Where is the real voice of Japan? Have we ever heard a Japanese diplomat, journalist, or even an ordinary citizen discuss the Second World War in a detached, clear and persuasive way? Probably not. Japanese have a well-earned reputation as the silent nationality.
While the names of Japanese products such as SONY and TOYOTA are known throughout the world, it seems evident that modern Japan’s outward communication remains largely confined to such commercial conduits. However, Japan needs to look inward and communicate outward in a much more forthright manner than it has so far done. The nation appears incapable of explaining its role in the history of the 20th century, either to itself or to a world that wishes to hear its response to the recurring issues of responsibility for the expansionist military adventures that ravaged Asia and brought ruin upon itself. The core of this problem is not some carefully orchestrated system of propaganda and disinformation, but a complex of cultural values and societal quirks that in effect blots out the embarrassing, the difficult, or the confrontational. It is a kind of ‘organic’ censorship.
In recent years, at least half a hundred lawsuits of various sizes have been filed against the Japanese government or Japanese corporations for their actions in the period 1931-1945. These suits seek compensation for such things as forced labor under brutal conditions, for organized, government-sanctioned sexual slavery, and for financial losses under Japanese occupation. But the Japanese government blithely ignores them, and the Japanese people – whatever their true feelings may be – stand by in silence. One wonders why; the answer lies in the phenomenon of organic censorship and the silent vacuum that is its product.
There are six aspects or elements that work together to maintain this phenomenon in what is at first glance an open and free democratic nation. These overlap to some degree, but they are in fact discrete features of contemporary Japanese society. They are:
1) A sense of spiritual paralysis from the defeat of the Second World War.
Between the founding of the nation in the dim days of protohistory and the end of WWII, Japan had never been defeated by any nation. The precipitous fall from the stage of world greatness and the deaths of over three million Japanese came as a great shock, and the inability to address this reality gave birth to the feeling that Japan was a victim (higaisha) of the world war, rather than a perpetrator (kagaisha) of aggression. The national psyche slipped into a paralysis that blamed the Allies – and particularly the United States – for the whole of the war and its destruction, especially that destruction inflicted on Japan itself, such as the mass air raids and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, Japanese seemed too stunned by the perceived enormity of the defeat to see that much of it was rooted in inane and shortsighted planning by their own wartime military leaders. While of course there have been individuals who have brought these topics into the public forum, the overall paralysis affecting both the government’s actions and the public perception has been very little affected.
2) A lack of a sense of closure in regard to WWII
So much is still unaccounted for, so many questions still lie unanswered, but the government’s attitude and the public understanding are light-years from actively putting the wartime past to rest. Does the Japanese government acknowledge or confirm the number of Allied POWs and others who died under Japanese control in the Dai-To-A-Kyoei-Ken (Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere)? Does the Japanese government even reveal any specifics, such as the number of POWs who perished in the crowded, squalid ‘Hell ships’ that brought POWs from the lands of the south to Japan proper?
“Those who know shame are strong in battle,” exhorted the tract Senjin Kun (Ethics in Battle). “You must always think of the reputation of your household, and perform your duties all the more to live up to its expectations. Do not live in dishonorable captivity; do not leave a bad name behind after your death.” This passage – titled ‘Value Your Names’ – was published and distributed as Army Instruction No.1. It was issued to every member of the Imperial Japanese Army by the January 8, 1941 order of then-Army Minister General Tojo Hideki. As a result of the application of this policy, POWs held by the Japanese were treated as less than human, and regarded as nameless animals. This is in marked contrast to such conflicts as the Russo-Japanese War and the First World War, in which captured enemy troops (Russians in the former case, Germans in the latter) are recorded as having been exceptionally well treated.
