The Long Defeat 3

 

4 3] Defeat Reconsidered Heroes, Victims, and Perpetrators in the Popular Media

 Every year on August 15, Japan commemorates the end of World War II with events that have become fixtures on the national calendar. On that day, government leaders and dignitaries, veterans and bereaved, media commentators and observers participate in annual rituals of commemoration to remember the lost war and to “renew the nation’s vow for peace.” Citizens can turn on the television at noon to watch the state-sponsored Memorial Service for the War Dead broadcast live from Budōkan, one of Tokyo’s largest arenas. It is the focal official event of the memorial day, attended by the Emperor who formally conveys words of mourning for those who died in the war, followed by a brief speech by the prime minister. The choreography of the one-hour ceremony is solemn, centered on a soaring tablet representing the souls of the war dead displayed in the middle of the stage and surrounded by a twin-peak sculpture of yellow and white chrysanthemums. Many participants are attired in funeral black, including representatives of all branches of government and over 5,000 representatives of bereaved families from all over the nation. Every year, this ceremony takes place at the same time and place, using the same stage, the same protocol, the same address, and with the same funerary effects. This sameness year after year brings a certain familiarity and indelibility to war memory, as it reiterates an official memory that promotes a continuity of collective mourning. At the same time, it allows the state to reiterate its discourse of war, reconnecting it to the private narratives of loss, and superimposing it on cultural templates of funerary dramaturgy.

On the same day, citizens can find commemorative editorials in their daily newspapers, usually recounting some tragic experiences of national failure and vowing to overcome them with pledges of peace. The somber themes of war and peace appear in most major national and regional papers, urging readers to carry on the war memory by never forgetting the hardship, passing on the painful lessons, confronting the difficult history, and more with varied emphasis according to the paper’s political persuasion.1 In the evening, and throughout most of the month, audiences can find similar themes on television that feature commemorative documentaries, live debates, oral history interviews, live-action drama and reenactments, or feature films. Media war discourses have thrived especially during this month in the past decades as the memory boom flourished: scores of nationally circulated magazines offered commemorative features molding and remolding the collective memory of war; major book publishers competed to sell war memory books and special editions that bring back memories of events and experiences, like oral history collections; film producers competed for audiences for their latest “commemorative” feature films. The mass media were apt to draw attention to the negative legacy with sensational headlines: “Japan was Defeated,” “Japan’s Failure,” “Causes of Japan’s Defeat,” “Why Did We Lose That War?”2

These concerted acts of commemoration show how deeply war memory is still embedded in contemporary life in Japan. At the same time, they show that the cumulative effect of reproducing familiar war memory over and over in a concentrated timeframe—recounting suicide missions, deadly bombings, mortal danger, fear, starvation, violence, killings, deaths, and more—also situates the hateful events in the past, on the other side of ruptured time symbolized by August 15, 1945. In a broader sense, August 15, 1945, has come to represent not strictly the end of a military conflict but the cultural trauma of a fallen nation, the collapse of the nation’s social and moral order, and the failed aspirations of an East Asian empire. Epitomizing a rupture of national history rather than a strictly military event, Japan’s notion of “August 15, 1945,” has come to represent an idea similar to the German “May 8, 1945” (the “Zero Hour”), that also emphasizes a radical departure from a stigmatized past. Japan’s commemorative performances and debates are discursive tools that set off the failures of 1945 from the present, while reinforcing the events as a cultural trauma for successive generations.3 Those commemorative events also conceal wide dissension among the populace, a trend common to national remembrances elsewhere.

The establishment of August 15 as the commemorative day was many years in the making. As in most cases of “invented tradition,” what appears today to be a long-standing custom was not, in fact, determined by historical imperative but constructed over time to symbolize, reinforce, and reinvent the political meaning of defeat. The official date of commemoration could have been August 14 (the date of signing the acceptance of the Potsdam declaration) or even September 2 (the signing of the instrument of surrender), but August 15 ultimately carried emotional resonance because it represented the ritual between the Emperor and his subjects, mediated by the radio broadcast, when the surrender was announced and emotionally accepted as final. At the same time, there were other coincidences for August 15, like obon, the day for honoring departed souls.4

During the US occupation (1945–1952), no commemoration of August 15 took place. The occupation had officially banned the Shinto memorialization of the war dead and commemorated Japan’s surrender on VJ Day, September 2. It was only in 1952, after regaining sovereignty, that the Japanese government held a memorial service for the departed soldiers for the first time. This commemoration set in motion a process of memory making focused on the Emperor’s announcement of the end of the war rather than the capitulation to the victors. In 1963, the government began the memorial service as an annual ritual broadcast on both radio and television, and, by 1965, when the secular service moved to the Budōkan arena, the construction of war memory was in full swing, establishing the association between the deaths of obon and deaths of soldiers, fathers, and sons all merged into one. Films, novels, television programs, and other cultural media dramatizing the events of August 15 rather than September 2 also accentuated it as the end of the imperial era and the war.5

Underneath this ritualization of the war’s end, however, lies deep social discord over the assessment of Japan’s war. Some have resisted and protested the annual state commemoration by holding their own countermemorial for Asians victimized by Japanese aggression, as the socialists did until 1993. Others have long attempted to elevate the status of annual commemoration beyond the state ceremony by agitating for prime ministers to officially honor the war dead regularly at the controversial Yasukuni Shrine. Because of this dissonance over the commemoration, different groups have come to attach different meanings to August 15: for some it is simply a day to pledge never to wage war again, for others it is a way of mythologizing the Emperor’s connection to the people or to purify the tainted war, and for still others it is an angry time to remember the untrustworthiness of the military and the evils of authoritarian leadership.6

Scholars have observed that commemorations severely test a society’s ability to cope with multiple versions of the past.7 Ritualized commemorations can rejuvenate the values of a moral community and bridge cleavages of political conflicts and debates, but they can also become catalysts for dissent and acrimony.8 A growing cacophony of views and voices has grown up around Japan’s August 15 anniversaries in the last two decades, igniting criticisms, conflict and animosity, and, to a lesser extent, forging common ground in recounting cautionary tales about past traumas. In this time, official government statements changed, as did the symbolic political performances for mourning the war dead. Commemorative television programs burgeoned, newspaper editorials intensified their claims, and major media corporations launched commemorative projects that revisited and probed war responsibility. Museum exhibits strained to find common language to represent the meaning of the Asia-Pacific War, with different degrees of success. Underlying the diverse views on the growing controversies of the war were two fundamental questions to be answered: Why did we fight an unwinnable war? Why did they kill and die for a lost cause?

These long-standing questions strike at the heart of troubling concerns over war responsibility and national belonging, which ultimately probe the relations between the individual and the state and between the living and the dead. People may bring different narratives to bear, debate different rational positions in the controversies, and opt for different solutions, but, ultimately, the answers are formed by personal and political reactions to knowledge of failure, injustice, and suffering. The moral doubts are numerous and run deep: Was it legitimate for the state to wage war and mobilize its people to die for the nation? If the war was wrong, did our people die in vain? Is it right for the living to change the war dead from heroes to perpetrators when the war is lost or wrong? Why didn’t the leaders stop the war, and who takes responsibility for the mass deaths and sacrifice? Questions like these, however, go against the grain of everyday habits we construct to avoid knowing what we do not want to know; they defy our desire to protect ourselves from information that is too disturbing and threatening. These direct questions therefore take people out of a comfort zone, which British sociologist Stanley Cohen calls a simultaneous state of “knowing and not knowing,” a condition of self-protective denial that is always incomplete because some information is always registered in the mind. When people attempt to formulate narratives of what happened, they are jolted out of complacency to recognize the knowledge of distant suffering they had safely tucked away in the back of their consciousness, to give some answers to questions that they have suspended but can no longer avoid.9

Controversies at commemorations discussed in this chapter, like the Yasukuni Shrine, are explosive precisely because they disturb this state of “knowing and not knowing” and reveal the dark side of the country’s history and its people. Carrying unresolved legal, religious, philosophical, and historical complexities as they do, the controversies themselves are in a sense epiphenomenal in terms of the underlying questions about the dark side of “our” moral identity as Japanese people. This chapter examines the struggles over public memory that force people to probe their moral compass, and rework their memory, in the face of an uncertain, changing memory culture. I will explore the layers of narratives offered to answer the fundamental questions, focusing on the interplay of political performance and media discourse during commemorative moments. I will trace how memory struggles served to remold the cultural trauma in the search for a more agreeable and less tarnished national identity.

