With members of APHAFIC, after the talk
The significance of the 70th year of the end of the Asia-Pacific War - Towards Reconciliation and Peace in East Asia
Thank you APHAFIC, the Association for Preserving Historical
Accuracy of Foreign Invasions in China, for having me at this13th annual
meeting and dinner. It is a great honour and privilege to be here.
I would like to start by reading you a poem by Joy Kogawa, a
Japanese Canadian author and poet known for her novel “Obasan.” This poem was
recited by another Japanese Canadian writer at the solidarity rally in Ottawa
in December 2011 to mark the 1000th “Wednesday Demonstration” held in front of
the Japanese Embassy in Seoul to call for justice for the victims of wartime
Japanese military sexual slavery.
The
whole world knows about the Holocaust in Europe.
The
whole world will soon know about a holocaust in Asia.
In
Germany it is a crime to deny the Holocaust.
In
the Land of the Rising Shame, such light does not yet shine.
My background
I am a resident of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, but as my
name may suggest, I am originally from Japan. I was born in Tokyo in July 1965,
twenty years after the end of WWII, and I grew up there as a child of a
mechanical engineer father and a full-time mother.
In 1982, When I was 17, I got a scholarship to attend Lester B.
Pearson College of the Pacific, in Victoria, BC. It was an international high
school, part of the United World College network, which aims to deliver education
to promote international understanding. I spent the last two years of high
school there, Grade 11 and 12.
There I lived and studied with two hundred students from over 70
countries from all around the world. I had roommates from different parts of
Canada including a native Canadian, as well as people from Swaziland, Northern
Ireland, Singapore, and Wales.
The biggest lesson that I learned at that college was that I knew
almost nothing about history, especially when it came to Imperial Japan’s
war-time atrocities committed against fellow Asian nations and their people. I
learned about this ignorance from my friends who had come from those victimized
nations.
A good friend from Indonesia told me about romusha. I wondered why she would know a word that was not commonly
used even in Japan. Romusha means
“labourers” and refers to the millions of Indonesian men and women whom the
Japanese Army mobilized for forced labour during its occupation of what was
then the Dutch East Indies. Many of them died from the severe working and
living conditions.
My roommate and best friend for life from Singapore told me about
how cruelly the Japanese Army treated Chinese residents in Malaya, including
incidents in which a Japanese soldier would throw a baby in the air to then
impale it on his bayonet.
I was shocked, almost to the point of disbelief, to learn about
this history from my friends and by the fact that I had never been taught or
heard about this in Japan. What I had learned about wartime history in Japan were
things such as the bombing by the United States of Japanese cities, including
the atomic-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I also learned about the wartime
and post-war poverty in Japan, and the “sacrifices” of Japanese soldiers
overseas. It was only later that I came to know that Japanese schools and
public media were emphasizing what Japan suffered during the war, not what
Japan did to other countries.
In hindsight, this high school experience set the foundation for
what I do and who I am now – writing, speaking, and educating for peace and
justice, and trying to encourage myself and others to transcend national bias
in learning and teaching history.
Asia-Pacific War 70th –
Significance
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the
Asia-Pacific War, or, I should say, the defeat and collapse of Imperial Japan.
It was not just the end of 15-years of aggressive war and invasion of China or 3
years and 8 months of war against the United States, Great Britain, Netherlands,
and others; it was the end of the Empire of Japan, which had been continually
expanding since the end of the 19th century, shortly after the
country opened itself to the rest of the world and followed in the footsteps of
Western colonial powers. The empire lasted over 70 years, just as long as the
time that has passed since the end of the war. So when we look back at those
years, we should look back at those 70 plus years of Japanese expansionist policy
in Asia as a whole including Japan’s colonial rule of Taiwan from 1895, and
Korea from 1910.
However, much of war memory in Japan seems to be confined with
their war against the US. Many in Japan think that they only lost the war
against the US, without ever thinking about having been defeated by China and
its people’s resistance. I find this similar to how many in the US do not
believe that they lost the Vietnam War.
