Just over 70 years earlier, the Japanese Empire had marched into Asia-believing as well that firepower would bring Asia a Pax-Nipponia. Naturally, the methods of bullying and using firepower-over-all were not only inappropriate to tasks of building any sense of peace and stability in the region. Japan was soon itself left a smoldering ruin by 1945.
In the early 1990s, I taught in Japanese high schools and returned again to study and do research there in 1995. On the one hand, I had a happy experience teaching in Japan in what was the largest teacher exchange program in the world- a program bringing over 5000 teachers to Japan from various lands around the world as part of an officially suported public diplomacy effort to have more and more Japanese coming in contact with non-Japanese views of life and of our planet. The focus on peace and getting to know one-another's cultures was very appealing to me as an educator in history and the social sciences. I met many Japanese who were interested in Peace issues and who were saddened by the educational practices and diplomacy inspired by its government.
As a person fascinated by the need to commemorate and invigorate oneself in the wake stopping further crimes against humanity, I have been disappointed by the public image portrayed by government leaders in their political acts related to the WWII era. They don't seem to realize how Imperialist Japanese history of the first half of the 20th Century was still affecting (1) how the average Japanese was educated and cultivated to relate to foreigners and (2) how foreign relations and national policies were failing to create an image of a matured Japan. The silent façade to memory revealed by the lack of critical textbooks and supported by insincere government pronouncements cover up shameful actions in China and a dozen other neighboring countries.
I recall the fact that when I was living in Japan, I had gained in a few days more information from what one-aged Japanese veteran of campaigns in China than his children or grandchildren had ever acquired. In short, the whole country of Japan at times appears to have had numerous skeletons in its closets that only the neighbors or neighboring peoples can see.
This façade of historical memory isn't due only to a culture of silence--driven by a tradition that runs from shame. This is the result political leadership putting up false images of what honor and dishonor mean. It also has to do with the fear of rocking the boat in a society that praises harmony-even if harmony is built on a false foundation: erasing of memory.
Compounding this silence in most corners of Japan has been a constant campaign to paint Japan as primarily a victim of history and of anti-Japanese crusades during recent decades. This focus on Japan as victim of history is certainly what drove Japanese nationalism at the birth of its imperialist efforts in the 1890s when Japan first faced off in Asia taking land from Russia and other neighboring countries in ensuing decades.
My country, the United States of America, also has played the victim card after the
11th September 2001--and naturally deserved this role to some small degree-- but the problem of always seeing oneself as victim is that one never grows up and takes responsibility for one's actions. Therefore, one never seriously tries to correct the faulty logic, faulty steps of acculturation and misdirected educational processes which led a people astray in creating Nanking Massacres in the first place.
This linking of imperialist Japanese memory and American war memories came full-circle in the April 2, 2007 publication of an editorial by a Japanese historian (and advisor to two Japanese prime ministers), Hideaki Kase. Kase's writing, called "The Use and Abuse of the Past" was an example of an almost official Japanese policy to rewrite again and again Japanese war crimes of the 20th Century.
NANKING'S MEMORY
The key quote expressing the sentiment of the author, Hideaki Kase, concerning the recent debate of war memories in Japan (and its affect on official Japanese diplomacy) was:
"The harder outsiders push Japan for an apology. The harder Japan may start pushing back."
Moreover, Kase claims or implies falsely:
(1) No Japanese military occupier ever forced women to serve as prostitutes or "comfort women".
(2) There is much evidence to indicate that no Nanking Massacre ever took place.
(3) Japanese politicians only ask forgiveness from its neighbors if it is good for business.
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