“13. Afterlives of the Damned” in “The Geography of Injustice”
CHAPTER 13 Afterlives of the Damned The Commemoration of Justice and Injustice, 1990s to the Present
To get to Li Qingxiang’s village of Beituan, the one I wrote about in the introduction, required several forms of transportation. High-speed rail, which the Chinese have been laying down at an unprecedented pace all around the country, gets you fairly close. This meant that the last leg of the journey was still two hours by car, or in our case, by a rented small bus—a Toyota. The Japanese brands are very reliable, I was told by the driver. Beituan Village presents a crucial locus of interest in determining, perhaps finding justice for, Japan’s wartime actions and what people wish to remember about the war.
In addition to trying to ascertain the lived experience of those who had seemingly found some justice through the CCP courts, such as at least one of the residents from Beituan Village who had testified at the 1956 Shenyang Trial, it was important to talk with others who had direct experience. In the city of Fushun, the actual location of the Japanese War Criminals Management Center, I interviewed a former nurse, Zhao Yuying. Sporting an ingratiating smile, the elderly Zhao lived in a two-room apartment with a large kitchen and comfortable furniture. According to her published oral history, on July 16, 1950, she arrived at the city of Suifenhe to wait for the Japanese prisoners in the small town. The train arrived on July 18, she remembered.1 Later, after ushering the Japanese war criminals back to Fushun, Zhao and a small group of doctors returned to Suifenhe to receive a second trainload of the Manchu war criminals from the USSR. On August 1, these men finally arrived by train, and the young Zhao saw the last Manchu emperor, Pu Yi, for the first time. He sported dark glasses and wore a Western suit, standing about 170 centimeters tall. He appeared to be in his forties, she recalled. Former Manchukuo prime minister Zhang Jinghui, who was in his seventies, was also present. He was short and looked “old and decrepit,” Zhao said.2
In our interview Zhao did not offer much more than what she had already expressed two decades prior in her oral history.3 She did talk about all the diseases that the Japanese prisoners had when they arrived and the fact that, like Wang Shilin, she was not informed of the nature of her work before it started. She met the POWs at the rail station and then realized what her job was going to entail. Much of our interview repeated what Zhao had said elsewhere, but I seemed to have been the first person to ask her about the KMT war criminals at the same prison where she worked. She responded that she never saw them and that they only came in later. This latter part was, of course, not true since we know the KMT prisoners trickled in by 1955, but it is possible the staff were separated. However, Zhao’s reply implied that the various groups of prisoners were kept apart—“puppet” Manchukuo officials were separated on one wing, and Japanese war criminals were kept in a different area. KMT officers were impounded elsewhere. Interestingly, the museum (which was formerly the prison) does not detail these aspects of the history and mainly focuses on the Japanese war criminals along with detailing the life of the last emperor, Pu Yi.
In Zhang’s apartment I continued with the next interview of former director of the Fushun War Criminals Management Center Hou Jiahua. Hou had worked at the prison since 1986, when it was turned into a museum, and she was instrumental in the establishment of the first exhibit and reconstruction. This would have been around the same time that the Unit 731 museum just outside of Harbin was built, along with the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum and similar memorial sites throughout China, signaling a national return to remembering World War II history. But, as happened in Beituan Village and with the Taiyuan POW site as Liu Linsheng told me, part of the impetus to build these memorials was spurred by former Japanese war criminals and others coming back to China, giving money, donating items, and pushing for such commemoration of both the war and China’s postwar magnanimity. As I previously detailed, this wartime history was buried from just after the conclusion of the trials in 1956 until the 1980s. Importantly, in the interviews I conducted, everyone clammed up when I asked them about their lives after 1956, as if their lives never altered course and everything had stopped. I questioned Zhao what she did after Fushun, but she responded she had worked there for nine years, which would have taken her up to 1959, when KMT prisoners were there and many of the Japanese had already been released. She deferred from going into detail concerning how life changed after most of the Japanese POWs had departed. It was as if there was only one tale to tell, and that was the story of the Chinese benevolence toward the Japanese. That narrative was decoupled from any other elements of domestic or international history. It was unlinked to anything else, floating out there in an endless cycle in which a single story repeats its own greatness.
