Japan's War Memories

Amnesia or Concealment?

George Hicks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138334960
• eBook ISBN: 9780429814044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia giapponese

First published in 1997, this volume responds to attention in recent years which has been belatedly directed towards reviving World War II issues involving Japan. This study deals first with the manner in which such issues so long fell into abeyance under Cold War conditions, while tracing the vast and varied writing on the war which meanwhile appeared within Japan. Evolving Japanese views on the war are largely focused on debate over the revision of the postwar constitution, especially its renunciation of "war potential". The book also contains the first overview of the decades-long litigation within Japan on the screening of textbooks, especially on the war.

1 Under the occupation and ‘reverse course’ (1945-1952)

As is generally known, Japan’s part in the Second World War was terminated by the Emperor’s action, contrary to precedent, in the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War. Up to that time he had refrained from any initiative to end the war. The reason he habitually gave was that, as a constitutional monarch under the 1889 Constitution, he was obliged to accept the advice of the government and, in operational matters, the politically independent supreme command of the armed forces; his relation to the latter being that of titular commander-in-chief. Some authorities also emphasize a retiring temperament as a factor, perhaps as a result of the very peculiar upbringing unavoidable in his ‘transcendent’ role.

It was only when the Council was evenly divided on whether to continue the war, following the atomic bomb attacks and the subsequent Soviet entry into the war, that he was able, after some complex discussion with personal advisors, to exercise a casting vote, as it were, for surrender. The last sticking point holding up acceptance of the Allies’ Potsdam Declaration, calling for unconditional surrender, was concern for the fate of the Imperial House as the fulcrum of Japan’s national identity. The government’s preparedness to accept the declaration was cabled to the U.S. Secretary of State, with the sole reservation that ‘the said declaration does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of his Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler.’

The U.S. reply included the statement that ‘the ultimate form of government in Japan shall be established by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.’ The Japanese Minister to Sweden, through which peace feelers had been extended for some time earlier, advised that the reply was being interpreted internationally as implying noninterference with the Emperor system, upon which the declaration was accepted.

Even after this decision, army diehards unsuccessfully invaded the palace in an attempt to prevent the Emperor’s surrender rescript from being broadcast, on the theory that he had been misled by disloyal advisors—an episode which is sometimes quoted to demonstrate that at any earlier stage a surrender could not have been smoothly carried through. The mass of the people were, of course, quite unprepared for the announcement, having received only highly censored news and been for some time conditioned to prepare for ‘the decisive battle for the homeland,’ designed to inflict heavy enough casualties on the invading allies to obtain a peace settlement on terms short of unconditional surrender.

In order to brief the media on the required manner of presenting this devastating development, the head of the Cabinet Information Bureau, which had been in control of censorship, held a meeting of representatives on the day before the broadcast. This ‘unprecedented national disaster’ was to be presented in the terms that the nation as a whole was to share responsibility for it and to apologize profoundly to the Sovereign. ‘Any Communist or socialistic form of expression arising amid the confusion of defeat is to be sternly suppressed. Criticism of the armed forces and government leadership is strictly forbidden.’ (Irokawa 1995)

The possibility of a Marxist revolution in the event of defeat, as had happened in a number of other countries, had been a nightmare among the establishment since at least early in 1945. Since February, Prince Konoe, one of the most prominent civil politicians, had been advising the Emperor to end the war to forestall social breakdown and revolution. This possibility was probably undermined, at least in part, by the Soviet attack in the last week of the war, widely condemned as opportunistic and treacherous in view of the Neutrality Pact concluded with Japan early in 1941.

For the moment, the press, if only through inertia, could not easily depart from the information chiefs instructions. The Asahi, once the stronghold of liberal journalism from the 19th century origins of the party movement until the imposition of wartime controls and later to resume this role, supplemented factual reporting with an editorial which did not yet break with wartime ideology:

The spirit of the Greater East Asian declaration [following the declaration of war] aiming at the liberation of oppressed peoples [in the Western colonial empires] and the reconstruction of national states free of exploitation and servitude, together with the display of the Special Attack [kamikaze] spirit unique to our forces, may be described as honorable achievements in the course of the Greater East Asia War and these, irrespective of the outcome of the war, must be regarded as the fair fruit of our national character, to be recorded forever. (Ishida 1995)