The US dominance of the Japanese war memory was convenient for the
US, which likes to think that it was the primary victor in both the Pacific and
European theatres of World War II. This made it easier for the US to control
Japanese minds during the post-war occupation within the Cold War framework. This
notion also contributed to the Japanese post-war thinking that they are safe
and secure as long as they obey the United States, even if they don’t regain
the trust and friendship of the countries that they victimized, such as China
and Korea. As a result, and with the intensification of such thinking by the
current LDP government, Japan finds itself isolated in East Asia.
In Japan, or maybe even in the United States, it is commonly
believed that Japan’s war with the Allied Nations started at Pearl Harbor, when
the Japanese Navy launched a surprise aerial attack on the US Naval base in
Hawaii early in the morning of December 7. Everybody knows of Pearl Harbor, but
it is only one side of the story. Not many people in Japan know that the war
started in Southeast Asia at the same time, actually about an hour earlier,
with the Japanese Army’s surprise attack on British forces at Kota Bahru in
Malaysia. This may seem like a minor difference, but paying attention only to
the war against the US misses the essence of what this war was really about.
The true purpose of Japan’s war from December 1941 was not to take
on the United States but to get access to resources in Southeast Asian
countries and continue its military expansion into China and other regions.
Japan launched these attacks on the pretext of the war being to liberate the
Asian people from the Western colonial powers, but the reality was that Japan
replaced those Western powers as an even harsher colonial ruler.
This must be all well-known to you, but that is not the case in
Japan. And on this 70th anniversary, I feel more than ever that it
is critical for Japan and its people to fill the gap in historical knowledge
and consciousness, in order to get on the same page with its Asian neighbours,
or to become true friends with them. But of course, I myself am still learning,
still trying to pursue the truth.
A-bomb survivor’s apology in Malaysia
I came to a full realization of the true nature of Japan’s war
against the Allied nations when I travelled to Malaysia and Singapore last
summer with Nobuyoshi Takashima, a professor from Japan who has been going to
the region for the past 4 decades to research and document Japanese atrocities
in the area, particularly the killing of tens or hundreds of thousands of
Chinese people there.
On this trip, there was another realization. I sensed that there was
widespread sentiment throughout Asia that the U.S. atomic-bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki saved and liberated the people of Asia from Imperial Japan. It was
perceived as a gift from Heaven. I went to several war memory sites and
interviewed some of the Chinese people in the region who experienced Japanese
occupation, and understood that they had this perception.
One elderly Chinese community leader in Malaysia said that Japan
surrendered because they feared that “the next target of US atomic bombing might
be in Tokyo.” A medical doctor in Singapore who had been in Malaysia as a child
said that the atomic-bombing “ended the war early.” On the war victims monument
at a Chinese school in Penang in Malaysia it states that with the atomic-bombing
of Japan, “the nation’s shame and the family’s vengeance were washed away”, (国の恥と家の仇は川の流れとともに東へ流れ去った).” Both the National Museum of Singapore and the
Old Ford Factory Museum, which remembers the surrender of Percival’s British forces
to Yamashita’s Japanese army on February 15, 1942, use the image of the
atomic-bombing and the huge mushroom cloud as a symbol of liberation from Japanese
oppression.
Such views were sobering to me, and should also be to most
Japanese. Perhaps they are difficult to accept for atomic-bomb victims. But
then I learned from Professor Takashima that there was once a Japanese
atomic-bomb victim from Hiroshima who came on one of his education tours to
Malaysia.
She was the late Suzuko Numata, who passed away in 2011, at the age
87. She was 22 years old when she was exposed to the atomic-bombing and she had
to have her left leg amputated. Despite much hardship, not just physical, but also
society’s discrimination and prejudice against her, she became a teacher and from
the 1980s she was an active international storyteller for peace and anti-war.
In late 1987, she was shocked to learn that an army unit from Hiroshima,
the 11th Infantry Regiment of the 5th Division, committed
massacres against Chinese residents in Negri Sembilan, Malaysia, as early as
March 1942, shortly after Japanese occupation started. In the following year, 1988,
a Japanese civic group arranged for six survivors of the massacre of Chinese in
Malaysia to come and visit Hiroshima and meet atomic-bomb survivors including
Suzuko.
A newspaper then reported that when they dedicated flowers
together at the Atomic Bomb memorial monument, one of the atomic-bomb survivors
condemned the United States for dropping the bomb, and that was challenged by
one of the six survivors from Malaysia. He said, “If Japan had not started the war
of aggression, the United States would not have dropped the bomb.” This
experience led to Suzuko’s decision to visit Malaysia in the following year.
