Japan Scores Tragic Own Goal with UNESCO Stance

click book to order

Tokyo’s position is damaging its international reputation and playing into China’s hands

By Edward Vickers, Professor of Comparative Education at Kyushu University, Japan. He is a member of the War Memoryscapes in Asia Partnership (WARMAP), funded by the Leverhulme Trust and coordinated by Mark Frost of Essex University. He has published extensively on the history and politics of education in contemporary China, and on representations of history in public culture. His latest book, “Education and Society in Post-Mao China,” will be published by Routledge in 2017

First published in The Diplomat, October 21, 2016

On October 13, Japan announced the suspension of its payments to UNESCO, to which it is (after America) the second largest contributor. This was ostensibly done in belated protest at the decision a year ago to enshrine Nanjing Massacre documentation in UNESCO’s “Memory of the World Register.” However, it comes as the Japanese government attempts to ratchet up pressure on the international body as it considers a related application for registration of documents on the comfort women system of sex slavery operated by the Japanese military. 

While UNESCO’s decision on that application is pending, in Nanjing itself a Comfort Women Memorial Hall, opened last December, has become the newest feature of the local landscape of war commemoration. Located in the restored buildings of a former comfort station (military brothel), it is the first major Chinese museum dedicated to the issue. It provides some insight into the official position on this issue, while begging the question: why is it only very recently that the comfort women have attracted significant attention from the Chinese authorities?

The style and content of the exhibition at the new memorial contrast markedly with those of most Chinese war museums. For example, the nearby Nanjing Massacre Memorial (NMM) last year experienced a makeover to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. A huge new annex opened, celebrating the contribution of China, and especially its Communist Party, to victory in the global Anti-Fascist War. The effect is to further eclipse the original conception of the NMM as a shrine to peace modeled largely on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki memorials. The overwhelming emphasis of the new annex is on triumphalist celebration of Chinese moral and military force.

At the Comfort Women Memorial, however, triumphalism and strident nationalism are notably absent. Instead, the exhibition focuses primarily on the comfort women themselves, and their stories. The mundane possessions of women who worked in this brothel are displayed in the rooms where they were incarcerated. These underline the grinding poverty that was the fate of most survivors. To foster sympathy for them, the exhibition prominently displays images of frail elderly victims – including, at one point, a bronze bust of an old lady actually shedding tears. Visitors are invited to wipe these away (towels are provided). Indeed, tears are the symbol of the museum.

The emphasis on evoking sympathy here needs to be understood in the context of the lack of it experienced by most Chinese former comfort women. The Director of the new Memorial Hall, Su Zhiliang, a history professor at Shanghai Normal University, has spent 25 years researching the comfort women system and campaigning on behalf of victims. In the 1990s, he says, “the government thought this was no good, or there was no need for it, and I couldn’t get research funding.” But all this changed since 2010, as Sino-Japanese tensions over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands flared. And since Abe Shinzo became Prime Minister in 2012, relations with the Xi regime have been frosty at best. Alongside real Chinese anger at Abe’s historical revisionism, there is a sense that, in relations with the old wartime enemy, the tables have well and truly turned. Hence the new willingness to weaponize wartime heritage for diplomatic purposes.

But official attitudes towards comfort women remain distinctly ambivalent. It was in fact Professor Su’s home city of Shanghai, not Nanjing, which was central to the network of comfort stations in wartime China. The very first comfort station, the Dai-ichi Salon (“First Salon”), was recently identified. However, the Shanghai authorities have shown little interest in publicly commemorating comfort women. And as the destruction of older districts continues apace, traces of the wartime past are fast disappearing. Su recently succeeded in halting demolition of another former comfort station, the Umi no Ie (“Home of the Ocean”), but suspects that it is doomed anyway. As for the Dai-ichi Salon, it “won’t be demolished, but it won’t be preserved either,” he says.

Shanghai’s authorities like to celebrate their city’s heritage as an open, cosmopolitan metropolis. Commemoration of its wartime role as a haven for Jewish refugees has recently attracted lavish municipal sponsorship. But perhaps in part because the comfort women issue touches on the city’s past and present role as a major center for (illicit) commercial sex, and hence also the trafficking of women, it is not something to which the local government wishes to draw attention. In the early 2000s, a retired sociology professor, Liu Dalin, decided that Shanghai would be the ideal location for a Museum of Ancient Chinese Sex Culture; but after tensions with the local authorities, in 2004 he was forced to relocate to the small town of Tongli, 80 km away. As of this month, Shanghai does have an exhibition dedicated to the comfort women, but this is tucked away on the campus of Su’s university.

The opening of that exhibit was brought forward to coincide with the planned visit to Shanghai earlier this month of a UNESCO delegation. Last year, Su was prominently involved in a Chinese application to have comfort women documents placed on the Memory of the World Register. That bid, which coincided with the Nanjing Massacre-related application, was rejected by the UNESCO Committee after intensive behind-the-scenes lobbying from Japan. But the rejection was not outright: the committee recommended that, since the comfort women system extended across Japanese-occupied East Asia, an application to include related documents on the Memory of the World Register ought to come from several affected societies, rather than just one.

The current application to UNESCO therefore comes from a consortium of groups from Taiwan and East Timor to Holland and the UK (the Imperial War Museum holds a number of related photographs in its archives). Formally, it is led by the Korean academic Heisoo Shin – the bid initially enjoyed generous financial support from the Korean Government. But that abruptly ceased following a Korea-Japan agreement on December 28, whereby the Koreans agreed to adopt an “amicable” approach to settling the comfort women issue in return for a Japanese donation to a fund for supporting survivors. One result was the decision to host the UNESCO delegation in Shanghai earlier this month. For Su, securing government funding is relatively easy these days.