But only a few days later the question of war responsibility, now seen as something highly negative, began to be raised in another Asahi editorial:

Responsibility is not by any means to be attributed only to a particular set of people but borne by all hundred million of our nation, yet at the same time there are varying degrees of responsibility. The responsibility of the media in particular must be admitted to be extremely heavy. Even if, from the standpoint of the present, it may be claimed that there was no other course for us to take, we must humbly reflect on whether there was not some other recourse in our mode of proceeding. On the one hand being actually aware of our past responsibility and anxious to atone for it, we on the other hand steadfastly hope for a healthy development of the media in the future. (Ishida 1995)

Other newspapers followed a similar course, and there was considerable replacement of senior staff identified with wartime policies, but meanwhile, only ten days into September, a new type of control in the form of occupation censorship came to be raised. A memorandum was addressed by occupation General Headquarters to the Japanese government, which was being left in place as the instrument of allied control, regarding the ‘freedom of press and media.’ It comprised the following points:

1. Prohibition of false reports or any threatening public security.

2. Restrictions on freedom of expression to be kept to a minimum and debate on Japan’s future to be encouraged so long as it does not impede Japan’s efforts to join the comity of peace-loving nations.

3. Prohibition of discussion on the activities of the [occupation] forces, other than official announcements, and of false or subversive criticism or rumors regarding allied countries.

4. Broadcast news or commentary for the present to be restricted to Tokyo Broadcasting Station; others to be confined to entertainment.

5. Publications or broadcasting stations making false reports or any threatening public security will be suspended or closed.

The implementation of these policies inevitably involved complexities and inconsistencies and gradually increased in scope and severity, but these developments are best left until later. The allies had also considered the possibility of a revolt against the established order and instructions to the Supreme Commander, General MacArthur, had even indicated that, if such a movement arose the occupation should not suppress it. The reasoning was that reform on Japanese initiative would be more durable than any imposed from outside, but MacArthur and more senior staff were wary of any such movement getting out of control, especially if it took a Marxist direction. This concern deepened as the Cold War intensified and little scope was allowed for Japanese initiative.

On the political level, the cabinet that had presided over the war’s last phases was replaced by one headed by Prince Higashikuni Naruhiko, a member of the imperial clan and husband of an aunt of the Emperor. He was an army general of some prominence who had had a long career including postings in Europe and service on the Asian continent, and had also developed a wider political network among the establishment than any other member of the imperial clan (the Emperor himself of course being insulated from political maneuvers outside his institutional roles). He had more than once been considered a prime ministerial candidate in the early years when the acute factional struggles and spectacular terrorism leading up to the war had seemed to need an imperial head of government to avert breakdown in the political process. In later 1941 in particular, when the last cabinet before Pearl Harbor, headed by Prince Konoe (a court noble), resigned on reaching a deadlock in negotiations with the United States, the then War Minister Tojo, who regarded war as inevitable, proposed Higashikuni as Prime Minister a means of ensuring national solidarity in that event.

The Emperor, however, typically cautious, took the view that the Imperial House itself would be jeopardized if one of its members headed a government that initiated war. This implied that, if the war were lost, the Imperial House could not evade responsibility for it and would face the fate of the German and Russian monarchies after the First World War. So Tojo was appointed, not because of any charisma but because his career had been so closely linked to the military police (Kempeitai) that these were virtually his personal henchmen and could be entrusted to enforce national solidarity by their own notorious means. For some time they had been extending their normal role of keeping order in the army to one of general suppression of dissidence in the name of national security.

But now, in the ultimate emergency of defeat, Higashikuni was the logical candidate to inherit the task of achieving a smooth transition to peace. He could now use the prestige of the Imperial House for this purpose and, being an army general, could exercise the force of military discipline as distinct from civil authority. Most importantly, though, from the Emperor’s point of view, he would if successful demonstrate to the allies the need to maintain the role of the Imperial House as a guarantee of social stability, even if, as was sometimes contemplated, the Emperor himself should abdicate. The establishment was already aware of the approach of the Cold War and hoped to turn it to Japan’s advantage. In the farewell address by the Chief of the Naval Staff to his subordinates, he urged them to cooperate with the Occupation because the United States would soon be at war with the Soviet Union and Japan could make a comeback as America’s ally. It was through such reasoning that ultranationalist elements, who had been expected to cause the occupation the most trouble, turned out to be a negligible problem in contrast to those presented, in the occupation’s view, by left wing or radical reformist elements or ‘liberated’ Koreans.