In March 1989, Suzuko joined Professor Takashima’s annual tour with
other participants from Japan. One day during the tour, they were at a
gathering with about 100 local Chinese residents at a town called Titi in Negri
Sembilan, close to where it is said that 1,474 residents were massacred and the
whole village burned down on March 18, 1942. The local host invited speakers
from both sides, and Suzuko immediately volunteered. What she said took
Takashima and others by surprise.
Suzuko said:
“I am from Hiroshima, the past headquarters of the Japanese Army,
which killed innocent people, your family members, one after another, as though
they were insects. I did not know the army unit from Hiroshima committed
atrocities in Malaysia. When I learned about it last year, I thought I had to
come to here. I wanted to personally apologize to you. Everyone, I am very
sorry. I ask for your forgiveness.”
Professor Takashima was at the back of the room and did not see
that coming. When Suzuko gave her apology, everybody in the meeting room stood
up and ran up to her. Takashima did not know what was going on. But a little
later, the person interpreting for Suzuko went over to Professor Takashima and
told him that what the local residents were saying to her,
“How
courageous of you to come all the way from Japan when you only had one leg
because of the atomic-bombing!”
“I
have long wanted to hear such words from Japanese people,”
“You
are a victim yourself. But I am touched to hear your words.”
After that, Suzuko went back to Hiroshima and convinced fellow
atomic-bomb survivors that it would be impossible to build any level of solidarity
with Asian friends if they only talked about what they suffered. Since then,
she would always include perspectives from the victimized Asian nations’ whenever
she gave talks about her atomic bomb experience to young people.
Suzuko’s story of transformation offers us much to think about. I
thought, among all Japanese, atomic-bomb survivors would be the last group of
people to expect such apology to come from. But Suzuko apologized. She probably
knew she did not have to. But she knew more than many people what it was like
to be a victim of a war atrocity. And she took the responsibility of the army
unit from her home town on her shoulders. She chose to do that.
Maybe at some stage in the past, she had heard an apology for the
atomic-bombing from an American citizen who did not drop the bomb and knew what
a healing effect it had on her. Now that she is gone, it is impossible to know,
but her story makes me think. What is an apology? What is reconciliation? How does
each of us take responsibility for the deeds of an individual or group, a
region or a nation that we are associated with? It is another key question to
be asked in the 70th anniversary, at a stage when few people who
directly experienced the war still survive, and we must inherit the memory and the
lesson of the war without depending on the survivors.
Japan’s current denial of history and its remilitarization
In Professor Takashima’s article about Suzuko, he wrote:
A
quarter of a century after Suzuko’s visit to Malaysia, we can hardly say that
the change that she wanted to bring to Japan has penetrated widely into society
as a whole. We must continue our efforts patiently and steadily.
Today, as Takashima says, much of Japan is oblivious to what an
aggressive, imperial, and colonial power Japan was throughout the seven decades
leading up to 1945, and the uncountable crimes and human rights violations it
committed during that time against people in its colonies and occupied
territories, including war atrocities like the Nanjing Massacre, Unit 731,
military sexual slavery, forced labour, and abuse of POWs.
And that ignorance is being reinforced and history is further being
distorted in Japan under the government of Shinzo Abe, with his first term from
September 2006 to September 2007, and the second term from December 2012 to the
present.
Abe is by far the worst Prime Minister Japan has had where the
denial of history is concerned. He is known for his slogan “Departure from the
Post-War Regime.” In this, he rejects the equations that shaped the post-war
Japan, such as the July 1945 Potsdam Declaration, and the new Constitution of
Japan of November 1946 that demilitarized and democratized Japan, and the 1946 –
48 International Military Tribunal for the Far East that held Japan’s military
and political leaders accountable for war crimes, except Emperor Hirohito.
In recent years, Abe has been particularly known around the world
for his denial of the use of force in the mobilization of women into the military
sexual slavery, and the very notion of sexual slavery itself.
