Ghost of a flea: Japan as victim

August 05, 2005

Japan as victim

Fifty years after the end of the war the democratically elected and representative government of Japan still refused to assist in war crimes proceedings regarding biological warfare. In addition to the tens of thousands killed by Japanese germ warfare, Unit 731, Unit 100, Unit 516, Unit 1855 and other research facilities were directly responsible for the deaths of ten thousand people in the course of medical experimentation. Live un-anesthetized vivisection was a common practice.

This is to say nothing of the remaining grotesquerie of Japanese war crimes. Hundreds of thousands raped and forced into sexual slavery, the mass torture, abuse and murder of prisoners of war and atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre that manage to exemplify the actions of imperial Japan's people while being entirely unexeptional.

I have little patience for much of what is going to be said about Hiroshima on August 6 or Nagasaki on August 9. More particularly, with everything people will choose not to say.

Ground zero in Hiroshima, meanwhile, symbolizes a view of the war long engraved in Japanese hearts: that of Japan as victim. Outside Hiroshima, there is the Holocaust Education Center to teach Japanese about Nazi atrocities. Its operators insist they make no connection between the Holocaust and Hiroshima, but the museum's location resonates deeply with the Japanese view of the bombings as a slaughter of innocents.

And nowhere does the museum note that Japan was Germany's ally, or that Japanese soldiers, like the Nazis, perpetrated mass killings and medical experiments on humans.

I am no admirer of mainland China's government but the continuing unrepentant attitude of much of the Japanese government and all too many Japanese people explains much of the alarm felt by those who were among the worst victims of Japanese militarism. I can only imagine what the Koreans must feel. Worse yet than this abuse of the memory of the Holocaust is the story told by the museum at the Yasukuni Shrine, home to Class-A war criminals among the "honoured dead".

A video presentation prepares visitors, most of them Japanese, for elaborate displays that highlight foreign colonialism, present Japan as a liberator and glorify the sacrifices of kamikaze suicide pilots. The imperial army�s wars in China from 1931 to 1945, which claimed millions of lives, are described merely as "the China Incident".

Britain and Holland, it is explained, were the "main obstacles" to Japan�s rightful possession of oil and iron ore in Asia. President Franklin Roosevelt the display says, starved Japan of resources to provoke it into action and at a cabinet meeting on November 7, 1941 set in motion "the US plan to force Japan into the war".

Update: White Peril has sensible things to say about the revisionist history textbook controversy. Also, about the use of the atomic bomb.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at August 5, 2005 07:33 AM

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Comments

Well put. I remember seeing some stupid play about the 'intriguing' world of Canadian diplomacy in the mid-20th century and one of the key points of the thing was that the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima was nothing more than a chest-thumping exercise by the Americans for the Russians' benefit. Frak me.

Posted by: The_Campblog at August 6, 2005 08:12 AM