At this point it helps to dust off the pages of a book published 20 years ago by the American-European intellectual Ian Buruma: The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan. One of the volume's principal themes is that the Japanese have not come to terms with their war guilt precisely because the crimes their government and military committed in the 1930s and 1940s were different from those of Germany. Buruma notes that such horrific acts as the Bataan Death March, the sacking of Manila and the massacres in Singapore have been relatively little discussed in Japan compared to Nazi crimes in Germany. He notes the streak of revisionism that has affected Japanese narrations of the epic war crimes committed against Chinese civilians by Japanese troops in Nanking and Manchuria. There are, too, the visits by politicians, and of the emperor himself, to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo that honors the souls of Japan's war dead, including, among many others, Class-A war criminals who massacred civilians and slave laborers and tortured prisoners of war.
Buruma writes, from the vantage point of 1994, words that are still relevant: "The curious thing was that much of what attracted Japanese to Germany before the war -- Prussian authoritarianism, romantic nationalism, pseudo-scientific racialism -- had lingered in Japan while becoming distinctly unfashionable in Germany." While many individual Japanese rejected these ideas after the war, the national narrative remained defiant.
But condemning the Japanese is too easy. For, as Buruma painstakingly explains, one chief reason why Japan tried to sweep its war crimes under the rug was because it could: Japan's crimes don't descend to the same circle of Hell as Germany's. Japan had no Auschwitz. Though racist and brutal, Japanese leaders did not minutely plan and largely execute the torturous, industrial elimination of an entire people like the Nazis did to the Jews. "The jargon of Japanese imperialism was racist and overblown, but it did not carry the stench of death camps," Buruma writes. The Tokyo war crimes tribunals were exactly that: tribunals against war criminals, not trials against genocidal planners with absolute, mechanized control, like those at Nuremberg.
At any rate, the dropping of the two atomic bombs gave Japan a victim's narrative of its own to displace some of the soul-searching that might otherwise have occurred. The crimes were bad enough to terrify people all around Asia for decades, and Japan's unapologetic stance presented a moral dilemma and a strategic problem for the United States: how to get the Japanese to come to terms with their past, neutralize regional resistance to Japanese military resurgence, and thus lift some of the burden of balancing against China off the United States.
Oddly, the problem of history may be solving itself. Fears of China's rise across the region are bringing Japan closer to several of the states it conquered -- even South Korea faces a greater need to get along with Japan under the American aegis. Necessity may eventually grant Japan's military the regional forgiveness -- or at least forgetfulness -- that its diplomatic and economic gestures never could achieve.