But such cruelties were not reserved for enemies alone. The citizens of Japan’s ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’ were treated like mere chattel, and this attitude often graduated into brutality and atrocity. Moreover, overweening Japanese military arrogance flourished in Japan itself: the families of the empire’s fighting men never knew where their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons had been sent or how they had died, been taken prisoner, or gone missing. And as the tide of war turned against the Japanese nation, so the military turned upon the nation’s people. The mass suicides of Japanese civilians – usually enforced with rifle shots or bayonet points – on Saipan and Okinawa are well-known cases in point. One can barely imagine the self-inflicted horror that would have resulted had the planned Allied landings in Japan actually taken place.
Japan still has its own great, unfinished, half-century-old task on its hands. The number of undiscovered or unidentified Japanese war dead scattered all over Asia and the western Pacific still totals around one million. My own brother is among them, and the government is either unwilling or unable to tell me when, where, and how he died.
In 1945, 14-year-old Ishii Kohei was a student at the First Xinjing Middle School in Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria then actively occupied by the Japanese military. In May, by order of the Education Bureau, he was sent to a National Service Farm in Dongning, near the then-Soviet border. Together with 120 of his classmates, he was caught up in the Soviet assault of August 9 and was never heard from again.
In 1991, I made a trip to that location to commemorate him and his classmates. I had brought his photograph and cakes and white orchids for that purpose, but due to local hostility to anything Japanese – still smoldering after almost a half-century – the others in our group who had come for similar purposes and myself took the advice of our guide and relocated our memorial service to a site away from the town where we would not attract attention.
This is a capsule of the lack of closure so prevalent in Japan: the scars of the war both within and without are ignored. Eyes and minds are averted from the results of brutality and arrogance, the ‘bread and circuses’ of the present actively eclipse gaping wounds that will not disappear on their own.
3) A persistent ignorance of the breadth and depth of the war itself.
Even now, Japanese are not really aware of the mechanism of responsibility that brought them into active conflict. Will the government provide the names of exactly who decided on the need to attack Pearl Harbor and when that decision was made? Or exactly who was responsible for the gamble of joining with Hitler’s Reich and Mussolini’s Italy in the Axis alliance? The details of the Tosuiken (the Imperial Supreme Command System) are still hidden in a black box of willful ignorance.
The greater portion of Japan’s wartime military records has been lost. These documents were destroyed – burnt – in accordance with official orders issued in the weeks between the Japanese acceptance of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration and the beginning of the active Allied occupation of the Japanese homeland and annexed territories. An August 5, 1946 Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal affidavit states that Miyama Yozo, Chief of Administration and Legal Affairs, First Department of Veterans’ Affairs attested to the following: “…by order of the Ministry of the Army, the following order was dispatched: ’All documents held by each unit are to be incinerated.’ This order was transmitted by telephone to each unit in Tokyo, and by telegram to those outside Tokyo. Both the telegrams and the original written order were then incinerated.”
Most of the materials that managed to survive were taken by the Allies to Washington and Moscow; some of these were repatriated from Washington during the 1980s. But these are not easily accessible. Documents dealing with military, diplomatic, and political aspects of the Imperial period are under the control of career bureaucrats whose arbitrariness is almost legendary. In the case of military materials, control is held by the Defense Agency. Classified materials are categorized using Roman letters: P indicates material held closed because disclosure would involve violation of privacy rights; N indicates those with a potential impact on national interest; S indicates those that might trigger a social reaction. A fourth category is more nebulous: “Inappropriate for Other Reasons.” Those documents that might touch on abuse of POWs or the development, testing, or use of biological weapons will without fail be covered by these four in some configuration. Bureaucratic darkness completes what incineration began.
The postwar educational system must also carry the burden of responsibility for the ignorance of modern Japanese about the war that nearly destroyed their nation a generation ago. As a result of ‘democratization’ by the Occupation forces, virtually anything referring to Japan’s military became taboo. While some of the evils and excesses of Japan’s militarism were in fact taught, a broad-based understanding of Japan and its place in the world at that time was not. This has resulted in the current generation of Japanese being woefully unaware of historical reality. This ignorance is a major underpinning of the ‘victim’ perception mentioned earlier.