Former director Hou was an interesting interview and not reticent to offer her sharp opinions. She told me that she hated the Japanese, but it was not from personal experience or really any conviction. She explained that partly this was perhaps the result of having grown up watching so many anti-Japanese movies, including Tunnel Warfare and others.4 She despised the Japanese but also realized she had to do her job. She did not appreciate my question whether the Japanese prisoners had been brainwashed in their reformation, she intimated. If they had been forced, she bristled, why would these men come back year after year to Fushun to thank their former jailers? Hou Jiahua was the person who received these visiting teams from Japan and then worked with the Liaison Group. These men were able to showcase their personal journeys of psychological transformation when they brought their families with them, or returned to China as old men to say thank you and to remark that the prison was their “place of rebirth.”5
But what about the deeper legal issue of the eleven years these men had spent in incarceration before they were put on trial? Was that not a form of extended pressure—you cannot go home until you change, if ever? Was there not severe, and thus extralegal, inducement to change? Sadly, this conversation was a nonstarter and connected back to the impossibility of digging in further concerning the question of justice that lurks under the surface of Chinese trials of Japanese war criminals. Questioning even a fraction of the process gets mistaken for historical revisionism or denial of the truth—now punishable by law.
Another aspect I grew to understand from talking to former guards and legal staff involved with the extensive CCP trials, like Wang and Zhao, was the idealism of youth of those who were involved. Many were in their twenties or early thirties, idealist communists or at least prepped for a national shift from what they believed was a corrupt former KMT administration. They saw an avenue for change and talked about that era with smiles and in fond terms with me. The fact that most of them never discussed it in any interviews or wrote much about it until the 1990s also tells us volumes about the meaning of those trials, for so long kept silenced while waves of political violence internal to China continued to rumble.
FIGURE 13.1. Japanese former war criminals’ apology stele at Fushun War Criminals Management Center (“To the anti-Japan martyred heroes, we apologize for our crimes”)
Taiwan (The Republic of China)
At the outset of its rule in 1949, the KMT government was practical about how to gain legitimacy for its cause. And on the island of Taiwan, where in the immediate aftermath of Japan’s surrender pro-KMT memorials were in short supply, Chinese Nationalist leaders did what many authorities have done in the past. They remade the former enemy’s commemorative sites into their own. Several of the major Japanese Shinto shrines on Taiwan were quickly repurposed as Chinese Nationalist “martyr’s shrines” to economize.6 This happened at approximately fifteen sites around Taiwan and not just at the periphery. The main Japanese imperial Protect the Nation Shrine (Gokoku jinja) in the center of Taipei in the immediate postwar period was transformed into the Taiwan provincial martyr’s shrine. Later, when Taiwan became its own country, this shrine was nationalized and served as the one at which foreign guests would pay their formal respects on official visits to the Republic of China. Afterward, it was renamed the People’s Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine.7 Such memorials helped “to engender and consolidate social practices of visitation.”8 Political change began to slowly percolate in Taiwan beginning in the 1990s. Elections of the permanent government representatives did not actually happen until the early 1990s, with full elections in 1996, when Lee Teng-hui became Taiwan’s first democratically chosen president.