  The Political Performance of Commemorations

 Modernity, Benedict Anderson reminds us, has been characterized by the emergence of nation-states that can mobilize the passion of young men to “die for the country” on a mass scale.10 Once mobilized, nationalist passion allows a soldier in modern wars to believe “he is dying for something greater than himself, for something that will outlast his individual, perishable life in place of a greater, eternal vitality.”11 But after demobilization, this passion withers, no longer fed and needed for everyday combat. For those on the losing side of the war, this passion no longer has any social and moral legitimacy. Justification for violent deaths on a scale of millions is especially hard to summon in a lost war.

The tension between recognizing the futility of war and seeking something meaningful in the deaths has remained an unresolved dilemma after modern wars that called up millions of conscripts. The tension is especially acute in vanquished nations where, as Schivelbusch asserts, the desire to search for positive meaning in the defeat by seeking a progressive narrative of the loss is a common and powerful need. So strong was the impulse for making meaning that it led to the myth of the “lost cause” among the American Confederacy after the Civil War and also to the myth of the “fallen soldier” among the German soldiers who died in World War I.12 Among the victors, too, mass deaths have called for moral justifications, the most famous of which was calling World War I “the war to end all wars” in Great Britain. Attempts to look for a “silver lining” force the momentous question of the ultimate value in national sacrifice.

These conflicting desires and contradictory reasoning lie at the heart of efforts to make sense of the Asia-Pacific War in Japan’s public discourse. If Japan embarked on an unwinnable war, as most would now agree, then efforts to give meaning to the catastrophic losses that followed run into enormous problems of comprehension and justification. At the turn of the twenty-first century, these questions were raised by a new generation of politicians, public intellectuals, journalists, teachers, and families further removed from the reality of the war in time and space. These questions “refused to go away” and had no easy answers.13

In the past, the political schisms were described in dichotomous categories in the public discourse: reactionaries versus progressives, right versus left, Liberal Democrats versus Socialists, and so on. However, as political parties reconfigured and realigned after the end of the Cold War, these dichotomies had less descriptive power. The end of the Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) monopoly, the Gulf War, and the North Korean missile launches all conspired to shake up the long-secure national self-definitions based on pacifism. The complexities lurking underneath the old dichotomies began to show. The political performances and the disputes invoked today come with new scripts, interests, alliances, and agendas, partly hidden even as they are encoded and recoded in the discourse of war memory by new and old players.14

  Why Did We Fight and Die for an Unwinnable War?

In 1985, the same year that German President Richard von Weizsӓcker made his definitive speech on German guilt to the Bundestag on the 40th anniversary of the end of the war, Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro broke with postwar political practice and paid an official visit to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine on August 15. It was the first time in postwar Japan that an incumbent head of government paid homage in his official capacity to the century-old Shinto Shrine, built to honor the nation’s soldiers who fought and died for the Emperor, which today enshrines the war dead of the Asia-Pacific War, including Class 

A war criminals indicted for crimes against peace. This highly visible performance met with a storm of protests from the Chinese government, vexed at the symbolic act of legitimating the war in which China had suffered severe casualties and destruction. Nakasone, recognizing that his action had deeply strained Japanese–Chinese relations, refrained from making visits in subsequent years. This moratorium on an incumbent prime minister’s visits to Yasukuni on August 15 was to last for another 20 years until 2005.15 During this interval, Japan’s war memory landscape would develop dramatically.

The developments in subsequent decades had much to do with changing political and government leadership, increasing transnational scrutiny, and the growing public consciousness that the time had come to bring closure to the unfinished business of war before the wartime generation passed on. The death in 1989 of the controversial Shōwa Emperor who reigned during wartime Japan opened the discursive space to address some old taboos; the trouncing of the LDP in the election of 1993 made room for others to seize the official narrative for the first time in 55 years. With a socialist prime minister leading a coalition government, the 50th anniversary of the end of war in 1995 offered Japan a chance to break with the practice of articulating ambiguous messages of remorse for the war in the international arena. Prime Minister Murayama Tomi’ichi sought to move beyond the domestic political impasse by defining Japan’s war responsibility in a resolution of remorse in the national parliament. The effort was hardly a success; 241 members of parliament walked out, some claiming that Maruyama went too far, and others accusing him of not going far enough to express “deep remorse.” The resolution that ultimately passed in the Diet was a watered-down version that hardly met the high expectations for genuinely addressing the wrongs of the imperial past.16 Then, two months later, at the August 15 commemoration, Maruyama raised the stakes by issuing an official statement recognizing Japan’s wrongdoing as perpetrators in the Asia-Pacific War. It prefigured the increasing diffusion of perpetrator awareness in the 1990s and 2000s.

During a certain period in the not too distant past, Japan, following a mistaken national policy, advanced along the road to war, only to ensnare the Japanese people in a fateful crisis, and, through its colonial rule and aggression, caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations. In the hope that no such mistake be made in the future, I regard, in a spirit of humility, these irrefutable facts of history, and express here once again my feelings of deep remorse and state my heartfelt apology. Allow me also to express my feelings of profound mourning for all victims, both at home and abroad, of that history.17

This statement—approved by his cabinet—has proven to be surprisingly durable as the referent for his successors, in spite of the ideological discord it still generates. Recognizing perpetrator acts and responsibility for past wrongs has been an integral part of Japan’s contentious war discourse since the Tokyo War Crimes Trials (1946–1947), and especially since the antiwar movements of the 1960s and 1970s, so in that sense, the acknowledgment itself was nothing new.18 An explicit expression of state responsibility in the official national narrative of the war, however, had to await the advent of this coalition government in 1995.19 Once officially articulated, this perpetrator narrative was continually adopted by successors, which include some conservative politicians in coalition governments.20

The next shift in the official national narrative came during the 60th anniversary in 2005, when Prime Minister Koizumi Junichirō, like Nakasone, seized the commemorative moment to make an official visit to the shrine. He then introduced significant victim sentiments into his commemorative statement. Koizumi declared:

On the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the war, I reaffirm my determination that Japan must never again take the path to war, reflecting that the peace and prosperity we enjoy today are founded on the ultimate sacrifices of those who lost their lives for the war against their will. More than three million compatriots died in the war—in the battlefield thinking about their homeland and worrying about their families, while others perished amidst the destruction of war, or after the war in remote foreign countries.21 (Emphasis mine)

Koizumi would reiterate this notion of unwilling sacrifice in six successive anniversaries during his tenure as prime minister.22 While presupposing that people died in a war “against their will,” Koizumi also regretted the pain inflicted in Asia through Japan’s “colonial rule and aggression,” using Murayama’s phraseology. Put together, the two sentiments blurred and contradicted the demarcations of guilt and innocence, and merged the transgressions with national sacrifice. Speeches such as Koizumi’s readapted the script of national sacrifice to contemporary society where willingly dying for the state was now logically incompatible with the ideal of the “peace-loving” nation.

