Victims or victimizers? Museums, textbooks, and the war debate in contemporary Japan

Journal of Military History

Volumn 69, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 149-195

  Jeans, Roger B ^a,b  

^a Department of History ^*  (United States)

^b LEE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62649108399     PISSN: 08993718     EISSN: 15437795     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jmh.2005.0025     Document Type: Review

References (132)

1. See, e.g., Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000),
2. and the reviews by Joshua A. Fogel, Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 3 (1998): 818-20,
3. and Mark Eykholt, China International Review 6, no. 1 (1999): 70-73.
4. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 12.
5. Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994).
6. T. R. Reid, "Japan Marks Day of Defeat by Facing Up to the Truth," International Herald Tribune, 15 August 1994, 5.
7. According to one Japan specialist, there are more than one hundred museums and exhibition sites in Japan dealing with the war, the defeat, and world peace. Kerry Smith, "The Showa Hall: Memorializing Japan's War at Home," Public Historian 24, no. 4 (2002): 35.
8. "Yasukuni Jinja," English-language brochure, n.p., n.d.
9. John Nelson, "Social Memory as Ritual Practice: Commemorating Spirits of the Military Dead at Yasukuni Shinto Shrine," Journal of Asian Studies 62, no. 2 (2003): 450-51.
10. There are no bodies or ashes at Yasukuni. Instead, the names are recorded in more than two thousand folders. Katherine Tolbert and Doug Struck, "At Japan's War Shrine, Wounds Unhealed," Washington Post, 28 July 2001, A14.
11. A scholar of religion who has studied the shrine states 2.46 million war dead are enshrined there. Nelson, "Social Memory," 446, 450.
12. The Home Ministry was eliminated in 1947 as part of the Occupation reforms. Jane Hunter, comp., Concise Dictionary of Modern Japanese History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 63.
13. English-language and Japanese-language brochures, both entitled "Yasukuni Jinja," n.p., n.d.
14. For a report on their visits in 2002, see Doug Struck, "Increasingly, Japanese Look Back in Anger," Washington Post, 16 August 2002, A15, A17.
15. Ellen H. Hammond, "Commemoration Controversies: The War, the Peace, and Democracy in Japan," in Living with the Bomb, ed. Laura Hein and Mark Selden (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 111.
16. The controversy may be traced to Nakasone Yasuhiro's decision to be the first prime minister to visit the shrine (on 15 August 1985) in his official capacity. For a brief history of this controversy, see Nelson, "Social Memory," 456-58.
17. "The Yasukuni Dilemma Again," Japan Times (online), 26 April 2002. The newspaper opined the shrine was "clearly not an appropriate place for the prime minister of a nation that has forever renounced war to visit." On Koizumi's 2001 visit, see Tolbert and Struck, "At Japan's War Shrine," A13-14.
18. Struck, "Increasingly, Japanese Look Back in Anger," A15.
19. English-language brochure, "Yushukan," n.d., p. 2.
20. Buruma, Wages of Guilt, 219-22;
21. Kerry Smith, "The Showa Hall," 35.
22. There is even a stone monument to the military police, the Kempeitai, which Buruma calls "the Japanese equivalent of the SS." Buruma, Wages of Guilt, 221.
23. On 15 December 1945, the occupation authorities banned the term "Greater East Asian War," replacing it with "Pacific War." Saburo Ienaga, The Pacific War: World War II and the Japanese, 1931-1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 248.
24. Later revivals of "Greater East Asian War" worried those who opposed attempts by some Japanese to shirk Japan's war responsibility. Ienaga, for example, referred to the term as an "odious name." Ibid., 253-54. And yet, as an American historian has pointed out, the ban had an unfortunate and unforeseen consequence. Use of the term "Pacific War" in effect excluded Asians - who had suffered the most - from the very name of the conflict (as they had been barred from any significant role in the occupation). This "semantic imperialism" (as this historian calls it) helped Japan to forget what it had done to other Asians. John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 419.
25. Ivan Morris, The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan (New York: New American Library, 1975). During my 1986 visit to the Yushukan, I was particularly moved by the memorabilia of a kamikaze pilot who was half-Japanese and half-French. It was painful to think how intense the pressure must have been to prove himself 100 percent Japanese by volunteering to become a Special Attack pilot.
