History 280D: The Bomb, the Bombers, and the Bombed

Professor Diane Clemens

Hiroshima: A Critical Reconstruction

Michael Hurt

May 15, 1997

Flashpoint

Hiroshima was incinerated by a nuclear fireball on August 6, 1945 at 8:16 am Hiroshima time. The explosion came from a uranium fission gun type bomb nicknamed “Little Boy,” with a yield of 12,500 tons of TNT.[1] Official sources like the 1946 Strategic Bombing Survey estimate between seventy and eighty thousand people were killed instantly.[2] Sources in Japan place the death toll around 100,000, with 140,000 dead by the end of 1945. In comparison, for those killed in the Nagasaki blast range around the number 35,000.

To the present day popular misconceptions surrounding the dropping of the atomic bomb abound. The 1946 Strategic Bombing Survey concluded:

It cannot be said...that the atomic bomb convinced the leaders who effected the peace of the necessity of surrender. The decision to seek ways and means to terminate the war, influenced in part by knowledge of the low sate of popular morale, had taken place in May 1945 by the Supreme War Guidance Council.[3]

Military leaders at the time questioned not only the necessity of dropping the bomb on Hiroshima, but its moral implications as well. Significantly, the commanders of the Army Air Force, the Navy, and the Army felt the dropping of the bomb immoral in light of the fact that the Japanese were already defeated, and had been clearly making overtures towards surrender for months before August. The combined Joint Chiefs of Staff, both British and American, urged a clarification of surrender terms that the Japanese (indeed, the Emperor himself) had stated they would require in order to lay down their arms, a clarification to which no one was opposed, in principle. Indeed, this guarantee was offered when the Japanese actually did finally surrender. Even the most die-hard of the hawks, Major General Curtis Lemay (who was characterized by fellow commander Brigadier General Bonner Fellers as the perpetrator of “one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings on non-combatants in all history” for his firebombings of Tokyo) minced no words about what he thought of the atomic bomb’s role in bringing the war to a close: “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb.”[4] Indeed, Russian entry and postwar diplomacy diplomatic relations were central issues, looming large in the minds of Truman and his hawkish, calculating closest advisor, James Byrnes, as the day of Russian entry drew closer. However, to military leaders like Dwight Eisenhower (who expressed that he “disliked seeing the United States take the lead in introducing something into war something as horrible and destructive as this new weapon was described to be...”[5]), the bomb was akin to chemical and biological weapons, and these were men who had been trained according to more traditional standards of warfare. The killing of non-combatants, if anything, was unprofessional and dishonorable. Former President Richard Nixon, recalling a conversation with General Douglas MacArthur, made this clear: “MacArthur, you see, was a soldier. He believed in using force only against military targets, and that is why the nuclear thing turned him off, which I think speaks well of him.”[6]

Popular conceptions of the military overlook the fact that “military culture” is often far less hawkish than the civilian leaders who control them, these civilian leaders often having little understanding of professional codes of conduct governing what is considered acceptable methods of waging war, while lacking the exposure to harsh reality that death and mass killing that military leaders possess. Even Hitler is theorized to have abhorred the use of gas in military operations because of a bad mustard gas experience in World War I. Obviously, this did not deter him from using Zyklon B gas to exterminate the Jews; although not informed by moral qualms per se, his strategic decisions seem to have been influenced by personal experience. Navy Admiral Leahy’s objections, however, were much more firmly based in a code of professional moral conduct: “I was not taught to make war in that fashion...and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”[7] More than an indictment of the military, the use of the atomic bomb on civilian populations is damning of the values which everyday citizens possess, who have no real idea of what it means to kill, and even less what it means to kill on a grand scale:

...the culture which set the terms of reference for Harry Truman - and especially James Byrnes - obviously did not include ethical constraints sufficient to give serious pause to their decision-making. They drew their ideas and vision - good and bad - from the culture, ethics, morality we all imbibe.[8]

With this, it is important to understand the nature of “bureaucratic and organizational dynamics” when considering any theories that the bomb was the mere natural extension of a hungry military power structure. This is true in the present as well. Before the Gulf War, President Bush and a small group of advisors pushed through the decision to go to war against the counsel of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the State Department, and the Defense Department.[9] Indeed, General Colin Powell’s refusal to “complete his mission” and attempt to kill Saddam Hussein was a source of surprise and scandal for the American media and public. It did not fit the popular image of the warrior-general. It did not fit into the set of standards possessed by the public, and the collective surprise comes from the sudden realization of this fact.

This is the reason many Americans cannot deal with the bomb, besides the fact that what most Americans understand about the atomic bomb - on both sides of the morality issue - is deeply based on myth and distorted fact. The ethical questions which we, as Americans, must ask of ourselves are too difficult, but at least there is an explanation, even if there is no true justification. The motivation for American engagement with the enemy, indeed even the construction of an enemy in the first place, came from a Japanese attack, and much of the anger in which American excesses occurred was largely a reaction to not only Japan’s perceived “treachery,” but actual extreme and excessive brutality.

For the Japanese, however, wartime actions took place in the context of a feeling of justification for rule over Asia, as the inherent right and destiny of a superior race and culture. There can be no equivocation of this with the motivations of the United States, no matter what occasional instances of brutality took place. During “heat of battle,” as goes the common cliché, excesses are inevitable. This is a reasonable expectation, as the greater process in which war crimes take place is one of organized death and destruction. This is the argument used by the Japanese to explain the Rape of Nanjing - the Imperial Army, after weeks of prolonged and bloody fighting, were venting their frustrations - regrettable, but understandable. However, the critical item left out of this historical construction is the fact that ideals of inherent racial superiority were taught to the Japanese from youth, the brutality they displayed was purposely cultivated and instilled in the soldiers as a desirable trait, and all of the actions committed by the Kwantung Army took place with the implicit, and often explicit approval of military leaders in Tokyo. That is the difference. Even the German military was not renowned for its brutality on the battlefield - most of Nazi Germany’s infamy stems from the actions undertaken by a relative few, even if it was tacitly (alas, some would now say actively) approved by the majority. Examples used in arguments which try to equivocate all military training by stating that military establishments want to create the same type of soldiers, and implicitly condone the same means and methods towards winning the war oversimplify the issues. Events such as My Lai are often cited to point out the United States’ own inherent capacity to brutalize, but the equivocation is a false one. The crucial distinction is one of ideology. What Lt. Calley represented to the American people was an aberration against most people’s (including some of the soldiers with the Lieutenant) set of moral standards. Most telling is the fact that the rape and killing in the village of My Lai were stopped by a helicopter gunner who leveled his weapon at a superior officer and ordered him to “cease and desist.” This is quite a distinction from the Japanese military structure, which not only tolerated cruel acts of torture, rape, and murder from its soldiers, but actively condoned it. Such behavior was not an departure from commonly-held values, but rather it was standard, accepted practice; it was the norm, and not an aberration. The “three alls” slogan which guided the actions of Japanese soldiers in Nanjing is but one example of this: “kill all, burn all, destroy all” was more than just an empty battle cry; it was standard procedure.[10]

But it is not just war crimes as such that are the focus of this paper. It is the conflict between what such cruel acts represent to most countries in the Pacific Rim, versus how they are represented in Japan itself. What is missing from the Japanese end is a critical exploration of what made these barbarous acts of ritualized violence possible in the first place. The tenets of Japanese wartime ideology remain largely unexamined, and the rest of Asia still fears a resurgence. If Japan cannot deal with its past, what will happen to its future? This is the question the world asks about Germany, but there has been so much symbolic atonement that the question has lost its urgency. However, in the case of Japan, the question remains: Is Japanese wartime ideology really dead, or is it just lying dormant? Related to this question is the fact that many in Asia look at the history of Japan as one of a people congenitally predisposed to expansion and invasion. Countries like China, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and many Pacific Island nations quite understandably do not trust present-day Japan. Linking Japan’s flawed historical representations of itself in WWII with a disturbing increase in the amount of recent nationalistic posturing and symbolic reassertion of pre-war land claims, Asia is understandably more angry, as well as more nervous.

For Japan, August 6, 1945 has become the day when it became a martyr, sacrificed in the flames of a nuclear pyre, quite literally a burnt offering in the name of world peace. It stands as a symbol to the rest of the world of the nuclear horror which awaits us all. While this construction of history is valid and desirable on some levels, one problem remains: Japan has constructed its dominant historical discourse in such a way that does not hold itself accountable for its actions during the Pacific War. In fact, the reconstruction of a history placing Hiroshima at the literal and figurative epicenter of World War II creates a discourse that cannot include any in-depth discussion of the Pacific War, as this decenters the issue uncomfortably for the Japanese people. This is similar to the United States’ inability to reconstruct the Hiroshima narrative after the war, even in light of ample historical evidence that would suggest that American common conceptions of the war are founded on a shaky bed of myths. But equating the two cases of historical amnesia distorts the crucial difference. Japan, an imperialist state with delusions of grandeur arguably far bigger than Nazi Germany’s, justified by ideologies of inherent racial and cultural superiority, began the war of aggression that necessitated the entry of the United States. The fact that America’s use of the atomic bomb on Japan was unequivocally unjustified is, in a crucial way, besides the point - a separate issue. An exchange of apologies for actions taken in the war should not take place on a quid pro quo basis. Rather, it should take place as the result of a sincere, critical rethinking of the histories that presently legitimates each country’s existence as a nation, although this seems unlikely in the near future. What the present analysis will hopefully make clear is that the divergent historical discourses surrounding the bombing of Hiroshima converge in such a way as to make Hiroshima inordinately the focus of the Pacific War, obfuscating the fact that Japan committed a litany of war crimes and atrocities on an horrible scale, in an unprovoked war of domination that was responsible for the deaths of millions of non-combatants on an unprecedented scale, even in comparison to the Nazi Holocaust. This obfuscation allows the belief that Japan should be viewed as a victim in the Pacific War in a general sense (as a result of the bombing of Hiroshima), rather than in a more appropriate limited sense that would allow, or even force Japan to claim the full gamut of responsibility for its actions in World War II, even as it fully acknowledges the human tragedy of mass civilian bombing and its effects on the Japanese people.

As the temporal distance between then and now increases, so does the malleability of the historical discourses about the meaning of Hiroshima and the atomic bomb. Interestingly, moral indignation over the bombing of Hiroshima overshadows Nagasaki, which is arguably more of a “war crime” than is Hiroshima. Even historians who would attempt to justify the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima would be hard-pressed to offer a convincing justification for the second atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Even with an explanation that the atomic bomb was significant because it was a “first,” the fact that the civilian bombing of Tokyo (which may seem to hold a more important position as a “first” - the first mass bombing aimed at the civilian population ) is left almost entirely out of the discourse again points the fact that a great deal is being ignored by a discourse ostensibly having to do with the unethical nature of bombing civilian populations. However, why is “The Night Tokyo Burned,”[11] when a number of civilians comparable to the number initially killed in Hiroshima lost their loves to the bombs of the B-29s, generally left out of this type of discourse? What is significant is that the Tokyo bombing marks a change in United States strategy from a policy of “precision” tactical bombing to one making civilians themselves the target. The Americans were frustrated with the results of high altitude bombings runs that never seemed to destroy their targets; indeed, out of twenty-two raids on Japanese industrial targets, only one factory had been destroyed, with a loss of over 102 B-29s.[12] General Curtis Lemay was responsible for the revamping of targeting policy, but he still met with a significant amount of objection to bombing civilian populations. Many people were rightly resisting the moral shift that must occur with the decision to commit acts of immorality on the magnitude then being contemplated. However, the justification to the XXI Bomber Command neatly reconstructed the Japanese citizen as fair game:

“These operations are not conducted as terror raids against the civilian population. The Japanese economy depends heavily on home industries carried on in its cities close to major factory areas. By destroying these feeder industries, the flow of vital parts could be curtailed and war production disorganized.”[13]

With the redefinition of the Japanese civilian as a legitimate military target, almost any action was justifiable on these grounds. Indeed, in making the decision for using the weapon against Japan, the Interim Committee - set up to make recommendations to the president on the atomic issue - consciously made the decision to target civilians even as they claimed that they were limiting themselves to military targets. The redefinition of “civilian” as “military” was clear in their guidelines for a selecting targets. It would be a “vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.”[14] Targeting planners now could have some justification for the indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations with the explicit intent of destroying it - people were no more than cogs in the war machine, and a legitimate target for obliteration. That is, anything and everything became an object worth destroying in the name of winning the war.

What occurred was a significant moral shift, an ethical slide so slight that the policymakers barely felt it. The Interim Committee, in laying out the guidelines for the selection of the atomic bomb by the Targeting Committee, stated that the purpose of an atomic bomb drop on a civilian population would be “...to make a profound psychological impression on as many inhabitants as possible.”[15] This moral shift occurred well before the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima on August 9th; there had been precedent. Hiroshima did not seem to mark a “first” in terms of a moral/ethical question, and it was not really even a matter of scale, as some estimates of the total death toll from the Tokyo firebombings claimed that between 84,000 and 124,000 civilians died in those two long nights,[16] in comparison to estimates between 80,000 and 100,000 for the Hiroshima bombing, and between 35,000 and 60,000 in Nagasaki.[17] The Tokyo firebombings cannot seem to compete with the “specialness” of Hiroshima.

Might it have something to do with the fact that the sensibilities of the nuclear age have affected the way all of us looks back on Hiroshima and its historical meaning? It is significant that in present-day terminology, the Tokyo firebombings are considered “conventional.” It reflects something about warfare that has subtly altered the meaning of warfare forever. It reflects the fact that mass death and civilian body counts have become an integral part of warfare, something that cannot be avoided, and that has to be factored into a concept of “acceptable losses.” When Japan bombed Shanghai in 1937, the world was outraged. The image of a half-burned baby crying among the ruins of a bombed train station shocked the world.

[18] The reactions to this was indicative of the fact that civilian bombing as wartime policy, as begun by Japan with the bombing of Chinese cities in 1937, was condemned as a moral aberration, a reprehensible act. The critical process was the gradual slide into the “barbarism” for which the Allies had previously condemned Germany and Japan. In June 1938, the Senate denounced the Japan’s “inhuman bombing of civilian populations” because it was a “crime against humanity.” Similar statements came out of the League of Nations and Great Britain. However, this would all change when Germany began the incendiary bombing of Germany in 1942. By 1945, the Americans had changed policy as well, finally giving up on “precision” bombing.[19] They started it, but we finished it - with a vengeance.