But while nationalism and realpolitik undoubtedly inform official Chinese support for the UNESCO bid, many of the researchers and activists involved are by no means the inveterate Japan-haters of Japanese media stereotype. At the Comfort Women Memorial in Nanjing, the exhibition text – largely drafted by Su Zhiliang – emphasizes that it was Japanese scholars, notably Nishino Rumiko and Yoshimi Yoshiaki, who first investigated the history of wartime sex slavery, drawing attention to the issue within Japan itself and overseas. Su himself first became aware of it during a spell as a visiting scholar at Tokyo University in the early 1990s. He counts many Japanese researchers among his friends.

This underlines the tragedy of the Japanese government’s stance. The fact that Japanese researchers have always been at the forefront of those campaigning for recognition for the victims of the wartime system of military sex slavery is testament to the relative openness of Japanese society. China’s recent history is replete with atrocities that Chinese scholars mention only at great personal risk. Japan is different. But rather than celebrate that difference, the Abe regime and its supporters have energetically sought to suppress open debate over difficult history both at home and abroad. In doing so, they sully Japan’s international reputation and play right into the hands of China’s propagandists.

Japan’s public diplomacy of churlish cluelessness

From the Yushukan

BY JEFF KINGSTON director of Asian Studies, Temple University Japan and APP Member

First published in The Japan Times October 17, 2015

Enough is enough. How dare UNESCO inscribe primary sources and a wartime video about the Nanking mayhem into global memory? I fully support the Japanese government’s threats to withdraw funding from UNESCO to protest its recent decision to include a dossier submitted by China, “Documents of Nanjing Massacre,” in the Memory of the World Register. Nothing could better highlight Japan’s bumbling public diplomacy, or pettifogging about its shared history with Asia.

Perhaps the money saved could be used to establish a “Forgetting of the World Registry,” an institution that would surely do a brisk business as so many nations would love to cleanse their reputations and bury their darkest moments in such a repository. The Yushukan Museum adjacent to Yasukuni Shrine could serve as a model for such an initiative as the displays regarding Japan’s era of imperialism are meticulously scrubbed of any atrocities, while the wartime leaders who led the rampage through Asia between 1931 and 1945 — liberating tens of millions of oppressed Asians from the miseries of life, while enslaving countless others — are presented as martyrs who sacrificed their lives for a noble mission.

I think the Cabinet of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe should make a publicized visit with a phalanx of LDP lawmakers to the museum, perhaps inviting UNESCO representatives, so everyone can see that there was no Nanking Massacre, no mistreated prisoners of war, no Unit 731 vivisection experiments on those POWs, no “comfort women” and indeed no Asian victims whatsoever of Japanese colonialism or aggression. Now that is airbrushing with verve!

At a news conference following the UNESCO decision, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga complained about the lack of transparency in the process of evaluating the documents. But truth be told, the Japanese government has a rather mixed record on this issue. Nonetheless, Suga confirmed the government’s official position that Japanese soldiers killed many noncombatants and engaged in the plundering of China’s wartime capital. So what it boils down to is Japan quibbling over the precise scale of the atrocity that it owns up to committing, caviling about exactly how many died and were raped in the Rape of Nanking.

Sure there are some reactionary Japanese who deny that a massacre ever took place, but Abe has denied denying this. Alas at the time nobody had an abacus handy to record every single Chinese soldier, hands tied behind their back, mowed down on the banks of the river by machine-gun fire, nor was anyone meticulously keeping track of the rapes and slaughter of noncombatants, but a Japanese Army Veterans Association survey of members who were actually there, which was published in the group’s magazine in 1985, confirms that atrocities were widespread. Conservative historian Ikuhiko Hata actually revised his casualty estimates significantly upward after the publication of the diary of John Rabe, a German employee of Siemens and member of the Nazi party who witnessed the outrages and tried desperately to protect as many Chinese as he could from marauding Japanese soldiers.

In terms of public diplomacy, the Abe government’s fulminating damages Japan’s reputation because it sends a message that the government is seeking to downplay or deny the atrocities committed by the Imperial armed forces in the war of aggression Tokyo instigated against China. Its denunciation of UNESCO makes Japan appear churlish and clueless while handing China a rare diplomatic victory.

Moreover, there is very little glory in hypocrisy. UNESCO also accepted two sets of archives compiled by Japan, including a submission about the mistreatment of Japanese detainees by the Soviet Union. Furthermore, UNESCO did not accept China’s dossier on the comfort women, a decision that further undermines Japan’s intemperate attack on UNESCO’s alleged bias. No complaints about lack of transparency there. And, to put it delicately, accusations that Beijing is politicizing UNESCO seem inconsistent. Is Japan alone allowed to position itself as a victim of World War II while nations victimized by Japanese imperialism are castigated for drawing attention to Japan’s misdeeds? Tokyo’s finger-pointing is just as petulant and diplomatically deplorable as Washington’s legendary UNESCO-bashing.

The Abe government has issued guidelines that require Japanese textbook publishers to present history that conforms to the government’s views, and compelled deletion of passages that don’t, but seems to have gotten carried away with its revisionist hubris in ways that tarnish Japan’s global image.

In July, the government also made a hash of the UNESCO designation of 23 Meiji Era (1868-1912) industrial sites after some very public wrangling with South Korea. Seoul had opposed the listing of seven sites honoring Japan’s modernization because they involved over 50,000 Korean forced laborers, but finally acquiesced to Japan’s proposal. This is because Japan agreed to establish an information center that would acknowledge the miserable conditions experienced by Koreans and because Kuni Sato, Japan’s ambassador to UNESCO, stipulated, “Japan is prepared to take measures that allow an understanding that there were a large number of Koreans and others who were brought against their will and forced to work under harsh conditions in the 1940s at some of the sites.”

