Inferno - Max Hastings [422]
In both Europe and Asia from 1945 onwards, the confrontation with the Soviet Union created new strategic imperatives which were perceived to demand the enlistment of thousands of German and Japanese war criminals in U.S., British and Russian intelligence organisations and scientific research establishments. With notable cynicism, the Americans amnestied the Japanese biological warfare Unit 731’s commander, Lt. Gen. Shiro Ishii, in return for his secrets. After investigation, U.S. scientists at Camp Detrick declared Ishii’s data worthless. But as a result of a personal decision by the supreme commander in Japan, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, most of the 20,000 scientists and physicians engaged in Japan’s wartime biological warfare programme were able to resume comfortable civilian careers, despite having been responsible for unspeakable murders in China. The only retribution for their atrocities was extracted by the Russians, who convicted twelve leading members of Unit 731 at a trial at Khabarovsk in 1949. The guilty received long terms of imprisonment; General MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo denounced as propaganda both the trials and well-founded Soviet allegations of an American cover-up of Japan’s biological warfare crimes.
Who was to blame for the catastrophe that had befallen Japan? Kisao Ebisawa, a petty officer, shrugged and said: “The brass—the people in charge.” But then he added: “Really, though, one must include the whole nation, because its mood had been dragging us towards war for so long. There was a horrible inevitability about the way we just plunged deeper and deeper into the mire.” After 1945 the Japanese people renounced their militarists, and indeed the soldiers who had fought in the war, with a fervour that distressed the nation’s veterans, many of whom remained impenitent. Col. Hattori Takushiro, the former military secretary to Japan’s war minister, wrote proudly in 1956: “The Japanese army had no peer in its terrific fighting capacity, which is a separate issue from the fact that Japan lost the war.” The Japanese people embraced the postwar United States with an enthusiasm that won the hearts of most Americans who served in the occupation army. Japan’s campaigns of conquest, and its treatment of its subject peoples, notably including the Chinese, became forbidden subjects of political or social exchange, and indeed of school learning. Hiroshima and Nagasaki dominated postwar Japanese perceptions; Emperor Hirohito kept his throne despite having led his country to war, which made it less plausible that his subjects should acknowledge collective guilt.
The Japanese writer Kazutoshi Hando, who survived the Tokyo firestorm, said in 2007: “In the aftermath of the war, blame was placed solely on the Japanese army and navy. This seemed just, because the civilian population had always been deceived by the armed forces about what was done. Civilian Japan felt no sense of collective guilt—and that was the way the American victors and occupiers wanted it. In the same fashion, it was the Americans who urged that no modern Japanese history should be taught in schools. The consequence is that very few people under fifty have any knowledge of Japan’s invasion of China or colonisation of Manchuria.” In the early twenty-first century, Hando lectured at a women’s college about the Shōwa era: “I asked fifty students to list