26. In 1979, survivors of a Japanese construction unit who had worked on the railway purchased the locomotive and donated it to the shrine. It was a memento of their dedication to an arduous project, albeit one others bitterly recall as the "death railway." George Hicks, Japan's War Memories: Amnesia or Concealment (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Publishing, 1997), 63-64.
27. English-language and Japanese-language brochures, both entitled "Yushukan," n.p., n.d. The English one is paginated. For a biography of Yamamoto, see Hiroyuki Agawa, The Reluctant Admiral: Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1982).
28. On the Oka ("Cherry Blossom"), see Morris, Nobility of Failure, 276-81.
29. Hsi-sheng Ch'i, "The Military Dimension, 1942-1945," in China's Bitter Victory: The War with Japan, 1937-1945, ed. James C. Hsiung and Steven I. Levine (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), 179.
30. According to another historian of modern China, "Precise and reliable figures do not exist." Lloyd E. Eastman, "Nationalist China during the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945," in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 13, part 2, Republican China, 1912-1949, ed. John K. Fairbank and Albert Feuerwerker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 547 n 1. Having written that, he goes on to provide a range of figures for Chinese deaths in the war. Ibid.
31. English-language brochure, "Yushukan," n.p., n.d. In August 1945 the army was determined, until the emperor intervened, to fight a decisive battle in Japan. Despite arguments Japan was finished, the army still had 2,250,000 men, the navy had 1,300,000, and ten thousand planes were standing by for use in kamikaze attacks. Mikiso Hane, Modern Japan: A Historical Survey, 2d ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992), 335-36.
32. For a convincing account of the end of the war, based in part on cryptanalysis materials, see Richard Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (New York: Random House, 1999; Penguin Books, 2001).
33. Howard W. French, "At a Military Museum, the Losers Write History," New York Times, 30 October 2002, A4.
34. Reid, "Japan Marks Day of Defeat," 5
35. Muse: Newsletter of Japanese Network of Museums for Peace 2 (December 1999): 2. For a recent and detailed study of the museum, see Smith, "Showa Hall." As he points out, the hall is different from the Yushukan, for while the latter is private, the hall was built and is funded by the national government. Ibid., 37.
36. Earl H. Kinmouth to H-Net list for Asian History and Culture, "National War Museum," 3 April 1999.
37. Kinmouth, "National War Museum"
38. Ellen H. Hammond, "Politics of the War and Public History: Japan's Own Museum Controversy," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 27, no. 2 (1995): 56.
39. See also her article "Commemoration Controversies," 100-21.
40. Nicholas D. Kristof, "Japan's Plans for a Museum on War Mired in Controversy," New York Times, 21 May 1995, 4.
41. Hammond, "Politics of the War," 59.
42. Kristof, "Japan's Plans," 4.
43. Sebastian Moffett, "Past Perfect: Calls to Rewrite Recent History Gain Strength," Far Eastern Economic Review, 21 November 1996, 28;
44. Hammond, "Politics of War," 57;
45. Mary Jordan, "Japan Moves Ahead on War Museum in Face of Criticism of Its Limits," Washington Post, 31 October 1996, 7.
46. Jordan, "Japan Moves Ahead," 7.
47. Kerry Smith, "Showa Hall," H-Net list for Asian History and Culture, 13 April 1999 (hereafter, Smith, "Showa Hall," [1999]).
48. Http://www.showakan.go.jp
49. Http://www.willamette.edu/rloftus/showakan.htm.
50. Smith, "Showa Hall" (1999).
51. Kazuki Iguchi, chairman of the Society of Japanese History, and Masanori Nakamura, Chairman of the Historical Society of Japan, to H-Asia Net, 13 April 1995
52. Smith, "Showa Hall," 56. The center's website (which I accessed on 13 July 2004) is http://www.jacar.go.jp/f-e.htm. Ibid., 56 n 52.
53. Muse 1 (July 1999): 2
54. Yamane Kazuyo, Kochi City, e-mail to author, 14 September 2000.
55. A Japanese student who visited the museum later wrote, "The photographs were extremely inspiring in a sense, since in none of them were the pilots showing an expression of fatigue, or regret. Most of them were smiling." Sasaki, "Who Became Kamikaze Pilots," 14.