This meeting of minds was short lived as Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida soon thereafter asserted — quite wrongly — that “forced to work” does not mean “forced labor.” His remarks were probably aimed at smoothing the ruffled feathers of benighted LDP constituencies, but that does not make them any less fatuous and unbecoming of Japan’s top diplomat.

Earlier this year it was announced that Japan would treble its budget for public diplomacy to $500 million, apparently a response to perceptions that the governments of China and South Korea are embracing a more assertive diplomacy aimed at tarnishing Japan’s reputation. There is a worry that Japan’s diplomats have been ciphers on the world stage, adopting a reactive and ineffective approach to countering misinformation and misinterpretation of government policies and initiatives. Now they can’t complain about a lack of firepower in what is often likened to a public relations war. But based on Japan’s recent miscues, taxpayers have every right to complain that this gold-plated, brasher diplomacy is undermining Japan’s stature.

Actually, Japan’s reticent diplomacy over the years has paid dividends as polls show that Americans rate Japan more highly on history issues than Germany, a nation usually held up as the model penitent. It takes a quiet confidence for a government to acknowledge and atone for a shameful past, build a track record of peace and believe that, warts and all, global support will follow. Polls show that Japan’s self-effacing style over the years has won widespread admiration for Brand Japan, but this is now at risk from the Abe government’s swaggering public diplomacy, a shift in tone that reflects a fundamentally feeble self-esteem.

Japanese education ideology

Takahashi Shiro

Ideology is important to Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and his Administration. Nearly 90% of Abe's cabinet participate in highly ideological groups focused on recapturing the traditional Japanese spirit. These are not just politicians who want to govern Japan; they want to recast it.

Among the ideologies supported by PM Abe and his Education Minister Shimomura is Oyagaku founded by Shiro Takahashi [ 高橋 史朗] (b. 1950) in the late-1990s. Minister Shimomura is head of the secretariat of Oyagaku caucus in the Diet (Caucus to Promote Parental Education [親学推進議員連盟 Oya gaku suishin giin renmei], aka Home Education Support Caucus).

Takahashi, a professor at Meisei University and former deputy chairman of the revanchist Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, promotes the concept of “Oya Gaku” (Parenting Studies). It asserts that parents need to be educated about correct childrearing. “Correct” in this context means emulating pre-war education.

Takahashi and his supporters believe that today’s parents have been infected by Nikkyouso (Teacher Union)-sponsored leftist ideology during their own school years and, as a result, many are unfit parents. Although not a scientist and his work is not peer-reviewed, he has pioneered his own “science” of autism and other developmental delays in children and claims that they can be reversed. He argues that developmental delay is a product either of a lack of effort by parents or of “Westernization” undermining Japan’s traditional values.

Takahashi is an advocate for a return to pre-war Japanese education practices. He believes that the United States has crippled Japan and infused it with a sense of masochism, since the Occupation. He expresses reservations about sex education and gender equality. He has called the movement away from gender discrimination a tool used by Japan's occupiers to disarm the country psychologically.

Takahashi is a member of Abe’s Gender Equality Council in the Cabinet Office’s Gender Equality Bureau. He is a also a frequent speaker at anti-Comfort Women rallies in concert with Nadashiko Action. He participated in their press conference in New York earlier this year. He is a board member of the Japan Institute for National Fundamentals and is a signatory of the Institute's September 26, 2015 advertorial, "Time to hit back at international aspersions 'over comfort women'" in several Japanese newspapers, including English-language ones.

Happy Science's Liberty Web interviewed Mr. Takahashi last fall in an article entitled "GHQ Completely Occupied the Japanese Spirit." He states that "GHQ nurtured Japanese who could be used for anti-Japanese propaganda, and would, even after they were gone, expand the “occupational policies” by the Japanese themselves, and set the direction so that they would self-destruct." The result he believes created a

chain of negative post-war education for over three generations, the Japanese have lost their pride and confidence, and lost their traditional morality and spirit. Tradition and ethics governing the raising of children has been destroyed, and the spirit of children and grandchildren has been devastated. 

He calls on the Japanese "to take back the foundation of the Japanese spirit."

Books by Mr. Takahashi include:

Traditional Japanese Education and Brain Science – Developmental Delay Can Be Cured
[ 脳科学から見た日本伝統的子育ってー発達障害の予防、改善できる Nou kagaku kara mita Nippon no dentouteki ko-sodate – Hattatsu shougai ha yobou, kaizen dekiru] (Moralogy Institute, 2012)

What USA Did During The Occupation So That Japan Would Never Be Able To Stand Up Again [日本が二度と立ち上がれないようにアメリカが占領期に行ったこと, Nippon ga nido to tachiagarenai youni Amerika ga senryo-ki ni okonatta koto] (Chichi Shuppan, Jan 2014)

LATER: Expert on Nanking for Foreign Ministry before UNESCO

N.B.: Takahashi is not a professor of history

Akahata on November 10 reported that Japan participated as an observer in the meetings of the UNESCO International Advisory Committee held on October 4-6 in Abu Dhabi in United Arab Emirates, and that Meisei University Professor Takahashi Shiro who criticizes textbook descriptions of the Nanjing Massacre as “masochistic” and “anti-Japanese” accompanied the government delegation there. You can find his name in the final report under "observers" as the only non-governmental member of the Japanese delegation.