4) Japan’s lapdog media.
The basic difference between the nature of Japan’s press – which for the purposes of this essay will include both traditional print and modern broadcast media – and the other developed nation is that from the establishment of the Meiji government in the late 1860’s, the press has been seen as a partner in the nation’s power structure. And while throughout its history the Japanese press has been happy to use exposes and criticism to further its own image and circulation figures, it has not taken an adversary stance. While this was more blatantly obvious before the Second World War, this vital difference still exists and plays a critical role in the phenomenon of organic censorship.
In the years of Japan’s imperial expansion, Japan’s press was essentially a cheering section for that expansion. An example: in December 1932, all 132 Japanese newspapers issued a joint declaration reading thus: “We, in the name of Japan’s organs of public opinion, stand firmly opposed to any policy that would in the slightest way endanger the existence of the Manchurian state.” That Manchurian ‘state’ had been split off from the body of China by Japanese military intervention and diplomatic intrigue. It had then been set up as the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, in actuality a huge colony for Japanese settlers and business interests. Not a single newspaper questioned the overtly expansionist, militaristic policy. The press was part and parcel of the Taisei-Yokusan-Kai (Great Consolidated Discourse System), which enclosed the entire nation as one great ‘family’.
All through the Second World War, the media lied to the Japanese people. At first, the reports of victory were based in fact, but as the war turned against Japan, the press trumpeted fictional victories and ignored the accelerating pace of defeats. They repeated and echoed the words of the Dai-Hon-Ei Happyo (Imperial Headquarters announcements) without question, even as starvation stalked the nation and destruction began raining from the skies.
However, after the war ended, the same pattern persisted. The press essentially became mouthpieces for pronouncements from GHQ-SCAP (General Headquarters, Supreme Commander Allied Powers). For example, on December 8, 1945 (the fourth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor), the national dailies commenced a 10-day series called ‘The Reality of the Pacific War.’ This series had been mandated by GHQ, and told the story of the Pacific War from the victors’ perspective. While it was no doubt an education to many Japanese, the fact that it had been imposed from above and was accepted and published without complaint or comment echoed the same pattern that had existed before the war. The system itself had not been altered; it was fundamentally a room for hire. Only the tenants had changed.
The same pattern continues today. Japanese media take what they are given through the kisha-kurabu (reporter-club) system and probe no further. Each government ministry or agency has its ‘club’ of accredited reporters, usually one from each major newspaper and television station. The government provides the facilities: the floor space, desks, telephones, electricity, and even basic secretarial services are furnished at no cost. Non-members have no such access, and any infractions of the system, in which the reporters ask agreed-upon questions and accept the proffered information handouts, carry the risk of expulsion. Often the reporters will indulge in memo-awase (note-adjustment), where they fill in any gaps in each other’s reporting and ensure that all the stories are pretty much the same. This system filters out the investigative maverick and essentially hijacks the mainstream Japanese media into the role of government loudspeaker.
Moreover, this system resolutely blocks any true sense of reporting. An egregious example occurred in October of 1975 when a reporter – one of a group given a staged opportunity – directly asked Emperor Hirohito “What are your thoughts about responsibility for the war?” The Emperor replied: “In regard to your turn of phrase, since I have not done much research in that literary direction and do not understand it well, I cannot reply on that subject.” This is not a mistranslation; the words the Emperor used (bungaku homen) clearly mean ‘literary direction.’ Not a single reporter followed up on that strange response, and the incident was essentially ignored. “Literary direction”? In any other developed nation, the press would have had a field day with such a response. Just imagine such an answer by an American President to a question about, say, the bombing of Hiroshima or the Vietnam War.
5) Responsibilities from the war have not been addressed nor fulfilled
The war was not waged only by uniformed troops. The media, the bureaucracy, the educational system, various industries, the judiciary, and even religious organizations all bore some responsibility for the drumbeat march of militaristic Japan. The War Crimes Tribunal, however, focused on the military and diplomatic leaders while virtually ignoring the others. It seems fair to state that the tribunal was a political show put on by the victors to legitimize their revenge. Was it really seeking those responsible for the war? Hardly. The Emperor was never called, even as a witness. If the obvious bearer of the highest responsibility was not responsible, who then would be?
