Peace Treaty Locked Japan Into a Flawed Present

Many waves of national self-examination have swept Japan since it lost the Asia-Pacific war. These “debates” often have changed attitudes and advanced historical understanding of the war.

Throughout the occupation period (1945-52) and most of the Cold War, Japanese politics rested on the notion that Emperor Hirohito had been a pacifist, anti-militarist and passive Western-style constitutional monarch, one who had been coerced by “militarists” into supporting the war but in the end had acted single-handedly and heroically to end it. These myths of the emperor’s blamelessness were designed to maintain national unity and contain the psychological damage wrought by defeat and U.S. occupation.

By the time Hirohito had died in 1989 and the Cold War had ended, Japanese historians were making considerable progress in uncovering and documenting crimes committed by the imperial armed forces, from the Nanjing massacre to the system of “sex slavery.” Some even were probing the emperor’s role in the war. School textbooks screened and approved by the Education Ministry had begun to reflect the fruits of this new scholarship on the war, though not yet the critical analysis of the emperor’s role.

Soon, however, protests from rightists and conservatives alarmed by Japan’s increasing international openness could be heard. By the mid-1990s, around the time Japan commemorated the 50th anniversary of the war’s end, a backlash against “self-flagellating history” had begun to set in.

Today, a more inward-looking current of nationalist sentiment, whipped up by ideologues who have acquired a foothold among the younger generation, underlies Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s botched visit in August to Yasukuni Shrine. It also helps explain why Japan has slowed its progress on textbook reform.

Despite criticism from China and South Korea, though not the United States, the Education Ministry recently approved a deeply flawed “history” textbook written by right-wing historians. The swift, overwhelming rejection of the text by Japanese educators has not impeded its sales in the bookstores, however. Thus the 50th anniversary of the U.S.-Japan peace and security treaties arrives at a particularly critical time for the future of Japan’s economic and political reform. But is reform possible if Japan does not confront its past?

When signed by Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru at the height of the Cold War on Sept. 8, 1951, the peace treaty required the Allies to abandon their quest for reparations and war damages from the Japanese government. The treaty, craftily drawn up by John Foster Dulles, obliged Japan to acknowledge only minimal war responsibility by accepting the judgments of Allied war crimes tribunals in Tokyo and elsewhere, and to pay the victims of its aggression token reparations, and only at the state level. The Soviet Union and India refused to sign; China and the two Koreas were not even invited. These U.S. arrangements helped lodge Japan in a permanent Cold War position vis-a-vis its potential friends in Asia.

That same day, in return for securing the restoration of its sovereignty and the opportunity to reenter the world community, Yoshida Shigeru signed a security treaty that allowed U.S. bases and troops on the home islands and on strategic Okinawa to continue. The results have been mixed. The military alliance has helped Japan to prosper and the U.S. to expand its military hegemony throughout the Pacific, but at the cost of undermining Japan’s peace constitution and while giving the Pentagon a disproportionate voice in America’s Asia policy.

The 50th anniversary of these treaties furnishes an opportunity for Japan’s political leaders to confront and end their double standard on the past. They are already stalling on paying reparations to the surviving victims of their war. Now if they continue to focus on Yasukuni Shrine, sanitize their history and avoid the truth about the emperor’s war, they risk forfeiting for decades the trust of their closest Asian neighbors, Korea and China.