This sentiment that national sacrifice was forced on people “against their will” has now become a hallmark of recent victim narratives in the memory culture from films and documentaries to novels and manga books, although it does not necessarily mean the same thing to everyone. Here, the powerlessness of forced sacrifice has become an “organizing metaphor” for explaining and understanding the terror of war, giving vocabulary to the experience of overwhelming fear, and emphasizing the suffering of immediate family and friends over the torment inflicted on distant others.23 At the same time, the retroactive claim that people did not want the war also legitimates a self-serving “victim consciousness” that obscures the larger perpetrator guilt as well as the empirical evidence that many fervently supported the war especially at the beginning.24 To complicate the story, official narratives of the 2000s also proved to be more multivocal and mixed as other LDP members such as Speaker of the House Kōno Yōhei voiced dissent. He used his office to call for a moratorium on visiting the Yasukuni Shrine (2005) and for more elucidation on Japan’s war responsibility (2006).25

The official narrative was to take yet another turn in the next decade when Prime Minister Abe Shinzō aligned his official commemorative statement on August 15, 2013, with his keen nationalist beliefs: he removed the now routine “remorse” for Japan’s “colonial rule and aggression,” and the involuntary nature of the soldier’s national sacrifice, as well as the customary “vow never to wage war again.” These modifications in an official national speech were significant. In a stroke, he ennobled and “heroized” the fallen soldiers by omitting the implications that they were perpetrators or involuntary warriors.26 Then, four months after modifying the national narrative, Abe performed another highly visible political act by paying tribute to the Yasukuni Shrine on the anniversary of taking office (December 26, 2013, rather than August 15). He did this fully aware of the symbolic implication that an official visit would have, because Yasukuni has enshrined since 1979 Class A war criminals indicted and executed for crimes against peace, including Tōjō Hideki, the prime minister and the army minister.

Political performances like these—paying or not paying tribute to a controversial shrine that includes war criminals, or redefining the meaning of national sacrifice—attempt to rebrand the national symbols of war and, by extension, Japanese national identity. They are significant performances, because rituals, speeches, tributes, and worship can dramatize social relations and affirm carefully crafted meanings.27 Knowing that carefully calibrated semantic changes can alter the meaning and moral status of the national story, successive prime ministers used their office to champion their moral view of the cultural trauma of defeat. Nakasone and Abe promoted the narrative of the fallen heroes and fostered the lore of the fortunate fall: the nation is indebted to the noble sacrifices of the war dead for the peace and prosperity it enjoys today. By contrast, Murayama asserted the perpetrator narrative in the national narrative, acknowledging Japan’s dark descent in the past, and pointed the way toward a deeper reconciliation with former adversaries and former colonies. Koizumi expanded the victim narrative and affirmed the solidarity of the people that shared the catastrophe: the nation will never forget the suffering inflicted by the war.

The Yasukuni Shrine, historically a critical social device to legitimate the war dead and national sacrifice, no longer has the symbolic power to turn the next generations into believers of dying for the fatherland or the Emperor. As more wartime generations aged and died in the twenty-first century, the stakeholders of the shrine have dwindled dramatically, while those who venerate the Emperor are also now a small minority.28 The intense emotional logic of the controversy surrounding Yasukuni for the neonationalist advocates, according to Japanese philosopher Takahashi Tetsuya, can be characterized as an “alchemy of emotions,” a problem of transforming the moral status of the dead by transposing rhetoric of the war dead back to the prewar context of national mobilization.29 For its proponents, Yasukuni is the epicenter for meaning making for the lost war and for the fallen soldiers. Those wishing to keep the dead soldiers innocent, however, must then necessarily bracket out the Asian victims they killed.30 This way of remembering the soldiers as victims has protected many Japanese from confronting the meaninglessness of the war deaths of loved ones and from disrupting the tacit practice of “knowing and not knowing” the dark side of their past, while depriving them of “acknowledging responsibility for their own roles” in supporting the war.31 This “Yasukuni problem,” then, embodies the deeply personal conflicts and contradictions of mourning and self-protection, complicated by the politics of today.

  Discourses of War Responsibility and Sacrifice in  

National Newspaper Editorials

In both positive and negative ways, mass cultural media like newspapers, television programs, films, and novels have played a significant role in bringing about a broader awareness of war memory in the 1990s through the 2010s. If the ceremonies of August 15 are like annual funerals, newspaper editorials of August 15 are a cacophony of reflections on mass deaths. Although national newspapers are generally circumspect in reporting politically sensitive issues like perpetrator guilt, they do stake out the paper’s political position in their editorials. The commemorative editorials published on August 15 have become effective vehicles to articulate their stance on the legitimacy of war, national sacrifice, and war responsibility. In this section I illustrate the polyvalent arguments they publish using different threads of perpetrator, victim, and heroic narratives.

Riding the wave of a “memory boom” nationally and transnationally, the commemorative editorials of the national newspapers in the 1990s and 2000s grew more candid in expressing perpetrator guilt than in earlier years.32 In tandem with the political shifts in the 1990s, Japan’s perpetrator narratives in the public discourse deepened, coinciding with fresh political developments like the Murayama statement in 1995 and Chief of Staff Kōno Yōhei’s statement of apology to the “comfort women” in 1993 in which he expressed “sincere apologies and remorse to all those, irrespective of place of origin, who suffered immeasurable pain and incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women.”33 During this time, the plight of wartime “comfort women” came into the media limelight through new historical research.34 Feminist movements also helped bring attention to the women’s lawsuits against the government over sexual forced labor. The Asian Women’s Fund was established to extend compensation to the “comfort women,” although it stopped short of becoming an official government fund.35 New lawsuits from wartime prisoners, forced laborers, and other victims of maltreatment also kept perpetrator narratives in the public eye during this time. A research group called War Responsibility Center opened in 1993 and began to publish a journal dedicated to war responsibility issues. The progressive weekly Shūkan Kinyobi was inaugurated also in 1993 to give voice to independent journalists reporting on politically volatile issues including redress for wartime injustices. This constellation of developments in the public sphere helped raise awareness of Japan’s perpetrator acts among the broader population, who also began to hear the testimonies of victims through the global media in a democratizing Asia.

A backlash to this trend materialized quickly.36 In 1997, an assortment of nationalist academics and reactionary public intellectuals formed a coalition known as Tsukurukai (Atarashii rekishi kyōkasho o tsukurukai, Committee to Write New Textbooks) to insert their revised version of history to the popular discourse.37 The first Abe government introduced patriotic education in the curriculum in 2006.38 Other new legislation mandated the use of the national anthem and national flag in schools over the vigorous protests of progressive schoolteachers objecting to their association with the war.39 This radical-right populist backlash attracted the support of the socially disenfranchised against the backdrop of economic stagnation in the 2000s.40 The populists wanted to repair and restore the innocence of wartime heroes and challenged the outcome of the Tokyo Trials which defined Japan’s defeat and war crimes. In their eyes, the moral and political crusades to promote state officials’ visits to the Yasukuni Shrine were projects to cancel the stigma of defeat and an effort to decontaminate the “dirty” national identity.

All five national newspapers’ commemorative editorials of August 15 consistently adopt the notion that the national sacrifice is “our bedrock for peace” as a normative framework, mourning the dead with a determination to make something meaningful from the lives that were cut short.41 Most editorials echo the themes of damage, loss, and mass death, inviting the readers to remember, directly or indirectly, the enforced national sacrifice. Although the affirmation that the millions of war dead were an honorable “national sacrifice” is to this day an essential trope, the logic has always been strained, since much of the death, and even the war itself, might have been prevented with more prudent, courageous, and far-sighted decision-making. The need for this validating rhetoric in the editorials is nevertheless so strong that readers of national newspapers across the political spectrum—from Asahi, Mainichi, and Nikkei to Yomiuri, and Sankei—can usually find some version of it. This focus on the trauma of young lives cut short, then, usually leads papers to point the finger to the shadow perpetrators who wrought the catastrophe on their own people.

The idea that the national sacrifice has contributed to peace and prosperity in a narrative of the “fortunate fall” is articulated in this editorial in the Yomiuri newspaper (circulation ten million): “No one should forget that Japan’s peace and prosperity today are founded upon the death of 3.1 million Japanese in the war.”42 Layering this tribute to the dead with outbursts of mourning is also common, as in this editorial by the Asahi newspaper (circulation eight million):

There are 3.1 million of them—the number of military personnel and civilians who died in the last war. Who were they? How did they lose their lives?

