Japan Seeks Right Balance in Atoning for Past

Townspeople cheered when the Chinese slave laborers, dressed in rags, eyes wild with hunger, were paraded back from the mountains after a failed rebellion and escape.

At the time, July 1945, many in this northern mining town thought the 800 slaves got what they deserved for killing several Japanese guards in their revolt: They were beaten and denied food and water. Scores were tortured. At the end of the war, a few weeks later, only half survived.

Three employees of Kajima Gumi, the construction company overseeing the workers, were sentenced to death and another to life imprisonment by the Allied war crimes court in 1948. But the penalties were later reduced, and all perpetrators were released by 1955. The man responsible for laborers in the town is celebrated in a bust near where his charges were killed.

The “Hanaoka Incident” could easily enter the record as yet another example of how Japan, 60 years after the end of World War II, has not convincingly faced up to the colossal slaughter of innocents as it conquered a wide swath of Asia in the 1930s and ‘40s.

But there is another side to the Hanaoka story.

Yasuo Togashi remembers the bone-thin captives eating weeds as they were marched from the train station to the mining camp. As a boy of 9, he cheered with his neighbors when the escapees were recaptured.

Then, as he entered adulthood, he was overwhelmed with regret as he learned the details of what those Chinese endured. He joined a group of townspeople who dedicated their lives to keeping those memories alive, and spreading the word.

“We were militaristic youth. We thought the Chinese weren’t even human, and we were happy when they were caught,” said Togashi, now 69 and a retired elementary school teacher.

“Now, I feel nothing but remorse,” he said. “I didn’t really understand it at the time, but as an adult, I was really shocked about it.”

Starting in the 1950s, Togashi and others have tried to set things right: They have built monuments, hosted survivors visiting from China, and taught schoolchildren about the past. The town holds annual remembrances of the victims. The outdoor sculpture of the smiling labor manager, Kyoichi Hatazawa, lists his civic accomplishments and never mentions the massacre. But 25 feet away stands a stone slab commemorating the Chinese dead.

“We have to make an apology from the heart,” Togashi said. “Even if they were not directly involved, people should feel regret about this. We have to make sure it never happens again.”

Few countries have apologized as often as Japan for its aggression in Asia -- and to so little effect.

Since the 1970s, Japanese prime ministers and even emperors have expressed varying degrees of regret and remorse over the suffering Japan caused.

Just last April, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi sought to defuse a surge of war-related tension with China during a speech at an Asian summit: “In the past, Japan through its colonial rule and aggression caused tremendous damage and suffering for the people of many countries, particularly those of Asian nations.”

Tokyo’s commitment to peace goes beyond rhetoric.

The country’s U.S.-drafted constitution forswears war to settle international disputes, and no Japanese soldier has fired a shot in war since 1945. Japan is the world’s No. 2 source of developmental aid after the United States, and it has paid billions in reparations to nations it invaded.

Not all of Asia is clamoring for further atonement. Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam, all conquered by Japan, have mostly come to terms with the war and are more interested in lucrative ties with the world’s second-largest economy than in dwelling on the past.

Yet, with the approach of Aug. 15, the day Japan marks the end of World War II, it is clear many Asians have nagging doubts about the depth of Japanese remorse.

Those doubts can erupt into violence, particularly in countries that bore the brunt of Japanese expansionism: China and the Koreas. Anti-Japan riots broke out in China this year, triggered by the Japanese government’s approval of a history textbook that critics say glosses over atrocities in the 1930s and ‘40s.

The main reason for the doubt is the awesome scope of Japanese brutality as Tokyo built an empire that, at its wartime height, stretched from deep in the Pacific to Southeast Asia.

The Japanese assault was merciless. Civilians were bombed, doused with biological agents, machine-gunned and subjected to cruel medical experiments. Tens of thousands of women were forced into brothels for Japanese troops. Prisoners were tortured, executed, starved or worked to death.

Politics is another factor in the lingering resentment. The battle against Japanese aggression is a pillar in the Communists’ claim to leadership in China and North Korea.

But at bottom, the Japanese themselves have not decided how much remorse they feel, and their ambivalence is reflected in myriad ways that undermine their statements of regret.

On April 22, while Koizumi was apologizing for the war, at least one member of his Cabinet and more than 80 Japanese lawmakers were visiting Yasukuni Shrine, a bastion of the emperor-worship at the heart of Japan’s imperialist ambitions and the burial place for executed World War II war criminals.

An increasingly powerful clique of nationalist educators is encouraging a rollback of mentions of Japanese atrocities from wartime accounts in schoolbooks.

Comic book artist Yoshinori Kobayashi has sold millions of copies of works that rant against the United States and Japan’s neighbors and argue that apologies for the war are humiliating.

Even the verdicts of the war crimes tribunal that sat in Tokyo from 1946 to 1948 are being prominently questioned.

Ground Zero in Hiroshima, meanwhile, symbolizes a view of the war engraved in Japanese hearts: that of Japan as victim.

That a single bomb on Aug. 6, 1945, could kill 140,000 people -- and another on Nagasaki three days later could kill 80,000 -- obliterated from Japanese consciousness the history of much of what had preceded it: Japan’s invasions of Asia, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

Outside the city there is the Holocaust Education Center to teach Japanese about Nazi atrocities. Its operators insist they make no connection between the Holocaust and Hiroshima, but the museum’s location resonates deeply with the Japanese view of the bombings as a slaughter of innocents.

And nowhere does the museum mention that Japan was Germany’s ally during the war, or that Japanese soldiers, like the Nazis, perpetrated mass killings and medical experiments on human beings.

Comparison with Nazi Germany is unwelcome in Japan. The stock response is that what the Nazis did -- the extermination camps, the atrocities on an industrial scale -- far overshadow the haphazard, disorganized way Japan ran roughshod over its victims.

That reasoning is not universal in Japan.

Kiyoko Nakano, taking photographs with her husband beside the ruins of the Hiroshima dome, draws the standard Japanese lesson from the bombing of her hometown: that all killing of innocents is a crime and should be condemned.

But, unlike many Japanese, she includes her own country among the list of criminals -- and criticizes those who seek to obscure Japan’s wrongdoing.

“They always want to hide those bitter experiences,” she said. “But if we don’t face ourselves, Japan can never progress.”