Riding home on the train a number of advertisements for the new issue of the popular monthly magazine Bungei Shunjû (文藝春秋) caught my eye. They were all announcing this month’s special feature in large letters, “25 ‘Why?’s of Showa History for a Father to Teach his Son.” (父が子に教える昭和史２５の「なぜ？」)
I was curious to see what the sons of Japan were going to learn from fathers who had just put down October’s issue. I wasn’t suprised to find that there was much reason for concern about the conservative magazine’s responses to these questions “Why?” Let us look at just four of these questions, (none of which actually ask a question “Why?” in any language – but we shan’t quibble) which are most often dismissed outside of Japan with a resounding, “Duh!” …
Question #2 – Was the Manchurian Incident an invasion of China? (p. 264)
満州事変は中国への侵略？ 福田和也
A well published critic and professor of Keiô University, Fukuda Kazuya takes a stab both at this question and question #12 below. After briefly introducing some events that led up to the Mukden Incident in 1931, which triggered Japan’s occupation of northeastern China, we might be comforted that Fukuda concludes already in the third paragraph that, “At this point, from the perspective of a modern nation-state view and international law, the Manchurian Incident can probably be called an ‘invasion.'” To this, however, he adds, “…to end it at that is to overlook this event’s true essence (本質) , its breadth and influence (広がり) and its significance (意義).
In some ways, this initial qualification might just as well be found in Yamamuro Shinichi’s (山室信一) excellent book on the Manchurian adventure called “Chimera” (キメラ) or Prasenjit Duara’s fascinating and more ambitious new work. The two books are radically different but share a desire to go beyond a simplified retelling of a chapter in the story of Japanese imperialism to explore a number of new directions, both by looking at the history of Manchukuo itself and situating it in its broader historical context. To get there, though, any such author needs to take a step beyond the old narrative. We find, for example, Yamamuro say something similar to Fukuda when he writes, “[the establishment of Manchukuo] was most definitely not merely a puppet government or a colony, but hosted a movement which sought to build a utopian nation that rejected European imperialistic rule.” (p. 9) and only a few pages later, “It is often argued that we need to fairly address the achievements of Manchukuo and not simply focus on the element of conquest.” (p. 12) Unlike Yamamuro, Fukuda is initially focused only on the opening incident which lead to the later establishment of Manchukuo, but anyone seeing only these quotes might suggest the scholars were in full agreement. These similarities, end very quickly. Indeed, the 25 essays in this month’s Bungei Shunjû are rarely taking any sort of “new approach” but are instead salvaging a few old ones left in the closet.
According to Fukuda, then, what is the true essence and significance of the 1931 incident and the invasion of northern China that followed? Let us jump ahead to Fukuda’s conclusion, where we find him wrapping up his argument,
“In other words, if there was no Manchukuo we would not now have this prosperous Japan nor would the various nations of Asia have developed.”
One might wonder how in the space of two pages we have reached such an elaborate claim. Fukuda’s story of Manchukuo runs as follows:
Sun Yatsen once toyed with the idea of giving Manchuria to Japan in exchange for help with the 1911 revolution. It may now seem like openly self-serving conquest, but the Russians made admirable contributions to Manchuria’s development, modernization, and internationalization. The Japanese, who reluctantly assumed control of Russia’s rights after the Russo-Japanese war, briefly considering selling the rights to America. But instead, Japan devoted itself to investment in Manchuria’s economic and social development. Although the Chinese had assumed the mantle of the Qing dynasty, Japan could not now so easily give up control of a land for which they had spilled blood and dedicated themselves to nurturing. Japan wanted to develop Manchuria into Asia’s most international and free nation. Of course, it was pretty much run by a Japanese puppet government and there doubtlessly some unwise policies, but this was not some kind of brutal regime which stole property and killed people! Thanks to a few brilliant minds, Japan turned Manchuria into an economic and industrial powerhouse. The methods experimented with in Manchuria’s development were directly fed into Japan’s own development in the aftermath of the war. In other words, if there was no Manchukuo we would not now have this prosperous Japan nor would the various nations of Asia have developed.
Like many of the other essays here, there is a very unsophisticated process at work here. Clear the name, restore the honor. This isn’t an essay about Manchuria, or even the Manchurian incident, but about Japan. It is a story about what Japan didn’t do (anything bad, or if it did, it wasn’t worse than anyone else) and about those forgotten glorious things that are worth remembering. There is no need to attack Fukuda on empirical grounds (as when he rejects the idea of a 15 war between China and Japan because “there weren’t any battles between the Truce at Tanggu and the Second World War”) or point out its extraordinarily selective deployment of information. Doing so distracts us from the fact that this entire approach differs radically from recent works like those by Yamamuro and Duara who not only reject the self-congratulating tale of national pride recounted above and accept the deeply incriminating elements of force, violence, and power in the history of modern Manchuria, but ask far more interesting questions about the experiment that was Manchukuo.