Iga Takako (age 68) has been searching for the names of individuals who died in the fifty air raids of Osaka through the summer of 1945 . . . It’s taken her sixteen years to register 4,817 names from Osaka city and 914 from Sakai city. These are only half of the 15,000 or so who are said to have perished . . . Iga was thirteen years old when she ran to the water pool to escape the burning. Her mother died instantly. Her brother, a first grader, was burned severely and died three days later. Alone with her father, she buried the remains in a hole they dug up in the ruins. There were many scenes like that . . . For many people like Iga, the war dead are still alive.43

This despair then turns to fury toward the Japanese leadership who are the shadow perpetrators, as in this editorial by the Mainichi newspaper (circulation four million):

Japan’s military went over [to Asia], took over [their land] for selfish reasons, and then killed mountains of people. The prime minister must not worship in a shrine that enshrines Tōjō Hideki and other wartime leaders who ordered [the war], failed to stop it earlier, failed to instruct soldiers about international rules of treating war prisoners, forced mass suicides under the no surrender policy, and took decisions that incurred millions of deaths.44

In the 1990s and 2000s, the political differences in the treatment of perpetrator guilt became ever more salient even as the papers shared the similar intention of mourning the dead.45 Three national papers—Asahi, Mainichi, and Nikkei (circulation three million) newspapers—began to run regular commemorative editorials that defined Japan’s past as a perpetrator nation. The largest newspaper Yomiuri (circulation ten million) and the smaller Sankei (circulation two million) differed, taking a defensive, nationalist stance on war responsibility and claiming that guilt was framed unfairly by the victors.46 (Yomiuri was to change its position in 2006.) On August 15, 2005, at the 60th anniversary of the end of war when Koizumi visited the Yasukuni Shrine, all national newspaper editorials except the Sankei newspaper focused directly on the question of war responsibility. This consensus of the four papers was in remarkable contrast to earlier years. The pacifist Asahi newspaper has been particularly vocal in claiming that peace is Japan’s atonement for the war; the way to repair moral identity and attain the respect of the world.47 Asahi’s antiwar narrative originates in remorse over its history of war collaboration, the stain of having incited the mass readership to join the war effort and misleading them with distorted reportage.48 Given this sense of their own war responsibility, their demand for state accountability and indictment of wartime leaders and bureaucrats is particularly fierce.

The Nihon Keizai (Nikkei) newspaper, an elite business paper directed to a pragmatic, internationally minded readership, adds direct, lucid, and also practical editorials to the fray. In contrast to Asahi, Nikkei presents memorial editorials with ideological detachment but unreserved opinion. Taking a clear stand against Koizumi’s repeated visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, for example, Nikkei offers scathing, unsparing criticism of wartime leadership. “The responsibility of the wartime leaders who brought the nation to ruin and caused the tremendous damage to Japan’s neighbors should never be obscured . . . The terrible diplomatic ineptitude of the Japanese leaders that delayed the end of the war added to many more casualties.”49

The Yomiuri newspaper’s turn to directly tackle war responsibility came after 2005 when it carried out its own “reexamination” of war responsibility by the wartime leadership, independent of the judgment of the Tokyo Trials. Acknowledging that their own findings in the project were similar to those of the Tokyo Trials, Yomiuri ceased to defend the Yasukuni Shrine and Class A criminals. This turn will be discussed in more detail in the next section.

Comparing the editorials of the Mainichi newspaper, Japan’s oldest daily paper,50 and the Sankei newspaper is a study of contrasts. They are furthest apart in political ideology, while both take the tone of the political as personal, so to speak. War responsibility is a matter of “we,” not “they”; hence Mainichi’s embrace of war responsibility and Sankei’s rejection of war responsibility are about accepting or refusing the dark side of history as their own identity. Mainichi’s insistence on assuming perpetratorhood as part of “our” national identity also comes with ambivalence and complexity, however. In the 2005 anniversary editorial, the Japanese are perpetrators and victims; the Japanese military and Class A criminals are perpetrators, and the three million Japanese people who died were victims.51 For the Sankei newspaper, the most reactionary of the five national papers, Japan was victimized by the victors who stigmatized the nation, so the priority now is to fight those claims and take back the heroic narrative of the nation’s history from the West’s hegemonic discourse.52

Notwithstanding the inclusion of Asian victims in recent editorials, critics have often admonished the complacency of Japan’s narratives for settling too easily in a comfort zone without deeply probing the political and historical causes, and the structural violence and military abuse, that perpetuated the victimizers’ power in the first place.53 Sociologist Nina Eliasoph probes the question of how “perfectly capable people can keep misrecognizing themselves as innocent victims, seemingly blinded to the harm they’ve done, seemingly so myopic,” not because they are stupid, but because it is a means of social bonding.54 Sharing the generalized victim’s voice also serves to promote structured helplessness, and becomes a vehicle for legitimating victimhood.55 This recurring dynamic of self-pity partly explains why Japan’s victim consciousness has been so durable over the decades and so effective in reproducing the culture of defeat.

The enormous concern for the damage inflicted on one’s own people over any injury they wrought onto others permeates many mnemonic narratives, including the American memory of the Vietnam War.56 Japanese narratives of victimhood also demonstrate a narrow, ethnocentric vision of the war dead. The proclivity to care about those “close to home” over distant others, discussed earlier as part of the struggle to find redemption in the death of those who never returned, will be discussed further at the end of this chapter. As the meaning of national sacrifice shifts and shuffles during the long defeat of a now pacifist nation, the answers are often ambivalent and contradictory, leaving space for multivalent interpretations of victimhood.

  The Cultural Media Productions on Commemorations

 Memory culture produces what historian John Bodnar calls “tangled versions of what actually happened and some mythical or hopeful view of what the world was like before and could become again.” They do not represent the past perfectly but “fuse the real and the mythical, driven not simply by a need to remember, but also by a desire to forget.”57 Japan’s commemorative publications and programs, television documentaries, and feature films are such memory culture products. They depict wartime Japanese soldiers and civilians in narrative plots as heroes, victims, and perpetrators—and in shades of gray; the protagonists’ experiences and actions vary as do their relationships to the military state. They describe the different images and embodiment of war and defeat in individual lives, fusing different meanings, actions, and consequences. This section describes cultural memory projects that produce those “tangled versions” in the mass media.

Commemorating the war and deaths in a defeated nation that professes pacifism is a morally and politically complicated operation. 

Whether documentaries or dramatic enactments, memory products do not escape moral evaluations: stories of violence and danger, humiliated masculinity, helpless destruction and loss, liberation from state oppression, anger toward leadership, and the callous regression of human decency tend to be framed as morality tales for a wider audience in the present. The recent media productions, far from bridging disparate memories, fail to bring collective closure or renew national solidarity, and reinforce the deeper separate preoccupations of the trauma of defeat. They have managed the complex requirements of remembering a difficult past—redressing injustices and past wrongs, healing ruptured wounds, and restoring a positive moral and national identity—but do not coalesce into a neat “collective memory.”

Broadly, three preoccupations have dominated this memory landscape of the 1990s through today. First, there was a sense of urgency that the “witness generation” was passing on and that time was limited to seek more clarity from them about what happened in the war. The aging of this war generation reenergized efforts to disseminate victim narratives of how “little people” suffer in war, and this reinforced the pacifist, antiwar message. Second, there was at the same time a deepening awareness of the injustices committed against individual men and women in the war, which sharpened the perpetrator narratives that were then spread more widely. The growing recognition and claims of the Asian victims of the war for redress over the past decades has also been infused with a sense of urgency to resolve them while those victims they were still alive. Third, attempts to rehabilitate Japan’s identity that had been sullied by the war and defeat renewed a furious politics of identity. Partly in response to the deepening awareness of Japan’s history of perpetration, new heroic narratives emerged, conveying, directly or indirectly, indignation over the deviant identity imputed to Japanese men who fought the war. These nationalist efforts aimed to revise the vilified image and “restore the dignity” of these men. These trends are discussed below as they intersected with the concerns of different generations.