This fascinating evolution should cause us to reflect on the same “anchors of history” that we dealt with toward the beginning of the book. While noting that “heritage is not history,” we can still understand how the two categories are deeply intertwined, particularly during periods of political handover. “While history is the study of the past, the use of the past in heritage-making is dictated by present-day concerns.”9 Memorials to fallen soldiers or national sacrifice communicate “intangible values like honor, sacrifice, and spirit” to the population.10 Did the Taiwanese find it ironic that locales that had only months prior touted alignment with the Japanese emperor were suddenly switched over to fealty to Chiang Kai-shek? It is hard to tell. But at the edge of Japan’s former empire, that was precisely the problem with defeat. How militaries memorialize defeat while not being defeatist partly emerged in the Tokyo Trial. The Allies crafted a story of the war and this “masochistic” view of history pushed Japan’s conservative side to oppose this attitude and to prop up alternative meanings of the war in response.
The connective tissue of this narrative between war and postwar, or war and political legitimacy at the far fringes of Japan’s former empire, did not end with defeat or the refashioning of Japanese imperial shrines into Chinese Nationalist military commemorative sites. In March 2009, a brand new repatriation ceremony was designed to celebrate the repatriation of bones of former KMT soldiers who had died in Papua New Guinea as POWs. Many of these men were the Chinese POWs detailed in earlier chapters. Here was an interesting moment of historical significance. These men had been soldiers for the ROC, and thus represented China. But that government was no longer in control of mainland China and had shifted to Taiwan. It is not clear whether the PRC launched a formal protest, but eventually the former KMT soldiers were repatriated to Taiwan in a grand ceremony.11 Taiwan was now incorporating a new history for itself in some measure. These spirits/bones were placed into Taiwan’s National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine even though by the standards set by the United Nations Taiwan was no longer an internationally recognized state.12 This event was not without impact, because memorials shape the “contours of a historical event. They affirm what should be regarded as crucial to it, and what is understood as extraneous or ‘outside.’ ”13 It is possible this was all just part of Taiwan’s push to regain diplomatic relations with Papua New Guinea, having lost and retrieved it several times since that country’s independence from Australia in 1975. But the ceremony and money spent demonstrate something deeper, an attempt to ensure that Taiwan’s new history remains linked to the ROC’s longer story of postwar legitimacy as well.
The PRC also wedged in on the proceedings, claiming that several Chinese communist soldiers had given their lives in Rabaul. Competition between the mainland and Taiwan to maintain grave sites abroad and memorialize those fallen in the name of China remains a potent symbol even in the twenty-first century. In fact, in the words of one historian, these graves of “past wars have become bones of contention. The forgotten war graves have become the sites of contestation. The spirits of these soldiers and civilians have become sources of sovereign power, allowing both the PRC and the ROC to re-envision their common history prior to their Civil War.”14
But history is not just about remembering; it is also about forgetting or excising. Nowhere is this more physically felt than in a park a short drive from Taiwan’s international Taoyuan Airport. Almost forty-five minutes from central Taipei, many of the old or no longer necessary statues of Chiang Kai-shek are stored in an open field. The park was created by the mayor of Daxi and is called the Cihu Memorial Sculpture Park. The intent was to maintain the Chiang legacy but deal with a surfeit of statues that were no longer required to embellish the front of every school and public building.15 However, the actual impact, according to some foreign assessments, is more like a “memorial dump.”16
At the same time, over the past several decades since the birth of democracy in Taiwan, an assessment of the past still lags and people continue to press for justice. In Taiwan’s case, while pressure on Japan is low but persistent, it remains in sharper relief concerning domestic issues. Taiwan president Tsai Ing-wen created the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, which promised a report on an investigation into transitional justice concerning the February 28 Incident. This is indeed a laudable goal. For her government, greater focus is not on the era of Japanese colonialism but the much more recent KMT egregious actions of the February 28 Incident and the era of “white terror.”17 The Memorial Foundation of 2.28, headed by Professor Hsueh Hua-yuan, now hosts a new museum dedicated to the February 28 Incident and a foundation.
FIGURE 13.2. “Lost Chiangs” Cihu Memorial Sculpture Park in Taiwan.