Question #5 – Was there a massacre in Nanjing?
南京で大虐殺はあった？北村稔
This is, of course, the big daddy of controversies in modern Asian history. Outside of Japan, to deny the massacre, or indeed even question its existence in this way is nothing short of distasteful, creating reactions similar to those instigated by Holocaust deniers. The controversy surrounding the issue and the energy it generates has a long and rich history. Partly because of this, the amount of literature now available, in Japanese alone, is overwhelming. In addition to countless books denying the massacre using rehashed arguments first voiced and rebutted decades go (including the now openly fascist cartoonist Kobayashi Yoshinori), there is a wealth of primary evidence entirely untouched in Kitamura Minoru’s revisionist essay.
The best summary I have read of the complicated history of debate in Japan is Takashi Yoshida’s essay in The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography. Daqing Yang also has a great article on the history of the debate in the book Perilous Memories which includes passages from Japanese textbooks.
The very topic of this essay poses a question about which historians are in widespread agreement. Unlike the question of “How many died in the massacre in and around Nanjing,” the existence, the historical facticity, of an atrocity of considerable scale is not in doubt by any historian outside Japan or the vast majority of those in Japan. However, as Joshua Fogel notes in his introduction to the above mentioned collection of essays, “Of all [the] massive, man-made atrocities, only in the case of the Nanjing Massacre has a whole school – actually, several – developed that completely denies or significantly downplays it.” (p. 4)
That, in fact, is one of the only things interesting about the whole debate: the fact that the question is being asked, the fact that a huge number of Japanese feel their national pride is so injured by this symbolic event that they need to argue in vain that it is a ‘fabrication’, and the fact that a large number of ‘mainstream’ politicians (including the governor of Tokyo) also buy into this. As Fogel’s edited volume and many other essays on the debate appreciate, it is the historiography of the massacre that is itself perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this historical event.
So briefly, what does Kitamura argue? He suggests, as if he were taking some kind of “moderate” view, that there are issues with both the “300,000 killed” and the “No evidence, no basis” arguments. However, as Takashi Yoshida argues in his essay, by the late 1980s, all except for the absolute diehard remnants of the revisionist cause have realized that they cannot completely deny the mountains of primary evidence (p. 94) and have settled for the alternative: only a few people died, or only a few people died “illegally under the laws of war”, or that is was nothing special compared to everyone else’s atrocities. This is precisely the approach taken by Kitaoka in this short essay and there is nothing moderate about it. Here is a short summary of his argument:
There is great reason to doubt that all the bodies could have been buried with one car to transport the corpses. Japan did lots of nice things like set up the “Safety Zone” and, according to Safety Zone director Rabe, handed out lots of food to all the starving people of the city. The “100 man killing contest” was only a proud war story about killing enemies on the battlefield. However, to be fair, the “no evidence, no basis” argument is also flawed. There certainly were some difficulties in how to deal with feeding and imprisoning the prisoners of war under the provisions of international law. Many of those who escaped into the city clothed as civilians were killed, as is allowed under international law. Also, the rules against rape were not strictly enforced. The tragedy of these captured and later escaped soldiers is, of course, due to the fact that the Chinese army was confused and didn’t surrender like it should have. Ultimately, we can’t deny that the Japanese army and the Chinese army were both confused, resulting in much loss [of life]. However, what we can’t ignore is the fact that the Chinese used propaganda to spread news of an alleged massacre, much like the Kuwaitis hired a PR company to lie about babies being slaughtered by the Iraqis in the first Gulf War. Now, this critique of Japan’s military days is used as a foreign policy card by the Chinese. While we must reflect upon the past war, we must build upon a solid collection of confirmed facts. We can’t simply look at the past war as one of justice against evil. This is obvious when we look at America’s recent war against Iraq. While taking into consideration our own sacrifices and damage caused to other nations, we should develop an independent Japanese position on this issue.
What does the son learn? Certainly not that there was an atrocity committed. He learns not that rape was committed on a massive scale, but that “rules against rape were not strictly enforced”. He doesn’t hear that there was wide-scale looting, murder, and a rare savagery recorded in great detail by countless of victims, witnesses and not a few Japanese soldiers. He learns that soldiers handed out food, established a “safety zone” (again, I’m not going to touch the all the factual distortion), and that if the Chinese had just surrendered like they were supposed to, everything would have been fine. The child comes to believe that, just like the Kuwaiti babies, the Nanjing massacre was a brilliant piece of PR work that now has become a handy tool for the Chinese government to use against us.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this essay is a move which is also found elsewhere in recent revisionist history of the period (for example, Kobayashi’s new Sensôron 3). The revisionists play on the anger that many Japanese (and the rest of us!) feel at America’s policies. The war in Iraq and the history of US foreign policy is a hunting ground for these historians to either suggest that, “Well the Americans are doing it, so it can’t be all bad,” or far more often, “The Americans did it too, so why are you picking on us?” This is disingenuous but, of course, happening all over the place. The “war against terrorism” has been a rhetorical godsend for all of the world’s oppressive regimes, as long as they can stay off of the US target list.