  The Misery of Our Dreadful War

Recognizing a dark history of perpetration does not come easily to any nation. The self-protective impulse to suppress, overlook, or reinterpret the guilty, shameful past tends to prevail over the inclination to acknowledge it. Illuminating dark national history and questioning the political and moral responsibility of the war in Japan build on efforts of the wartime generation who became educators, intellectuals, journalists, and activists who insisted on accepting the offender’s identity, facing the responsibility, and redressing the injustices that were unleashed. Prominent public intellectuals of this generation played a critical role in articulating these concerns and influenced progressive elites for decades. In this effort crucial leadership came not only from historians like Ienaga Saburō (discussed in  chapter 1) but also from intellectuals in diverse fields, for example Maruyama Masao, Tsurumi Shunsuke, Oda Makoto, Ōe Kenzaburo, and others. Best-selling investigative journalism on the military’s brutal transgressions in China also emanated from well-known writers like Honda Katsuichi and Morimura Seiichi who wrote in the 1970s and 1980s. Social groups and movements such as the teachers’ union, peace movements, and human rights movements were all firmly engaged in keeping the perpetrator narrative alive and voiced their concern over redressing the injustice in different ways and with different degrees of success.58

Building on this work, mainstream journalism at the turn of the millennium produced high-profile war memory projects to reassess the state of the field as anniversary specials. They were intended for a wide popular audience: published in serials spanning days and months, then reproduced in books, television programs, and websites. One example was a long serial reportage on war responsibility published by the Yomiuri newspaper, designed as a countertrial to the Tokyo Trials, by the Japanese for the Japanese. This year-long (August 2004 to August 2005) independent inquiry over the conduct and responsibility of wartime leaders culminated in its own list of “who was responsible” for the failed war. The list had much overlap with, and was actually even longer than that of the Allies’ trial in 1948–1949, but like the Allies’ trial, it exonerated the Shōwa Emperor of war guilt.59

After this “reexamination,” Yomiuri was to switch its position to anti-Yasukuni, spearheaded by the well-known octogenarian editor-inchief Watanabe Tsuneo. Watanabe’s anger is not unlike others of his generation who knew many lost in the war:

Nothing shows the utter cruelty of the Japanese military more than the kamikaze suicide missions (tokkō). The soldiers didn’t go willingly [as officially claimed]. They were ordered to go by the higher-ups, orders that were tantamount to orders from the 

Emperor…

Military Headquarters also forced the soldiers [in the battlefront] to commit collective suicide (gyokusai). They sent no reinforcements, and then ordered the soldiers there to kill themselves [rather than surrender]. These were acts of brutal murder.

The irresponsible, sloppy war plans also forced countless “martyrs” of the nation to die of hunger—especially in the South Pacific. Mountains of them starved to death . . . To claim that they died “for the nation, hailing the Emperor,” is a complete distortion of history. We have to demolish that [myth].60

Similarly, the Asahi newspaper’s project to examine war responsibility in the “past that will not go away” culminated in a serial that spanned four months in 2006.61 Its approach to reexamining the Tokyo Trials was transnational, investigating the viewpoints from the United States to India, whose judicial representative issued the sole dissenting opinion finding all defendants not guilty. It also questioned the war responsibilities of the Emperor and the mass media (including Asahi’s own war collaboration) but not that of the masses. Showing how other nations mourned their war dead and overcame the past, the project also investigated international cases in Germany, France, Great Britain, South Korea, South Africa, Chile, and the United States. Unlike other commemorative projects, Asahi’s international approach necessarily entailed an examination of Japan’s colonial past in Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, and the scheme of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Investigating the injury wrought in annexing Korea and seizing China’s northern provinces, the project invited commentaries of international experts and interviewed Asian victims. This approach showed that the blame for war and colonial oppression cannot be confined to a handful of “reckless military leaders”; however, the project stopped short of pointing fingers and leaves readers to draw their own conclusions on the collaborative responsibility of colonists, business leaders, and the military administration in the occupied territories.

The sense of urgency to record and archive wartime experiences also led to an oral history project called Testimonial Records: The Soldiers’ War (Shōgen kiroku: Heishitachi no sensō, 2007–2011) produced by NHK television (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai), Japan’s national broadcasting station.62 Like the BBC’s oral history project WW2 People’s War in Great Britain, NHK’s project serves as a digital depository of war testimonies made available on the web. The project researched, recorded interviews, and produced programs over several years, starting in August 2007 and ending in 2011 to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the start of the Pacific War. It offers forceful accounts, in the words of the soldiers themselves, of what it was like to live through and survive the war. The programs reveal these veterans as unhappy men when they are recounting painful events, bitter about their brutal experience, mortified by their own desperate acts of self-preservation, ashamed of their degraded behavior, and haunted by their acts of violence.63 Their testimonies are infused with self-loathing for what they were reduced to do for naked survival and loathing for their superiors who reduced them to pitiful beasts and expendable pawns. The Asia-Pacific War looks anything but heroic in these vivid testimonies of dehumanization and degradation.

As the veterans reflect on the meaning of their experience, it is evident that most do not find any redemption in this suffering. They carry frustrations, anger, mourning, guilt, and repugnance that remain unresolved and unanswered. The audience, however, must rely on their own reflections to draw conclusions as they read and hear what it is like to kill your own wounded before retreat;64 rob the local peasants of their food;65 obey incompetent commands to charge ahead without any strategy or tactics other than wasting life after life;66 recognize the worthlessness of human life for the military command;67 feel haunted by survivor guilt;68 mourn69 and vent anger at the meaningless loss and suffering;70 remember the men who lost their minds71 and men who killed themselves to seek relief from the suffering;72 kill the enemy;73 and even resort to cannibalism for naked survival.74 The only positive aspects that comes through in these testimonies are examples of men of integrity (such as a commander who killed himself to save his subordinates75) and the compassion that men felt for each other.76

The intellectual monthly Sekai featured a project about Japan’s perpetrators in China tracing their emotional reckoning with their brutal crimes while incarcerated in Chinese reeducation camps as war criminals. Psychiatrist Noda Masaaki examined the impact of perpetrator trauma in the emotional journeys of dozens of former soldiers in the serial over the course of a year and a half in 1997–1998.77 Like American psychiatrist Robert Lifton’s study of Vietnam War veterans,78 Noda Masaaki unraveled the veteran’s arduous path to emotional recovery, from gaining the ability to recognize and feel pain, developing empathy with the victims whose lives and families they had destroyed, to recognizing abuse, accepting guilt for their crimes, and regaining a sense of humanity. After repatriation, these former war criminals went on to form a moral witness movement, in which they lectured, published memoirs, and even began their own journal in 1997.79 Noda’s study not only made their stories accessible and understandable to a general audience, but it also shed light on the profound psychic numbing and inability to feel guilt under the imperialist ideological indoctrination that these men had experienced. Such psychological study of perpetrator profiles by professional psychiatrists has been largely absent in Japan until recently.

One of the cases that Noda illustrated was Yuasa Ken, an indicted war criminal who spent years in Soviet and Chinese prisoners’ camps and, on return to Japan, became an activist in a veteran’s movement dedicated to atoning for Japanese war crimes. For decades he has been speaking out about the crimes he committed as a medical doctor in an army hospital in Shanxi, China, where he killed 14 prisoners for “surgical practice.” As difficult as it is for him to confess over and over to the wrongs he committed, he does not mince words. He spoke candidly to a journalist in a 2000 interview and makes his testimonies publicly available on the movement’s website, among those of his colleagues:

The goal of the Japanese army’s invasion in China . . . was to plunder their resources. So, it was basically, robbery…

None of my comrades will speak up . . . so, I will say this to rest the souls [kuyō] of the Chinese who were killed…

I did . . . live dissections . . . 7 times . . . on 14 Chinese people . . . I still remember . . . their faces…

When I remember those times, I am filled with remorse, bitterness, and regret.80

Works such as Noda’s have led the way to exploring anew the dark side of memory buried in the zone of “knowing and not knowing.”

