How Japan Remembers Pearl Harbor
SEIDENSTICKER, EDWARD
How Japan Remembers Pearl Harbor By Edward Seidensticker Tokyo It is now 20 years since Pearl Harbor and 16 since Hiroshima. Twenty years after Sarajevo and 16 after Compiègne the Japanese...
...Those were not tactful remarks to make...
...War guilt is a favorite propaganda weapon for the Left, because it means that everyone must be very kind to the Chinese Communists by way of atonement...
...Many Americans who urged a more "progressive" (and vindictive—the two adjectives often went together) Occupation feel a little silly today...
...Two imperialist powers got into a nasty competition as their internal contradictions produced a scramble for colonies...
...In Japan today, as in the 1920s, there is a disturbing tendency toward political polarization at the expense of the Center...
...Despatching the Crown Prince to Hiroshima for Bomb Day, 1960, was a very canny move...
...Hence Pearl Harbor falls into place as but another step in the great march forward...
...The country had to risk possible defeat, according to this line, because the alternative was certain defeat...
...They acted most efficiently, with the result that it will be a long time before they are rooted out of the trade unions and the teachers' organizations...
...The best answer to the perceptive newcomer who finds postwar Japan reminiscent of Weimar Germany is that the former has already lasted longer than the latter...
...Thus everyone has his own sort of Pearl Harbor to remember...
...Insofar as they think about it at all, the Japanese are also having second thoughts about Pearl Harbor...
...The situation in such matters is so free, not to say incoherent, that the Socialists, who proclaim that they are opposed to violence, resort to violence with complete impunity in opposition to the Government's plans for curbing violence...
...Even post-Occupation Japan is reaching the end of its first decade, and without the disasters that overtook the Weimar Republic in the same period of time...
...Anger at Pearl Harbor was responsible for some of the worst mistakes made by the American Occupation...
...The 20th anniversary has been the occasion for a rash of articles about "that day...
...Until recently they were the exclusive province of the front organizations...
...In general, they have contributed to strengthening a pair of ideas most comforting to the Japanese conscience: No one, including the two Japanese envoys then negotiating in Washington, knew what the generals and admirals were up to in 1941, so no one need feel guilty about not having done anything...
...The situation on the Left is a little more complicated...
...But the ramifications of the theory have not yet been fully developed...
...Some years ago, the chief Japanese delegate to the "normalization" talks with South Korea startled the Koreans and the press by remarking upon all the fine things 35 years of Japanese occupation did for Korea...
...Opposition to "Japanese imperialism" does not really have much power these days to stir men's hearts in the fight for "peace and Socialism...
...Recently, Saburô Eda, Secretary General of the Socialist party, warned the nation that it was being imperialistic again...
...That distinction is given to August 6, the anniversary of the first atomic bomb...
...It is quite natural that there should be such a tendency on the Right, which is only sorry that Pearl Harbor was not followed up more aggressively...
...It would seem that precisely the same reasoning could be applied to the War in Europe, in which Germans on the eastern front were imperialists and Germans on the western front antiimperialists...
...For them it is not the major anniversary of what they call "the Pacific War...
...So the Left has hit upon an ingenious theory, developed most notably by one of its China experts, Professor Yoshimi Takeuchi: From Japan's point of view, the Second World War was an imperialist war to the extent that it was directed at other Asians, but an anti-imperialist war insofar as it was directed at the West...
...The struggle was over which of the two imperialists would have its way with the Chinese...
...In their concentration on a broken enemy, "Japanese militarism," the leaders of the Occupation were not as quick as they might have been to note the rise of other enemies...
...No law even remotely resembling it is likely today...
...Yet the second-thinking goes on all the same...
...As it moves into its third decade, fewer and fewer people are likely to see that December 7 Sunday morning, 20 years ago, as a great many of us saw it: an act of deceit and naked aggression...
...What is more troublesome is a tendency to remember Pearl Harbor and gloat about it...
...Probably they never felt very much...
...Twenty years after Sarajevo and 16 after Compiègne the Japanese had already taken Manchuria, the Age of the Assassins had begun, the China Incident was in sight—and beyond it Pearl Harbor...
...The characteristic reaction was first a look of disbelief and then a raucous laugh...
...Guilt feelings are not the most important attributes of a good ally...
...It serves the purposes of the Left, however, to have as much righteous anger as possible directed at the United States...
...Both the Pacific War and the war on the Asian mainland can be explained very easily without departing from the broad principles of Leninism, accepted by the Japanese Communists, naturally, and by the larger part of the Socialist party as well...
...and events of the past yearand-a-half have shown that the Japanese retain their penchant for civil violence...
...Fear of resurgent Japanese militarism also led to the drafting of a Constitution which now makes it impossible to arm the Japanese effectively against the great Communist powers...
...and what the military did may not, after all, have been unmixed evil...
...The view that Japan was forced into the War is very popular...
...As for Korea, feelings quite the reverse of guilt have even received official expression...
...That the Japanese do not feel very guilty about Pearl Harbor need not disturb Americans...
...On the other hand, when the Japanese share of responsibility for the Pacific War can be whittled down and dismissed as insignificant, righteous anger becomes focused on a more present enemy—American imperialism...
...Nevertheless, things are undoubtedly going better than in the past...
...If the Japanese have ever felt any guilt about Pearl Harbor it is disappearing as the event recedes into the past...
...Edward Seidensticker, a veteran correspondent based in Japan, is a contributor to many periodicals...
...And it was considerably less than a decade after Compiègne that a draconian public-security law was enacted in Japan...
...Pearl Harbor is much more likely to stir a spasm of anger in an Englishman or an Australian than in an American...
...The Communists were the one force in a bewildered and demoralized nation that was ready to act...
...Indeed, there is a certain false note in all Japanese protestations that they feel terribly guilty about everything they did, both in the Pacific and on the Asian Continent...
...Now more moderate elements are making a strong effort to turn them into rallies against not just American bombs but all bombs...
...The Orient is sometimes a trifle contradictory...
...The limitations of the guilt are apparent, however, from the fact that it does not require being kind to Chiang Kai-shek, who, had the Japanese not invaded, might even today be sitting in Nanking...
...Every year the bomb festivals in Tokyo and Hiroshima are front-page news...
...Pearl Harbor, by contrast, is a shy, unobtrusive little anniversary which stimulates no rallies and no frontpage headlines...
Vol. 45 • January 1962 • No. 1
