Wages of Guilt

Memories of War in Germany and Japan

Ian Buruma

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781782398356
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In this highly original and now classic text, Ian Buruma explores and compares how Germany and Japan have attempted to come to terms with their violent pasts, and investigates the painful realities of living with guilt, and with its denial.

As Buruma travels through both countries, he encounters people whose honesty in confronting their past is strikingly brave, and others who astonish by the ingenuity of their evasions of responsibility. In Auschwitz, Berlin, Hiroshima and Tokyo he explores the contradictory attitudes of scholars, politicians and survivors towards World War II and visits the contrasting monuments that commemorate the atrocities of the war.

Buruma allows these opposing voices to reveal how an obsession with the past, especially distorted versions of it, continually causes us to question who should indeed pay the wages of guilt.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION TO THE 1995 EDITION: The Enemies

PART ONE

War Against the West

Romance of the Ruins

PART TWO

Auschwitz

Hiroshima

Nanking

PART THREE

History on Trial

Textbook Resistance

Memorials, Museums, and Monuments

PART FOUR

A Normal Country

Two Normal Towns

Clearing Up the Ruins

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

Preface

FOOTBALL, ESPECIALLY IN Europe, can be a useful way to gauge the state of nations. In 2006, the World Cup was staged in Germany. Apart from Zinedine Zidane’s head-butt in the final, the occasion was remarkable for the unselfconscious, festive outpouring of German patriotism. Germans, for good reasons, had been hesitant before to wave their national symbols in the face of the world. This time they did so in such a friendly spirit that no one could mistake it for anything sinister. In 2006, even though their team failed to reach the final, people seemed happy to be German.

The other remarkable thing about the cup was the fact that no seemed to mind much when Germany won a game. It used to be, if you were Dutch, French, Czech, or Polish, that losing to Germany was like being invaded all over again. And the rare victories over Germany were celebrated as sweet revenge. More than half a century after the end of the war, this feeling appears at last to have evaporated. And Germany’s two best players were born in Poland to boot.

Changing attitudes come with fading memories, even though some historical memories can be lethally tenacious. But I believe there was more to it in this case. When I wrote The Wages of Guilt in 1994, there was still a good deal of fear and distrust of Germany – the economic powerhouse of Europe – whose recent reunification was celebrated in the streets of Dresden, Leipzig and Berlin with raucous cries of “We are one people.” This sounded ominous to people whose memories had not yet faded, not least to some Germans themselves. But by 2006, Günter Grass’s famous remark that the memory of Auschwitz should have kept Germany divided forever sounded even more absurdly self-flagellating than it did in 1989. Germany had been such a good European, safely embedded for many decades in European institutions and NATO, that it seemed churlish to distrust a generation of Germans, who were not yet alive when their country was at war. But the main reason why Germans were more trusted by their neighbours was that they were learning, slowly and painfully, and not always fully, to trust themselves.

In the western half of Germany, at any rate, novelists, historians, journalists, teachers, politicians, and filmmakers, had already considered the monstrosities of recent Germany history, sometimes obsessively, but often with remarkable openness and honesty. Few German schoolchildren were unaware of their country’s horrors. If anything, some had begun to resent the relentless fashion in which they were sometimes pushed down their throats. There were still, in the twenty-first century, instances of public figures making dubious or tactless statements about the war, but they would be very swiftly taken to task by other Germans.

The war was never a laughing matter to Germans, and nor should it have been. But the fact that a comedy film, entitled Mein Führer, made by a Swiss-Jewish director, was a hit in 2008, was probably a healthy sign too. Laughter at their own country’s expense is surely preferable to self-flagellation. To the extent that the darkest chapters in history can be “coped” with, the Germans, on the whole, had coped.

Why can’t the same thing be said with equal confidence about Japan? The Japanese also hosted a world cup, together with Korea, in 2002. And young Japanese celebrated the unexpected victories of their team of hip young players with the same carnival spirit as the Germans did four years later. Yet the distrust of Japan, in Korea and other neighbouring countries, did not go away. For while the flag-waving young looked innocent of bellicose thoughts (or any thoughts about history at all, which is part of the problem), some of their elders, in government and the mass media, still voice opinions about the Japanese war that are unsettling, to say the least. Conservative prime ministers still pay their annual respects at a shrine where war criminals are officially remembered. Justifications and denials of war crimes are still heard. Too many Japanese in conspicuous places have clearly not “coped” with the war.

It should have been easier for the Japanese. The war in Asia was savage. The sackings of Nanking and Manila, the slaves worked to death on the Thai-Burma railroad, the brutal POW camps from Singapore to Sumatra, the millions of dead in China, these have left permanent scars on the history of Asia. But unlike Nazi Germany, Japan had no systematic programme to destroy the life of every man, woman, and child of a people who, for ideological reasons, was deemed to have no right to exist.

Perversely, this may actually have made it harder for the Japanese to come to terms with their history. After the fall of the Third Reich, few Germans outside a deranged fringe could condone, let alone be proud of the Holocaust. “We never knew”, a common reaction in the 1950s, had worn shamefully thin in the eyes of a younger generation by the 1960s. The extraordinary criminality of a deliberate genocide was so obvious that it left no room for argument.

