Japanese Imperialism and World War II / Reparations for Slavery vs those for the Holocaust

I don't know where the following might be from:


In opening the issue, any "revisionist" should make clear to China and Korea that the debate is not about the scale and nature of individual atrocities for which the "B" and "C" class war criminals were punished - many with death sentences. The standards of military justice applied may well have been less than perfect; but only the rabid fringe in Japan would deny that atrocities were committed, or seek to justify them.

It is, instead, about the events leading up to the war itself, and the burden of guilt of the so-called "A" class war criminals, including the seven who were hanged, and whose enshrinement in Yasukuni drives Chinese protests.

The first point for any revisionist to make is that the "orthodox" thesis - a blameless Japanese people dragged into the war by a fanatical fascist militarist faction whose leaders were properly hanged - is too easy a cop-out. As an excuse, it is morally available only to the tiny handful of people who passed the war in prison and the slightly larger handful who sat the war out in sullen alienation. Any 70-year-old Japanese will remember the general feeling, a month before Pearl Harbor, that war could not honourably be avoided, given what the Americans were demanding. They will remember, too, the national euphoria that prevailed in the initial, victorious six months of the war.

If by any chance Mr Koizumi adopts this line, he might even mention his politician grandfather who hounded an "unpatriotic" pacifist out of his party in the late 1930s, in the end finally destroying party politics.

The key question, however, is whether the sins of the Japanese nation were so extraordinary as to warrant execution of its leaders, even as a symbolic act. General Tojo and his crowd who gained control of Japan in the 1930s were certainly racists, but their assertions of Japanese superiority were partly a response to slights from the white, western world, such as the rejection of Japan's proposal for a declaration of racial equality in the preamble of the Versailles treaty. It was a racial war, but the Japanese had no genocidal project equal to the Nazis' systematic slaughter of Jews and Gypsies. They were racists, yes, but all imperialists were racists. Like the previous generations who fought China and Russia to win Taiwan and Korea, (victories acclaimed in many parts of Europe), they were trying to build an empire that could claim equality with the European empires. The racial resentment apart, they had much the same motives as the European imperialists: the same mixture of sheer national self-aggrandisement, the self-righteous belief in a civilising mission and the hypocritical cynicism to use the one to justify the other.

An amusing history game: try to match Japanese leaders with the imposing characters of 19th century British history. Matsuoka Yosuke had a bit of the flamboyant self-assurance of Palmerston, if not the wit. In the freelance buccaneer class, Sasakawa matches up with Cecil Rhodes (both eventually founders of educational foundations in Britain.) The dour General Tojo perhaps most resembled the pious General Gordon, the man who sacked Beijing, only 40 years before Tojo's men sacked Nanjing.

The big difference was that the Japanese came too late. And lost. The winners could declare that the imperial age had ended, cede their colonies and claim that they had saved the world for freedom and democracy. Why would mainstream Japanese politicians hesitate to talk in these terms? Probably because it would upset too many powerful Americans. The speaker of the lower house of the Japanese Diet, the former foreign minister Yohei Kono, got to the heart of it when he said last weekend: "We need an even-handed approach ...We need to rethink our habit of doffing our caps to America on the one hand and talking downto the Chinese on the other." Perhaps he had in mind the Chinese charge that putting Japan on the UN Security Council would be giving two votes to the US.


No, I would think that the big difference is that the Japanese carried out the Rape of Nanking in China and started the Death Railway in Thailand: the degree of the crime matters just as much as the type of crime.

And even if one argues that the crimes were the same, there's this thing called the Statue of Limitations, which leads me to this gem from my archives:


New York Times, September 11, 2001
Slavery Reparations

[T] o the Editor:

It seems to me that Prof. Martin Kilson (letter, Sept. 6) compares apples and oranges in his contention about the similarities of reparations by the Germans to Jews and our government to African-Americans. It has been my understanding, as a Holocaust survivor (Auschwitz-Birkenau, prisoner No. 172099), that the German reparations were to those Jews who suffered directly, not to the descendants.

A logical extension of Mr. Kilson's comparison might be payments by the Egyptian government to the Jews who were descendants of the slaves who helped build pyramids and other structures during the times of the pharaohs.

LEON W. ZELBY
Norman, Okla., Sept. 7, 2001