JAPAN'S WAR RESPONSIBILITY AND THE P A N - A S i a N

MOVEMENT FOR REDRESS AND COMPENSATION: AN OVERVIEW Paul Gordon Schalow

Most readers of East Asia may already be familiar with pan- Asian efforts seeking apology from Japan for crimes against hu- manity committed by the Japanese military during the Pacific War. The Nanjing Massacre and the sexual slavery of "Comfort Women" (ianfu) have received extensive coverage in both the academic and popular presses in recent years, but the actual scope of the move- ment for redress and compensation is growing bigger and more complex with every passing year. Besides the Nanjing Massacre and sexual slavery, Asian victims are suing for justice for: the forced relocation to Japan of Chinese and Korean slave laborers who toiled under brutal conditions in civil engineering, mining, and heavy industry; indiscriminate machine-gunning, incendiary shelling, and bombing of civilian targets in China; the extermination of villages in Manchuria by murder, pillage, and burning; the illegal use of biological and chemical weapons in warfare and of human subjects for biological and chemical weapons research; the vivisection and murder of human subjects for purposes of medical education and experimentation; ongoing and often fatal environmental degrada- tion caused by poison gas and bombs abandoned by the Japanese

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military after the defeat; the systematic looting of hundreds of thou- sands of irreplaceable books from Chinese libraries; and the plun- dering of Asia's wealth, including gold, cash, and art objects which were removed to Japan.

At issue is Japan's "war responsibility" (sens~sekinin), broadly defined as the criminal acts of war for which Japan should be held legally and morally accountable. The daunting complexity of the issue was made clear at the "International Citizen's Forum on Japa- nese War Atrocities and Redress" (hereafter, the Forum) held in Tokyo on December 10-13, 1999. This issue of East Asia is the first of two special issues devoted to the problem of Japan's war re- sponsibility and the questions of redress and compensation as it was discussed at the Forum. Our purpose is to familiarize readers with the bitter legacy shadowing Japan's relationship with its Asian neighbors at the dawn of a new century and new millennium.

One of the central themes of the Forum was "justice." Speaker after speaker testified, however, that true justice was impossible for either the dead or the survivors who suffered at the hands of the Japanese during the Pacific War. Given Japan's brutal wartime actions in Asia and the impossibility of true justice, what sort of "redress and compensation" were Asian victims seeking from the Japanese government? Was it money they wanted? It became clear in the course of the Forum that monetary compensation was not the primary issue. First and foremost, victims and their families wished for symbolic justice in the form of an official statement of apology by the Japanese government and sincere efforts to com- pensate them for their suffering. Unfortunately, the Japanese gov- ernment has been very reluctant to take responsibility in any concrete way for the suffering of fellow Asians at the hands of the Japanese imperial armies during the Pacific War. Historians have proved that this state of affairs is a result of post-war American policies that, by emphasizing Japan's economic recovery and Ameri- can political interests over the interests of justice in Asia, left the pre-war Japanese ruling elite virtually intact.

In the course of the Forum, it became clear that the Japanese government's decades-long refusal to accept responsibility and

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apologize for war crimes in Asia has infuriated and insulted not just survivors but many Asian people and their governments as well. This anger now serves to fuel the flames of the redress and com- pensation movement against Japan.

Very much on the minds of the audience and speakers at the Forum was the example of Nazi Germany. Here was a state that between 1939-45 slaughtered approximately 11 million or more people belonging to groups deemed "inferior" according to Nazi ideology: Jews, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals, the physically handi- capped, and the mentally ill. Immediately after the war Germany's new government had been held accountable by the world for Nazi crimes against humanity, for which there was a genuine sense of revulsion among Germans and non-Germans alike. Nazi leaders were tried and imprisoned or executed, a system of compensation for survivors was implemented, government leaders made sincere public apologies, and by the 1980s justice was felt to have been served. The question was raised repeatedly at the Forum, "Why cannot Japan respond to Asia similarly?" For the Asian victims of Japanese war crimes, Germany represented the "model" of what a state ought to do in compensating its victims in war. Although it could be argued that this is an idealized view of Germany's response to its Nazi past, the existence of the German model seems to serve, in its own way, as a catalyst for the Asian movement that now de- mands redress and compensation from Japan.

The sad fact is that the majority of Japanese born after the war are incapable of comprehending the issue of "war responsibil- ity" in all of its ramifications. This is because the postwar genera- tion has not been educated accurately about Japan's wartime role and has come to perceive Japan primarily as a victim of the Pacific War, not a perpetrator. Those who experienced the war firsthand knew the truth about Japan's aggression and destruction outside Japan, but the history they have passed on is one-dimensional. The war undeniably brought death and suffering to Japanese sol- diers and citizens on a scale never seen before or since, but the destruction, death, and suffering endured by other Asians at the hands of the Japanese during the war years has been conveniently

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forgotten. The younger generation is thus largely ignorant of the facts and perceives Japan only as a victim of war, not as a perpetra- tor or aggressor. It is fair to say that few are capable of assessing adequately whether Asian victims' demands for redress and com- pensation are reasonable or unreasonable.

Unfortunately, Japanese ignorance about Japan's role in the war is more a product of deliberate miseducation than of oversight. School textbooks, which in Japan must pass the scrutiny of the government's Ministry of Education (Monbush~), convey to Japan's children a carefully controlled image of wartime Japan. Until law- suits in the 1980s challenged the Ministry of Education's whitewash- ing policies, textbooks were not allowed to say that Japan had invaded China, only that Japan "entered" China; the Nanjing massacre (when acknowledged at all) was nothing more than a small-scale military "incident" resulting from an unfortunate breakdown in military discipline; the annexation and occupation of Korea and the increasingly draconian policies towards Koreans were barely touched upon. In short, any actions that might place the emperor, the state, or the ruling elite in a bad light were excised from the history books. When the truth about Japan's wartime aggression started to appear in children's textbooks, belatedly and in small increments, in the 1990s, it led to a conservative political backlash that included calls by prominent educators to "teach our children a history of Japan that they can be proud of." According to this way of thinking, a shameful past is not something to be acknowledged, reflected upon, and overcome, but to be ignored or whitewashed, and forgotten.

