August 05, 2005
The Ghost of a Conscience
Nick Packwood has little patience for the expected flood of "Japan as victim" noise on the anniversary dates of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings:
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.
No amount of retrospective angst, regrets, and belated second thoughts on the part of the allied nations of World War Two seems to be enough. No amount of contrition or genuine remorse on the part of the successor government of Japan seems to be too little. There's a moral disconnect there, wouldn't you say?
Posted by Nicholas at August 5, 2005 02:29 PM
I have no patience for the Japan-as-victim routine either, but I'm a little ambivalent about getting countries to grovel for wartime atrocities. Certainly Imperial Japan has a horrific wartime record and was the perpetrator of many, many crimes against humanity. And the distortion of their actual war record is evil and irresponsible. But this is war after all, and horrific things go hand in hand with war like peanut butter and jelly. It's always been thus.
At the same time, few of those who were truly responsible for Japanese atrocities are going to be alive and in shape to go to jail today. The time for war reparations and guilt is running out as our collective memory of these events goes down the toilet. I'm all for bagging war criminals as long as they are alive, but at a certain point (after they are all dead? After the govt apologizes 5, 10, 15 times?) forgiveness has to edge into the picture or we'll just end up creating another bunch of angry fascists who feel they're getting the short end of the stick.
I don't think citizens of Germany or Japan can or should constantly go about with heavy hearts, mindful of what their grandfather or great-grandfathers did, any more than Italians should feel guilt about imperial Rome today. Be a little ashamed and regretful, sure. Cooperate with war crimes tribunals and turn over a new leaf, sure. Shell out handouts to the aggrieved and make constant obeisance to the memory of the dead, hell no. Same goes for homegrown Japanese-Canadian crybabies (including my relatives) who clamoured for compensation for their internment. We ought to be fairly realist about these things and say "Yes, our government treated you badly, and it's a damned shame. But damned shames always happen in war and I'm not paying to assuage your anger or someone else's guilt. Sorry. Life's not fair, even in a democracy. Be a man and suck it up."
At some point these countries with evil records, especially regional powers like Germany and Japan, have to face facts and apologize, then suck it up and get one with the business of being a nation-state. As long as they are prepared to be candid (and I'm not by any means arguing that Japan is, right now -- far from it), we should let bygones be bygones.
I'm not particularly interested in seeing Japan, Germany, or any other country grovel . . . that's the most minor part of the necessity to acknowledge and accept responsibility for the crimes of the recent past.
Too much has been allowed to go down the Memory Hole in Japan, especially compared to the post-WWII German experience.
Today, it being the 6th, it is certainly appropriate to remember the civilian casualties of the first atomic bombing, but IMO it was still the right decision to drop the bomb. Millions more Japanese, Americans, and other nations' soldiers were absolutely going to die in the invasion of Japan. Millions more Japanese civilians were also going to be killed, either as innocent bystanders or (foreshadowing the guerilla wars of the Cold War period) as illegal participants in combat.
The two atomic bombs — without question — shortened the war and made the final casualty list far shorter than it would have been otherwise. To pretend this is not so is to argue in direct contravention of the known facts. Too many Western apologists do exactly this.