Hiroshima is the mental marker for the world’s baptism by fire into a new paradigm of fear. This is why the historical moment cum monument that is Hiroshima is so significant in the eyes of the world. Although no more than a shift in method of killing, it was a marked difference in scale. Not in absolute terms, however, for neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki were all that unusual for the scale of killing happening “conventionally” at the time. However, the sheer amount of destructive power which human beings had to wield against others had increased to an unimaginable scale. The real moral slide was not as sudden as popular memory would have us believe. Escalation in the scale of killing had been occurring gradually throughout the war, as the “rise of American air power” increased at what seemed like an exponential rate. Many histories of the Pacific War have tended to create Hiroshima as a climactic final act in a drama of tragedy (or triumph, depending on one’s point of view), and have given Hiroshima too much specific meaning in their historical narratives.

For the United States, it was a calculated decision made for the sake of both America and Japan - it saved “a million lives.” We needed to justify the dropping of the bomb to ourselves, as well as to the world. At the same time, the special status of the bomb as a new, atomic weapon separates it from the relatively “conventional” events surrounding it. Especially as the historical moment recedes further into the mists of time and memory, it is harder to contextualize events such as Hiroshima. Preserving a sense of historical context around an event is much more difficult to do than it is to simply present the event itself. In the United States, the dropping of the bomb is simply the event which ended the war. There is no other context - or if one is offered, it is simply dismissed as “revisionist.” This was the objection many in the conservative power structure had to a fully contextualized exhibit of the Enola Gay. A political cartoon succinctly summed up the conservative political zeitgeist: As a small child and her mother look up at the Enola Gay in the Smithsonian’s toned-down exhibit, the child asks, “Who, what, when, where, & why?” The mother admonishes her, “Please! It’s just something to look at.”[20] Newt Gingrich, expressing a slightly more intricate - but equally dubious - objection to the “revisionists”, explained in a speech to the National Governors’ Association that “The Enola Gay fight was a fight, in effect, over the reassertion by most Americans that they’re sick and tired of being told by some cultural elite that they ought to be ashamed of their country.”[21] Ironically such objections are no different from Japan’s own, and reflect both country’s shared unwillingness to allow Hiroshima to be contextualized by “revisionist” historians. Such reworkings of the past are crucial towards preserving a sense of moral righteousness and national pride in the present. Such reworkings of history are viewed as harmful to the nation and to the people, and the element of truth becomes a secondary issue. The history is never judged on its own terms, but rather on its potential deleterious effects. The United States has a deep interest in believing that the use of the atom bomb on Hiroshima was not only strategically sound, but morally justifiable. To that limited extent, we do answer the “how” and “why” of the bomb question - if perhaps a bit too patly, and with little regard for even the most reasoned historical arguments that happen to fly in the face of popular belief. But the Japanese have the same malady affecting their willingness to critically assess the meaning of the bomb in history.

Despite the fact that Hiroshima and the bomb occupy such a large space in the collective mind of the Japanese people, they themselves rarely consider the question - “Why?” when looking back upon why the bomb was dropped on them. What historical factors could explain what led up to August 6, 1945? Hiroshima is considered only in terms of the event itself, devoid of meaningful historical context. The rest of the world is guilty of the same crime, and the variety of different and specific historiographies about Hiroshima all suffer from the same affliction: Hiroshima is not considered in terms of the history that brought about the event, but instead, of the world that the event engendered. This is not the way we think about Auschwitz, nor the Warsaw Ghetto, nor even the internment of the Japanese-Americans on the West Coast during the War. However, in the process of using Hiroshima as a historical parable with which to warn the world about “things to come,” Japan has used the perpetration of an inhumane act upon itself as a cover with which to obscure its own inhumane deeds. In the same way, the continued justifying and rationalizing elements inherent in America’s discourse about the decision to drop the bomb is the salve, the medicine that keeps our gorge down - and keeps us sane. However, for Japan, the country on the other end of the fission gun, Hiroshima is the shield behind which historical denial and forgetting can and must take place. Japan’s role as the first in Asia to practice civilian bombing (Shanghai, 1937), its actions in the Rape of Nanking, or the forced sexual enslavement of thousands of women are historical elements which deeply threaten Japan’s understanding of itself as a nation and as a “civilized” people. This is the spiritual struggle which Germany was forced to endure, and a journey the Japanese have yet to begin.

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Metaphor and Allegory

Why is it that a critical look at Japan’s history in the Pacific War remains outside the realm of possibility for most? This is not to say that there is not a sizable portion of Japanese who do not look upon their past as critically as most other Asian nations do, but the differences between official Japanese histories of the war continues to raise the figurative hackles of almost all the nations in Asia that are not Japan. The fact that it is even a historical debate whether Japan even started the war, or that use of the term “aggression” is a source of controversy among those who write Japanese textbooks points to a fundamental problem in Japan’s representation of itself to itself. While the more sweeping the generalization about the percentage of a group who subscribe to a certain point of view, the less veritable the claim, it is reasonable to assert that the majority of people in Japan do not assess Japan’s role in the Second World War critically. This does not even speak to a large number of highly vocal, visible, and influential leaders who actively deny that Japan had any fault in the war, and continue to use their power to perpetuate the imperialist, racist ideologies that were taught to them. These are the ideologies that not only justified the war, but helped bring it about in the first place. They are, to the people who still subscribe to them, articles of faith that, if questioned, threaten in a fundamental way the notion of Japanese national identity. Often heard among anti-“revisionist” naysayers is how such histories would be deleterious to any effort to instill a sense of national pride in Japanese youth. How can one construct a national identity based on a politics of shame? Often cited is Germany’s alleged “guilt complex” that partially cripples the nation in that inherent in the German national identity is an overriding sense of guilt and shame in even being German. This is something that Japan, at least on the official level, wants to avoid.[22]

Japan recognizes the important link between education and identity. This is one of the stated reasons why they don’t want to revise - don’t want to make guilt a part of national identity. This brings to mind Ruth Benedict’s flawed, but sometimes useful conceptual model of Japan’s status as a “shame culture” rather than a Western “guilt culture.” When considering the two cases of Japan and Germany, the oversimplified-but-informative nature of this dual model becomes curiously appealing. While not necessarily useful as a predictive or even explanative conceptual model on its own terms, it can still be useful as an informative springboard off of which to launch an inquiry into the mechanisms which mediate the relationship between ideology, history, and nation in Japan.

“A society that inculcates absolute standards of morality and relies on men’s developing a conscience is a guilt culture by definition...” Benedict contends, while “True shame cultures rely on external sanctions for good behavior, not, as true guilt cultures do, on an externalized conviction of sin. Shame is a reaction to other people’s criticism.”[23] When considering the fact that an excessive amount of guilt is viewed as detrimental to the development of healthy Japanese citizens, proud of their nation and culture, the meaning of guilt and shame to Japan does become a matter for deeper consideration.

An important starting point for this analysis, however, comes with an eye to the critiques leveled against the theses contained in Benedict’s work. Not only was the book written with the intent of informing American policy towards Japan after the inevitable defeat, but the conclusion she draws contradicts completely much of her previous work on Japan and its culture. Quoting C. Douglas Lummis’s informative critique of her work, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, he makes the following apt observation.

American anthropology, born out of the study of Indian cultures, had always been the science of a conquering people. It is no accident that the first anthropological study of a large nation-state was of one which the United States had just defeated in war. But there was a new element here: the writer of that study was also an active participant in the conquest.[24]

Lummis’s issue with Benedict was her wild shift of stance from her previous work, Patterns of Culture, in which she had posited and defended the assertion that culture was artificial, learned behavior, and not an irreducible element of national character. The book was written in the same vein in which she wrote Race: Science and Politics, which was an effort to refute the idea that culture is tied up in genes and racial composition - the idea that Japanese were in some way, essentially Japanese.[25] Presumably, her view on the subject of Japanese militarism and national ideology would not have placed the cause of Japan’s wartime aggression and barbaric actions as the natural outcome of an inherent flaw in the Japanese culture itself. In Race: Science and Politics, she demonstrated a clear link between militaristic Japanese ideology of the (then) present as an ideology deeply rooted in the Meiji Restoration (as it is commonly termed), a period in which the military ruling elite effectively took control of the country in order to modernize and industrialize it, and to enable Japan to compete with the West as a powerful, developed nation-state. The elite began “a systemization of the whole society” and the conscious promulgation of a nationalist ideology, the “Meiji ethical system” which would “[legitimize] the new, modernizing capitalist nation-state.”[26] However, in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Benedict’s view had changed.

In The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Benedict offered an explanation of Japanese totalitarian culture as something rooted in the traditional Japanese culture itself, as something distinctively and inherently Japanese. It was a story of a people who exist in a “shame culture,” devoid of an objective moral sense, and governed only by “a complex set of external rules and relationships, which the individual is honor bound to follow.”[27] As an integral part of Japanese culture itself, the Japanese people’s tendency to behave like a herd of sheep would prove useful to a future occupier. Benedict uses an example of a little girl’s garden at home to begin her explanation of the book’s defining metaphors, the chrysanthemum and the sword. She contrasts the wildness found in the mission school’s “plant-as-you-please” garden to the “simulated wildness” found in her garden at home:

This simulated wildness stood to her for the simulated freedom of will in which she had been trained. And all Japan was full of it. Every great half-sunken rock in Japanese garden has been carefully chosen and transported and laid on a hidden platform of small stones. Its placing is carefully calculated in relation to the stream, the house, the shrubs, and the trees. So, too, chrysanthemums are grown in pots and arranged for the annual flower shows all over Japan with each perfect petal separately disposed by the grower’s hand and often held in place by a tiny invisible wire rack inserted in the living flower.[28]

According to Lummis, “The chrysanthemum is...the essence [sic] of everything Benedict holds horrifying in Japanese culture.”[29] What a release from the cultural prison holds for the Japanese is a release from their cultural prison, freeing the Japanese to be their “natural” selves. Here again, her premises seem to contradict themselves. But her agenda is clear: “Chrysanthemums can be beautiful without wire racks and such drastic pruning.”[30] And, as Benedict wants us to believe, so can people. At this point, the sword metaphor becomes a crucial part of Benedict’s argument.

What the sword represents, in a complex way, is Japan’s assumption of responsibility for its itself. Speaking of the responsibility one assumes when changing the situation from one of “human beings fixed rigidly on a rack, a wire passing through each soul,”[31] to one of liberation and the concomitant responsibility which comes with it. Benedict is obviously talking about the consciousness of post-war Japan, as mitigated by “traditional” value systems.[32] Here again, it is worthwhile to quote Benedict at length:

In this transition to a greater psychic freedom, the Japanese have certain traditional virtues which can help to keep them on an even keel. One of these is that self-responsibility which they phrase as their accountability for “the rust of my body,” - that figure of speech which identifies one’s body with a sword. As the wearer of a sword is responsible for its shining brilliancy, so each man must accept responsibility for the outcome of his acts. He must acknowledge and accept all natural consequences of his weakness, his lack of persistence, his ineffectualness. Self-responsibility is far more drastically interpreted in Japan than in free America. In this sense, the Japanese sword becomes, not a symbol of aggression, but a simile of ideal and self-responsible man...Today the Japanese have proposed to “lay aside the sword” in the Western sense. In their Japanese sense, they have an abiding strength in their concern with keeping an inner sword free from the rust which always threatens it. In their Japanese sense, they have an abiding strength in their concern with keeping an inner sword free from the rust which threatens it. In their phraseology of virtue the sword is a symbol they can keep in a freer and more peaceful world.[33]

The value of Benedict’s analyses on their own terms continues to be questionable, and the predictive power of the claims she made in 1946, as now, this was and still is dubious. But Ruth Benedict was before all else, a gifted writer and poet, much more talented as such than as an anthropologist or policymaker; so it is not surprising that the last three sentences from the above quotation are still hauntingly relevant to present-day Japan, even if the way her words are employed in this analysis may not be used in the way Benedict had intended. Keeping her concepts of the chrysanthemum and sword concepts in mind is useful to do as we segue into a discussion of Japanese responsibility, and begin an exploration of what ideology the Japanese have to be responsible for. Although her analysis suffers from a fundamental flaw, that she doesn’t see that “To a very large degree, what [she] extracted out of Japanese society was what the Meiji planners and ideologues put into it...It was an orderly and consistent pattern of values because it had been carefully made that way by its fabricators.”[34] Japan’s weirdness cannot be defined in terms of culture, but in nationalistic ideologies. The sword symbol, “an odd traditional virtue,” however, holds redeeming value for her. Japan has indeed put aside the sword in Benedict’s sense of the word - power and responsibility go hand in hand - Japan relinquishes both. One wonders whether a Japan responsible for its own defense - a Japan that is allowed to rearm itself - could be trusted to once again wield a sword, if it would properly assume the responsibility this act entails. This is the unanswerable question that occupies continues to vex Asia countries, as well as the rest of the world. Ruth Benedict’s words, with all their problematics, still speak across the decades, and have a renewed relevance as Japan continues, as all countries do, to reconstruct itself.

As Japan positions the Hiroshima bomb drop as the defining historical moment of the Second World War, the explosion itself is inordinately a focus of attention as the world pauses every year to ponder that day in history. Indeed, when considering the history of the Pacific War in general, the fact that the spectre of Hiroshima looms above all else is scarcely surprising. Indeed, what is more spectacular, what is more fitting an end for this narrative of war than the final, spectacular explosion, the violent climax that offers a final resolution? All that preceded this moment in the plot becomes secondary, peripheral. It is mere buildup for the satisfying climax; indeed, a better ending could scarcely have been written. In light of such momentous events, it is easy to forget how one got there in the first place.

Still, Hiroshima functions well as a symbol of the end of a horrible war, and as the perverse culmination of all the things about humanity’s entire history of war that brings our brutality into sharp relief - organized mass slaughter, especially via civilian bombing. On the scale of world history, the efficiency of Auschwitz and the bombing of Hiroshima stand out as moments in time that define the inhumane aspects of our character all too clearly. On this level, the parables function well. However, when comparing ways in which the historical actors who perpetrated these “crimes” are represented, it is easy to see that respective representations of the historical moments which they inhabit are constructed in radically different ways. In considering the existence of the death camp, this historical parable has been constructed in such a way as to make us, as human beings, wonder how and why such events could come to pass, and what kind of people could participate in such a systematic, brutal chain of events. On another level, it is also a space in which Germany has chosen to engage itself in critical self-evaluation, along with a degree of atonement. Significant was one act of atonement, when Willy Brandt, during an official visit as chancellor of West Germany to Poland in 1971, won the praise and respect of the world by kneeling before a monument built to the memory of Polish victims of the Nazis.[35]

However, this type of atonement cannot occur, even on the individual level, if there is no questioning of how Japan constructs its narrative regarding the atomic bomb and World War II. The reason for this in the United States is fairly clear; the United States has not come to terms with the fact that its dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima was, at the very least, morally questionable.

