The Long Defeat 5

 

6 5] The Moral Recovery of Defeated Nations A Global–Comparative Look

 “Our job is peace.” “There is someone I want to protect.”1 These poster slogans greet visitors in the lobby of the visitors’ center in Camp Asaka, a military installation 14 miles northwest of central Tokyo. This spacious multipurpose center of the Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) combines a theme park, a military museum, a multimedia archive and library, and an information and recruitment center. Nicknamed Rikkun Land after the GSDF’s mascot, the site hosts weekend outings for young families, community events and school visits, and has attracted millions of visitors since opening in 2002. The main gallery is dedicated to showcasing military “cool” for young visitors and projecting a positive image of Japan’s Self-Defense Force (SDF). On a recent weekend, visitors could see a vivid 3D documentary film about the back-breaking training of young Japanese rangers; in the main hall, children could dress up in military fatigues and climb into helicopters and tanks. Especially popular among the youngsters are the simulation games for flying, camping, and more. There is hardly any real sense of violence, threat, or death. Nor is any war history or war memory found on the site.

Young families visiting Rikkun Land can easily spend the day there not realizing that the place used to be a significant military training facility for the Imperial Army in the Asia-Pacific War, which later became a garrison for the US military, Camp Drake, used during the US occupation, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. In fact, visitors will not find any sign of military life before 1950—the date when the SDF was established—in the galleries’ chronology.2 More visible are the proud displays of recent SDF accomplishments, like the rescue efforts after the 2011 earthquake in northeast Japan; the UN Peacekeeping operations (PKO) in Cambodia, Mozambique, Iraq, Somalia, and Haiti; and in other humanitarian missions. The displays present the SDF as the ultimate protector of the nation whose power can ensure Japan’s “peace.” This notion that peace has to be guarded by the deployment of military power is, however, quite distinct from a vision of peace ensured by disavowing war, as discussed in  chapter 2, or achieved through international reconciliation.

Seventy years after the end of the war, the long-standing, contentious proposal to revise the role of the Japanese military—elevating the SDF to a full military force by easing restrictions placed on it—is taking on a renewed significance. With a sea-change in East Asia’s geopolitics and economics at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Japan’s frictions with its neighbors—China, South Korea, and North Korea—have escalated. Aggravating these frictions are acrimonious disputes over unresolved and unsettled accounts of the war and Japanese imperialism. Stoked by rising nationalist sentiments, these disputes bring the past into direct collision with the present.3 As the public anti-Japan sentiments have intensified in these nations, Japan’s problems with bringing closure to the “history problem” and handling the territorial disputes with China and South Korea have only inflamed East Asia’s memory politics.4 The tensions in this shifting geopolitical environment are a new impetus for Japan to reconsider and reevaluate the parameters of its “peace” identity.

This concluding chapter considers Japan at the crossroads of becoming a “normal country”—a nation possessing the full military capability to wage war—which is one of the most divisive issues in Japanese politics today. I outline the impact of war memory on this debate, which focuses on the question of whether to revise the postwar peace constitution that has never been altered since 1947. The debate arouses deep misgivings because Article 9 renounces the sovereign right to wage war as well as the right to possess military forces.5 The issue of armament embodies a question of basic national credo and identity. I suggest that the three memory narratives discussed throughout this book underlie three different approaches for moving forward on this question: nationalism, pacifism, and reconciliationism. These approaches have been embraced and promoted to different degrees by different stakeholders in Japanese society, from state and business leaders to religious and civic groups, public intellectuals, political networks, social activists, and transnational movements. I examine these approaches in turn as attempts to overcome Japan’s history problem and to bring closure to the long defeat. I then consider the possibilities for Japan to move beyond the culture of defeat and help regenerate peace in East Asia by drawing on comparative observations of Germany and other defeated nations.

In her award-winning book Sengo wakai (Postwar Reconciliation), Japanese international relations historian Kosuge Nobuko explains that “remembering the past” as a way to bring closure to conflict is a relatively modern approach for building peace. Although “forgetting the past” had been considered the formula to attain postwar peace in premodern societies, this practice became increasingly untenable with the modern establishment of secular international law.6 By the time World War II ended, the winners had become the adjudicators of “remembering past wrongs” and the prosecutors of the losers for the war crimes they committed. Thus the international war crimes tribunals in Nuremberg (1945–1946) and Tokyo (1946–1948) were designed to demarcate clearly between the winner and loser, perpetrator and victim, guilty and innocent, and then to punish the guilty to make sure that “mistakes will never be repeated.”7 Japan’s peace constitution, written and enacted during the US occupation as the Tokyo Trials progressed, was part of the victors’ strategy. It could be accomplished, the occupiers believed, by ensuring a weaker Japan, “cut down to a fourth rate nation with little hope of ever again becoming a world power.”8

Thus, it is not surprising that Japan’s constitution still carries poignant symbolism and historical memory linked to the trauma of defeat. While many felt the peace constitution offered liberation from military violence and wanton belligerence, for others it meant emasculation, a profound humiliation for a sovereign nation with a long warrior tradition.9 The precursor of the SDF was established when the Korean War started in 1950, to take over the policing functions of US occupation forces that were diverted to the Korean peninsula. In this Cold War environment, the goal of ensuring a weaker Japan shifted to ensuring an anticommunist Japan—a democratic, capitalist, military ally for the United States and the West. Ironically, the SDF had limited capability because of the peace constitution; but, as the Cold War escalated, it was gradually transformed, under the auspices of the 

US-Japan security alliance, into a virtual standing military.10

Japan’s pacifism thus became a complicated patchwork of different practices and policies, pursued by diverse stakeholders for whom “peace” meant different things. It is easy to point to the contradictions: Japan renounces war in its constitution, yet it also has a viable military unit called the SDF, complete with an army, navy, and air force. As a pacifist nation, Japan prides itself in containing its defense expenditure to 1% of its GNP, yet total defense spending today is the fifth largest in the world, after the United States, China, Russia, and the United Kingdom.11 Japan bans nuclear arms that are illegal under the constitution, yet it does not enforce the ban when the US military transports its nuclear missiles through Japan. Under the US-Japan security treaty, pacifist Japan hosts over 130 military installations and facilities across the nation, especially in Okinawa; thus Japan has indirectly aided—and thrived economically from—US wars, such as the Korean War and the Vietnam War.

