From ming@lamar.ColoState.EDU Sun Aug 13 23:03:31 1995 Received: by cnd.org (4.1/4.7) id AA09400; Sun, 13 Aug 95 23:03:33 PDT Return-Path: Received: from lamar.ColoState.EDU by cnd.org (4.1/4.7) id AA09395; Sun, 13 Aug 95 23:03:31 PDT Received: by lamar.ColoState.EDU (AIX 4.1/UCB 5.64/4.03) id AA134114; Mon, 14 Aug 1995 00:03:25 -0600 Date: Mon, 14 Aug 1995 00:03:25 -0600 From: ming@lamar.ColoState.EDU (Ming Chen) Message-Id: <9508140603.AA134114@lamar.ColoState.EDU> To: cnd-editor@cnd.org X-Delivery-Note: This mail was relayed by CND.ORG X-Reminder: Please all CND members use CND-***@FLYNN.CHEM.COLUMBIA.EDU X-Reminder: or use CND-***@CELLO.UNM.EDU for internal mails in normal situation Status: RO Dear CND editor, The following newspaper article very precisely represented some thoughts I have about Japan, German, and the US in the World War II. I hope that you will also find it valuable and include it in whatever package CND might be preparing for the 50th anniversary of Japan's surrender. Yours Sincerely, Ming Chen ####################################################################### Japan, Germany forced to face WWII's ghosts by Teresa Watanabe and Mary Williams Walsh Los Angeles Times (8/13/95) Shiro Azuma can't deny Japan's sordid history of atrocities during World War II. After all, he committed some of them: As an Imperial Army soldier in China in 1937, he and his comrades unleashed six weeks of breathtaking brutality in what has come to be known as the Rape of Nanking. "When we raped the women, we thought of them as humans, but when we killed them we considered them pigs," he says matter-of-factly in his rural home three hours outside Kyoto. "This was the Japanese army at the time." Now Azuma, a spry and pugnacious man of 83, is fighting a new battle. This time, his adversaries are Japanese who deny the atrocities, threaten him with death and condemn him for smearing the honor of those who died in the name of the divine emperor. Fifty years after World War II, Azuma is one of a growing number of Japanese battling to air the truth about their war deeds, apologize squarely for them and set things right, once and for all, with their Asian neighbors. It is a battle Germany has successfully fought - underscoring how two nations, Axis allies in war and democratic partners in peace, have come to terms with their war legacies in distinctly different ways. At first glance, it might seem that Germany has repented while Japan has not; Germany has faced its demons while Japan continues to duck them. But, as Azuma illustrates, the reality is far more complex. Stereotypes are not true "The cliche is that the Japanese are not contrite and not apologetic and the Germans are," said Ian Buruma, author of a new book, "Wages of guilt," comparing how Germans and the Japanese have dealt with their was legacies. "But it's simplistic and not true." In fact, polls show the majority of Japanese support an apology and compensation, views not reflected by political leaders. And despite its many atrocities, Japan had no "Mein Kampf," no Hitler - and no system for exterminating an entire people. Even if Japan has less to apologize for however, it has not done even the minimum - an accurate historical reckoning, Johnson said. "If the Japanese don't want to be treated as Nazism they shouldn't act like them," he said. "The fact that they keep covering up is part of what contributes to the view that they've got something to hide and are not truly contrite. Anti-Nazi Education In school, Germany has hammered students with anti-Nazi education and the concept of "Zivilcourage," or civil courage, to give students a sense of moral responsibility even in times of terror, dictatorship or war. While Japan's newer textbooks show vast improvement in covering the nation's aggressive acts in Asia, they still leave hazy the issue of who was responsible for the war. Germany were able to pin the war's blame squarely on Adolf Hitler and purge most of officials of the Nazi regime - in the East more so than in the west. But in Japan, the man in whose name the war was fought and atrocities were committed - the late Emperor Hirohito - was protected by U.S. occupation authorities who needed him after the war to unify the country. Germany leaders consistently apologize for their past aggression in the clearest possible terms, calling their deeds "the worst crimes against humanity." Japanese officials, however, dance around diction. While then Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa clearly apologized in 1993 for Japan's "war of aggression," his phrase set off a political uproar. After that, he and the two prime ministers after him slipped back to the more ambiguous phrase "acts of aggression" - implying the war itself had justifiable aims. To utter what is called "the Auschiwtz lie" - denial of the death camps or the deliberate extermination of European Jews - is a crime in Germany. But Japanese politicians and others routinely assert that the Nanking massacre was fabricated, that Japan's purpose was not to dominate Asia but to liberate it from white colonizers. Germany has made generous acts of atonement, including official payments of about $69 billion to Israel and personal pensions to Holocaust survivors that are estimated to total as much as $14.8 billion. Japan has paid a total of $3.9 billion to the Philippines, Vietnam, Myanmar (formerly Burma) and Indonesia but has never officially paid China or Korea one yen. Despite American anthropologist Ruth Benedict's famous formulation that Japan is a "culture of shame" reluctant to reveal embarrassing truths, compared to the Western "culture of guilt" inclined to confess its sins, many Japanese are expressing guilt about the nation's war past. Differences can be explained "I reject that shame vs. guilt theory," says Buruma. "You can explain the differences by looking at the history of the European and Asian wars and the political development since 1945." Germany was not much more forthcoming than Japan for the nearly two decades after the war. Education guildlines on the Nazi era were vague; most West German teachers glossed over the war crimes. Textbooks, largely focused on German suffering, were evasive, mentioning "acts of cruelty" without saying who committed them. That evasiveness reflected a palpable public unwillingness to deal with the war, and most historians at the time described Germany as a normal, orderly country that was mysteriously hijacked by a gang of criminals in 1933. But in 1968, West Germany was shaken by the same kind of students unrest that was then sweeping other nations - and coming clean about the past was a key demand. The protests led directly to tough new guidelines that direct schools to "protest juveniles against the danger of euphemistic conceptions" of the Third Reich. 'Victim mentality' in Japan By contrast, the U.S. nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped foster an overwhelming "victim mentality" in Japan that blinded the public to the nation's acts of aggression and is only now beginning to change. The death of Hirohito in 1989 cracked open the door to examining issues of war guilt, including establishment of peace museums and more debate in the nation's intellectual journals. Some say unwritten taboos still exist against debating the emperor's war responsibility; Nagasaki's former mayor was shot and nearly killed a few year ago for doing so. Japan's growing desire to play a larger political role in the world - reflected, for instance, in attempts to secure a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council - is also fueling efforts to settle its past and win global trust.