However, this coming to terms is even more complex in Japan, as the context is completely different. What this essay does not do is equivocate levels of moral culpability. To some extent, at least, America was fighting “the good war,” a just war, even with the moral ambiguities of its actions as a nation in dropping the bomb. However, Japan is responsible for beginning the war in the first place. This is a crucial distinction to remember. Although this is the distinction behind which follows the reactionary line of argument that goes, “They started it, and got what they deserved,” this is not what is being invoked here. It is only relevant to the extent that this is the crucial way Japan must remember and consider Hiroshima, as well as its historical import.

The problematic aspect of most Japanese historical representations of itself is the one that centers on its victimization. In The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Japan and Germany, Ian Buruma writes:

The history of the war, or indeed any history, is indeed not what the Hiroshima spirit is about. This is why Auschwitz is the only comparison officially condoned. Anything else is too controversial, too much a part of the “flow of history.” The plan to build an Auschwitz memorial in a small town between Hiroshima and Kure was proposed in the late 1980s by the mayor of Kure. The mayor of Hiroshima thought it was a good idea. And the pacifist citizens’ groups were not against it either, but they insisted that a memorial to the Nanking Massacre should form a part of such an enterprise. The plan was quietly dropped.[36]

However, the crucial difference between Auschwitz and Hiroshima is the fact that, no matter what the argument, the bombing was, in some extended way, a response to Japanese aggression. Auschwitz victims were just that - completely innocent victims. No argument can be made that the Germans had any reason at all to kill Jews - there is no point of controversy as to whether genocide is moral. However, the crucial difference in the case of the Japanese is that American actions were a response to Japanese actions in the first place. We were at war; and it was the Japanese who, in 1937 began the process of redefinition of the civilian as an enemy target, even though we would eventually not be able to resist the moral slippage into that kind of barbarism ourselves.

Ian Buruma traveled to Okunojima, a tiny Japanese island where fluffy white bunnies, descendants of animals left over from laboratory experiments for what was the biggest toxic gas factory in the Japanese Empire. Murakami Hatsuichi is the one curator for the Okunojima Toxic Gas Museum, which was created out of the funds of surviving workers of the factory in an effort to “pass on the historical truth to future generations.” The government still refuses to acknowledge that the plant ever existed, for it would not only open a sensitive line of questioning having to do with illegal war activities and evil intentions, but also make them liable to pay compensation for the workers, as well as to the families of over 80,000 Chinese allegedly killed by the chemical weapons this factory produced.[37] When Buruma asked Murakami what he thought about the Hiroshima Peace Museum, which has often been criticized for its enshrinement of Japanese victimhood, he simply stated:

At the Hiroshima museum it is easy to feel victimized...but we must realize that we were aggressors too. We were educated to fight for our country. We made toxic gas for our country. We lived to fight the war. To win the war was our only goal... Look...when you hit another man, and hit him and kick him, he will hit and kick back. One side will win. How will this be remembered? Do we recall that we were kicked, or that we started the kicking ourselves? Without considering this question, we cannot have peace.[38]

This is the course of inquiry which a meaningful understanding of Japan during wartime must follow. Hiroshima’s place in history must be decentered, and contextualized in historical terms. Japan must being to deal with the ideologies that once justified their rampage across Asia - they must begin to deal with its identity as an oppressor.

The modern art museum in Hiroshima is full of works expressing the horror, sorrow, and pain. However, noticeably absent are any works on anything but Hiroshima itself. A noticeable omission was the work of a recognized artist, Kazuki Yasuo, whose works revolve around the paintings of Japanese POWs in Siberia. But they do not “indulge in self-pity,” but rather work on a slightly more complex level, subtly posing an uncomfortable challenge to conventional wisdom Japan’s martyrdom. The motivation behind Kazuki’s work, however, is quite simple. On the way to a Siberian POW camp, Kazuki saw a corpse soaked in blood and gore. It was the body of a Japanese soldier who had been lynched by an enraged Chinese mob. In his art, he compares the “red corpse” to the “black corpses” motif found in artwork about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He says:

The story of the black bodies...has been told and re-told in these past twenty years. Hiroshima and Auschwitz have become the symbols of World War II, the deaths of these particular innocents symbolizing the general cruelty of war. The black corpses made the Japanese feel that they were the main victims of the war. In unison they shouted “No more Hiroshimas!” It seemed almost as though there had been war apart from the dropping of the A-bomb. A deeper insight into he real nature of war, and the only true basis for the anti-war movement, must come, not from the black corpses, but from the red one.[39]

Indeed, Japan must learn from the rage that drove Chinese peasants to kill the first Japanese they could get their hands on. For the purposes of a movement truly dedicated to pacifism, recognition of the actions that brought about the final result are the key. In 1987, a group of peace activists petitioned the city to incorporate the history of Japanese aggression into the Memorial, a symbol ostensibly representing world peace and pacifism. This petition for an “Aggressors’ Corner was started by a group of junior high school students from Osaka who wanted to see more than just the grotesque curios the bomb left behind: bottles melted from the heat, torn bits of clothing, shadows left on solid objects, created by the initial flash. Their demands were an official recognition of the fact that many of the Koreans killed by the bomb had been brought to Japan as slave laborers, they wanted to see some context. The director of the Peace Museum, Kawamoto Yoshitaka, rejected their request.

We couldn’t have such a thing here. The aggressors were in Tokyo. Our only aim is to show what happened on August 6, 1945....You see, they come here and tell me that Japanese committed war crimes, but they don’t know what they’re talking about. They just repeat what their left-wing teachers say...You see, this museum was not really intended to be a museum. It was built by survivors as a place of prayer for the victims and for world peace. Mankind must build a better world. That is why Hiroshima must persist...We must think of human solidarity and world peace. Otherwise we just end up arguing about history.[40]

But that is exactly the point.

Interlude: The Master’s Apprentice

There are ample historical lessons to be learned from Japan. As much as Germany is often used as a model study of state ideological control, the magnitude of that former Nazi regime’s ideological hold on its populace pales in comparison to that possessed by Imperial Japan. As stated earlier, many of Japan’s economic and educational reforms were informed by Prussian (Hozumi Yatsuka, one of the most influential creators of the “family state ideology” during the 1880s and 1890s, had been educated in Germany)[41] models, but Japan was an apprentice who possessed the ability to surpass its master.

Even the Japanese national anthem, the kimigayo, was deeply influenced by the Prussian military tradition. Although influenced by a Western tradition in form, the anthem was still Japanese in content and meaning. Originally composed in 1880 by Hiromori Hayashi from an old collection of Japanese poems, a German composer working at the Japanese Ministry of Navy added a certain militaristic pomp and circumstance that would characterize much of Japanese war songs. Sung as marching troops pass in review, with the Japanese national flag raised high, while huge crowds yell “Banzai!” (10,000 years) - this was typical fascist pomp and circumstance aimed at creating a feeling of unity and fervent pride in the nation.[42] Superficially, this is exactly the sort of grandiose, nationalistic ritual practiced by the Germans - troops passing in review, raising their arms in the Nazi salute, yelling “Sieg, Heil! Heil, Hitler!” - but the different strains of ideology are clear. While the new Third Reich was alleged to have a life-span of 5,000 years, Nazi soldiers pledged their allegiance to Hitler, the man. In fact, it is unclear what the Third Reich would have been without Hitler at the reins. This sort of thinking is most likely what led to two assassination attempts on Hitler’s life - the Third Reich being his vision, without him, it would likely crumble. However, the shout “Banzai,” means “Ten Thousand Years!” of long life to the Empire, via allegiance to the Emperor. Swearing allegiance to the empire meant allegiance to the state. Emperors were but the representation of the state. The man would change, but the state would endure.

In Germany, like Japan, there was a reconsolidation of authority from the Führer on down, a redistribution of loyalties towards the state, via Hitler. However, under the Meiji Constitution, since the Emperor was reconstructed as both the secular and religious symbol of authority, at the same time a divine figure descended from the founder the Japanese people, Emperor Jimmu, and the leader of the state, he was the “Sovereign Leader,” and anyone and everyone in the power structure under him possessed the mandate of heaven.[43] The other major difference the extent to which each was a proactive leader; in the case of the Emperor, he was more of a state justification of authority rather than an actual architect of state policy.

Hitler’s influence as the controlling political figure in the Nazi state was great, and Germany’s systems of indoctrination and the extent of the German state’s ideological control were considerable, but they were not boundless. Nationalist youth organizations wielded control over the undeveloped mind throughout childhood. However, this control was never absolute, nor permanently established. Indeed, just as the ideological control of Hitler’s regime even began to gain momentum, the Nazi state was already deeply engaged in war, without having had the considerable time with which to fundamentally reconstruct the social relations in society, as Japan had. Helmut Kohl made reference to the “blessing of being born late.”[44]

The crucial difference between Japan and Germany was that the Hitler Youth and other similar bodies existed outside of the influence of the school, which remained separate and distinct from Hitler’s totalitarian control. The 1936 Law on the Hitler Youth contained the proviso that Hitler’s control did not extend “without prejudice to the parental home and the schools.” Of course, the school system did not stand inviolate against Hitler’s powerful influence, but it not recreated into the complete arm of state control that was the Japanese Ministry of Education.

Some significant changes, however, took place during Hitler’s attempt to “reorganize” the school system according to its designs:

Corporal punishment was reintroduced; parent and pupil participation was abolished; the introduction of the ‘Führer’ principle bolstered the power of head teachers at the expense of the rest; and much time was wasted with a politicized morning assembly and in observing the regime’s self-celebratory calendar. Inevitably, some teachers patrolled the school corridors in Party uniform, harassing anyone who was not quick enough with their ‘Heil Hitler,’ and generally taking it upon themselves to disseminate the ‘spirit of National Socialism’ in the school concerned.[45]

As Hitler consolidated his power against that of Reich Minister for Education and Science Bernard Rust’s, who “succeeded in curtailing the influence of the Hitler Youth within schools,” structurally, the school increasingly resembled the Japanese model. Head teachers and Hitler Youth leaders used corporal punishment and intimidation to enforce ideological correctness, rituals designed to increase nationalistic pride and loyalty to the state became the norm, and the concept of Führer (leader) began to take on new meaning outside of the persona of Hitler.

However, the overt ideological agenda of the Hitler Youth began to seem distasteful and held little appeal for some of the population, especially among the younger generation. “It had become identified with ideological indoctrination, paramilitary training, and the exploitation of the labour of young people in he service of war.” [46] Even though the resisters to organizations such as the Hitler Youth may not have resisted out of distaste for the ideas promulgated within the Third Reich in general, what seemed to be the problem was its transparent and unsubtle techniques of coercion and control, which seemed stark and unusual because of the fact that they stood out starkly against a backdrop of a previous normality. This was a collective memory the Japanese government had the power to suppress, and to forget the reality of a previous mode of existence. With concern to the youth, the authoritarian establishment had the time in which to reconstruct a new “normality,” to reconstruct the state’s relationship to the individual as something as natural and timeless as Japanese culture itself.

The German state’s web of ideological control over the population was in no way this monolithic, insidious, and effective. On the contrary, groups such as the “Swing Youth,” Edelweiss Pirates,” and other “wild cliques” relished the idea of challenging institutional authority and resisted by listening to banned music, foreign radio stations, and imitating Anglo-American styles and fashions. The Hitler Youth saw this as a challenge to state authority, one which Himmler and Gestapo took seriously. Some youth chose a slightly different path. Many young people from the working classes joined “gangs” or “packs,” and

...had left school at fourteen, were too young for the armed forces, but too mature for the Hitler Youth. They also wanted to spend the wages they earned on the objects of their choice, and not to participate in the sham collectivism of the Hitler Youth whose leadership often came from the social classes above them. [47]

Throughout the war, when nationalist sentiment arising from a desire to preserve the state from the enemy might be imagined to be high, this sort of juvenile delinquency continued to be a problem for the state.

Whatever the exact origins of this fact may indeed be, what seems clear is that the German state had neither the time not power to consolidate itself completely over the minds of its youth. Although the Germans have often been used in historical examples to demonstrate the excesses of state ideological power over institutions, in fact, the German state never came close to Japan’s ability to instill state ideology so unequivocally and completely into the minds of the people. Working in tandem with other state organs, the Japanese Ministry of Education was able to increase its efficacy to the fullest extent possible. Even though “racism replaced the Weimar Republic’s imperfect experiment in political pluralism,” Hitler simply had neither sufficient time, nor the support, to completely establish an “ideology of the elect nation” in such a complete way as did the Japanese.

Japan’s military elite, from the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, however, created a program of indoctrination and control which sharpened and tightened its hold over the minds of generations of people, and the authority of the Ministry of Education was complete. In contrast, the German equivalent was inconsistent in its ideologies and curriculum, and constantly competed for Hitler’s favor against other political suitors. The Japanese, over time, completely restructured the relationship between the subject and the state, and had complete institutional control of this process. Unlike Japan, Nazi Germany had neither the time nor such effective mechanisms with which to carry out its agenda.

The racist ideologies of Nazi Germany, however, took hold within a long-standing tradition of anti-Semitism as an integral part of European, and especially German, culture. Contrary to some popular historical representations of the German people, the growth of these ideologies, with considerable massaging from Hitler, was an outgrowth of what was already there, and not so much the result of a history, ethics, and a whole worldview which had been imposed upon them - or, one could argue - reconstructed for them in such a way that prevented them from realizing that there was any other way besides the Imperial way.[*]

The Importance of History

This is what the Japanese must remember, or be doomed to an ignorance that could become dangerous and misused later. The government continues to reconstruct the past in a dangerous way. Without active recognition of the fact the Japan, as a country and a people, perpetrated some of the worst atrocities in human history, there can be no reconciliation, and offers the rest of Asia little reason to believe that Japan might not turn victimization into a justification for something more nefarious than simply being a passive symbol of world peace. The victim scenario has ample potential to be reworked and subsumed into a different historical narrative. One wonders how secure European nations would be if the recently reunified Germany decided to make claims on territory gained through Nazi invasion in World War II, or claim that the Holocaust was an “exaggeration.” The average Japanese person should be aware of the fact that present-day ideology does not differ all that much from the ideology promulgated in Imperial Japan, especially among some of the more conservative and right-thinking sectors of the population. There should also be some basic knowledge of the ways which ideology and near-blind obedience were created a population that would not only die for, but brutally and indiscriminately maim, murder, torture and rape, all in the name of the Emperor.