The constitutional revisionists (kaikenha) claim that contradictions between the ideal of unarmed peace and the practice of armed peace—made possible by successive “reinterpretations” of Article 9—have now reached a limit in the post–Cold War global age. The constitutional preservationists (gokenha) counter that the original ideal must be protected to ensure and reassure the world that there will be no military escalation ever again in Japan. This stalemate is grounded in the deep mistrust between the constitutional revisionists and preservationists and has given shape to the patchwork of practices and compromises that have long sustained Japan’s postwar military defense structure.

To amend the constitution, Japan requires a two-thirds majority approval in both houses of parliament followed by a national referendum. It is a high hurdle that no postwar Japanese government has ever cleared. Although successive governments led by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) have vied for remilitarization since the 1950s in line with the strategic alliance with United States, a broad-based opposition headed by the Socialist Party (JSP) vying for “unarmed neutrality” (hibusō chūritsu) effectively blocked LDP efforts to revise the constitution for decades. Time and again, civil rights lawyers, students, and activists have used Article 9 to contest the constitutionality of a military presence in Japan: the constitutionality of US bases (Sunagawa case, 1959); of the SDF (Hyakuri Base case, 1977–1989; Naganuma-Nike Missile Site case, 1973–1982); and, more recently, of the deployment of the SDF to Iraq as part of UN Peacekeeping operations (Lawsuit Opposing the Dispatch of Japanese Self-Defense Force to Iraq [Jieitai iraku hahei sashidome soshō] in Nagoya and other regions 2004–2008). These landmark legal battles ultimately ended in defeat for the plaintiffs, except for the Nagoya case.

Public opinion has also been divided for a long time: those in favor of constitutional revision have consistently averaged 25–45% and never exceeded 60%.12 The relative upswing since the 2000s has been due to the growing perceptions of threat triggered by North Korea’s missile launches in 1998, 2006, 2009, 2013, and 2014;13 worsening territorial disputes with China and South Korea; and the Abe government’s intensified efforts to legitimate rearmament. In 2014, the government introduced a revised interpretation of Article 9 that would allow the SDF to participate in military actions of collective self-defense in limited cases.14 This move, which the government called “proactive peace,” has been largely unpopular in the court of public opinion, where the stalemate remains unresolved.15 As of this writing, the contentious issues surrounding the use of SDF for collective self-defense has yet to be fully debated in parliament or translated into specific legislation.16

  Moving Beyond the Culture of Defeat: Three Visions of Moral Recovery

 The central idea of this book is that culture is shaped by memories of violent conflicts and their outcomes. I have argued that in defeated societies, this memory work does not produce a monolithic and consensual culture but a divided public discourse. War memories illustrated in this book recount different versions of the past that make the past more bearable and the present more palatable; they also vie for recognition to influence future generations and legitimate their self-identity. Overcoming defeat requires this type of moral recovery work which is just as important as economic recovery to revitalize postwar society.17 The culture of defeat is fueled by a shared desire to recover from the setback even if people’s specific visions for the future are not identical. Those visions as expressed in memory narratives are often incongruent—as we have seen in the narratives of fallen heroes, victims, and perpetrators—and prioritize different aspects of moral recovery. Japan’s long defeat, then, is a process of moral recovery work, to recover from stigma, to heal from the losses, and to right the wrongs. The long standoff on the question of revising the constitution and becoming a “normal country” is deeply symptomatic of the domestic impasse over the different means of attaining “recovery.”

In the post–Cold War world, political dichotomies such as “left versus right,” “conservative versus liberal,” or “hawks versus doves” pegged to political party affiliations increasingly lost their illustrative power on the map of political culture. As memory politics also cuts across party lines, it makes sense to identify different approaches to moral recovery by orientations within the political culture rather than by party ideologies and affiliations.18 The three approaches that I outline here are different options for Japan to move forward on the questions of constitutional peace and the “history problem.” These approaches—nationalism, pacifism, and reconciliationism—are direct logical extensions of the three memory narratives discussed in this book and suggest the pathways beyond the long defeat. They are preoccupied with different concerns and visions for the future, and Japan must ultimately find some compromises among them.

The nationalist approach calls for overcoming the past by advancing national strength rather than through international reconciliation. It emphasizes shared national belonging and collective attachment to a historical community and derives a social identity from that traditional heritage. People adopting this approach tend to use the language of national pride and resent the loss of national prestige and international standing that came with defeat. They vary along a spectrum of intensity from aggressive hardliners to moderates in their search for respect, and vary from realist to idealist in seeking the competitive edge over other nations, like those in neighboring East Asia. Their use of heroic narratives of the war is consistent with their preoccupation to remove the stigma of the past and gain equal recognition from the United States and the West as part of “overcoming” the long defeat.

The pacifist approach espouses an antimilitary ethos and a pacifist creed as part of atonement for the Asia-Pacific War. It considers war as the enemy and mistrusts the state as an agent for peaceful conflict resolution. Pacifism is a source of humanist pride as well as a collective identity that allows Japan to recover its moral prestige from the deviant past. This people-centered vision focuses on all victims of war violence and nuclear threats, and uses the language of human suffering and human insecurity wrought by military action. People adopting this approach vary along a spectrum of intensity from aggressive to moderate in their protest of military violence, and from national to international in their images of victims, like those killed by atomic bombs and air raids, and the refugees in Syria.

