Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (30 page)

Then there was the matter of socializing. Women were generally welcome to go out eating with their colleagues after work. But office nights out often ended with
niji kai
, after-party drinks, or
sanji kai
, after-after-party drinks. As the evening wore on, the entertainment tended to get more lewd and female colleagues dropped away, leaving
the men to get on with their male bonding in hostess bars or ‘soapland’ massage parlours. Some women felt this tradition was detrimental to their chances of success since they missed out on the best company gossip, which flowed more easily after a night of drinking. Kumiko Shimotsubo, the human resources consultant who missed out on the promised road, called such sessions ‘nomunication’, an amalgam of ‘communication’ and
nomu
, which means to drink in Japanese.

Nakahara told the story of a young male employee at the bank. ‘One day his boss took him out. The only thing he was told in advance was that they were going to one of those places with girls. Anyway, they go in and, after they were welcomed, the first thing they were told to do was to pull their pants down, underwear and everything.’ The two men, both wearing business attire from the waist up, were then ushered into the exact replica of a subway carriage. There were even straps of the sort that hang from train compartments to add authenticity. The young graduate and his older boss sat opposite each other. ‘Then these girls come out with school uniforms on and basically kept on touching them for an hour,’ Nakahara said. The most awkward thing, her colleague later told her, was that throughout the entire experience, he was sitting within feet of his boss who was naked from the waist down. And all the time, Nakahara said, bursting out laughing, ‘the boss was smiling at him’.

Many Japanese women make relatively light of such entertainment. It is not uncommon to see families go out for a stroll with their young children in the huge neon-lit red-light districts that exist in every town and city. Many of the young women who work in such places are not desperately poor, but university students seeking extra spending money. Kirino said there were fewer taboos about such things in Japan than in the US. But unlike some, who regarded the Americans as too puritanical, she was not happy about the Japanese situation at all. ‘The way the sex industry exists in Japan is something that really upsets me, especially when teenage girls are exploited. Some people say: “Oh no. They love to go and work in that industry.” But when I hear that, my heart is crushed. The existence of hostess bars is one of the reasons that Japanese men and women don’t get along,’ she said. ‘You see, there are women who will perform services for men, pour
their drinks, light their cigarettes. And at home, wives will cater to their husbands’ needs. There is a separation of roles, of being kind to men in two different settings. So men feel that, as long as they pay, they will receive service in such places. And when they go home, they will receive service from their wives. Japan is truly a kind of men’s paradise.’

Adrift

Asia Ex-Japan

More than six decades after the end of the Second World War and some 120 years since Japan set out on its ruinous attempt to conquer Asia, history continues to stalk Japan’s relations with its neighbours and former enemies. Unlike Germany, which has dealt with its Nazi history and reconciled with the rest of Europe, Japan has never been able to put the past behind it. That is partly because it suits its neighbours to play the ‘history card’ by keeping the past alive. Governments in China and South Korea have become adept at switching on old hatreds when it suits them. But Japan’s patchy record on facing up to its past has given them plenty of ammunition.

Many younger Japanese, with scant knowledge of what went on in the war, are bemused at the hatred still harboured by some Chinese and South Koreans towards them. Some attribute it to brainwashing by the Communist Party, but this is a less useful explanation when it comes to democratic South Korea, where it is still common to refer to the Japanese by pejorative terms such as ‘dwarves’. Nor, though less spoken about, has Japan’s wartime conduct been forgotten in places such as the Philippines, whose people also suffered massacres and rapes on a horrifying scale. The writer F. Sionil José once told me he had shocked his Japanese hosts – at a convention to discuss Hiroshima – by proclaiming that the Americans should have nuclear-bombed every Japanese city they could find. He was not invited again.
¹

It is true that in China, since the military crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989, education has placed more emphasis on Japan’s wartime atrocities, stoking a sometimes frighteningly virulent nationalism among Chinese youth. It is true too that anti-Japanese demonstrations in China can sometimes be cover for
broader dissatisfaction with an authoritarian system that usually does not permit protests. Still, the common view in China is that the Japanese have never honestly repented for their wartime aggression and that Japan remains an unpredictable country in which militarism lies dangerously close to the surface.

This idea of Japan as dangerous aggressor – so far removed from the pacifist image the Japanese harbour of themselves – was not such a problem twenty or thirty years ago. Then, Japan was at the height of its economic resurgence and China was an impoverished nation only beginning to emerge from the ruinous decades of Mao Zedong’s rule. Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who uncorked reform in the late 1970s, took a pragmatic view towards Japan, preferring to downplay history in the interests of a more practically useful relationship. Then, the chance of conflict between a weak China and a demilitarized Japan was almost non-existent. Not so today. Now, to borrow Mao’s phrase, China has ‘stood up’. In 2010, as we have seen, its economy surpassed that of Japan, making China once again the strongest power in Asia. Although China continues to benefit from Japanese technology and investment, with each passing year the balance tips further in China’s favour: Japan, in short, is more economically dependent on China than the other way around. With each year, too, China becomes stronger militarily. In 2012, Hu Jintao, the outgoing president, declared that China intended to become a ‘maritime power’, serving notice that it wanted a blue-water navy capable of projecting power in the Pacific. By most reckoning, China has already become the world’s second-highest spender on its military. China’s economic and military ascendancy has sparked fears in Japan, helping those on the right who have long argued the country should become more ‘normal’ through the restoration of its ‘sovereign right’ to wage war. History, in short, has become ever more pressing as the balance of economic and military power shifts within the region. For Japan, which would prefer to forget, history is an unattended corpse at the bottom of its diplomatic garden.

