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Javier E

The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (Ian Buruma) - 0 views

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Japan history revisionist memory remembrance WWII interwar germany DDR

shared by Javier E on 12 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • the main reason why Germans were more trusted by their neighbors was that they were learning, slowly and painfully, and not always fully, to trust themselves.
  • elders, in government and the mass media, still voice opinions about the Japanese war that are unsettling, to say the least. Conservative politicians still pay their annual respects at a shrine where war criminals are officially remembered. Justifications and denials of war crimes are still heard. Too many Japanese in conspicuous places, including the prime minister’s office itself, have clearly not “coped” with the war.
  • unlike Nazi Germany, Japan had no systematic program to destroy the life of every man, woman, and child of a people that, for ideological reasons, was deemed to have no right to exist.
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  • “We never knew,” a common reaction in the 1950s, had worn shamefully thin in the eyes of a younger generation by the 1960s. The extraordinary criminality of a deliberate genocide was so obvious that it left no room for argument.
  • Right-wing nationalists like to cite the absence of a Japanese Holocaust as proof that Japanese have no reason to feel remorse about their war at all. It was, in their eyes, a war like any other; brutal, yes, just as wars fought by all great nations in history have been brutal. In fact, since the Pacific War was fought against Western imperialists, it was a justified—even noble—war of Asian liberation.
  • in the late 1940s or 1950s, a time when most Germans were still trying hard not to remember. It is in fact extraordinary how honestly Japanese novelists and filmmakers dealt with the horrors of militarism in those early postwar years. Such honesty is much less evident now.
  • Popular comic books, aimed at the young, extol the heroics of Japanese soldiers and kamikaze pilots, while the Chinese and their Western allies are depicted as treacherous and belligerent. In 2008, the chief of staff of the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force stated that Japan had been “tricked” into the war by China and the US. In 2013, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo publicly doubted whether Japan’s military aggression in China could even be called an invasion.
  • The fact is that Japan is still haunted by historical issues that should have been settled decades ago. The reasons are political rather than cultural, and have to do with the pacifist constitution—written by American jurists in 1946—and with the imperial institution, absolved of war guilt by General Douglas MacArthur after the war for the sake of expediency.
  • Japan, even under Allied occupation, continued to be governed by much the same bureaucratic and political elite, albeit under a new, more democratic constitution,
  • a number of conservatives felt humiliated by what they rightly saw as an infringement of their national sovereignty. Henceforth, to them, everything from the Allied Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal to the denunciations of Japan’s war record by left-wing teachers and intellectuals would be seen in this light.
  • The more “progressive” Japanese used the history of wartime atrocities as a warning against turning away from pacifism, the more defensive right-wing politicians and commentators became about the Japanese war.
  • Views of history, in other words, were politicized—and polarized—from the beginning.
  • To take the sting out of this confrontation between constitutional pacifists and revisionists, which had led to much political turmoil in the 1950s, mainstream conservatives made a deliberate attempt to distract people’s attention from war and politics by concentrating on economic growth.
  • For several decades, the chauvinistic right wing, with its reactionary views on everything from high school education to the emperor’s status, was kept in check by the sometimes equally dogmatic Japanese left. Marxism was the prevailing ideology of the teachers union and academics.
  • the influence of Marxism waned after the collapse of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s, and the brutal records of Chairman Mao and Pol Pot became widely known.
  • Marginalized in the de facto one-party LDP state and discredited by its own dogmatism, the Japanese left did not just wane, it collapsed. This gave a great boost to the war-justifying right-wing nationalists,
  • Japanese young, perhaps out of boredom with nothing but materialistic goals, perhaps out of frustration with being made to feel guilty, perhaps out of sheer ignorance, or most probably out of a combination of all three, are not unreceptive to these patriotic blandishments.
  • Anxiety about the rise of China, whose rulers have a habit of using Japan’s historical crimes as a form of political blackmail, has boosted a prickly national pride, even at the expense of facing the truth about the past.
  • By 1996, the LDP was back in power, the constitutional issue had not been resolved, and historical debates continue to be loaded with political ideology. In fact, they are not really debates at all, but exercises in propaganda, tilted toward the reactionary side.
  • My instinct—call it a prejudice, if you prefer—before embarking on this venture was that people from distinct cultures still react quite similarly to similar circumstances.
  • The Japanese and the Germans, on the whole, did not behave in the same ways—but then the circumstances, both wartime and postwar, were quite different in the two Germanies and Japan. They still are.
  • Our comic-book prejudices turned into an attitude of moral outrage. This made life easier in a way. It was comforting to know that a border divided us from a nation that personified evil. They were bad, so we must be good. To grow up after the war in a country that had suffered German occupation was to know that one was on the side of the angels.
  • The question that obsessed us was not how we would have acquitted ourselves in uniform, going over the top, running into machine-gun fire or mustard gas, but whether we would have joined the resistance, whether we would have cracked under torture, whether we would have hidden Jews and risked deportation ourselves. Our particular shadow was not war, but occupation.
  • the frightened man who betrayed to save his life, who looked the other way, who grasped the wrong horn of a hideous moral dilemma, interested me more than the hero. This is no doubt partly because I fear I would be much like that frightened man myself. And partly because, to me, failure is more typical of the human condition than heroism.
  • I was curious to learn how Japanese saw the war, how they remembered it, what they imagined it to have been like, how they saw themselves in view of their past. What I heard and read was often surprising to a European:
  • this led me to the related subject of modern Japanese nationalism. I became fascinated by the writings of various emperor worshippers, historical revisionists, and romantic seekers after the unique essence of Japaneseness.
  • Bataan, the sacking of Manila, the massacres in Singapore, these were barely mentioned. But the suffering of the Japanese, in China, Manchuria, the Philippines, and especially in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was remembered vividly, as was the imprisonment of Japanese soldiers in Siberia after the war. The Japanese have two days of remembrance: August 6, when Hiroshima was bombed, and August 15, the date of the Japanese surrender.
  • 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. Why?
  • the two peoples saw their own purported virtues reflected in each other: the warrior spirit, racial purity, self-sacrifice, discipline, and so on. After the war, West Germans tried hard to discard this image of themselves. This was less true of the Japanese.
  • Which meant that any residual feelings of nostalgia for the old partnership in Japan were likely to be met with embarrassment in Germany.
  • I have concentrated on the war against the Jews in the case of Germany, since it was that parallel war, rather than, say, the U-boat battles in the Atlantic, or even the battle of Stalingrad, that left the most sensitive scar on the collective memory of (West) Germany.
  • I have emphasized the war in China and the bombing of Hiroshima, for these episodes, more than others, have lodged themselves, often in highly symbolic ways, in Japanese public life.
  • Do Germans perhaps have more reason to mourn? Is it because Japan has an Asian “shame culture,” to quote Ruth Benedict’s phrase, and Germany a Christian “guilt culture”?
  • why the collective German memory should appear to be so different from the Japanese. Is it cultural? Is it political? Is the explanation to be found in postwar history, or in the history of the war itself?
  • the two peoples still have anything in common after the war, it is a residual distrust of themselves.
  • when Michael sees thousands of German peace demonstrators, he does not see thousands of gentle people who have learned their lesson from the past; he sees “100 percent German Protestant rigorism, aggressive, intolerant, hard.”
  • To be betroffen implies a sense of guilt, a sense of shame, or even embarrassment. To be betroffen is to be speechless. But it also implies an idea of moral purity. To be betroffen is one way to “master the past,” to show contriteness, to confess, and to be absolved and purified.
  • In their famous book, written in the sixties, entitled The Inability to Mourn, Alexander and Margarethe Mitscherlich analyzed the moral anesthesia that afflicted postwar Germans who would not face their past. They were numbed by defeat; their memories appeared to be blocked. They would or could not do their labor, and confess. They appeared to have completely forgotten that they had glorified a leader who caused the death of millions.
  • There is something religious about the act of being betroffen, something close to Pietism,
  • heart of Pietism was the moral renovation of the individual, achieved by passing through the anguish of contrition into the overwhelming realization of the assurance of God’s grace.” Pietism served as an antidote to the secular and rational ideas of the French Enlightenment.
  • It began in the seventeenth century with the works of Philipp Jakob Spener. He wanted to reform the Church and bring the Gospel into daily life, as it were, by stressing good works and individual spiritual labor.
  • German television is rich in earnest discussion programs where people sit at round tables and debate the issues of the day. The audience sits at smaller tables, sipping drinks as the featured guests hold forth. The tone is generally serious, but sometimes the arguments get heated. It is easy to laugh at the solemnity of these programs, but there is much to admire about them. It is partly through these talk shows that a large number of Germans have become accustomed to political debate.
  • There was a real dilemma: at least two generations had been educated to renounce war and never again to send German soldiers to the front, educated, in other words, to want Germany to be a larger version of Switzerland. But they had also been taught to feel responsible for the fate of Israel, and to be citizens of a Western nation, firmly embedded in a family of allied Western nations. The question was whether they really could be both.
  • the Gulf War showed that German pacifism could not be dismissed simply as anti-Americanism or a rebellion against Adenauer’s West.
  • the West German mistrust of East Germans—the East Germans whose soldiers still marched in goose step, whose petit bourgeois style smacked of the thirties, whose system of government, though built on a pedestal of antifascism, contained so many disturbing remnants of the Nazi past; the East Germans, in short, who had been living in “Asia.”
  • Michael, the Israeli, compared the encounter of Westerners (“Wessies”) with Easterners (“Ossies”) with the unveiling of the portrait of Dorian Gray: the Wessies saw their own image and they didn’t like what they saw.
  • he added: “I also happen to think Japanese and Germans are racists.”
  • Germany for its Nazi inheritance and its sellout to the United States. But now that Germany had been reunified, with its specters of “Auschwitz” and its additional hordes of narrow-minded Ossies, Adenauer was deemed to have been right after
  • The picture was of Kiel in 1945, a city in ruins. He saw me looking at it and said: “It’s true that whoever is being bombed is entitled to some sympathy from us.”
  • “My personal political philosophy and maybe even my political ambition has to do with an element of distrust for the people I represent, people whose parents and grandparents made Hitler and the persecution of the Jews possible.”
  • in the seventies he had tried to nullify verdicts given in Nazi courts—without success until well into the eighties. One of the problems was that the Nazi judiciary itself was never purged. This continuity was broken only by time.
  • To bury Germany in the bosom of its Western allies, such as NATO and the EC, was to bury the distrust of Germans. Or so it was hoped. As Europeans they could feel normal, Western, civilized. Germany; the old “land in the middle,” the Central European colossus, the power that fretted over its identity and was haunted by its past, had become a Western nation.
  • It is a miracle, really, how quickly the Germans in the Federal Republic became civilized. We are truly part of the West now. We have internalized democracy. But the Germans of the former GDR, they are still stuck in a premodern age. They are the ugly Germans, very much like the West Germans after the war, the people I grew up with. They are not yet civilized.”
  • “I like the Germans very much, but I think they are a dangerous people. I don’t know why—perhaps it is race, or culture, or history. Whatever. But we Japanese are the same: we swing from one extreme to the other. As peoples, we Japanese, like the Germans, have strong collective discipline. When our energies are channeled in the right direction, this is fine, but when they are misused, terrible things happen.”
  • to be put in the same category as the Japanese—even to be compared—bothered many Germans. (Again, unlike the Japanese, who made the comparison often.) Germans I met often stressed how different they were from the Japanese,
  • To some West Germans, now so “civilized,” so free, so individualistic, so, well, Western, the Japanese, with their group discipline, their deference to authority, their military attitude toward work, might appear too close for comfort to a self-image only just, and perhaps only barely, overcome.
  • To what extent the behavior of nations, like that of individual people, is determined by history, culture, or character is a question that exercises many Japanese, almost obsessively.
  • not much sign of betroffenheit on Japanese television during the Gulf War. Nor did one see retired generals explain tactics and strategy. Instead, there were experts from journalism and academe talking in a detached manner about a faraway war which was often presented as a cultural or religious conflict between West and Middle East. The history of Muslim-Christian-Jewish animosity was much discussed. And the American character was analyzed at length to understand the behavior of George Bush and General Schwarzkopf.
