Japan’s Historical Amnesia

Two years ago the Justice Department began adding to its list of suspected war criminals the names of Japanese who are believed to have taken part in atrocities during World War II. The list is used, among other things, to bar undesirable aliens from entering the United States. It has long held the names of Germans and others who were involved in genocidal Nazi activities or otherwise implicated in war crimes. But for reasons that are unclear, Washington had not previously sought to identify Japanese suspects, several hundred of whom are thought by one private research group to still be alive. Now there is a U.S. request for cooperation from Japan’s government, and it has met with silence. Eli Rosenbaum, the director of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, says Japan has refused to provide even birth dates for the dozens of Japanese suspects now on the list.

This is an unusual way for an ally to act, but it is also consistent with Japan’s institutionalized reluctance to acknowledge the extent of the crimes committed by its armed forces and secret police before and during World War II. Germany, or at least the West German government before reunification in 1991, forthrightly brought before its people the harsh truths about the crimes committed during the Nazi era. Japan, in part because right-wing nationalists continue to wield strong political influence, has largely evaded that responsibility.

Japanese textbooks for decades all but ignored the aggression and brutalities committed in Korea, China, the Philippines and other occupied Asian countries. Even today, the texts treat wartime activities obliquely. It wasn’t until 1992 that Tokyo finally admitted that thousands of Asian women had been dragooned as sex slaves by Japanese troops. A Japanese translation of the American author Iris Chang’s “The Rape of Nanking,” documenting the 1937 orgy of mass killings of as many as 300,000 Chinese, was scheduled to be published in Tokyo next month. Now publication has been indefinitely postponed, after right-wing extremists made threats against the publisher.

George Santayana’s well-known warning that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it is universally valid. But Japan’s problem isn’t so much that it can’t remember its past but that successive postwar generations have largely been denied the chance even to learn that past. Japan’s reluctance to honestly confront its recent history continues to be an insult to its victims and a grievous disservice to its own people.