Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [373]
Perhaps this was a necessary part of a cleansing process after the years of military dominance and national self-delusion. From 1950 onwards, stimulated ironically enough by the Korean War, there followed an economic resurrection which awed the world.
YET THE NEW JAPAN proved distressingly reluctant to confront the historic guilt of the old. Its spirit of denial contrasted starkly with the penitence of post-war Germany. Though successive Japanese prime ministers expressed formal regret for Japan’s wartime actions, the country refused to pay reparations to victims, or to acknowledge its record in school history texts. I embarked upon this book with a determination to view Japanese wartime conduct objectively, thrusting aside nationalistic sentiments which have clouded the perspective of many British and American writers since 1945. Japanese veterans whom I met proved warmly sympathetic. It is essential for every historian to keep in view the wartime excesses of Allied forces, which seldom incurred censure, far less judicial sanction. Yet it proved hard to sustain lofty aspirations to detachment, in the face of the evidence of systemic Japanese barbarism, displayed against their fellow Asians on a vastly wider scale than against Americans and Europeans. The knights of bushido, like those of medieval Europe, made mockery of their lofty ideal of honour by behaving so basely towards the great multitudes whom they deemed undeserving of the protection of their code. In modern times, only Hitler’s SS has matched militarist Japan in rationalising and institutionalising atrocity. Stalin’s Soviet Union never sought to dignify its great killings as the acts of gentlemen, as did Hirohito’s nation.
It is easy to perceive why so many Japanese behaved as they did, conditioned as they were. Yet it remains almost impossible to empathise with those who did such things, especially when Japan still rejects its historic legacy. Many Japanese today adopt the view that it is time to bury all old grievances—those of Japan’s former enemies about the treatment of prisoners and subject peoples, along with those of their own nation about fire-bombing, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “In war, both sides do terrible things,” former Lieutenant Hayashi Inoue argued in 2005. “If you win, then that justifies any action you have taken. If you lose, you become the guilty party. Surely after sixty years, the time has come to stop criticising Japan for things done so long ago.” Maj. Shigeru Funaki, a former staff officer at Japanese army HQ in Nanjing, says sternly: “A lot of the stuff about what Japan is supposed to have done in China is simply invented. At the end of the war, I had to negotiate constantly with Nationalist army officers. None of them said a word about, for instance, a massacre in Nanjing. OK, some people died there, because there was a battle and people die in battles. But this idea that 150,000 or 200,000 were killed—who is supposed to have counted them?” Japanese media tycoon Tsuneo Watanabe has sponsored a major project to review more realistically Japan’s record in World War II. Most of his fellow countrymen, however, decisively reject both the concept of self-analysis and his bleak conclusions.
Germany has paid almost $6 billion to 1.5 million victims of the Hitler era. Austria has paid $400 million to 132,000 people. By contrast, modern Japan goes to extraordinary lengths to escape any admission of responsibility, far less of liability for compensation, towards its wartime victims. By an absurd, indeed grotesque, irony, in 1999 the British government chose to make ex-gratia payments to British former captives of the Japanese, having despaired of the perpetrators of their sufferings doing so. Repeated attempts at litigation before