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The anniversary
elegy
By Yu Bin
When
the "greatest generation", to borrow Tom Brokaw's
phrase, finally fades away in East Asia's nations,
the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II -
celebrated on August 15 to mark the day when Japan
surrendered - may well be remembered as a turning
point when the region did not move forward into
the future but back toward the past, in both style
and substance.
While commemorations in
Europe were joined by both victors and vanquished,
Asians have gone their separate ways: the Japanese
to Hiroshima, Yasukuni Shrine or Saipan; the
Chinese to Beijing's Marco Polo Bridge, the
Nanjing Massacre Museum or Harbin (where the
Japanese biological warfare Unit 731 was
stationed); and others to Seoul, Hong Kong,
Singapore, Manila, and so on.
The
substance and chemistry of those events also
differ vastly in Europe and Asia. Gatherings at
Normandy, Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin and Dresden
conveyed not only painful reflection but also
heartfelt remorse, reciprocal forgiveness, genuine
reconciliation and a determination not to forget
and repeat the greatest slaughter in human
history. Europe has indeed turned a historical
corner. In sharp contrast, the anniversary year in
Asia has so far witnessed hyper-nationalism,
rising mutual hatred, and intensifying interstate
rivalry.
The agony and irony of
war
There are plenty of reasons why Asians
have not found it easy to become reconciled to the
past, even after 60 years. For one thing, World
War II both began and ended in Asia. It also
lasted longer and was more devastating than the
war in Europe. The ball started rolling in 1931
when Japan seized the three northeastern provinces
of China and turned them into the Japanese colony
of Manchukuo. This was five years before Hitler
sent troops into the Rhineland, eight years before
the official start of World War II in Europe with
the German attack on Poland, and fully 10 years
before Pearl Harbor in 1941. Japan's 1931
annexation of Manchuria was also the beginning of
the end of the Versailles system put in place by
the Western democracies in 1919. When the League
of Nations, the predecessor of the United Nations,
ruled that Japan was the aggressor in the
"Manchuria Incident", Tokyo angrily withdrew from
it in 1933. This "unilateralism" of the Japanese
was echoed and followed by Germany, which withdrew
from the League in 1933. Italy followed in 1937,
Austria in 1938 and Spain in 1939. The rest is
history.
Despite the different durations
of the war - 14 years in Asia (1931-45) versus six
years in Europe (1939-45) - the two theaters were
intimately connected, ironically, by the action
and inaction of the United States. The European
democracies were totally consumed by their own war
and paid little attention to Asia, save a major
campaign by the British in Burma. The United
States, a crucial weight in deciding the final
outcome in both sectors, was still sitting on the
fence. Harry S Truman, then Democratic senator
from Missouri, explicitly expressed the feelings
of many Americans when he said in June 1941, "If
we see that Germany is winning we should help
Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help
Germany and that way let them kill as many [of
each other] as possible, although I don't want to
see Hitler victorious under any circumstances."
[1] In actuality, ever since the 1937 Neutrality
Act the US practiced a policy of "cash and carry".
Belligerents could purchase certain war materials
from the US if they paid cash and carried them
away in their own ships. In short, it was an "MM"
policy of maximizing profit while minimizing
risks.
Even after Germany, Italy and Japan
signed the Tripartite Pact to form the Axis bloc
in September 1940, the only thing FDR (president
Roosevelt) was able to do was "lend and lease"
goods to the European allies, which they were
expected to "return" after the war. In Asia, Japan
remained one of the largest trading partners of
the US, while the Emperor's Imperial Army
devastated China's vast territory. Following the
Japanese army's move into Indochina in the summer
of 1941, the US "accidentally" initiated an oil
embargo against Japan. This "mistake" was
inadvertently made by lower-level bureaucrats who
went ahead with a total stoppage of oil shipments
to Japan when FDR meant only a partial embargo.
Only after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor did the
US have no choice but to declare war on both Japan
and Germany. Thus the resolution of the war in
Europe was hastened by events in Asia.