Prince Higashikuni fulfilled his role successfully in all respects and General MacArthur’s personal contacts with the Emperor seem to have confirmed to him the need to retain the Emperor system to avoid social destabilization and to spare the Emperor himself any attribution of war guilt, even to the limited extent requiring abdication. In Prime Minister Higashikuni’s first press conference, intended to direct the public mind along the required lines, he stated:

This situation has of course come about partly because government policies were wrong but another factor was the decline in moral principles among the nation. On this occasion I believe that the whole nation—armed forces, officials, and people, must engage in thorough self-criticism and repent. I believe that general penitence by the whole nation is the first step in the reconstruction of our country and in achieving internal unity. (Yoshida 1995)

In his succeeding policy speech to the Diet he maintained the same line, bequeathing to posterity the slogan ‘General Penitence by the Hundred Million.’ This last expression was a customary term for the Japanese nation but was arrived at by counting the colonial subjects in Korea and Taiwan who were of course even less responsible for the war than the mass of ethnic Japanese who lacked any part in decision-making. In contrast to his criticism of the nation, Higashikuni described the termination of the war as due to the Emperor’s gracious benevolence. He went on, however, to detail more concrete military reasons for the defeat itself in terms of the vastly discrepant war potentials of Japan and the United States. He thus separated the question of defeat itself, explained in material terms, from that of war responsibility, to be met with collective penitence.

This line provoked an intense double backlash among the public. To begin with, it was now possible to express long-held but smothered resentments of the inequality of sacrifice experienced during the war, when the mass of the people had suffered acute hardship and loss, while senior military and civil officials maintained comfortable and even luxurious lifestyles. So Higashikuni’s bracketing of privileged and unprivileged as equally owing penitence was a bitter pill. Regarding the reasons for defeat, too, his revelation of Japan’s material inferiority starkly demonstrated the recklessness of the war and the irresponsibility of the leadership who had gambled the country’s fate on it.

Reports on public reactions brought statements like ‘we now realize the deceitful policy of the leadership who knew the realities of national strength,’ ‘the leaders who deceived the nation right to the end deserve ten thousand deaths,’ and ‘before the nation repents, those who had been in charge must themselves take responsibility.’ Such reactions happened to coincide with current instructions being issued to the occupation authorities on initial postsurrender policy, which emphasized that the public be made aware of the role of the armed forces leadership and their collaborators to prepare for national reeducation and acceptance of the planned war trials of representative figures among that leadership.

Prince Higashikuni resigned after less than two months following the repercussions of a report in the U.S. forces’ newspaper Stars and Stripes by a British correspondent, relating an interview with the Home Minister. The latter had stated: ‘All those who advocate a reform of the political system, especially the abolition of the Emperor system, are Communists and will be arrested under the Peace Preservation Law.’ This law had been the main legal basis for ideological suppression and provided for a maximum penalty of death for any who advocated a change in the form of government or opposed the rights of private property. It originally had been aimed at Marxists, though gradually extended to cover any form of dissidence and was administered by a branch of the civil police called the Special Higher Police or the ‘thought police,’ for their function of prosecuting ‘ideological crimes’ or ‘dangerous thoughts.’ In practice, the establishment was usually reluctant to impose the death penalty, particularly as the Special Higher Police achieved considerable success with brainwashing techniques. Dissidents who did not succumb to this treatment were sentenced to life imprisonment and most prisoners of this kind still being held at the end of the war had been underground Communists.

This press report drew the attention of GHQ to the persistence of repressive ideology in the government, which was then ordered to release all political prisoners, abolish the Special Higher Police, dismiss the Home Minister and all officials engaged in repression, and repeal all laws restricting civic freedom. At this Higashikuni realized that the occupation intended to introduce fundamental reforms, even if the Emperor were retained, and resigned rather than preside over such a process.