56. In this emphasis on "sacrifice," the museum resembles the postwar bestseller composed of letters by university students killed in the war, Kike - Wadatsumi no koe (Listen - voices from the deep). As one historian put it, the book "perpetuated an image of sacrifice that came perilously close to the imagery the militarists had promoted. These were pure young men. Their deaths were noble.... It was their deaths, rather than the deaths of those they might have killed, that commanded attention and were truly tragic." Dower, Embracing Defeat, 198-200.
57. Http://www2.gol.com/users/myhran/chiran.htm.
58. Charles Burress, "Grafting Peace on the Roots of War," San Francisco Examiner, 2 August 1992, 14.
59. T. R. Reid, "Japan's WWII Self-Image Conflict," Washington Post, 6 August 1995, A22.
60. The website for the Kyoto Museum for World Peace (http://www.ritsumei.ac. jp) contains a list of museums that belong to the "peace network," including the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the Osaka International Peace Center, the Kawasaki Peace Museum, the Peace Museum of Saitama, the Takamatsu Civic Culture Center/Peace Memorial Museum, the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, and the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum.
61. Yamane Kazuyo, Kochi, Japan, e-mail to author, 14 September 2000.
62. The newsletter estimated that those who experienced the war would all be gone in ten years. Muse 3 (June 2000): 7.
63. Reid, "Japan's WWII Self-Image Conflict," A22. In April 1998, Hiroshima established another organization, the Hiroshima Peace Institute, as a research unit of Hiroshima City University. A survey of its website and the contents of thirteen issues of its newsletter, Hiroshima Research News, reveals only one reference to the events that led to the use of the atomic bomb. Under "Background," the institute acknowledged, "Japan has inflicted, by its colonialism and militarism, an enormous amount of grief and hardships upon peoples in Asia and the Pacific in its drive for modernization. Hiroshima has to fully recognize the seriousness of this fact." Http://serv.peace. hiroshima-cu.ac.jp/English/menuframe2.htm.
64. Hicks, Japan's War Memories, 87.
65. Perri Klass, "To See Japan, Try Rail Pass and Ryokan," New York Times, 23 July 2000, 18.
66. Helena Cobban, "Looking at Hiroshima: Tough, Touching," Christian Science Monitor, 23 August 2000 (web version at http://www.csmonitor. com/durable/2000/08/23/p9s1.htm, p. 2).
67. Burress, "Grafting Peace," 14.
68. Http://www.gsquare.or.jp. The term "Fifteen-Year War," it has been asserted, is favored by Japanese leftists and liberals.
69. Osaka International Peace Center, "A Guide to the Exhibition." The prospectus also recalls Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Okinawa, and, more broadly, the "countless number[s] of Japanese people [who] lost their precious lives, became wounded or fell to illness."
70. Osaka International Peace Center, "A Guide to the Exhibition."
71. Edward J. Drea, In the Service of the Emperor: Essays on the Imperial Japanese Army (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), chapters 10, 11.
72. "Greetings of Director," http://ritsumei.ac.jp. The site displays a photograph of the director but does not give his name (perhaps out of fear of the right wing?). The museum opened in May 1992, eight months after the Osaka International Peace Center.
73. Http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp. The museum guide is entitled Kyoto Museum for World Peace (Kyoto: Ritsumeikan University, 1995). I am grateful to a former Washington and Lee University exchange student from Kansai Gaidai, Okano Kaori, for sending it to me.
74. Okano Kaori, Kanazawa, Japan, letter to author, June 1997.
75. Laura Hein and Mark Seiden, eds., Censoring History: Perspectives on Nationalism and War in the Twentieth Century (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2000) (four essays on textbook struggles in Japan);
76. James J. Orr, The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001) (contains a chapter on "Narratives of War in Postwar Textbooks").
77. For an excellent analysis of Japanese textbooks from the beginning of the Meiji era through World War II, see John Caiger, "The Aims and Content of School Courses in Japanese History, 1872-1945," in Japan's Modern Century: A Special Issue of Monumenta Nipponica Prepared in Celebration of the Meiji Restoration (Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1968), 51-81.
78. For an analysis of Japanese textbooks published from 1903 through 1943-44, see Harry Wray, "The Lesson of the Textbooks," in Harry Wray and Hilary Conroy, eds., Japan Examined: Perspectives on Modern Japanese History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983), 282-90.
