Different Wars, Different Crimes

...The museum seems to produce the same effect on visitors as the Vietnam Memorial in Washington does...

...Against them are ranged Rightists and "revisionists," who contend that the War was a noble struggle for national survival, that Japan was no worse than other combatants and perhaps, in its spirit of honor and sacrifice, better...

...The similarities between Germany and Japan, and the differences, prompted Buruma to examine the way World War II is remembered by the two nations most responsible for starting it...

...if anyone should have been charged with personal responsibility for the War, it was he...

...It is not the only point about World War II that is missed in modern Japan...

...In every other form the War is a living presence...

...Japan, in any case, cannot perform the same distancing operation on its history...

...To many in Japan, "as long as the Emperor lived, Japanese would have trouble being honest about the past...

...And Japan, he continues, was never really a fascist state??racist, yes, but not fascist...

...Even in 1989," Buruma reports, "when I began, for the first time, to travel extensively in Germany, this was considered among my Dutch friends an interesting but slightly eccentric thing to do...

...Ironically, the Germans are better able to acknowledge their past because the atrocities committed in their name were greater...

...The banality and inauthenticity of their phrasing notwithstanding, he finds the letters "almost unbearably moving...

...Textbooks invariably present pictures of the Holocaust and quote extensively from Nazi documents...

...He also notes that German writers and filmmakers have a deeper problem: It strikes them as inappropriate to identify in their work with the victims, yet they do not want to identify with the perpetrators...

...Although few German novels, plays or films deal directly with the Holocaust, Buruma insightfully observes that this is due not to avoidance but, rightly or wrongly, to a kind of esthetic fastidiousness, a reluctance to trivialize or sentimentalize an inexpressible horror...

...All this belongs indelibly to the German heritage...

...Finally, no one ever tried the winners for their own war crimes, a fact that is not lost on the Japanese...

...The wartime government did not represent a break with the nation's past, either culturally or politically...

...Monuments to the victims are erected out of what the author calls "a neurotic fear of amnesia," and camps are maintained as shrines and museums...

...For them, a list of Allied atrocities would begin with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...

...When former Nazis are tried in Germany, it is for crimes against humanity, not war crimes...

...This perspective is certainly a valid one, and possibly necessary for the sake of Germany's national sanity...

...Despite strong cultural ties, the Dutch turned their backs on their German neighbors in the 1950s and '60s...

...High school teachers are advised to spend at least 60 hours a year on the Third Reich...

...The more Japanese romantics went on about the essence of Japaneseness, the more they sounded like German metaphysicians...

...He is at his best in his description of a kamikaze museum on the island of Kyushu...

...In the Introduction, entitled "The Enemies," he explains how, as a boy growing up in the postwar Netherlands, he learned to view the people who had overrun his nation a few years earlier as the embodiment of evil...

...But there was no genocide in Japan...

...There, it appears, people cannot do enough to remember...

...Instead, they focused on their own sufferings...

...The author's technique in The Wages of Guilt is to follow his nose wherever it leads him...

...That is to say: Goethe and genocide, Beethoven and gas chambers, Kant and jackboots...

...the Japanese did not commit crimes against humanity...

...The past is less detachable than Buruma feels it is, and there is another way of viewing Germany's history that makes its own claims on us...

...Buruma spent much of the 1970s and '80s in and around Japan as a student and an editor, and there too he was reminded of World War II, though for a reason that surprised him...

...Buruma offers chapters on textbooks and on monuments...

...Insofar as there is discussion in Japan about the War, it is debate with an airy, unreal quality...

...Maybe they did, Buruma thinks, though "it was not immediately clear to me how they contributed to it...

...Between the quarreling factions stands a silent majority (the Rape of Nanking is not mentioned in high school textbooks), or a muddled one (the head of the kamikaze museum believes both that wars are bad and that the pilots he celebrates were noble and brave...

...The Japanese scarcely mentioned their aggressions...

...they had tortured and murdered many of his countrymen...

...The Americans were highly selective in choosing the culpable...

...The building's official name is the Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots, and a sign at its entrance declares that the dead airmen "wished for the restoration of peace and prosperity...

...Buruma quotes the Polish film director Andrzej Wajda: "Germany will continue to mean, among many other things, Auschwitz...

...Sometimes he roams rather too far afield, or goes on a bit too long, but for the most part he is a remarkably sensitive and acute observer: humane in his receptivity to individual experience, unforgiving when he detects overcooked sentiment or emotional falseness...

...What is so awful about the memory of their deaths is the cloying sentimentality that was meant to justify their self-immolation...

