TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/120291/12029912.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 14KB | 277 lines

                                                                                PEARL HARBOR, Page 70

Fleeing the Past?


Fifty years later, Pearl Harbor still colors relations between
the U.S. and a Japan that has yet to come to terms with its
history

By BARRY HILLENBRAND and JAMES WALSH -- With reporting by David
Aikman/Washington


    For Americans, the day Pearl Harbor went up in smoke was
Dec. 7. For Japanese, on the other side of the International
Date Line, it was Dec. 8. A small point, perhaps, but one with
symbolic dimensions. It illustrates how the two giants focus
differently on their shared history. Americans remember Dec. 7
as a day of infamy. Japanese, when they think of Dec. 8 at all,
tend to dismiss the date as mizu ni nagasu: water under the
bridge. Many Americans see Japan's economic juggernaut as a
continuation of war by other means. Japanese protest that they
are tagged as rapacious when they are merely successful. When
Wall Street recalls that Tokyo time is 14 hours ahead, it
wonders if Japan has cornered the future. Some Japanese consider
that they might be running away from their past.

    The two societies agree on one important thing. Fifty
years after the Pacific war's outbreak, they wonder whether they
are on some critical new collision course. A broad range of
Americans, knowledgeable and temperate ones at that, see Japan
as insensitive and arrogant. Washington is abuzz these days not
about Japanese car sales and real estate purchases in the U.S.,
but about what is seen as a budding growth market in Japan for
blatantly anti-American screeds.

    Readers of U.S. newspapers and magazines have noted a new
word: kembei, a telescoped term roughly translated as
"resentment of America." They have seen reports of querulous
Japanese best sellers like The Japan That Can Say No, journalist
Shintaro Ishihara's provocative manifesto of his country's
superiority in all ways over the U.S. They have seen a
screenwriter, Toshiro Ishido, quoted as exclaiming, "I have
nothing but contempt for America!" and an unnamed Japanese
professor predicting that the U.S. will become "a premier
agrarian power, a giant version of Denmark."

    To a nation that brought democracy to Japan and still
guarantees its defense, those are not only ungracious sentiments
but fighting words. They seem to confirm the implications of
occasional opinion surveys that reflect a new degree of threat
both countries sense in each other. Gennadi Gerasimov, the
former Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman, phrased the
development in a joking way last year. On a visit to Washington,
he said "The cold war is over, and Japan won." In some views
Japan is already achieving economically what it failed to win
by force of arms: a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

    If all that were true, Pearl Harbor's anniversary might
mark an ominous turning point in trans-Pacific relations. But
truth has a way of being much less dramatic. If Japan is
shifting much investment and production to its Asian neighbors,
it is doing no more than U.S. multinationals have done for
decades. Japan's economic output may top America's GNP in 10
years if current growth rates persist, but large numbers of
Japanese who struggle with skimpy retirement benefits and
cramped homes still look up to the American way of life. Kembei
books amount to little more than curiosities. The very term
kembei is so new as to be virtually unknown.

    A poll figure that foreigners rarely cite is the share of
Japanese who like and admire the U.S., which has long ranked No.
1 in Japanese eyes. Last month, in a Yomiuri survey rating
public trust in various countries, a record 56.3% of Japanese
gave the U.S. the top slot. When Americans are asked the same
thing, 13.5% pick Japan.

    For every gadfly who voices contempt for the U.S. and its
ills, countless Japanese evince tremendous fondness for their
only military ally and premier trading partner. It would be
hard, perhaps, to find any nation anywhere so besotted with
things American -- from the music, books and movies Japanese
absorb to the clothes they wear and hamburgers they eat.
Millions of Japanese tourists visit the U.S. every year, while
tens of thousands who return from working in America gush about
how they loved their stay.

