George Will on Yasukuni

A friend pointed out an article about the Yasukuni issue, “The Uneasy Sleep of Japan’s Dead” by the Washington Post’s conservative commentator George Will which I found deeply problematic. I find the article to be a short but good example of a particular type of writing about Japan’s relations with its neighbors and the sensitive issues related to history and memory which employs a rhetoric that is effective in creating sympathy for Japan’s position but seriously flawed.

This kind of writing portrays Japan as a friendly, civilized, and eminently rational state surrounded by dangerous and evil neighbors. Japan, the writer will claim, is provoked and insulted, and forced to react to this outside pressure either by concessions or the rare and just stand against its attackers.

I find this style of writing particularly annoying not only because it is essentially a perfect reproduction of the Japanese nationalist line on foreign policy, but because it resembles the writing of so many of Japan’s misguided supporters in earlier times. This kind of expository can be found in the English language newspaper articles and books written by those friendly to Japan from the end of the 19th century and through the Manchurian incident of 1931. In earlier times it showed the degree to which contemporary diplomats and politicians within Japan were able to successfully portray themselves as enlightened members of the world club of nations while continuing to describe their neighbors as, at best, half-sovereign unruly children awaiting the benevolent and guiding hand of the Japanese empire. Both then and now, this kind of writing essentially avoids the need to address the problem at hand face on, since any accusations can be dismissed as the pernicious ranting of outsiders.

Let us take a closer look at Will’s article in order to offer more concrete criticism. Let us reduce the article to a series of more basic clips:

[*] 1. Japan is a history-haunted place living in a dangerous communist neighborhood with “truculent” China and “weird” North Korea.
2. “World War II still shapes political discourse because of a Shinto shrine in the center of this city”
[C] 3. “In 1978, 14 other souls were enshrined [at Yasukuni] — those of 14 major war criminals.”
[*] 4. “Between that enshrinement and 1984, three prime ministers visited Yasukuni 20 times without eliciting protests from China.”
[*] 5. China and South Korea have national identities partly formed from being victims of Japan, but ” significant extent, such national identities are political choices.”
[*] 6. “Leftist ideology causes South Korea’s regime to cultivate victimhood and resentment of a Japan imagined to have expansionism in its national DNA.”
[*] 7. “China’s regime, needing a new source of legitimacy, seeks it in memories of resistance to Japanese imperialism.”
[*] 8. “Actually, most of China’s resistance was by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces, Mao’s enemies.”
[*] 9. Mao killed millions more Chinese than the Japanese did.
[*] 10. One of the reasons that Koizumi and Abe want to visit the shrine “China should not dictate the actions of Japan’s prime ministers.”
11. “Nelson picked up a poker and said: It doesn’t matter where I put this — unless Bonaparte says I must put it there. In that case, I must put it someplace else.”
[C] 12. Shrine has problematic museum but Koizumi and Abe don’t include the museum in their visit.
[C] 13. It would be helpful if Abe would discontinue visiting Yasukuni. After all the emperor stopped going because of the war criminals being enshrined.
[*] 14. China had “vicious” riots against Japan, has refused to support Japan’s permanent seat on Security Council but back in 1972 Mao said both Chinese and Japanese had been victims of Japan’s militarists
[*] 15. China’s submarines and aircraft are making incursions into Japanese territory and Japan says China is not in full control of its military.
16. Lots of travel and other relations good between China and Japan
17. Don’t be mystified by Yasukuni, we can understand it, since, after all, its kind of like the issue of Confederate flags and how to honor the dead without honoring the cause.

I have marked some of these clips with a [*] or a [C]. The former are statements which make it difficult to describe this article as having anything to do with Yasukuni. In fact, this article doesn’t discuss any of the major controversies surrounding the issue whatsoever, including whether or not the Prime Minister’s visits are constitutional, whether an alternative memorial for the war dead should be set up, whether the war criminals should be removed, whether the war criminals were unfairly judged by victor’s justice, or whether, more generally, the visits to the shrine are necessarily or just empirically done in order to honor both the cause and the dead, let alone the issue of whether one should be honoring the dead if they include major war criminals responsible for wars of aggression.

Instead, a full majority of the claims in this article are in fact provocative and insulting statements made about China and Korea. “Truculent” China which is apparently not in full control of its military, “weird” North Korea, the “leftist ideology” of South Korea appear to be the main topic of this short article. He drags out such completely irrelevant claims such as the idea that Chang Kai-shek was more responsible for the resistance than Mao’s communists and that Mao killed millions more Chinese than the Japanese did.