  • In the words of one Albrecht Fürst von Urach, a Nazi propagandist, Japanese emperor worship was “the most unique fusion in the world of state form, state consciousness, and religious fanaticism.” Fanaticism was, of course, a positive word in the Nazi lexicon.
  • the identity question nags in almost any discussion about Japan and the outside world. It
  • It was a respectable view, but also one founded on a national myth of betrayal. Japan, according to the myth, had become the unique moral nation of peace, betrayed by the victors who had sat in judgment of Japan’s war crimes; betrayed in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in Nicaragua; betrayed by the arms race, betrayed by the Cold War; Japan had been victimized not only by the “gratuitous,” perhaps even “racist,” nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but by all subsequent military actions taken by the superpowers,
  • When the Prime Minister of Japan, Shidehara Kijuro, protested in 1946 to General MacArthur that it was all very well saying that Japan should assume moral leadership in renouncing war, but that in the real world no country would follow this example, MacArthur replied: “Even if no country follows you, Japan will lose nothing. It is those who do not support this who are in the wrong.” For a long time most Japanese continued to take this view.
  • What is so convenient in the cases of Germany and Japan is that pacifism happens to be a high-minded way to dull the pain of historical guilt. Or, conversely, if one wallows in it, pacifism turns national guilt into a virtue, almost a mark of superiority, when compared to the complacency of other nations.
  • The denial of historical discrimination is not just a way to evade guilt. It is intrinsic to pacifism. To even try to distinguish between wars, to accept that some wars are justified, is already an immoral position.
  • That Kamei discussed this common paranoia in such odd, Volkish terms could mean several things: that some of the worst European myths got stuck in Japan, that the history of the Holocaust had no impact, or that Japan is in some respects a deeply provincial place. I think all three explanations apply.
  • “the problem with the U.S.-Japan relationship is difficult. A racial problem, really. Yankees are friendly people, frank people. But, you know, it’s hard. You see, we have to be friendly …”
  • Like Oda, indeed like many people of the left, Kamei thought in racial terms. He used the word jinshu, literally race. He did not even use the more usual minzoku, which corresponds, in the parlance of Japanese right-wingers, to Volk, or the more neutral kokumin, meaning the citizens of a state.
  • many Germans in the liberal democratic West have tried to deal honestly with their nation’s terrible past, the Japanese, being different, have been unable to do so. It is true that the Japanese, compared with the West Germans, have paid less attention to the suffering they inflicted on others, and shown a greater inclination to shift the blame. And liberal democracy, whatever it may look like on paper, has not been the success in Japan that it was in the German Federal Republic. Cultural differences might account for this. But one can look at these matters in a different, more political way. In his book The War Against the West, published in London in 1938, the Hungarian scholar Aurel Kolnai followed the Greeks in his definition of the West: “For the ancient Greeks ‘the West’ (or ‘Europe’) meant society with a free constitution and self-government under recognized rules, where ‘law is king,’ whereas the ‘East’ (or ‘Asia’) signified theocratic societies under godlike rulers whom their subjects serve ‘like slaves.’
  • According to this definition, both Hitler’s Germany and prewar Japan were of the East.
  • There was a great irony here: in their zeal to make Japan part of the West, General MacArthur and his advisers made it impossible for Japan to do so in spirit. For a forced, impotent accomplice is not really an accomplice at all.
  • In recent years, Japan has often been called an economic giant and a political dwarf. But this has less to do with a traditional Japanese mentality—isolationism, pacifism, shyness with foreigners, or whatnot—than with the particular political circumstances after the war that the United States helped to create.
  • when the Cold War prompted the Americans to make the Japanese subvert their constitution by creating an army which was not supposed to exist, the worst of all worlds appeared: sovereignty was not restored, distrust remained, and resentment mounted.
  • Kamei’s hawks are angry with the Americans for emasculating Japan; Oda’s doves hate the Americans for emasculating the “peace constitution.” Both sides dislike being forced accomplices, and both feel victimized, which is one reason Japanese have a harder time than Germans in coming to terms with their wartime past.
  • As far as the war against the Jews is concerned, one might go back to 1933, when Hitler came to power. Or at the latest to 1935, when the race laws were promulgated in Nuremberg. Or perhaps those photographs of burning synagogues on the night of November 9, 1938, truly marked the first stage of the Holocaust.
  • There is the famous picture of German soldiers lifting the barrier on the Polish border in 1939, but was that really the beginning? Or did it actually start with the advance into the Rhineland in 1936, or was it the annexation of the Sudetenland, or Austria, or Czechoslovakia?
  • IT IS DIFFICULT TO SAY when the war actually began for the Germans and the Japanese. I cannot think of a single image that fixed the beginning of either war in the public mind.
  • Possibly to avoid these confusions, many Germans prefer to talk about the Hitlerzeit (Hitler era) instead of “the war.”
  • only Japanese of a liberal disposition call World War II the Pacific War. People who stick to the idea that Japan was fighting a war to liberate Asia from Bolshevism and white colonialism call it the Great East Asian War (Daitowa Senso), as in the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.
  • The German equivalent, I suppose, would be the picture of Soviet soldiers raising their flag on the roof of the gutted Reichstag in Berlin.
  • People of this opinion separate the world war of 1941–45 from the war in China, which they still insist on calling the China Incident.
  • Liberals and leftists, on the other hand, tend to splice these wars together and call them the Fifteen-Year War (1931–45).
  • images marking the end are more obvious.
  • argued that the struggle against Western imperialism actually began in 1853, with the arrival in Japan of Commodore Perry’s ships, and spoke of the Hundred-Year War.
  • These are among the great clichés of postwar Japan: shorthand for national defeat, suffering, and humiliation.
  • The Germans called it Zusammenbruch (the collapse) or Stunde Null (Zero Hour): everything seemed to have come to an end, everything had to start all over. The Japanese called it haisen (defeat) or shusen (termination of the war).
  • kokka (nation, state) and minzoku (race, people) are not quite of the same order as Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) or Einsatzgruppe (special action squad). The jargon of Japanese imperialism was racist and overblown, but it did not carry the stench of death camps.
  • The German people are spiritually starved, Adenauer told him. “The imagination has to be provided for.” This was no simple matter, especially in the German language, which had been so thoroughly infected by the jargon of mass murder.
  • All they had been told to believe in, the Germans and the Japanese, everything from the Führerprinzip to the emperor cult, from the samurai spirit to the Herrenvolk, from Lebensraum to the whole world under one (Japanese) roof, all that lay in ruins
  • How to purge this language from what a famous German philologist called the Lingua Tertii Imperii? “… the language is no longer lived,” wrote George Steiner in 1958, “it is merely spoken.”
  • out of defeat and ruin a new school of literature (and cinema) did arise. It is known in Germany as Trümmerliteratur (literature of the ruins). Japanese writers who came of age among the ruins called themselves the yakeato seidai (burnt-out generation). Much literature of the late forties and fifties was darkened by nihilism and despair.
  • It was as though Germany—Sonderweg or no Sonderweg—needed only to be purged of Nazism, while Japan’s entire cultural tradition had to be overhauled.
  • In Germany there was a tradition to fall back on. In the Soviet sector, the left-wing culture of the Weimar Republic was actively revived. In the Western sectors, writers escaped the rats and the ruins by dreaming of Goethe. His name was often invoked to prove that Germany, too, belonged to the humanist, enlightened strain of European civilization.
  • the Americans (and many Japanese leftists) distrusted anything associated with “feudalism,” which they took to include much of Japan’s premodern past. Feudalism was the enemy of democracy. So not only did the American censors, in their effort to teach the Japanese democracy, forbid sword-fight films and samurai dramas, but at one point ninety-eight Kabuki plays were banned too.
  • yet, what is remarkable about much of the literature of the period, or more precisely, of the literature about that time, since much of it was written later, is the deep strain of romanticism, even nostalgia. This colors personal memories of people who grew up just after the war as well.
  • If the mushroom cloud and the imperial radio speech are the clichés of defeat, the scene of an American soldier (usually black) raping a Japanese girl (always young, always innocent), usually in a pristine rice field (innocent, pastoral Japan), is a stock image in postwar movies about the occupation.
  • To Ango, then, as to other writers, the ruins offered hope. At last the Japanese, without “the fake kimono” of traditions and ideals, were reduced to basic human needs; at last they could feel real love, real pain; at last they would be honest. There was no room, among the ruins, for hypocrisy.
  • Böll was able to be precise about the end of the Zusammenbruch and the beginning of bourgeois hypocrisy and moral amnesia. It came on June 20, 1948, the day of the currency reform, the day that Ludwig Erhard, picked by the Americans as Economics Director in the U.S.-British occupation zone, gave birth to the Deutsche Mark. The DM, from then on, would be the new symbol of West German national pride;
  • the amnesia, and definitely the identification with the West, was helped further along by the Cold War. West Germany now found itself on the same side as the Western allies. Their common enemy was the “Asiatic” Soviet empire. Fewer questions needed to be asked.
  • Indeed, to some people the Cold War simply confirmed what they had known all along: Germany always had been on the right side, if only our American friends had realized it earlier.
  • The process of willed forgetfulness culminated in the manic effort of reconstruction, in the great rush to prosperity.
  • “Prosperity for All” was probably the best that could have happened to the Germans of the Federal Republic. It took the seed of resentment (and thus future extremism) out of defeat. And the integration of West Germany into a Western alliance was a good thing too.
  • The “inability to mourn,” the German disassociation from the piles of corpses strewn all over Central and Eastern Europe, so that the Third Reich, as the Mitscherlichs put it, “faded like a dream,” made it easier to identify with the Americans, the victors, the West.
  • Yet the disgust felt by Böll and others for a people getting fat (“flabby” is the usual term, denoting sloth and decadence) and forgetting about its murderous past was understandable.
  • The Brückners were the price Germany had to pay for the revival of its fortunes. Indeed, they were often instrumental in it. They were the apparatchik who functioned in any system, the small, efficient fish who voted for Christian conservatives in the West and became Communists in the East.
  • Staudte was clearly troubled by this, as were many Germans, but he offered no easy answers. Perhaps it was better this way: flabby democrats do less harm than vengeful old Nazis.
  • the forgetful, prosperous, capitalist Federal Republic of Germany was in many more or less hidden ways a continuation of Hitler’s Reich. This perfectly suited the propagandists of the GDR, who would produce from time to time lists of names of former Nazis who were prospering in the West. These lists were often surprisingly accurate.
  • In a famous film, half fiction, half documentary, made by a number of German writers and filmmakers (including Böll) in 1977, the continuity was made explicit. The film, called Germany in Autumn (Deutschland in Herbst),
  • Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of the participants in this film. A year later he made The Marriage of Maria Braun.
  • To lifelong “antifascists” who had always believed that the Federal Republic was the heir to Nazi Germany, unification seemed—so they said—almost like a restoration of 1933. The irony was that many Wessies saw their new Eastern compatriots as embarrassing reminders of the same unfortunate past.
  • Rarely was the word “Auschwitz” heard more often than during the time of unification, partly as an always salutary reminder that Germans must not forget, but partly as an expression of pique that the illusion of a better, antifascist, anticapitalist, idealistic Germany, born in the ruins of 1945, and continued catastrophically for forty years in the East, had now been dashed forever.
  • Ludwig Erhard’s almost exact counterpart in Japan was Ikeda Hayato, Minister of Finance from 1949 and Prime Minister from 1960 to 1964. His version of Erhard’s “Prosperity for AH” was the Double Your Incomes policy, which promised to make the Japanese twice as rich in ten years. Japan had an average growth rate of 11 percent during the 1960s.
  • It explains, at any rate, why the unification of the two Germanys was considered a defeat by antifascists on both sides of the former border.
  • Very few wartime bureaucrats had been purged. Most ministries remained intact. Instead it was the Communists, who had welcomed the Americans as liberators, who were purged after 1949, the year China was “lost.”
  • so the time of ruins was seen by people on the left as a time of missed chances and betrayal. Far from achieving a pacifist utopia of popular solidarity, they ended up with a country driven by materialism, conservatism, and selective historical amnesia.
