The Long Defeat

The subtitle of this book is Cultural Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Japan. It is about how Japan and the people and government there have dealt with what Japan did in World War II. Unfortunately, the book is very tedious and seems to have been written in the style of a thesis. There are still a number of interesting things I picked up from the book, though.

There are people who wonder why Japan fought an unwinnable war and why did so many have to die for what was essentially a lost cause.

The author writes that cultures sometimes have to deal with emotions from their losses by minimizing the events such as Japan's atrocities in Asia during the war.

There can also be a great difference in how people in Japan see World War II. For some it was a sacred war, a war to establish the East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere and a war against colonial control by Western powers of various countries on the Asian mainland. This colors, of course, how people saw the actions by their soldiers during the war.

The death toll during the war is estimated at 60 million people. About 1/3 of those died in Asia, mostly due to Japanese actions although American bombing of Japan caused about a million deaths in that country.

People view the war a something bad that could have been avoided; something bad that could not have been avoided and something that was plain inevitable.

About a third of Japanese today believe the war was one of Japanese aggression.

How the war dead are dealt with is still a controversial issue today especially centered around the Yasukuni shrine.

One of the difficult things that the Japanese people had to deal with was that their country had never lost a war. The book also deals with how different generations of Japanese view the war differently. About half of Japanese who answered a 2006 survey felt that issues form the war had not yet been adequately dealt with (such as comfort women, Unit 731, treatment of prisoners of war and the Nanking Massacre.)

There's a lot of controversy over exactly who has and who has not apologized in Japan for what Japan did during the war from an official government view of things. Some individuals have apologized but not the "official" government itself.

There is still a strong nationalist movement in the country of people who still feel the war was just and Japan did nothing really wrong, that the atrocities attributed to Japan was overplayed or never happened at all and that Japan doesn't owe an apology to anyone at all.

There have been newspaper series in Japan that were very critical of the war and what Japan did. Peace education is stressed in Japan. What it seems to me is that the majority of Japanese today either feel the war was bad and Japan did very bad things or that they don't even really think about something that happened that far in the past. The minority, quite vocal, consists of the nationalists who take a strong right-wing stance that Japan did nothing wrong. A number of things complicate matters: Japan did not have major war crime trials in the nature of Germany; many Japanese who were involved in atrocity-type activities were not punished and moved right into business positions and later positions of power in the government and the number of people who are still alive from that time decreases daily as the events recede into the past.

The controversy is shown in various media including manga, anime and films.(Grave of the Fireflies is a particular moving animated feature.)

Another thing that complicates everything is that particular people and what they did can be seen in different lights such as the people involved were patriots, horrible aggressors and victims all at the same time. "You see what you want to see" I think is appropriate here.

The book discusses exhibits and educational programs related to the war. About a third of all the peace museums in the world today are found in Japan.

The book also covers how the American occupation of Japan influenced various things. The current textbook controversies are also covered.

A survey in 2014 showed that over half of the Chinese still believe Japan is a military threat.

As you can see there is a lot of information in this book. It just takes some work to slog through it.

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Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
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