These national-ad-hominem attacks are both completely irrelevant to the issue of whether or not the Japanese prime minister should be going to Yasukuni but they should also be dismissed for other reasons. It is certainly true that Chang’s more equipped and mechanized forces were the primary opponent of the Japanese during the war, thus the primary “resistance” against the Japanese. However, no Japanese commander at the time would dare underestimate the incredible draining effect of the powerful Communist resistance throughout China behind Japanese lines, which contributed greatly to gradual attrition of forces, sabotage, attacks on supply lines and logistical targets, and incessant guerilla warfare that forced the Japanese to station many forces and resources in China even in areas it had already conquered. A comparison of the two is to miss the different strategies and roles of the two, especially in the later stages of the war.

As to the issue of Mao killing more Chinese than the Japanese this too is really a problematic claim. Mao and the Communist Leadership must take responsibility for the millions of deaths during the famine of the Great Leap Forward and the violence that ravaged China during the Cultural Revolution, not to mention the political violence throughout the postwar period. Mao was a horrible leader both for what he ordered, but more for what he neglected.

However, you cannot simply line up these numbers with wartime casualties in the war with Japan and declare Mao to be Satan’s champion. People who died at the hand of a bullet, a sword, or a bomb surely belong in a different moral category of victimization than that those who died of starvation as a result of economic policy which exported grain during a massive famine or encouraged government grain procurement at high levels in order to meet impossible growth projections. This is even a more clear division, in my mind, than the persuasive distinction Richard Overy makes in his recent book, The Dictators between the horrors of Stalin’s gulag, and that of the concentration camps and holocaust of Germany, “Though Soviet camps were prisons of a particularly brutal and despairing character, they were never designed or intended to be centres of extermination.” (608)

The only criticism of Japan, or anything nearing a critical approach, can be found in a statement thankfully mentioning the fact that war criminals were enshrined at Yasukuni in 1978 (though the press didn’t find out about it until 1979), a statement noting that there is a completely revisionist museum, Yûshûkan at the shrine, and finally one line saying it would be “helpful” if Abe stopped going.

Even here, Will fails to mention that not only the museum but the entire shrine and most organizations which support it are extremely revisionist and clearly honor the cause as well as the dead. For example, when entering the shrine, you can find pamphlets at the entry in both Japanese and other languages, including one for children, proudly proclaiming how the shrine contains the spirits of the “Showa martyrs” who were unjustly condemned at the “puppet trials” of the early postwar. The official Yasukuni website contains similar passages and the entire shrine, despite its non-government status is, whether we like it or not, historically an absolutely central symbol of Japanese war and militarism for more than a century.

Will is also totally irresponsible when he mentions that, “between that enshrinement and 1984, three prime ministers visited Yasukuni 20 times without eliciting protests from China,” without providing the slightest bit of context. This statement is clearly designed to give the reader the following impression, “China never thought Yasukuni was a problem until suddenly it became nationalist all of a sudden, then it started complaining.”

This strategy: delegitimization by historicization is classic but without context here it is unacceptable. Two very important points have been left out. First, the Yasukuni issue did not suddenly become controversial in 1985, it had long been protested by Japan’s left, and Prime Minister Miki’s visit in 1975, for example, got a lot of press. It was protested then, as it is now, as a violation of the constitution (because of the shrines former state status and the ambiguous status of the prime minister on his visit) but perhaps more importantly as a horrible message to send by visiting such a powerful symbol of war, militarism, and most of all, the emperor. This was made much worse by the enshrining of the war criminals.

China’s government started paying closer attention to the Yasukuni issue from Nakasone’s visit in 1985 is because 1984 was the year of the first “Textbook incident” – which inflamed Chinese public sentiment. The mid-1980s was a period in which Chinese public sentiment and something of a relaxation of controls on the public sphere combined with the textbook incident to create the first massive wave of anti-Japanese sentiment which then, as it did in the recent riots, frightened the government as it tried to juggle strategies of repression with co-option.

It is true that China’s government has encouraged a more nationalist education but in no period was China’s communist government not made use of nationalism, whether directed at the Soviet Union, the United States, or Japan. Its character has changed shape and has acquired a mass character, but has not been invented out of nothing in the mid-80s.

Yasukuni became the powerful issue it was for Chinese because after 1984 there was the widespread, and largely justified realization that the issue of history and memory in Japan was anything but resolved. The repentant words of Tanaka on his visit to China in 1972 may have soothed but in 1984 Chinese throughout the country realized that there was anything but consensus in Japan about how to interpret the past war of aggression against China. Yasukuni, especially from the Chinese perspective, cannot be separated from the broader fear and realization on the behalf of the Chinese people that a significant proportion (though exaggerated in their own writings and propaganda) of the Japanese public still viewed the war as one of liberation and were continuously trying to rewrite.