The reconciliationist approach espouses rapprochement in East Asia as atonement for Japan’s perpetrator past. This approach prioritizes better relations with Japan’s regional neighbors and crosses party lines in that regard. To different degrees, people in this category share the recognition that an acknowledgment of past guilt is indispensable to move forward and redressing the wrongs is the only viable way for Japan to build mutual trust in the global world. They use a range of language from human rights and transitional justice to friendships and pluralism, and they emphasize the requirements of good relations with regional neighbors. Embraced by an eclectic mix of internationally minded leaders in politics, business, scholars, and civic activists, people vary along a spectrum from aggressive to moderate in their quest for redress and justice, and from realist to idealist in pursuing rapprochement.19 This approach is cosmopolitan, presupposing justice as a universal value, whether it comes from Christianity, feminism, socialism, transnational intellectual sensibilities, or declarations of international agencies.

The parallel horizons inhabited by people subscribing to these approaches were jolted into being by the new international realities of the 2000s and 2010s when military threats and belligerence increased with a multitude of international events: the missile launches from China and North Korea; the failure to be part of the victorious coalition in the Gulf War (1990); 9/11 and the ensuing “war against terror”; and the failure to gain permanent membership in the UN Security Council (reserved for the victors of WWII) (2005). Japan’s ideal of peace diplomacy collided with the reality of shifting geopolitics, and reshuffling priorities became inevitable. Confidence in peace diplomacy was shaken by the realization that “checkbook diplomacy” was no longer sufficient in supporting Kuwait; at the same time, confidence in reconciliation diplomacy was shaken by the rising anti-Japan nationalist sentiments in the region. Thus contingency legislation was enacted in 2003 and 2004 in the wake of 9/11, and, soon after, the new defense guidelines that designated North Korea and China as potential threats were established (2004).20 In the same year, Japan’s Diet approved dispatching 1,000 SDF troops to southern Iraq on a “humanitarian recovery mission” as part of the UN Peacekeeping operations (2003–2008).21 These developments among others challenged the effectiveness of Japan’s peace strategy based on Article 9 and increasingly strained the established memory narratives.

  The Nationalist Approach: From Defeat to  

Respect and National Belonging

From aggressive neonationalism to moderate civic and cultural nationalism, a nationalist approach subscribes to the notion that furthering the national interest will bring the best solution to the “history problem.” Based on a sense of shared national belonging and attachment to a historical community, this approach partakes of a certain cultural resistance to cosmopolitanism.22 Recent Japanese prime ministers making official visits to the Yasukuni Shrine on commemoration day can be identified in this category (often called “neonationalist”), as well as those who passively condone traditional symbols of national honor like the national flag and the national anthem. Many in this category favor revising the constitution, as Japan’s Prime Minister Abe Shinzō described at a special new year’s interview with the Sankei newspaper in 2014. Asked about his vision for Japan in the year 2020, the year that Tokyo will host the summer Olympic Games, he responded:

[I foresee that by 2020] the constitutional revision will be done. At that stage, I want Japan to fully recover its prestige and be recognized respectfully for its momentous contributions to world peace and stability in the region. Japan’s higher prestige will restore the balance of power in the Asia region.23

Emphasizing the recovery of prestige and respect, Abe makes clear that he wants to restore some fundamentals of nationhood that he believes were lost after defeat. His often-quoted ambition to “leave behind the postwar regime” (sengo rejiimu karano dakkyaku) is precisely about ending the long defeat, overcoming the cultural trauma of “a weaker Japan” that has been the subtext in postwar political culture, and gaining equal recognition in the world. In practical terms, this means strengthening Japan and ending military disempowerment and the one-sided dependence on the United States as a “client state.” An example of this nationalist vision is encapsulated in the revised draft constitution (kenpō kaisei sōan) announced in April 2012 by Abe’s political party (LDP): it is a nativized, domesticated version of the constitution, emphasizing tradition, patriotism, and duties to the state; and, significantly, it changes Article 9, replacing the renunciation of possessing a military force with the establishment of a National 

Defense Army (kokubōgun).24

The nationalists’ impetus to inculcate national pride and patriotism in the country is readily explicable when we consider the erosion of support for traditionalist sentiments in recent decades. National pride has declined in recent decades from 57% in 1983 to 39% in 2008, and it is consistently lower in the younger generations.25 Japanese high school students, for example, have the lowest sense of national pride compared to American and Chinese counterparts.26 Japan’s younger generations born after the baby boom also report that they have no religion (neither Buddhism nor Shintoism) and no sense of attachment to the Emperor.27 The nationalists’ drive to cultivate patriotism in schools today actually emanates from a sense that their power base is eroding among the new generations who are disengaged and disinterested. In this sense, the mutual provocations that fan the perceptions of threat in relations with China are effective tools to promote a stronger sense of national belonging and solidarity among disenfranchised groups.

This approach to “overcoming” the past is complicated. The accusation by the West that Japan is not doing enough to accept responsibility for World War II war crimes invites anger from nationalists who resent not being a member of the established Western clique. Not being firmly established in the European order, Japan’s path to shedding the stigma and asserting its established position is more arduous than Germany’s. Taking account of this international stratification, the hurdle for recognition for non-Western, nonwhite nations is doubly high and perpetually hard to clear.28 Nationalistic remembering is, then, not directed to reconciliation efforts but to gaining moral and strategic superiority.29 In this sense, the moral recovery from the long defeat is directed to revising the script of defeat, questioning the legitimacy of the Tokyo Trials, the devaluing of the Yasukuni Shrine, and China’s victory in the Asia-Pacific War. From this vantage point, China is a country that exploits historical grievances to promote political gain. Relations with South and North Korea should also be “normal,” that is, uncompromised by Japan’s guilt and uninhibited by constitutional constraints.

