Japan and World War II: The Legacy Six Decades Later

George Wilson, Scott O'Bryan, and Gregory Kasza
September 2005

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Contents

 

George Wilson: The Long Postwar Period

Scott O'Bryan: Remembering and Forgetting

Gregory Kasza: Japan's Security Policy

George Wilson: Concluding Thoughts

George Wilson: The Long Postwar Period

Sixty years after an event as large as the Pacific War has to provide some sort of perspective. One way is to ask whether the perspective is different now--sixty years later--than it was fifty years later or twenty years later. In 1965, Japan was in the midst of rapid change--to put it very mildly. It was about to become the second largest economy in the world, its balance of trade was about to switch to entirely positive, its favorable positive holdings of hard currency were about to skyrocket, the Tokyo Olympics had just occurred, and Japan was back on the map after two decades of shadow existence. In 2005, pretty much the same as in 1995, Japan is a slow paced place where change is not occurring as rapidly as it has in the past.

The adoption of a constitution, which opened Japan to various kinds of liberal freedoms in a full way for the first time, even though it was adopted under a military occupation from overseas, led to an immense range of changes that are still playing out. [See the Japan Digest "Lessons on the Japanese Constitution" (Parisi 2002) for more information.]

The postwar period is somehow treatable as a whole even though the material circumstances of Japan , Japanese culture, and much about the Japanese people has changed. One of the outgrowths of that is Japan still does not have a foreign policy. I am well aware that policies have changed in ways that are important. Yet, when was the last time that Japan , the second largest economic power in the world, acted fully independently?

Scott O'Bryan: Remembering and Forgetting

A victim's consciousness--certainly most broadly defined-- is a lever by which most people have made critiques of Japanese forms of memory, accountability, and war responsibility. There is the very well-known chrysanthemum taboo that surrounds the whole question of imperial role in war. In 1990, the mayor of Nagasaki was shot after he proposed the possibility of needing to reopen discussion of Hirohito's role. In regard to imperialism, separate from World War II , some public officials suggested that Japanese imperialism was a glorious imperialism as opposed to the "bad kind." More recently, the botching of the comfort women issue by the Japanese government--and this is a botching that has gone on across different administrations, cabinets, and prime-ministerships in Japan during the 1990's--was defined by the inability of the government to pay public money, and rather, using a private consortium to pay reparations to women who had been pressed into sexual slavery.

Despite all of this there has also been a lot to applaud. Especially as these negative remembrances are talked about in the U.S. press and the English language press, it is very easy to think that there is not very much discussion at all. There are deniers about certain parts of Japanese war responsibility. There are certainly those on the more conservative, or right wing position. But to say that there is some kind of social taboo against any discussion just defies the historical record.

Iris Chang, despite the many good aspects of her book on the Nanjing massacres (Chang 1997), does not help when she suggests that people in Japan risk their careers if they say anything about Japanese war responsibilities. There are many people whose careers have gone on just fine in academia, in public life, and in business who very obviously and publicly talked about war responsibility. I think she overstates the newness of what she is saying in some ways, but Chang's book does a great service, especially in English language historiography, about what happened in Nanjing.

What is amazing is what has not been talked about--the Study Group on the Nanjing Massacre, consisting of some 20 Japanese historians, journalists, lawyers, and others, formed in 1984 in response to another attempt to deny that the massacre happened. It has published at least 12 volumes exclusively discussing the Nanjing Massacre. There have been vigorous right-wing attempts to downplay Japanese war atrocities and the like in the 1990's. Every time those sorts of voices have been heard more vigorously, there have been constituencies that speak to them in Japan. [See the Japan Digest " Examining the Japanese History Textbook Controversies" (Masalski 2001) for more information.] Japan has this ongoing debate. We should not simply view Japanese public opinion as monolithic and one-sided.

There have been a host of changes in Japanese memorialization of the war in museum settings that are significant. In 2000, Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum reopened. It has existed since the 1970's, but it reopened in a much fuller way and really is a scathing look at what the Imperial Army did to Okinawa during the end of World War II.

Hiroshima itself had one building--famously designed by Kenzo Tange--that stood from the mid-fifties, which was the focal point of much criticism about how the war was remembered. But, in 1994 a whole wing was added on, which helped put the bomb and the war itself in a much more historical perspective. Voices are there that were not there before: a history of the city of Hiroshima, for example, and its role in empire, the history of foreign workers pressed into service in Hiroshima and the ways that Hiroshima acted as a hub in the circulation of peoples in the empire, and the voices of Japanese citizens who were not always in favor of imperial usurpation of space and resources in Hiroshima.

Most recently, there has also been the addition of memorial halls to the victims complete with a Holocaust museum style. Both Nagasaki and Hiroshima have these sorts of memorial halls. And also changes that included a general broadening within the park itself in regards to victim's consciousness, such as understanding that Koreans were victims of the bomb, are also now included in the Hiroshima Park.

Gregory Kasza: Japan's Security Policy

Japan 's foreign economic policies have changed sharply in the last thirty years or so, but, Japan 's security policy has been slower to evolve. Moreover, for various reasons, I do not expect to see drastic change in Japan 's security policy in the near future. Japan 's basic postwar foreign policy should persist for some time.

Nonetheless, there have been a series of small, incremental changes in Japan 's security policy over the last fifteen years that cumulatively may amount to something substantial in the long run.