Fast forward to 1945, when Asia was also
the last to stop fighting. After 50 years of war
with its neighbors and various Western powers in
Asia, the unprecedented military ascendancy of the
Empire of the Sun was finally arrested in 1945,
thanks to the combined efforts of three
continental powers - America, China, and Russia -
plus US atomic weapons. This first war to engulf
the whole of Asia therefore effectively made World
War II a conflict on a truly global scale. The
United States of America, the only real winner of
the war, was able to achieve an unprecedented
global reach in the second half of the 20th
century, thanks to its ideal geostrategic location
and its late entry into the war.
A tale
of two axis powers
When the guns finally
fell silent across Asia, 35 million Chinese had
died, along with 27 million Russians, 10 million
Germans, three million Japanese, 870,000 French,
760,000 British and 600,000 Americans. The manner
in which they died, however, was significantly
different from previous conflicts. Whereas
military operations in Europe were far more
effective and destructive, they were also fought
between two more or less equally equipped and
determined sides. The Germans' relatively high
casualty figure (10 million in six years)
testifies to the severity of the war. By contrast,
Japan's aggression against China was very much a
one-sided slaughter with the Chinese viewed as
easy prey. The huge difference between the Chinese
and Japanese casualties clearly indicates the
asymmetry (Japanese military records show that
some 400,000 Japanese military personnel died in
China out of the total of 1.9 million between 1937
and 1945).
Many of the World War II
casualties were civilians. In Europe, both sides
resorted to the use of deadly force against the
civilian population. (And of course Hitler's
attempted extermination of the Jews killed an
additional six million.) In Asia, before the US
started large-scale air raids against Japanese
cities in March 1945, civilian casualties largely
meant the slaughter of defenseless Chinese by the
Japanese invading army. During the notorious Rape
of Nanking in 1937, the killing and raping spree
went unchecked for three months and an estimated
300,000 Chinese died. [2]
"We'd do
everything for the sake of the emperor, raping,
killing, everything," explained Masayo Enomoto, a
former Japanese soldier (1939-45) in a recent US
TV interview. "We'd march into a village, find the
men and question them as to where they kept their
arms. And when we finished questioning them, we'd
kill them. We were told it was too good to kill
Chinese with our swords. So we used stones,"
recalled Hajime Kondo, another former Japanese
soldier. [3]
The killing and raping in
Nanjing even sickened John Rabe, the leader of the
German Nazi party in the area and head of the
International Safety Zone in Nanking. When he
failed to persuade Japanese military authorities
to stop the massacre, Rabe began to roam the city,
trying to prevent the atrocities himself. He'd go
anywhere raping was taking place. With only his
status as an official of an allied nation, he
would chase Japanese soldiers away from their prey
and on one occasion even bodily lifted a Japanese
soldier off a young girl.
Rabe's diary was
publicized only in 2000. [4] The Japanese wartime
media, however, avidly covered the army's killing
records near Nanking. In one of the most
notorious, two Japanese sublieutenants, Mukai
Toshiaki and Noda Takeshi, went on separate
beheading sprees near Nanjing to see who could
kill 100 men first. The Japan Advertiser in Tokyo
ran their picture under the bold headline,
"Contest to Kill 100 Chinese with Sword Extended
When Both Fighters Exceed Mark - Mukai Scores 106
and Noda 105." [5]
For years after the
war, Japan insisted that its atrocities in China
were "normal" wartime attrition and therefore
different from the Holocaust in Europe. This may
be true. While the SS troopers' "final solution"
of European Jews was systematically done for
efficiency, the killings of Chinese by the
Japanese soldiers were apparently for fun. "We
actually treated them more like things than
people," Ken Yuasa, a Japanese military doctor
(1942-45), recently stated. [6]
In another
category, the Germans' wartime excessiveness was
somewhat balanced by its restraint not to use
chemical and biological weapons against the Allies
for fear of retaliation. There were, nonetheless,
no such restraints for the Japanese, whose
systematic chemical and biological warfare in
China killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese
during the war. At the peak of its production,
Unit 731 was able to produce 600 kilograms of
anthrax per month. A recent study totals at
270,000 the victims of Japanese chemical and
biological warfare in China. [7] To date, the
Chinese people are still living with 200,000
pieces of chemical weapons hurriedly buried all
over China before Japan's surrender. Their
occasional leaking and explosions continue to
injure and kill people in China. [8]
In
Asia, there is also the comfort women issue. The
system, which forced some 200,000 young women into
the Japanese wartime military brothels all over
Asia, was put in place after the 1937 Rape of
Nanking when the random raping spree by Japanese
soldiers alarmed even the Japanese military high
command. For all the crimes the Germans committed
in Europe, there was simply no such equivalent for
the systematic enslaving of hundreds of thousands
of young women. Despite all the sufferings and
humiliations of those young women, one may well
ask the question, what would have happened if
those women had not been "employed" as comfort
women when soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army
were roaming all over Asia? This hypothetical
question may never be answered.
