|
|||
GLOBAL VIEWPOINT GLOBAL ECONOMIC VIEWPOINT EUROPEAN VIEWPOINT NOBEL LAUREATES |
9/4/01 Herbert P. Bix is author of the controversial best-selling book But Koizumi undercut his opportunity by promising publicly that on the anniversary of the war's end he would visit the Yasukuni Shrine, where the spirits of Japan's war dead, including major and minor (A-, B- and C-class) war criminals, have been enshrined, turned into national deities and designated "heroic spirits'' (eirei). The governments of Korea and China protested. Koizumi's foreign minister and some members of his own party pleaded with him not to make the visit, just as some Germans in 1985 had pleaded with Chancellor Helmut Kohl not to visit Bitburg cemetery where 49 Koizumi said he didn't understand the criticism coming at him from home and abroad because "Japan's prosperity was based on the sacrifice'' of its war dead. Visiting the shrine, he said, was a "natural'' thing for a Japanese to do. Immediately after winning the July 30 election, however, he hedged the issue. And two days before the official Aug. 15 ceremonies marking Japan's surrender in World War II, he paid a quick, early visit to the Shinto shrine, angering all sides. Leftists and liberals charged his act of mourning the dead was not What makes Yasukuni so controversial is its connection to militarism, emperor worship and an emperor-centered view of history. Established in Tokyo in 1869 and later given its name by Hirohito's grandfather Meiji, Yasukuni enshrines and mourns those who died for the emperor. It effaces the distinction between those responsible for the war and its victims, treating all equally in terms of the sacrifice of life offered to the emperor and the state. When U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur abolished State Shinto and disestablished Yasukuni right after World War II, he then had Yet the disputed legacy of the lost war only partly explains why this relic of a discredited political order continues to roil the political Many waves of national self-examination have swept Japan since it lost the Asia-Pacific war. These "debates'' have often changed attitudes and advanced historical understanding on the war. Throughout the occupation period (1945-52) and most of the Cold War (till 1991) Japanese politics rested on the notion that Emperor Hirohito had always been a pacifist, anti-militarist and passive Western-style constitutional monarch, one who had been coerced by "militarists'' into supporting the war but in the end had acted single-handedly and heroically to end it. These myths of the emperor's blamelessness were designed to maintain national unity and contain the psychological damage wrought by defeat and American occupation. By the time Hirohito died in 1989 and the Cold War had ended, Japanese historians were making considerable progress in uncovering and documenting crimes committed by the imperial armed forces, from the Nanjing massacre to the system of "sex slavery.'' Some even were probing the emperor's role in the "holy war.'' School textbooks screened and approved by the Ministry of Education had begun to reflect the fruits of this new scholarship on the war, though not yet critical analysis of the emperor's role. Soon, however, protests from rightists and conservatives alarmed by Japan's increasing international openness could be heard. By the mid-1990s, around the time Japan commemorated the 50th anniversary of the war's end, a backlash against "self-flagellating history'' had begun to set in. Today, a more inward-looking current of nationalist sentiment, whipped up by ideologues who have acquired a foothold among the younger generation, underlies Koizumi's botched visit to the Yasukuni Shrine. It also helps explain why Japan has slowed its progress on textbook reform. Despite criticism from China and South Korea, though not the United States, the Ministry of Education and Science recently approved a deeply flawed "new history'' textbook (with 137 mandated corrections) written by right-wing historians. The swift, overwhelming rejection of the text by Japanese educators has not impeded its sales in the bookstores, however, which suggests how contentious the current moment is. Thus the upcoming anniversary of the U.S.-Japan peace treaty and When signed by Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru at the height of the Cold War on Sept. 8, 1951, the San Francisco Peace Treaty required the Allies to abandon their quest for reparations and war damages from the Japanese government. The peace treaty, craftily drawn up by John Foster Dulles, obliged Japan to acknowledge only minimal war responsibility by accepting the judgments of Allied war crimes tribunals in Tokyo and elsewhere, and to pay the victims of its aggression merely token reparations, and only at the state level. The Soviet Union and India refused to sign; China and the two Koreas were not even invited to attend the peace conference. These American arrangements helped lodge Japan in a permanent Cold War position vis-a-vis its potential friends in Asia. That same day, in return for securing the restoration of its sovereignty and the opportunity to reenter the world community, Yoshida signed a Security Treaty that allowed American bases, facilities and troops on the home islands and on strategic Okinawa to continue. The results have been mixed. The military alliance has helped Japan to prosper and the United States to expand its military hegemony throughout the Pacific, but at the cost of undermining Japan's peace constitution while giving the Pentagon a disproportionate voice in America's Asian policy. The 50th anniversary of these treaties may furnish a last opportunity for Japan's political leaders to confront and end their double standard on the past. They are already stalling on paying reparations to the surviving victims of their war. Now, if they continue to focus on Yasukuni, sanitize their history and avoid the truth about the emperor's war, they risk forfeiting for decades the trust of their closest Asian neighbors, Korea and China. (c) 2001, Global Viewpoint. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate |
||