Repurposing Victory
The CCP copied on mainland China what the KMT did in Taiwan, repurposing a former enemy’s monuments. In the PRC’s case, the CCP took the KMT World War II victory monument in the center of Chongqing, the wartime Chinese capital, and remade it into a monument commemorating the 1949 communist victory. There is a large public square in the center of the downtown, now known as Liberation Monument Square. Originally, the Chinese Nationalists celebrated the defeat of Japan and their role with the erection of a seven-story octagonal tower with a slogan running down the side of it, reading “Anti-Japan War Victory Monument.” On October 1, 1950 (as China perched on the precipice of joining the Korean War), the CCP refaced the tower and changed the commemorative appellation from a “victory monument” to a “Liberation Monument.”18 The Chinese central government, however, did not always share the provincial city governments’ opinions about the protection of national heritage. For the village of Pingfang and the city of Harbin nearby, pushing for a war crimes museum concerning Japanese Imperial Army Unit 731 was not necessarily in their interest. In fact, “during the 1950s and 1960s the provincial authorities in Harbin endeavoured to demolish the entire Pingfang site, in order to erase memory of the war there.”19 A confidential US embassy report from Harbin corroborates this view. The report details information about Chinese attitudes toward war crimes memorials during Senator Henry Jackson’s August 20–26, 1983, visit to northeast China. At that time, the ruined factory, as it was termed, was “not prominently identified from the road and the visit was only arranged at Senator Jackson’s specific request.” The report notes that “the ruined main building” was “unmarked except for a small sign in Chinese.”20 When I first visited in 1996, the site was still fairly unremarkable and scant educative facilities existed. Twenty years later, this location now pulsates with historical meaning in the new architectural monument of an expanded museum and its very archivally detailed exhibits. This pales in comparison with what the building and museum have become today. China is pouring money into museums and cultural sites of memory, paradoxically more numerous the further the history recedes into the past.
FIGURE 13.3. New Unit 731 Museum on outskirts of Harbin.
This reformatting of monuments and heroes can also be seen in popular culture expressions of history. The valiant KMT soldiers who tried to fight off the Japanese at the 1937 Sihang Warehouse Battle in Shanghai were celebrated by Chinese media as “the eight hundred heroes,” even though they numbered only 423.21 In 1975, a Taiwanese film championed this history. In 2005, mainland Chinese news grew excited over a rekindled interest in the Sihang Battle and the KMT’s role in attempting to push back the Japanese, even though it signaled the ultimate demise of KMT power in Shanghai. In 2014, President Xi Jinping publicly praised the eight hundred heroes.22 In 2018, mainland Chinese movie producers wrapped up a new film about the famous warehouse battle with epic special effects and backed by a colossal budget. But for reasons that were never clear, the release was suddenly canceled, days after it was pulled from a Shanghai film festival.23 However, a year later, the movie was released with international fanfare and very briefly shown in IMAX theaters in London as well.24
Japanese Commemorations of the “Damned”
The shift from victim to hero demonstrates the shifting landscape of the cultural heritage bolstering the varied historical interpretations of Japan’s war crimes trials, particularly the Tokyo Trial. The “Martyr’s Graves of the Seven Great Men” is a commemorative stone outdoor mausoleum in Aichi Prefecture dedicated to the seven Class A war criminals executed on the final judgment of the Tokyo Tribunal.25 But the seven war crimes “martyrs” did not just find themselves in Buddhist commemorative site by accident. These executed Japanese war criminals ended up in three sites in Japan.