In a sense, the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing days of the war have provided the Japanese with justification for devising a cultural discourse in which Japan is the innocent victim, rather than the guilty perpetrator, of the Pa- cific War. Americans, to be sure, have had their own difficulties acknowledging their feelings of guilt about the production and de- ployment of the atomic bomb, but for Japan the atomic bombings serve as undeniable proof of Japan's victimhood. The post-war lit- erature of Hiroshima and Nagasaki appears to provide convincing

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testimony that no one was made to suffer more terribly in the war than the Japanese themselves. Next to the horrors of the atomic bombings, some would argue, what do the sufferings of Nanjing, the comfort women, and the slave laborers amount to? Because the annual August ritual of "remembering Hiroshima" and "re- membering Nagasaki" is divorced from any other contexts, such as "remembering Nanjing" or "remembering Pearl Harbor," the atomic bombings have sometimes functioned to absolve Japan of blame in the war and have relieved its citizens from the necessity of reflecting upon their wartime role. Memory is an integral part of social and cultural cohesiveness, but incomplete or selective memory is a dangerous thing.

Japan's propensity to position itself as a victim, coupled with the post-war generation's lack of education about the facts of Japan's wartime atrocities in Asia, means that many Japanese people find it psychologically disorient ing to be asked to recognize the victimhood of others, especially when it involves admitting the unfamiliar possibility of Japan as victimizer and perpetrator. The former mayor of Nagasaki, Motoshima Hitoshi, was one of sev- eral speakers at the Forum who addressed the Japanese reluctance to admit that Japan had committed evil acts in the Pacific War. He described denial as a cultural mechanism whose purpose was to preserve the sanctity of Japan's imperial system. Motoshima pub- licly stated on the occasion of the anniversary of the Nagasaki atomic bombing in 1988 that the Showa Emperor, Hirohito, bore some responsibility for the war but had been exonerated by General MacArthur's Occupation policies in order to ensure the well-being of the Japanese people. To political conservatives, this statement was tantamount to treason. On January 24, 1990, one year after Hirohito's death, Motoshima was shot in an assassination attempt by a right-wing extremist. The bullet struck just above the heart, and he was fortunate to survive.

If Asian demands for justice continue to grow in ferocity, fu- eled by frustration in the face of Japanese denial, the Japanese gov- ernment may find itself increasingly isolated from its Asian neighbors. More than once at the Forum speakers and members

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of the audience raised the disturbing possibility that Japan will re- spond to that sense of isolation by renouncing its peace constitu- tion and trying to reassert itself militarily in East Asia. In fact, a proposal to delete Article 9 (renouncing war as a method of resolv- ing international conflict) from the Occupation-era Japanese con- stitution was under consideration in the Japanese Diet during its 145th ordinary session in 1999, shortly before the Forum met. The argument used in the Diet debates was that Japan ought to have the right to be a "normal" (futsF~) nation, legally capable--like any other nation--of waging war. To Asian ears, especially in the light of Japan's intransigence regarding redress of Pacific War atroci- ties, the prospect of a Japan with military capabilities sounds night- marish.

More than one speaker at the Forum suggested that Japan has already begun to reassert itself as a military power, partially in response to United States military policy encouraging Japan to play a larger role in its national defense. As Nishikawa Shigenori ex- pressed it, "We are on the brink of a new era of war. Even though we haven't accepted our postwar responsibilities, we are again al- ready in the midst of a new pre-war era." It would be the ultimate irony if Asian demands for justice from Japan were to produce the opposite result, bringing about Japan's isolation and remilitarization instead of apology and redress.

Japanese speakers and members of the audience at the Fo- rum showed that there are numerous individual Japanese who are willing to face Japan's unpleasant wartime record and enter into a dialogue with their Asian compatriots about Japan's war responsi- bility. Some are academicians and activists who have struggled with the issue of war responsibility as an educational or political issue. Some are lawyers who have recognized the validity of Asian calls for justice and attempted, often at great personal risk, to bring their cases for judgment before the Japanese court system. Others are everyday people whose first-hand knowledge of the truth, as imperial soldiers or the children of soldiers, has led them to come forward and acknowledge publicly Japan's, and their own, war re- sponsibility.

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The mood at the end of the Forum was hopeful but realistic, showing that participants understood well the nature of the ob- stacles that stand in the way of the movement for redress and com- pensation. The possibility of a broad-ranging reassessment by the Japanese people regarding Japan's wartime atrocities may seem less likely with each passing year, but, even so, individuals of con- science must continue to confront Japan's wartime legacy in the classrooms and courtrooms of Japan. If the Forum accomplished anything, it was to illustrate that justice is not governed by a statute of limitations. It is not too late for the Japanese government to respond with compassion and justice and set the record straight.

It is our hope that this special issue of EastAsia will help clarify for our readers the moral grounds of Asian demands for redress and compensation from Japan. Our purpose is to encourage con- structive dialogue among Asians, non-Asians, and Japanese con- cerning the problem of Japan's war responsibility. In that sense, East Asia's project echoes the "Tokyo Appeal" adopted by the Fo- rum on December 12, 1999, which concluded with this statement: "We solemnly declare that by boldly confronting the historical truth of the 20th century, we will seek and ensure reconciliation and peace in the 21st century."