  • the “red purges” of 1949 and 1950 and the return to power of men whose democratic credentials were not much better helped to turn many potential Japanese friends of the United States into enemies. For the Americans were seen as promoters of the right-wing revival and the crackdown on the left.
  • For exactly twelve years Germany was in the hands of a criminal regime, a bunch of political gangsters who had started a movement. Removing this regime was half the battle.
  • It is easier to change political institutions and hope that habits and prejudices will follow. This, however, was more easily done in Germany than in Japan.
  • There had not been a cultural break either in Japan. There were no exiled writers and artists who could return to haunt the consciences of those who had stayed.
  • There was no Japanese Thomas Mann or Alfred Döblin. In Japan, everyone had stayed.
  • In Japan there was never a clear break between a fascist and a prefascist past. In fact, Japan was never really a fascist state at all. There was no fascist or National Socialist ruling party, and no Führer either. The closest thing to it would have been the emperor, and whatever else he may have been, he was not a fascist dictator.
  • whereas after the war Germany lost its Nazi leaders, Japan lost only its admirals and generals.
  • Japan was effectively occupied only by the Americans. West Germany was part of NATO and the European Community, and the GDR was in the Soviet empire. Japan’s only formal alliance is with the United States, through a security treaty that many Japanese have opposed.
  • But the systematic subservience of Japan meant that the country never really grew up. There is a Japanese fixation on America, an obsession which goes deeper, I believe, than German anti-Americanism,
  • Yet nothing had stayed entirely the same in Japan. The trouble was that virtually all the changes were made on American orders. This was, of course, the victor’s prerogative, and many changes were beneficial.
  • like in fiction. American Hijiki, a novella by Nosaka Akiyuki, is, to my mind, a masterpiece in the short history of Japanese Trümmerliteratur.
  • Older Japanese do, however, remember the occupation, the first foreign army occupation in their national history. But it was, for the Japanese, a very unusual army. Whereas the Japanese armies in Asia had brought little but death, rape, and destruction, this one came with Glenn Miller music, chewing gum, and lessons in democracy. These blessings left a legacy of gratitude, rivalry, and shame.
  • did these films teach the Japanese democracy? Oshima thinks not. Instead, he believes, Japan learned the values of “progress” and “development.” Japan wanted to be just as rich as America—no, even richer:
  • think it is a romantic assumption, based less on history than on myth; a religious notion, expressed less through scholarship than through monuments, memorials, and historical sites turned into sacred grounds.
  • The past, wrote the West German historian Christian Meier, is in our bones. “For a nation to appropriate its history,” he argued, “is to look at it through the eyes of identity.” What we have “internalized,” he concluded, is Auschwitz.
  • Auschwitz is such a place, a sacred symbol of identity for Jews, Poles, and perhaps even Germans. The question is what or whom Germans are supposed to identify with.
  • The idea that visiting the relics of history brings the past closer is usually an illusion. The opposite is more often true.
  • To visit the site of suffering, any description of which cannot adequately express the horror, is upsetting, not because one gets closer to knowing what it was actually like to be a victim, but because such visits stir up emotions one cannot trust. It is tempting to take on the warm moral glow of identification—so easily done and so presumptuous—with the victims:
  • Were the crimes of Auschwitz, then, part of the German “identity”? Was genocide a product of some ghastly flaw in German culture, the key to which might be found in the sentimental proverbs, the cruel fairy tales, the tight leather shorts?
  • yet the imagination is the only way to identify with the past. Only in the imagination—not through statistics, documents, or even photographs—do people come alive as individuals, do stories emerge, instead of History.
  • nature. It is all right to let the witnesses speak, in the courtroom, in the museums, on videotape (Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah has been shown many times on German television), but it is not all right for German artists to use their imagination.
  • the reluctance in German fiction to look Auschwitz in the face, the almost universal refusal to deal with the Final Solution outside the shrine, the museum, or the schoolroom, suggests a fear of committing sacrilege.
  • beneath the fear of bad taste or sacrilege may lie a deeper problem. To imagine people in the past as people of flesh and blood, not as hammy devils in silk capes, is to humanize them. To humanize is not necessarily to excuse or to sympathize, but it does demolish the barriers of abstraction between us and them. We could, under certain circumstances, have been them.
  • the flight into religious abstraction was to be all too common among Germans of the Nazi generation, as well as their children; not, as is so often the case with Jews, to lend mystique to a new identity, as a patriotic Zionist, but on the contrary to escape from being the heir to a peculiarly German crime, to get away from having to “internalize” Auschwitz, or indeed from being German at all.
  • a Hollywood soap opera, a work of skillful pop, which penetrated the German imagination in a way nothing had before. Holocaust was first shown in Germany in January 1979. It was seen by 20 million people, about half the adult population of the Federal Republic; 58 percent wanted it to be repeated; 12,000 letters, telegrams, and postcards were sent to the broadcasting stations; 5,200 called the stations by telephone after the first showing; 72.5 percent were positive, 7.3 percent negative.
  • “After Holocaust,” wrote a West German woman to her local television station, “I feel deep contempt for those beasts of the Third Reich. I am twenty-nine years old and a mother of three children. When I think of the many mothers and children sent to the gas chambers, I have to cry. (Even today the Jews are not left in peace. We Germans have the duty to work every day for peace in Israel.) I bow to the victims of the Nazis, and I am ashamed to be a German.”
  • Auschwitz was a German crime, to be sure. “Death is a master from Germany.” But it was a different Germany. To insist on viewing history through the “eyes of identity,” to repeat the historian Christian Meier’s phrase, is to resist the idea of change.
  • Is there no alternative to these opposing views? I believe there is.
  • The novelist Martin Walser, who was a child during the war, believes, like Meier, that Auschwitz binds the German people, as does the language of Goethe. When a Frenchman or an American sees pictures of Auschwitz, “he doesn’t have to think: We human beings! He can think: Those Germans! Can we think: Those Nazis! I for one cannot …”
  • Adorno, a German Jew who wished to save high German culture, on whose legacy the Nazis left their bloody finger marks, resisted the idea that Auschwitz was a German crime. To him it was a matter of modern pathology, the sickness of the “authoritarian personality,” of the dehumanized SS guards, those inhumane cogs in a vast industrial wheel.
  • To the majority of Japanese, Hiroshima is the supreme symbol of the Pacific War. All the suffering of the Japanese people is encapsulated in that almost sacred word: Hiroshima. But it is more than a symbol of national martyrdom; Hiroshima is a symbol of absolute evil, often compared to Auschwitz.
  • has the atmosphere of a religious center. It has martyrs, but no single god. It has prayers, and it has a ready-made myth about the fall of man. Hiroshima, says a booklet entitled Hiroshima Peace Reader, published by the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, “is no longer merely a Japanese city. It has become recognized throughout the world as a Mecca of world peace.”
  • They were not enshrined in the Japanese park, and later attempts by local Koreans to have the monument moved into Peace Park failed. There could only be one cenotaph, said the Hiroshima municipal authorities. And the cenotaph did not include Koreans.
  • What is interesting about Hiroshima—the Mecca rather than the modern Japanese city, which is prosperous and rather dull—is the tension between its universal aspirations and its status as the exclusive site of Japanese victimhood.
  • it is an opinion widely held by Japanese nationalists. The right always has been concerned with the debilitating effects on the Japanese identity of war guilt imposed by American propaganda.
  • The Japanese, in contrast, were duped by the Americans into believing that the traces of Japanese suffering should be swept away by the immediate reconstruction of Hiroshima. As a result, the postwar Japanese lack an identity and their racial virility has been sapped by American propaganda about Japanese war guilt.
  • Hiroshima, Uno wrote, should have been left as it was, in ruins, just as Auschwitz, so he claims, was deliberately preserved by the Jews. By reminding the world of their martyrdom, he said, the Jews have kept their racial identity intact and restored their virility.
  • But the idea that the bomb was a racist experiment is less plausible, since the bomb was developed for use against Nazi Germany.
  • There is another view, however, held by leftists and liberals, who would not dream of defending the “Fifteen-Year War.” In this view, the A-bomb was a kind of divine punishment for Japanese militarism. And having learned their lesson through this unique suffering, having been purified through hellfire and purgatory, so to speak, the Japanese people have earned the right, indeed have the sacred duty, to sit in judgment of others, specifically the United States, whenever they show signs of sinning against the “Hiroshima spirit.”
  • The left has its own variation of Japanese martyrdom, in which Hiroshima plays a central role. It is widely believed, for instance, that countless Japanese civilians fell victim to either a wicked military experiment or to the first strike in the Cold War, or both.
  • However, right-wing nationalists care less about Hiroshima than about the idée fixe that the “Great East Asian War” was to a large extent justified.
  • This is at the heart of what is known as Peace Education, which has been much encouraged by the leftist Japan Teachers’ Union and has been regarded with suspicion by the conservative government. Peace Education has traditionally meant pacifism, anti-Americanism, and a strong sympathy for Communist states, especially China.
  • The A-bomb, in this version, was dropped to scare the Soviets away from invading Japan. This at least is an arguable position.
  • left-wing pacifism in Japan has something in common with the romantic nationalism usually associated with the right: it shares the right’s resentment about being robbed by the Americans of what might be called a collective memory.
  • The romantic pacifists believe that the United States, to hide its own guilt and to rekindle Japanese militarism in aid of the Cold War, tried to wipe out the memory of Hiroshima.
  • few events in World War II have been described, analyzed, lamented, reenacted, re-created, depicted, and exhibited so much and so often as the bombing of Hiroshima
  • The problem with Nagasaki was not just that Hiroshima came first but also that Nagasaki had more military targets than Hiroshima. The Mitsubishi factories in Nagasaki produced the bulk of Japanese armaments. There was also something else, which is not often mentioned: the Nagasaki bomb exploded right over the area where outcasts and Christians lived. And unlike in Hiroshima, much of the rest of the city was spared the worst.
  • yet, despite these diatribes, the myth of Hiroshima and its pacifist cult is based less on American wickedness than on the image of martyred innocence and visions of the apocalypse.
  • The comparison between Hiroshima and Auschwitz is based on this notion; the idea, namely, that Hiroshima, like the Holocaust, was not part of the war, not even connected with it, but “something that occurs at the end of the world
  • still I wonder whether it is really so different from the position of many Germans who wish to “internalize” Auschwitz, who see Auschwitz “through the eyes of identity.”
  • the Japanese to take two routes at once, a national one, as unique victims of the A-bomb, and a universal one, as the apostles of the Hiroshima spirit. This, then, is how Japanese pacifists, engaged in Peace Education, define the Japanese identity.
  • the case for Hiroshima is at least open to debate. The A-bomb might have saved lives; it might have shortened the war. But such arguments are incompatible with the Hiroshima spirit.
  • In either case, nationality has come to be based less on citizenship than on history, morality, and a religious spirit.
  • The problem with this quasi-religious view of history is that it makes it hard to discuss past events in anything but nonsecular terms. Visions of absolute evil are unique, and they are beyond human explanation or even comprehension. To explain is hubristic and amoral.
  • in the history of Japan’s foreign wars, the city of Hiroshima is far from innocent. When Japan went to war with China in 1894, the troops set off for the battlefronts from Hiroshima, and the Meiji emperor moved his headquarters there. The city grew wealthy as a result. It grew even wealthier when Japan went to war with Russia eleven years later, and Hiroshima once again became the center of military operations. As the Hiroshima Peace Reader puts it with admirable conciseness, “Hiroshima, secure in its position as a military city, became more populous and prosperous as wars and incidents occurred throughout the Meiji and Taisho periods.” At the time of the bombing, Hiroshima was the base of the Second General Headquarters of the Imperial Army (the First was in Tokyo). In short, the city was swarming with soldiers. One of the few literary masterpieces to emerge
  • when a local group of peace activists petitioned the city of Hiroshima in 1987 to incorporate the history of Japanese aggression into the Peace Memorial Museum, the request was turned down. The petition for an “Aggressors’ Corner” was prompted by junior high school students from Osaka, who had embarrassed Peace Museum officials by asking for an explanation about Japanese responsibility for the war.