Whereas we have not yet found a copy of this government paper, this article by Takahashi published by the Japan Institute for National Fundamentals, Speaking Out #332, October 20, 2015, Japan Should Urgently Organize Team to Deal with UNESCO Problem is reflective. He outlines the six proposals he made upon his return from the UNESCO conference to a joint meeting of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s Foreign Affairs Division, the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Division, the Headquarters for Regional Diplomatic and Economic Partnership, the Global Information Study Committee and the Special Committee for Recovery of Japan's Honor and Credibility. Five of these suggestions have been enacted.

The following article tries to point out the difficulties of involving Takahashi in government policy.

Japanese statement protesting UNESCO registration of Nanjing Massacre docs backfires
Mainichi Shimbun November 6, 2015

Documents the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and experts submitted to UNESCO in protest of its registration of China's "Documents of Nanjing Massacre" in its Memory of the World (MOW) program are backfiring, as it includes a statement that cites a scholar known for views denying that the massacre even took place.

The statement in question was compiled by Meisei University professor Shiro Takahashi, and was submitted in late September to the International Advisory Committee of the MOW Program alongside a statement from Kuni Sato of Japan's permanent delegation to UNESCO.

Based on his own analysis of a portion of the documents submitted by China to UNESCO for the Nanjing Massacre's registration in the MOW program that was released to the public, Takahashi wrote that it was impossible to determine the authenticity of the contents.

The statement not only noted the "publication of a book in which some 100 Japanese soldiers deny that such a 'massacre' took place," but also stated that the contents of a diary kept by a Chinese woman who was in Nanjing at the time was . mostly based on hearsay Furthermore, Takahashi cited Shudo Higashinakano - a professor at Asia University known for his views denying the Nanjing Massacre - and expressed doubts about the dates of the photos China submitted to UNESCO and their relation to the massacre. [APP Editor: Higashinakano was sued and lost a defamation suit by a Nanjing Massacre victim. The Supreme Court judge severely reprimanded him for telling falshoods.]

As for the lieutenant general from the Imperial Japanese Army who was sentenced to death in the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal for masterminding the killing of 300,000 Chinese, Takahashi concluded, "His troops were ordered to change course when they were 500 meters inside the City Wall of Nanjing, so it was physically impossible to carry out a massacre. "

University of Shizuoka professor Hisaki Kenmochi, whose research focuses on comparisons between interpretations of history in Europe, Japan, China and South Korea, said he was concerned about the image Takahashi's statement may give to the world. "The statement gives the impression that Japan is siding with the school of thought that the Nanjing Massacre did not take place. This makes it possible for the world to view the situation as the same as the school of thought denying that the Holocaust ever took place. "

Hirotaka Watanabe, an international relations professor at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, also expressed his misgivings, saying, "There's a possibility that the statement made the world's impression of Japan worse, which is the opposite of what the Japanese government meant to do."

Takahashi, however, is unmoved by his critics. "People may criticize Higashinakano's scholarship, but I believe that what I cited from his work has been verified." Meanwhile, a source from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, "Takahashi maintains a good balance compared to other conservative scholars. "

The Japanese government officially recognizes that it can not deny that Japanese soldiers killed Chinese civilians and looted in Nanjing. In the 2010 Japan-China Joint History Research Committee meeting, scholars from the Japanese side set the maximum possible number of civilian victims at 200,000, with estimates of around 40,000 or 20,000. The Chinese scholars of the committee maintained that at least 300,000 were killed.

On Nov. 5, Japanese Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Hiroshi Hase made a speech at UNESCO's General Conference in Paris, and urged party states to engage in debate to improve the MOW registration process, including increased transparency.

Abe ignores his Emperor - at his peril

‘Emperor Akihito favors an honest and long-overdue reckoning with Japan’s wartime past’

Interview by APP member, Peter Ennis of Dispatch Japan published January 23, 2015

Emperor Akihito raised many an eyebrow in Japan and abroad recently when he used his New Year message to urge Japan’s citizens to learn from history in this, the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. He specifically referred to the Manchurian Incident of 1931 as the start of the war, which many saw as a not-so-veiled swipe at Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and other advocates of a ‘revisonist’ view of history, who have tried to diminish Japan's responsibility for the hostilities in the Pacific that ultimately led to Japan’s destruction and surrender in 1945. The key passage in the Emperor’s message was:“This year marks the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, which cost many people their lives. Those who died on the battlefields, those who died in the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those who died in the air raids on Tokyo and other cities-so many people lost their lives in this war. I think it is most important for us to take this opportunity to study and learn from the history of this war, starting with the Manchurian Incident of 1931, as we consider the future direction of our country.”The Emperor’s comment was initially overshadowed by the New Year’s festivities in Japan, but subsequently provoked a subdued but charged debate in intellectual and policy circles.

Below is the first of a two-part discussion about the controversy with Tokyo-based scholar and commentator Jeff Kingston. Professor Kingston is the director of Asian Studies at Temple University Japan, where he teaches courses on modern Japanese history, contemporary Japan, and Japan’s relations with Asia. He has been a regular contributor to The Japan Times since 1988. Kingston’s most recent book, Contemporary Japan, was published in 2012. He has a B.S. degree in foreign service from Georgetown University, and a PhD. in history from Columbia University.


DISPATCH JAPAN: Emperor Akihito referred to the Manchurian Incident of 1931 in several of his past birthday greetings, but never in a New Year’s message. Why do you think it is notable that he brought this up in his most recent New Year’s message?

KINGSTON: It is impossible to know what exactly Emperor Akihito intended with his 2015 New Year Thoughts. His comments were sufficiently vague to avoid giving the impression that he was infringing on constitutional limits that prevent him from weighing in on political issues.