Ideology

Precious are my parents that gave me birth,

So that I might serve His Majesty.

-Poem by Sakura Azumao,

frequently quoted by the

Japanese Thought Control Bureau[48]

Ienaga Saburo’s New History of Japan was dangerous history. The Ministry of Education had commissioned Ienaga, an accomplished historian, to write the history textbook for Japanese high schools in 1952. He performed his job too well. The problem was that he covered subjects such as “the Rape of Nanking, germ warfare experiments on prisoners of war, and the conscription of Korean and Chinese women ‘as comfort girls’” in the narrative.[49] After a major shift in public perception of nuclear weapons in the mid 1950s, The Ministry of Education began to demand that Ienaga delete all sections on wartime atrocities. He refused, and after long struggle with the Ministry, began his suit against the government in 1964. On March 16, 1993, the Supreme Court finally ruled that “the government had the right to decide educational content.” The right of the government to exert ideological control over the populace superseded Ienaga’s claim that “the ministry’s review procedure violated his constitutional right to freedom of expression and denied students the freedom of education.” Ienaga’s history was counter to the interests of the state. The government’s interest was in portraying the Japanese state in a positive light. Most telling was the Ministry’s objection to Ienaga’s use of the word “aggression” to describe Japan’s invasion of China.

“Aggression” is a term that contains negative ethical connotations. In the education of the citizens of the next generation it is not desirable to use a term with such negative implications to describe the acts of our own country. Therefore an expression such as “military advance” should be used.”[50]

When Ienaga did win victories in lower court rulings throughout the 1980s, he, the judges involved, as well as the lawyers received numerous death threats as a matter of course. What Ian Buruma claims many Japanese nationalists are defending is not a return to the military state of Imperial Japan, but rather the integrity of Japanese traditional culture from contamination from the West. The “culture” in question is the concept of the family state, whose traditional values have been passed down for hundreds of unbroken generations.[51] The Imperial period, then, is not a source of shame for nationalists, but a time when Japan was in best form, resisting Western imperialism and trying to make an Asia for Asians (under Japanese rule). The attack on Pearl Harbor was not “treachery” from an Imperial/nationalist point of view, but unavoidable in light of the fact that the United States had cut off Japan’s flow of precious mineral goods and was trying to starve Japan out. Japan was fighting a war of liberation for the good of Asia.

But Ienaga was undermining the Ministry of education’s efforts to instill these ideals in the nation’s youth.

His zeal to make people reflect on the past...has strayed a long way from the proper aims of teaching Japanese history, which are to acknowledge the historical achievements of our ancestors, to raise our awareness of being Japanese, and to foster a rich feeling of love for our people.[52]

This kind of ideological strains of thought is an only-slightly diluted version of the old-school Imperial party line - the preservation of traditional Japanese culture from being too caught up with the west, while at the same time fostering a sense of national unity patriotism. This demonstrates how little Japan has learned since the Imperial period about the relationship between education and nationalist goals. Even thought there was some degree of emulation of the Western educational tradition, the Meiji government’s stated purpose was the construction of an education system grounded in the Japanese tradition. The Principles of Education in 1879 stated that:

The core of education lies in the clear teaching of benevolence, responsibility, loyalty, fidelity and in mastering knowledge and the arts so that one can serve the people. This is the basic principle given by our ancestors and national literature which is commonly accepted for the instruction of all, high or low...Although the advantages of Western culture were adopted and resulted in spectacular effects for the moment, once it leads to a tendency to neglect benevolence, responsibility, loyalty, and fidelity and becomes merely a competition to introduce Western manners, there is a fear that in the future no one will know responsibility between the Emperor and his subjects.[53]

The military elite in Japan had taken control of societal reins, and strove uphold this ideal, to construct a militarized society based with the Emperor leading the nation as naturally as a father does his children. This took place outside of the realm of education as well, as the adults of the nations were not indoctrinated under the Imperial education system. In The Pacific War, Ienaga minces no words about this. “The Meiji political systems gagged and blindfolded the populace.” Political repression and censorship became the norm as the government continued in its program to reform the every citizen into an extension of the state.[54]

It was the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education, however, that “dressed Confucian moral precepts in the garb of modern nationalism.” [55] The family-state model of society was promulgated with the intent of redirecting local loyalties towards the central government, symbolized by the Emperor. Each person would be “bound personally and directly to the Japanese government,” as loyalty to one’s parents, teachers, commander, and especially Emperor all took on the same moral/ethical import. One could no more disobey the desires of a superior officer, for example, than one could a one’s father, or the Emperor himself.[56] The morals curriculum began to take on particular importance in the new education system. More and more the vessel of Imperial ideology, the discipline defined the good subject in no uncertain terms. Fundamental to the smooth working of society, the morals curriculum stressed the “natural morality of family life,” which emphasizes which duty played in familial relationships, friendships, and love. The Emperor was regarded as the “ideal patriarchal model for the people,” and it was to him one pledged undying loyalty, and in his name wars would be fought. The Prime Minister at the time, Yamagata Aritomo, said that "education, just like the military, ought to possess an imperial mandate." In times of national need, all Japanese were taught to offer themselves "courageously" to the state, and "thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne."[57]

It was no coincidence that during this period, Imperial Japan began putting into motion its designs on dominating Asia. Indeed, it was out of fear that this "organ" would once again lead to the disease of Japan's rabid nationalism that ethics as a discipline of study was abolished in Japan after the war, and government control over educational materials, especially textbooks, ended. To characterize the importance of ethics education in Japan during the colonial period, I again quote Ian Buruma at length.

This is how such national values as self-sacrifice, military discipline, ancestor worship, and the imperial cult were bred. And as was true in most countries in the first half of the century, military heroes were held up as the cardinal models to follow. Kimigayo, a prayer for the everlasting imperial reign, was sung as the national anthem, and the Rising Sun flag hoisted all over Asia. It was the duty of all Japanese to spring to attention at the very mention of the divine emperor. every Japanese school had a shrine with the emperor's portrait. A speck of dust on the picture and careless hanging were reasons for severe punishment.[58]

Behind the Army, the education system was looked upon as the most important concern of the government. As the Army protected the physical boundaries of the nation, the Ministry of Education defined and preserved the ideological ones. Moreover, the link between military service and the school was crucial to the continued smooth functioning of the Japanese war machine. The education system created pliant subjects, while actual military training turned them into soldiers. The loyalty instilled in the soldiers ran high. Suicide missions and captured Japanese soldiers taking their own lives shocked American sensibilities, as this kind of unlimited dedication was difficult to understand without an idea of the historical context in which such attitudes came to be.

The Japanese were almost blindly obedient. The arbiters of authority were the “petty emperors” who received their orders from their superiors. In this kind of hierarchical structure, decision-making processes were removed from the subordinate, and the societal system was one that necessitated nothing more than the enforcement of a superior’s decisions. It required an adequate system of control. “Actions were judged according to their conformity to external norms, rather than in terms of individual motivation or conscience.” This brings to mind Benedict’s characterization of the “guilt culture.” The only responsibilities and obligations to others were defined in terms of the hierarchical relationship to them. The main social expectation became to do as one was told, especially in the military atmosphere of Imperial Japan at war. “As a result of this lack of personal responsibility, the average Japanese was blindly obedient to persons in authority.”[59] This was the ideal taught in school. In a ritual before the beginning of instruction each day, students were required to swear this oath of allegiance:

One, I will be loyal to the Emperor and dutiful to my parents, and I will become a sincere subject of Japan. Two, I will discipline my mind and train my body, and I will become a powerful member of strong imperial Japan. Three, I will follow the teachings, make efforts in my studies, and make our tombstone shine brightly.”[60]

The subjects in which the bulk of formal ideological training took place were history and morals. Students were specifically instilled with ideology and propaganda to make them better soldiers, and the elimination of creative or individual thinking was crucial to this process. According to historian Toshio Iritani,

Fanatical patriotism and an emotional attachment to achieving the objects of war were encouraged in school texts. Children were told stories of laudable wartime events by their parents and teachers who would often shed tears of emotion in the telling. Teaching materials produced by the army were used to train students mentally and physically.[61]

Ienaga Saburo remembers his own experiences as a child growing up under this system:

I was in elementary school during the most liberal years of the prewar period. Yet through middle school I soaked up jingoistic ideas and never questioned them. When the Manchurian Incident occurred shortly after I entered high school, I was incapable of understanding its real nature. I was shocked to discover classmates who rejected the orthodox views and ideology I had accepted as gospel truth....The latter part of 1932 was the turning point in my own intellectual and spiritual growth. To escape the snares of my “education,” I rejected most of what I had been taught in the public schools. It took another twenty years to overcome the handicap of that early indoctrination and be able to grapple with fundamental questions.[62]

With the increasing militarization of society into strict social relations constructed to seem as natural as familial ties, coupled with ideologies of racial and cultural superiority, Japanese society was reconstructing itself as no other nation had done before in all of history - as a country ready, capable, and eager to expand not only its economic and industrial base, but its territory and people as well. It was via such strict educational and social controls that Japan created not only faithful and unquestioning citizens, but ones righteous and patriotic enough to perform suicide runs in the Emperor’s name, or take pleasure in gang-raping and then disemboweling, from vagina to chin, Chinese women in Nanjing.

In the broader picture, according to Iritani, “Gleichschaltung” is necessary for mobilization of the people behind a national agenda. This belief on an ideology of “similar thought” is essential in order to “overcome the deadlock in the Japanese domestic economy through the use of military force and to secure her Lebensraum through the domination of world markets in her occupied territories. At the time, the majority of Japanese people were convinced of the rightness of these objectives.” The author’s use of that particular German term is apropos, as this was one area where Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan shared a common objective - expansion.[63]

As stated earlier, the Japanese model of the state linked the Emperor and subject together in a direct, natural link, as natural as the bond between mother and daughter, father and son. More than just this, this particular father figure had even more significance as not only the religious head of state, but as a direct descendant of the progenitor of the Japanese people itself. The Emperor being another descendant in the “unbroken line” stemming from the first, Emperor Jimmu, the Emperor was constructed as the corporeal embodiment of Japan and the Japanese people.[64]

This “family state” model of society is crucial to understand in order to grasp the meaning and scope of Imperial ideology’s claim of right to rule over all of Asia. The analogy used to describe the Emperor as the holy father for the people extended far beyond the realm of Japan. This ideology was a central foundation for the Japanese people’s sense of entitlement and even duty to rule over the rest of Asia, and was also a myth central to the Japanese belief in their innate superiority, by virtue of both their divine origin and racial purity.

Although the belief in the superiority of the Japanese people was as insidious and dangerous as Nazi Germany’s, the foundations for this ideology was also deeply based in the myth of a common origin and common destiny. Imperial conceptions of the “new order” of the world are vividly outlines in a 6-volume document bearing a completion date of July 1, 1943 called An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus. 3,127 pages long, the document neatly summarizes the goal of Imperial policy and Japan’s relationship with Asia. Most valuable to historians is the document’s conveyance of a clear conception of the origins and meaning of Japanese racist ideology.

John Dower’s treatment of the document in War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War is probably the best available in the English language, and is one of the most valuable contributions to the present analysis. Dower aptly identifies the “assumptions of permanent hierarchy and inequality among peoples and nations that lay at the heart of what the Japanese really meant by slogans such as ‘Pan-Asianism’ and ‘co-prosperity.’” In other words, Japan would fight on behalf of its Asian compatriots against the ravenous, capitalist West, in the hopes of making a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” but the race at the top of a hierarchical relationship between the Asian races would be the Japanese, by virtue of their divine origin and destiny as a chosen people. Dower identifies a clear relationship between Nazi ideology and Japanese racial thought, but he does not conclude that one influenced the other. In order to best convey the complexity of Dower’s analysis, I quote him at great length:

The overlap between borrowed ideas and indigenous attitudes in Japanese racism can be illustrated by two popular phrases in the ministry report: “blood and soil” and “proper place,” the first a transparently alien expression and the second, on the surface, almost quintessentially “Oriental.” The blood-and-soil rhetoric reflected indebtedness to Nazi sloganeering (the words, in fact, were almost always placed in quotation marks); and the impression of a general affinity with Nazi thought is reinforced by other aspects of the report, such as demands for “living space,” affirmations of a “family-centered” morality transcending bourgeois law, and an emphasis on “organic” relationships, especially in the form of a racially bonded organic community or “Volk.” [The Japanese concept of minzoku is similar. - MH] The fact that the government’s researchers were obviously familiar with Nazi doctrine and sympathetic to it, however, does not necessarily mean that they were decisively influenced by it. They did not, for instance, carry their racial prejudices to formal policies of genocide as their Nazi allies did. Moreover, for concepts such as the family system or the organic community, they were not really beholden to the Nazis at all. Here it is more accurate to speak of conceptual affinities rather than influences.[65]

The distinctively Asian aspect of Japanese racial ideology is the Confucian tradition of “proper place.” What Japanese morals and history textbooks always stressed was the conception of the society as the extension of natural relationships of the family, in which everyone occupied a distinct place in order “to enable all nations and races to assume their proper place in the world, and all peoples to be at peace in their own sphere.”[66] This is the way the Japanese framed their relationship with the rest of Asia. The analogy with the Great Chain of Being in Western thought is clear, but the philosophical origins of the two ways of logically ordering the world are completely different, even if the result is the same.[67]

However, this is not to say that Imperial policy was pro-actively created by documents such as An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus. This was the mere formal iteration of a belief system which had existed for many years. Indeed, the publication in 1931 of a book written with the clear intent in affecting public opinion was Yosuke Matsuoka’s Moving Manchuria and Mongolia, which argued that for the Japanese people, “Manchuria and Mongolia are our lifelines.” Published in 1931, it was a best-seller, and justified Japan as having rights to Manchuria as the result of her victory in the Russo-Japanese war. The Japanese people needed room to expand, and the ruling class wanted to use the land for Japanese agriculture. The rationale was that Japan could only end her economic depression by taking these territories.[68] It was not surprising that the military staged an attack by the Chinese army, giving them the pretense to attack. The Japanese people, held under the strict ideological vise of the government, knew nothing other than what they were fed, and could not help but believe the information fed to them by the government, because divergent views of the incident were non-existent. Because of the government’s control of information and dogma, The Manchurian Incident in 1931 was the crucial point which sparked off the Pacific conflict, and held as much meaning for the Japanese as Pearl Harbor did for Americans. Many people expressed feelings of indignation and rage over the perceived slight against Japan.[69]

Imperial policy instilled in youth the doctrine of Japanese supremacy to not only defend its claims to hegemony, but to instill hatred and loathing towards the people against whom the country was waging war. Going back even earlier than the previous two examples, Ienaga Saburo cites teaching materials which not only exhort children to “guard and maintain the prosperity of the Imperial throne,” but teach them to hate the Chinese as well. In an elementary school ethics class, children were shown pictures which “described in exciting detail how our loyal and brave officers and soldiers drive the pig-tailed Chinks to P’yongyang, keep hammering away at them and finally capture the vile enemy’s positions.” An example of a “war report” was placed on a bulletin board described an average day’s activities:

September 22, 1894. Battle Report. Japanese troops defeat Chinese at P’yongyang and win a great victory. Chinese corpses were piled up high as a mountain. Oh, what a grand triumph. Chinka, Chinka, Chinka, Chinka, so stupid and they stinka.[70]

A Japanese schoolchild in the 1930s who was squeamish about dissecting a frog was sharply admonished: “Why are you crying about one lousy frog? When You grow up you’ll have to kill a hundred, two hundred Chinks.”[71]

It was no different when Japan’s power elite began to prepare the Japanese public for war against the United States. Having had more time to evolve, and having been continuously built upon through the first three decade of the century, Japanese ideology, though essentially the same as it was when it began to take form in the 1890s, was much more highly refined by the time The Way of the Subject was published in August 1941, five months before the outbreak of war between the United States and Japan.

