end. This kind of thing is not only an English failing. It occurs everywhere, and also in the USA, particularly in its interventions in South America (Chile is one example). Nobody is innocent.