    Does all this reflect unalloyed good attitudes? Well, no.
In detecting evidence of trouble in the U.S. that Americans
themselves see, many Japanese react with sorrow more than
anything like contempt. Explains Kazuo Ogura, a senior Foreign
Ministry official and expert on U.S.-Japanese relations:
"Because Japanese like America and want to admire it, they are
frustrated. When they look at America, they see disintegration
of the family, drugs, AIDS, middle-class values collapsing.
Traditional values are what many Japanese still respect and
think important."

    Highly sensitive to what foreigners think of them,
Japanese chafe under a constant buzz saw of American complaints.
A country that emerged from the smoking ruins of 1945 to achieve
the free, modern and prosperous society that their conqueror
wanted is now blamed for being too good at the game. Says a
senior official, Chief Cabinet Secretary Koichi Kato: "Americans
told us to be diligent and work hard. We followed that advice.
Now we are criticized for our virtue. There is a smoldering
frustration about that." Sensitivity extends to the way Japanese
reporters minutely track U.S. opinions of their country, in an
almost masochistic zeal to record any bad views.

    In part, though, the attitude may also be compensation for
what some Japanese historians consider to be their country's
biggest defect before World War II: a failure to read properly
what the rest of the world thought of Japan. Militarists at the
time preached and probably believed, for example, that China
would welcome them as liberators. Today the Japan that has
constitutionally renounced war is awakening to the need for
greater responsibility in world affairs. The shift has been
slow, however, and underwent a sharp setback during the gulf
war.

    In a society that may be the most pacifist on earth, the
government's failed attempt to circumvent constitutional curbs
in order to send noncombat personnel to the Persian Gulf at
American behest provoked widespread outrage. More irritating
still was the carping from Washington after Japan pledged $13
billion in aid to the allied effort. Says a high Japanese
official: "First Americans taught us that pacifism was a good
thing, and then they called us cowards when we did not send
troops. Oh, Americans did not say that directly, but we felt
that was what they were thinking."

    Now a new bill that would enable Japanese military
personnel to take part in U.N. peacekeeping missions is likely
to pass. And despite gulf-war frictions, formal U.S.-Japanese
relations are in excellent shape. Few trade disputes remain, and
an emotion-fraught effort to open Japan to rice imports may be
settled by the current round of worldwide trade talks.
Foreigners still do not find it easy or cheap to do business in
Japan, but the markets are mostly open. Japan's trade surplus?
Despite a recent bulge, it has been in decline for three years.

    But for many nations, what remains troubling about Japan
is a sense that its economic engines are escaping history at
full steam. They fear that the lessons of Pearl Harbor and the
other traumas that attended Japanese militarism have never been
squarely faced, let alone digested.

    All nations embroider their history to some extent. In
Hungary schoolchildren are taught that Attila the Hun, hardly
history's most sympathetic character, introduced uplifting
elements of Roman culture to his court. Britain turned the
painful retreat from Dunkirk into a triumph of the spirit.
Americans remember the Alamo as a heroic episode, though the war
for Texas was a land grab by gringo interlopers. In recent
decades Japanese officials, abetted by political and business
conservatives, have subtly but systematically diluted the facts
about Japanese aggression in Asia from 1931 to 1945. The
tampering is reflected in school textbooks and popular
literature, films and television, and has rendered some of the
war's tragedies almost benign.

    Japan's ruthless invasion of China is termed an "advance."
The 1937 rape of Nanking, in which imperial troops massacred
thousands of Chinese civilians, is deemed problematic because
of "muddled factual data." Other harsh episodes like the Bataan
death march are wholly ignored, perhaps in hopes that dodging
the unpleasant will somehow make it disappear.

    But the bitter memories will not go away, and Japan is too
pivotal and wealthy a global power to be allowed -- or to allow
itself -- the luxury of historical amnesia. Increasingly, Asian
neighbors demand that it deal more forthrightly with its past,
especially if it hopes to play a leading regional role. Many
Japanese scholars, exasperated by Tokyo's studied forgetfulness,
are joining foreign critics in insisting on the same thing.
"Without a deep understanding of the many facets of the war,"
says Makoto Ooka, a prominent poet, "the Japanese people cannot
regain their sense of dignity in the world."