70 years after Japan accepted the Potsdam Declaration and
surrendered, Abe still seems to be resisting it. In a recent debate with Japan
Communist Party’s leader Kazuo Shii, Abe shocked the country by saying that he
had not read the Potsdam Declaration thoroughly and refused to answer when Shii
asked him whether he thinks Japan’s war was wrong or not. It was significant
that Abe’s wife Akie visited the Yasukuni Shrine around the same time.
Abe and his LDP/Komeito government is now trying to pass legislation
that will destroy the very heart of Article 9 of the Constitution, the clause
that stipulates the renunciation of war and war potential, by expanding the capabilities
of the the Self Defense Forces outside of Japan under the name of the “exercise
of the right to collective self-defense” with its ally the United States.
This summer, Abe is planning to issue a special statement to mark
the 70th anniversary of the ending of the war, but this debate with
Shii gives us a good preview of what the statement is going to be. He wants to
downplay the remorse over Japan’s aggressive war and his apology for it, if
there is going to be one at all. He wants to stress “future orientation,” by which
he means Japan’s readiness to be a more active military presence in the world
as an US ally, under his slogan “proactive pacifism,” using the supposed threat
of China as a pretext for military expansion.
Abe wanted to revise the Kono Statement of 1993 and the Murayama
Statement of 1995, but with pressure from the US, China, and Korea not to do so,
he says he adheres to the statements of apology by past prime ministers, but we
all know that he does not sincerely think this way.
Abe is also a destroyer of the education formulated in post-war
Japan. He revised the Fundamental Law of Education in 2006 to promote
patriotism and to dilute the law’s core anti-war principles, which were based
on a critical reflection of Japan’s war of aggression. He strengthens
government influence on children’s textbooks so that Japan-centred and
pro-government views are emphasized and description of the history of Japan’s
aggression against fellow Asian nations is downplayed.
Japan’s renewed war crime
The late Shuichi Kato, who was a prominent anti-war public
intellectual, once said the following to young people in Japan:
The
young are not responsible for the past wrongdoing of their country, but this
does not mean that they do not need to be engaged. The young need to be engaged
with history. The purpose of studying history lies in, for example, an active
effort to examine whether the kind of discrimination and prejudice, which
caused the Nanjing Massacre in the old days, still exists today. The postwar
generation is responsible for learning from history and making sure never to
wage war again. It is responsible for the present and the future.
But what Abe and his colleagues are doing is the exactly opposite.
He is denying or downplaying history, hurting the surviving aging victims of
military sexual slavery and other war crimes, and their descendants.
What Abe, his right-wing supporters, media and many in Japan have
been doing, such as denial of coercion in the military sexual slavery, are, to
me, a renewed round of war crimes, committed every day, today --- the crime of denial
of war-related atrocities.
This is not about the past. This is the present. And I think we,
Japanese nationals who allow such history deniers to dominate and represent the
country should be held responsible. I realize that many in this room are
Chinese American people whose lives or whose family or relatives’ lives have
been affected by the deeds of Imperial Japan.
For this round of secondary war crimes that Abe and other history
deniers in Japan are committing, I apologise. I am just a regular citizen and
in no position to represent the country, but as a Japanese national, and a
voter, I am deeply ashamed and feel personally responsible. I am very sorry.
And I know that saying sorry isn’t enough. As a writer, speaker,
and educator I want to continue to work with like-minded people and groups in
North America, Japan and beyond, who are committed to preserving the accuracy
of history like you are, so that historical truth and justice prevail, and
trust and reconciliation can be nurtured among us, between the people of Japan,
and the people of fellow Asian nations, the United States, and beyond.
Thank you and I would now love to take any questions and comments
that you may have.
 |
| Satoko Oka Norimatsu |
Satoko Oka NORIMATSU is Director of Peace Philosophy Centre, a peace-education organization in Vancouver, Canada. She
is also an editor of Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (japanfocus.org) and Director of Vancouver Save Article 9. She writes
and speaks on topics such as peace and justice, war memory and education in East Asia, the peace constitution of Japan, Japan's
war responsibilities, US-Japan relations, US military bases in Okinawa, and nuclear issues. She is co-author with
Gavan McCormack of Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012). This
book has been translated into Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. She is also a co-author with filmmaker Oliver Stone and historian
Peter Kuznick of Let's Talk About War - Let's Talk About What War Really Is (Kinyobi, 2014).
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