Japan 's response to the attempted coup against Corazon Aquino's democratic government in the Philippines in 1989 is a useful baseline for measuring subsequent changes. Japan did nothing to assist Mrs. Aquino when some three-thousand Philippine troops seized several bases in and around Manila. The Japanese government did not even offer verbal support. Japan was a complete non-factor in this political crisis that had occurred right there in its neighborhood. In the end, the United States flew a couple of war planes over the bases that had been seized by the plotters, thus ending the crisis. How does Japan 's foreign policy behavior since compare to its passivity in 1989?

In 1991, the Japanese government paid $13 billion to the United States to defray costs of the Gulf War. This was only money, not troops. But Japan had not supported the U.S. intervention in Vietnam in that precise fashion, and the efforts by Ozawa Ichiro to win approval for this payment required some difficult political deals that cost him his post as Secretary General of the Liberal Democratic Party.

In 1992, Japan passed the Peacekeeping Operation Bill, the so-called PKO Bill. This authorized Japan to participate in United Nations peacekeeping operations worldwide, which it did for the first time in helping to supervise an election in Cambodia over 1992-93. Subsequently, Japan has sent troops elsewhere in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East on U.N peacekeeping missions. Nothing like this had happened for over forty years.

In 1997, Japan intervened as a mediator to help stabilize the fragile democracy that had been forged in Cambodia some four years earlier. Japan had not played such a vital role in the internal affairs of another country since World War II. This was also the first time that Japan cut off economic aid to influence the internal affairs of a foreign country without the United States having ordered it to do so.

Also in 1997, Japan intervened to aid its neighbors during the Asian financial crisis. Japan first proposed that an Asian Monetary Fund be created to provide relief. When United States killed this idea, the Japanese set up a unilateral $30 billion relief fund for borrowing by the Asian states.

Japan has also become active in promoting other multilateral political and economic institutions in Asia. Throughout the 1990s and continuing to this day, Japan has been campaigning for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, though thus far its efforts have been thwarted, partly by opposition from China.

In 1998, North Korea fired a missile over Japan. Japan responded by temporarily cutting off economic aid as well as the repatriation of funds from Koreans living in Japan. Shortly after the incident, the Japanese government decided to develop its own surveillance satellite system for military purposes. The Japanese also announced that they would participate with the United States in plans to build a theater missile defense system in Japan. This is something that the Japanese government had declared to be inconsistent with the peace constitution as recently as 1990.

In 2003, Japan 's naval self-defense forces chased a North Korean spy ship into Chinese waters and sunk it. This was Japan 's first unilateral, purely military action since World War II. Much more recently, the Japanese Navy chased an unidentified submarine out of Japanese waters, which proved to be a Chinese vessel.

In late 2003, Japan sent 500 troops to Iraq. To be sure, they are formally in non-combat roles, but this too was a novel step. There is no U.N. sponsorship for the Iraq invasion, so this move went beyond the scope of the Peacekeeping Operation Bill of 1992. It involved Japan , for the first time in the postwar period in an action of collective self defense.

Finally, all of these steps have been accompanied by a more open public discussion of security policy in Japan than we have witnessed since the end of the war. Major politicians now advocate that Japan should become a "normal" country, that is, one free to use military force in world affairs.

None of these steps considered individually involves a drastic change in Japan 's international role. But, together they add up to a significant shift in security policy. Every one of them reflects a more assertive role for Japan in world affairs.

George Wilson: Concluding Thoughts

You don't see two things you might very well expect to see in a country that went through a vast war over a long period of time and now has been in a postwar condition for an even longer time: constitutional revision and a rapprochement with Asia. It could be that the current constitution, written during the American occupation and written in English, is a perfect document, which suits the Japanese people now and forever more. I doubt it. So, something is going to happen and it does not have to be in regard to article 9-- the anti-war clause--but it might help if the anti-war clause were clarified.

The second point about Japan and Asia seems to me to be absolutely fundamental. Japan has made no rapprochement with Asia. Is Japan an Asian country or culture? If you ask the Japanese they will say yes. Geography suggests it, history suggests it, and a tremendously long set of associations suggest it, but they don't act that way. It's quite true that Asia is paranoid about Japan. I think there may be some good reason for that, but it takes two to tango and it will be necessary for everyone to work toward remedying this situation. But, if Japan is to resume an Asian present and future, something will have to happen in its relationship to the rest of the continent. As of now, it is an island culture sitting out in the ocean, which relates in many ways to North America and Europe better than to some places in Asia.

References

Chang, Iris. 1997. The Rape of Nanking : The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. New York , NY : BasicBooks.

Parisi, Lynn. 2002. "Lessons on the Japanese Constitution." NationalClearinghouse for U.S.-Japan Studies. Full text at http://www.indiana.edu/~japan/Digests/const.html

Masalski, Kathleen Woods.2001. " Examining the Japanese History Textbook Controversies." National Clearinghouse for U.S.-Japan Studies. http://www.indiana.edu/~japan/Digests/textbook.html

Atomic Bomb Museums

Hiroshima Peace Site: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.
http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/index_e2.html

Kids Peace Station-Hiroshima http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/kids/KPSH_E/top_e.html

Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum http://www1.city.nagasaki.nagasaki.jp/na-bomb/museum/museume01.html