The Way of the Subject was a malleable chunk of ideology, reworkable into diverse situations, and it was the set of defining principle for which the Japanese people were fighting. It was passed out to every member of the military, and was a reference work on the ideology for which they were expected to die. Additionally, it was issued to all schools as a guideline for determining curriculum. It was “a chronicle of the destructive values, exploitative practices, and brutal wars” of the West, an unrelenting polemic proving the West’s inferiority. Early in the war, it offered the quick victories and many successes against the American military as evidence of the weak temperament of Western society; as things turned for the worst for Japan towards the end of the war, it became proof of the brutal and amoral nature of the West, especially after the United States began the practice of mass city bombing.[72]

However, the analysis of education and ideology cannot end at this point, as protracted and lengthy as it may seem. Before moving on to a discussion of other issues, it is necessary to talk about not only the roles which instrumentalist education and ideological means of control played in the minds of the people, but also the motivations which caused common soldiers to commit some of the most heinous acts the world has ever witnessed. This is the crux of the exploration of the education and ideology - their relationship to action.

Cruelties perpetrated in the army, passed down along a hierarchical power structure, eventually found outlet on the battlefield. Although drawing a causal conclusion using inferential logic may seem specious, even the most simple understanding of the mechanisms of the human psyche, coupled with evidence of an overwhelming cruelty on the part of the Japanese military commanders, makes the argument a compelling one. The Japanese military was characterized by the peculiar extent to which ritualized “hazing” and outright torture aimed at subordinates was common practice. Harsh physical punishment and outright torture was the norm in the military, and codified (in the very same General Rules of Military Education that made corporal punishment technically illegal) in subtle-but-clear language: “Love through one’s flesh and blood.” A member of the Japanese military who was beaten over 250 times during period of service puts its succinctly:

The Army existed as an organization to fight with an enemy...In a normal state of mind, one cannot kill people. So the army was a place for brainwashing us to quash dissent. having been subjected to cruel and irrational punishments we were trained to act without thinking in response to orders.[73]

After the Nanking Massacre/Nanking Atrocities, the Japanese government issued a booklet to the soldiers in order to persuade them to practice some restraint, even in warfare. The Psychology of the Battlefield and Spiritual Education was an attempt to tone down the violent tendencies that Japanese militaristic, organizational hierarchies - especially the Army - had created. The soldiers were losing control. The following passage from this booklet speaks volumes about not only the nature of the average soldier in the Japanese military, but about Japan and the societal practice of physical punishment and torture in general. “When brutality against the enemy worsens, it becomes even more cruel...One act of cruelty makes a person interested in even greater cruelty.”[74]

The government was more right than they knew. The Japanese soldiers’ propensity for violence could not be curbed by mere suggestion, or even military ordinances; it was imbedded into the structure of the Japanese military itself, along with the ideologies of inherent superiority that made the believe that a Chinese peasant was not even human.

When one’s own fellow soldiers can be the target of such inhumane cruelty, the status of someone who is not even a soldier, not even Japanese, is becomes clear. The chain of cruelty was passed down along the chain of command, until it reached the bottom - and from there it moved into a new realm - for violence against the “real” enemy - the “chink” or “barbarian” - takes place with no limits - there will be no feeling of remorse or moral compunction. This is the critical point when an education teaching an ideology of superiority and hatred of other groups, along with a system of ritualized torture and cruelty, comes together in a most insidious and devastating manner. Not only were “chinks” not human, they were not even worth the penny that the Japanese grunt was not worth himself.

The brutality among the ranks of the Imperial Army seemed limitless. The draftee was called an issen gorin, which was less than a penny, the cost of a draft notice postcard. In the same way the postcards were, they came in limitless supply and were expendable. Weapons and horse were well-cared for, but “no second-class private was as valuable as an animal.” Cruelty towards subordinates was more than a just a means of control, it was a psychological outlet for the soldiers who received abuse from those superior to themselves. According to Ienaga, the oppression “snowballed as it rolled down the ranks, till all the tension and abuse landed on the recruits. They were the lowest of low; they had no outlet, no one they could mistreat.”[75] However, they did. Anyone who was not in the Imperial Army was fair game. Their only outlet was mistreatment of the enemy. The treatment of recruits was not just the result of harsh techniques for the purposes of training itself, or enforcing discipline; the commanders of men in the Army deliberately practiced and encouraged sadistic practices against the grunts in order to elicit more aggression from them - their fighting spirit. It was believed that enlisted men should hate their officers because it would not only make them respect and fear their superiors, but the treatment would make the grunts fiercer fighters: “Their resentment is often converted into fighting strength. The represses anger of the drill field and camp life explodes in wartime as a bloodthirsty desire to slaughter the enemy.”[76]

But to argue that it was the military system alone that was responsible for such explosions of mass violence among a certain class of Japanese people - battle-weary soldiers in adverse circumstances - would be disingenuous. What happened in the aftermath of the 1923 Kanto Earthquake speaks to the power and danger of Imperial ideology. After a massive earthquake struck Japan in 1923, ordinary Japanese citizens went on man-hunts lasting for days, killing every Korean national they could identify. It was more than just a brief frenzy of uncontrolled violence, or the actions of an angry mob. It was a systematic hunt which lasted for days. Koreans had been brought over from the peninsula for years as forced labor, and occupied the absolute bottom rung on the societal ladder in the eyes of the Japanese (many argue that they still do today). Rumors abounded that the Koreans were spreading fires and trying to take advantage of the chaos by displaying their true, treacherous colors. So over the span of several days after the earthquake, vigilante groups (jukeidan) hunted down and brutally killed any Korean they could identify. Most surprising was the amount of violence and gore the average citizens could inflict and enjoy taking part in. Even compared to the infamous lynchings in the American south, the degree of brutality of which the Japanese were capable goes unparalleled. A Korean who escaped the mayhem reported:

Jikeidan were looking for Koreans day and night. When they captured one, they shouted, “Korean!” Many Japanese rushed to the scene, surrounding the victim. They tied him to a telephone pole, scooped out his eyes, cut off his nose, chopped open his stomach, and pulled out his internal organs. Sometimes they tied a Korean’s neck to a car and dragged him around until he choked to death. They also captured women, grabbed their legs, pulled them in opposite directions, and tore their bodies. The Koreans resisted till the last moment, begging and insisting on their innocence. But the crowd never listened. The Korean women and children were screaming and crying for mercy in vain. The massacre lasted for six days and nights.[77]

As a significant and unique event in Japanese history, one would think that it would occupy some space in the greater historical narrative of Japanese history. Given the fact that Korean-Japanese tensions continue to vex the nation to this day, which makes this incident all the more relevant, it is surprisingly rarely mentioned in educational sources, in fact anywhere at all. The reason may have to with the fact that recognition of this sordid incident would open the doors to many questions about the ideology of the Japanese people and their lack of innocence. The Korean question would open the proverbial floor for all kinds of questions about Japanese ideology, especially since the social status of Koreans today remains unchanged from that of 1923. It speaks to the propensity of the Japanese at the time to brutally kill and maim racialized “others,” and it asks the question “What about the Japanese has not changed over the years?”

The result of ideological indoctrination and the militarization of society was a Japan armed with both the spiritual and material ammunition ready for to struggle to the death. As General Tojo ??? read the declaration of war against the United States in 1941, the words from a classical Japanese poem redone over a military theme strained out of every listening radio in Japan:

Across the sea, corpses soaking in the water;

Across the mountains, corpses heaped upon the grass.

We shall die by the side of our lord.

We shall never look back.[78]

The meaning of the last line can have many interpretations, and I admit to a liberal interpretation here. However, that final line has a haunting quality about it that continues to ring across the decades, and perhaps has new meaning, meaning for the history of a new Japan that does indeed have trouble looking back.

Secret Histories

In this “looking back” the present analysis emphasizes the visuals of the Japanese atrocities, for just as Nazi Germany was forced to look upon the photo representations which burned themselves into the mind of the German people, there should be equal exposure to the shocking images that outraged the world enough to name the “Holocaust” as just such a thing. Images of the “Chinese Holocaust” must balance the graphics that represent Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Chinese historians who invoke the word “Holocaust” do so consciously. Here are Kazuki “red bodies” that must be viewed along with the black ones.

When the word “Holocaust” is invoked, we see German death camps, and in Japan, we see a mushroom cloud. Where are the shocking graphics that communicate the true horror of the event? Such things inform the formative processes of a historical narrative. This makes Schindler’s List a network event, and allows the “holocaust” in Asia to be ignored. Perhaps it also has to do with the fact that all the bodies in the Nanjing Massacre were Asian. The bodies “stacked like matchsticks” in Bergen-Belsen or Auschwitz were definitely European, even if the Jews did occupy a space as racialized “other”. The Japanese were definitely further away than the Jews in terms of racial distance. Perhaps they were so “other” that they existed beyond the Pale of human consideration as the primacy of World War II faded in the collective mind of Americans and Europeans. Then there is the fact that Japanese were more than otherized - they were demonized as well. Maybe it was because of the relatively early demonization of the Japanese that it could be said that we expected nothing more from then. There is no moral shock at watching barbarians prove that they are such. In some ways of thinking, the “Japs” being the embodiment of pure evil anyway, one would ask, “What do you expect?” The United States could identify with the cultured Germans. This is what made us stop and ask ourselves, “Could it happen here?” For the Western occupiers who affected so much of Asia after 1945, the rejoinder to the previous statement would be, “Of course it happened over there.” As Asian countries assert their growing global influence, different historical narratives enter into the fray. As countries like China, Taiwan, and South Korea gain prominence as powerful entities in Asia, they demand the recognition of the validity of their own versions of the narrative that had been previously denied currency.

For the Japanese, the question is how to reconcile the dominant narrative with the critical orientation of the others. In more concrete terms, what is crucial for the Japanese to understand is the fact that their ideology had predisposed them to commit not only indiscriminate murder, but planned mass murder at a large scale. On this point, the moral import of mass murder and ideology for Japan must be clear. Japan was far from an innocent moral defender against Western Imperialism; rather, it was a country ready and willing to exterminate as many people as possible in order to accomplish its goals. In Japan, Chinese lived and worked in forced labor camps, and were used by major organizations such as the Kajima Corporation, a major construction company. Lawsuits from former internees of these camps have begun to be filed recently, bringing the issue of complicity once again to the fore. With language evoking images of black-suited SS officers devoid of emotion, the company’s defense was that it was only “following orders.”[79] True, unlike Germany, the Japanese undertook no form of organized genocide, as the Nazis had, but the ways in which two different ideologies justified the mass slaying of non-combatants was similar in effect. Moreover, the record of history cannot chronicle or quantify the potentiality of a people’s murderous disposition. Judging from the actions of not only the Japanese military, but Japanese civilians as well, the systematic elimination of a class of people for the ideals of national purity does not seem too fantastic a scenario, had there actually been a perceived need to actually eliminate the inhabitants of the countries they conquered. This is not mere conjecture, but grounded in an ample amount of historical evidence pointing to Japan’s increasing willingness to carry out their plans in Asia and the world, by any and all needs necessary.

In terms of mass murder in its purest form, the December 1937 “Rape of Nanjing” exemplified the propensity of the average Japanese soldier to rape, maim, and murder in the most horrible ways imaginable. What marks the incident so heinous in the eyes of the world (especially for China) is not just the scale of the indiscriminate mass murder itself, but the ideology which informed the way it took place. Not only did Japanese troops slaughter 340,000 Chinese civilians[†] in a period of only six weeks (even without the machinery of mass death which the Germans had perfected), but they took perverse pleasure in the acts, the majority of which were marked by not a cold detachment which might suggest a suppression of an inner morality, but by a gleeful, playlike atmosphere in which killing was, quite literally, fun and games.

Words can scarcely describe, and in fact, do not do justice to what pictures can best convey. Japanese troops routinely raped young women in groups, then disemboweled them with swords inserted into the vagina.

[80]

There was no discrimination between age, and in fact, age difference and family ties were often used as elements to sweeten the game. Sons were made to rape their mothers, fathers to rape their daughters, and men were forced to have sex with dead women. Soldiers took extreme pleasure in deflowering young girls and then killing them, or raping nuns. One witness recounts a seeing a nine year-old boy made to rape his 80-year-old grandmother. The soldiers killed them both afterwards, of course.[81] Soldiers played soccer with decapitated heads, and everyone took trophies and many posed for pictures. The most chilling one is a photograph of a soldier smiling at the camera holding the head of one of the many men he has just killed. There is no better image that conveys the horror of the Nanjing Massacre:

There was a much-celebrated competition between two soldiers, Toshiaki Mukai and Iwao Noda, to see who could behead the most Chinese on the way to Nanjing. Mukai won, 105-106. What is most disturbing about this incident is the fact that Japanese back in Tokyo vicariously enjoyed the fun as well. The Tokyo Daily News carried an article about them, reporting their exploits as “combat gains” and “military feats.”[82] The fact that the government viewed this as reading material that would bolster morale back home, without putting the military in a bad light, is particularly odious. From the WWW Memorial Hall of the Victims in the Nanjing Massacre:

Two Japanese officers, Toshiaki Mukai and Iwa Noda, held a competition of beheading Chinese. They denied the accusation as "imagination" but were confronted with the above evidence published in Tokyo Nicinichi Shimbun. They were executed in 1947 in Nanjing.[83][‡]

Kozo Tadokoro, a Japanese soldier who took part in the slayings, in 1971 in a Japanese magazine, said that killing the Chinese was “just like killing pigs...We were on the mainland for quite some time before finding such entertainment. Without entertainment such as this, what else were we supposed to do?”[84]

One of the most damning pieces of evidence against the Japanese and any claim to the moral high ground in terms of the orchestration of mass murder is the fact that the Japanese had been busily conducting biological and chemical weapons research throughout the war, this being the same kind of research that enabled the United States to create its own weapon of mass destruction. As is well known, however, is the fact that the impetus to build an atomic weapon came from the fear that the Germans would get it first. Einstein’s famous letter to Roosevelt was emphasized the gravity of the issue. However, Japan cannot make such a justification for their research into not only chemical and biological weapons, but with their nuclear research as well. What would they have done had they gotten the bomb? An adequate answer to this question comes from a consideration of their motivations for undertaking research in the first place. Also important is consideration of the methods used in biological and chemical weapons research also informs this answer.

