SELF-DECEPTION MEANS NEVER HAVING
TO SAY YOU'RE SORRY
by Philip Cunningham
"The Chinese people must speak up
to protest the Japanese government for
refusing to acknowledge the historical
misdeed of the 1937 Nanjing
Massacre." These are the words
of an unknown hacker who added a new twist to
the seven decade old Sino-Japan
argument about a brutal war and the
remembrance of that war. The cyber
attack, the first of its kind on a
Japanese government site, came
shortly after a Japanese rightist rally
calling the Nanjing Massacre of
1937 "the biggest lie of the century" was
held in Osaka. Although the hacker
has not been identified, many people in
China are furious that some people
in Japan, with the apparent complicity of
the government, are trying to re-write
a past that young people know about
(or don't know about) from textbooks
only.
China's foreign ministry issued
a statement encouraging the Chinese people
to express their utmost anger in
reaction to the Osaka rally and the Beijing
media has duly complied. Night
after night, CCTV News berates Japan for its
inability to face its own history,
noting that while the economy has
advanced, so has the ultra-nationalist
right wing and the government's tacit
acceptance of it. Newspaper headlines
such as "Japanese Devils" "Infamous
Past Undeniable" ?China Indignant
over rightist rally" and references to
Japan as an "emotional dwarf" (dwarf
is a common epithet for Japanese in
China) are common fare these days.
China Daily, Beijing's primary English
mouthpiece, ran a number of articles
pointing the finger not at the
rightists but at the Japanese government for
permitting the rightists to "remove
the smirch on Japanese history." An
anti-Japanese breeze is blowing
across China just now, but it does not
necessarily portend a downturn
in Sino-Japanese relations. Japan's foreign
ministry has released conciliatory
statements acknowledging the basic fact
of the massacre and in China it
is not uncommon for emotionally-charged
campaigns to be reversed by fiat.
One need look no further than the
incendiary anti-American vitriol
in the Beijing press last May after a US
jet bombed the Chinese embassy
in Belgrade and the subsequent muffling and
complete extinguishing of the same
anti-American sentiment only a month
later, to see that political campaigns
in China are under tight control.
They can turn them on, they can
turn them off. In the case of the buried
anti-American sentiment, it is
fair to say that high-level strategic
concerns about balance of power
and economic expansion won the day.
There are numerous individuals in
Japan, elite and lowbrow alike, ranging
from the influential author and
current mayor of Tokyo, Ishihara Shintaro,
to various low-brow criminal syndicates
and anti-communists who claim that
the event known to the world as
the Nanjing massacre is a fabrication
intended to dishonor Japan. Others
say that terrible things happen in war,
the unpleasantness is best forgotten.
The more moderate of the revisionists
don't deny killing by Japanese
troops, but say the figures are greatly
exaggerated which is certainly
an arguable point.
The topic is a touchy one because
it opens old wounds, especially of victim
and vanquished, and reinforces
mutually negative stereotypes that influence
how Chinese and Japanese continue
to see one another.
NANJING 1937: WAS THERE A MASSACRE?
Massacre is a strong word, but it
does not do justice to the horror of the
event, let alone the commonly used
euphemism Nanjing "Incident". Historical
records, photos, diaries, newsreels,
unearthed corpses and tearful
eyewitness testimony of survivors
attest to the ferocity and magnitude of
the killing that took place when
the Japanese Imperial Army chose to
frighten China into submission
by making a bloody example of its capital
city. Perhaps Nanjing was, in the
twisted mind of the militarists, the
massacre to end all massacres.
Every nation has ugly chapters in its history
and this chapter will always be
the disgrace of Japan. But what does that
have to do with the peaceful Japan
of today with no little direct memory of
war? Most Japanese that I've talked
to reluctantly acknowledge such things
took place,though with a reserve
and perhaps shame similar towhat middle
Americans might express when confronted
with how the ??Anglos?? decimated
North America's Indian population.
HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI: GOOD NEWS
IN CHINA
Japanese soldiers, like other soldiers
in other unjust wars, commited some
really terrible crimes above and
beyond the horrible job of being a soldier,
or professional killer, during
the invasion of China. Precious little of
Japan's negative legacy in China
makes it into the Ministry of
Education-approved list of teaching
materials, another irksome irritant in
Sino-Japanese relations. Nor has
Japan adequately apologized , in China's
view, though some Japanese would
argue, for cultural reasons, that an
oblique expression of regret by
the current emperor is apology enough.
A few of Japan's aged killer soldiers
have broken the silence and risked
death to come clean about the worst
excesses of the bloody wars of invasion
in China, Korea and Southeast Asia
between 1937-1945.
SELECTIVE AMNESIA
It is unfortunate, but perhaps a
testament to human inability to stare
horror in the face, that in the
aftermath of a massacre, the statistical
issues concerning the death toll
often become the main topic of discourse
rather than the sick psychological
reasons for the murderous madness and the
imponderable tragedy befallen by
the victims and their kin. No amount of
selective amnesia is going to change
the facts, but amnesia sometimes makes
for bad neighbors.
Unlike Germany, which has intermittently
come to grips with the horrible
excesses of the Hitler era, Japan
is largely in denial about its own
history. In fact the Japanese collective
memory is suspiciously vague and
forgetful until the moment at which
Japan arguably became the victim: the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and
Nakasaki. (two horrid, inhumane,
unnecessary explosions which to
this day are regarded as a very positive
development by most Chinese because
the atomic hits marked the end of
Japan's brutal occupation of China.)
RIGHTIST REVISONISTS ARE NOT ALWAYS
WRONG
Where the Japanese rightists have
a valid point, and it's a point worth
exploring further in a less mutually
incriminating atmosphere, is on the
question of the scope of the massacre.
Who's to say Irene Chang got it right
in the Rape of Nanking? Numerous
errors in her reporting have been
documented, and not just by Japanese
writers. Who's to say the Communist
Party's figure of 300,000 raped
and killed is correct? The Chinese Communist
Pary, responsible for the famine
that followed on the heels of the Great
Leap Forward, (caused partly by
phony, inflated statistics of grain output)
among other self-inflicted tragedies
with death tolls in the millions, is
hardly a sterling source when it
comes to statistics. The discussion never
gets to a point where such things
can be talked about because of the vested
interests of Japan-bashers and
China-bashers on each shore of the
Japan/China sea.
BEIJING 1989: WAS THERE A MASSACRE?
The Beijing government rightly condemns
Japan, not just for its proven
record of brutality during its
invasion and occupation of eastern China, but
for the especially infuriating
fact that even today, six decades later Japan
doesn't own up to what it did.
There are, however, sadly and ironically
enough, recent parallels in Chinese
history where the Chinese government is
guilty of the same kind of brutal
aversion to the truth and selective
amnesia. One need only look back
to the June 4, 1989 crackdown on the
peaceful Tiananmen student movement
to realize that impulse to whitewash the
past is not a monopoly of Japanese
rightists.
To this day the Beijing government
blames the victims of the June 4
bloodshed by asserting it took
necessary, firm actions to prevent
instability. There are extremists
in China who even argue no one died at
Tiananmen, distracting the argument
away from who killed whom to quibbling
about the dimensions of the Square.
Many powerful people in China, some in
leadership positions today, some
even in the military, were upset by the
clumsy and unecessary bloodletting
on that fateful June night, but few have
had the courage to speak out openly.
So much harder then for the weak and
disenfranchised millions of ordinary
citizens who have to reconcile their
private truth with official lies.
Those who cannot stand the hypocrisy and
speak out loudly are imprisoned
or driven into exile.
So even as China righteously wags
its finger at Japan for denying the
unpalatable past, there are skeletons
in the closet, rattling, but unseen.
The point is, Japan's refusal to
recognize what it did in Nanjing, (and
elsewhere) and China's refusal
to recognize what it did to its own people in
cracking down on the Tiananmen
protests, (and elsewhere) both share the
common motivation of saving face
and presenting one's nation in the best
possible light by distorting, denying
or distracting the public with trivial
unproveable arguments to cover
up the shame of crimes against humanity and
murder.