The Imperial Household Agency carefully vets his remarks, so one can only speculate about the message he is trying to convey. In my opinion, the choice of topics is indicative, and must be considered in the context of Akihito’s track record on war responsibility. He has relentlessly crisscrossed the region over the past quarter of a century to express remorse to nations victimized by Japanese aggression.

Akihito has done more than all of Japan’s politicians combined to demonstrate that Japan is not in denial, and is contrite about the horrors it inflicted. Although revisionist politicians and the jingoistic press have worked hard to undermine the emperor’s reconciliation diplomacy, Akihito regards this as the unfinished business of the Showa Emperor (Akihito's father, Emperor Hirohito, who died in 1989), and persists in doing what he can in his circumscribed role.

His record suggests he favors an honest and long overdue reckoning. He has maintained his father’s post-1978 boycott of Yasukuni Shrine that was prompted by the enshrinement of 14 Class A war criminals at that time.

He also rebuked a Tokyo government official who explained to the monarch at an autumn 2004 garden party that he was in charge of enforcing a directive to teachers to stand and sing the national anthem (kimigayo) facing the national flag (Hinomaru). Akihito replied that this is not desirable, and should be left up to individual choice, comments he repeated in the Spring 2005 garden party. The Imperial Household Agency went into damage control mode, arguing that Akihito’s remarks held no political implications, even though they had clearly offered moral support to teachers who complained that their constitutional rights were being infringed on.

So when Akihito refers to the Manchurian Incident, he is weighing in on contemporary history controversies. Prime Minister Abe and like-minded revisionists seek to legitimize Japanese aggression, asserting that it was a war of Pan Asian liberation aimed at lifting the yoke of western subjugation. In addition, revisionists argue that it was a defensive war against escalating pressures from the western powers, the so-called ABCD (American, British, Chinese and Dutch) encirclement thesis.

But by pegging the war’s onset to 1931, Akihito inconveniently focused attention on the Kwantung Army’s plot in Mukden, which blamed ‘Chinese terrorists’ for a staged attack on Japan’s South Manchurian Railway, and used this as a pretext to launch a full-scale invasion and pacification of Manchuria.

This interpretation meshes with what scholars call the Fifteen Year War (1931-45), a reference to escalating Japanese aggression in China and a decision in 1940 to widen the war to Southeast Asia in order to secure the resources needed to subjugate China.

This narrative dismisses the Pan Asian liberation thesis as a fig-leaf for Japanese imperialism. Moreover, in 1931 Japan was not being encircled, but rather was carving off part of China to promote autarchy and prepare for the coming war with the US for hegemony in the Pacific. Ishiwara Kanji, the man who planned the Mukden Incident, was Japan’s foremost military strategist, and someone who had carefully studied the lessons of WWI. Total war meant a no-holds barred approach to winning, meaning that civilians were fair game and that economic sanctions were a weapon of war.

Ishiwara believed that Germany lost the war owing to economic sanctions that starved its war machine of what was required to wage war and thus became an advocate of economic autarchy. Manchuria had many of the resources Japan lacked that were crucial for its war machine, so taking it over was aimed at promoting autarchy and getting ready for the coming conflict. The Pan Asian thesis is more appealing to contemporary conservatives because it positions Japan as selfless and sacrificing for the benefit of others.

By contrast, the Manchurian thesis makes Japan look like a greedy predator, invading nations to secure resources and markets just like other imperial nations.

So Akihito’s apparently bland remarks actually resonate loudly in the arena of historiography. They position him in the camp critical of Japanese aggression, and critical of contemporary revisionists like Abe, who seek to rehabilitate Japan’s wartime past and assert a valorizing and vindicating narrative.

Akihito’s view represents the longstanding mainstream consensus in Japan (and elsewhere), but revisionists have bristled at this ‘masochistic’ history that singles Japan out for blame while overlooking Allied war crimes. They argue that the mainstream consensus is based on the judgments of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMFTE), a biased ‘victor’s justice’ narrative.

Judicial process at the IMFTE was indeed very flawed, and the guilty verdicts were preordained, but this doesn't mean that Japan’s military forces, or the architects of war called the Class A war criminals, were innocent. Revisionists often cite the dissenting opinion of Radhabinod Pal as exonerating Japan from the war crimes charges. A memorial to him is even located just outside the Yushukan Museum adjacent to Yasukuni Shrine, the talismanic ground zero for an unrepentant view of Japanese military aggression. In fact, Pal argued no such thing. He dismissed the IMFTE as lacking legal standing in international law, and for the baseless retroactive application of laws it allowed. But Pal readily acknowledged that Japan committed war crimes, and he lamented the fact that the Allies were not in the dock alongside the Japanese, sensibly pointing out that they should also be held accountable.

DISPATCH JAPAN: Why is this relevant to contemporary Japanese politics, and Japan’s national security policy?

KINGSTON: The judgments of the IMFTE, deeply flawed as they may be, are intrinsic to the Treaty of San Francisco that Japan signed to end the US occupation and make peace with the other signatories. In signing the treaty, Japan committed itself to accepting these judgments. Prime Minister Abe often talks about overthrowing the ‘postwar system’, one that most Japanese are rightly proud of. He is unhappy with the denunciatory view of wartime Japan and the US penned constitution, both essential elements of the postwar order that he believes humiliates Japan and keeps it subordinate.

In contrast, Akihito and most Japanese feel that Japan’s exemplary record in the second half of the 20th century brought redemption, and serves as the basis for the nation regaining its dignity. While Abe rails against the Peace Constitution, most Japanese see it as a reassuring touchstone of national identity. That is why his efforts to chip away at Article 9 are so unpopular. Hardly anyone in Japan supports Abe’s reinterpretation of Article. 9 to allow for collective self-defense, because they worry that Washington will drag them into war, and they understand that the new US-Japan Defense Guidelines will facilitate that scenario. Both governments keep postponing formal adoption of the guidelines precisely so they don’t become a liability to the LDP in elections.