•   •   •

In 1970, Willy Brandt, chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, fell to his knees before a monument to victims of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The gesture, apparently spontaneous, was such a
convincing demonstration of German contrition that the word ‘Kniefall’ entered the lexicon and Brandt went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Japan has never had a Willy Brandt moment. A constant refrain in Asia is that, unlike Germany, it has never properly owned up to its history – to itself or to others. Over the years, Tokyo has paid billions of dollars in lieu of war reparations and its leaders have issued innumerable formal apologies. Rightly or wrongly, these have never been taken as sincere. In 2001, for example, Junichiro Koizumi, then prime minister, said in a typical and oft-repeated statement of regret at Japan’s wartime actions, ‘We conducted colonization and aggressive acts based on a mistaken national policy and caused immeasurable pain and suffering. I wish, in the light of our country’s regrettable history, to take this to heart, to express my deepest regret and remorse.’ Such statements belie the claim, so often heard, that Japan has never apologized, though readers will judge whether it is a ‘proper apology’ or not.

Koizumi followed his statement of contrition, however, with a visit to Yasukuni shrine, a religious monument to Japan’s war dead that is reviled in Asia as a symbol of its hated militarism. Among more than 2 million ordinary foot soldiers, Yasukuni contains the ‘souls’ of fourteen convicted Class-A war criminals. The Japanese like to see the shrine as their equivalent of Arlington National Cemetery, a place to show respect for those fallen in war. Many in Asia, however, regard prime ministerial visits to the shrine as the equivalent of a German chancellor laying a wreath at the tomb of Adolf Hitler. Koizumi’s pilgrimage in 2001 provoked a macabre demonstration in Seoul, where twenty male protesters each chopped off a little finger. Beijing said the visit suggested Japan had not properly ‘reflected’ – a favoured word in this debate – on its wartime conduct. Seoul lamented that a Japanese leader would show his respect to ‘war criminals who destroyed world peace and inflicted indescribable damage on neighbouring countries’.
²

That, in a nutshell, captures the problem with Japanese apologies as seen from Beijing or Seoul. No sooner do the Japanese say sorry, goes the complaint, than someone on the right undermines it by denying, or even glorifying, Japan’s wartime behaviour. Part of the problem is that Japan is a democracy where people, in and out of government,
are free to say what they like. Japan will never stop its wartime apologists, just as Germany cannot hope to silence its neo-Nazis. But conservatives and nationalists have tended to dominate the discourse in Japan, overshadowing the statements and actions of many Japanese who have sought to look at history more squarely. As a result, the revisionist view of history is often seen by Japan’s critics as the true sentiments of its people, normally hidden but revealed after a few glasses of sake or in the company of fellow Japanese.

The rightwing has certainly kept alive the idea that Japan’s was an honourable war of national defence and Asian liberation fought against western colonial aggression. Sure, the Imperial Army did terrible things, some will admit. But wasn’t that the nature of war? Hadn’t the Americans incinerated hundreds of thousands of civilians in Japan and didn’t they go on to commit atrocities in Vietnam? Weren’t the Chinese armies locked in their own civil war in the 1930s and 40s, every bit as murderous as the Japanese? And wasn’t it true that, after the war, as a result of Japan’s intervention, countries from Indonesia to Burma had been able to shuffle off the indignity of European colonization? Why was Japan’s attempt to build an empire any more heinous than Britain’s, a country that was not constantly hounded to apologize for its past excesses? In 2013, David Cameron, the UK’s prime minister, expressed regret for the 1919 Amritsar massacre in which British troops opened fire on unarmed protesters, killing up to 1,000 people. But he refused to apologize, saying it would be inappropriate to say sorry for events that had taken place before he was born. The Japanese, it seemed, were being held accountable to a higher standard. Still, there were those in Japan that went further, putting a positively glorifying spin on the country’s wartime record. Shintaro Ishihara, the nationalist former governor of Tokyo, once succinctly put the rightwing case to me. ‘We were proud during the war and we were proud after the war. We felt the war was not just for Japanese people but was to help the countries that had been colonized by the US and Europe,’ he said.
³
Forgiveness of Germany contrasted with a continued belief that Japan was congenitally evil, he added. That was both hypocritical and racist, he said.