For all
these atrocities between 1931 and 1945, Japanese
documents, publications and official
pronouncements usually described Japan's war on
China as the "Manchurian Incident", Marco Polo
Bridge Incident, Nanjing Incident, etc, as if
Japan had never really "declared" war on China and
without the slightest hint that Japan engineered
them all. Another glossing over of Japan's war of
aggression was to describe the invasion as Japan's
"entrance" into China/Asia. The term, or
justification, seems to miss a crucial difference
between consensual love-making and violent raping,
though both are accomplished by the act of
"entering".
Softer peace and half
justice
No war produces love affairs
between nations, at least not immediately
afterward. It is the way peace is handled that
determines the postwar chemistry. Sixty years
after the war ended, a thoroughly remorseful and
reformed Germany is able, with dignity and
respect, to rejoin the European community of
nations. Meanwhile, Japan is barely on speaking
terms with its neighbors over the issue of
history.
At the heart of the different
fate of the two former Axis powers lies the two
different occupation policies: one multilateral in
Germany and the other unilateral in Japan. After
Germany's surrender, the nation was jointly
occupied and administered by the US and its
European allies, including the former Soviet
Union. The joint occupation, shared responsibility
and mutual constraints ensured a more consistent
de-Nazification process, despite the fact that
Germany was at the center of the Cold War
(1947-91). General George Patton, a legendary
World War II hero and postwar military governor of
Bavaria, was fired by General Dwight Eisenhower
after making comments that the Nazis were nothing
more than a normal political party and his
personal decision to employ some former Nazi
officials for local administration. [9]
In
Japan, however, the occupation by the so-called
"SCAP" (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers)
involved the allies in name only. From the
beginning, MacArthur decided for a variety of
reasons to exempt Emperor Hirohito from any war
guilt and responsibility. During the Tokyo Trials,
MacArthur explicitly instructed that the emperor
be taken off the list of war criminal trials, kept
him away from testifying and later coached wartime
prime minister General Hideki Tojo, with the
latter's full cooperation, to shoulder all
responsibility for the war and to cast the emperor
as a peace-lover.
The truth is that
Hirohito was behind or acquiesced in every major
strategic and military decision/operation:
Manchuria (1931), Shanghai (1937), Nanking (1937),
Pearl Harbor (1941), Unit 731, Kamikaze suicide
bombings (1944), etc. The emperor "is a
cheerleader for the war. At every turn, the
emperor agreed with his ministers and military,"
noted a recent documentary. When the tide of the
war started to turn against the Japanese in 1943,
the emperor encouraged his troops to "rise to the
challenge, make a tremendous effort and achieve a
splendid victory". He even rejected in February
1945 a plea from some Japanese officials to end
the war, thus opening the door for the Americans'
carpet bombing of Japanese cities a month later
and ultimately Hiroshima and Nakasaki. [10]
The remaking, or disinformation, of
Hirohito's wartime record in the postwar years was
thorough and complete. Until his death in 1989,
the emperor was remembered as a helpless
figurehead during Japan's wars with China and the
US who knew nothing of the plan to bomb Pearl
Harbor and had no power to stop atrocities such as
the Rape of Nanking; who brought peace through
surrender; and who was a mild-mannered little man
interested in only marine science and Mickey Mouse
in Disneyland. "It was almost a Hollywood
production," commented Columbia University
historian Carol Gluck on what she called the
"efficient" US "publicity machine". [11]
When the Cold War started in 1947,
MacArthur radically reversed the US occupation
policy - which now lies at the heart of Japan's
current "confusion" over its own historical
behavior in Asia - from the postwar "three-D"
policy (democratization, demilitarization, and
decentralization of Japan's economic system) to
one of releasing wartime leaders and officers and
rearming Japan. Later, neither the Nationalist
government in Taiwan nor the People's Republic of
China were invited to the 1951 San Francisco Peace
Conference, despite the fact that China suffered
the most and longest from the Japanese militarism.
