According to Washington Post reports
out of Tokyo, the Clinton Administration promised in March that plans
for commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II
would be toned down in deference to Japanese sensitivities. "We
have assured Japan that nobody in the US government or the military
will use the term 'V-J Day' this year," an unidentified official
said. A neutral term like "the end of the war" would be used,
avoiding any reference to victory over Japan.
Back in Washington, a damage control team swung into action. A State
Department spokesman assured Air Force Magazine that the US government
had "no policy to not use the phrase 'V-J Day.'" The effort
to set the record straight, however, was conspicuously limp until complaints
by veterans' groups forced the issue. Eventually, "administration
underlings" were blamed.
This clumsy episode reminds us that World War II is still a sore subject
in Japan and also that some people in this country are determined to
make the memory of it as inoffensive as possible to the Japanese. Many
in Japan believe their nation was a victim, not the aggressor. Conservative
groups in the Japanese parliament, reflecting a position of considerable
public popularity, are blocking a proposal by Prime Minister Tomiichi
Murayama that Japan apologize for invading other Asian nations and killing
millions of people.
* In May 1994, Justice Minister Shigeto Nagano was dismissed after saying
that the 1937 "Rape of Nanking" -- where the death toll of
civilians killed by Japanese troops exceeded the combined total from
Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- was a hoax. In August, another cabinet minister,
Shin Sakurai, Director-General of the Environment Agency, was forced
to resign for saying that the subjugated nations of Asia had benefited
from the Japanese occupation.
* In August 1994, Ryutaro Hashimoto, Minister of International Trade
and Industry, declared, "I can't think that the war with the United
States, England, France, and Holland was aggression."
* In January 1995, a Tokyo news magazine, Marco Polo, was shut down
after denying, in an article titled "There Were No Nazi Gas Chambers," that
the Holocaust ever happened.
* Popular historian Noboru Kojima says that "Japan is too eager
to nervously apologize when anyone complains about the war." He
questions whether, for example, the "comfort women" dragged
away by Japanese soldiers were not just prostitutes.
Not everyone in Japan thinks this way. Otherwise, Ministers Nagano and
Sakurai would not have been driven from office and Marco Polo might still
be publishing. Recently, textbooks used in Japanese schools have begun
to acknowledge that Japan waged a war of aggression, but the sneak attack
on Pearl Harbor gets only passing mention.
On this and other aspects of the war, Japan remains in denial mode.
Former Cabinet Minister Seisuke Okuno, who heads a group of 161 members
of parliament opposing the resolution of apology, says that if anybody
owes somebody an apology for World War II conduct, it is the United States.
In March 1995, Nagasaki Mayor Hitoshi Motoshima declared the US use of
the atomic bomb in 1945 to have been a war crime on a par with Germany's
program of genocide against the Jews. "I think that the atomic bombings
were one of the two greatest crimes against humanity in the twentieth
century, along with the Holocaust," he said.
Mayor Motoshima has been upset ever since the Smithsonian Institution
canceled an exhibition that would have used the Enola Gay, the
B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, as a prop in a political
horror show. As originally planned, the exhibition portrayed the Japanese
as defending their culture against Western imperialism in a war that
culminated, needlessly, in the use of atomic weapons. Mayor Motoshima
and his colleagues in Nagasaki want to bring an atomic bomb exhibit of
their own to the United States to do the job that the Smithsonian has
dropped. Such a program will be welcome, no doubt, as part of the "National
Teach-In on Hiroshima" that academic activists are trying to organize
at US colleges and universities.
The tragedy of the war did not begin when bombs fell on Japan. It started
with Japan's campaign of conquest and atrocity to establish a "Greater
East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere." The US entered the war when attacked
without warning at Pearl Harbor. Ultimately, the war Japan started spread
devastation throughout Asia and most of the Pacific. By 1945, Japan had
no hope of winning but refused to surrender. Between April 1 and June
30, the US took 48,000 casualties in the battle for Okinawa alone. To
hold the home islands and preserve the imperial regime, Japan was prepared
to expend a force of 3.5 million troops, thousands of kamikaze aircraft,
and a mobilized population. In making his decision to use the atomic
bomb, President Truman considered the probable losses if an invasion
led to "an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other." The
mission of the Enola Gay on August 6 was a military action taken
to bring the war to an end.
World War II does not call for neutral interpretation. There was a right
side and a wrong side. The right side won. That is what we remember this
anniversary year -- no conciliatory adjustments are required -- on V-E
Day, May 9, and on V-J Day, August 15.
Copyright Air Force Association. All rights reserved.
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