This is an exciting time for history of the Sino-Japanese war and surrounding periods. Chinese and Taiwanese scholars, together with Western and Japanese scholars are publishing a whole range of interesting new research, much of it based on newly available materials. They are also working together and increasingly doing studies of the period which do not directly address the war itself but rather the life and changes going on as the fires raged. For all the theoretical rumblings in the historical field, or attempts to go beyond old narratives, historians are not treading the old beaten path of denying the violence, the slaughter, and the cruelty exhibited by the war. In fact, some of them, through a wider critique of modernity, are emphasizing it even more.
Question #6 – Did Japan do something bad in Korea?
日本は朝鮮で悪いことをした？呉善花
By question #6 the son is already warmed up. He has got that skeptical eye for Chinese propaganda, and he knows things are not as simple as they look. He sees this question, “Did Japan do something bad in Korea?” and he’s thinking, “No, that is probably just propaganda too. I bet we handed out food and did lots of other nice things there to, right daddy!” That’s right son, and a Korean critic, a Ms. O Seonwa (오선화), is going to tell us the details. She is also author of many other books including How did I become a “Japan Believer”? (私はいかにして「日本信徒」となったか) and There is No Future for an ‘Anti-Japan Korea’ (「反日韓国」に未来はない) as well as a book on Korea’s annexation.
Japan annexed Korea in 1910 and ruled it as a colony until 1945. The memory of that period, and the decades leading up to it, is fresh in the minds of the Korean people and anti-Japanese sentiment is a highly potent political force in both South Korea and North Korea. In recent years, research on the colonial period has, as above in the case of Manchukuo and the Sino-Japanese war, matured considerably, even in Korean language materials. Some of this new work is influenced by an idea of “colonial modernity” and a collection of essays are available on this in English which exemplifies the work. However, again, this is not a kind of history which ends the discussion with, “Korea was modernizing during Japanese colonial rule.” It goes well beyond this to examine the relationship between the national, the colonial, and the modern. What it finds is often very disturbing, and shows how this modernity and the colonial experience penetrated all aspects of life in Korea. Without exception this approach has yielded a more rich and complex view of the colonial period than we have had in the past.
Ms. O, unfortunately, is apparently not interested in this sort of approach. She has another sort of “colonial modernity” in mind. Here is a short summary of her three page essay:
Korea today abounds with anti-Japanese sentiment. It isn’t unusual for them to say horrible things about Japan. Lots of Japanese are really apologetic for Japan’s colonization of Korea. These two views, “We caused you so much grief,” and “Japan invaded Korea” share in common the assumption that Japan did something bad. But as you will see the truth is that “colonization=bad” doesn’t measure up to a comparison of life before and after annexation: Japan did land reform, opened up new land for agriculture, built roads and trains, and boats, and telephones and…[continue long list of modern industrial goodies]. We can’t dismiss all this as a Japanese “candy and whip” approach. There was good stuff and bad stuff in colonial days, but this kind of thinking is believed to be treason to one’s people in Korea. The most important thing was that the Japanese colonial rule never entered the domain of private life and there were almost no incidents of rape or murder or other such things. At least I have never heard anything like this that wasn’t hearsay. What would you rather have, a good foreign government or a bad domestic one? Of course, not all the policies were good, but overall, Japanese rule was not a military rule marked by violent oppression. We can’t attach a good/bad label to colonization. The problem is how the governments after liberation behaved. The problem is the barbaric governments of Syngman Rhee and Kim Il Song that ruled after liberation. We need to pass on to future generations the fact that the colonial period simply doesn’t compare to what followed.
This is a excellent example of some popular current mythology about Korean colonial rule and the story behind the many controversial statements uttered by politicians and bureaucrats about colonial rule. The most common element is the list of modern goodies which I cut short. Invariably, we are faced with this sort of description: Japan’s rule over Korea, much like Fukuda’s description of Japan’s development of Manchukuo, is marked by Japan’s many and varied contributions to the economic development and industrial modernization of the country. Sure, some of this was self-serving, but so many of the colonizers at the time, really wanted to lend a hand. It was the thought the counts. It is a classic case of a monolithic Japan, that benevolent elderly brother, taking Korea by the hand and giving it a generous but firm jerk into the modern world. Any reading of Japanese (or for that matter English) scholars and politicians during the period of colonial rule will find countless materials that are in perfect agreement. Now, however, a whole school of thinkers, post-colonial scholars, fill books that address this sort of argument, and most importantly, the elements of colonial rule which are ignored by this sort of story.
