Apologies for Atrocities: Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of World War II's end in the United States and Japan

American Studies International, June-October 2004. Kyoko Kishimoto. Quotes from her work will be in italics.

The author starts off by talking about the recent attack on the World Trade Centers.

As the American people's initial shock and sadness about this incident shifted to anger, the World War II rhetoric of "revenge" and "kill'em all" began to be heard from those who failed to make the distinction between the alleged perpetrator and the religion and culture associated with the terrorists.

Which is something which continues eight years later; distrust of Muslims anywhere, especially in the United States. The only thing that has tempered this a little has been the death of Osama bin Laden. What she is saying here is that the response to that attack was similar to the response to the attack on Pearl Harbor and how Americans regarded the Japanese during the war. One thing to point out, though, is that there was long-standing prejudice against Orientals in the United States while there was no similar prejudice against Germans or Italians.

In relation to the Japanese atrocities during World War II, she goes after both Japan and the United States.

...Japan's continuing refusal to make formal apologies (with restitution) for its wartime conduct and how it left room for contemporary Japan to revert to conservatism and nationalism. Even though this paper will focus on the media coverage of the apology.

So she hits Japan for not apologizing and not making restitution, and notes how Japan has become more conservation with a rise of nationalism partially due to not paying adequate attention to what Japan did during the war.

She also faults the United States, though, for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This reluctance to re-examine the United States' role in the war also allowed U.S. complicity in Japan's wartime transgression to be ignored.

What she is referring to her are things like Unit 731 where the United States did not press for massive war crimes trial for the men involved in that unit since they turned over the results of their experiments and vivisections to the U.S.

She then talks about the Enola Gay controversy, where the plane that dropped the bomb on Hirosima was supposed to be display but the textual material that went with the display strongly opposed by veterans groups which had parts which they termed offensive and 'politically correct,' and also lowered the number of deaths the bombs are estimated to have caused. Critics thought the text showed the United States as an aggressor and Japan as a victim.

According to the U.S. government, despite the existence of dissenting views by some historians and segments of the public, the official interpretation of World War II justified the atomic bombings for saving many American lives and shortening the war. Therefore, any questioning of the legitimacy of the bombings would have challenged the interpretation of World War II as the "good war," which at the same time contested the very meaning and identity of American culture.

There is, I feel, adequate analysis that has been done of what would have happened if the United States had invaded Japan and not used the atomic bombs and that such an invasion would have cost tremendous American casualties and would have led to the deaths of far more Japanese than the atomic bombs killed.

John W. Dower, who argues that World War II was a race war, states that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has long been burned into Japanese people's minds as the memory of World War II. Thus, historically Japan has long used the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to portray itself as the victim of the Second World War and to conveniently forget (or cover up) the aggression and colonization it had committed in Asia.

It is interesting that even today there is still controversy about the Rape of Nanking, a Japanese atrocity in China. When I view various videos on You Tube about that I notice that videos that take a documentary approach to the attack and emphasis how vicious the Japanese military was are often met by comments from people that are excessively vitriolic, denying that any such thing ever happened and that it's some kind of plot.

As far as matters go, Japan has also not apologized for the attack on Pearl Harbor and for starting that aspect of the war in the first place.

In Japan, the issue of apology has caused great controversies. The orthodox interpretation of the war has been that it was a "defensive war" against Western imperialism and a liberatory war of Asian nations from Western colonial powers.

This type of approach totally fails, though, to note that while the Japanese were claiming they were liberating the countries of Asia from colonialism they were, themselves, at the same time treating those areas as colonies of Japan, basically. The countries were treated as Japan's 'little brothers' who needed a guiding hand which Japan would apply. It also side-steps Japan's invasion of Manchuria and taking it over and renaming it Manchuko which was about as open an act of aggression as you can get.

To its neighbors, especially Korea and China, Japan during World War II was a brutal aggressor; invading, colonizing, even forcing women into government sponsored brothels.

Almost sixty years later there are still strong feelings in Korea and China about what Japan did both before and during World War II.

These incidents in which politicians made historically distorted comments reveal that there are many in the Japanese government who still are not willing to acknowledge or apologize for the Japanese aggression and atrocities committed during the war.

The she talks about the textbook controversies where some Japanese textbook either downplayed the Japanese atrocities during the war or ignored them altogether. Nor, apparently, do the textbooks explain just why the United States felt it was necessary to use the atomic bombs. The issue of comfort women is also something that doesn't seem to be given as much attention as some people want.

Now, I'll take a moment here to point out one problem that no one else, to my knowledge, has pointed out. I taught school for thirty years. I taught science but have always had a major interest in history. Textbooks can be rather large books. In science there is still the controversy issue of what to include in the books about evolution. History books have a slightly more weighty problem and that is how much history to include. Studying American, for example, can cover the years from say around 1492 to today, with maybe some mention of inhabitants in North America before that time period.

Japanese history, on the other hand, is much, much longer than American history. Thus, the textbooks have a lot more to cover and it becomes a question on how much space to allow each topic without making the textbooks so massive that it becomes impossible to cover the required material in one school year. On that basis alone the coverage of Japan's war in World War II would never be able to be as large as it should simply because there is so much other history to cover.

In colleges more time could be spent on the subject, maybe even a course on Japan's role during the war, but there really isn't enough time in public schools to allot much space to any one topic. I'm not giving this as an excuse but simply as a note that with more to cover more material gets passed over.

In Japan, because so much time is spent on teaching the earlier part of Japanese history, history classes often run out of time to teach World War II and simply skim over it.

She is saying something similar here. There's a similar thing in the United States where some teachers will put off the study of evolution until very late in the year, knowing there will be a good chance there won't be time to cover it much if at all and, by that late in the year, the absentee rate among the students is higher and there would be fewer to listen to anything about evolution. (Assuming it's allowed to be taught at all, of course. )

Then there is also the issue of what kinds of words are used to describe something. As the author points out Japanese newspapers will tend to use the term 'comfort women' rather than the more accurate term 'sex slaves' in describing the women that were forced to service Japanese soldiers sexually.

Another issue that is very controversial today is the exact role the Emperor played in the events of the war.

However, considering how Pearl Harbor and the Asia-Pacific War had taken place with the strong involvement of the emperor, it is ironic and problematic that in the year 2001, when the Japanese public should have been re-examining their nation's role in the war, the Japanese public was again celebrating and worshiping the imperial family. However, this fits with the current trend in Japan where nationalistic, conservative, and militaristic forces are on the rise again. (This is also a phenomenon in other parts of the world.)

There is more and more evidence coming out that the Emperor played a direct hand in the running of the war, at least at times. The fact that he was not held for war crimes trials was due to the United States wanting to maintain him on the throne in order to make it easier to occupy Japan, figuring if they tried the Emperor or even hung him or something this could basically set off a long time of further fighting.

All-in-all this was a very well done and interesting paper.

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