Japan's Unfinished War

“Victims or Victimizers? Museums, Textbooks, and the War Debate in Contemporary Japan” by Roger B. Jeans, in The Journal of Military History (Jan. 2005), George C. Marshall Library, Lexington, Va. 24450–1600.

Are the Japanese determined to whitewash their nation’s militarist past and wartime atrocities? Protesters in China this spring were only the latest foreigners to say so. But the perception, widespread outside Japan, is at odds with the reality of a nation divided over its past, says Jeans, who teaches East Asian history at Washington and Lee University. “By the 1990s, it looked as though the long battle to include the truth of Japanese wartime aggression in Asia in textbooks had been won. In 1995, a survey of the 12 most popular textbooks in Japanese schools showed they agreed [that] Japan pursued a ‘war of aggression.’ . . .  They also included the [1937] Nanjing Massacre, as well as Japan’s use of poison gas and slave labor.”

Then, in 1996, University of Tokyo professor Nobukatsu Fujioka and others who condemned this “mas­o­chistic” and “anti-Japanese” view of history founded the Society for the Creation of New History Textbooks. A middle-school textbook produced by the society was one of several approved by Japan’s Ministry of Education in 2001 as suitable for use in schools. But when many Japanese groups, including one headed by novelist and Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, joined Chinese and Koreans in attacking the textbook for “watering down” Japan’s wartime past, 98 percent of Japan’s 542 school districts refused to adopt it.

The “culture war” over Japan’s past is also being fought in the country’s museums. On one side are the “war museums,” such as the Yasukuni Shrine War Museum in Tokyo, which glorifies the wartime sacrifice and Japan’s “Greater East Asian War” of “liberation.” Since the early 1990s, however, a more critical Japanese attitude toward World War II has begun to manifest itself in new “aggression” or “peace” mu­­se­ums, such as the Kyoto Museum for World Peace.

Operated privately or by local governments, these museums were built away from the nation’s capital, in Kyoto, Osaka, Kawasaki, Saitama, and Okinawa. “They present Japan as an aggressor in the war and describe its brutal treatment of other Asian peoples. In addition, the atomic bomb museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki added exhibits making it clear the bombings did not take place in a vacuum but were the result of Japan’s wartime aggression.”

Though the debate over the past is bound to continue for years, foreign commentators who claim that “Japan has amnesia” about its wartime past simply aren’t very cognizant about its present.