In the summer of 1939, Japanese troops met those of the Soviet Union in the first great armored clash of the 20th century. This prelude to the great tank battles to come was played out on a desolate Mongolian plain, and the Japanese army was soundly defeated. There was no mention of the defeat in Japan. The two commanders in the planning and execution of that battle, Cols.Tsuji Masanobu and Hattori Takushiro, escaped any censure for their inept failure, and they proceeded to have a hand in many wartime operations, most of which eventually bore disastrous consequences for Japan. Among them were the debacles of Guadalcanal, Leyte, and Okinawa. Most of the Japanese troops who fought these campaigns died on those battlefields. Were Tsuji and Hattori held responsible? After the war, Hattori assisted GHQ in its assessment of the war, and Tsuji went on be elected to the House of Councillors.
There are other examples as well: in July 1944, United States forces took the island of Saipan. Saipan was considered a key part of Japan’s ‘Absolute Defense Line’, and the defeat there was indeed ominous handwriting on the wall. Prime Minister Tojo Hideki was forced out of his seat, but was any concrete step taken to stop the unfolding disaster? The only concerns voiced were about Kokutai-goji (protecting the Imperial System). No one moved to end the war. No one took any real responsibility. This tendency has remained unchanged, even through the Occupation and postwar history of Japan. Only after a problem has reached crisis proportions is there any concrete action, and that is usually far too little and far too late.
6) Jigyaku-shikan (a self-incriminating view of history) is becoming a taboo in Japan.
As Japan recovered in the postwar years, there was some popular and intellectual introspection and open regret about the war. While this was not the mainstream, it did have its effects: the avoidance of any subject even touching on the military by the educational system likely stemmed from this. Recently, however, new nationalistic voices are heard attacking anything that may incriminate Japan for its wartime actions. They insist that it was a struggle for national survival thrust on the nation from without, and that it was a just war in that it ended the Western colonial domination of Asia and liberated the peoples of that continent and the Pacific region. They may even concede that there were some brutalities, but they insist that these pale beside those of the Western colonialists in Asia. As for apologizing for Japan’s aggression, they ask if Spain has apologized for its brutal colonization of Latin America, or if the United States has apologized to its Native Americans for the same kind of conduct.
It is surprising to see that this attitude has gained a substantial following among the younger generation, who obviously have no wartime experience to rationalize or justify. Perhaps it is in response to a thirst for a national identity, perhaps it is in response to frustration with Japan’s long-depressed economy. It is apparent that rejecting or distorting historical fact will ill serve Japan in this new century, but what is alarming is that the media and a large segment of public opinion appear to be moving in this nationalistic direction. In everything from films to novels to comic books, a romanticization of the war is evident, and the true responsibility for the holocaust of the Dai-To-A Senso (The Greater East Asia War), and its effects on the other peoples of Asia and the Pacific is never examined. The rigid militarism of the Japanese imperial system is ignored; the fact that the nation was a fascist dictatorship is left unaddressed. Where will all this lead? Does another disaster await Japan a generation hence?
Japan is no longer a lockstep, militarized society, and there are no harsh official controls on the flow of information. There is nothing like the pre-1945 Public Order Maintenance Act, which gave the government absolute censorship powers. Instead, there is a paralyzing passivity. Information is not controlled by fiat from without, it is organically managed from within: the kisha-kurabu system, for example, ensures that the press will not ask uncomfortable questions; the bureaucratic control over the records of Japan’s wartime history – and other records, to be sure -- assures that upsetting revelations will not occur. There is no need for the police-state control that characterized 20th century dictatorships. Who needs the equivalent of Goebbels and the Gestapo when reporters and bureaucrats will provide functionally equivalent services with a smile? This organic – and cancerous – censorship is the greatest barrier to Japan’s full emergence into the 21st century.