The Japanese never reached the same kind of consensus. Rightwing nationalists like to cite the absence of a Japanese Holocaust as proof that Japanese have no reason to feel bad about their war at all. It was, in their eyes, a war like any other; brutal, yes, just as wars fought by all great nations in history have been brutal. In fact, since the Pacific War was fought against Western imperialists, it was a justified – even noble – war of Asian liberation.

Few Japanese would have taken this view in the late 1940s or 1950s, a time when most Germans were still trying hard not to remember. It is in fact extraordinary how honestly Japanese novelists and filmmakers dealt with the horrors of militarism in those early years after the war. Such honesty is less evident in 2009. Popular comic books, aimed at the young, extol the heroics of Japanese soldiers and kamikaze pilots, while the Chinese and their Western allies are depicted as treacherous and belligerent. In 2008, the chief of staff of the Japanese Air Self Defense Force stated that Japan had been “tricked” into the war by China and the US.

Why? It has often been assumed that there must be a cultural explanation. Shame, to the Oriental mind, has to be covered in silence, or denial, and so forth. I rather dismissed this claim when I wrote my book, and I still do. The Germans are not a morally superior people, with a keener sense of guilt, or shame, than the Japanese. Evasions, there too, were once the order of the day.

The fact is that Japan is still haunted by historical issues that should have been settled decades ago. The reasons are political rather than cultural, to do with the pacifist constitution – written by American jurists in 1946 – and with the role of the imperial institution, absolved of war guilt by General MacArthur after the war for the sake of expediency.

The end of the Third Reich in Germany was a complete break in history. Japan, even under Allied occupation, continued to be governed by much the same bureaucratic and political elite, albeit under a new, more democratic constitution, after the emperor was made to renounce his divine status. Since there had been no equivalent of the Nazi Party in Japan, and thus no Führer, Japanese militarism was blamed on “feudal” culture and the warrior spirit. Like a reformed alcoholic who cannot be trusted with another sip of the hard stuff, Japan was constitutionally banned from using military force, or indeed maintaining its own armed forces. Henceforth, the US would be responsible for Japanese security.

Even though most Japanese were more than glad to be relieved of martial duties, and the constitution was soon fudged to allow for a Self-Defence Force, a number of conservatives felt humiliated by what they rightly saw as a raid on their national sovereignty. Henceforth, to them, everything from the allied Tokyo War Crimes tribunal, to the denunciations of Japan’s war record by leftwing teachers and intellectuals, would be seen in this light. The more “progressive” Japanese used the history of wartime atrocities as a warning against turning away from pacifism, the more defensive rightwing politicians and pundits became about the Japanese war.

Views of history, in other words, were politicized – and polarized – from the beginning. To take the sting out of this confrontation between constitutional pacifists and revisionists, which had led to political turmoil in the 1950s, mainstream conservatives made a deliberate attempt to distract people’s attention from war and politics by concentrating on economic growth.

It largely worked. Japan became increasingly wealthy, and a rather oppressive stability was found under the continuous rule of one large conservative party, the Liberal Democrats (LDP). And yet history refused to go away. Resentment over the postwar deal continues to fester in the nationalist rightwing of the LDP. At a cruder level, it is voiced, or rather shouted, by thuggish young men in khaki uniforms blaring wartime military marches from flag-bearing sound trucks – not at all in the festive spirit of the football fans in 2002.

For several decades, the chauvinistic rightwing, with its reactionary views on everything from high-school education to the emperor’s status, was kept in check by the sometimes equally dogmatic Japanese Left. Marxism was the prevailing ideology of the teachers union, and academics. Like everywhere else in the world, however, the influence of Marxism waned after the collapse of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s, and the brutal records of Chairman Mao and Pol Pot became widely known.

This collapse resulted in the – possibly brief – ascent of neo-conservatism in the US. In Japan, the consequences have been graver. Marginalized in the de facto one-party LDP state, and discredited by its own dogmatism, the Japanese Left did not just wane, it collapsed. This gave a great boost to the war-justifying, rightwing nationalists, who even gained strength in such bastions of progressive learning as Tokyo University. Committees sprang up to “reform” history curriculums by purging textbooks of all facts that might stand in the way of healthy patriotic pride.

The Japanese young, perhaps out of boredom with nothing but materialistic goals, perhaps out of frustration with being made to feel guilty, perhaps out of sheer ignorance, or most probably out of a combination of all three, are not unreceptive to these patriotic blandishments. Anxiety about the rise of China, whose rulers have a habit of using Japan’s historical crimes as a form of political blackmail, has boosted a prickly national pride, even at the expense of facing the truth about the past.

Briefly, just after The Wages of Guilt was first published, I thought that things were moving in a more positive direction. For the first time since 1955, the LDP had been replaced in government by a coalition of liberal-left parties led by the socialist Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi. One of the first things this very decent man did was to apologize unequivocally for Japan’s military atrocities on the fiftieth anniversary of the Pacific War.

Many Japanese were in sympathy with Murayama. His clear repudiation of Japan’s wartime behaviour would surely make it easier to talk about Japanese security and revising the constitution in a rational manner. Alas...