After these seven war criminals were hanged by American executioners in December 1948, their bodies were driven to the Kuboyama Crematorium in Yokohoma. Two Japanese lawyers, Sanmonji Shōhei, who had worked on Koiso Kuniaki’s case at the Tokyo Trial, and Hayashi Itsurō supposedly conspired to steal some of their ashes. The two lawyers did not want to allow Japanese leaders to be anonymously disposed of by the Allies. They did not manage to get the bulk of the bones after incineration, but some of the leftover ashes were apparently swept up and preserved.26 Exceedingly detailed US records point to the contrary, in that the occupation authorities went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that they could “refute any possible claim that one or more of these war criminals are still alive or that anyone has all or any part of their ashes.”27 Regardless, a group of Japanese bent on what they believed would maintain the dignity of the accused formed, and head temple priest Ichikawa Iyū etched that story in stone. It can be found on a stele located to the side of the Kōzen Temple near the Yokohama funeral home.28 Some Chinese writers have painted the incident in a more devious and conspiratorial tone.29
A decision was then made to move the remains, dust essentially if it ever existed, to the Rising Asia Kannon Temple in Atami, Shizuoka Prefecture. This temple had an important backstory, having been created at the behest of Japanese general Matsui Iwane as a way to commemorate imperial soldiers who died in the war for China. Matsui requested that a shrine to the China Incident be erected in 1940. It became, ironically, the same site at which he would be memorialized years later. The temple grounds are a location that promote the idea that Japan’s war in China was righteous and sought to liberate Asia. Tanaka Masaaki wrote that Matsui “loved China more than anyone,” although one would have to admit Matsui had a funny way of showing it.30 On the sixtieth anniversary of the establishment of the Rising Asia Temple, Tanaka Masaaki was by this point the head of the Association to Protect the Rising Asia Temple.31
In the inaugural temple newsletter, Tokutomi Tasaburō, son of liberal Meiji turned wartime strident nationalist journalist Tokutomi Sohō, instructively wrote what the temple stood for. Tokutomi was a classmate of Tanaka Masaaki’s from the army’s 58th class. This was the officer class of slightly more than one thousand second lieutenants who had graduated from the Imperial Japanese Army Academy just before the war finished, in June, and most were purged during the occupation. Tokutomi laid out the three main canonical elements of the temple:
- First: To offer solace to the spirits of the war dead (including those executed)
- Second: To exonerate those for the so-called Nanjing Massacre
- Third: To correct the Tokyo Trial historical view32
Several years later, Sejima Ryūzō made some favorable comments about the Rising Asia Kannon Temple in the newsletter. For Sejima the temple embodied the Japanese spirit because it allowed for the celebration of the fallen spirits of both Japan and its previous enemies.33 Sejima was a high-ranking imperial military officer who was caught by the Soviets at the end of the war, brought forward to testify at the Tokyo Trial, and then detained for more than a decade in the USSR. He managed to have a second life after release and became head of a large and financially successful Japanese conglomerate. In 1959, with calligraphy from a former prime minister, a memorial stone with the words “7 Martyrs Memorial” was erected.34 Finally, in 1978, a portion of the remains were removed from the Rising Asia Kannon Temple to Mount Sangane in Aichi Prefecture.35
The 1970s saw a resurgence of interest in the Tokyo Trial and the BC class war crimes trials within Japan because some intellectuals felt it was precisely this era of war crimes tribunals where postwar Japan had rebooted. At the same time, this was the moment that generated numerous problems for postwar Japanese society because the people never came to terms with their colonial and imperial military responsibility. The Japanese “miracle” of economic rebirth by the 1970s had undercut its successes. As the famous Japanese playwright Kinoshita Junji wrote, “The war and defeat had bequeathed to Japanese society historical ‘caverns’ and ‘distortions,’ in other words unresolved issues, or a ‘syndrome.’ ” Kinoshita was alluding to the problem of how to match Japan’s postwar economic success with how it conceived of the justice and injustice found within the trials. To be sure, Japanese committed war crimes, but many of the trials, particularly at the BC class level, were of a variety where the verdict almost seemed random and justice was not always served.36 Kinoshita had penned the drama Between God and Man as a stage play in the early 1970s. His message in the play was not to generate a discussion about the guilt of the twenty-eight defendants at the Tokyo Trial, but rather to push the idea that responsibility lay within the audience. “The guilty are among us; the guilty are none other than us; we have no place to take this burden, and lay it bare except within ourselves.”37
