From Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis (Jared Diamond, 2019) pp314-6
For an Asian perspective on Japan’s view of World War Two, here is an assessment by Lee Kuan Yew, a keen observer of people who as prime minister of Singapore for several decades became familiar with Japan, China, and Korea and their leaders: “Unlike Germans, the Japanese have not had a catharsis and rid themselves of the poison in their system. They have not educated their young about the wrong they had done. Hashimoto [a Japanese prime minister] expressed his ‘deepest regrets’ on the 52nd anniversary of the end of World War Two (1997) and his ‘profound remorse’ during his visit to Beijing in September 1997. However, he did not apologize, as the Chinese and Koreans wished Japan’s leader to do. I do not understand why the Japanese are so unwilling to admit the past, apologize for it, and move on. For some reason, they do not want to apologize. To apologize is to admit having done a wrong. To express regrets or remorse merely expresses their present subjective feelings. They denied the massacre of Nanking took place; that Korean, Filipino, Dutch, and other women were kidnapped or otherwise forced to be ‘comfort women’ (a euphemism for sex slaves) for Japanese soldiers at the war fronts; that they carried out cruel biological experiments on live Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, Russian, and other prisoners in Manchuria. In each case, only after irrefutable evidence was produced from their own records did they make reluctant admissions. This fed suspicions of Japan’s future intentions. Present Japanese attitudes are an indication of their future conduct. If they are ashamed of their past, they are less likely to repeat it.”
Every year, my undergraduate classes at the University of California in Los Angeles include students from Japan, who talk to me about their schooling there and about their experiences on coming to California. They tell me that their history classes in Japanese schools devoted little time to World War Two (“because that war lasted just a few years in the thousands of years of Japanese history”), said little or nothing about Japan’s role as aggressor, stressed the role of Japanese as victims (of the two atomic bombs that killed about 120,000 Japanese) rather than as responsible for the deaths of millions of other people plus several million Japanese soldiers and civilians, and blamed the US. for somehow tricking Japan into launching the war. (In all fairness, Korean, Chinese, and American schoolbooks present their own skewed accounts of World War Two.) My Japanese students are shocked when they join Asian student associations in Los Angeles, meet Korean and Chinese students, and hear for the first time about Japan’s wartime deeds that still arouse hatred of Japan by students from those other countries.
At the same time, some of my Japanese students, and many other Japanese people, point to numerous apologies offered by Japanese politicians, and ask, “Hasn’t Japan already apologized enough?” A short answer is: no, because the apologies sound contrived, unconvincing, and mixed with statements that minimize or deny Japanese responsibility. A longer answer is to compare Japan’s and Germany’s Opposite approaches to dealing with their respective legacies of recent history, and to ask why Germany’s approach has largely convinced its former enemies while Japan’s approach has not convinced its main victims China and Korea. Chapter 6 described the many ways in which Germany’s leaders have expressed remorse and responsibility, and in which German schoolchildren are taught to face up to what their country did. Chinese and Koreans might be convinced of Japan’s sincerity by Japanese responses analogous to Germany’s: for instance, if Japan’s prime minister were to visit Nanking, fall on his knees before Chinese spectators, and beg forgiveness for Japan’s wartime massacres at Nanking; if throughout Japan there were museums and monuments and former POW camps with photos and detailed explanations of Japanese wartime atrocities; if Japanese schoolchildren were routinely brought on school outings to such sites in Japan, and to sites outside Japan such as Nanking, Sandakan, Bataan, and Saipan; and if Japan devoted much more effort to depicting wartime non-Japanese victims of Japanese atrocities than to depicting Japanese victims of the war. All of those behaviors are non-existent and unthinkable in Japan, but their analogues are widely practiced in Germany. Until they are practiced in Japan, Chinese and Koreans will continue to disbelieve Japanese scripted apologies, and to hate Japan. And as long as China and Korea are armed to the hilt while Japan remains without the means to defend itself, a big danger will continue to hang over Japan.
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