  • Yukoku Ishinkai (Society for Lament and National Restoration), thought the bombing had saved Japan from total destruction. But he insisted that Japan could not be held solely responsible for the war. The war, he said, had simply been part of the “flow of history.”
  • They also demanded an official recognition of the fact that some of the Korean victims of the bomb had been slave laborers. (Osaka, like Kyoto and Hiroshima, still has a large Korean population.) Both requests were denied. So a group called Peace Link was formed, from local people, many of whom were Christians, antinuclear activists, or involved with discriminated-against minorities.
  • The history of the war, or indeed any history, is indeed not what the Hiroshima spirit is about. This is why Auschwitz is the only comparison that is officially condoned. Anything else is too controversial, too much part of the “flow of history.”
  • “You see, this museum was not really intended to be a museum. It was built by survivors as a place of prayer for the victims and for world peace. Mankind must build a better world. That is why Hiroshima must persist. We must go back to the basic roots. We must think of human solidarity and world peace. Otherwise we just end up arguing about history.”
  • Only when a young Japanese history professor named Yoshimi Yoshiaki dug up a report in American archives in the 1980s did it become known that the Japanese had stored 15,000 tons of chemical weapons on and near the island and that a 200-kilogram container of mustard gas was buried under Hiroshima.
  • what was the largest toxic gas factory in the Japanese Empire. More than 5,000 people worked there during the war, many of them women and schoolchildren. About 1,600 died of exposure to hydrocyanic acid gas, nausea gas, and lewisite. Some were damaged for life. Official Chinese sources claim that more than 80,000 Chinese fell victim to gases produced at the factory. The army was so secretive about the place that the island simply disappeared from Japanese maps.
  • in 1988, through the efforts of survivors, the small museum was built, “to pass on,” in the words of the museum guide, “the historical truth to future generations.”
  • Surviving workers from the factory, many of whom suffered from chronic lung diseases, asked for official recognition of their plight in the 1950s. But the government turned them down. If the government had compensated the workers, it would have been an official admission that the Japanese Army had engaged in an illegal enterprise. When a brief mention of chemical warfare crept into Japanese school textbooks, the Ministry of Education swiftly took it out.
  • I asked him about the purpose of the museum. He said: “Before shouting ‘no more war,’ I want people to see what it was really like. To simply look at the past from the point of view of the victim is to encourage hatred.”
  • “Look,” he said, “when you fight another man, and hit him and kick him, he will hit and kick back. One side will win. How will this be remembered? Do we recall that we were kicked, or that we started the kicking ourselves? Without considering this question, we cannot have peace.”
  • The fact that Japanese had buried poison gas under Hiroshima did not lessen the horror of the A-bomb. But it put Peace Park, with all its shrines, in a more historical perspective. It took the past away from God and put it in the fallible hands of man.
  • What did he think of the Peace Museum in Hiroshima? “At the Hiroshima museum it is easy to feel victimized,” he said. “But we must realize that we were aggressors too. We were educated to fight for our country. We made toxic gas for our country. We lived to fight the war. To win the war was our only goal.”
  • Nanking, as the capital of the Nationalist government, was the greatest prize in the attempted conquest of China. Its fall was greeted in Japan with banner headlines and nationwide celebration. For six weeks Japanese Army officers allowed their men to run amok. The figures are imprecise, but tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands (the Chinese say 300,000) of Chinese soldiers and civilians, many of them refugees from other towns, were killed. And thousands of women between the ages of about nine and seventy-five were raped, mutilated, and often murdered.
  • Was it a deliberate policy to terrorize the Chinese into submission? The complicity of the officers suggests there was something to this. But it might also have been a kind of payoff to the Japanese troops for slogging through China in the freezing winter without decent pay or rations. Or was it largely a matter of a peasant army running out of control? Or just the inevitable consequence of war, as many Japanese maintain?
  • inevitable cruelty of war. An atrocity is a willful act of criminal brutality, an act that violates the law as well as any code of human decency. It isn’t that the Japanese lack such codes or are morally incapable of grasping the concept. But “atrocity,” like “human rights,” is part of a modern terminology which came from the West, along with “feminism,” say, or “war crimes.” To right-wing nationalists it has a leftist ring, something subversive, something almost anti-Japanese.
  • During the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, Nanking had the same resonance as Auschwitz had in Nuremberg. And being a symbol, the Nanking Massacre is as vulnerable to mythology and manipulation as Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
  • Mori’s attitude also raises doubts about Ruth Benedict’s distinction between Christian “guilt culture” and Confucian “shame culture.”
  • In her opinion, a “society that inculcates absolute standards of morality and relies on man’s developing a conscience is a guilt culture by definition …” But in “a culture where shame is a major sanction, people are chagrined about acts which we expect people to feel guilty about.” However, this “chagrin cannot be relieved, as guilt can be, by confession and atonement …”
  • memory was admitted at all, the Mitscherlichs wrote about Germans in the 1950s, “it was only in order to balance one’s own guilt against that of others. Many horrors had been unavoidable, it was claimed, because they had been dictated by crimes committed by the adversary.” This was precisely what many Japanese claimed, and still do claim. And it is why Mori insists on making his pupils view the past from the perspective of the aggressors.
  • Two young Japanese officers, Lieutenant N. and Lieutenant M., were on their way to Nanking and decided to test their swordsmanship: the first to cut off one hundred Chinese heads would be the winner. And thus they slashed their way through Chinese ranks, taking scalps in true samurai style. Lieutenant M. got 106, and Lieutenant N. bagged 105.
  • The story made a snappy headline in a major Tokyo newspaper: “Who Will Get There First! Two Lieutenants Already Claimed 80.” In the Nanking museum is a newspaper photograph of the two friends, glowing with youthful high spirits. Lieutenant N. boasted in the report that he had cut the necks off 56 men without even denting the blade of his ancestral sword.
  • I was told by a Japanese veteran who had fought in Nanking that such stories were commonly made up or at least exaggerated by Japanese reporters, who were ordered to entertain the home front with tales of heroism.
  • Honda Katsuichi, a famous Asahi Shimbun reporter, was told the story in Nanking. He wrote it up in a series of articles, later collected in a book entitled A Journey to China, published in 1981.
  • the whole thing developed into the Nankin Ronso, or Nanking Debate. In 1984, an anti-Honda book came out, by Tanaka Masaaki, entitled The Fabrication of the “Nanking Massacre.”
  • back in Japan, Lieutenant M. began to revise his story. Speaking at his old high school, he said that in fact he had beheaded only four or five men in actual combat. As for the rest … “After we occupied the city, I stood facing a ditch, and told the Chinese prisoners to step forward. Since Chinese soldiers are stupid, they shuffled over to the ditch, one by one, and I cleanly cut off their heads.”
  • The nationalist intellectuals are called goyo gakusha by their critics. It is a difficult term to translate, but the implied meaning is “official scholars,” who do the government’s bidding.
  • the debate on the Japanese war is conducted almost entirely outside Japanese universities, by journalists, amateur historians, political columnists, civil rights activists, and so forth. This means that the zanier theories of the likes of Tanaka…
  • The other reason was that modern history was not considered academically respectable. It was too fluid, too political, too controversial. Until 1955, there was not one modern historian on the staff of Tokyo University. History stopped around the middle of the nineteenth century. And even now, modern…
  • In any case, so the argument invariably ends, Hiroshima, having been planned in cold blood, was a far worse crime. “Unlike in Europe or China,” writes Tanaka, “you won’t find one instance of planned, systematic murder in the entire history of Japan.” This is because the Japanese…
  • One reason is that there are very few modern historians in Japan. Until the end of the war, it would have been dangerously subversive, even blasphemous, for a critical scholar to write about modern…
  • they have considerable influence on public opinion, as television commentators, lecturers, and contributors to popular magazines. Virtually none of them are professional historians.
  • Tanaka and others have pointed out that it is physically impossible for one man to cut off a hundred heads with one blade, and that for the same reason Japanese troops could never have…
  • Besides, wrote Tanaka, none of the Japanese newspapers reported any massacre at the time, so why did it suddenly come up…
  • He admits that a few innocent people got killed in the cross fire, but these deaths were incidental. Some soldiers were doubtless a bit rough, but…
  • even he defends an argument that all the apologists make too: “On the battlefield men face the ultimate extremes of human existence, life or death. Extreme conduct, although still ethically…
  • atrocities carried out far from the battlefield dangers and imperatives and according to a rational plan were acts of evil barbarism. The Auschwitz gas chambers of our ‘ally’ Germany and the atomic bombing of our…
  • The point that it was not systematic was made by leftist opponents of the official scholars too. The historian Ienaga Saburo, for example, wrote that the Nanking Massacre, whose scale and horror he does not deny, “may have been a reaction to the fierce Chinese resistance after the Shanghai fighting.” Ienaga’s…
  • The nationalist right takes the opposite view. To restore the true identity of Japan, the emperor must be reinstated as a religious head of state, and Article Nine must be revised to make Japan a legitimate military power again. For this reason, the Nanking Massacre, or any other example of extreme Japanese aggression, has to be ignored, softened, or denied.
  • the question remains whether the raping and killing of thousands of women, and the massacre of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of other unarmed people, in the course of six weeks, can still be called extreme conduct in the heat of battle. The question is pertinent, particularly when such extreme violence is justified by an ideology which teaches the aggressors that killing an inferior race is in accordance with the will of their divine emperor.
  • The politics behind the symbol are so divided and so deeply entrenched that it hinders a rational historical debate about what actually happened in 1937. The more one side insists on Japanese guilt, the more the other insists on denying it.
  • The Nanking Massacre, for leftists and many liberals too, is the main symbol of Japanese militarism, supported by the imperial (and imperialist) cult. Which is why it is a keystone of postwar pacifism. Article Nine of the constitution is necessary to avoid another Nanking Massacre.
  • The Japanese, he said, should see their history through their own eyes, for “if we rely on the information of aliens and alien countries, who use history for the sake of propaganda, then we are in danger of losing the sense of our own history.” Yet another variation of seeing history through the eyes of identity.
  • their emotions were often quite at odds with the idea of “shame culture” versus “guilt culture.” Even where the word for shame, hazukashii, was used, its meaning was impossible to distinguish from the Western notion of guilt.
  • wasn’t so bad in itself. But then they killed them. You see, rape was against military regulations, so we had to destroy the evidence. While the women were fucked, they were considered human, but when we killed them, they were just pigs. We felt no shame about it, no guilt. If we had, we couldn’t have done it.
  • “Whenever we would enter a village, the first thing we’d do was steal food, then we’d take the women and rape them, and finally we’d kill all the men, women, and children to make sure they couldn’t slip away and tell the Chinese troops where we were. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night.”
  • Clearly, then, the Nanking Massacre had been the culmination of countless massacres on a smaller scale. But it had been mass murder without a genocidal ideology. It was barbaric, but to Azuma and his comrades, barbarism was part of war.
  • “Sexual desire is human,” he said. “Since I suffered from a venereal disease, I never actually did it with Chinese women. But I did peep at their private parts. We’d always order them to drop their trousers. They never wore any underwear, you know. But the others did it with any woman that crossed our path.
  • He did have friends, however, who took part in the killings. One of them, Masuda Rokusuke, killed five hundred men by the Yangtze River with his machine gun. Azuma visited his friend in the hospital just before he died in the late 1980s. Masuda was worried about going to hell. Azuma tried to reassure him that he was only following orders. But Masuda remained convinced that he was going to hell.
  • “One of the worst moments I can remember was the killing of an old man and his grandson. The child was bayoneted and the grandfather started to suck the boy’s blood, as though to conserve his grandson’s life a bit longer. We watched a while and then killed both. Again, I felt no guilt, but I was bothered by this kind of thing. I felt confused. So I decided to keep a diary. I thought it might help me think straight.”
  • What about his old comrades? I asked. How did they discuss the war? “Oh,” said Azuma, “we wouldn’t talk about it much. When we did, it was to justify it. The Chinese resisted us, so we had to do what we did, and so on. None of us felt any remorse. And I include myself.”