  The Folly of Our Father’s War

In his classic study of postwar television documentaries on the war, Sakurai Hitoshi is self-critical of the early efforts as “closed circuit monologues.” Working in isolation, he remembers that the producers’ efforts to articulate victimization actually only made sense to those inside Japan. By the 1990s and 2000s, however, the uncomfortable themes of war guilt and responsibility for Japan’s perpetrator past had become inescapable subjects of anniversary television broadcasts. Documentaries today typically involve extensive investigative reportage tracking down evidence and witnesses abroad, and incorporating archival work in the United States and Europe. These critical documentaries and action docudramas have become mainstays of August broadcasts and garner high ratings. In particular, NHK Special, a prime-time documentary series broadcast twice weekly, has long been a wellspring of award-winning investigations. It played a significant, sometimes controversial, role in shaping and transmitting war memory, including perpetrator narratives, to an intergenerational audience, although its general political orientation remains within the confines of a state-funded public television station.81

NHK Special, produced entirely by the postwar generation today, has offered some of the most in-depth investigative journalism on the Asia-Pacific War. The documentaries have uncovered many subjects of the war, especially the military organization and its conduct: the systemic cover-ups of the wartime navy’s blunders and crimes (Japanese Navy’s 400 Hours of Testimonies, 2009);82 the opportunism, negligence, and collusion of the military, government, power elite, and media that collectively failed to stop the war (Why Did the Japanese Go to War? 2011, a four-part series);83 the opium trade that the Japanese army dabbled in to finance the war in China (Investigative Report: The Japanese Army and Opium, 2008);84 and more.

On the 64th anniversary of the end of the war in 2009, for example, NHK devoted prime-time programming over three days (August 8, 9, and 10) to a documentary series based on recently uncovered records of former Imperial Navy officers discussing what went wrong in the war. These men met 163 times from the 1970s through the 1990s to exchange their frank thoughts; those exchanges, recorded in 400 hours of tape, were the basis of the program and revealed candid confessions of efforts to shield their leaders at the Tokyo Trials, the crimes committed by the navy in the Philippines, and even a frank discussion of the Emperor’s war responsibility.85 The project also sought to contextualize those former officers’ behavior and motives by interviewing their children (now in their 60s and 70s). Those children seemed to suggest that the hint of guilty conscience redeemed their fathers: “Father never spoke about it.” “It was guilty silence [yamashiki chinmoku dana].” “He prayed for the lost soldiers every day.” “He said he was powerless to stop what he opposed.”

Piling up the evidence of incompetence and irresponsibility has a powerful cumulative effect, even as the program stops short of criticizing these officers directly. However, by revealing their collective loss of nerve, not having the courage to confront difficulty, and looking to others for approval, the program lets the data speak for themselves that the Imperial Navy was as guilty and self-serving as the Imperial 

Army.86

Six years later on the 70th anniversary of the start of the Pacific War in 2011, NHK Special produced a four-part series that asked why Japan decided to enter an unwinnable war against the United States.87 The series, broadcast early in the year and then rerun during the August commemoration, probed the historical circumstances that led to Japan’s plunge into the Pacific War in 1941. The NHK journalists targeted four culpable parties: the diplomac corps, the army, the media, and the state and military leadership. Individuals are not singled out for blame, but the sense of doom is pervasive. The series covered the enormous mistakes made, and the tragic consequences that ensued, emphasizing the deep sense of irresponsibilty permeating all four parties collectively. Of special note was the candid indictment of the mass media that manufactured the will, enthusiasm, and exaltation to fight, in lock step with state censorship. The moderator’s commentaries suggest that there is a morality tale to be learned from this history by the postwar generation:

Most important is to realize that they went to war, even while knowing well that war was a foolish choice. We can’t just say it was insanity of the moment when so many perished because of Japan. We can’t stop asking why we chose to go to war when so many sacrificed themselves.88

This theme of the folly and pity of war was repeated in an NHK Special called The Red Papers Were Delivered to the Village: Who and Why They Were Sent to the Battle Front (August 1996) about the destruction of life and livelihood of an entire village.89 It traces the conscription records of a village in Toyama prefecture over eight years when 246 men were drafted to the war, receiving their conscription orders printed on red paper. The narrative alludes to the state as the shadow perpetrator that victimized the villagers and presents an obliquely negative view of how villagers and the village economy were killed in the name of the state. Muted resentment runs through the interviews with survivors who returned and labored to recover their tulip farms. A farmer who was conscripted at age 15 recalled how he was meant to dedicate his life to the state: “it was absolutely cruel.” Some of the men had been drafted three or four times, even at age 44. Ultimately the enormity of these deaths cannot escape the verdict that they were futile, because that is the only assessment consistent with the widespread perception that the public was duped by wartime leaders—duped into making the mistake of going to war.90 This awareness of coercion, exploitation, and betrayal by the state is not easily placated by government speeches such as Koizumi’s.

Although NHK often presents new evidence and revelations for investigative documentary programs, it also courts its share of political controversies: one such case came in 2001 when NHK’s educational station ostensibly gave into political pressure to modify its depiction of the International Women’s Tribunal that highlighted the crimes against “comfort women.” This independent people’s tribunal, designed as women’s countertrial to the Tokyo Trials, was held on Pearl Harbor Day in 2000 and indicted the Shōwa Emperor among several others for their wartime crimes of sexual forced labor. Organized by the well-known feminist journalist Matsui Yayori, the ensuing lawsuit over the “edited” NHK program fortuitously brought further publicity to the “comfort women” issue and the television program itself than the producers had probably originally envisaged.91

These recent accounts of Japan’s wartime perpetration have not gone unchallenged. Some have criticized these perpetrator narratives as overly “politically correct,” staying on the level of rhetoric, and never reaching a deeper understanding of the perpetrators motivations and sentiments.92 For these critics, mostly from the political left, deepening consciousness requires a public recognition that the perpetrator past is an irrevocable part of national history to be accepted as national identity. The ritualized pledge for peace that usually accompanies the narratives often leaves ambiguous the roles of the perpetrators as colonizers, military aggressors, war criminals, and “ordinary” soldiers, not clarifying whether they are meant to be “us” or “them.” From a critical memory perspective, this ambiguity of the audience’s relationship to the perpetrators leaves much room to draw self-serving conclusions about Japan’s war responsibility: a handful—especially a limited group of leaders defined guilty by the Tokyo Trials—can be made to bear the brunt of responsibility for the war, while the rest of the military, bureaucracy, government, power elite, and civilian population can remain comfortably “innocent” or even consider themselves victims.

By contrast, others from the opposite end of the political spectrum have criticized those perpetrator narratives as overly “self-loathing” and “biased”; such critics have challenged NHK Special’s coverage for going too far rather than condemning it for not going far enough.93

  The Gallantry of Our Grandpa’s War

Since the prevailing worldview of the West is that good triumphed over evil in World War II, coming to terms with the past in Japan has as much to do with addressing stigmatized deviant identity as making sense of gruesome losses. The instigators of the mass carnage have been demonized as fanatical, barbaric, and backward, and diminished from normal to deviant; the very moral fiber of the nation’s inhabitants is called into question. Sociologist Erving Goffman defined stigma as “an attribute that is deeply discrediting” that diminishes the bearer “from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one.”94 This deviant identity does not fade easily; it thrives as caricatures and stereotypes on the broad canvas of global mass culture that can still make Japanese viewers wince and cringe. It has also been internalized by many Japanese over the course of the long defeat.

It is not surprising then that this diminished, discounted identity has strained the national sense of self-esteem over time and across generations, much to the consternation of Japanese neonationalists. Attempts to restore the tainted image of patriotic heroes discussed in this section cannot be understood without taking account of this bitter resentment. Here I discuss efforts to reimagine the “deviant” Japanese military to counteract the images of misery and folly that became the mainstay of the cultural media in the 1990s and 2000s. Suggesting kinship as well as temporal distance from the imagined past, these stories are framed as narratives of our grandfathers’ war. Often they are about war heroes of one’s family who fought gallantly but did not return. Recently, however, these grandpa stories probe different outcomes, to make up for the flaw in the plot that war heroes of a lost war have to die to become war heroes: they show grandpas who survived the war—survived to help others live, survived in spite of the flawed military plans, and survived for the future of their families. Plausibly glamorizing those who survived life-changing carnage is not easy. Nor is it easy to depict them as kinder and gentler warriors, looking to save their lives rather than sacrifice themselves, so that they may return to their loved ones.95 Yet this effort tries to turn the whole war into one fought to protect their loved ones, not to sacrifice for the fatherland or the Emperor.