The US's "harder war" (including nuclear weapons)
and "softer peace" toward Japan have sown the
seeds for the current disputes between Japan and
its neighbors over the issue of Japan's wartime
aggression in Asia.
The two different
occupation policies led to startlingly different
results with respect to the past in Germany and
Japan. To date, former Nazi officers have been
systematically chased around the world and brought
to justice. German school books have been purged
of racist references, and the message in German
classrooms is that the end of the war was not a
defeat but the liberation of Germany from a
criminal regime. While no German scholars would
engage in a debate about how many Jews were
actually killed, the mere denial of the Holocaust
remains a criminal offense. Throughout the postwar
decades, the German government and companies have
provided, and continue to provide, financial
assistance to hundreds of thousands of victims of
Nazi Germany. In 1970, West German Chancellor
Willy Brandt fell to his knees before a monument
to the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. No
one requested that he do so: it was the heavy
burden of German guilt that dragged the most
powerful man in Germany to the ground. [12]
Japan is still apologizing today. Nobody,
however, seems to be listening. Nor are any of
Japan's neighbors willing to believe Japan's
"reflection", which is usually followed by more
rhetoric and actions by some high-level officials
to beautify and whitewash Japan's history of
aggression. Since the 1980s, the Japanese
government has gradually and persistently revised
the nation's history textbooks in order to
minimize its responsibility and maximize its own
suffering. The result? Almost all Japanese under
the age of 50 know that atomic bombs were dropped
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki but have little idea of
why the bombs fell on Japan.
At the onset
of the 21st century, all of these developments in
Japan have borne their logical "fruits" - the
overwhelming right-turn in the Japanese political
and social environment. Only 10 years ago, at the
50th anniversary of the war, the possibility of
Japan's acquiring nuclear arms and revising its
official renunciation of war was unthinkable.
Nowadays, both are either in active consideration
or preparation. In the 1990s, Japanese politicians
still kept a low profile for their visits to
Yasukuni, where numerous Japanese war criminals
are enshrined. In the new century, lawmakers and
prime ministers openly rush to visit the shrine,
most in their official capacity. For the 60th
anniversary, the two largest conservative
newspapers, the Yomiuri Shimbun and the Sankei
Shimbun, are sponsoring a 200,000-person visit to
Yasukuni. On August 2, the Japanese parliament
passed a resolution that plays down Japan's
militarist past, omitting the words "invasion" and
"colonial rule", which were put into a similar
resolution 10 years earlier. On the same day, the
Japanese cabinet passed the 2005 Defense White
Paper zeroing in the tremendous growth in Chinese
military power, and right-wing Fusosha Publishing
Inc put school textbooks on sale.
Japan's
uneasiness with its pacifist image could even be
felt on the nation's most solemn Hiroshima day
(August 6). Although the commemoration went
through the usual rituals, the unmistakable
national impulse was to shed Japan's postwar
pacifism, go ahead with constitutional revision
(remove or reinterpret Article 9) and toy with the
idea of acquiring nuclear weapons. In a broad
sense, the symbolism of Hiroshima is no longer
viewed as important or even desirable for Japan
now. An editorial in the Yomiuri Shimbun went so
far as to call it "empty" and to urge that Japan's
anti-nuclear movement "should reflect reality".