  • got more and more agitated. “They turned the emperor into a living god, a false idol, like the Ayatollah in Iran or like Kim II Sung. Because we believed in the divine emperor, we were prepared to do anything, anything at all, kill, rape, anything. But I know he fucked his wife every night, just like we do …” He paused and lowered his voice. “But you know we cannot say this in Japan, even today. It is impossible in this country to tell the truth.”
  • My first instinct was to applaud West German education. Things had come a long way since 1968. There had been no school classes at Nuremberg, or even at the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt from 1963 till 1965. Good for the teacher, I thought. Let them hear what was done. But I began to have doubts.
  • Just as belief belongs in church, surely history education belongs in school. When the court of law is used for history lessons, then the risk of show trials cannot be far off. It may be that show trials can be good politics—though I have my doubts about this too. But good politics don’t necessarily serve the truth.
  • There is a story about the young Richard when he was in Nuremberg at the time of the war crimes trials. He is said to have turned to a friend and to have remarked, in his best Wehrmacht officer style, that they should storm the court and release the prisoners. The friend, rather astonished, asked why on earth they should do such a thing. “So that we can try them ourselves” was Weiszäcker’s alleged response.
  • There was also concern that international law might not apply to many of the alleged crimes. If revenge was the point, why drag the law into it? Why not take a political decision to punish? This was what Becker, in his office, called the Italian solution: “You kill as many people as you can in the first six weeks, and then you forget about it: not very legal, but for the purposes of purification, well …”
  • Becker was not against holding trials as such. But he believed that existing German laws should have been applied, instead of retroactive laws about crimes against peace (preparing, planning, or waging an aggressive war).
  • It was to avoid a travesty of the legal process that the British had been in favor of simply executing the Nazi leaders without a trial. The British were afraid that a long trial might change public opinion. The trial, in the words of one British diplomat, might be seen as a “put-up job.”
  • The question is how to achieve justice without distorting the law, and how to stage a trial by victors over the vanquished without distorting history. A possibility would have been to make victors’ justice explicit, by letting military courts try the former enemies.
  • This would have avoided much hypocrisy and done less damage to the due process of law in civilian life. But if the intention was to teach Germans a history lesson, a military court would have run into the same problems as a civilian one.
  • Due process or revenge. This problem had preoccupied the ancient Greek tragedians. To break the cycle of vendetta, Orestes had to be tried by the Athens court for the murder of his mother. Without a formal trial, the vengeful Furies would continue to haunt the living.
  • The aspect of revenge might have been avoided had the trial been held by German judges. There was a precedent for this, but it was not a happy one. German courts had been allowed to try alleged war criminals after World War I. Despite strong evidence against them, virtually all were acquitted, and the foreign delegates were abused by local mobs. Besides, Wetzka was right: German judges had collaborated with the Nazi regime; they could hardly be expected to be impartial. So it was left to the victors to see that justice was done.
  • When the American chief prosecutor in Nuremberg, Robert H. Jackson, was asked by the British judge, Lord Justice Lawrence, what he thought the purpose of the trials should be, Jackson answered that they were to prove to the world that the German conduct of the war had been unjustified and illegal, and to demonstrate to the German people that this conduct deserved severe punishment and to prepare them for
  • What becomes clear from this kind of language is that law, politics, and religion became confused: Nuremberg became a morality play, in which Göring, Kaltenbrunner, Keitel, and the others were cast in the leading roles. It was a play that claimed to deliver justice, truth, and the defeat of evil.
  • The Nuremberg trials were to be a history lesson, then, as well as a symbolic punishment of the German people—a moral history lesson cloaked in all the ceremonial trappings of due legal process. They were the closest that man, or at least the men belonging to the victorious powers, could come to dispensing divine justice. This was certainly the way some German writers felt about it. Some welcomed it
  • We now have this law on our books, the prosecutor said: “It will be used against the German aggressor this time. But the four powers, who are conducting this trial in the name of twenty-three nations, know this law and declare: Tomorrow we shall be judged before history by the same yardstick by which we judge these defendants today.”
  • “We had seen through the amorality of the Nazis, and wanted to rid ourselves of it. It was from the moral seriousness of the American prosecution that we wished to learn sensible political thinking. “And we did learn. “And we allowed ourselves to apply this thinking to the present time. For example, we will use it now to take quite literally the morality of those American prosecutors. Oradour and Lidice—today they are cities in South Vietnam” (Italics in the original text.)
  • The play ends with a statement by the American prosecutor on crimes against peace
  • (It was decided in 1979, after the shock of the Holocaust TV series, to abolish the statute of limitations for crimes against humanity.)
  • after Nuremberg, most Germans were tired of war crimes. And until the mid-1950s German courts were permitted to deal only with crimes committed by Germans against other Germans. It took the bracing example of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem to jolt German complacency—that, and the fact that crimes committed before 1946 would no longer be subject to prosecution after 1965.
  • Trying the vanquished for conventional war crimes was never convincing, since the victors could be accused of the same. Tu quoque could be invoked, in private if not in the Nuremberg court, when memories of Dresden and Soviet atrocities were still fresh. But Auschwitz had no equivalent. That was part of another war, or, better, it was not really a war at all; it was mass murder pure and simple, not for reasons of strategy or tactics, but of ideology alone.
  • Whether you are a conservative who wants Germany to be a “normal” nation or a liberal/leftist engaging in the “labor of mourning,” the key event of World War II is Auschwitz, not the Blitzkrieg, not Dresden, not even the war on the eastern front. This was the one history lesson of Nuremberg that stuck. As Hellmut Becker said, despite his skepticism about Nuremberg: “It was most important that the German population realized that crimes against humanity had taken place and that during the trials it became clear how they had taken place.”
  • In his famous essay on German guilt, Die Schuldfrage (The Question of German Guilt), written in 1946, Karl Jaspers distinguished four categories of guilt: criminal guilt, for breaking the law; political guilt, for being part of a criminal political system; moral guilt, for personal acts of criminal behavior; and metaphysical guilt, for failing in one’s responsibility to maintain the standards of civilized humanity. Obviously these categories overlap.
  • The great advantage, in his view, of a war crimes trial was its limitation. By allowing the accused to defend themselves with arguments, by laying down the rules of due process, the victors limited their own powers.
  • In any event, the trial distanced the German people even further from their former leaders. It was a comfortable distance, and few people had any desire to bridge it. This might be why the Nazi leaders are hardly ever featured in German plays, films, or novels.
  • And: “For us Germans this trial has the advantage that it distinguishes between the particular crimes of the leaders and that it does not condemn the Germans collectively.”
  • Serious conservative intellectuals, such as Hermann Lübbe, argued that too many accusations would have blocked West Germany’s way to becoming a stable, prosperous society. Not that Lübbe was an apologist for the Third Reich. Far from it: the legitimacy of the Federal Republic, in his opinion, lay in its complete rejection of the Nazi state.
  • their reaction was often one of indignation. “Why me?” they would say. “I just did my duty. I just followed orders like every decent German. Why must I be punished?”
  • “that these criminals were so like all of us at any point between 1918 and 1945 that we were interchangeable, and that particular circumstances caused them to take a different course, which resulted in this trial, these matters could not be properly discussed in the courtroom.” The terrible acts of individuals are lifted from their historical context. History is reduced to criminal pathology and legal argument.
  • they will not do as history lessons, nor do they bring us closer to that elusive thing that Walser seeks, a German identity.
  • The GDR had its own ways of using courts of law to deal with the Nazi past. They were in many respects the opposite of West German ways. The targets tended to be the very people that West German justice had ignored.
  • Thorough purges took place in the judiciary, the bureaucracy, and industry. About 200,000 people—four-fifths of the Nazi judges and prosecutors—lost their jobs. War crimes trials were held too; until 1947 by the Soviets, after that in German courts.
  • There were two more before 1957, and none after that. All in all, about 30,000 people had been tried and 500 executed. In the Federal Republic the number was about 91,000, and none were executed, as the death penalty was abolished by the 1949 constitution.
  • East German methods were both ruthless and expedient, and the official conclusion to the process was that the GDR no longer had to bear the burden of guilt. As state propaganda ceaselessly pointed out, the guilty were all in the West. There the fascists still sat as judges and ran the industries that produced the economic boom, the Wirtschaftswunder.
  • society. Although some of his critics, mostly on the old left, in both former Germanys, called him a grand inquisitor, few doubted the pastor’s good intentions. His arguments for trials were moral, judicial, and historical. He set out his views in a book entitled The Stasi Documents. Echoes of an earlier past rang through almost every page. “We can
  • Germany of the guilty, the people who felt betroffen by their own “inability to mourn,” the nation that staged the Auschwitz and Majdanek trials, that Germany was now said to stand in judgment over the other Germany—the Germany of the old antifascists, the Germany that had suffered under two dictatorships, the Germany of uniformed marches, goose-stepping drills, and a secret police network, vast beyond even the Gestapo’s dreams.
  • It is almost a form of subversion to defend a person who stands accused in court. So the idea of holding political and military leaders legally accountable for their actions was even stranger in Japan than it was in Germany. And yet, the shadows thrown by the Tokyo trial have been longer and darker in Japan than those of the Nuremberg trial in Germany.
  • never was—unlike, say, the railway station or the government ministry—a central institution of the modern Japanese state. The law was not a means to protect the people from arbitrary rule; it was, rather, a way for the state to exercise more control over the people. Even today, there are relatively few lawyers in Japan.
  • Japanese school textbooks are the product of so many compromises that they hardly reflect any opinion at all. As with all controversial matters in Japan, the more painful, the less said. In a standard history textbook for middle school students, published in the 1980s, mention of the Tokyo trial takes up less than half a page. All it says is that the trial…
  • As long as the British and the Americans continued to be oppressors in Asia, wrote a revisionist historian named Hasegawa Michiko, who was born in 1945, “confrontation with Japan was inevitable. We did not fight for Japan alone. Our aim was to fight a Greater East Asia War. For this reason the war between Japan and China and Japan’s oppression of…
  • West German textbooks describe the Nuremberg trial in far more detail. And they make a clear distinction between the retroactive law on crimes against peace and the…
  • Nationalist revisionists talk about “the Tokyo Trial View of History,” as though the conclusions of the tribunal had been nothing but rabid anti-Japanese propaganda. The tribunal has been called a lynch mob, and Japanese leftists are blamed for undermining the morale of generations of Japanese by passing on the Tokyo Trial View of History in school textbooks and liberal publications. The Tokyo Trial…
  • When Hellmut Becker said that few Germans wished to criticize the procedures of the Nuremberg trial because the criminality of the defendants was so plain to see, he was talking about crimes against humanity—more precisely, about the Holocaust. And it was…
  • The knowledge compiled by the doctors of Unit 731—of freezing experiments, injection of deadly diseases, vivisections, among other things—was considered so valuable by the Americans in 1945 that the doctors…
  • those aspects of the war that were most revolting and furthest removed from actual combat, such as the medical experiments on human guinea pigs (known as “logs”) carried out by Unit 731 in…
  • There never were any Japanese war crimes trials, nor is there a Japanese Ludwigsburg. This is partly because there was no exact equivalent of the Holocaust. Even though the behavior of Japanese troops was often barbarous, and the psychological consequences of State Shinto and emperor worship were frequently as hysterical as Nazism, Japanese atrocities were part of a…
  • This difference between (West) German and Japanese textbooks is not just a matter of detail; it shows a gap in perception. To the Japanese, crimes against humanity are not associated with an equivalent to the…
  • on what grounds would Japanese courts have prosecuted their own former leaders? Hata’s answer: “For starting a war which they knew they would lose.” Hata used the example of General Galtieri and his colleagues in Argentina after losing the Falklands War. In short, they would have been tried for losing the war, and the intense suffering they inflicted on their own people. This is as though German courts in 1918 had put General Hindenburg or General Ludendorff on trial.
  • it shows yet again the fundamental difference between the Japanese war, in memory and, I should say, in fact, and the German experience. The Germans fought a war too, but the one for which they tried their own people, the Bogers and the Schwammbergers, was a war they could not lose, unless defeat meant that some of the enemies survived.
  • Just as German leftists did in the case of Nuremberg, Kobayashi used the trial to turn the tables against the judges. But not necessarily to mitigate Japanese guilt. Rather, it was his intention to show how the victors had betrayed the pacifism they themselves had imposed on Japan.