Question #12 – What were the “Military Comfort Women”?
「従軍慰安婦」とは何？福田和也
Fukuda is back but this article is written with much greater care than question number two. This may be a calculation on his part that an audience with many female readers might not like a more standard revisionist line. The comfort women issue has really only become explosive since the 80s and 90s, and has spread out into a number of areas. The legal efforts of former comfort women culminated in a the government admitting moral but not legal responsibility in 1992. The comfort women issue has also contributed much to research on gender and sex in war, the conclusions of which offer considerable challenges to many of even those who sympathize with the cause of the comfort women themselves.
Much of this research goes well beyond a simple consideration of questions of “coercion” and military involvement in the hiring/enslavement of comfort women for Japanese soldiers. This is part of the reason that the debate is much more fractured, with one side split between those who believe the sole issues revolve around determining whether the Japanese government established and ran comfort women stations, and whether they were involved in recruitment and coercive subjugation of women to sexual slavery and those who wish to press on to consider the whole relationship of gender, sex and war.
The other side plays lip service to the tragedy of women’s position in war while also playing on the instinctive male reactions of, “well, men have gotta do what they gotta do,” or “those poor lonely men on the battlefield” that will find sympathy among military veterans of countries who may have frequented brothels while in service. They then usually proceed to disregard all or most oral evidence of former comfort women as useless as evidence. Some of them say this is simply due to the flawed nature of memory, especially so long after the event, nothing but documentary evidence should be referred to (a view which the historical establishment has traditionally been fond of). Other particularly nasty revisionists suggest that this can all be explained as a scheme by selfish money grubbing prostitutes who want to squeeze extra income out of their former employers.
I think many would agree that in this explosively emotional issue, the importance of gender and the work of feminist researchers is all important, and results in divisions not seen in some of the other issues.
Here is a list of quotes in Japanese textbooks about the Comfort Women. I don’t think we should include the comfort women issue in textbooks and am particularly resistant to the use of the words “coercively lead away” (強制連行). War and sex have a deep relationship dating back to Homer…most officers banned looting and sexual violence because of the simple reason that this would increase resistance and vengeful feelings on the part of the occupied…In the old days many soldiers brought their wives and mistresses with them. However, by the French Revolution, it was no longer just the elites who participated in war, but the common man as well. In Japan’s case there were lots of rapes reported in the civil war at the end of the Edo period but in later wars it was never a big problem. However, “the management of sexual desire” became a big issue starting with the second Shanghai Incident of 1937 when we first see the military management of comfort women stations. As Japan approached Nanjing from Shanghai there were sometimes cases of uncontrolled violence and looting. These young soldiers were dazzled by urbanization and popular culture, they watched movies, listened to jazz music and danced. Some of the soldiers lost some of their spirit due to the savage realities of battle and committed acts of violence. Because of this violence, which had a negative effect on Japan’s military reputation, and for reasons of hygiene, the Japanese military established comfort women stations…Ultimately, the problem isn’t “the management of sexual desire” but how this management was carried out. There were many professional prostitutes, and many Japanese. However, some were beaten, and some were forced into service. However, there is no strong evidence that any of them were forced into service by the military. We should not forgive this as being a “necessary evil”, precisely because it is war there a need to demand moral behavior and the Nation must use its military strategically in such a way that avoids this sort of dilapidation.
One has to admit that this essay is a considerably more sensitive account and conclusion that the previous articles. However, there are still deeply problematic elements to this account. With one or two exceptions the article is again not about the comfort women; it is about Japan, the Japanese military, and the Japanese policy towards “the management of sexual desire”, and looting in battle. The women themselves, get only brief and cursory attention in the end of the article but otherwise, this is a story about the jazz-music loving young soldiers who were devastated by the experience of war. There is, of course, mention of the reputation of Japan’s military, but nothing considering that of the devastated comfort women. None of their own accounts of the experience apparently count as strong evidence, and the mention of the relationship between sex in war is more like a chronicle than a discussion of the very problematic issues that arise with its serious consideration.
It is these bigger issues which have yet to really explode into the “mainstream.” One thing is certain: that when it does, it will be obvious that Japan’s history of comfort women is merely one example of a global phenomenon. John Dower’s compelling Embracing Defeat on the American occupation of Japan (see pages 121-139) addresses this and, I’m sure, so do countless of other books I should be reading.
This will hopefully be my last article here on the revisionist histories here at my Muninn blog. I will be doing one more project on a related topic, currently under construction at my ChinaJapan.org site on a museum, named Yûshûkan which is attached to the infamous Yasukuni shrine. I have collected a number of quotes from its displays and skimmed through two volumes published by its supporters. I am creating this site primarily for students to see specific examples of how the museum’s perhaps unfamiliar narrative addresses major events in modern East Asian history.