In this perspective, an apology is not a compelling, ennobling act that exemplifies strength of character and courage to take responsibility for the dark past, but a self-defaming and belittling act that exposes weakness and gives license to opponents to endlessly disgrace and diminish Japan.30 Drawing on the earlier discussion on generational proximity in family memory, it is not surprising that the children and grandchildren of the wartime power elite strongly resist apologizing for Japan’s wartime deeds. As an inheritor of a political dynasty and family memory, Prime Minister Abe Shinzō’s case is a well-known example.31

  The Pacifist Approach: From Defeat to Healing and Human Security

The pacifist creed has long been an important counterweight to nationalism in postwar Japan, and its proponents delivered on that mission months after Japan dispatched the SDF to southern Iraq to take part in its first “humanitarian recovery mission.” In June 2004, a group of nine prominent Japanese public intellectuals gathered in Tokyo to announce the founding of the “Article 9 Association” (A9A, Kyūjō no kai) to protect the constitution from the state’s intensified efforts to revise it. The high-profile cast ensured that the group would draw wide public attention. All the founding members were of the wartime generation and had well-established credentials as postwar pacifists: Oda Makoto and Tsurumi Shunsuke had been leaders of the anti-Vietnam War movement; Ōe Kenzaburo, the Nobel laureate, is known for his pacifist conscience and outspoken public criticism of the state, evoking comparisons with Germany’s Günter Grass. Miki Mutsuko had been active in the movement to attain redress for “comfort women” and joined the Asian Women’s Fund in 1995. Others included Kato Shūichi, a leading public intellectual, and Okudaira Yasuhiro, a prominent constitutional scholar. The Article 9 Association’s manifesto reads as follows:

Let our Constitution Article 9 shine upon this [changing] world, so we may hold hands with our fellow pacifist citizens around the world. For this purpose, we must reselect Japan’s constitution and Article 9 as sovereigns of this nation . . . as it is our responsibility to shape the future of this country.

We appeal to the world to do everything possible to prevent the revision of this Constitution, and to protect it for future peace in Japan and the world.32

The popular response to this appeal was resounding: within a year and a half, more than 4,000 local citizens’ groups of the Article 9 Association sprang into action. Ten years later, there are more than 7,500 A9A groups of all imaginable stripes: A9A for film makers, poets, women, children, the disabled, patients, doctors, musicians, scientists, the fisheries business, trading companies, the mass media, Buddhists, Greens, the Communist Party, and so on; and local community groups have sprouted by the thousands across towns, cities, and prefectures.33 An international petition drive ensued, organized by the Global Article 9 Campaign to Abolish War, which was established by the youth movement Peace Boat (2005).

The accusation by the West that Japan is suffering from collective self-pity in its vow never to allow another war that would create more Hiroshimas and Nagasakis, misses the significance of pledging disarmament for a country with 700 years of military tradition and three victories in international wars.34 The pride in this radical break with the past is such that a citizen’s group nominated Article 9 for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014.35

The popular appropriation of Article 9 as a form of civic identity was long in the making. Japan’s postwar pacifism, historian Akazawa Shirō explains, was born out of a profound skepticism for state-defined “justice” that wrought massive sacrifices and immoral acts of violence.36 As war memory fostered persistent antipathy for the military and mistrust of the government’s ability to control the military, Article 9 came to function as an important constraint on the government that allayed those fears. What emerged over time was an antiwar pacifism based on a desire for human security, regret for a violent past, and a promise to be model global citizens in the future. Peace is therefore a civic identity and a strategy of moral recovery, expressing contrition as well as an aspiration for an elevated moral status in the eyes of the world. This multifaceted discursive practice of peace is therefore fundamentally different from an antiwar pacifism based on questions of war responsibility.

The A9A was a corrective to defy the resurgence of aggressive nationalism in the 2000s; it reasserted the pride in a pacifist identity that had become a standard moral framework learned in schools and historically found role models in both Christian pacifists—like Nitobe Inazo, Yanaihara Tadao, and Uchimura Kanzo—and atheist pacifists—like Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein who led the Pugwash movement dedicated to eliminating “all weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical and biological) and of war as a social institution to settle international disputes.”37 However, only six months after the A9A was launched, the Japanese government announced the new National Defense Program Outline (NDPO) that broadened and realigned the range of SDF activities to react rapidly and multifunctionally to domestic and international emergencies. In this policy, China and North Korea were identified as “potential threats.”38

More recently, new civic organizations and networks have sprung into action to defend the integrity of Article 9 and the constitution in response to the cabinet’s decision, announced on July 1, 2014, to reinterpret Article 9 to permit the SDF to participate in some level of collective self-defense. Those civic groups, consisting of scholars, public intellectuals, activists, and other public figures, who are mostly of the postwar generation, vow to safeguard constitutionalism and constitutional democracy, and hold the government accountable to them. An example of these groups is Save Constitutional Democracy. Like the movement to petition the Nobel Peace Prize Committee mentioned above, it represents an updated brand of pacifism that seeks a broader constituency to hold off further challenges to Article 9 by the nationalists in government.39 From this perspective, constitutional pacifism embraced by popular, democratic choice symbolizes the ultimate moral recovery from the long defeat.40

  The Reconciliationist Approach: From Defeat to  Justice and Moral Responsibility

A reconciliationist approach to overcoming the past prioritizes international dialogue to build relations with regional neighbors with antagonistic histories, based on mutual respect and, ultimately, mutual trust. Japan’s acknowledgment of its history of aggression is indispensable in this regard, together with an acceptance of guilt and an effort to redress the wrongs. In the West German case, the effort to promote mutual understanding of the antagonistic histories with its neighbors started within years of the war’s end. Under UNESCO’s auspices, West Germany started an international dialogue first with France (1951), and then, with the advent of Ostpolitik, with Poland (1972). The joint textbook commissions carried out bilateral reconciliation work successfully by all accounts, and continue the efforts today with ongoing institutional support and state funding.41 By contrast, Japan’s joint history research projects with South Korea and China started only in the 1990s and 2000s, and with limited institutional and supranational resources compared to the German case. During this time Japan carried out both state and civilian projects with South Korea and China.42 One such effort was a trinational joint history textbook called History that Opens the Future published in 2005 by a group of 54 scholars, teachers, and citizens from Japan, China, and South Korea; it was the first textbook of its kind in East Asia published in all three languages.43 The preface reads as follows:

[This textbook] is about the history of East Asia in Japan, China, and South Korea.