Shinpei Ishii
While the names of Japanese products such as SONY and TOYOTA are known throughout the world, it seems evident that modern Japan’s outward communication remains largely confined to such commercial conduits. However, Japan needs to look inward and communicate outward in a much more forthright manner than it has so far done. The nation appears incapable of explaining its role in the history of the 20th century, either to itself or to a world that wishes to hear its response to the recurring issues of responsibility for the expansionist military adventures that ravaged Asia and brought ruin upon itself. The core of this problem is not some carefully orchestrated system of propaganda and disinformation, but a complex of cultural values and societal quirks that in effect blots out the embarrassing, the difficult, or the confrontational. It is a kind of ‘organic’ censorship.
In recent years, at least half a hundred lawsuits of various sizes have been filed against the Japanese government or Japanese corporations for their actions in the period 1931-1945. These suits seek compensation for such things as forced labor under brutal conditions, for organized, government-sanctioned sexual slavery, and for financial losses under Japanese occupation. But the Japanese government blithely ignores them, and the Japanese people – whatever their true feelings may be – stand by in silence. One wonders why; the answer lies in the phenomenon of organic censorship and the silent vacuum that is its product.
There are six aspects or elements that work together to maintain this phenomenon in what is at first glance an open and free democratic nation. These overlap to some degree, but they are in fact discrete features of contemporary Japanese society. They are:
1) A sense of spiritual paralysis from the defeat of the Second World War.
Between the founding of the nation in the dim days of protohistory and the end of WWII, Japan had never been defeated by any nation. The precipitous fall from the stage of world greatness and the deaths of over three million Japanese came as a great shock, and the inability to address this reality gave birth to the feeling that Japan was a victim (higaisha) of the world war, rather than a perpetrator (kagaisha) of aggression. The national psyche slipped into a paralysis that blamed the Allies – and particularly the United States – for the whole of the war and its destruction, especially that destruction inflicted on Japan itself, such as the mass air raids and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, Japanese seemed too stunned by the perceived enormity of the defeat to see that much of it was rooted in inane and shortsighted planning by their own wartime military leaders. While of course there have been individuals who have brought these topics into the public forum, the overall paralysis affecting both the government’s actions and the public perception has been very little affected.
2) A lack of a sense of closure in regard to WWII
So much is still unaccounted for, so many questions still lie unanswered, but the government’s attitude and the public understanding are light-years from actively putting the wartime past to rest. Does the Japanese government acknowledge or confirm the number of Allied POWs and others who died under Japanese control in the Dai-To-A-Kyoei-Ken (Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere)? Does the Japanese government even reveal any specifics, such as the number of POWs who perished in the crowded, squalid ‘Hell ships’ that brought POWs from the lands of the south to Japan proper?
“Those who know shame are strong in battle,” exhorted the tract Senjin Kun (Ethics in Battle). “You must always think of the reputation of your household, and perform your duties all the more to live up to its expectations. Do not live in dishonorable captivity; do not leave a bad name behind after your death.” This passage – titled ‘Value Your Names’ – was published and distributed as Army Instruction No.1. It was issued to every member of the Imperial Japanese Army by the January 8, 1941 order of then-Army Minister General Tojo Hideki. As a result of the application of this policy, POWs held by the Japanese were treated as less than human, and regarded as nameless animals. This is in marked contrast to such conflicts as the Russo-Japanese War and the First World War, in which captured enemy troops (Russians in the former case, Germans in the latter) are recorded as having been exceptionally well treated.
But such cruelties were not reserved for enemies alone. The citizens of Japan’s ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’ were treated like mere chattel, and this attitude often graduated into brutality and atrocity. Moreover, overweening Japanese military arrogance flourished in Japan itself: the families of the empire’s fighting men never knew where their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons had been sent or how they had died, been taken prisoner, or gone missing. And as the tide of war turned against the Japanese nation, so the military turned upon the nation’s people. The mass suicides of Japanese civilians – usually enforced with rifle shots or bayonet points – on Saipan and Okinawa are well-known cases in point. One can barely imagine the self-inflicted horror that would have resulted had the planned Allied landings in Japan actually taken place.