The use of live subjects at the infamous Unit 731 facility in Manchuria reflected not only the brutality of the perpetrators, but the ideology which molded their thinking that captured human beings were not worth the sympathy given to even to animals during live vivisection. General Ishii Shiro, explaining why the patients were given no anesthetic, said that "Vivisection should be done under normal circumstances. If we'd used anesthesia, that might have affected the body organs and blood vessels that we were examining. So we couldn't have used anesthetic."

Allowed to live a normal life until he died from throat cancer in 1959, he was but one of the many members of the medical establishment who could rise to prominence and success after the war, because the U.S. Army granted immunity from war crimes prosecution to the doctors in exchange for their research data.[85] As was the case with the Nazi’s wartime experimentation results, methodology was the central ethical question. Prisoners of war and civilians alike were purposely infected with plague, typhoid fever, and hemorraghic fever and then dissected while being restrained and conscious. Research often meant more than just professional involvement with the subject:

“A Unit 731 doctor vivisecting a pregnant girl who had his baby after being raped.”[86]

Japan’s research into weapons of mass death did not take place because of a dedication to the pursuit of science, but with concrete technological implementation in mind. having already been tested and used on the Manchurian population, the Japanese decided to implement this weapon of war in their desperate attempt to hold Okinawa. Loaded onto a submarine and en route to the island, the weapons were destroyed when the ship was sunk.[87] Little is known about Japan’s successful utilization of balloons to bomb the American mainland in 1944. According to a website put together by Nicholas Kristof, a noted journalist on East Asian affairs, the Japanese “launched huge balloons that rode the prevailing winds to the continental United States. Although the American Government censored reports at the time, some 200 balloons landed in Western states, and bombs carried by the balloons killed a woman in Montana and six people in Oregon.” According to Kristof, with the success of the balloon bombing raids, Japanese generals favored the idea of loading the balloons with biological agents for use against the American population. General Hideko Tojo, recently ousted as Prime Minister and the Chief of Staff, who still retained veto authority, stopped the proposal, to the surprise of his associates. “He knew by then that Japan was likely to lose the war, and he feared that biological assaults on the United States would invite retaliation with germ or chemical weapons being developed by America.”[88] Given the circumstances of the war and Japan’s relative inability to defend its sea and airspace. Perhaps this was merely the realistic appraisal of a statesman concerned for the welfare of his country, or perhaps there was more. Tojo was hanged after the war as a war criminal, and this story was never told. However, an even more fascinating instance of this sort has been kept from the eyes of the world.

As recently as two years ago, new evidence has come to light of an even more elaborate plan of biological attack against the United States mainland. This is one of the most fascinating unknown stories of the war, one which further sheds light on the ethical dimensions of Hiroshima and the policy of civilian bombing. “Operation PX” was a Japanese plan to deliver kamikaze planes carrying plague, cholera and other assorted diseases to the American mainland via “underwater aircraft carriers” (the I-400 submarine was capable of holding one to three specially-designed planes inside watertight compartments at deck level). A suicide mission, the disease-infected crew would run ashore carrying the pathogens as well. A joint army/navy plan plagued with technical difficulties, it was first proposed in December 1944, but quickly finalized from the planning stages on March 26, 1945, two weeks after the infamous Tokyo firebombings of the 9th and 10th. Toshimi Mizobuchi, who was an instructor for new recruits in Unit 731, claimed that the submarine would take them to the coast of Southern California, from where they would fly the planes into San Diego and disseminate plague-infected fleas. The target date was to be Sept. 22, 1945.[89] A new Chief of Staff, General Umezu Yoshijiro, canceled the plan, to the intense objection of the other generals present. Even after the slaughter of civilians in Tokyo with the introduction of America’s newest technological innovation, napalm, Umezu reasoned that “if bacteriological warfare is conducted, it will grow from the dimension of war between Japan and America to an endless battle of humanity against bacteria. Japan will earn the derision of the world.”[90] Obviously, Umezo, like his predecessor, considered the war lost, and was thinking forward to postwar Japan, as Japan had already earned the world’s derision; he was concerned about starting something that would not end with political treaties and battles on the field.

While the fact that both plans of attacks on American civilian populations were stopped potentially weakens the argument that Japan had no monopoly on the distaste for targeting civilians, the fact remains that the vast majority of military leaders were in favor of these plans, only to be vetoed by a powerful individual. What the two Chiefs of Staff had in common was an apparent belief I the futility of the war situation, with a concern to concrete consequences - one military, the other having to do with the welfare of postwar Japan. Perhaps both had concerns for their postwar personal welfare as well. Indeed, Tojo was executed, and Umezu died in prison in 1949 with a life sentence hanging over him. While perhaps a worthy parable of an individual’s resistance to Japanese ideology and conformity, it is easy to understand the United States’ additional interest in suppressing this bit of history; besides the need to cover up all evidence of biological weapons research, there was a need to suppress a story which might place a Japanese general in a better moral light than the Americans who carried through the policy of targeting civilians. There is an even more interesting twist, in light of recent “revisionist” history (especially that of Gar Alperovitz’s) which places a lot of blame for Hiroshima and Nagasaki on powerful individuals, namely Harry Truman and his advisor, James Byrnes. As stated earlier, they pushed to the decision for using the bomb past the objections of almost every member of the military staff. Perhaps this says something about the differences between the moral/ethical groundings of the two militaries, and the men who inhabited them.

Signs of the Times

All of the symbols, monuments, and markers that have been enshrine the “Hiroshima spirit” - the memorialization of the bomb - share the same fundamental flaw. The present narrative of history about the bomb is incompatible with any contextualization or critical rethinking of history via the history presented in previous sections of this analysis. Why is Hiroshima the single most important symbolic markers of memory in our time? Of course, Hiroshima was a significant event in world history for a variety of reasons, one of which was that it was the first and one of the only use of atomic weapons on civilians, and many argue that it was the first act of the Cold War. But why the emphasis on just that act? There are countless books about life from ground zero, but what of the pictures taken of the Nanking Massacre? They should resound with the same grave power to convey the chilling reality of limits of inhumanity as do movie reels from Auschwitz and pictures of human bodies piled “like matchsticks” on top of one another. But somehow, these images have been forgotten. The mechanisms behind this are not easy to isolate, but nevertheless are important to explore.

Immediately following the war, Japan’s phenomenology of victimhood had not begun to take shape. According to Iritani, the dominant mood of the public was one of confusion and a feeling of betrayal. Before the war, ideology had determined the right course of action for all. Thinking was not required - obedience to authority had been a virtue. But now, old rhetoric of “the one hundred million moving as one” for the good of the country had suddenly turned into “the collective guilt of one hundred million.” This was the stance of the new Cabinet. The Japanese people were being asked to repent, but the average Japanese placed the burden of blame upon those formerly in power. They had not been in moral error - they had just been performing their individual duties to the best of their ability. A factory worker’s opinion reflected the opinions of most of the lower strata of society:

With which mouth and to whom can you government officials says [sic], “Reflect’ or “Repent?” I ask you with tears in my eyes. Should the suicide squad and the families of the other war dead repent together with the sinful government officials? Reflect on it yourselves.[91]

The common sentiment was that the government had asked for unwavering loyalty and dedication from the government, and the people had delivered. Now that the war was over, the government whose policies had gotten them into the war was placing the blame upon the people and not themselves. This feeling that it had primarily been the government’s responsibility for the war was part of what allowed for the belief that all scores had been settled with the Tokyo trials. Even though feelings on the matter were complex, especially concerning the question of whether the accused were actually criminals, the overriding feeling was that primary responsibility for the war lay with those in power.

This is the stickiest issue to consider when weighing the burden of blame in history. The 1946 “Guide to New Education In Japan” suffered from an acute lack of ability to decide how to deal with this problem. Issued by the Ministry of Education as a teacher’s guide, it preached:

Although the direct cause of Japan being in the condition she is in today is due to the wrong leadership of those in power lately, i.e., people who are now being cross-examined by their own people and the Allied powers as those responsible for the war [in the war crimes trials], it was because he Japanese nation as a whole possessed this weakness. In this sense, the responsibility of the war should be borne by the Japanese nation and they must apologize most humbly to the world for the sins they have committed. [Emphasis added by Orr][92]

However, in the same text, the Ministry contradicted itself:

[T]he government cheated the people concealing the facts and oppress[ing] those who gave criticisms and warnings...it was the militarists and ultranationalists composed of the military clique, rightist reactionaries, fascist thinkers, bureaucrat zaibatsu, etc., who led Japan since about the time of the Manchurian Incident, that drove Japan into desperate war and put its people into the distresses of defeat.[93]

A more enlightened perspective would place the complete stranglehold of the military elite over the populace as beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, possibly even earlier. The question of “responsibility” becomes a complex one considering the fact that the government had exercised complete hegemony over the Japanese collective mind via the ever-present inculcation of ideology, propaganda, and the suppression of dissent and the dissemination of information that contradicted the party line of the state. In this way, in a comparison between Germany and Japan, it would follow that the onus of responsibility would fall more squarely upon the shoulders of the German people for the actions of their nation than it would for the Japanese. This is in keeping with the present analysis, which maintained earlier that the German state, in comparison to the Japanese one, was relatively unable fully instill its ideological principles into the minds of its people, whereas the option for dissent never existed on either an intellectual or corporeal level. Hitler rode the popular zeitgeist into power, and was a reflection of the people whom he led. The militarists in Japan, however, claimed power over an agrarian, relatively politically unsophisticated population and constructed the state from the ground up, according to their wishes.

U.S. military government policy, however, took a different emphasis, one informed by “experts” such as Ruth Benedict, who placed the blind obedience to authority and conformity of the Japanese as an inherent flaw which had to be actively countered. All “militaristic and ultranationalistic ideology” was, of course, prohibited in the new curricula, and a curriculum centered around democratic ideals and individualism was stressed. The goal was to create a “peaceful and responsible citizenry” who could resist unjust authority and prevent the “passive acquiescence” of the people to be exploited.[94]

Emphasis on the civilian government’s helplessness in the light of the military still should not absolve individuals and the national ideals they reflect, in light of the amount of brutality committed by the Japanese in wartime. This is the most difficult question to ask: Where does the responsibility begin and the victimology end? They were brainwashed, but can they be absolved of their actions? Here, the analogy between Japan and a killer who uses the insanity defense is enlightening. How can one punish one who cannot know that what he or she is doing is wrong? As we talk of history and collective memory, however, the analogy breaks down in a crucial way. The difference between an individual and a nation is that for the individual, even though there can be renewal of self, there can be no renewal of self-reference; that is, the identity of the person will always be the same in reference to the historical event. However, a nation and a people is always reconstructing itself and regenerating its self-identity. In this way, the meaning of history and historical events changes over time. This is true of Japan and its understanding of itself in relation to Hiroshima and the rest of the Pacific War.

In most early texts, the emphasis is on the state’s exploitation of power and control over the populace, but during occupation, the United States purposely suppressed information about the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The public knew, of course, about the bombs in general, but the conventional firebombings of Tokyo actually loomed much larger in the collective memory of the people. When immediately after the bombings, the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun published former education minister Hatoyama Ichiro’s critical comment that “the atomic bombing is more against international law than the use of poison gas and is a war crime, the occupation government reprimanded the paper for publishing material questioning American authority - especially in light of the upcoming war trials.[95] Indeed, there was a great deal of moral ambiguity about the United States’ claim that the Japanese were alone in the commission of war crimes - there was a clear motive on the part of the United States to suppress this line of thinking.

It was, however, notably taken up by Justice Radhabinod Pal of India, who categorically dismissed charges that the Japan’s leaders had followed undertaken a conspiracy to commit atrocities. He even suggested that perhaps the victors themselves should be on trial, as the clearest evidence of a conspiracy to commit murder lay with a case against the wielders of the atomic bomb.[96] The ethical standard of the Allies had regressed significantly since 1937, when the League of Nations condemned Japan for its bombing of civilian in China. This very act was what had convinced millions of Americans and Europeans that the Japanese were barbarians. President Franklin Roosevelt made his famous “quarantine speech” in October 1937, and the Department of State continued denouncing Japan in March and June of the following year.[97] The firebombing and nuking of two Japanese cities were the symbols of a dramatic fall from grace for the Allied power, the descent into a moral morass from which there was no escape - no return. This was the vulnerable spot for the American occupation government - history that could be used to threaten the authority of the occupation government on both legal and moral levels.

Hiroshima began to be invoked in a variety of non-critical discourses about atomic energy even through the end of official U.S. censorship in 1949, until the mid-1950s. As soon as 1946, Hiroshima was used as a symbol in discussions about the peaceful applications of nuclear power like the Baruch Plan (to control the spread of fissionable materials and atomic technology), or in proposals to make an international body responsible for the prevention of the abuse of atomic energy. It even became the standard of measure for death itself: in 1950, a newspaper bemoaned the fact that tuberculosis claimed the lives of two “Hiroshimas” per year.[98] But the Japan identity as victim still had not taken shape.

