Bad Way to Start a Friday
Opening up the Op Ed section of the WSJ this morning, there was a piece on a flap in Japan, probably old news now, about a JSDF General wining a prize for writing his version of how the Pacific War started (Roosevelt trapped Japan) and that Japan's war was not a war of aggression. I lived and enjoyed for the most part, my over twenty years in Japan, traveled through much of the country, have Japanese in-laws and friends and a son who of course is part Japanese, but seeing this grotesque, bare-faced lie crop up again guarantees a 50-point rise in my blood pressure.
The article is remarkable for two reasons. One, this latest in a long line of historical misspeaks must have been a particularly egregious one; the WSJ is on whole , fairly slow to pick up on stuff like this, let alone put it in its Op Ed page. The second is that this continued, blinkered denial of what did actually happen is both infuriating and frightening since these are not 'crackpots', but this is (or was) a senior government official. And this is not the first time a senior government official was caught with his zori in his mouth- can't recall the name of the person now, but there was the official who at first denied there were 'comfort women'.
Its also scary in the sense I've sensed parallels between Japan and post WWI Germany, that a sizable portion of the German populace (and military) did not feel they were defeated, or to blame for WWI. And of course all it took was a man of evil vision to nurse these grievances and tap into historical anti-Semitism (and a note here, there is no, evil German gene in this regard. The late historian, Barbara Tuchman, in her book, The Distant Mirror, devotes a chapter on violent anti-Semitism in all of Europe during the 13th century), to set off the second great world cataclysm. Nor do I think I am alarmist. During one of our Japanese psyh classes back in the Sake Dojo Days, taught by a Japanese psychologist, I still recall this from him, and this is a quote,” The Japanese are like a suitcase, they can be picked up and taken anywhere.".
As the article as touches on, history can be a chronicle of convenience. U.S. soldiers were not altar boys during WWll, as my late father once told me of an incident he witnessed, but the difference here is that such acts were not systematic- U.S. soldiers were not indoctrinated that they were the Asian version of ubermensch, and thus justified in committing horrible acts upon others. What my late father witnessed was rather a case of what combat can do to otheriwse normal people.
Sometimes historical inaccuracies are amusing. Recall going to a small public library in an equally small village in the UK, to wait out another rain storm, pulling out a book on British history and flipped through how our War of Revolution was treated. Besides being reasonably unbiased I came across the Battle of Yorktown and discovered the places names were hopelessly scrambled (place in the wrong states).