  • the Japanese left has a different view of the Tokyo trial than the revisionist right. It is comparable to the way the German left looks upon Nuremberg. This was perfectly, if somewhat long-windedly, expressed in Kobayashi Masaki’s documentary film Tokyo Trial, released in 1983. Kobayashi is anything but an apologist for the Japanese war. His most famous film, The Human Condition, released in 1959, took a highly critical view of the war.
  • Yoshimoto’s memory was both fair and devastating, for it pointed straight at the reason for the trial’s failure. The rigging of a political trial—the “absurd ritual”—undermined the value of that European idea of law.
  • Yoshimoto went on to say something no revisionist would ever mention: “I also remember my fresh sense of wonder at this first encounter with the European idea of law, which was so different from the summary justice in our Asiatic courts. Instead of getting your head chopped off without a proper trial, the accused were able to defend themselves, and the careful judgment appeared to follow a public procedure.”
  • Yoshimoto Takaaki, philosopher of the 1960s New Left. Yet he wrote in 1986 that “from our point of view as contemporaries and witnesses, the trial was partly plotted from the very start. It was an absurd ritual before slaughtering the sacrificial lamb.”
  • This, from all accounts, was the way it looked to most Japanese, even if they had little sympathy for most of the “lambs.” In 1948, after three years of American occupation censorship and boosterism, people listened to the radio broadcast of the verdicts with a sad but fatalist shrug: this is what you can expect when you lose the war.
  • Some of the information even surprised the defendants. General Itagaki Seishiro, a particularly ruthless figure, who was in command of prison camps in Southeast Asia and whose troops had massacred countless Chinese civilians, wrote in his diary: “I am learning of matters I had not known and recalling things I had forgotten.”
  • hindsight, one can only conclude that instead of helping the Japanese to understand and accept their past, the trial left them with an attitude of cynicism and resentment.
  • After it was over, the Nippon Times pointed out the flaws of the trial, but added that “the Japanese people must ponder over why it is that there has been such a discrepancy between what they thought and what the rest of the world accepted almost as common knowledge. This is at the root of the tragedy which Japan brought upon herself.”
  • Political trials produce politicized histories. This is what the revisionists mean when they talk about the Tokyo Trial View of History. And they are right, even if their own conclusions are not.
  • Frederick Mignone, one of the prosecutors, said a trifle histrionically that “in Japan and in the Orient in general, the trial is one of the most important phases of the occupation. It has received wide coverage in the Japanese press and revealed for the first time to millions of Japanese the scheming, duplicity, and insatiable desire for power of her entrenched militaristic leaders, writing a much-needed history of events which otherwise would not have been written.” It was indeed much-needed, since so little was known.
  • The president of the Tokyo tribunal, Sir William Webb, thought “the crimes of the German accused were far more heinous, varied and extensive than those of the Japanese accused.” Put in another way, nearly all the defendants at Nuremberg, convicted of crimes against peace, were also found guilty of crimes against humanity. But half the Japanese defendants received life sentences for political crimes only.
  • the question of responsibility is always a tricky affair in Japan, where formal responsibility is easier to identify than actual guilt. Not only were there many men, such as the hero of Kinoshita’s play, who took the blame for what their superiors had done—a common practice in Japan, in criminal gangs as well as in politics or business corporations—but the men at the top were often not at all in control of their unscrupulous subordinates.
  • “These men were not the hoodlums who were the powerful part of the group which stood before the tribunal at Nuremberg, dregs of a criminal environment, thoroughly schooled in the ways of crime and knowing no other methods but those of crime. These men were supposed to be the elite of the nation, the honest and trusted leaders to whom the fate of the nation had been confidently entrusted
  • many people were wrongly accused of the wrong things for the wrong reasons. This is why there was such sympathy in Japan for the men branded by foreigners as war criminals, particularly the so-called Class B and Class C criminals, the men who followed orders, or gave them at a lower level: field commanders, camp guards, and so on.
  • “The Japanese people are of the opinion that the actual goal of the war crimes tribunals was never realized, since the judgments were reached by the victors alone and had the character of revenge. The [Japanese] war criminal is not conscious of having committed a crime, for he regards his deeds as acts of war, committed out of patriotism.”
  • Yamashita Tomoyuki. Terrible atrocities were committed under his command in the Philippines. The sacking of Manila in 1945 was about as brutal as the Nanking Massacre. So to depict him in the movie as a peaceful gentleman, while portraying the American prosecutor in Manila as one of the main villains, might seem an odd way to view the past.
  • The Shrine ranks highest. It is the supreme symbol of authority, shouldered (like a shrine on festival days) by the Officials.
  • The political theorist Maruyama Masao called the prewar Japanese government a “system of irresponsibilities.” He identified three types of political personalities: the portable Shrine, the Official, and the Outlaw.
  • those who carry it, the Officials, are the ones with actual power. But the Officials—bureaucrats, politicians, admirals and generals—are often manipulated by the lowest-ranking Outlaws, the military mavericks, the hotheaded officers in the field, the mad nationalists, and other agents of violence.
  • But it was not entirely wrong, for the trial was rigged. Yamashita had no doubt been a tough soldier, but in this case he had been so far removed from the troops who ran amok in Manila that he could hardly have known what was going on. Yet the American prosecutor openly talked about his desire to hang “Japs.”
  • When the system spins out of control, as it did during the 1930s, events are forced by violent Outlaws, reacted to by nervous Officials, and justified by the sacred status of the Shrines.
  • Here we come to the nub of the problem, which the Tokyo trial refused to deal with, the role of the Shrine in whose name every single war crime was committed, Emperor Hirohito,
  • The historian Ienaga Saburo tells a story about a Japanese schoolchild in the 1930s who was squeamish about having to dissect a live frog. The teacher rapped him hard on the head with his knuckles and said: “Why are you crying about one lousy frog? When you grow up you’ll have to kill a hundred, two hundred Chinks.”
  • the lethal consequences of the emperor-worshipping system of irresponsibilities did emerge during the Tokyo trial. The savagery of Japanese troops was legitimized, if not driven, by an ideology that did not include a Final Solution but was as racialist as Hitler’s National Socialism. The Japanese were the Asian Herrenvolk, descended from the gods.
  • A veteran of the war in China said in a television interview that he was able to kill Chinese without qualms only because he didn’t regard them as human.
  • For to keep the emperor in place (he could at least have been made to resign), Hirohito’s past had to be freed from any blemish; the symbol had to be, so to speak, cleansed from what had been done in its name.
  • The same was true of the Japanese imperial institution, no matter who sat on the throne, a ruthless war criminal or a gentle marine biologist.
  • the chaplain at Sugamo prison, questioned Japanese camp commandants about their reasons for mistreating POWs. This is how he summed up their answers: “They had a belief that any enemy of the emperor could not be right, so the more brutally they treated their prisoners, the more loyal to their emperor they were being.”
  • The Mitscherlichs described Hitler as “an object on which Germans depended, to which they transferred responsibility, and he was thus an internal object. As such, he represented and revived the ideas of omnipotence that we all cherish about ourselves from infancy.
  • The fear after 1945 was that without the emperor Japan would be impossible to govern. In fact, MacArthur behaved like a traditional Japanese strongman (and was admired for doing so by many Japanese), using the imperial symbol to enhance his own power. As a result, he hurt the chances of a working Japanese democracy and seriously distorted history.
  • Aristides George Lazarus, the defense counsel of one of the generals on trial, was asked to arrange that “the military defendants, and their witnesses, would go out of their way during their testimony to include the fact that Hirohito was only a benign presence when military actions or programs were discussed at meetings that, by protocol, he had to attend.” No doubt the other counsel were given similar instructions. Only once during the trial
g-dragon

Compare Nationalism in China and Japan - 0 views

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  • China had long been the only superpower in the region, secure in the knowledge that it was the Middle Kingdom around which the rest of the world pivoted. Japan, cushioned by stormy seas, held itself apart from its Asian neighbors much of the time and had developed a unique and inward-looking culture.
  • both Qing China and Tokugawa Japan faced a new threat: imperial expansion by the European powers and later the United States.
  • Both countries responded with growing nationalism, but their versions of nationalism had different focuses and outcomes.
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  • Japan's nationalism was aggressive and expansionist, allowing Japan itself to become one of the imperial powers in an astonishingly short amount of time. China's nationalism, in contrast, was reactive and disorganized, leaving the country in chaos and at the mercy of foreign powers until 1949.
  • The foreign powers wanted access to China's other ports and to its interior.The First and Second Opium Wars (1839-42 and 1856-60) between China and Britain ended in humiliating defeat for China, which had to agree to give foreign traders, diplomats, soldiers, and missionaries access rights.
  • As a result, China fell under economic imperialism, with different western powers carving out "spheres of influence" in Chinese territory along the coast.
  • In 1853, however, this peace was shattered when a squadron of American steam-powered warships under Commodore Matthew Perry showed up in Edo Bay (now Tokyo Bay) and demanded the right to refuel in Japan.
  • In 1894-95, the people of China suffered another shocking blow to their sense of national pride. Japan, which had at times been a tributary state of China's in the past, defeated the Middle Kingdom in the First Sino-Japanese War and took control of Korea. Now China was being humiliated not only by the Europeans and Americans but also by one of their nearest neighbors, traditionally a subordinate power.
  • As a result, the people of China rose up in anti-foreigner fury once more in 1899-1900. The Boxer Rebellion began as equally anti-European and anti-Qing, but soon the people and the Chinese government joined forces to oppose the imperial powers. An eight-nation coalition of the British, French, Germans, Austrians, Russians, Americans, Italians, and Japanese defeated both the Boxer Rebels and the Qing Army, driving Empress Dowager Cixi and Emperor Guangxu out of Beijing.
  • Foreign Christian missionaries fanned out in the countryside, converting some Chinese to Catholicism or Protestantism, and threatening traditional Buddhist and Confucian beliefs.
  • For 250 years, Japan existed in quiet and peace under the Tokugawa Shoguns (1603-1853). The famed samurai warriors were reduced to working as bureaucrats and writing wistful poetry because there were no wars to fight. The only foreigners allowed in Japan were a handful of Chinese and Dutch traders, who were confined to an island in Nagasaki Bay.
  • China slipped into a decades-long civil war between the nationalists and the communists that only ended in 1949​ when Mao Zedong and the Communist Party prevailed.
  • this development sparked anti-foreign and nationalist feelings in the Japanese people and caused the government to fall. However, unlike China, the leaders of Japan took this opportunity to thoroughly reform their country. They quickly turned it from an imperial victim to an aggressive imperial power in its own right.
  • With China's recent Opium War humiliation as a warning, the Japanese started with a complete overhaul of their government and social system. Paradoxically, this modernization drive centered around the Meiji Emperor, from an imperial family that had ruled the country for 2,500 years. For centuries, however, the emperors had been figureheads, while the shoguns wielded actual power.
  • Japan's new constitution also did away with the feudal social classes, made all of the samurai and daimyo into commoners, established a modern conscript military, required basic elementary education for all boys and girls, and encouraged the development of heavy industry.
  • Japan refused to bow to the Europeans, they would prove that Japan was a great, modern power, and Japan would rise to be the "Big Brother" of all of the colonized and down-trodden peoples of Asia.
  • In the space of a single generation, Japan became a major industrial power with a well-disciplined modern army and navy. This new Japan shocked the world in 1895 when it defeated China in the First Sino-Japanese War. That was nothing, however, compared to the complete panic that erupted in Europe when Japan beat Russia (a European power!) in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05.