...Yet at General MacArthur's insistence he was retained to provide the very continuity that now serves to confound understanding...

...But Buruma is firm in his conclusion: "The tragedy is not just that the suicide pilots died young...

...editor THIS SEEEMS to be a book that the talented journalist Ian Buruma was destined to write...

...it was actively worked on, labored, rehearsed...

...The Germans are openly coming to grips with their past, Buruma says, because they are able to distance themselves from Hitler and his regime...

...the book is descriptive, discursive, and occasionally meandering...

...He wanders among the torn uniforms and damaged airplanes, the old photographs of laughing boys about to die, and final letters to families and loved ones...

...No wonder the majority of Japanese today prefer silence...

...Everywhere Buruma traveled and in most of what he read and saw, he found an avoidance of responsibility, an unwillingness to face up to facts...

...and, of course, they had practically annihilated Holland's Jewish community...

...Then comes Buruma's kicker: "And this point is still completely missed at the Peace Museum today...

...There are no sustained arguments here...

...For he had been formally responsible for everything, and by holding him responsible for nothing, everybody was absolved, except, of course, for a number of military and civilian scapegoats...

...Buruma visits Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nanking, along with small towns like Passau and Hanaoka...

...How different was the situation Buruma encountered in Germany...

...Buruma notes that the Japanese have two War memorial days: August 6, when Hiroshima was destroyed by the atomic bomb, and August 15, when Tokyo surrendered...

...I began to notice how the same German names cropped up," he says, "Spengler, Herder, Fichte, even Wagner...

...The official head of government was, as always, the Emperor...

...There is no reason to suppose they didn't believe in the patriotic gush about cherry blossoms and sacrifice, no matter how conventional it was at the time...

...One sometimes got the impression, especially in Berlin, that German memory was like a massive tongue seeking out, over and over, a sore tooth...

...As Buruma notes, there were no exiled writers and artists who could return after the War to become the consciences of the country, no Japanese Thomas Manns or Alfred Doblins...

...What the Germans remember, and memorialize, are the genocidal horrors of the Holocaust...

...It "was not only remembered on television, on the radio, in community halls, schools, and museums...

...It was the exploitation of their youthful idealism that made it such a wicked enterprise...

...As Buruma remarks: "If identification with historical figures is to be encouraged, it is surely better to identify with Count von Stauffenberg than with, say, Heinrich Himmler...

...The problem is that these trials give every appearance of having been "victor's justice," the revenge that conquerors exact upon the conquered...

...Identification with Western liberal values gives the Germans a moral vantage point, an ability to shed a burden without ignoring it, to reclaim the past without being overwhelmed by it...

...The Nazi period is generally seen as a terrible excrescence, a temporary interruption in a historical stream of Western civilization and humanism that includes Goethe, Beethoven and Kant...

...as many as 300,000 civilians were massacred when Nanking fell...

...On one side are Leftists, who oppose militarism of any kind and preach the pacifist message that all wars are evil...

...Not only did the Emperor escape, but perhaps more damning still, the doctors who conducted experiments on humans were allowed to go free in exchange for sharing their findings...

...Soldiers (and civilians) do that in wars everywhere...

...He talks to a wide range of people, from an East German schoolteacher who has been forced by reunification to relearn the history of the War from a non-Communist perspective, to the Christian Mayor of Nagasaki, who was shot and almost killed by Right-wing fanatics for questioning the Emperor's wartime role...

...Chinese were treated as subhuman...

...He was brought full circle upon discovering that the foundations of modern Japanese nationalism were laid in 19th-century Germany...

...One does not necessarily have to agree with that to grant the larger point, or to understand why memories of the War in Japan contain so many ambiguities??ambiguities that are troubling not just for them but for us...

...Reviewed by Barry Gewen New York "Times Book Review," preview...

...They did, to be sure, commit plenty of war crimes: Women were forced into sexual slavery...

...People weep or fall silent...

...Which was exactly the point: They were made to rejoice in their own death...

...After the War, the Americans tried some leaders for atrocities, or at least for condoning them...

...Nevertheless, uncomfortable doubts are bound to linger...

...Thus they can in good conscience celebrate resisters to Nazism like Count von Stauffenberg, the man who led the plot to murder Hitler, despite the fact that resistance groups represented only a small minority of the German people...

...The atmosphere is quasi-religious, prayerful...

...Buruma is not done, however, and by digging deeper he emerges with what I think is his shrewdest observation: The Germans and the Japanese have responded differently to World War II because they are dealing with different wars and different crimes...

...Germans had sent his father away to work in their factories...

...He digresses to discuss the use of the word "atrocity" in Japanese and to meditate on the aims of education...