The paradigm shift occurred in the early 1950s, with the incident of the Lucky Dragon acting as the catalyst which set off a wave of anti-nuclear sentiment in Japan and the set the ground for a politics of victimology. Even the year before the Lucky Dragon incident, public support of the small-but-growing anti-nuclear and peace movements was merely lukewarm. In early 1954, a panel of peace activists was drawn together to discuss the problems of mobilizing the apathetic Japanese populace towards support of a peace movement based on protest on the United States’ use of Japan as a military staging ground. One member of the panel related his frustration with attracting an audience for the showing of the film Hiroshima even with discounted tickets in one of Japan’s trendiest shopping districts. He claimed that the Japanese people could never be mobilized without rentaikan, a “sense of connectedness” between people that whatever happened to one Japanese meant repercussions for all Japanese. His wish would was fulfilled in spades the following year.[99]

On March 1, 1954, a Japanese fishing boat ventured in too close to the 15 megaton “Bravo” experiment in the Bikini atoll. Although outside of the announced safety zone, this test of a hydrogen bomb was considerably more powerful than expected. The crew was exposed to a rain of radioactive ash for several hours, and when the symptoms of radiation poisoning began to set in after they returned home, it became a national scandal, and the beginnings of paranoia in general about things nuclear. The fish I their hold had been irradiated before distribution, and the fish markets of the nation were temporarily closed. A nuclear panic seized the nation, as people became anxious about radioactive food, snow, even air. When one member of the Lucky Dragon crew finally died, the danger of radiation became clear. Even outside of the blast itself, you could die. So many people who had even stepped foot in Hiroshima after the initial bombing in 1945 began to attribute minor health problems to radiation sickness that people named it the “Hiroshima neurosis.”[100]

The popular base had been built, and a resolution to ban the hydrogen bomb was went swiftly up to the Diet. Textbooks in 1955 began to place a new emphasis on the suffering of the atomic bomb victims in Japan, and displayed a marked increase in sensitivity to Japanese suffering in the war in general.[101] A 1954 textbook which had not even mentioned Hiroshima in a summary about the end of the war was radically different in 1956:

On August 6, 1945, we Japanese confronted something horrible which humanity had never before experienced. The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and many innocent people were thrown into he depths of hell in the blink of an eye...but as you can see in the above photograph [a still of young boys jumping off a bridge and swimming in the river], children are happily playing in the ruins. By now these children are no doubt fine young men and women. And Hiroshima has been reborn a city of peace, and the ringing bells there echo with calls for peace to the people of the world.[102]

The end of world war II was now permanently tied with Hiroshima, as well as Japan’s role as victim. The imagery in the above excerpt speaks volumes, as it demonstrate clearly the relationship between both the pre- and post-Lucky Dragon historical discourses. The representation of the Japanese people as the thralls of a militaristic Imperial state, exploited and deceived, spoke to Japanese ideals of innocence in the midst of suffering. But the children, could be nothing more than mere innocents in the war going on around them, “are now fine men and women.” Japan has come of age, and now Hiroshima is “a city of peace.” In this way of looking at things, any bad history of the past is something from another age, from a past in which the Japanese, as innocent children, had no part in constructing.

Atomic victimhood was the “single national principle”, according to political scientist Sakamoto Yoshikazu, which gave the peace movement its particularly Japanese character, and moved the Japanese to construct its historical narrative with an eye towards the future. He said in 1961:

Of course there is no doubt that the victim experience arising from wartime suffering and the victimizer experience as supporters of a war of aggression carry great significance as the source of the pace movement. But while it is unavoidable that memories of war damage and awareness of war responsibility tend with the passage time to be seen as past issues, the issue of nuclear bombs forces itself upon us, on the young generations especially, as a future problem.[103]

With the Cold War raging around them, and with the nuclear threat hanging ominously over Japan in particular because of its peculiar singular experience with the bomb, Japan radically reconstructed is history around contemporary concerns. Hiroshima had taken on meaning for a Japanese people trying to mitigate the dual statuses of victim and victimizer, but interestingly, the victimizer identity began to gain more currency in the 1970s as the soldiers’ accounts and other war memoirs began to become popular.[104] Perhaps this speaks to a natural tendency for people to want to tell their stories before passing on, before something is lost to the next generation. At the end of life, old fears and obligations lose relevancy to the ever-growing importance to tell one’s story and settle the balances. As the last of the old generation approach their time, more stories continue to come out.

As the distance from August 1945 continues to increase, Hiroshima becomes less of a lesson about the collective Japanese self than it is a parable for the world in general. As Orr puts it, the Japanese began, in the mid 1950s, to feel that their “responsibility for their state’s policies was mitigated by their own suffering.”[105] The Japanese people cannot continue to keep repaying the same old dues. The time to move on had come. But the crucial question, however, remains unanswered: Who is responsible for the actions of the people? The government cannot be held accountable for the actions of its people simply because it set the tone for the commission of those acts. Ideology begets action, but the relationship is not necessarily causal. The Japanese people, according to the popular master narrative, were not responsible because they were merely pawns duped into compliance. And the younger generation cannot be held accountable for the actions of those who came before them. Hiroshima moves to the center, while everything else falls into the periphery. Where does the responsibility lie, and how can the Japanese people simply allow themselves to forget, like a bad bout of drinking the night before? “I wasn’t myself,” one might say. “If not, then who were you?” might be the appropriate reply.

According to Orr, “if we speak of an ‘amnesia’ in Japanese pacifism, then, it should really be the amnesia about ‘the people’s’ agency in Japanese aggression against others.”[106] Instead, the Japanese people feels that they were more of a victim than the Asian countries they victimized. They were gulled into something they did not start, and were forced to pay the price at the finish. This is the dominant view, that the present-day Japanese people, to the extent that they feel an affinity to an earlier “Japanese people,” has lost the victimizer identity in the mists of time and historical reinvention privileging Hiroshima above all else.

Symbolic Acts and The Struggle for the Narrative

Presently in Japan, the debate over history continues, with renewed vigor and controversy as Japan and its historical representations of itself comes under increasing scrutiny, especially as geopolitical power is continually decentered from Japan. The conservatives tend to be from the older generation, more products of nationalist education and its adherents than is the younger generation busy looking for an idea of what these increasingly less obscure histories mean. There is no set pattern to the struggle; in recent years, an offensive statement from a public official asserting that the Nanjing Massacre never happened, that Korea should thank Japan for colonizing and modernizing it, or that Japan did not start the war - these are almost expected occasionally. There are many different degrees of denial, from indifference to vehement disbelief; however, new, progressive ideas also find quarter in society, and it would be unfair to characterize the pattern of denial in Japan as anything but just that - a pattern, not a statement about the thoughts of every Japanese person. Few societies or nations are so monolithic as to be without diverse aspects of public opinion.

One of the most controversial areas of discourse takes place around the 1996 visit of Japanese prime minister Ryutaro Hashimoto to the Yakasuni Shrine. A Shinto place of worship that honors not only Japanese war dead, but specifically, convicted Class A war criminals like General Hideki Tojo. When asked by reporters why he was the first prime minister in over ten years to make that pilgrimage to honor the war dead, he replied, “Why should it matter any more. “Surely it's time to stop letting that sort of thing complicate our international relations.” However, this misses the whole point. The rest of Asia The Japanese must realize that they cannot enshrine the war dead without celebrating the other end of the ideology. This parallels the problem with the historiographical representation of the bomb - a lack of context. The Yakasuni shrine must be seen in ideological as well as historical context. One of the ultimate expressions of Japanese wartime ideology was the valor of the kamikaze pilot, who embodied the spirit enshrined at the Yakasuni Shrine. However, the flip side of that ideological coin is the violence that was made possible by the belief system instilled in the hearts and minds of not just soldiers, but in every citizen of the state. These acts of ideology go hand in hand. When the Japanese can Japanese can realize this, then they have traveled that critical moral distance that the Germans are said to have, which is critically appraising the role of the individual in relation to ideology and the state. This is the “lesson” that was learned when people vowed “never again.”

However in terms of the narrative of victimology, the memorial with the most symbolic meaning for this kind of analysis is the Hiroshima Peace Park. According to most Korean sources on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of the total atomic bomb victims, around 50,000 of the 350,000 to 400,000 eventual total deaths (from the initial blast and radiation sickness) were Koreans. This is a total of around twenty percent, but the figure was much higher in Hiroshima because there was a high concentration of Koreans working in that particular city as forced labor in war industry.[107] In the Hiroshima blast, 20,000 initially killed is the statistic accepted by most Koreans. A source of enormous controversy is the fact that the monument is forced to sit on the literal fringes of the park, just outside the boundary.[§] The symbolic import of this fact is lost on no Korean: “But how could this be? Discrimination even against the dead?” In a country where a person of Japanese descent is not a citizen, and must carry an alien registration card at all times, the issue slams into the face of the dominant Hiroshima narrative like a Mack truck. The major reason given in 1986 by the mayor and city administrators for the decision not to allow the Korean memorial to be moved within the confines of Peace Park was the contention that the bomb enshrined all of the souls taken by the atomic bomb without respect to nationality or race.[108] However, with the coming 1994 Asian Games and the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima in 1995, the potential for negative publicity seemed high. News captions such as “Discrimination after death?” headed stories highlighting tourists’ outrage towards the city and the Japanese people for their myopic victimology and history. The 1990 proposal to relocate the bomb into the park proper was met with approval, however with specific stipulations that reference to Korea should be eliminated, the Korean prince Yi Gu’s name should be stricken, and a quotation from classical Korean literature, “the precious death of the people will remain as a fragrant stream forever in people’s hearts,” be deleted.[109] The negotiations fell through for a variety of different political reasons not necessary to explore here, but the symbolic importance of the stipulations given by the city officials Is obvious.

The Korean memorial’s status as a historical monument “celebrate[ing] the Korean nation’s independence and its emancipation from Japanese colonial rule” is incongruous with the Japanese memorial, commemorating the Japanese victim. These two artificial distinctions made solely for the purpose of analytical comparison are helpful towards understanding the issues at hand. In the words of Lisa Yoneyama, whose analysis was indispensable to this one:

...the memorial stands for the irreconcilable chasm between the colonizers and the colonized and for the disparity of memories that even the sincerest sentiments for the dead cannot easily conflate under a common denominator...As a monument, the present icon not only mourns the victims; but also...it celebrates the Korean nation’s independence and its emancipation from Japanese colonial rule. Moreover its messages delegitimize the Japanese government’s policies towards Koreans in the past and present. By defacing these memories, the city and committee’s proposal would transform the memorial in such a way that it would be commensurate with other memorial icons in the Peace Memorial Park. It tried to convert the magnificent, the monumental, and the accusatory to a banal, universalizing “tribute to the dead.” What the city would have prohibited was precisely such an excess of memory in Japan’s official remembering of the Hiroshima holocaust.[110]

While the Korean monument clearly identifies Japan’s positionality as a victimizer, the Japanese memorial mourns the dead while celebrating Japan’s status as victim. So the meanings for the two monuments are locked in a completely oppositional relationship. In this construction, the bomb drop marked a beginning for the Korean people and peninsula, but for the Japanese, a brutal defeat. As long as the two histories maintain the veracity of their claims of meaning, there can be no reconciliation of the two. The Korean monument must always exist outside of the realm of Japanese victimization - outside of the park and outside of the narrative. The monument completely explodes notions of Japanese innocence at the time the bomb was dropped upon them. This is why the memorial, in its present form, must stay outside of the park, outside of the greater narrative about Japan.

Given the recurrent strings of denials by prominent figures, officials, and political leaders of the existence of the Nanjing Massacre, and the questioning of the veracity of claims made by former “comfort women” from across Asia, combined with the symbolic acts of historical representation enumerated above, all point to an ever-present problem of historical amnesia. In 1996, the conservative-majority government under Ryutaro Hashimoto has gone so far as to make claims on territories in China, Taiwan, and South Korea that had been taken during Japan’s wars of aggression, which makes former Prime Minister Tomiichi Muruyama’s overture of “deep remorse” in 1995 next to meaningless.[111] Hashimoto’s recent visit to the Yakasuni Shrine last year further complicated matters for the worst. In Korea, where the import of Japanese products such as music or cars are prohibited by law, such matters are taken very seriously. The Liberal Democratic Party platform, riding a recent conservative resurgence in Japanese politics, calls on cabinet ministers to visit the shrine dedicated to Japan's war dead, which includes executed war criminals, and has convinced many Koreans of a resurgence in Japanese nationalism. The party has also made claims on the Tokdo Islands, which lie between the two nations in the Korea Strait, which Koreans see as intolerable.[112] Similar claims made on China’s Diaoyutai Isles brought about even more conflict. Right-wing militant groups went so far as to erect a lighthouse, along with a memorial to the Japanese fallen war dead. China and Taiwan, which both lay claim to the islands, warn of the potential threat to the future of diplomatic relations.[113]

Indeed, future relations in Asia look strained at best. In this context, the Japanese government’s desire to gain a seat on the U.N. Security Council is problematic to most of the other countries who do not feel that Japan is responsible enough for the assumption of that kind of responsibility. Cited in the U.S. House Resolution to postpone the admission of Japan into the U.N. Security Council, drafted by Congressman William O. Lipinski of Illinois, are all of the abominable acts of murder and terror committed by the Japanese, including some of those which were mentioned above; significantly, there was explicit mention of the fact that United States had acknowledged “the unfairness of its policy of detaining Japanese-Americans during World War II”, and that the Germans had formally apologized to the victims of the Holocaust. In contrast, Japan had extreme trouble even expressing “deep remorse,” a sentiment of one individual, and as significant as this unofficial but heartfelt apology from Prime Minister Muruyama was, it was repudiated by the subsequent actions and statements of the Japanese government the following year. Additionally, international jurists in Geneva formally decided in 1993 that the former “comfort women” deserved compensation for their “extreme pain and suffering.” So far, this has had little impact on Japanese government circles.[114] Japan does not seem worthy of gaining a Security Council seat, for In terms of Ruth Benedict’s sword metaphor, even as Japan lies on the verge of wielding a new degree of geopolitical power, it seemingly cannot come to terms with its misuse of that power in the past. Indeed, it is difficult to convince some ultra-conservative elements that the power was misused at all. The final analysis is that Asia does not trust Japan; and with the irresponsible attitude and actions displayed in recent years, why should it?