  • While nationalism helped to fuel Japan's incredibly quick development into a major industrialized nation and an imperial power and helped it fend off the western powers, it certainly had a dark side as well. For some Japanese intellectuals and military leaders, nationalism developed into fascism, similar to what was happening in the newly-unified European powers of Germany and Italy. This hateful and genocidal ultra-nationalism led Japan down the road to military overreach, war crimes, and eventual defeat in World War II
Javier E

Japanese Mind: Understanding Contemporary Japanese Culture (Roger J. Davies and Osamu I... - 0 views

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  • Japan, the need for strong emotional unity has also resulted in an inability to criticize others openly. As a consequence, the development of ambiguity can be viewed as a defining characteristic of the Japanese style of communication: Japanese conversation does not take the form of dialectic development. The style of conversation is almost always fixed from beginning to end depending on the human relationship. It is one-way, like a lecture, or an inconclusive argument going along parallel lines or making a circle round and round, and in the end still ending up mostly at the beginning. This style
  • To express oneself distinctly carries the assumption that one’s partner knows nothing, so clear expression can be considered impolite.
  • own customs. Japanese people, too, have their own opinions, but they tend to wait their turn to speak out. If they completely disagree with a speaker, they will usually listen with an air of acceptance at first, then disagree in a rather vague and roundabout way. This is considered the polite way to do things in Japan. On
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  • In Japan, however, if you go against someone and create a bad atmosphere, your relations may break off completely. People tend to react emotionally, and most are afraid of being excluded from the group.
  • For the Japanese, silence indicates deep thinking or consideration, but too much silence often makes non-Japanese uncomfortable. Whereas the Japanese consider silence as rather good and people generally feel sympathetic toward it, non-Japanese sometimes feel that it is an indication of indifference or apathy.
  • The concept of amae greatly affects all aspects of Japanese life because it is related to other characteristics of the Japanese way of thinking, such as enryo (restraint), giri (social obligation), tsumi (sin), haji (shame) (Doi, 1973, pp. 33–48).
  • In other words, in the inner circle, amae is at work and there is no enryo, in the middle zone enryo is present, and in the outer circle, which is the world of strangers, there is neither amae nor enryo.
  • they feel giri (obligation) when others, toward whom they have enryo (restraint), show kindness to them. However, they do not express their appreciation as much to people they are close to and with whom they can amaeru
  • Japanese have difficulty saying no, in contrast to Westerners, who are able to do so more easily. The reason for this is that Japanese relationships, which are based on amae, are unstable (Doi; cited in Sahashi, 1980, p. 79); that is, people hesitate to refuse others for fear of breaking this bond. Doi insists that Westerners can refuse easily because amae is not at work in their relationships
  • Hirayama and Takashina (1994, pp. 22–23) state, for example, that the Japanese sense of beauty is based on a concept known as mono no aware, a kind of aesthetic value that comes from feelings, while in Western art, people try to construct something of beauty with a logic of what is beautiful. In contrast, Japanese art focuses not on what is logically considered beautiful, but on what people feel is beautiful. The Japanese aesthetic is very subjective, and there are no absolute criteria as to what this should be.
  • Aware is thus connected to feelings of regret for things losing their beauty, and paradoxically finding beauty in their opposite. Moreover, anything can ultimately be appreciated as beautiful in Japan, and what is beautiful depends upon people’s subjective point of view.
  • ma is an empty space full of meaning, which is fundamental to the Japanese arts and is present in many fields, including painting, architecture, music, and literature.
  • The Japanese have long treated silence as a kind of virtue similar to “truthfulness.” The words haragei and ishin denshin symbolize Japanese attitudes toward human interactions in this regard. The former means implicit mutual understanding; the latter suggests that people can communicate with each other through telepathy. In short, what is important and what is true in Japan will often exist in silence, not in verbal expression.
  • uchi-soto, or inner and outer duality. Lebra (1987, p. 345) provides an explanation: [The Japanese] believe that the truth lies only in the inner realm as symbolically located in the heart or belly. Components of the outer self, such as face, mouth, spoken words, are in contrast, associated with cognitive and moral falsity. Truthfulness, sincerity, straightforwardness, or reliability are allied to reticence. Thus a man of few words is trusted more than a man of many words.
  • Zen training is designed to teach that truth cannot be described verbally, but can exist only in silence. Traditional Japanese arts and the spirit of dō (the “way” or “path”) reflect this characteristic silence.
  • Otoko-masari means a woman who is superior to men physically, spiritually, and intellectually. However, despite this literal meaning of “a woman who exceeds men,” it often sounds negative in Japanese because it carries a connotation of lacking femininity, and such women are usually disliked.
  • Zen emphasizes that all human beings originally possess the Buddha-nature within themselves and need only the actual experience of it to achieve enlightenment (satori). This is a state that is seen as a liberation from man’s intellectual nature, from the burden of fixed ideas and feelings about reality: “Zen always aims at grasping the central fact of life, which can never be brought to the dissecting table of the intellect” (Suzuki, 1964,
  • For the Zen master, the best way to express one’s deepest experiences is by the use of paradoxes that transcend opposites (e.g., “Where there is nothing, there is all” or “To die the great death is to gain the great life”). These sayings illustrate two irreducible Zen dilemmas—the inexpressibility of truth in words, and that “opposites are relational and so fundamentally harmonious” (Watts, 1957, p. 175).
  • In all forms of activity, Zen emphasizes the importance of acting naturally, gracefully, and spontaneously in whatever task one is performing, an attitude that has greatly influenced all forms of cultural expression in Japan.
  • All practice takes place in an atmosphere of quietude, obedience, and respect, mirroring the absolute obedience and respect of the master-student relationship.
  • Common expressions in Japanese reflect these steps: kata ni hairu (follow the form), kata ni jukutatsu suru (perfect the form), and kata kara nukeru (go beyond the form).
  • moves must be repeated thousands of times and perfected before new techniques may be learned. The purpose of such discipline is “not only to learn new skills but also to build good character and a sense of harmony in the disciple” (Niki et al., 1993, p.
  • Japanese mothers, who “apparently do not make explicit demands on their children and do not enforce rules when children resist. Yet, diverse accounts suggest that Japanese children strongly internalize parental, group, and institutional values”
  • Sen no Rikyu transformed the tea ceremony in the sixteenth century with an aesthetic principle known as wabi, or the contrast of refinement, simplicity, and rusticity. He advocated the use of plain, everyday Japanese utensils rather than those imported from China in the tea ceremony. Proportions and sizes were carefully chosen to harmonize perfectly with the small tearooms. Not only the utensils but the styles of the buildings and tea gardens, the order and etiquette of the ceremony were designed to be in accord with an atmosphere in which the goal was to perfect one’s existence without self-indulgence. Thus, the ideas of simplicity, perfection, discipline, and harmony with nature, which are central to the Zen way of life, are also reflected in sadō.
  • Reischauer (1988, p. 200) concurs: The Japanese have always seemed to lean more toward intuition than reason, to subtlety and sensitivity in expression rather than to clarity of analysis, to pragmatism rather than to theory, and to organizational skills rather than to great intellectual concepts. They have never set much store by clarity of verbal analysis and originality of thought. They put great trust in nonverbal understanding and look on oral or written skills and on sharp and clever reasoning as essentially shallow and possibly misleading. They value in their literature not clear analysis, but artistic suggestiveness and emotional feeling. The French ideal of simplicity and absolute clarity in writing leaves them unsatisfied. They prefer complexity and indirection as coming closer to the truth.
  • Gambaru is a frequently used word in Japan, with the meaning of doing one’s best and hanging on.
  • a discussion on the subject, scholars, journalists, and graduate students from other countries who know the Japanese and Japanese culture well provided expressions that are close to gambaru in their mother tongues, such as a ushalten, beharren, and beharrung in German; tiens bon in French; a guante in Spanish; and chā yo in Chinese.
  • Both Chinese and Korean have the characters that make up gambaru, but they do not have expressions that possess the same nuances. This suggests that gambaru is an expression that is unique to Japan and expresses certain qualities of the Japanese character.
  • There are some expressions that are often used in America but seldom in Japan, such as “take it easy.” Americans say to a person who is busy working, “take it easy” or “don’t work too hard”; in contrast, the Japanese say “gambatte ” (or work hard) as a sign of encouragement. Americans, of course, also think that it necessary to be diligent, but as the proverb says, “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” suggesting that working too hard is not good for you.
  • giri involves caring for others from whom one has received a debt of gratitude and a determination to realize their happiness, sometimes even by self-sacrificing. (Gillespie & Sugiura, 1996, p. 150)
  • Giri can perhaps best be understood as a constellation of related meanings, the most important of which are as follows: (1) moral principles or duty, (2) rules one has to obey in social relationships, and (3) behavior one is obliged to follow or that must be done against one’s will (Matsumura, 1988, p.
  • the cost of ochūgen and oseibo gifts is almost equivalent to the cost of justice in the USA, meaning that the cost of keeping harmony in human relations and that of mediating legal disputes is almost the same.
  • A Japanese dictionary (cited in Matsumoto, 1988, p. 20) describes haragei as follows: (1) the verbal or physical action one employs to influence others by the potency of rich experience and boldness, and (2) the act of dealing with people or situations through ritual formalities and accumulated experience. In other words, haragei is a way of exchanging feelings and thoughts in an implicit way among the Japanese.
  • Honne and tatemae are another related set of concepts that are linked to haragei. “These terms are often used as contrasting yet complementary parts of a whole, honne being related to the private, true self, and tatemae typifying the public persona and behavior. Honne then has to do with real intentions and sincere feelings, while tatemae conveys the face the world sees” (Matsumoto, 1988, p. 18). People in Japan are implicitly taught from a young age how to use honne and tatemae properly, and these concepts are important in maintaining face and not hurting the feelings of others; therefore, what a speaker says is not always what he or she really means. intentions and sincere feelings, while tatemae conveys the face the world sees” (Matsumoto, 1988, p. 18). People in Japan are implicitly taught from a young age how to use honne and tatemae properly,
  • those who cannot use these concepts effectively are not considered to be good communicators, because they may hurt others or make a conversation unpleasant by revealing honne at the wrong moment.
  • In high-context cultures most of the information lies either in the setting or people who are part of the interaction. Very little information is actually contained in a verbal message. In low-context cultures, however, the verbal message contains most of the information and very little is embedded in the context or the participants. (Samovar & Porter, 1995,
  • Personal space in Japanese human relationships can be symbolized by two words that describe both physical and psychological distance between individuals: hedataru and najimu. Hedataru means “to separate one thing from another, to set them apart,” and it is also used in human relationships with such nuances as “to estrange, alienate, come between, or cause a rupture between friends.” A relationship between two persons without hedatari means they are close. On the other hand, najimu means “to become attached to, become familiar with, or used to.” For instance, if one says that students “najimu ” their teacher, it means that they become attached to and have close feelings for the teacher.
  • Relationships are established through hedataru and then deepened by najimu, and in this process, three stages are considered important: maintaining hedatari (the noun form of the verb hedataru), moving through hedatari, and deepening friendship by najimu.
  • Underlying these movements are the Japanese values of restraint and self-control. In Japan, relationships are not built by insisting strongly on one’s own point of view but require time, a reserved attitude, and patience.
  • In the seventh century, Prince Shotoku, who was a nephew of Emperor Suiko, occupied the regency and discovered a way of permitting Buddhism and the emperor system to coexist, along with another belief system adopted from China, Confucianism. He stated that “Shinto is the trunk, Buddhism is the branches, and Confucianism is the leaves” (Sakaiya, 1991, p. 140). By following this approach, the Japanese were able to accept these new religions and philosophies, and the cultural values and advanced techniques that came with them, in such a way that they were able to reconcile their theoretical contradictions.
  • Iitoko-dori, then, refers specifically to this process of accepting convenient parts of different, and sometimes contradictory, religious value systems, and this practice has long been widespread in Japan. In modern times, Sakaiya (ibid., p. 144) notes that the number of Japanese people who do not admit to following some form of iitoko-dori is only about 0.5 percent of the population.
  • However, the process of iitoko-dori, which has given rise to relative rather than absolute ethical value systems, has also resulted in serious negative consequences. For example, many Japanese students will not oppose bullies and stop them from hurting weaker students.
  • In other words, in Japan, even if people know that something is wrong, it is sometimes difficult for them to defend their principles, because rather than being absolute, these principles are relative and are easily modified, depending on the situation and the demands of the larger group to which people belong.
