Conclusion The Poverty of Political Ambition in East Asia

Years ago, while sitting in the front row of a press conference concerning a Chinese lawsuit against the Japanese government for wartime compensation, I was spat on. It was not so much that the salivatory bomblet was directed at me but more that I was in its orbit of trajectory. The emitting Japanese lawyer was incensed that, yet again, his just cause of legal pursuit against Japan for a war crime of forced wartime labor had been tossed out of a higher court in Tokyo. He was, in fact, yelling in front of those of us assembled in a small side room where we gathered to hear about the continued legal frustration that his group consistently encountered. That moment stays with me because while much of this book has been about justice denied, or feelings of injustice created, there is still much to observe in the gap behind how mainstream Japanese society reacts and hopes to find reconciliation but is often stymied by its leaders and the conservative branch. Which brings me to a crucial point in this conflict between the memory of injustice and the search for justice: How much do we remember about other recent-history war crimes trials?

War crimes trials do not always work. In Serbia this pursuit of justice actually managed to assist the former pariah state in ignoring its past as a perpetrator.¹ This is not just the sense of “inverted justice” mentioned in the introduction. Rather, this is hijacked justice because domestic actors parrot the words of transitional justice but do not adhere to international norms. Many will recall accounts of what occurred in Rwanda: a slaughter of untold magnitude during only a few months between the Tutsis and Hutus.² War crimes trials continue to abound, but what do they achieve? In the early twenty-first century, perhaps even more confusing for many would be the Khmer Rouge trials. These trials gained more attention internationally than among the Cambodians, who arguably suffered the most. When placed in an international context, Japan’s war crimes do not pale in comparison, nor are they more understandable. What does come into relief is the sense that such atrocities are not unique to Japan and that war crimes trials do not always seamlessly lead to postwar reconciliation.

At the same time, as much as I have argued in this book to not overextend the comparison between Germany and Japan, we can distinguish between the rhetorical aims of their politicians. The patriotic but sympathetic words of German federal president Frank-Walter Steinmeier are a case in point. In his moving May 8, 2020, speech from Berlin commemorating the end of World War II, Steinmeier called on his compatriots to bear in mind that Germany was responsible for the murder and suffering of millions. He also reminded his fellow citizens to not draw a line under their past, because that would lead to “denying the catastrophe that was the war and the Nazi dictatorship.” Germany, he proclaimed, “can only be loved with a broken heart.” Such a position is necessary so that no one devalues “all the good that has since been achieved.”³ Powerful words that sadly no Japanese politician seems capable of enunciating in public. Steinmeier’s central point is that apology is a never-ending cycle of reflection. One can only be chagrined when comparing Steinmeier’s elegant comments with those of Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, Abe Shinzō. His tempered take on the situation in his August 2015 speech concerning the end of World War II marks a stark contrast: “In Japan, the postwar generations now exceed eighty per cent of its population. We must not let our children, grandchildren, and even further generations to come, who have nothing to do with that war, be predestined to apologize.”⁴ Here was a missed opportunity to move beyond putting Japan’s own suffering front and center and press the government to consider how its past affected others. Abe’s focus on apology fatigue instead of reconciliation is telling. Japanese conservatives delude themselves into parallel thinking as well. They constantly enjoy testing the argument: the Americans had no right to judge Japan because the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japanese cities. However, to me what this really smacks of is what the young American poet laureate spoke of at President Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021. Amanda Gorman, the poet, was decrying the damage done to the United States by the megalomaniac Trump and how the nation needed a period of self-reflection to heal from its hypocrisy. How strikingly similar, I thought, to what happened in some ways to Japan in its soul-searching in the postwar era. In her longer poem, Gorman reflected:

It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit,
it’s the past we step into
and how we repair it⁵

The past is not merely something to laud. Oftentimes it is a burden, Gorman explained. A nation’s past cannot simply be something to be extolled; it carries a responsibility and it is a legacy that needs to be “repaired” to move forward. How fitting an ideology for nations other than just the United States.