Japan still has its own great, unfinished, half-century-old task on its hands. The number of undiscovered or unidentified Japanese war dead scattered all over Asia and the western Pacific still totals around one million. My own brother is among them, and the government is either unwilling or unable to tell me when, where, and how he died.
In 1945, 14-year-old Ishii Kohei was a student at the First Xinjing Middle School in Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria then actively occupied by the Japanese military. In May, by order of the Education Bureau, he was sent to a National Service Farm in Dongning, near the then-Soviet border. Together with 120 of his classmates, he was caught up in the Soviet assault of August 9 and was never heard from again.
In 1991, I made a trip to that location to commemorate him and his classmates. I had brought his photograph and cakes and white orchids for that purpose, but due to local hostility to anything Japanese – still smoldering after almost a half-century – the others in our group who had come for similar purposes and myself took the advice of our guide and relocated our memorial service to a site away from the town where we would not attract attention.
This is a capsule of the lack of closure so prevalent in Japan: the scars of the war both within and without are ignored. Eyes and minds are averted from the results of brutality and arrogance, the ‘bread and circuses’ of the present actively eclipse gaping wounds that will not disappear on their own.
3) A persistent ignorance of the breadth and depth of the war itself.
Even now, Japanese are not really aware of the mechanism of responsibility that brought them into active conflict. Will the government provide the names of exactly who decided on the need to attack Pearl Harbor and when that decision was made? Or exactly who was responsible for the gamble of joining with Hitler’s Reich and Mussolini’s Italy in the Axis alliance? The details of the Tosuiken (the Imperial Supreme Command System) are still hidden in a black box of willful ignorance.
The greater portion of Japan’s wartime military records has been lost. These documents were destroyed – burnt – in accordance with official orders issued in the weeks between the Japanese acceptance of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration and the beginning of the active Allied occupation of the Japanese homeland and annexed territories. An August 5, 1946 Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal affidavit states that Miyama Yozo, Chief of Administration and Legal Affairs, First Department of Veterans’ Affairs attested to the following: “…by order of the Ministry of the Army, the following order was dispatched: ’All documents held by each unit are to be incinerated.’ This order was transmitted by telephone to each unit in Tokyo, and by telegram to those outside Tokyo. Both the telegrams and the original written order were then incinerated.”
Most of the materials that managed to survive were taken by the Allies to Washington and Moscow; some of these were repatriated from Washington during the 1980s. But these are not easily accessible. Documents dealing with military, diplomatic, and political aspects of the Imperial period are under the control of career bureaucrats whose arbitrariness is almost legendary. In the case of military materials, control is held by the Defense Agency. Classified materials are categorized using Roman letters: P indicates material held closed because disclosure would involve violation of privacy rights; N indicates those with a potential impact on national interest; S indicates those that might trigger a social reaction. A fourth category is more nebulous: “Inappropriate for Other Reasons.” Those documents that might touch on abuse of POWs or the development, testing, or use of biological weapons will without fail be covered by these four in some configuration. Bureaucratic darkness completes what incineration began.
The postwar educational system must also carry the burden of responsibility for the ignorance of modern Japanese about the war that nearly destroyed their nation a generation ago. As a result of ‘democratization’ by the Occupation forces, virtually anything referring to Japan’s military became taboo. While some of the evils and excesses of Japan’s militarism were in fact taught, a broad-based understanding of Japan and its place in the world at that time was not. This has resulted in the current generation of Japanese being woefully unaware of historical reality. This ignorance is a major underpinning of the ‘victim’ perception mentioned earlier.
4) Japan’s lapdog media.