These images of war and family are, of course, updated to fit the ideals of the twenty-first century and to resonate with young audiences who were raised in an era of romantic love. The wartime generation had a generally weaker emotional attachment to family life compared to now: they did not generally have romantic love marriages but had arranged marriages; they also gave up children for adoption when desired for primogeniture;96 and in the wartime state Shinto ethos, mothers were congratulated when their sons died at war and were expected not to grieve their deaths. But family love has grown more important now and offers revised heroic role models for the young audience; it makes possible a new and improved image of Japanese military men to look up to even if they are fictive.

Thus, in a significant shift from martyrdom, the new and improved heroes do not always die at war. In the new feature films and novels about the war, Japanese soldiers are no longer willing to fight and die for the Emperor or the state but only for their “loved ones,” that is, their parents, spouses, children, siblings, and friends. The greater cause has changed: they reject dying for the nation at war and cherish survival. Heroes are therefore not warmongers but peace seekers.

Even with this crowd-pleasing bent, recent feature films released to coincide with the August 15 commemorations still represent different meanings of war and defeat, a variety of real and fictive situations, and an assortment of diverse characters. Recent protagonists are an imprisoned dissident tortured to death by the military police and his widow; an indicted war criminal who pursues exoneration; a navy captain who defies the call to sacrifice his men in suicide missions and then happily marries his sweetheart after the war; a decorated soldier disfigured and limbless from combat injury and haunted by the memory of the rapes and atrocities in China, who callously and sadistically abuses his wife; a civilian shopkeeper who upholds a moral conscience to guide his children through wartime chaos; and a dreamy civilian engineer single-mindedly pursuing his childhood dream of building the best aircraft in the world, completely oblivious to the carnage it would cause as a weapon of lethal destruction.97 These war stories are less about staking contentious truth claims than they are about illuminating different pieces of a larger whole that yet remain in tension. It is left to the audience to stitch the pieces together, recognizing that the characters are morally complicated and multidimensional and that our understanding is imperfect and incomplete.

Recent films like Last Operations under the Orion (2009) are inspired, written, created, and acted by postwar generations that never experienced the war but have grown up with an understanding that Japan’s defeat and practices in World War II have left an indelible stain on the military. However, in Orion—and others of the same genre—military protagonists neither die tragic deaths nor become victims of the war but survive with daring and tenacity. This particular story revolves around Captain Kuramoto, played by the heartthrob Tamaki Hiroshi, who runs a submarine charged with thwarting the operations of American destroyers in the Pacific Ocean. Reversing the image of the fanatical Japanese military leader, Kuramoto is a kind, courteous, courageous, smart, and decisive leader who sees that his mission and responsibility are to save his men from needless death. So, he coolly refuses repeated pressures to send his men on suicide missions as human torpedoes (kaiten) that would help save ammunition. He counsels the four zealous kaiten volunteers on board with reason and compassion: “Listen to me. We’re not fighting to die. We are fighting to live. Humans are not weapons. We only have one life. It’s too precious.”

Although his best friend dies in a downed submarine, Kuramoto survives the war, marries his childhood sweetheart, and lives long enough for his granddaughter, who is now discovering his past military life, to remember his family life. While it is easy enough to criticize this entertaining action film as a prowar and promilitary tale, it should be recognized that the film also repudiates the erstwhile practices of kamikaze missions and suicide charges that were valorized by the pre-1945 military. The audience finds moral dignity in a sanitized, revised past that is inhabited with Japanese men who treat each other with respect and resolutely refuse to sacrifice subordinates like dispensable pawns. This new and improved image allows the young audience to identify with and applaud the captain when he refuses false bravery, just as they can identify with and applaud American captains like Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan. Orion attempts to overcome the deviant “Jap” label in a growing genre of what might be called “grandpa” stories that refashion the armed forces into one that Japanese could become proud of.

To be a good soldier today, then, is to have a warm heart and good family values. Similar heroic grandpa stories are making their mark as a new popular fantasy genre in which the postwar audience can identify with brave and honest military heroes in a reimagined world. In the million-seller novel and feature film Eternal Zero (Eien no zero) a jobless, wayward grandson goes on a journey to discover his grandfather’s life, and along the way discovers the true meaning of life—love for the family and not dying for the state and Emperor. The courage of his grandfather to stick to this principle even as he serves as a phenomenal ace zero pilot for the Imperial Navy is the key to this story. The protagonist Miyabe is a cool flier, caring officer, smart strategist, and loving family man who is forced to become a tokkō suicide pilot by the navy and dies at the end of the war. The mixture of valorizing zero pilots and lamenting the tokkō system that killed those talented young men in the name of the state, defines the moral scope of this story. It keeps the empathy and respect for the sacrifices intact, but the purpose of those sacrifices has been switched from nation, Emperor, and fatherland to family and home.98

These stories work as entertaining fantasy for the young audience, resonating with notions of “loved ones” and “family values” now saturated in the global entertainment media. Furthermore, Zero expresses a selective antimilitarist streak in denouncing inept petty bureaucrats in the navy, self-serving and cowardly military upper brass, and other reckless war mongers, all of whom are blamed for the tragic deaths of young Japanese men. In this worldview, the tokkō men are not zealous ultranationalist suicide bombers, but good men in bad situations who had no other choice. They wanted to live for their families but died. Depicting these men as “good ordinary men,” however, also has major limitations: the stories must start after 1941 and depict the war against the United States rather than China. If Miyabe’s story had started before 1941 during his deployment in China, he might well have had to be shown as one of the pilots carrying out vicious, indiscriminate bombings, like the infamous air raid of Chongqing city. The message from this fictive genre is disregard the inconvenient memory; there is something worth cherishing about the wartime heritage that can and should comprise the backbone of positive national and moral identity.

Ironically, the fictive grandpas reimagined by postwar authors and producers today actually adopt the norms and moral boundaries of the global Anglo-American popular culture. Courage, principle, skills, loyalty, and dedication indeed comprise the backbone of positive moral identity for Hollywood models. Japan’s wartime ideal of ultimate courage and loyalty—a willingness to sacrifice one’s own life for the sake of the Emperor or fatherland—is entirely incompatible with peacetime ideals to live for family, love, and happiness in a “peace-loving” nation. Grandpa’s war stories in the commercial media have to overcome this cognitive dissonance by modifying the past.

How does the young audience today react to these tales of national sacrifice? On August 15, 2001, on the 56th anniversary of the end of the war, another NHK Special aired at prime time asked three dozen young participants in the studio to share their thoughts and perceptions of wartime Japan, especially of the young soldiers who fought to their death as suicide pilots. The majority were critical of their grandparents’ war, though the views were far from uniform.

“I couldn’t do what [the kamikaze pilot] did. How could anyone young do that for a cause? Was it because he didn’t have a choice? I don’t understand it.”

“I don’t get it. Did they go out to die because there was no other way? How could a cause [taigi] sway so many young people? I couldn’t do it.”

“I think it was convenient for them to say they couldn’t help it.”

“I sort of get it. I may have done the same thing. We’re a bit similar to prewar Japan now: No principles or integrity”

“To say they couldn’t help it must have been frustrating. It’s resignation, accepting what they couldn’t control.”

“I also like to say that I can’t help it. I’d say it one hundred times. But I’m not going to think about the public good. I’m only going to think about myself. I don’t want to try too hard.”

“To switch perspectives like that after the war . . . that was so spineless [darashiganai].”

“The negative legacy isn’t over. I can see in my Korean friends that they are still carrying the anger [kuyashisa]. New ties can begin with apologies.”

“I do feel the weight of [being part of] a ‘nation,’ but I’m not sure how to integrate [internalize] it in myself. I don’t know what to believe, which makes me nervous.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what it means to ‘take responsibility.’ What am I supposed to do?”