He was succeeded by Shidehara Kijuro, a member of the House of Peers who obtained the support of the largest group of Lower House members. He was also a logical choice at this juncture since, in the period of liberal ascendancy and party government ended by the Manchurian Incident and right wing terrorism in the early 1930s, he had long served as Foreign Minister and was identified with the conciliatory policies known as ‘Shidehara diplomacy.’ The parties, though in decline, had continued to dominate Lower House elections until their dissolution in 1940 and now promptly revived. The two main groups reverted to the original names of their forebears in the later 19th century, Progressives and Liberals.

Shidehara now headed a Progressive Party Cabinet and launched a project to set the record straight by setting up a Committee of Inquiry into the War. British and Soviet representatives in the Allied Council, however, objected to its approach, and it was abolished in less than a year. Meanwhile, the Progressive Party, which naturally attracted many opportunists, was badly affected by the first phase of the purge of wartime officeholders in politics and the economy, and, following the first postwar election, Shidehara was replaced by Yoshida Shigeru of the Liberal Party. He was also a career diplomat with a record of opposition to military domination, though socially highly conservative and monarchist. After some vicissitudes, he was to dominate politics in the later phase of the occupation—the ‘reverse course.’

During this time, the occupation program of reeducation combined with censorship was taking hold and was to have enduring effects on Japanese perceptions of the war, far beyond the occupation itself. Some early steps were the abolition of the state Shinto cult and the Emperor’s ‘denial of his divinity’ in his New Year message. This was framed under Shidehara’s guidance along the lines that ‘the ties between us and you as members of the nation have been bound together throughout by mutual trust, respect, and affection and have not arisen through mere myths and legends.’ A Time correspondent, sampling reactions in street interviews, was baffled to be repeatedly told ‘we always knew he wasn’t a god.’ Actually the Shinto conception of divinity had always been pantheistic, without the Western conception of a definitive gulf between the divine and the human, and it has been common usage to describe outstanding figures as ‘god of strategy’ or ‘god of elections’ and so forth, so this exercise was not quite as momentous as conceived in the West. But it was a step to a more democratic conception of the Emperor, suited to the reforms being planned.

Shidehara seems to have had some part, not entirely clear, in framing Article 9 of the new Constitution renouncing war. Although most of this Constitution was drafted by GHQ, there was some Japanese input, and the form presented to the Diet was officially represented as the result of Japanese initiative, so as to avoid criticism of the soundness of a Constitution imposed from outside.

Another step in reeducation was the banning of the term ‘Greater East Asia War’ because of its ideological implications as to the nature of the war as aimed at the liberation of East Asia from Western colonialism. It was replaced by ‘Pacific War,’ which was popularized by a U.S.-centered version of the war’s history serialized in all newspapers and over Japan’s national broadcasting system, designed to ‘inform the Japanese nation of the facts of the war and the crimes of the leadership who led Japan to defeat.’ It treated the war as beginning in Manchuria in 1931 and excluded any consideration of Japan’s colonialism in Taiwan and Korea (since these were acquired in a period of alliance with Britain and U.S. acquiescence). China was treated as a victim of Japanese aggression, but little significance was attached to its war of resistance (in which the Chinese Communists played an important role) even though it involved the largest number of troops in any theater of war. Resistance movements in Southeast Asia were ignored except for the Philippine guerrillas, who were linked to the U.S. effort (though later condemned as Communist). The Emperor, the Court, the Zaibatsu combines, which had done much to mobilize the war economy, and the media were portrayed as ‘moderates’ overridden by the militarists, mainly in the armed forces, so as to narrow war responsibility to them, though this was by no means wholly accurate. The people’s deception by militarists was emphasized with a view to sparing the nation as a whole from a sense of direct blame or rancor which could impede future cooperation with the Western camp in the mounting confrontation with the Communist bloc.

The wholly U.S. centered image of the war which so downplayed the Asian dimension also had the long-term effect of reinforcing the habitual Japanese attitude of contempt for other Asians, which dated from the last century and stemmed from their failure to resist Western colonialism or to modernize their societies...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Under the occupation and ‘reverse course’ (1945-1952)
• 2 Through the high growth period (1952-1972)
• 3 Oil shock and restabilization (1973-1981)
• 4 From the textbook uproar through the Emperor’s death (1982-1990)
• 5 The nineties
• 6 The evolution of textbook screening
• 7 Ienaga and the course of textbook litigation
• 8 Right wing revisionist counterattacks
• A final word
• Select annotated bibliography