East Asia’s history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is scarred by the wounds of invasion, war, and human oppression that cannot be washed away.

But . . . East Asia also has a long tradition of cultural exchange and friendship as many people work across national boundaries, committed to building a bright future.

We can build a brighter, peaceful future on this beautiful earth by inheriting the positive assets of the past, while thoroughly reflecting [tetteitekini hansei] on the mistakes as well.

How can we learn from the lessons of history to build a future that guarantees peace, democracy, and human rights in East Asia? Let’s think about it together. (History That Opens the Future [Mirai o hiraku rekishi] 2005)44

A joint history textbook project presumes that a shared historical perspective is possible based on some shared universal values such as peace building, democracy, and human rights, as this preface describes. The effort calls for a search for a common language, and, as much as possible, a shared framework of understanding and interpretation. The common language behind History That Opens the Future is Japan’s history of imperial aggression and its damage to modern East Asia. The language of perpetration ties the three national histories together in what might be considered a primer on the origins of Japan’s “history problem.” Here the perpetrators are delineated clearly (Japan), as are the heroes who resisted the incursions (China and Korea), and the victims who suffered (China, Korea, and Japan). It also provides a blueprint for a possible resolution, which is that Japan must offer a full “apology and restitution [shazai and hoshō]” for its imperialism, invasions, and exploitation if East Asia is to find true healing, justice, and long-term reconciliation.45

Finding this common language is central in reconciliation work, yet hard to attain.46 Korean-American sociologist Gi-Wook Shin points to four key areas of reconciliation in East Asia—apology politics, joint history research, litigation, and regional exchanges—where the search for common ground is necessary for progress to be made.47 At a pragmatic level, it means that former adversaries, former perpetrators, and victims must set aside the hate and prejudice that have stewed for decades and find a reservoir of patience and good will. This process is also complicated ideologically by the “universal” international norm that defines a common language of justice in the global arena: human rights, democracy, and international norms such as crimes against peace (wars of aggression) and crimes against humanity (genocide, torture, persecution, etc.).48 It was precisely the failure to find common ground in the understanding of “justice” that eventually ended the government-sponsored bilateral history research committees of the 2000s.49

Indeed, recent polls show that only a small fraction of Chinese and South Korean people (less than 11%) actually believe that Japan embraces pacifism or reconciliationism, while much larger proportions (one-third to one-half of respondents) believe that Japan upholds militarism. At the same time, many in China and South Korea point to Japan’s “history problem” and the territorial disputes as obstacles that stand in the way of building better relationships.50 At the same time, Japanese views favoring China and South Korea have also declined significantly and are currently at an all-time low. Japanese who said they liked China peaked in 1980 (78.6%) and declined to the lowest level in 2012 (18%). The decline was sharp particularly after the Tiananmen Square massacre (1988), the anti-Japan riots (2005), and the flare up of confrontations over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands disputes (2010). Japan’s view favoring South Korea reached a peak (62.2%) in 2011—rising steadily after President Kim Dae-Jung lifted the ban on importing Japanese popular culture (1998), through jointly hosting the FIFA World Cup (2002), and the growing popularity of the Korean “wave” of popular culture (K-Pop)—but promptly plummeted 

(to 39.2%) after President Lee Myung-Bak inflamed the Takeshima/ Dokdo Island dispute with his visit to the island in 2012.51

Indeed in the second phase of the trilateral scholars’ efforts to build international dialogue and mutual understanding in the 2010s, the political and social climate had grown considerably worse than in the 2000s. The follow-up publication,52 which had set itself the ambitious task of providing an overarching regional history of East Asia, reflected this difficult climate. Finding common ground on the understanding of “justice” seemed strained, as evidenced by the failure to synthesize the section on collective memory that could have led to an understanding of the most pressing issue facing the three nations, the territorial disputes. Yet it is this type of painstaking and persistent work of cultivating civilian dialogue, however difficult it may be, that ultimately paves the way for future generations to pursue the task of East Asia’s reconciliation. These efforts join the assiduous work of many activist-scholars like Utsumi Aiko, Ōnuma Yasuaki, and others who have labored to achieve transitional justice in Asia over the decades.53

As Germany’s reconciliation history shows, rapprochement ultimately presupposes a compelling apology, an admission of wrongdoing, to achieve a common sense of justice. In this approach, an apology is an ennobling act that enhances the public perception of the apologizer for the profound courage to admit one’s evildoing. Precisely contrary to the Japanese nationalists’ view noted earlier, staring down one’s own capacity for evil and accepting responsibility for it enhances rather than diminishes a person’s moral stature. An apology here becomes a pathway to transcend stigma, serving one’s interest in accruing symbolic capital, in a cultural milieu where self-reflection is highly prized. Not all cultures, however subscribe to the notion that “an unexamined life is not worth living.” When cultural resources do not exist that allow for a pathway to prize apology through self-reflection, the prospect of reconciliation is diminished.

The nationalist, pacifist, and reconciliationist approaches have been at odds, vying for dominance in different disputes over the past decades. They do not coalesce into a unifying national strategy for overcoming the past, and they demand different strategies for political legitimacy and politics of social integration. The pacifist approach has been particularly strong in the areas of family memory and the school curriculum, as the previous chapters in this book showed. Mending the broken fences and healing the deep scars of history, however, will take more than the advocacy and practice of pacifism, however well-intentioned and well-practiced. Moral recovery in current geopolitics is achievable only when respect can be gained from past adversaries and victims. The new tensions between Japan, China, and the Koreas make this task even more difficult.

  Is There a Global Model of Reconciliation?