DISPATCH JAPAN: So the political right finds itself in the interesting position of opposing the views of an Emperor in whose honor they claim to speak?

KINGSTON: The Emperor’s remarks highlight the horrors of war and send a strong anti-militarism, pro-peace message. He has enjoined Japanese citizens to reflect on the lessons of the past, perhaps because he has witnessed the culture wars since Abe came to power. Many Japanese and long-time Japan observers have expressed dismay about the recrudescence of self-righteous nationalism under Mr. Abe, who has emboldened right-wing extremists.

They have aggressively attacked liberal targets, such as the Asahi, and downplayed some of the more egregious examples of wartime Japan’s depredations, including the comfort women. Akihito is surely aware that Abe did nothing to repudiate colleagues in the Diet who worked to undermine the 1993 Kono Statement, in which Japan accepts responsibility and promises to atone for the sordid system of sexual slavery that involved tens of thousands of young women throughout Asia between 1932-1945. They were recruited through deception and/or coercion, both direct and indirect.

The Asahi’s admission that a handful of their reports on the comfort women over twenty years ago were based on the discredited testimony of Yoshida Seiji has been disingenuously used as a pretext to try to cast doubts on the nature and extent of this system and thereby promote a narrative of minimization and denial. Naturally, Team Abe is manipulating the Asahi affair for political advantage. This saga is, after all, more about politics than journalism, part of a larger culture war being waged by conservatives to redefine Japanese identity on their terms. The Asahi has long been the right’s main media adversary in this culture war and thus a prime target.

There is also the case of Net Uyoku (ultra-nationalists on the Internet) harassing former Asahi reporters and their university employers, threatening to harm students by deploying nail bombs if these former journalists’ contracts are not terminated. And the hate speech campaign promoted by the Zaitokukai (an organization devoted to denying rights to non-citizens – mostly Koreans – residing in Japan), harassing Japan’s zainichi (mostly Korean) community, again threatening death. Abe has tolerated this intolerance, and indeed has acted as cheerleader in chief for the anti-Asahi campaign. This is not the Japan that most Japanese feel comfortable with, and is not consistent with their national identity.

This is the context in which Akihito’s comments can be interpreted as a rebuke and warning.

Creating the "Big Lie"

Mr. Stokes

An ancient and infirm former British journalist, Henry S. Stokes (76), has long been used by Japan's right-wing to lend some respectability to their more outrageous revisionist history. It is a peculiar form of racism. Simply by being a "white man," they believe, Stokes is credible. As such, his recent, Japanese-only book, Eikokujin Kisha Ga Mita Rengokoku Sensho Shikan no Kyomou [“Falsehoods of the Allied Nations’ Victorious View of History, as Seen by a British Journalist”] has become a national bestseller with over 100,000 copies sold since being released last Fall. ,

His "essays" pepper the English-language website of the Society of Historical Fact and he gave a recent presentation "Japan was the Light of Hope in Asia" for the 70th anniversary of the Greater East Asian Conference held on Nov. 5-6, 1943. He sees the believes that Japan was instrumental in helping "end of the curse of colonialism."

In an April interview with The Economist's David McNeil at the Foreign Correspondent's Club, Stokes makes it clear that he "sides with the staunchest revisionists in attributing the end of European colonialism in Asia to imperial Japan – “Asia’s light of hope,” he says. “It is largely as a result of Japanese shedding their blood that we entered a new world where colonies did not exist any more and there is racial equality.” 

He questions if “Is Japan the only criminal country?" in his second chapter and sees only “victor’s justice. Stokes', like all Japanese revisionists and the current Prime Minister, holds the view that the U.S., not Japan, bears the “prime responsibility” for the Pacific War."

Most interesting, however, is that McNeil gets him to admit "to not knowing exactly what’s between the pages of the book that carries his name – he says he reads little Japanese and an English translation has yet to be produced." This admission led another journalist (see below) to expose how the Japanese Rights perpetuates the "big lie" by all means.

Journalist backtracks on best-seller after Nanjing switcheroo Former Times bureau chief 'shocked' by revisionist conclusion of own book

BY BEN DOOLEY
KYODO, MAY 8, 2014

reprinted for scholarly analysis from The Japan Times

Former New York Times Tokyo bureau chief Henry S. Stokes should have reason to celebrate. His latest book “Eikokujin Kisha Ga Mita Rengokoku Sensho Shikan no Kyomou” (Falsehoods of the Allied Nations’ Victorious View of History, as Seen by a British Journalist) has moved 100,000 copies in the five months since its December release, according to its publisher Shodensha.

The mashup of journalistic anecdotes from the front lines of Japan’s modern history and hard-nosed arguments against its responsibility for World War II atrocities has made the 75-year-old Stokes a darling of the country’s resurgent right wing. With the slim volume popping up on best-seller lists across the nation, its author has found himself in the brightest spotlight of his career.

There is just one problem — until a recent interview with Kyodo News, Stokes, a longtime resident of Tokyo, did not know what was written in his own book.

Now, the former reporter, who reads and writes only a little Japanese, says he is “shocked and horrified” by the book’s conclusion that the Chinese government fabricated the Nanjing Massacre, describing the claim as “straightforward right-wing propaganda.”

The book’s translator, Hiroyuki Fujita, “smuggled” the rogue passages into the work, Stokes says, adding that the conclusion was “just spooned into the text.” Fujita admits that he added his own language to the book but argues that he closely based his additions on Stokes’ own views.

