Negotiating War Legacies and Postwar Democracy in Japan

Abstract

This article surveys the ongoing struggles over legacies of World War II within Japan's postwar history. As in Europe, different types of responsibility for the wartime past manifested themselves in changing international and domestic contexts and continuously redefined the relationships between victors, perpetrators of crimes, survivors, and a growing population for whom the war — and increasingly the postwar past — registered only as memory. Under the Allied occupation, Japan's criminal past loomed large in war crimes trials, political reforms, and intellectual discourse but contributed mightily to the deep divisions that have characterized Japan's political landscape ever since. Struggles over Japan's militarist past animated these domestic political divisions through the 1970s over questions of history textbooks, commemorations of the war dead, social relations, as well as Japan's compromised position within Cold War Asia. Globalisation processes beginning in the 1980s brought Japan's colonial past to the fore as questions of individual compensation and state reconciliation began to connect formerly domestic struggles over the legacies of the war to the international politics of historical memory. Both the chronology and the political uses of the wartime past followed a different pattern from Europe, not only because of stark differences between the wars themselves but more critically because of the historical developments that kept Asia as a region divided for decades.

Notes

1. The Economist 336/7927 (12 August 1995), pp.31–4.

2. To be fair, The Economist ran a shorter article on 3 June 1995 explaining the party‐political manoeuvring behind the challenge to the Diet Resolution and also suggests that the difference to Germany originates in part in the American occupation of Japan. “The Symbols of Japan Past,” The Economist 335/7917 (3 June 1995), p.31.

3. John Dower, War Without Mercy (New York: Pantheon, 1986), p.190.

4. Kobayashi Yoshinori, Shin gomanizumu sengen supesharu sensoron (Sensōron and other manga) (Tokyo: Gentosha, 1998). An illuminating discussion of the ‘history’ theme in contemporary Japanese comic books is Tessa Morris‐Suzuki, The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History (London: Verso), 2005.

5. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997). See particularly Part III “The Forgotten Holocaust: The Second Rape”. A German analogue to this was Ralph Giordano, Die zweite Schuld, oder: Von der Last Deutscher zu sein [The Second Guilt: About the Burden of being German] (Hamburg: Rasch und Röhring Verlag, 1987).

6. Katō Shūichi, “Sensō sekinin no ukekata: Doitsu to nihon. Bukuletto ikiru,” Bukuletto ikiru (Tokyo: Adobanteiji saabaa, 1993), pp.8–9.

7. Mochida Yukio, “Sensō sekinin to sengo sekinin.” Kamogawa bukuletto (Kyoto: Kamogawa shuppan, 1994).

8. Nishio Kanji, Kotonaru higeki: Nihon to Doitsu (Tokyo: Bungei shunjūsha, 1994).

9. Oda Makoto, “Rikaishi yurusuna: sengo gojūnen, rekishi ni bunkiten ni tatte” Wadatsumi no koe 99 (1994).

10. Chalmers Johnson in John Junkerman's documentary “The Japanese Peace Constitution,” 2005.

11. Carol Gluck, “The ‘Long Postwar’: Japan and Germany in Common and in Contrast” in Ernestine Schlant and J.Thomas Rimer (eds), Legacies and Ambiguities: Postwar Fiction and Culture in West Germany and Japan (Washington, DC and Baltimore, MD: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press and The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp.63–78.

12. Dower, Embracing Defeat (New York: Norton, 1999), pp.45–53.

13. Dower (note 12), p.23.

14. Hosaka Masayasu. “Ichioku sōzange to iū katarushisu: Higashikuni naikaku,” in Haisen zengo no Nihonjin (Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 1985). Also, Dower (note 12), p.496.

15. Yoshimi Yoshiaki, “Senryōki Nihon no minshū ishiki: Sensō sekinin o megutte,” Shisō (January 1992), p.74.

16. For a full list of censored topics, see Dower (note 12), p.411.

17. An excellent source for the diverse writings and interpretations on war responsibility is Okuma Nobuyuki, Sensō sekininron (Tokyo: Yuijinsha, 1948).

18. Nakano Yoshio, “Jikaku to kōdō nitsuite,” Jinbutsu hyōron (October 1946). Cited in Nobuyuki (note 17), pp.138–42.

19. Yokota Kisaburō, “Sensō hanzai to kokusai hō no kakumei,” Chūō kōron (January 1946), pp.31–40.

20. Dower (note 12), p.449.

21. An excellent analytical overview of the trials can be found in Dower (note 12), chap. 15.

22. Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–45, and the American Cover‐Up (London: Rutledge, 1994).

23. Kimura Gorō, letter to the editor, Yomiuri shinbun (13 December 1948).

24. Quoted in Dower (note 12), p.451.

25. This argument is most forcefully made in John Dower, “The Useful War,” in Japan in War and Peace (New York: The New Press, 1993), pp.9–32.

26. Dower (note 25), p.11.

27. Dower (note 12), p.23.

28. Quoted in Dower, “Occupied Japan and the Cold War in Asia,” in Japan in War and Peace (note 25), p.184.

29. Dower (note 28), pp.184–5.

30. Okamoto Kōichi, “Imaginary Settings: Sino‐Japanese–U.S. Relations during the Occupation Years” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2000), p.183.

31. Kōichi (note 30), p.198.

32. Lawrence Olson, Japan in Postwar Asia (New York: Praeger, 1970), p.100.

33. Monica Braw, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Voluntary Silence,” in Laura Hein and Mark Selden (eds), Living With the Bomb (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), pp.155–72.

34. James Orr, The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Hawaii University Press, 2001), p.52.

35. From Hidankyō's founding documents, quoted in Orr (note 34), p.143.

36. Sebastian Conrad, Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Nation: Geschichtsschreibung in Westdeutschland und Japan, 1945–1960 (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), pp.196–9.

37. See especially Rekishigaku Kenkyūkai (ed.), The History of the Pacific War (Taiheiyō sensō), 5 vols (Tokyo: Tōyō Keizai shinposha, 1953–4).

38. Conrad (note 36), pp.199–202.

39. Hayashi Fusao, Daitō‐a sensō kōteiron (Tokyo: Chūō kōron, 1964).

40. A good overview of these trials is Nozaki Ysohiko and Inokuchi Hiromitsu, “Japanese Education, Nationalism, and Ienaga Saburō's Textbook Lawsuits,” in Laura Hein and Mark Selden, Censoring History (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2000), pp.96–126.

41. Gavan McCormack, “The Japanese Movement to ‘Correct’ History” in Laura Hein and Mark Selden, Censoring History (note 40), pp.53–73.

42. For information on the trial and verdict, see http://www1.jca.apc.org/vaww‐net‐japan/english/womenstribunal2000/whatstribunal.html