“I think keeping peace is the best way to take responsibility.”99

Neither uniform nor consensual, these young people are different from one another in how they feel about and understand the war, and what they take away from it. And yet, there are some discernible common sentiments among them: a thinly veiled contempt for the war generation for having completely switched their moral identity after the war; some anger that there are no moral principles besides “no more war” to guide their thinking about the future of Japan; and care about peace as a worthy goal.

  National Belonging and Blocked Empathy

Critical of the perpetrator narratives in today’s media, Japanese sociologist Fukuma Yoshiaki has argued that they have become overly politically correct and self-satisfied. He also takes issue with victim narratives that are used as a refuge from exploring perpetrator guilt. Fukuma reasons that to probe both positions in depth, we would inevitably have to understand the connection between the two, create a circuitry between understanding perpetratorhood and victimhood and bridge them at a deeper level of awareness. A deepening consciousness of perpetratorhood-cum-victimhood would lead us to an understanding of the complex sentiments of perpetrators themselves. It would also ultimately force us out of a safety zone of “knowing and not knowing” where we shield ourselves from accusations of wrongdoing. It would force us to examine whether we would or could have done differently under the same conditions. Deepening perpetrator-cum-victim consciousness should ultimately take us from the depths of the inexpressible, unutterable sentiments to recognizing the political structure in which the victimizers abused the victims. The quest is therefore not to abandon the comfortable victim’s sentiments but to weave them into a more inclusive imaginative circuitry.100

This new circuitry requires a deeper imperial consciousness (teikoku ishiki), as historian Arai Shin’ichi maintains.101 Without that imperial consciousness, the Japanese are blocked from empathizing with the Asian victims, insisting instead that they themselves were innocent bystanders caught up in an undeclared war. To gain an imperial awareness, however, it is important to reach a deeper level of awareness about the collusion of the masses in the war effort, whether as collaborators or bystanders. That this is both difficult and painful is evident in the words of this war-timer:

After all, everyone older than my age had war experience of one kind or another regardless of gender. We all lived through the war, pulling each other’s legs, and helping ourselves. So, thinking about war responsibility means we’d have to be critical of ourselves, and admonish ourselves . . . It’s hard for us . . . If we tried, we’d have to tear ourselves from within; [we] are not mentally strong enough to bear that.102

This complex approach to remembering embraces a trend toward identifying an integrated “good-and-also-evil” narrative. It attempts to move beyond the split between good versus evil by identifying the perpetrators as victims of military abuse, while, at the same time, condemning their actions as perpetrators. These attempts are efforts to move beyond the impasse that has stagnated Japan’s culture of defeat for some time and has contributed to a weak sense of responsibility for the victims “far-from-home” in Asia.103 Among others, public intellectuals Oda Makoto, Tsurumi Shunsuke, Kato Norihiro, Oguma Eiji, and Yoshida Yutaka have attempted to break through this impasse, to suture the different horizons of meaning.104

Historian Hyōdō Akiko suggests a framework that conceptualizes the intersection of perpetrator and victim as two sides of the same coin.105 While desensitization to violence is imperative to carrying out violent warfare, it can also lead to desensitization to violence directed at oneself. In a sense, Hyōdō calls for empathy for those who were trained and conditioned, and thereafter compelled, to carry out atrocities, without excusing those atrocities. This is an approach that calls for a level of empathy for the soldiers who turned into killing machines and who had to make a pact with the devil to survive in hell. It is no longer as easy to identify with them as classic heroes or villains, but some level of understanding the perpetrators-cum-victims as vulnerable and flawed men is necessary for an empathetic understanding that “it could happen to me, too.”

The postwar generation seems to be taking heed. Recent surveys show that more Japanese of the postwar generation than the wartime generation think that they should bear responsibility for the war.106 Nearly half (47%) think that the Japanese should continue to feel responsible for the enormous damage they brought to the people of China.107 More than two-thirds (69%) thought that postwar Japan has not sufficiently examined what Japan did in the war and should debate the problem of war responsibility.108

This search for an integrated, coherent approach to heroes, victims, and perpetrators may allow postwar generations to evaluate individuals participating in the war as neither all-perpetrator nor all-victim. Contradictions abound in this way of looking at the realities of life: accept viciousness in kind people, and expect meanness in nice people. The approach ultimately reaches a zone of ambiguity between good and bad, or what Primo Levi has called the gray zone.109

Narratives of heroes, victims, and perpetrators coexist uneasily in part because different elements are embodied in the same people simultaneously: victims of one story can be simultaneously perpetrators of another story, and yet be cast as heroes of yet another story. A given family may be remembered at once as ardent supporters of military aggression as well as victims of indiscriminate aerial scorching, yet also saviors to local neighbors. As individuals, a Japanese soldier may be remembered at once as a perpetrator of illicit invasion and also a victim of army maltreatment, while also unwilling to kill a POW as ordered. Adding more complexity, a given family may remember several members in different hero/victim/perpetrator roles, like a dissident, a war dead, and a war criminal. The moral complexity is especially poignant for kamikaze pilots who embody this moral dilemma of simultaneous role assignment: although a “victim” of senseless orders, he makes a “heroic” sacrifice, which turns him into “perpetrator” of a military that committed war crimes.

Public intellectual and peace activist Oda Makoto articulated his vision of the integrated perpetrator-cum-victim already in the 1970s stemming from his experience of surviving the meaningless Osaka air raid on the eve of Japan’s surrender and involvement in Japan’s anti–Vietnam War movement (Beheiren). He suggested that the separation between perpetrator and victim is an artificial construct of moralities that are actually intermeshed. Perpetrators are born when people are turned into killing machines, which is enforced by the military state. Insofar as that turn (to perpetration) is enforced by a military system of authority that people had no option to refuse (by conscription), the perpetrators, before becoming perpetrators, are victims of the military state. This does not exonerate the perpetrators of atrocious crimes or of the need to take responsibility for them, but it means that perpetratorhood originates in another kind of violence done to them by the state. The original victimhood cannot be denied, though it does not cancel out their perpetratorhood.110

Without a more complex imaginative circuitry connecting victimhood to perpetratorhood, Japan’s national attempt to keep its dead soldiers innocent will continue to require the bracketing out of other Asian deaths. Stories of Japanese victims, mobilized for many purposes and feeding into the larger cultural trauma of defeat, tend to push the distant Asian victims largely out of the official narratives and the public media. When empathy for the Asian victims seemingly falls off the radar of the postwar generation, we tend to attribute this behavior to apathy, small-mindedness, or amnesia. But prioritizing concerns about issues “close to home” is not unusual, and this apparent apathy may not be different from the ignorance of and indifference to the enemy dead in wars from the Vietnam War to the Iraq War. It may have to do with the feeling of powerlessness to address sufferings “far from home” relative to sufferings “close to home,” or a sense of resignation on the part of people who feel disempowered to voice their concerns.111 War responsibility, however, never ceases, so long as the same nation-state remains in place.112

Comparative studies scholar Nakamasa Masaki points out that the limited scope of national discussion about the culpability of the civilians and the suffering of distant victims lies at the heart of Japan’s ambiguous self-understanding as perpetrator-cum-victim. He argues that self-understanding has been seriously compromised for political reasons: the situation derives from the collusion of convenience between the political left and the right for whom suppressing the discussion served different purposes. For the left, it helped ensure that they did not have to antagonize the general public whose political support they were seeking. For the right, it helped deflect possibly endless presumptions of guilt, including that of the Emperor. This protection of bystanders with silence became a diffuse practice as the sacrifice discourse solidified. Leaving the war dead unscathed became a national imperative.113 This ambiguous self-understanding also derives from the salient memory of Hiroshima, framed and diffused as a massive victim story in the public discourse. This narrative, effective for peace education and pacifist socialization of children, can reinforce the vision that war’s lethal violence is random and arbitrary instead of recognizing the human agency that makes that violence possible.114 I turn to this problem of transmitting war memory to children in the next chapter.