In the shifting world of memory making, the German model of repenting the past is fast becoming something of a “global standard,” recognized by the successive Truth and Reconciliation commissions in different parts of the world. The Holocaust has become a globalized cultural trauma that may serve also to represent universal moral sensibilities.54 Whether a “global standard” to right past wrongs—derived from a belief system that conceives sin to be addressed by repentance, forgiveness, and redemption—can acquire profound resonance outside the Judeo-Christian civilizational orbit remains an unanswered question. Whether a model of atonement for the Holocaust based on European anti-Semitism can find effective political traction in Asia and elsewhere, and be recognized as a “universal model” to reconcile disparate national memories in the global world, is sure to become one of the major problems in the politics of memory in the future.

This “global norm” is a “Western liberal norm,” which suggests today that not addressing past wrongs through truth-seeking, confession, apology, and forgiveness is uncivilized, backward, narrow minded, self-serving, and, by implication, unworthy of full membership in the established Western world. In this process, the ideals of human rights and freedom, born out of a Euro-American Weltanschauung and centered on a liberal democratic discourse are imposed on the non-West, which aspires to join the civilized world.55 On the one hand, this global discourse has made inroads into Japan’s memory culture, enabling the burgeoning redress movements, often in the form of litigation that continue to this day. On the other hand, it has radicalized racial antagonism from those who resent the implication of moral inferiority in the “insufficient” reckoning with the past. In the emergent “politics of regret” that has come to dominate the global discourse on wars and atrocities since the 1990s,56 an explicit hierarchy of “civilized” behavior has also emerged.

In discussing the culture of defeat in Turkey, Russia, and Japan, Turkish-American political scientist Ayse Zarakol emphasizes that the quest for security and equal recognition of an “outsider nation” is structurally different from that of an “insider nation.” Suggesting a complex, structural explanation for Japan’s predicament of defeat, she claims that the requirements of recognition and the burden of stigma are different in the East from the West. The outsider nations have always had intense anxieties about not being an integral part of the international system. In the desire to gain international stature under the gaze of the West, the defeated, like Japan and Turkey, made special efforts to emulate the West after defeat. The reluctance to apologize for war crimes is costly for both nations, but they are both hesitant to apologize because doing so requires a self-redefinition that is incompatible with their long-standing goal of attaining equality with the West. Admission of “barbarism” and the capacity to carry out unjustified violence not only “challenge[s] the integrity of the narrative of state identity,” but it also ironically casts the nation as falling short of the normative standards of the West that they have striven to attain for years—such as progress, rationality, and scientific achievement.57

Japan’s nationalists, pacifists, and reconciliationists today fall into the quandary of wanting to be recognized as a civilized nation espousing the “global standard,” yet also wanting to be recognized as a civilized nation that would not carry out barbaric deeds so unworthy of civilized nations. Conforming to the global standard accrues symbolic capital and carries the approval of the world, yet at the same time confirms the West’s stereotype of the yellow peril menacing white societies. Increasingly, China’s and South Korea’s demands for apology are articulated within this global framework even if they do not apply it to themselves for their own dark histories of oppression.

  A Comparative Look at Germany

In Shattered Past, Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer examine the diverse memory narratives of Hitler’s war, the Nazi regime, and the Holocaust since reunification (1989) in Germany, and illustrate how different individuals and social groups take diverse perpetrator, victim, and bystander perspectives, replete with contending recollections that highlight different lessons. They highlight how people do not produce a cohesive sense of the past, notwithstanding the official German contrition policy. War stories of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders coexist in everyday life, based on different perceptions, experiences, and self-interests that are not unified as an account for the whole nation.58 These divided memories have emerged out of particular social and political conditions: the rift between the West-East political regimes in the Cold War, different generational perceptions, the diversity of battlefront and home front memories, and distinct ideological orientations. Different beliefs and memories of wartime experiences and the Third Reich have become evident, especially in the decades after reunification, that reveal how partial, selective accounts lead to irresolvable differences.59 This diversity of memory narratives in Germany seems not altogether different from other nations with difficult pasts, such as Japan as discussed in this book, as well as others like postwar France and Austria.60

The official approach of managing the Holocaust legacy, however, emerged as a relatively consistent contrition policy since the 1970s and 1980s, which looked to the deeply flawed past, called for self-incrimination, a radical break, and a reconstruction of a new collective self.61 Notwithstanding the diversity of popular narratives—for example, the traditionalists’ long resentment of the contrition approach that was formulated by the 1968 generation, the war stories of heroes and victims produced on the silver screen, the private narratives of German suffering and innocence at home—Germany’s politics of contrition has managed to control and efface many dissenting voices.62 There were geopolitical and domestic conditions that made this not only possible but also necessary. In postwar West Germany, reconciliation was an imperative: West Germany’s economic and political survival depended on establishing an official policy of reconciliation and integration, formulating a new cooperative framework with its neighbors starting most importantly with France, integrating itself in Europe, joining NATO, becoming part of the European Union, and forging a European identity that made up for a German identity that was viewed with deep suspicion. The political dynamics at home produced conditions favorable to this approach especially when the Social Democrats (SPD) governed for two decades (1969–1982 and 1998–2005) and implemented a number of critical policies in foreign relations (Ostpolitik) and education (the Holocaust and Third Reich curriculum). These structural conditions of reconciliation are markedly different from those of postwar Japan, which faced a different set of imperatives not to reconcile with its communist neighbors: China, North Korea, and the Soviet Union.63

This German approach was different from its approach after the defeat in World War I when it marshaled narratives of fallen heroes and betrayed victims to heal and unite the nation.64 The self-incriminating approach that emerged from the second defeat amalgamated lessons learned from the failures of the first half of the twentieth century: the Holocaust and the Third Reich, as well as the failures of two world wars, and the failure of democracy in the interwar Weimer republic.65 Germany’s reformed parliamentary system supported this approach by allowing Germany proactively to control “extreme ideologies” like nationalism and communism whose parties were banned in the 1950s.66 It also controlled any mushrooming “fringe” voices in parliament by setting an electoral threshold for party representation at 5% of the vote.67 These institutional tools, and others designed to stabilize democracy, allowed Germany to prevent its official policies for overcoming the past from being held hostage to opposition from the extreme left or right. Thus, even though protecting and rehabilitating former Nazi’s was salient in German society until the 1960s, they could be effaced once the Social Democrats and the youth generation were in a position in the 1970s to define the perpetrator narrative that demarcated German guilt.