79. See also James L. McClain, A Modern History of Japan (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2002), 260, 262, 264, 465-66, 548-49, and 592-93.
80. For Ienaga's own rendition of his struggle, see his memoir, Japan's Past, Japan's Future: One Historian's Odyssey, trans. Richard H. Minear (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001).
81. See also his Pacific War, 254-56.
82. For a description of the process of textbook review, see Irie Yoshimasa, "The History of the Textbook Controversy," Japan Echo, August 1997, 35.
83. Sonni Efron, "Japan's High Court Rules Government May Not Tamper with the Truth," Washington Post, 30 August 1997, A28.
84. John Nathan, Japan Unbound: A Volatile Nation's Quest for Pride and Purpose (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 129.
85. Earl Kinmouth to H-Japan@H-net.msu.edu, "Japanese Textbook Revision," 24 January 2001.
86. Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 238.
87. Irie, "The History of the Textbook Controversy," 35-36. Irie argues the press reports concerning the replacement of "invasion" with "advance" were wrong. However, he also admitted that for several years the Ministry of Education had suggested that "advance" replace "invasion." Ibid.
88. Irie, "History of the Textbook Controversy," 34. One of Fujioka's three revisionist books on the war sold 250,000 copies in a few months in 1996.
89. Moffett, "Past Perfect," 26, 28. For the fuzzy and illogical views of another leader of the society
90. see Nishio Kanji, "Rewriting Japanese and World History," Japan Echo, August 1997, 39-44;
91. Howard W. French, "Japan's Resurgent Far Right Tinkers with History," New York Times, 25 March 2001, 3. In railing against what he terms the "Eurocentric viewpoint" of Japanese textbooks, Nishio revealed an abysmal ignorance of European history (referring, e.g., to Europe before the fifteenth century as "nothing but a collection of savage tribes").
92. Nishio, "Rewriting Japanese and World History," 41.
93. French, "Japan's Resurgent Far Right Tinkers with History," 3.
94. On Kobayashi, see also the excellent discussion in Nathan, Japan Unbound, 123-37.
95. In November 2003, it was reported more than 250 million copies of manga are sold each year. André Schiffrin, "In Japan, Books Are Windows to the World," Chronicle of Higher Education, 28 November 2003, B5.
96. Donald MacIntyre, "Seoul Searching: Hot Potato," Time Asia, 21 February 2001, wysiwyg://13/http:www.time.com/time/asia/news/column/ 0,9754,1000070,00.html.
97. Earl Kinmouth to H-Japan@H-net.msu.edu, "Latest Textbook Flap in Japan," 5 March 2001.
98. Hiro Inokuchi, University of East Asia, Shimonoseki, e-mail to H-Asia@H-net.msu.edu, "Updates of Japanese Revisionist Textbook Issues," 3 April 2001. For interviews with veterans who oppose the war
99. see Howard W. French, "Japan's New Self-Assertion Troubles Veterans of WWII," Asahi Shimbun, 21 June 2001, 1, 6. See also the recent film (2001) about these veterans, Japanese Devils: Confessions of Imperial Army Soldiers from Japan's War Against China. For an interview with the director and one of the producers
100. see wysiwyg://1/http://www.asiasource.org/news/special-reports/ japanesedevils.cfm
101. The question of veterans' views of the war is not a simple one, though, for some cling to the nationalist version of the conflict. French, "Japan's New Self-Assertion," 1, 6.
102. Inokuchi, "Updates of Japanese Revisionist Textbook Issues," 3 April 2001. For a translation into English of the 5 December 2000 appeal by Japanese historians
103. For an example, see the criticism by a retired teacher reported in French, "Japan's New Self-Assertion," 6.
104. "Teaching Sadistic History," Korean Herald, 22 February 2001, wysiwyg://6/http://www.koreaherald.co.kr;
105. "Ministry Displeased with Japanese Textbook," Chosun.com, 3 April 2001, p. 1;
106. Earl Kinmouth to H-Japan@H-net.msu.edu, "Latest History Textbook Flap in Japan," 5 March 2001;
107. Carol Gluck, "Japanese History Angers Koreans," BBC News, 1 March 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/asia-pacific/newsid-1196000/ 1196403.stm;
108. "Korean Protest at Japan History Book," BBC News, 15 March 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/asia-Pacific/newsid-1221000/ 1221047.stm;
109. "Japan Will Not Bow to Neighbors on Textbook," CNN.com, 4 April 2001, wysiwyg://3/http://asia.cnn.com/2001/WORL...apcf/east/04/04/japan. textbook/ index.html.