Stokes, who suffers from advanced Parkinson’s disease and cannot easily type or use a pen or pencil, entrusted the book’s production to Fujita and Hideaki Kase, two men with close ties to the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact, a nonprofit educational group that advocates “revisionist” positions on Japanese history.

At Kase’s urging, Stokes sat with Fujita for over 170 hours of interviews about his journalistic career and his self-described “right of center” political views. He says the men told him that they would translate the interviews into Japanese and then shape them into a book.

Stokes agreed to participate in the project, despite warnings from family and friends to be wary of the men, whom he describes as “personal, close friends.”

According to Stokes, Fujita had assured him that “90 to 95 percent” of the book was based on their interview sessions. While Fujita reiterated these claims, he would not comment on what other additions he had made to the text and declined multiple requests to share the recordings.

“As I’m being interviewed by these people, I would trust them to stick by the record,” Stokes said. “And if they haven’t done that, they have let me down and let themselves down.”

The “record” of Stokes’ comments on Nanjing is decidedly mixed. On one hand, the claims made in Stokes’ book appear, almost word for word, in an article attributed to him in the March 2014 issue of WiLL, a hard right-wing Japanese magazine, edited by Kazuyoshi Hanada. Similar comments appear under Stokes’ name in a series of interviews in Yukan Fuji, a popular evening tabloid.

But, in the March issue of Voice Magazine, another Japanese-language publication, Stokes expresses a very different opinion on both subjects. In a translated response to a question about Nanjing by reporter Taka Daimaru, Stokes says that he “can’t support” right-wing arguments that the massacre never happened, because they “aren’t realistic.” Similar comments appear in an interview with journalist David McNeil that ran in the April issue of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan’s magazine Number 1 Shimbun.

Despite the contradictions, Fujita, Daimaru and McNeill all say that they have faithfully reproduced their conversations with Stokes. Hanada was not available for comment.

“In the process of compiling the Japanese version of course I summarized or interpreted basically what he said,” Fujita said, adding that the quotation marks around the words Nanjing Massacre make it clear that he intended to convey Stokes’ position that the Chinese government has exaggerated the scale of the massacre, not that it is an outright lie.

Japanese readers, however, have interpreted the text differently. In a tweet sent two days before the interview, for example, one wrote that Stokes claims “there is not even one piece of evidence that the Nanjing Massacre occurred.”

That conclusion could not be further from the truth, Stokes says.

Over the course of multiple interviews with Kyodo News beginning on April 5, Stokes repeatedly expressed a view on Nanjing that directly contradicts the remarks attributed to him in both his own book and the articles in WiLL and Yukan Fuji.

“I don’t come within ten-thousand miles of this stuff as a position,” he said, dismissing the view that Nanjing is a fabrication as “ludicrous,” “fatuous” and “utterly, utterly asinine.”
“The stance I take is that ghastly events occurred in Nanjing,” Stokes said, adding that he does, however, disagree with Chinese assessments that 300,000 people died during the six days when the Imperial Japanese Army overran China’s then capital. He also objects to the use of the term massacre, preferring the more anodyne “Nanjing Incident.”

Stokes’ claims are supported by one of the project’s transcriptionists, who resigned for “ethical concerns” stemming from what she described as major differences between Fujita’s interviews with Stokes and the book’s contents. The text, she said, takes out of context or deliberately ignores several of Stokes’ statements, especially on the subject of Nanjing and the comfort women.

Stokes’ career as Tokyo bureau chief for the left of center New York Times, where he worked from 1978 to 1983, makes him the perfect vehicle for providing credibility to historical revisionists’ arguments against Japan’s responsibility for wartime atrocities, according to Takesato Watanabe, a professor of media ethics at Doshisha University in Kyoto.

Fujita admits this was a consideration in producing the book. “If I wrote this,” Fujita said, “people would say that I’m right-wing or a revisionist, and the things I say can’t be trusted, because I’m defending Japan.”

“If a foreign correspondent says it for me,” he added, “no matter what the content . . . people will say it’s interesting.”

Although Fujita played a major role in the book’s production, “without Kase-sensei (Mr. Kase), this publication was not possible,” he said, adding that he had consulted with Kase on the book’s topics and what questions to ask Stokes.

While admitting that he introduced Stokes to the book’s publisher, Kase denied that he had any direct role in writing it or that he knew about Fujita’s additions. Kase wrote the book’s afterword.

Stokes met Kase, who describes himself as a “diplomatic critic,” in the late 1960s. In the years following, Kase became an adviser to former Prime Ministers Takeo Fukuda and Yasuhiro Nakasone.

Kase, 77, has stayed active in conservative political circles in Japan. In addition to his position as the chairman of the revisionist group, he has been involved with several other right-wing organizations, most notably as a “representative” and “auditor” to the board of directors of the Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), a hard-right political group with links to the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

In November 2012, Kase’s name appeared alongside Abe’s in a full-page newspaper advertisement in the New Jersey newspaper The Star-Ledger that described comfort women as high-paid prostitutes and made a number of additional claims that closely resemble those found in Stokes’ book. The ad instructs readers “eager to look further into the truth” to visit the website of the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact.

This is not the first time that Kase’s name has appeared in connection with a literary sleight of hand. In the 1990s, a Korean journalist accused the prolific author of ghostwriting “Minikui Kankokujin” (“Ugly Koreans”), a Japanese best-seller that argues Japan’s occupation of Korea had been good for the country. The book’s original author later came forward and accused Kase of making substantial revisions to the text, which was published under a Korean pen name. Kase says he “corrected” the book, but denies writing it.