There are several reasons why Japan has found it harder to deal with history than Germany. One is the fact that, after the war, General
Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, kept Emperor Hirohito on the throne. For that, Hirohito had to be absolved from all responsibility for the war on the improbable grounds that he did not know what was happening and was powerless to stop it. With US collusion, elaborate steps were taken to ensure that he was not implicated. Strict US censorship after the war made it even harder for the Japanese to assess what had gone on or come to a proper reckoning with their immediate history. Some historians still praise the decision not to try Hirohito as the foundation of Japan’s post-war economic success. Without the emperor’s unifying presence, it might indeed have been more difficult for a foreign occupying force to govern a defeated and demoralized Japan. But with their wartime leader exonerated, the Japanese found it harder to disinter the past. The emperor, in whose name soldiers had been sent to slaughter and be slaughtered, was still officially the nation’s most revered figure. As John Dower wrote, ‘If the man in whose name imperial Japan had conducted foreign and military policy for twenty years was not held accountable for the initiation of or conduct of the war, why should anyone expect ordinary people to dwell on such matters, or to think seriously about their own personal responsibility?’ The Americans’ exoneration of the emperor, he concluded, had turned the issue of ‘war responsibility’ into a joke.
⁴

In post-war Germany, by contrast, Nazi leaders, including Adolf Hitler, had died or been executed. They were severed from the body politic. That made it easier for Germans to blame the now destroyed fascist regime, even though they voted for it in 1933. In Japan’s case there was no such clean break with the past. Japan’s militarism was closely linked with the very idea of what ‘Japaneseness’ had meant since the Meiji Restoration, an identity that, as we have seen, required unquestioning loyalty to a god-like emperor. (At least after the war, the emperor was relieved of his divine status.) Still, there was much that stayed the same. Bureaucrats and politicians who had served during the war continued to play a prominent role after it. That was largely a consequence of the US policies of the early 1950s when, in the name of anti-Communism, the process of purging the right was reversed. When it came to it, Washington preferred continuity with a sullied Japanese past than the dangers of unleashing a more democratic, but more unpredictable, future.

Another reason many Japanese have struggled to see themselves as aggressors is the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Radiation washed away much of the guilt from Japan’s collective memory. ‘To the majority of Japanese, Hiroshima is the supreme symbol of the Pacific War,’ writes Ian Buruma in
The Wages of Guilt
, his superb account of how both Japan and Germany have remembered – and forgotten – the war. ‘All the suffering of the Japanese people is encapsulated in that almost sacred word: Hiroshima.’
⁵
If the German symbol of the war is the Holocaust – the suffering they imposed on the Jews – Japan has chosen to remember a different symbol, one that epitomizes their own suffering at the hands of others. Hiroshima has served a double function in the post-war psyche. It has obliterated the idea that the Japanese were uniquely barbaric in wartime. Whatever they did, the Americans were willing to do the same, or worse. More subtly, especially for the left, it has transformed Japan from aggressor into the sacred guardian of world peace. Hiroshima has become a global symbol. It is the pacifist people of post-war Japan, whose soldiers have not fired a shot against an enemy in more than six decades, who have been entrusted to keep the flame of peace alive.

The lingering stereotype of the Japanese in much of the world as cruel and bloodthirsty could hardly be further removed from the typical view the Japanese have of themselves. For many, their country remains uniquely peaceful and harmonious, a supposed trait sometimes attributed to the absence of a monotheistic religion. True, they might say, Japan erred once by following the aggressive example of European nations, but it dearly paid for that mistake and will never act that way again. Typical is the view of Kazuo Inamori, a legendary businessman (and subsequently Buddhist priest) who was one of the pioneers of Japan’s electronics industry. When I asked him about it, he invoked Japan’s abundant marine resources, plentiful rainfall and geographical isolation to explain what he saw as his country’s intrinsically pacifist nature. ‘We never had to conquer others with force. Conquering with force is something European countries have done repeatedly in their history. It is in their nature to be warriors. We are not like that.’ Almost as an afterthought, he acknowledged Japan’s less-than-pacifist tendencies in the last century. ‘If you go back a hundred years, of course, Japan tried to conquer some neighbouring
countries,’ was how he put it. ‘All in all, though, Japan has been leading the world as a peaceful country.’
⁶

Japan’s sense of victimhood was compounded by the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, Asia’s version of Nuremberg, held between 1946 and 1948. It is an article of faith on the Japanese right that the trial of twenty-eight so-called Class-A defendants was a kangaroo court, founded not in international law, but rather in the barely disguised desire of the victors to punish the vanquished. At Nuremberg, Britain had, in fact, argued that it would be better to dispense with the pretence of legality and simply hang those whom the Allies held most responsible.
⁷
In many ways, the Tokyo Tribunal was indeed a charade. Evidence was suppressed, not least in protecting the emperor, and some of those eventually executed were less implicated in atrocities than others never put on trial. Justice Radhabinod Pal of India, the only dissenting judge, has won lasting affection among many on the right in Japan for concluding that the trial was a ‘sham’ with no legal or moral authority. He also endorsed the commonly held opinion of Japanese conservatives that, as the noose of sanctions tightened around Japan, Tokyo was left with little option but to wage all-out war.