This work of constructing moral social boundaries between perpetrators and victims also carried over to civil discourse.68 The German heroes to be looked up to in postwar society as models of courage were those who opposed the Third Reich by risking their lives—Claus von Stauffenberg who attempted to assassinate Hitler, Hans and Sophie Scholl who led the White Rose student resistance movement, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Christian anti-Nazi dissident who was incarcerated and executed, among others. Narratives of victimized Germans were effaced and made less significant than perpetrator narratives, even though millions of Germans were expelled from Poland and Czechoslovakia after 1945; hundreds of thousands were killed by air raids in Hamburg, Bochum, Mainz, Kassel, and a host of other cities; and the hundreds of thousands of soldiers perished from starvation and disease on the eastern front. Over time, civil discourse extended the circle of perpetrators to include more “ordinary” Germans who enabled the Holocaust. The circle of perpetrators remains open even today because the state abolished the statute of limitations on war crimes prosecutions (genocide and crimes against humanity, 1979) and also outlawed the expression of neo-Nazi sentiments described as the “Auschwitz lie” (1993).69

The German identity polluted by the Holocaust and the Third Reich could also be reconstructed effectively. A new collective self could be built on Europeanism and the notion of constitutional patriotism, which are the foundation of the European Union today.70 In time, contrition and atonement for the past itself became a form of civic identity fostered by a sense of national purpose modeled by the examples set by Chancellor Willy Brandt who kneeled at the Warsaw ghetto memorial and President Richard von Weizsӓcker who pronounced German guilt at the Bundestag in 1985. The civic identity among the postwar generations is also referred to as Sühnestolz (repentance pride), a new source of national pride.71 In the 2000s, the pendulum began to swing the other way in civil discourse as more victim narratives garnered popular attention. For example, Jörg Friedrich’s bestseller The Fire (Der Brand, 2002) is about the trauma of air raids in Germany,72 and the television miniseries Generation War (Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter, 2013) told stories of innocent German soldiers and civilians caught in a bad war. The demarcation of perpetrators and victims in these narratives is more fluid, blurred around the edges in ways similar to the “gray” perpetrator-cum-victim narratives in Japan discussed in  chapter 3. At the same time, the difficult task of reckoning with how ordinary men and compatriots transform into serial killers defies definitive explanations.73

  Rejoining the World as a “Normal” Country

Many more transnational wars have now been fought since World War II: the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Afghan War, the Gulf War, the War in Kosovo, and the Iraq and Afghan Wars. These wars caused escalating civilian casualties and used technologies that were ever more potent and destructive. Accordingly, the narrative of war and peace is in need of rethinking and reformulation for the post–Cold War twenty-first century. The distinction between the good war and the bad war is no longer clear-cut; the heroes and villains are no longer obviously apparent; the moral codes begin to blur from black and white to shades of gray. There are many instances that call for the understanding of the gray zone:74 the Jewish kapos who cooperated with the Nazis in concentration camps during the Holocaust; the Soviet liberators who raped scores of German women in the Third Reich’s capital; American soldiers who destroyed whole villages inhabited by Vietnamese civilians; and Iraqi prisoners detained and tortured in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. As these gray zones proliferate, the construction of moral frameworks for war is becoming more and more tenuous. If the social construction of a moral framework is based fundamentally on our ability to code the distinction between good and bad legitimately, as Jeffrey Alexander suggests, the very legitimacy of those codes is called in question.75

Ultimately this social construction of moral boundaries is “an ambivalent endeavor” where the demarcation of good from bad and guilty from innocent is inherently unstable and open to dispute.76 Japan’s three options to bring closure to the long defeat and resolve the “history problem” are part of this complicated endeavor, as this chapter has shown. At the heart of this complexity is Japan’s ambivalence about drawing lines and demarcating guilt, while the globalizing memory norms demand greater clarification of those very boundaries. The “normalization” discourse surrounding Article 9 illustrated in this chapter represents the tension between line-drawing and line-erasing, a tension that tears at the national social fabric. The impasse will continue to deny closure to the long defeat.

Japan’s sense of postwar progress relied largely on the growth of tangible wealth and prosperity.77 While this gauge worked for parents and grandparents, it no longer makes sense to the younger generations who will henceforth have to carry on the task of Japan’s postwar memory work. Economic security, gradually declining since the 2000s, has become even more precarious for young Japanese workers who cannot count on employment in the manufacturing sector as their parents did a generation ago. Those jobs have now moved to the emerging economies. Young Japanese men and women contending with this bleak job market have become weary, cautious, and suspicious of their future prospects.78 Some are embittered by a sense of broken promises and betrayal;79 others try to transcend the national confines to seek gainful pursuits elsewhere.80 Sensational accounts of gloom and doom notwithstanding, reports on these young Japanese reveal that they are not entirely unhappy with their relatively unambitious lives. Whether they are genuinely contented with the here and now or entrapped in a false consciousness of the oppressed, a surprisingly large portion of this young generation reports a high level of happiness in their lives.81