Indeed, the tone and trend in Japan is to avoid
these "humiliating" anniversaries. [13] In their
place, politicians and the general public are
embracing another anniversary: the centennial
celebration of Japan's victory in the 1904-05
Russo-Japanese War. "At that time Japan's spirit
was very strong but it went down after World War
II," former prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone told
a crowd at Tokyo Bay in May. "We should remember
Japan's spirit at that time and we should build a
new Japan," he urged. Defense Agency
director-general Yoshinori Ono also expressed hope
that the anniversary would "have the nation,
especially the young generation who will lead the
future of Japan, realize the importance of loving
and defending our country and thus to make a
contribution to the ... awareness of defense in
general". [14] Both officials, however, forgot
that the war was fought in China and Korea with
tremendous damages to the local peoples.
Thus, on the 60th anniversary of the end
of the war, Japan remains unmoved, unrepentant and
reluctant to face the historical fact that it
invaded, occupied and brutalized its neighbors to
an extent that no Western imperialist powers had
ever done. Many in Asia still wonder how and why
so many Asian peoples were slaughtered in order to
be "liberated" from the rule of "white
imperialism", a common justification for Japanese
actions both during the war and now.
The rise of Asian
nationalism
There was a general rise of
nationalist feeling across East Asia during much
of 2005 when the region and the world were
commemorating the 60th anniversary of the end of
World War II. Much of this originated inside Japan
where political elites have consistently
whitewashed history. As a result, anti-Japan
sentiment and activities escalated in China, South
Korea and other Asian nations. Ironically, the
more Asian nations have expressed their opposition
to Japan's effort to whitewash history, the more
revisionist Japan has become. In the midst of all
these issues over history and its interpretations,
territorial disputes in the region are also
growing. These include Japan-China disputes over
the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands and demarcation of the
Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in the East China
Sea; Japan-South Korea over the Tokdo/Takeshima
Islets; Japan-Russia over the Southern
Kuriles/"Northern Territories;" and to a lesser
degree Japan-Taiwan over the Diaoyu islands. All
this is taking place against a backdrop of the
strengthening US-Japan alliance. In February, at
the 2+2 conference in Washington, Japan agreed for
the first time to extend its geographic military
protection to Taiwan.
As all these thorny
issues of history and territory between Japan and
its neighbors are heating up, Tokyo has also
launched a determined effort to acquire a
permanent UN Security Council seat. While nothing
is wrong with Japan's desire to address the issue
of "taxation without representation", the timing
and manner simply do not work and have led to
another vicious cycle of mutual misperception and
resentment among East Asian nations. Thus the more
Japan struggles to get itself onto the UN Security
Council, the stronger the effort to avert it in
the region, leading to still more resentment
inside Japan against its neighbors.
Why
does Japan pay so little attention to Asian
opinions? How come so many Japanese policies,
domestic and foreign, appear calculated to offend
its neighbors, precisely when Japan needs the
region for its bid for the Security Council seat
and to be accepted as a "normal" state? Is Asia no
longer important for Japan, the second largest
economy with the fourth largest military spending
in the world? How far will Japan travel along this
trajectory of allying itself with the distant US
while being nasty with neighbors? When will Japan
"return" its attention to Asia, for what purpose,
and by what means? The last time Japan massively
and aggressively "advanced" into the Asian
continent as a modernized and Westernized "normal"
state, it began with the 1894-95 war with China.
Is history returning to the starting point of a
centennial cycle?
These questions, among
others, are difficult to answer due to the vastly
different international and regional environment.
A glimpse into the Japanese sense of identity,
however, may offer some clues regarding how and
why Japan pursues certain policies. Behind Japan's
extraordinary rise to modernize and Westernize is
a key issue of Japan's mixed and twisted national
identity. In the 19th century, the opening of
Japan by US Commodore Matthew Perry forever
changed Japan's perception of and policies toward
China. The "Central Kingdom", which used to be a
useful if not superior neighbor for the purpose of
cultural and commercial exchange, was now to be
defied, defeated and dismembered for the pride and
prosperity of the Japanese nation. And China
happened to be such easy prey after the Opium War
(1839-43). Japan's military victories against
China and others furthered its self-confidence and
sense of racial superiority, which at least
partially explains the violent behavior of
Japanese soldiers in Asia during World War II and
its reluctance and refusal to apologize to Asian
nations regarding its wartime atrocities.