The basic difference between the nature of Japan’s press – which for the purposes of this essay will include both traditional print and modern broadcast media – and the other developed nation is that from the establishment of the Meiji government in the late 1860’s, the press has been seen as a partner in the nation’s power structure. And while throughout its history the Japanese press has been happy to use exposes and criticism to further its own image and circulation figures, it has not taken an adversary stance. While this was more blatantly obvious before the Second World War, this vital difference still exists and plays a critical role in the phenomenon of organic censorship.
In the years of Japan’s imperial expansion, Japan’s press was essentially a cheering section for that expansion. An example: in December 1932, all 132 Japanese newspapers issued a joint declaration reading thus: “We, in the name of Japan’s organs of public opinion, stand firmly opposed to any policy that would in the slightest way endanger the existence of the Manchurian state.” That Manchurian ‘state’ had been split off from the body of China by Japanese military intervention and diplomatic intrigue. It had then been set up as the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, in actuality a huge colony for Japanese settlers and business interests. Not a single newspaper questioned the overtly expansionist, militaristic policy. The press was part and parcel of the Taisei-Yokusan-Kai (Great Consolidated Discourse System), which enclosed the entire nation as one great ‘family’.
All through the Second World War, the media lied to the Japanese people. At first, the reports of victory were based in fact, but as the war turned against Japan, the press trumpeted fictional victories and ignored the accelerating pace of defeats. They repeated and echoed the words of the Dai-Hon-Ei Happyo (Imperial Headquarters announcements) without question, even as starvation stalked the nation and destruction began raining from the skies.
However, after the war ended, the same pattern persisted. The press essentially became mouthpieces for pronouncements from GHQ-SCAP (General Headquarters, Supreme Commander Allied Powers). For example, on December 8, 1945 (the fourth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor), the national dailies commenced a 10-day series called ‘The Reality of the Pacific War.’ This series had been mandated by GHQ, and told the story of the Pacific War from the victors’ perspective. While it was no doubt an education to many Japanese, the fact that it had been imposed from above and was accepted and published without complaint or comment echoed the same pattern that had existed before the war. The system itself had not been altered; it was fundamentally a room for hire. Only the tenants had changed.
The same pattern continues today. Japanese media take what they are given through the kisha-kurabu (reporter-club) system and probe no further. Each government ministry or agency has its ‘club’ of accredited reporters, usually one from each major newspaper and television station. The government provides the facilities: the floor space, desks, telephones, electricity, and even basic secretarial services are furnished at no cost. Non-members have no such access, and any infractions of the system, in which the reporters ask agreed-upon questions and accept the proffered information handouts, carry the risk of expulsion. Often the reporters will indulge in memo-awase (note-adjustment), where they fill in any gaps in each other’s reporting and ensure that all the stories are pretty much the same. This system filters out the investigative maverick and essentially hijacks the mainstream Japanese media into the role of government loudspeaker.
Moreover, this system resolutely blocks any true sense of reporting. An egregious example occurred in October of 1975 when a reporter – one of a group given a staged opportunity – directly asked Emperor Hirohito “What are your thoughts about responsibility for the war?” The Emperor replied: “In regard to your turn of phrase, since I have not done much research in that literary direction and do not understand it well, I cannot reply on that subject.” This is not a mistranslation; the words the Emperor used (bungaku homen) clearly mean ‘literary direction.’ Not a single reporter followed up on that strange response, and the incident was essentially ignored. “Literary direction”? In any other developed nation, the press would have had a field day with such a response. Just imagine such an answer by an American President to a question about, say, the bombing of Hiroshima or the Vietnam War.
5) Responsibilities from the war have not been addressed nor fulfilled
The war was not waged only by uniformed troops. The media, the bureaucracy, the educational system, various industries, the judiciary, and even religious organizations all bore some responsibility for the drumbeat march of militaristic Japan. The War Crimes Tribunal, however, focused on the military and diplomatic leaders while virtually ignoring the others. It seems fair to state that the tribunal was a political show put on by the victors to legitimize their revenge. Was it really seeking those responsible for the war? Hardly. The Emperor was never called, even as a witness. If the obvious bearer of the highest responsibility was not responsible, who then would be?