The Chinese want to treasure the Nuremberg Trial and retain that master narrative to fit the same parameters for the Tokyo Trial. However, mainland scholarship on the topic has not kept pace with the international turn from hagiography of the trials to a more critical stance. And this is the core issue—one cannot accept a golden rule about these war crimes trials and then ignore how international attitudes have changed toward that history since 1945.

Even though wartime Japanese history has often, and not exactly fruitfully, been compared with Nazi Germany because of their Axis Alliance, a more fitting analysis would place Japan alongside France.⁶ For Japan, Korea was seen as a vital frontier for international security, as was Algeria for France. Both Japan and France felt their imperialism helped civilize their colonial holdings. More importantly, in terms of historical memory, both Japan and France experienced an imperial blackout in the decades after their losses concerning both Algeria and Korea. Unlike Germany, which in fits and starts was coming to terms with its legacy of barbarism, France, like Japan, ignored this past and focused merely on aspects of retaining and restoring postwar power. If we think about war crimes, then the two cases are even more alike. Japan’s failure to domestically pursue its war criminals stands out as unique, but the massive French massacres in Algeria and elsewhere that were never pursued remain an open wound for French society as well.⁷

Chinese Ideas about History

About fifteen years ago, a popular weekly supplement to the China Youth Daily, “Freezing Point” (Bingdian), published an article by Yuan Weishi that gained the venom of CCP leaders. Yuan had dared to write that China needed to investigate its own history, and it had a duty to educate the younger generation about that truth. This opinion displeased Chinese officials, who quickly shut the supplement down. Yuan drew a line between Japanese and Chinese textbook treatments of modern history. He also revealed an open secret, that patriotic education on the mainland has created problems.⁸ This nationalist ideology propels both countries into a state of conflict, but blame cannot fall only on Japanese shoulders, he recognized.⁹ Liu Jie, an eminent Chinese historian who works in Japan, proposes that herein lies a deeper problem. In facing the decades of unequal treaties and imposition from the Great Powers during the prewar era, Chinese leaders placed faith in a system above and outside of the law, namely revolution. This idea established the notion of “justice” as a value that superseded law and exceeded treaties, since neither had been helpful to the Chinese in the early modern era. The result, by the middle of the twentieth century, was the development of a specific mind-set. The Chinese suffered from what others did to them. Consequently, whatever the Chinese did in response was correct and patriotic.¹⁰ Liu asked: did China want to be the country that championed justice and emphasized the results of its revolution and the concordant historical views such a narrative brings with it? Or did the PRC wish to become a country founded on the rule of law, which therefore cannot hold up the ideals of the revolution as the sole foundation for authority? These two historical views work in opposition, and only one can be ascribed to at a time. The current Beijing government would like the international community to believe that China has always supported multilateralism and the rule of law. China’s minister of foreign affairs Wang Yi said as much in February 2020: “As the first founding member of the UN to sign its Charter, China has stayed true to the UN’s founding aspirations and firmly defended the purposes of the Charter and international law.”¹¹ But this assertion dulls the edges of truth because in reality it was the Chinese Nationalist government that signed this charter in 1945, not the communists.¹²

Did the Trials Bring about Peace?