At the end of the 20th century, Japan's
perception of its national identity continues to
be one of "above and away" from Asia. According to
Japanese political scientist Shin'ichi Kitaoka,
Japan is "a country that sits on the outskirts of
Western civilization but continues to thrive as an
independent civilization not completely
overwhelmed by Western culture." [15] Nowhere does
this statement offer any explicit idea regarding
where Japan is located in both the physical and
cultural worlds. The only message from the quote
is one of intangibility ranging from abstraction
to emptiness. Asia simply does not exist according
to this Japanese scholar. Western nations,
particularly the United States, are also
contributing to Japan's identity crisis. In his
famous treatise The Clash of Civilizations,
Samuel Huntington singles out Japan as an
independent and separate "civilization", along
with the West, Islam, Confucian, Hindu,
Slavic-Orthodox, Latin America, and Africa. The
special treatment of Japan makes little sense when
the whole of Africa is defined as a separate
civilization despite the numerous religious and
ethnic groupings there. [16] One may understand
Japan's special place in the minds of Americans
based on America's perception of Japan over the
past 100 years as a favorite pupil of
modernization and Westernization, except for the
four-year "anomaly" of the Pacific War.
Even with its obsession for Westernization
at the expense of its Asian identity, Japan still
needs to decide which "West" to join: the
Europeans' more secularized, liberal and pacifist
version or America's more conservative, religious,
and from time to time, more militaristic one? The
American legacies, however, are by no means fixed.
The US itself is deeply divided in its society and
politics over how to relate to the rest of the
world. Japan's elite would do well to remember
that it was the United States that forced Japan to
adopt a pacifist foreign policy for much of the
20th century, which has so far benefited both
nations as well as the world.
Some
modest proposals
Regardless of which "West"
or which "America" Japan chooses to identify with,
the world is irreversibly moving into the 21st
century, in which distinctions among victims,
victors, and vanquished of the war will come to
signify less and less in the real world.
What happened in the past cannot be
changed, though it has been constantly
reinterpreted. For the sake of the future, Japan
really needs to face its own past while
understanding that forgiveness cannot be demanded
or even expected but must be earned with heartfelt
remorse and concrete steps toward reconciliation.
Japan's "reflection" on its past should also move
beyond an obsession with what happened and look at
why things happened. This should be done without
blaming the Americans for dropping atomic bombs or
accusing other nations that their governments are
said to have killed more of their own in the past.
These are totally different things from what Japan
did in Asia in World War II. At a minimum,
Americans did not drop the atomic bombs without
reason. And Chinese troops have never "advanced"
into Tokyo.
Beyond history, Japan should
try to find a way to live with its neighbors, no
matter how "Westernized" it perceives itself to
be. There are limits to how much Japan can
continue to ignore or get tough with its neighbors
in East Asia. In its long-term interactions with
neighbors, Japan as a "normal" state does not only
imply the right to use force but also the ability
and willingness to make peace and reach a
compromise with others, as Germany has done in the
past 60 years. The frequent shrine visits by
Japan's ruling political elite are justified with
and defended by a claim of exercising democracy.
Democracy without moderation and a stable middle
ground, however, is perhaps dangerous for both
itself and others, as were the cases of the Weimar
Republic in Germany and Japan's Taisho democracy
in the 1920s. [17] Both had infrastructures
typical of a parliamentary democracy. Neither,
however, survived the tidal waves of extreme
nationalism, militarism and racism in the
1930s.
When US president Woodrow Wilson
declared his intention to make the world safe for
democracies at Versailles, he obviously failed to
see the other side of the coin, that is, an
equally important task was to make democracy safe
for the world. And the rest is history. Sixty
years after the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, why
do Japan's neighbors still feel unsafe with such a
"pacifist" democracy, whose ruling elite
increasingly insists that nothing was wrong with
what Japan did in the first half of the last
century except Japan was defeated? But if nothing
was wrong then, will Japan do it again? In that
sense, what Wilson failed to see in 1919 and
MacArthur failed to do in 1952 (end of US
occupation of Japan) continue to haunt East Asia,
as well as the US in the 21st century.