110. "Japan Will Not Bow to Neighbors on Textbook," CNN.com, 4 April 2001. Two examples of changes the publisher made, in response to the ministry's request, were to make clear Japan's annexation of Korea was carried out by force, and to remove the reference down-playing the scope of the Nanjing Massacre. Ibid. According to a report a month earlier, the authors of the text had already made the 137 changes.
111. "Japan Textbook Angers Neighbors," 3 April 2001, p. 2
112. "S. Koreans Try to Halt Sale of Book in Japan," Washington Post, 11 May 2001, A36.
113. Michael Mandelartz to H-Japan@H-net.msu.edu, "Japanese Textbook Issues; Websites," 10 April 2001.
114. Doug Struck, "New Text Reopening Old Wounds," Washington Post, 18 April 2001, A14.
115. For an analysis of the contents of the nationalist textbook, see John Nelson, "Tempest in a Textbook: A Report on the New Middle-School History Textbook in Japan," Critical Asian Studies 34, no. 1 (2002): 129-48 (esp. 138-44 on the Pacific War).
116. For society member Takubo Tadae's rationale for the society's text, see Doug Struck, "New Text Reopening Old Wounds," A14.
117. "Glory Be, New Textbook Calls Japan's Invasion a Liberating Experience," Daily Telegraph (London), SMH.com.au, 24 February 2001, wysiwyg://3//http://www.smh.com.au/news/0102/24/world/world12.html.
118. Statement drafted by Children and Textbooks Japan Network 21 and eleven other Japanese organizations, "Information on the Outcome of the Japanese Government Textbook Screening of the History and Civics Textbooks Developed by the Members of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform," 3 April 2001, forwarded by Inoguchi Hiro, University of East Asia, to H-Japan@H-net.msu.edu, "Controversial Textbooks in [Japan]," 30 April 2001.
119. Kirk Madsen, Kumamoto Gakuen University, to H-Japan@H-net.msu.edu, "Local Textbook," 6 May 2001
120. "Most Japanese School Districts Reject Disputed Textbook," 16 August 2001, wysiwyg://9/http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/16/international/asia/ 16JAPA.html.
121. Doug Struck and Shigehiko Togo, "Japanese Schools Rejecting Textbook," Washington Post, 15 August 2001, A14;
122. "Most Japanese School Districts Reject Disputed History Textbook," 16 August 2001, wysiwyg://9/http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/16/ international/asia/16JAPA.html.
123. French, "At a Military Museum, the Losers Write History," A4.
124. James Brooke, "Rightist Confesses to killing Japanese Lawmaker, Police Say," New York Times, 27 October 2002, 15;
125. Charles Burress, San Francisco Chronicle, "Japanese History Textbooks," e-mail to NBR Japan Forum, 16 May 2000.
126. Kristof and WuDunn, Thunder from the East, 236. Polls taken in the early 1990s also supported the notion that the Japanese people, unlike their government, were ready to acknowledge Japan's war responsibility.
127. Hammond, "Commemoration Controversies," 121 n 35.
128. Yoshida Takashi, e-mail to H-Net list for Asian History and Culture, 16 January 1999
129. Yoshida Takashi, e-mail to H-Net/KIAPS List for Japanese History, 21 March 2000
130. John Dower and Mark Seiden, "Report on Japan's War Responsibility," in Mark Selden to Steve Leibo, H-Asia@H-net.msu.edu, 18 January 2001.
131. Yoshida Takashi, "Japanese Textbook Revisions," 25 January 2001. Hence, according to a 2000 poll, in response to the statement, "The last war was unavoidable for Japan's survival due to the shortage of natural resources," almost one-third (31 percent) did not know. Brian Shoesmith to H-Asia@H-net.msu.edu, 10 March 2001.
132. "Ministry Displeased with Japanese Textbook," Chosun.com, 30 April 2002, 1-2.