As Japan moved through the 1970s, commemoration of the war developed into a larger international issue concerning what to do with the former historical sites such as the Sugamo Prison site, where Japanese war criminals had long been held. The complaints of JCP representative Ueda Kōichirō in the upper house of the Japanese parliament in 1980 mirror the background I presented toward the beginning of this book. He was incensed that a former war criminal became minister of justice and that Kaya Okinori was able to gain cabinet approval to protect sites related to former war criminals’ imprisonment. In parliament Ueda remarked that “the idea to protect these various sites is rather unthinkable isn’t it?”38
An example of how public monuments can impact their surroundings and private understanding of the past can be observed in the monument to the seven Class A war criminals. From 1965 onward, the site subsequently developed into a commemoration compound, housing 128 graves of other war criminals. There is also the “Memorial Tower to Sixty Patriots,” erected in 1968, which memorializes sixty war criminals (of all classes) who were executed at Sugamo Prison. This is located on the grounds of the Kōmyō Temple in Yokohama, just down the road from the Kōzen Temple. This site emphasizes the Tokyo Trial as a form of “victors’ justice.” The back of the stone lists the names of those convicted and an epitaph: “The recorded names are those who unselfishly offered their service to the nation in the Greater East Asia War. Regardless, they suffered extreme sentences at Sugamo in trials unilaterally imposed by former enemies. We mourn them and enshrine their spirits here to offer solace, imploring future generations to ensure their legacy.”39 Not everyone agreed with the commemorative stele to war criminals, and there have been instances of vandalism against the sites.
In 1996, former Takushoku University president Odamura Shirō announced that “we should try to correct what we call the war.” To reclaim the war and its meaning for the Japanese, he wrote, the people cannot let the war be called by other labels. It must be called “The Greater East Asian War,” he publicly stated. Odamura heaped disdain on the Tokyo Trial for having distorted the meaning of the war. “This trial was full of prejudice and falsehoods, and the fact that it was nothing more than a tragedy of revenge borrowing the term of a trial is already something well established with proof among numerous intellectuals. Moreover, this scar still cuts deep in our national psyche.”40
History Never Ends
In its bid to quickly discard the tools of empire, Japan’s imperial forces in China buried, left behind, or abandoned chemical weapons at “more than 90 locations across 18 Chinese provinces or municipalities.” The Chinese estimate this at approximately two million chemical weapons; the Japanese count puts that number at slightly half with seven hundred thousand. Either number means mountains of harmful weaponry leaking into the environment.41 In late summer 2003, workers in Heilongjiang Province unearthed several drums of formerly buried Japanese chemical weapons at a construction site. Dozens of people suffered injuries and one man died.42 Over the years such incidents have continued to surface all over China, but the Japanese government’s responses have been slow. Even eight decades after Japan’s aggression in China, the long arm of war crimes reaches into the current era and dampens international relations.43
As key Japanese intellectual pundits highlight, Japan has continually lacked strong political guidance concerning how to resolve crises in both the short and long term. The fact that the imperial Japanese military had to resort to barely trained pilots on kamikaze missions to try to eke out a victory in World War II has eerie echoes with what occurred during the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident when TEPCO management crafted the story of the “Fukushima fifty”—literally workers consigned to risk their lives to try to control the reactor meltdown. In both instances, the war and the nuclear disaster, the number of staff was fundamentally insufficient to complete the job; no one was prepared for a potential disaster, and there was no plan in place. According to Funabashi Yōichi, this idea continues to plague Japan in the conviction that the “people’s spirit” can overcome material deficiencies and a lack of crisis management.44 Unfortunately, the reality of both situations conclusively demonstrates this error in Japanese thinking.
