Keeping The War Alive by Fareed Zakaria

August 27, 2001, U.S. Edition

Keeping the War Alive
Japan needs to confront its past honestly--and the same is true for its former Asian enemies.
By Fareed Zakaria

If the art of modern politics is triangulation--finding a middle ground between right and left--then Junichiro Koizumi's visit to the Yasukuni shrine last week was a study in failure. First, the Japanese prime minister tried to please right-wing nationalists by announcing he would visit the memorial to Japan's war dead on Aug. 15, the anniversary of Japanese surrender in World War II. Then, responding to criticism, he abruptly switched plans and dropped by two days earlier for a quick, private visit. The right was disappointed, the left hardly mollified; Japan's neighbors were furious, and the rest of the world was startled. Where is Dick Morris when you need him?

But despite all the hype, there is actually very little danger of resurgent militarism in Japan. The country, still shellshocked by its legacy in World War II, is almost obsessively pacifist. Japanese diplomats are squeamish about even contemplating the use of force in places like Yugoslavia. The Army and Navy are relegated to secondary roles in the government. In polls, almost half the country opposes using the Army even if Japan were invaded!

In fact this ultrapacifism is a sign of Japan's real problem. Rather than confronting its past, the Japanese government has tried simply to get beyond it. It apologizes, stays resolutely peaceful, but has never given a full accounting of its role in World War II. The result is national schizophrenia. The novelist Kazuo Ishiguro portrays modern Japan in one of his books as a nation in a kind of trance about its past, unable to remember it distinctly and yet unable to forget--living in "a floating world."

Thus, while the Japanese apologize for their aggression in World War II repeatedly, they also ceaselessly undermine those efforts. Every Aug. 15, while the prime minister reads a wooden statement of "regret" for Japan's role in the war, a procession of cabinet ministers pay homage at Yasukuni, which honors General Tojo and 13 other convicted war criminals. Koizumi is now the third prime minister to visit Yasukuni. And it's not just the politicians. Japan's textbooks are silent about the country's atrocities. Movies that show this whitewashed version of history become instant blockbusters.

Japan's task is not made easy by its neighbors, who use history as a weapon against it. Chinese, South Korean and Indonesian textbooks are no less biased than Japanese ones in their accounts of World War II. China and Korea, in particular, brandish their victim status for political gain. As communism has lost its appeal in China the regime has found it convenient to fan anti-Japanese sentiment. For example, its estimate of Chinese killed by Japanese troops during World War II has risen over these three decades from 10 million to 35 million. A liberal Japanese intellectual said to me, "Of course we need to apologize more fully. But would the Germans have been able to apologize if France had continued to spout a steady stream of anti-German rhetoric? It takes two for real reconciliation."

Europe has achieved its postwar peace by putting the past behind it. Asia, however, remains a cauldron of complaints, with almost all its nations carrying around their own versions of history. (I remember as a child in India finding that all the maps of South Asia in my Encyclopaedia Britannica had been blacked out by the censors to prevent readers from seeing heretical versions of our borders with Kashmir.) And Japan is at the center of the dispute over history. For more than a century it has been the region's strongest power, with an economy that is even now more than seven times the size of China's. And it was the aggressor in World War II. Until Japan gets over its hang-ups, no other country in Asia will.

In going to Yasukuni, Koizumi had understandable intentions. "Every society needs to find a way to mourn its dead," says the historian John Dower. "Almost every Japanese family lost someone in the war, and they must be able to mourn those people. But what Koizumi needed to do was not just go to Yasukuni, but to use it as an occasion to give a great cathartic speech about what Japan did to its neighbors and to its own people during World War II. He could have done for his country what Richard von Weisacker did for Germany. But instead he left the Japanese as frustrated as ever."

Japan's search is not an easy one. Other countries have had their own difficulties with this task. It was, after all, the deeply pro-Western Chancellor Helmut Kohl who asked Ronald Reagan to accompany him to Bitburg, whose cemetery includes graves of members of the dreaded Waffen SS. It has taken the Germans much time and great leadership to accept responsibility for their acts. France has still not come to grips with its role in collaborating with the Nazis during the war (nor with its support for brutal terrorism in Algeria).

Every nation faces this tension in some way with some element of its past. What to make, for example, of a leader who dedicated a monument to an army that fought for racial nationalism, who praised the willingness of the army to shed its blood "rather than pursue the weak course of expediency" and who celebrated a movie made to affirm the righteousness of the lost cause, calling it "history written with lightning." The monument is the Confederate Memorial in Arlington Cemetery; the movie was D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation"; and the leader was, of course, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, 28th president of the United States of America.