Naturally, I had a poke around while I was in Tokyo. Actually, the kids (our one, and two of a friend) loved it, lots of Zeros, tanks, even a piloted Kamikaze torpedo to look at. But I will outline the revisionist high (low) points for you.
But firstly, some possible misconceptions:
The Yasukuni Shrine is not a monument to WW2 (known as the East Asian war in Japan). It's a Shinto Shrine, originally built in the late 1860s to commemorate the Imperial Army which ended the 600-year rule of the Shogun warlords, who kept the Emperor around as a quaint figurehead. This was the birth of the modernising Meiji imperial regime which took Japan out of a era of near-complete isolationism, and general Koto-plucking feudal backwardness under the Shogunate. In that sense, the Shrine itself is originally a monument to a wholly unobjectionable -indeed rather positive - development in Japanese history.
Second, well, no one really has a problem with a memorial to the ordinary war dead, do we? The poor schmos in the lower ranks etc. Pretty much no one in the region objects to that, as I understand it.
Nope: its the interment of 1000+ documented war criminals - including several very high profile ones - that really pisses off Japan's Asian neighbours, and a whole lot of other nations for that matter. This is where the Japanese Government goes off the rails at Yasukuni.
And then the revisionism: so, apparently there were loads of "Chinese soldiers in civilian uniform" at Nanking. Oh really? I guess that would explain the indiscriminate massacre of people looking like civilians. I mean.... seriously. Do the kids get taught this? This section of the Museum is a card-carrying outrage in progress.
And oh yeah, Pearl Harbor happened because the US was deliberately denying resource-poor Japan access to steel, energy etc. Actually, that's pretty much true: but what it fails to mention is that by that point the Japanese army had not only been committing major atrocities in China for several years, but had just recently invaded French Indochina.
And can you believe it? Then the Yanks blockaded us! Yeah, what a head-scratcher. Hard to fathom, right?
Moving along, the really notable feature was the emphasis placed on the support the Japanese armies provided to anti-colonial movements in South and Southeast Asia.
Actually - and this can be hard for many in the West to swallow - there's substantially more than a grain of truth in that. Of course, it would have been 'Cheerio George, Hello Hirohito' - but nonetheless, you will find first generation nationalists like Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore ambivalent about the Japanese, and despite the atrocities, publicly acknowledge their role in inspiring post-war, anti-colonial nationalism. And in India too, the veterans of the Indian National Army - set up by the Japanese - still receive state pensions. Unlike the vets from the British Indian Army.
So, there it is. Yasukuni. Hard to fathom why they don't cut their losses and decommemorate the war criminals and move on.
6 comments:
The japanese live in their way in an honour society . Their need to commemerate the war dead especially those the western forces executed at what many japanese consider to be show trials if not done would involve a loss of face.
Face is definitely a difficult concept for us to understand at an emotional level.It can seem to be politeness on an individual level but when national issues are addressed watch out for the wooden headed recalcitrance.
Could I also suggest a useful concept to explain this is the nihonjinron theories? These frankly weird and isolationist ideas elevate the japanese race ( entire debate to consider here too) above other mortals and render them separate and special in ways we poor heathens can't understand . It's the culture , you see.
Anyway as far as revisionist strangeness goes try and get a trip to the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Museum into your itinery.There the story goes a bit like this "Whoa - man out of nowhere and for no reason they blew us up - especially this band of school kids who were just minding their own business."
The kids who were killed were all making munitions - probably slave child labour but you get the drift.
The guest book invites comments as you leave the museum ( well it did - I last visited in the 90's) and you could always rely on the chinese visitors to leave a pithy little note about what a farce this tragic and sad site is.
Thanks for that great comment Murph - I'm a rank amateur on matters Japanese, but I suspect you're right about the issue of face - and certainly about the nihonjinron idea. Even today, there's so much exceptionalism: your mobile doesn't work there, though it does eberyhwhere else; no one uses internet much (owing to some Kanji script problems, specifically the syllabary); ATMs are plentiful, but rare as hen's teeth if your on a non_Japanese card; and I gather their banking system is extremely weird and one of a kind (Fyodor may be able to explain if he drops through).
The Hiroshima museum sounds like Yakusuni vibe. I must admit, though, Ive never understood why the allies needed to drop the second bomb on Nagasaki. The first, yes - "you must surrender - we have this". But surely the point was made. I tend to see the 2nd as a war crime. "just testing another sort of bomb now" has never really cut it for me as an adequate justification.
But thats probably taking the debate elsewhere....
I would note that the official name of the force raised among Indian POWs to fight alongside the Japanese against the British was the Indian National Army (INA), not 'Liberation' army. This was Netanji Bose's idea and, I dare say, put enough fright into the Raj as to make Gandhi look a more attractive option.
Interestingly, Bose also raised a force among Indian POWs in German captivity, which ended up being called the 'Free Indian Legion'. The language of command in that unit, ironically, was English. Some of its members were killed fighting the Resistance in France. A strange and pathetic way for an Indian nationalist to die, I'd wager...
The Japanese also raised a Burmese National Army, which skilfully did an about-face and attacked Japanese units late in 1945. The leader of the BNA was one Aung San, father of Aung San Suu Kyi.
I recommend Joyce Lebra's Japanese-trained armies in Southeast Asia, as well as Peter Ward Fay's The Forgotten Army, for more detail on these matters.
Lastly, on Lefty E's point about the second atomic bomb: there's ample evidence this was dropped as much to scare the Soviets as defeat the Japanese. The US had tried hard to keep Stalin out of the Pacific War. It was actually Moscow that broke the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Treaty to invade Manchuria and Korea. Essentially, there was no Yalta agreement concerning East Asia, and they didn't want to be left out of the geopolitical carve-up. We can thank Stalin for the bizarre, psychotic Disneyland that is North Korea...
Thanks for those authoritative and informative points, World of Yentl. original post corrected re: INA.
And don't forget the Japanese orchestrated "colunas negras" (black columns) - West Timorese militia used to horrifying effect in Portuguese Timor.
The Indonesians actually picked up a few tricks, if you ask me.
I am so jealous of the lifestyle of lefty elitists in this modern world. They appear to be jetting off to some interesting part of Asia every second week. And all this on an academic income.
I really must get into this academic racket, which evidently offers a life of beer and skittles, and never-ending travel. Which are the best online universities to purchase a PhD from? ;-)
"Even today, there's so much exceptionalism ..." Is there anything the Japanese do, or have ever done, that approximates normal human behaviour?
I've recently been reading reviews of Japanese hentai computer games at somethingawful.com. They're quite hilarious, in a really, really black humoured way. Among these games is an entire sub-genre of, quote, rape simulators, unquote.
Now when I think of 'simulator', in the context of computer games, I think of Spitfires and F-16s. The Japanese think of unwilling schoolgirls.
Perhaps we should have just kept nuking them until the world ran out of uranium.
Cheers,
Paulus.
it IS tremendous being a lefty elitist, Paulus. However, in this case the Japan trip was regrettably self-funded!
And yes, thats some weird shit. Its a land of seriously weird shit.
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