In August 2014, Japan’s Asahi Newspaper revealed letters of support Japanese prime minister Abe Shinzō had sent to the Okunoin Temple at Mount Kōya in Wakayama Prefecture that memorialized Class A and other war criminals. Abe hailed those executed by the Allied powers as “forming the foundation of this nation.”45 The wording of the commemoration made clear the tendentious Japanese reasoning: the Allied war crimes trials of the Japanese were based on hatred and revenge. Abe had been consistent in this message, arguing previously in the National Diet that on the level of domestic law, Japan has no war criminals. The owner of a popular hotel chain in Japan, APA, produced a revisionist book that denies the Nanjing Massacre and emphasizes the message that only Japan has been historically accused of wrongdoing.46 The APA group donates generously to the main conservative lobbying arm of the LDP, the Japan Conference (Nippon Kaigi).
Nowhere, perhaps, are the ambiguous lines of law, war, and empire more blurred than with the historical issues concerning “comfort women.” Over the past twenty years a range of endeavors by various pressure groups in East Asia and North America have pushed different political agendas in a bid to prove that the comfort women were only prostitutes, were all forced by the Japanese military into prostitution against their will, were a mix of both efforts, were all young girls violated by the state, and so forth. The truth of this tragic episode of history lies somewhere in between all these examples with no one single definition satisfying any one party. Historical inquiry posturing as political opinion has created a situation that has devolved to the point that questioning the prevailing politically correct wisdom in some settings has resulted in one scholar in South Korea being charged in criminal and civil court for her research. In the meantime, bilateral relations between Korea and Japan have come to a standstill.47 In search of a way out of this deadlock that has already endured several years, Japanese leaders announced a sudden and decisive political decision in December 2015 with the agreement between Japanese prime minister Abe Shinzō and South Korean president Park Geun-hye concerning the issue of comfort women. This accord acknowledged “involvement of the Japanese military authorities at that time” and stated that the “Government of Japan is painfully aware of responsibilities from this perspective.” Japan committed to contributing a large financial sum to be distributed to the victims by the South Korean government. But the agreement also included a fascinating clause that “the Government of Japan confirms that this issue is resolved finally and irreversibly with this announcement.”48
However, history has no end and is always evolving, as are our interpretations of the past. To declare that history is finished, that a complete and total consensus had been reached, is destined to end in failure.49 This is regrettably what occurred. Declaring that history had reached its final destination invited even more scrutiny of the ultimate historical interpretation that had supposedly been achieved. In true reconciliation, parties need to constantly engage; justice and reconciliation are two different processes. Justice is finite and has a declaration attached. Reconciliation is without end and is based on future behavior as well as the present. History never stops; we cannot put an end to discussions or debate. While we may applaud the Japanese and Korean governments for at least trying to depoliticize colonial and imperial history, this format could not attain its goals. Within moments of its announcement, loud complaints from both sides quickly emerged. A few outspoken South Korean educators have suggested that this form of “anti-Japan tribalism,” where nothing is acceptable, is hurting South Korea internationally.50
One of the main functions behind war crimes tribunals is to manage society after a calamitous event. It is a venue where individuals present proof and make reasoned arguments to arrive at a judgment.51 That verdict is then used as the basis for domestic legal order and employed in foreign relations with other countries. The battle in East Asia is now defined as a Sino-Japanese struggle but also, in part, one between Korea and Japan. And the battleground is the no-man’s-land between memory and history. The fundamental problem centers on the issue that “to speak of a duty of memory is fine, but ‘memory’ may not be something that can be authoritatively fixed by a legal process.”52 Court testimony, archives, and records are evidence but not memory. And once the verdict is rendered, the legal aspects of justice are complete. Following the conclusion of a trial, the historians take over. They organize and interpret the materials bequeathed by a trial to put together a narrative for the people to digest for the future. This involves selection, deletion, and oftentimes trying to summarize a much more complex historical situation into simpler terms for the larger public to understand. The limitations of these processes and the gaps that arise within them confuse and irritate many.
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