    Almost imperceptibly, that view is gaining acceptance
beyond a limited circle of intellectuals. The need to air the
topic, if only for the benefit of audiences in Asia and the
West, has nudged discussion along. The recently replaced Prime
Minister, Toshiki Kaifu, did his part. On trips abroad, he was
direct in addressing Japan's wartime transgressions. In the
Netherlands he expressed "sincere contrition" for the
"unbearable sufferings and sorrow" the Japanese army inflicted
on Dutch nationals in what is now Indonesia. In September the
new Emperor, Akihito, carried similar messages to Southeast
Asia.

    Still, Japanese schools have done a highly inadequate job
of teaching the facts about the country's aggression. This
year, for example, the Education Ministry insisted that a
textbook passage that said "over 70,000 people were reportedly
killed by the Japanese imperial army" in Nanking be changed to
"a large number of Chinese people were killed." Many Japanese
scholars are appalled at such censorship. Over the years they
have sued to protect their books, while the teachers' union, a
bastion of liberalism, has fought to reinstate some text cuts.
At times they win, generally after foreign protests, but
progress is slight.

    Some teachers do attempt to strike a more balanced view.
Shinji Mikabe, a faculty member at the Matsubara High School in
Tokyo, devotes time in a course on discrimination to telling
students what they should have learned in history class. "To
understand discrimination," says Mikabe, "they must begin with
the historical background, and that includes the war." His
students consistently admit that they know little about what the
Japanese army did in China and Southeast Asia. They are, by
contrast, familiar with the U.S. atom-bombing of Hiroshima and
the bloody battle for Okinawa.

    Lack of balance is also evident in popular treatments of
the war. In movies and TV documentaries, a few scenes from
black-and-white newsreels seem to appear over and over again:
the damage from Americans' fire-bombing of Tokyo, U.S. Marines
using flamethrowers to clear Japanese troops out of Okinawa
bunkers and foxholes, the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima,
imperial army generals on trial in Tokyo. The images convey the
sense that the Japanese people were the war's real victims --
of both the Allies and the militarists who led the nation into
disaster. Seldom is there a hint that Japan victimized others.

    Confronting the past is hard partly because of Japan's
headlong rush, since the mid-19th century, toward modernization.
Says Junichi Kyogoku, president of Tokyo Women's University:
"We always look ahead. So the Japanese people are not
particularly self-reflective." Asked about Pearl Harbor's
anniversary, one Japanese official replied testily, "It's a
historical fact. We can't deny it, but let's move on."

    Japanese who were youngsters in 1945 recall how
politicians and teachers who had been extolling the Emperor and
Japan's war aims one day turned into instant democrats and peace
lovers the day after surrender. It smacked of betrayal and
helped spawn the cynical, rebellious generation that marched
through Tokyo in the '50s and '60s. Defeat and disillusion also
weighed heavily upon the older generation. They passed the
blame, considering it best simply to avoid the past --
especially after U.S. occupation authorities rehabilitated some
key wartime politicians and businessmen with hardly a question
asked.

    Antipathy to war of any kind took root deeply. The
Self-Defense Forces now are well below their authorized strength
of 274,000 because of trouble in recruiting young people. So
desperate are the forces to fill officers' billets that in
September, for the first time ever, women were allowed to take
the entrance exam for the National Defense Academy, a striking
concession in a nation where most men still prefer women to hold
jobs that allow them to do little more than serve tea.

    The relative insensitivity of some Japanese men to the
hardships of women and ethnic minorities has antagonized some
U.S. communities where Japanese companies have set up shop. Yet
a growing number of Japanese, especially younger ones, are more
aware of that shortcoming. The Social Democratic Party is set
to begin a series of symposiums examining Japan's wartime
exploits. Kembei is not a word used in these circles, which are
peering through the smoke of war memories and postwar trade
frictions to find a durable basis for relations with their
trans-Pacific partner in destiny. They only hope that Americans
see fit to join them.