Like their media mates in the US, who obsessively replayed the collapse of the
twin towers, Japanese TV stations have broadcast and rebroadcast the horrible
images of mushroom clouds billowing first over Hiroshima and then over
Nagasaki. Newspapers likewise have quoted an endless stream of critics,
including pop artist Takashi Murakami, who last week asserted that Japan had
been "castrated" by the atomic bombs.
Please do not misunderstand. In my judgment, the US committed war crimes by
unleashing its new technology of death on Japanese civilians in those cities;
"Little Boy" and "Fat Man" instantly incinerated hundreds of thousands of
innocent people, and exposed hundreds of thousands more to radiation sickness.
However, while morally indefensible, those August bombings followed a series of
historical events that deserve to be debated in both Japan and the United
States.
Before resorting to nukes, the US military already had proven its ability to
crush Japan - to no avail, politically. In the spring of 1945, B-29s dropped a
devastating load of firebombs on urban targets, killing as many as 100,000 in
Tokyo on just one night in March. About the same time, US troops rolled over
Iwo Jima and Okinawa, demonstrating superior force. But instead of
surrendering, Japan responded by sending an even larger number of young pilots
on hopeless, suicide missions.
In addition, Japan had waged a war of aggression in China, committing ghastly
crimes of its own. In Manchuria, the Imperial Army's Unit 731 carried out
secret experiments on live Chinese prisoners, infecting them with various
diseases and then cutting them open to examine the results. And in Nanjing,
Japanese troops went on a rampage, slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent
civilians (perhaps hundreds of thousands, if you believe official Chinese
accounts). Photographs show Japanese soldiers using long swords to chop off the
heads of local men, and bamboo sticks to violate women.
You will not see those gruesome pictures on any TV program or in any newspaper
here in Tokyo. Instead, you will see picture after picture of victims from
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, especially those who somehow managed to survive and
serve as public martyrs (hibakusha). With important exceptions, such as the
Japanese feminists who recently opened a museum dedicated to the Asian "comfort
women" recruited to serve as sex slaves for the Imperial Army, Japanese
opinion-makers tend to view their country as the victim, not the aggressor, in
World War II. And they tend to identify with the hibakusha, sometimes comparing
Hiroshima to Auschwitz.
For good reason, Japan's view of itself as the ultimate war victim irritates
many Chinese and Koreans. Last spring, demonstrations erupted in Shanghai and
Seoul over revised history textbooks that whitewash Japan's wartime behavior,
omitting any mention of comfort women. Chinese activists are planning new
demonstrations for Monday, when Japanese patriots - including, perhaps, Prime
Minister Junichiro Koizumi - make their annual pilgrimage to Yasukuni Shrine to
honor Japan's war dead, including the 14 Class A war criminals enshrined there.
Sadly, those activists cannot expect much support from the United States.
In the past, when it needed a junior partner in an anti-communist alliance in
Asia, the US helped Japan cover up the historical record. American occupation
authorities spared Unit 731 doctors from postwar prosecution in exchange for
valuable information on biological warfare, and - in a fateful decision - also
exempted the Showa emperor, who had been Japan's commander in chief and
political anchor.
More recently, the US Justice Department joined forces with the Japanese
government and private corporations defending themselves against lawsuits
brought by former US prisoners of war who claimed they had been used for forced
labor. The Justice Department said the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951 had
settled all such claims against Japanese interests.
Today, the Bush administration continues to enable Japanese amnesia, albeit
less directly, by conducting its war on terror outside international law. For
example, the doctrine of "preventive war," used by the administration to
justify its 2003 invasion of Iraq, undermines not only the United Nations
charter, but also the moral ground for questioning Japan's 1937 invasion of
China.
In the end, what we have is a conspiracy of silence.
Walter Hatch is an assistant professor of government at Colby College in
Waterville, Maine. He is a visiting scholar this year at the Jackson School of
International Studies at the University of Washington. He is a former Seattle
Times reporter.