The paradox of war crimes trials based on international law is that even with more than seven decades of accumulative experience, few would disagree with the idea that international law—as the UN Charter states, to “be centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of … common ends”—has not fulfilled all the goals originally attached to its birth. The goals of peace, security, and justice are admirable, but they mean different things for different parties and vary widely in relation to those common ends.¹³ Everyone calls for peace, but what it means for each party is so unique that discussions are not actually about international law but rather the meaning of the ideas of peace or justice. To say that international law is for peace and justice is only significant within a system where the meanings are “agreed and understood between the members of the system.”¹⁴ By contrast, even recent books, including the prolific output of the Center for the Tokyo Trial Studies of Shanghai Jiaotong University, frequently mention peace and the fact that the trials aimed at establishing it. But such books in mainland China do not detail how the trial managed to implement these important ideas.¹⁵ In his long book on the fury with which the Allies investigated the atrocities visited on the European continent in the immediate postwar, A. T. Williams arrives at a different conclusion: “For all Nuremberg’s value in confronting the overarching systems of Nazi inhumanity, the victims were only numbers. That’s what law and trial invariably promises; an impersonal and imperfect reaction to human cruelty and human suffering.”¹⁶ The Europeans and Americans realized they needed to bring some measured response to the destruction caused by Nazi injustice or future generations would suffer. But Williams also realized that this form of trial would also end with a certain measure of inadequacy.

Ironically, even given the at-times frosty bilateral relations in the region, since 1979 East Asia has been more peaceful than ever before. However, that important transformation seems to have been overlooked because to do so would require admission that Japan no longer threatens the region. Strangely, little consensus exists concerning what this peace represents.

Monumental History Misses Much of the Story

The structures of a national history create zones of conflict and sites of commemoration that are not immune from influence on how this history is shaped. The first comes in the form of “monumental history,” which is used to build domestic notions of nationalism. This formation is often pitted against “critical history,” which is historical inquiry that aims to investigate the past regardless of how it lauds or denigrates the state.¹⁷ The gap between these different genres of history is made clear in recent Chinese government maneuvers to more blatantly emphasize its version of history throughout the world, through the internet and propaganda platforms. Mainland Chinese historical scholarship is frequently forced to reflect what the state wants its citizens to believe. This is not history but rather mimicry.¹⁸

It is not just China, however, that leans on the glory of monumentality in history. In 1997, the Group of Young Parliamentarians Thinking of the Future of Japan and Historical Education formed. This group consists of one hundred Japanese parliament members from the ruling LDP. It was founded in part to push against what was felt to be the negative historical vision the supposedly liberal media in Japan publicized.¹⁹ Furuya Keiji, a lower house member of parliament who headed the group at one point, blogged about Japan’s need to avoid cultivating a masochistic national history.²⁰ The group produced two books of dubious quality that questioned Japanese war guilt and an “Investigation Report” on the Nanjing Massacre “problem” as they labeled it.²¹ What is at stake here is that the issue of reconciliation encapsulates a debate in Japan concerning one’s political stance toward empire and the war. The “Tokyo Trial view” of history (that Japan’s empire was aggressive and wrong) is posited against the conservative view that empire was about the liberation of Asia and that the war was fought to protect Japan’s security because it was forced into a corner.

Nations cannot be left to resolve historical issues on their own. Japan and China need to investigate their own histories, not just rely on national sophistry and feel-good commissions to get them through times of crises. James Baldwin, the noted and polemical American writer, said as much at the end of his address to the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on December 10, 1986. “And as long as you pretend you don’t know your history you’re going to be the prisoner of it.”²² Baldwin did not repeat the tired idea of being condemned to repeat history. Rather, he articulated that reconciliation could only occur when a full grasp of a nation’s history, however distasteful and horrible, was undertaken. He was explicitly talking about the United States’ problems with race and injustice. But he was also soberly acknowledging that staring history in the face regardless of one’s identity or color was perhaps the most difficult task in which a society could engage because it required shelving one’s assumptions and exploring uncomfortable and unfamiliar intellectual frontiers. Baldwin never lived to see this dream achieved; he died soon after his address. War crimes trials in Asia did not lead to reconciliation in East Asia, but they offered a first step forward. The choice for leaders and the various national populations in this age is to decide in which direction they will advance the ideas behind those verdicts. Or will citizens merely continue to repudiate these legal processes in a bid to bolster the shorter-term satisfaction of emotional victimization? The choice is theirs and ours. Nothing is inevitable.

Glossary of Japanese and Chinese Names and Terms