As for ourselves, the question of responsibility still vexes America and Americans. We have not fully come to terms with the legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but then, the issues have a different relevancy for us. Japan, in short, is challenged with facing up to its ideology, while the United States is faced with the moral/ethical implications of isolated, specific acts. The bombing of Shanghai, the Rape of Nanjing, the advent of forced sexual slavery, the Bataan Death March, Unit 731, or the kamikaze pilots who flew in the name of the Emperor all represent not just the acts themselves, but the ideology which made them possible. While the United States can make no claim that it was free of harmful ideologies, in the case of Hiroshima, it was and always will be a question of morality for us; it is significant that most of the policymakers at the time were not in favor of using the atomic bomb against Japan. The question of our slippage into the practice of mass civilian bombing is also an ethical one. As evidenced by American and world reaction to Japan’s bombing of China in 1937, what the United States displayed in 1945 was an aberration, a moral stumble into a darkness that fundamentally changed the waging of war, from which the world still has yet to recover. Noticeably absent from the Congressional Resolution above was a mention of our inability to atone for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is what Japan holds out for - the turning point in this debate would be an apology from the United States; one wonders how this would change even conservative Japan’s willingness to reconsider it stances on many issues. Our two countries’ hardlines reinforce one another. Our insistence on moral justification in dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki must come before Japan can come to terms with its own actions. Japanese barbarity must be delinked with the actions we took by dropping the bomb. Perhaps this will allow the Japanese to do the same, and re-acknowledge their role as victimizer.

The following statement was made by a spokesman representing an atomic bomb victims’ group lashed out against the conservative U.S. Congress, which had issued a ridiculous statement about Hiroshima in response to the debate about the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian. He attempts to put the bombings into the proper perspective:

It was an immeasurably atrocious massacre. The atomic bombs instantly turned the two cities into a “hell,” killing hundreds of thousands of people, including infants, the elderly, and the sick...The bombs inflicted lasting agony on the survivors, from which they cannot escape until their lives end...

That the Senate adopted a resolution trying to justify the atomic bombs as a “benevolent act” is unendurable for all of us who have lived and are still living in the “hell” caused by the atomic bombing.

We strongly protest the resolution adopted by the U.S. Senate which virtually calls black white.[115]

This is a statement with which most Japanese would likely agree. But if the word “Japanese” is substituted for “atomic bomb,” and the word “Japanese Diet” for “Senate,” the irony becomes clear. The conservative line of thought that Japan’s actions during the Pacific War were for the “co-prosperity” of all Asia, which helped improve the lives of millions in the countries it “developed,” is equally ridiculous, but still counts much of Japan as its adherents. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are indeed symbols of why the bomb should never be used, and how such use was unequivocally amoral. Because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s very real importance as the start of a new age and a nuclear-aware (read paranoid) world, the moments of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have taken on a special importance in world history. However, in Japan, this takes place at the expense of other histories, and flies in the face of that country’s self-proclaimed position as arbiter of the history which the world must remember so that “it can never happen again.” The Hiroshima discourse is framed in such a way that it overshadows the rest of the events in the Pacific war, ignoring them. Who is “calling black white?”

It is at this point that historiography from a non-Western point of view comes together with the debate about “revisionist history” of the bomb. Efforts to reorient the treatment of the Pacific conflict must come from a desire to preserve history for its own sake, using it as a parable for the education of all, and not as a political device. Resistance to the Smithsonian exhibit of the Enola Gay centers around the perceived need to respect the actions of veterans by not besmirching their names or their heroic actions. In the same way that history must not be whitewashed in order to justify to ourselves America’s actions in dropping the bomb on two Japanese cities, a newer, more critical history of Japan cannot come from a desire to paint a background for a more flattering picture of ourselves. Historical revision for the sake of psychic comfort is the trap that Japan has fallen into, and from which it cannot escape, despite more open and diverse public debate. In this way, the United States is no more disinterested in the outcome of its historical representations than Japan. As much as Japan refuses to take on the identity of the victimizer, so do we. This may be our common bond.

Closer to home, the history of the Pacific war continues to undergo reconstruction. The Cupertino-based Alliance for Preserving the Truth of the Sino-Japanese War organized a one year experiment in the San Francisco curriculum. Given the demographics of states like California, the school board felt that the need to alter the representation of the Pacific War was particularly acute, because of many Asians and Asian-Americans who felt that the history of World War II as it was taught in the United States did not reflect the realities and histories of most of the countries in Asia. As part of a greater trend away from Euro-centric history, the Pacific War is now taught as having begun in 1931, which the rest of Asia usually looks at as the beginning of armed Japanese aggression that directly led to the war in the Pacific. This is the kind of start required for understanding Japan’s aggressive past in proper historical context, as Japan had already committed some of the worst atrocities of the war by the time Pearl Harbor was bombed in December 1941. The Rape of Nanjing will be taught as “the Forgotten Holocaust.” It emphasizes the 300,000 killed in Nanjing, and the 30 million Chinese who died from the “indiscriminate killing and starvation” that happened with the Japan’s occupation of China. The teacher’s guide outlines the purpose of teaching a revised history of the Pacific War: "The unit examines the effect of the Japanese's Chinese invasion, the examination of social responsibility and a global investigation of inhumanities of war by looking at many aggressive conflicts and possible solutions to those conflicts."[116]

Despite Japan’s ostensive commitment to representing the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a parable of non-violence, it cannot commit itself to reflect critically upon its own past, a past which is constructed as one of victimization. Perhaps the populace was brainwashed by ideology and a reconstructed culture that emphasized the virtue of obeying orders; it was indeed true that the general public was deceived by Imperial propaganda and lies. But where does the buck stop? The majority of Japanese today were not alive and did not participate in the Pacific War, but yet that period still has great symbolic meaning for the Japanese identity, no matter where one might fall along the lines of discourse; the present-day Japanese self exists in a very specific relationship to the bomb. The Japanese have decided to integrate the experience of the Pacific War into the national identity; however, it is by choice that the other histories of the war are not included in this construction of Japan’s relationship with the past.

The recentering of Hiroshima as a defining aspect of Japanese identity has problematic ramifications for the elements of Japanese history that do not fit into the greater narrative of victimization so smoothly. This conflict between differing ways of looking at the Japanese people and its relation to the past is so critical because the conventional wisdom of Japanese history has little room for alternative histories, and the dominant narrative cannot be simply tweaked and adjusted to accommodate them, for they threaten the very foundations of the Japanese identity, as well as Japan’s historical understanding of itself. A fundamental reworking of the dominant narrative is necessary to account for these alternate histories. Otherwise, they are doomed to marginality, and the myth of victimhood will live on, and Japan will have learned nothing from its transgressions.

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[*] An insight gained from a reading of Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.

[†] According to Chinese historian Duan Yueping.

[‡] According to the Beijing review, the soldiers were executed in January 1948.

[§] Please see Appendix 1.

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[1] Richard Rhodes. The Making of the Atomic Bomb . (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986) p. 711

[2] The United States Strategic Bombing Survey. The Effects of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki . (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1946) p. 15

[3] The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, p. 22

[4] Gar Alperovitz. The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb . (New York: Vintage Books, 1995) p. 333

[5] The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb, p. 353, quoting from his 1948 book Crusade in Europe.

[6] The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb, p. 352

[7] The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb, p. 640

[8] The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb, p. 640

[9] The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb, p. 659

[10]Toshio Iritani. Group Psychology of the Japanese in Wartime . (New York: Kegan Paul International, 1991) p. 198

[11] Hoito Edoin. The Night Tokyo Burned . (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), a book written by Hoito Edoin about the infamous March 9th and 10th firebombings of Tokyo.

[12] Edoin, Hoito. The Night Tokyo Burned, pp. 21-22

[13] Edoin, Hoito. The Night Tokyo Burned, pp. 21-22

[14] Alperovitz. The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb, p. 528

[15] Alperovitz. The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb, p. 528

[16] Alperovitz. The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb, p. 18

[17] Barton Bernstein. "The Struggle Over History," in Judgement at the Smithsonian. Philip Nobile, (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1995) p. 129

[18] Internet source, or alternatively, the picture can be found in United States Diplomatic History: The Age of Ascendancy p. 443

[19] John W. Dower. "Three Narratives of Our Humanity," in History Wars. Tom Engelhardt and Edward T. Linenthal, (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996) p. 94

[20] Martin Harwit. An Exhibit Denied: Lobbying the History of Enola Gay . (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1996) p. 405

[21] An Exhibit Denied, pp. 406-407

[22] The overarching theme of Ian Buruma’s book The Wages of Guilt, for which I wish to give the appropriate conceptual credit here.

[23] Ruth Benedict. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword . (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1946) pp. 222-223

[24] C. Douglas Lummis. A New Look at the Chrysanthemum and the Sword . (Tokyo: Shohaksha, 1982) p. 56

[25] Lummis, p. 68

[26] Lummis, p. 68

[27] Lummis, p. 60

[28] Benedict, pp. 294-295

[29] Lummis, p. 62

[30] Benedict, p. 296

[31] Lummis, p. 63

[32] Throughout her argument, Benedict’s arguments about essentialist culture and human nature seems contradictary and confusing.

[33] Benedict, p. 298

[34] Lummis, p. 75

[35] Author Unknown. "Germany's Apology to Its War Victims and Japan's Homage to Its War Criminals," 1995. http://www.cnd.org:8004/mirror/nanjing/NMB&J.html. May 13, 1997.

[36] Ian Buruma. The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan . (New York: First Meridian, 1995) pp. 108-109

[37] Buruma, pp. 109-110

[38] Buruma, p. 111

[39] Buruma, pp. 103-104

[40] Buruma, pp. 107-108

[41] Lummis, C. Douglas. A New Look at the Chrysanthemum and the Sword, p. 72

[42] Group Psychology of the Japanese During Wartime pp. 167-168

[43] Group Psychology of the Japanese in Wartime, p. 2

[44] Michael Burleigh. Wolfgang Wipperman.The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 . (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) pp. 207-208

[45] Burleigh and Wipperman, p. 210

[46] Burleigh and Wipperman, pp. 218-219

[47] Burleigh and Wipperman, pp. 222

[48] Robert King Hall. Shushin: The Ethics of a Defeated Nation . (New York: Bureau of Publications, Columbia University Teachers College, 1949) p. 13

[49] Karl Taro Greenfield, The Nation, “War and Amnesia”, 12/16/93)

[50] Buruma, pp. 196-197

[51] Buruma, p. 199

[52] Buruma, pp. 199-200

[53] Tokiomo Kaigo. Series on Japanese Life & Culture,Japanese Education: Its Past and Present . (Tokyo: The Society for International Cultural Relations (Kokusai Bunka Shinkotai), 1965) pp. 53-54

[54] Saburo Ienaga. The Pacific War: 1931-1945 . (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978) p. 15

[55] Richard H. Mitchell. Thought Control in Prewar Japan . (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976) p. 67

[56] Lummis, p. 73

[57] Buruma, p. 191

[58] Buruma, p. 191

[59] Iritani, pp. 13-14

[60] Iritani, pp. 164-165

[61] Iritani, p. 161

[62] Ienaga, p. 31

[63] Iritani, p. 27

[64] Dower, p. 228

[65] Dower, pp. 265-266

[66] Dower, p. 281

[67] Dower, p. 266

[68] Iritani, p. 29

[69] Iritani, p. 117

[70] Ienaga, p. 23

[71] Buruma, p. 173

[72] Dower, p. 24

[73] Iritani, pp. 190-191

[74] Iritani, p. 198

[75] Ienaga, p. 52

[76] Ienaga, p. 53

[77] J. Michael Allen. "The Price of Identity: The 1923 Kanto Earthquake and Its Aftermath,"Korean Studies. 20 (unknown issue, 1996) p. 73

[78] Dower, p. 25

[79] Mari Yamaguchi. "Japanese onstruction Giant Defends Use of Wartime Slave Labor" in Associated Press Website. 1996. http://users.ccnet.com/~suntzu75/docs/kajima-2.txt. May 13, 1997.

[80] Found in Alliance for Preserving the Truth of Sino-Japanese War website, in “APTSJW Literature Archive,” http://sii.stanford.edu/~sjwar/home.htm (the 1st page of the photos: http://sii.stanford.edu/~sjwar/photos.htm

[81] Haibo Li. "Unforgivable Atrocity,"Beijing Review. Vol. 38, no 33 (Aug.14-20, 1995): p. 21

[82] Li, pp. 19-20

[83] In “Photos of the Massacre,” in WWW Memorial Hall of the Victims in the Nanjing Massacre, http://www.arts.cuhk.hk/NanjingMassacre/NM.html

[84] Li, p. 15, 19

[85] Unlocking a Deadly Secret (Website), text By Nicholas D. Kristof, with excerpts from the New York Times. http://www.cs.umn.edu/~dyue/wiihist/germwar/germwar.htm

[86] Kristof, http://www.cs.umn.edu/~dyue/wiihist/germwar/germwar.htm

[87] Hal Gold. Unit 731: Testimony . (Tokyo: Yenbooks, 1996) p. 86

[88] Kristof, http://www.cs.umn.edu/~dyue/wiihist/germwar/germwar.htm

[89] Kristof, http://www.cs.umn.edu/~dyue/wiihist/germwar/germwar.htm

[90] Gold, p. 91

[91] Iritani, pp. 215-216

[92] James Joseph Orr, The Victim as Hero in Postwar Japan: The Rise of a Mythology of War Victimhood. Ph.D. Stanford University. 1995, pp. 97-98

[93] Orr, p. 98

[94] Orr, pp. 95-96

[95] Orr, pp. 48-49

[96] Dower, pp. 37-38

[97] Dower, p. 38

[98] Orr, pp. 49-50

[99] Orr, p. 61

[100] Orr, pp. 61-62

[101] Orr, pp. 107-108

[102] Orr, p. 114-115

[103] Orr, p. 80-81

[104] Orr, pp. 240-241

[105] Orr, p. 116

[106] Orr, p. 236

[107] Yoneyama, Lisa. “Memory Matters: Hiroshima’s Korean Atom Bomb Memorial and the Politics of Ethnicity,” Public Culture 7.3 (Spring 1995), p. 502

[108] Yoneyama, pp. 506-506

[109] Yoneyama, pp. 514-515

[110] Yoneyama, p. 516

[111] “Muruyama’s Personal Apology,” on The Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Research Institute for the Humanities Web Server, http://www.arts.cuhk.hk/NanjingMassacre/NMAPOLOGY.html

[112] The Korea Herald News, http://apec.gspa.washington.edu:80/apec/media/korher/october/961002tokto_kh.html

[113] Newswatch (AP and other press releases), http://www.cnd.org:8019/mirror/nanjing/nmnwe96.html#960729

[114] “The Mail to U.S. President”, in The Other Holocaust: Nanjing Massacre, Unit 731 & Unit 100, http://www.interlog.com/~yuan/cgi/mailfaxu.cgi (Main website: http://www.interlog.com/~yuan/japan.html)

[115] Harwit, An Exhibit Denied, p. 363

[116] SFUSD SCHOOL BOARD PASSES HISTORIC RESOLUTIONS, http://www.sfusd.k12.ca.us/news/boardresos.html