Stokes has requested that Fujita issue a correction to his book. Fujita says that he will correct the record in a forthcoming English edition, but there are currently no plans to amend the existing text.

Contacted by Kyodo News, the publisher said that he was “surprised” by the allegations and that if true a correction would be issued.

Despite his objections, Stokes refuses to assign blame for the book’s contents to the men he calls friends.

No matter how much he may disagree with the end result, “If I’ve been taken advantage of, it’s with my complicity,” Stokes said. “And, it’s my responsibility and my fault.”

Revisionism Tokyo-style

Nanking Movie Poster

Japan's leaders still won't acknowledge their country's wartime atrocities.

By Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman (Bill Guttentag is a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He and Dan Sturman directed the documentary film Nanking, which won a Peabody Award in 2009)

First appeared in the January 18, 2013 edition of the Los Angeles Times.

This month 75 years ago, the people of Nanking, China's ancient capital city, were in the midst of one of the worst atrocities in history, the infamous Rape of Nanking. The truth of what actually happened is at the center of a bitter dispute between China and Japan that continues to play out in present-day relations. Many Chinese see Japan's election last month of ultraconservative nationalist Shinzo Abe as prime minister as just the latest in a string of insults. And it was recently reported that Japan is considering rolling back its 1993 apology regarding "comfort women," the thousands of women the Japanese army sexually enslaved during World War II.

In 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army, captured Nanking on Dec. 13. No one knows the exact toll the Japanese soldiers exacted on its citizens, but a postwar Allied investigation put the numbers at more than 200,000 killed and at least 20,000 women and girls raped in the six weeks after the city fell.

In 2006, we traveled to China and to Japan to interview victims and soldiers who took part in the massacre. One former Japanese soldier explained, without a hint of regret: "We all drew straws, and the man who pulled out the one marked first, he brushed off her face tenderly and treated her pretty, yes, and then proceeded to rape her. As their daughter was being raped, the parents would come outside and gesture to us, 'Please spare her!' They'd bang their heads on the ground and plead with us. We'd take one girl and five of us would hold her down."

In China, a 79-year-old man tearfully described how, at 9 years old, he watched a soldier bayonet his mother to death as she breast fed his brother. Another man saw his 13-year-old sister sliced in half by a Japanese soldier after she resisted being raped. Elderly women told harrowing stories of the rapes they endured as young girls.

It was the mass rapes in Nanking and the brutalization of an entire populace that eventually convinced Japanese military leaders that they needed to contain the chaos. Japanese soldiers began rounding up women and forcing them to serve as sex slaves in so-called comfort stations.

This is what most historians believe. But not in Japan, where a large faction of conservatives, led by Abe, denies that the Japanese military forced women into sexual slavery. They maintain that any suggestion to the contrary is simply anti-Japanese propaganda and probably spread by China. At the furthest end of the spectrum, the minimizing turns to flat-out denial; one professor we interviewed at a top Japanese university adamantly insisted there were no killings or rapes in Nanking.

Not surprisingly, all this minimizing and denial enrages the Chinese and others in Asia. But this is a familiar pattern.

Abe has visited the controversial Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo and has said he plans to visit again as prime minister. This is the place where the souls of more than 2 million Japanese war dead are said to be enshrined. Among them are 14 men convicted at the end of World War II of what are known as Class-A war crimes, including Iwane Matsui, the general who led Japanese forces in Nanking. To the Chinese, every visit by an official is like ripping open an unhealed wound. Former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi went there six times, and his 2005 visit resulted in anti-Japanese riots in China.

It's also informative to walk just a few yards to the Yushukan, the museum affiliated with the Yasukuni shrine. There, as we surveyed the exhibits on the Great East Asian War (World War II to much of the rest of the world), we were surprised to learn that Franklin D. Roosevelt had forced Japan to go to war in a calculated effort to lift the U.S. out of the Depression. (This exhibit was recently revised to omit the Depression reference; now it just says the U.S. forced Japan into bombing Pearl Harbor.)

Then there's the exhibit that argues that Japan's "entry into" other Asian countries was simply an effort to help them throw off the yoke of Western colonization. The museum claims that the Japanese leaders who were tried as war criminals were heroic. A tiny section on Nanking makes no mention of atrocities.

All this revisionism is interspersed with militaristic displays. And crucially, these are not a handful of dusty exhibits in an out-of-the-way place; the Yasukuni complex occupies 25 acres of prime Tokyo real estate.

Fueled by such an aggrieved interpretation of Japan's wartime past, Abe and his party are leading efforts to amend Article 9 of the nation's postwar constitution, which mandates that Japan not maintain a standing army. This comes at a time of escalating tension with China, much of it focused on the Senkaku islands. And Abe's government is considering revising what is known as the Kono Statement, a 1993 apology Japan made for the comfort women, an issue of great meaning to China and other nations that had women forced into sexual slavery.

It seems unlikely that the region will erupt into armed conflict over three tiny islands or repeal of the apology. And it can be argued that the move to amend the constitution shouldn't be a cause for great alarm because Japan already has a well-armed self-defense force.

What is alarming is that the leaders of Japan — and a large and vocal minority of its citizens — have an understanding of their country's wartime history that is grounded primarily in fiction. The Rape of Nanking is not in dispute. There is abundant eyewitness testimony from foreign observers, victims and Chinese and Japanese soldiers; contemporaneous news accounts; horrifying forensic and photographic evidence; and even film footage, surreptitiously shot by an American missionary.

Japanese denial in the face of all this ensures that a historical event will continue to fan the flames of anger and distrust. The sooner the facts are recognized and Japanese leaders renounce paying tribute to mass killers and rapists, the sooner true healing can begin.

Copyright © 2013, Los Angeles Times