Regardless of what it did in the past, the
United States is perhaps the only nation in the
world that Japan may still listen to on the
subject of history. In a broader sense, the US as
the sole superpower of the world should not only
exercise its military power and political
influence, but also strive for moral authority and
ethical restraints over itself and others. In this
regard, a democracy should be held to higher, not
lower, moral standards regarding both past and
present issues. This is particularly imperative in
the era of weapons of mass destruction. There are
therefore limits to how far Washington should play
off one Asian power against the other at the
expense of a just international system. A more
balanced approach to Beijing and Tokyo is in the
long-term interests of Washington, as well as of
the region and the world.
Yu Bin
is a professor of political science at Wittenberg
University in the US, senior research associate
for the Shanghai Institute of American Studies,
and visiting scholar at Fudan University in
Shanghai. He is also a regular contributor to
Comparative Connections. He can be reached at
byu@wittenberg.edu
Notes
[1] New York Times, June 24, 1941, p. 7.
[2] Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking:
The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
(Penguin Books, 1997).
[3] Cited from
Hirohito, Emperor of War, Discovery Channel,
August 6, 2005.
[4] John Rabe, The Good
Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe
(Vintage, 2000).
[5] Iris Chang, The
Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World
War II (Penguin Books, 1997).
[6]
Hirohito, Emperor of War, Discovery Channel,
August 6, 2005.
[7] Xinhua, "Zhuanjia:
qinhua rijun xijunzhan zhishao danhai yu 27wan
zhongguoren [Experts: at least 270,000 Chinese
fell victims to biological warfare by the invading
Japanese forces]," August 9, 2005,
http://politics.people.com.cn/GB/1026/36033391.html.
[8] For more information regarding Japan's
chemical and biological warfare in China, see
Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese
Biological Warfare, 1932_45 and the American
Cover_Up, revised edition (Routledge, 2001);
Daniel Barenblatt, A Plague upon Humanity: The
Secret Genocide of Axis Japan's Germ Warfare
Operation (HarperCollins, 2004); Hal Gold, Unit
731Testimony (Tuttle Publishing, 2004).
[9] See
www.historylearningsite.co.uk/george_patton.htm.
[10] Hirohito, Emperor of War, Discovery
Channel, August 6, 2005.
[11] Hirohito,
Emperor of War, Discovery Channel, August 6, 2005.
Also see Herbert Bix, Hirohito and the Making of
Modern Japan (HarperCollins Publishers, 2000).
[12] For a sharp comparison of the postwar
policies in Germany and Japan, see Foreign Report,
"Japan, Germany and War Guilt," Jane's Defense
Weekly, June 15, 2005, Internet version.
[13] Norimitsu Onishi, "Mourning Pacifism
in Hiroshima," New York Times, August 8, 2005;
Joichi Ito, "Nagasaki and Hiroshima: An
Anniversary To Forget," New York Times, August 8,
2005; Kazuo Ogoura, "Don't Judge Japan Only by Its
Past," International Herald Tribune, July 22,
2005.
[14] Mie Kohiyama, "Japanese Urged
To Seize Spirit of Victory Over Russia on
Centennial," Agence France-Presse (AFP), May 27,
2005.
[15] Ito Ken'ichi, Nishio Kanji,
Kitaoka Shin'ichi, Japan's Identity: Neither the
West nor the East (Tokyo: The Japan Forum on
International Relations, Inc., February 1999), p.
1. Excerpted from the Japanese version, Nihon no
Aidentiti: Seiyou Demo Nai, Touyou Demo Nai
(Tokyo: Foresto Shuppan, 1999). Cited in Michael
J. Green, Japan's Reluctant Realism: Foreign
Policy Challenges in an Era of Uncertain Power
(Palgrave, 2003), p. 27.
[16] Foreign
Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 7 (Summer 1993).
[17] For debates regarding the more
aggressive behavior of certain democracies, see
Fareed Zakaria, "The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,"
Foreign Affairs (Nov./Dec. 1997); Jack L. Snyder,
From Voting to Violence: Democratization and
Nationalist Conflict (W. W. Norton & Company,
2000).
(Copyright 2005 Yu Bin) |
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