At the same time, these generations are left to seek their own raison d’être without much guidance or many role models in modern Japanese history. An intransigent minority among them has established itself by vocalizing frustration and xenophobic hate toward “racialized others” in popular Internet groups. Commenting on the emerging populist nationalism in the 2000s, Japanese sociologists Oguma Eiji and Ueno Yōko point to its new features: the members find appeal in patriotism but are relatively indifferent to the Emperor; many members are men in their 20s and 30s—a generation after the baby boomers—who are conspicuous in their hate for the left, the Asahi newspaper, China, and the teachers union, but they are not LDP supporters. Oguma believes they occupy the amorphous middle ground of the politically uncommitted, looking for a place to share values to secure their identity, and seeking respite from the harsh economic realities by identifying with strong politicians like Koizumi Junichirō and Ishiwara Shintarō.82 Commenting on the emerging fringe groups that promote xenophobic hate in the 2010s, critics have shown that these groups offer solace and belonging to motivate members to join.83

Japan’s younger generations are confronting a world that has become, and is likely to remain, unstable economically and geopolitically. The spectacular global economic and political transformations of recent decades have surely impacted many Japanese both old and young, just as they did for the rest of East Asia. China’s explosive economic rise surpassed Japan’s economy in the early 2010s, jolted Japan’s self-confidence, and evoked fear over its future domination.84 At the same time, China is now Japan’s largest trading partner, surpassing the United States and accounting for as much as $345 billion of business a year.85 Japan’s economic response to this sea-change has been diverse and also stratified: opportunistic investors are always happy to capitalize on a burgeoning market, and strategic producers may be well poised to take advantage of China’s rise, but there are as many workers for whom the swinging economic momentum has meant a painful loss of livelihood to an upstart rival. The growing anti-Japan sentiments have also cast a shadow on further Japanese investments in China’s economy. It would be a mistake to generalize that the impact has been uniformly favorable or problematic in the same way for everyone.86

International relations experts Kosuge Nobuko and Fujiwara Kiichi believe that Japan–China relations will continue to be strained without any true “reconciliation” until China achieves greater national successes that can supplant the success of defeating Japan in 1945—until it has fully “caught up” with the postindustrial nations and feels it has fully joined the world leaders.87 In the meantime, China’s politics of patriotism, its uses of anti-Japanese sentiments to marshal national solidarity, its quest to overcome the “century of humiliation,” and its spiraling defense budget and nuclear arsenal are likely to continue fueling strained relations with Japan.88 For its part, Japan will be adding two more aegis ballistic missile destroyers to its fleet of six aegis destroyers,89 and continues to update its military aircrafts and tanks, while stepping up its cooperation with the US military to train troops for contingencies. These actions are reinforced by the government’s new reinterpretation of the peace constitution in July 2014 to allow the exercise of collective self-defense. The nation is treading the path of “normalization.”

According to a public opinion survey published in 2014, over half of Chinese adults (55.2%) considered Japan to be a military threat, second only to the United States (57.8%). A major reason for this perception is trepidation over Japan’s past and present military power: over half (58.2%) felt that Japan’s military capability today is already threatening, while a similar proportion (52.4%) felt that the history problem was an indication of future threat. At the same time, two-thirds of Japanese adults (64.3%) perceived China to be a military threat, second only to North Korea (68.6%). The outlook for the future is relatively grim: almost half of Japanese adults (42.7%) were pessimistic about relations with China, feeling that the history problem between them will never be resolved. The Japanese respondents were more pessimistic than their Chinese counterparts (26.9%) in foreseeing this bleak future for the Japan–China relationship.90

Even with the increased tension in relations in East Asia, the portion of Japanese people who would volunteer to fight in a hypothetical invasion has been consistently low, around 5 to 6% (1978–2012). There is, however, a steady increase (39.3% to 56.6% in 1994–2012) in those who would “support the SDF in some way.” The younger the age of respondents, the lower is their willingness to participate in a military response against invaders. At the same time, the young-age cohorts also have a stronger sense than others that Japan is in danger of getting involved in a war.91

Ultimately, Japan’s moral recovery cannot be complete without constructing a new collective self, and a political identity that extends beyond the alliance with the United States. Japan has envisioned this new identity in the body of world governance, the United Nations. Japan’s ultimate ambition for moral recovery has been to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council—a goal that the nationalists, pacifists, and reconciliationists can agree on. Such an achievement would take Japan beyond the long defeat, garnering a transnational identity acceptable to the victors and the world, comparable to Germany’s integration into the EU and NATO. It would also dismantle the monopolistic power structure of the Security Council that is shaped by the veto powers of the winners of World War II (the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom). This bid, however, will continue to be frustrated by China’s objection. This issue may not be resolved until China no longer needs to use anti-Japanism to draw attention away from its domestic problems.92

Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s observations on the culture of defeat that explained postwar myth making by the aspiration never to be defeated again, now requires a post–World War II update.93 Democratic societies can generate new, multifaceted options for overcoming defeat that the vanquished in the pre–World War II era did not have. These options involve education to overcome lingering hate and prejudice against inherited enemies; civil discourse to redefine the norms of disobedience against authorities; and transnational institutional frameworks to maintain rules, solidarities, and dialogue among former adversaries. At the same time, national memories of war are no longer self-contained in a globalizing culture of memory, and forgetting is no longer an option as it had been in the past. The new international world order demands imaginative concessions and innovative compromise to break the logjams of historical grievances.94 For the Japanese this will mean giving up their comfort zone of ambiguity in the amorphous middle ground between guilt and innocence in World War II. For their part, Japan’s former adversaries and victims will have to extend hope of forgiveness.

Although postwar culture is shaped by memories of violent conflicts that leave a deep imprint in national collective life long after the event, individuals living under those conditions do not necessarily choose the same strategies to overcome them. While the multiple war narratives of the twentieth century may eventually be generalized and stabilized over several more generations, this does not mean that differences of moral and political understandings will be settled.95 Cultural trauma is reproduced by assorted memories and irreconcilable stories that are interconnected, sutured together, by common reference to the national rupture.96 It is at once integrative and fractured, kept alive and effaced, in ways that renew collective identity. The divisiveness of cultural trauma makes it all the more difficult for the nation’s past to be fully comprehended by later generations, but it ensures that those memories are kept alive in a continuous struggle to imagine the nation’s future.