In the summer of 1939, Japanese troops met those of the Soviet Union in the first great armored clash of the 20th century. This prelude to the great tank battles to come was played out on a desolate Mongolian plain, and the Japanese army was soundly defeated. There was no mention of the defeat in Japan. The two commanders in the planning and execution of that battle, Cols.Tsuji Masanobu and Hattori Takushiro, escaped any censure for their inept failure, and they proceeded to have a hand in many wartime operations, most of which eventually bore disastrous consequences for Japan. Among them were the debacles of Guadalcanal, Leyte, and Okinawa. Most of the Japanese troops who fought these campaigns died on those battlefields. Were Tsuji and Hattori held responsible? After the war, Hattori assisted GHQ in its assessment of the war, and Tsuji went on be elected to the House of Councillors.
There are other examples as well: in July 1944, United States forces took the island of Saipan. Saipan was considered a key part of Japan’s ‘Absolute Defense Line’, and the defeat there was indeed ominous handwriting on the wall. Prime Minister Tojo Hideki was forced out of his seat, but was any concrete step taken to stop the unfolding disaster? The only concerns voiced were about Kokutai-goji (protecting the Imperial System). No one moved to end the war. No one took any real responsibility. This tendency has remained unchanged, even through the Occupation and postwar history of Japan. Only after a problem has reached crisis proportions is there any concrete action, and that is usually far too little and far too late.
6) Jigyaku-shikan (a self-incriminating view of history) is becoming a taboo in Japan.
As Japan recovered in the postwar years, there was some popular and intellectual introspection and open regret about the war. While this was not the mainstream, it did have its effects: the avoidance of any subject even touching on the military by the educational system likely stemmed from this. Recently, however, new nationalistic voices are heard attacking anything that may incriminate Japan for its wartime actions. They insist that it was a struggle for national survival thrust on the nation from without, and that it was a just war in that it ended the Western colonial domination of Asia and liberated the peoples of that continent and the Pacific region. They may even concede that there were some brutalities, but they insist that these pale beside those of the Western colonialists in Asia. As for apologizing for Japan’s aggression, they ask if Spain has apologized for its brutal colonization of Latin America, or if the United States has apologized to its Native Americans for the same kind of conduct.
It is surprising to see that this attitude has gained a substantial following among the younger generation, who obviously have no wartime experience to rationalize or justify. Perhaps it is in response to a thirst for a national identity, perhaps it is in response to frustration with Japan’s long-depressed economy. It is apparent that rejecting or distorting historical fact will ill serve Japan in this new century, but what is alarming is that the media and a large segment of public opinion appear to be moving in this nationalistic direction. In everything from films to novels to comic books, a romanticization of the war is evident, and the true responsibility for the holocaust of the Dai-To-A Senso (The Greater East Asia War), and its effects on the other peoples of Asia and the Pacific is never examined. The rigid militarism of the Japanese imperial system is ignored; the fact that the nation was a fascist dictatorship is left unaddressed. Where will all this lead? Does another disaster await Japan a generation hence?
Japan is no longer a lockstep, militarized society, and there are no harsh official controls on the flow of information. There is nothing like the pre-1945 Public Order Maintenance Act, which gave the government absolute censorship powers. Instead, there is a paralyzing passivity. Information is not controlled by fiat from without, it is organically managed from within: the kisha-kurabu system, for example, ensures that the press will not ask uncomfortable questions; the bureaucratic control over the records of Japan’s wartime history – and other records, to be sure -- assures that upsetting revelations will not occur. There is no need for the police-state control that characterized 20th century dictatorships. Who needs the equivalent of Goebbels and the Gestapo when reporters and bureaucrats will provide functionally equivalent services with a smile? This organic – and cancerous – censorship is the greatest barrier to Japan’s full emergence into the 21st century.
Shinpei Ishii