  • The characteristics most often associated with the traditional Japanese arts are keishikika (formalization), kanzen shugi (the beauty of complete perfection), seishin shūyō (mental discipline), and tōitsu (integration and rapport with the skill). The steps that are followed are as follows: The establishment and formalization of the pattern or form (kata): every action becomes rule-bound (keishikika) The constant repetition of the pattern or form (hampuku) Mastering the pattern or form, as well as the classification of ability en route to mastery, resulting in licensing and grades (kyū and dan) Perfecting the pattern or form (kanzen shugi): the beauty of perfection Going beyond the pattern or form, becoming one with it (tōitsu)
  • It is also interesting to note the differences in this concept of “good-child identity” between Japan and America. As far as expectations for children’s mental development are concerned, Japanese mothers tend to place emphasis on manners, while with American mothers the stress is on linguistic self-expression.
  • In other words, the ideal of the “good child” in Japan is that he or she should not be self-assertive in terms of rules for living together in society, while American “good children” should have their own opinions and be able to stand by themselves.
  • In other words, Japanese mothers tend to refer to people’s feelings, or even to those of inanimate objects, to modify their child’s behavior, and this establishes the basis for making judgments for the child: Children who are taught that the reason for poor behavior has something to do with other people’s feelings tend to place their basis for judgments, or for their behavior, on the possibility of hurting others.
  • As a result, there is a constant emphasis on other people’s feelings in Japan, and parents try to teach their children from a very early age to be sensitive to this information. In Japan, people are expected to consider others first and foremost, and this is a prerequisite for proper behavior in society. It
  • A senior or an elder is called a sempai; one who is younger or subordinate is a kōhai. This sempai-kōhai dichotomy exists in virtually all Japanese corporate, educational, and governmental organizations.
  • The Japanese language has one of the most complicated honorific (keigo) systems in the world. There are basically three types of keigo: teineigo (polite speech), sonkeigo (honorific speech), and kenjōgo (humble speech). Teineigo is used in both
  • Although keigo is used to address superiors or those whom one deeply respects, it is also widely employed in talking to people one does not know well, or who are simply older than oneself. Moreover, it is common for company employees to use keigo in addressing their bosses, whether or not they feel any respect for the other on a personal level. As
  • Recently, it has been said that the younger generation cannot use keigo properly. In fact, children do not use it in addressing their parents at home, nor do students in addressing their teachers in modern Japan. Furthermore, humble forms seem to be disappearing in colloquial language and can be found today only in formal speeches, greetings, and letters.
  • Dictionaries usually suggest kenkyo as the equivalent of modesty. One Japanese dictionary states that kenkyo means sunao to hikaeme. Hikaeme gives the impression of being reserved, and sunao has a variety of meanings, including “gentle, mild, meek, obedient, submissive, docile, compliant, yielding,” and so on. Many of these adjectives in English connote a weak character, but in Japanese sunao is always seen as a compliment. Teachers often describe good students as sunaona iiko. This means that they are quiet, listen to what the teacher says, and ask no questions in class.
  • The Japanese ideal of the perfect human being is illustrated in these folktales, and this is generally a person who has a very strong will.
  • Dentsu Institute reported that only 8 percent of Japanese people surveyed said that they would maintain their own opinion even if it meant falling out with others, which was the lowest percentage in all Asian countries (“Dour and dark outlook,” 2001, p. 19).
g-dragon

A Brief History of Buddhism in Japan - 0 views

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  • It took several centuries for Buddhism to travel from India to Japan. Once Buddhism was established in Japan, however, it flourished. Buddhism had an incalculable impact on Japanese civilization. At the same time, schools of Buddhism imported from mainland Asia became distinctively Japanese.
  • The Koreans brought with them Buddhist sutras, an image of the Buddha, and a letter from the Korean prince praising the dharma. This was the official introduction of Buddhism to Japan.
  • The Japanese aristocracy promptly split into pro- and anti-Buddhist factions. Buddhism gained little real acceptance until the reign of the Empress Suiko and her regent, Prince Shotoku (592 to 628 CE).
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  • In the centuries that followed, Buddhism in Japan developed robustly. During the 7th through 9th centuries, Buddhism in China enjoyed a "golden age" and Chinese monks brought the newest developments in practice and scholarship to Japan.
  • Six schools of Buddhism emerged in Japan in the 7th and 8th centuries and all but two of which have disappeared. These schools flourished mostly during the Nara Period of Japanese history (709 to 795 CE). Today, they are sometimes lumped together into one category known as Nara Buddhism.
  • After the Nara period, five other schools of Buddhism emerged in Japan that remain prominent today. These are Tendai, Shingon, Jodo, Zen, and Nichiren.
  • Tendai is best known for two distinctive features. One, it considers the Lotus Sutra to be the supreme sutra and the perfect expression of the Buddha's teachings. Second, it synthesizes the teachings of other schools, resolving contradictions and finding a middle way between extremes.
  • Shingon is the only non-Tibetan school of Vajrayana. Many of the teachings and rituals of Shingon are esoteric, passed orally from teacher to student, and not made public. Shingon remains one of the largest schools of Buddhism in Japan.
  • Very simply, Pure Land emphasizes faith the Buddha Amitabha (Amida Butsu in Japanese) through which one may be reborn in the Pure Land and be nearer to Nirvana. Pure Land is sometimes called Amidism.
  • After some years of study at Mount Hiei and other monasteries, Nichiren believed that the Lotus Sutra contained the complete teachings of the Buddha.
  • Nichiren also believed fervently that all of Japan must be guided by the Lotus Sutra or lose the protection and favor of the Buddha. He condemned other schools of Buddhism, particularly Pure Land.
  • The Buddhist establishment became annoyed with Nichiren and sent him into a series of exiles that lasted most of the rest of his life. Even so, he gained followers, and by the time of his death, Nichiren Buddhism was firmly established in Japan.
  • In time, this favoritism led to a partisan rivalry, which sometimes became violent.
  •  Japanese Buddhist culture flourished in the 14th century and Buddhist influence was reflected in art, poetry, architecture, gardening, and the tea ceremony.
  • After Nichiren, no new major schools of Buddhism developed in Japan. However, the existing schools grew, evolved, split, fused, and otherwise developed in many ways.
  • The influence of Buddhism declined, however. Buddhism faced competition from Shinto -- the Japanese indigenous religion -- as well as Confucianism. To keep the three rivals separated, the government decreed that Buddhism would have first place in matters of religion, Confucianism would have first place in matters of morality, and Shinto would have first place in matters of state.
  • The Meiji Restoration in 1868 restored the power of the Emperor. In the state religion, Shinto, the emperor was worshiped as a living god.
  • The Emperor was not a god in Buddhism, however. This may be why the Meiji government ordered Buddhism banished
  • Temples were burned or destroyed, and priests and monks were forced to return to lay life.
  • Buddhism was too deeply ingrained in Japan's culture and history to disappear, however. Eventually, the banishment was lifted. But the Meiji government was not done with Buddhism yet.
  • In 1872, the Meiji government decreed that Buddhist monks and priests (but not nuns) should be free to marry if they chose to do so. Soon "temple families" became commonplace and the administration of temples and monasteries became family businesses, handed down from fathers to sons.
  • Today, the government of Japan recognizes more than 150 schools of Buddhism, but the major schools are still Nara (mostly Kegon), Shingon, Tendai, Jodo, Zen, and Nichiren.
  • In more recent years, several news stories have reported that Buddhism is dying in Japan, especially in rural areas.
  • For generations, the many small "family owned" temples had a monopoly on the funeral business and funerals became their chief source of income. Sons took over temples from their fathers out of duty more than vocation. When combined, these two factors made much of Japanese Buddhism into "funeral Buddhism." Many temples offer little else but funeral and memorial services.
  • Japanese living in urban centers are losing interest in Buddhism.
Javier E

Opinion | What Japan's Economy Can Tell Us About China - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • The timing of this Japan obsession was impeccable: It came at almost the exact moment Japan’s remarkable rise turned into a sustained decline in economic power. Here’s the ratio of Japan’s gross domestic product to America’s, adjusted for differences in purchasing power:
  • China has seemed to be faltering lately, and some have been asking whether China’s future path might resemble that of Japan.
  • My answer is that it probably won’t — that China will do worse. But to understand why I say that, you need to know something about what happened to Japan, which wasn’t at all the catastrophe I think many people imagine.
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  • Here’s the story you may have heard: In the late 1980s Japan experienced a monstrous stock and real estate bubble, which eventually burst. Even now, the Nikkei stock average is significantly below the peak it reached in 1989. When the bubble burst, it left behind troubled banks and an overhang of corporate debt, which led to a generation of economic stagnation.
  • There’s some truth to aspects of this story, but it misses the most important factor in Japan’s relative decline: demography. Thanks to low fertility and unwillingness to accept immigrants, Japan’s working-age population has been declining quite rapidly since the mid-1990s.
  • The only way Japan could have avoided a relative decline in the size of its economy would have been to achieve much faster growth in output per worker than other major economies, which it didn’t.
  • Adjusted for demography, Japan has achieved significant growth: It has seen a 45 percent rise in real income per relevant capita. The United States has done even better, but this hardly fits the narrative of Japanese stagnation.
  • there’s more. Managing an economy with a declining working-age population is difficult, because low population growth tends to lead to weak investment. This observation is at the heart of the secular stagnation hypothesis, which says that nations with weak population growth tend to have persistent difficulty in maintaining full employment.
  • Yet Japan has, in fact, managed to avoid mass unemployment, or indeed mass suffering of any kind. Here’s one indicator, the employed percentage of men in their prime working years:
  • This percentage has remained high in Japan; indeed, consistently higher than that of the United States.
  • What about young people? Japan did see a rise in youth unemployment (ages 15-24) in the 1990s, but that rise has since been reversed. Here, via the World Bank, are International Labor Organization estimates of youth unemployment in Japan and, since the subject is attracting attention, China:
  • So Japan’s economic performance since the days when everyone thought it would rule the world has actually been pretty good. It’s true that employment has been sustained in part through large deficit spending, and Japanese debt has shot up:
  • But people have been predicting a Japanese debt crisis for decades, and it hasn’t materialized. In some ways, Japan, rather than being a cautionary tale, is a kind of role model — an example of how to manage difficult demography while remaining prosperous and socially stable.
  • while this is hard to quantify, lots of people I’ve talked to say that Japanese society is far more dynamic and culturally creative than many outsiders realize. The economist and blogger Noah Smith, who knows the country well, says that Tokyo is the new Paris
  • having been taken around Tokyo by locals, I can confirm that the city has a lot of vitality.
  • True, that same language barrier means that Tokyo likely can’t play the same role in global culture that Paris once did. But the Japanese are clearly having great success with sophisticated urbanism; if you think of Japan as a tired, stagnant society, you’re getting it wrong.
  • Will China be the next Japan?
  • There are some obvious similarities between China now and Japan in 1990. China has a wildly unbalanced economy, with too little consumer demand, kept afloat only by a hypertrophied real estate sector, and its working-age population is declining
  • there are growing concerns that China may have fallen into the “middle-income trap” that seems to afflict many emerging economies, which grow rapidly but only up to a point, then stall out.
  • if China is headed for an economic slowdown, the interesting question is whether it can replicate Japan’s social cohesion — its ability to manage slower growth without mass suffering or social instability
  • is there any indication that China, especially under an erratic authoritarian regime, is capable of pulling this off? Note that China already has much higher youth unemployment than Japan ever did.
Javier E

Japanese Culture: 4th Edition (Updated and Expanded) (Kindle version) (Studies of the W... - 0 views

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  • It is fitting that Japan’s earliest remaining works, composed at a time when the country was so strongly under the civilizing influence of China, should be of a historical character. In the Confucian tradition, the writing of history has always been held in the highest esteem, since Confucianists believe that the lessons of the past provide the best guide for ethical rule in the present and future. In contrast to the Indians, who have always been absorbed with metaphysical and religious speculation and scarcely at all with history, the Chinese are among the world’s greatest record-keepers.
  • he wrote that it is precisely because life and nature are changeable and uncertain that things have the power to move us.
  • The turbulent centuries of the medieval age produced many new cultural pursuits that catered to the tastes of various classes of society, including warriors, merchants, and even peasants. Yet, coloring nearly all these pursuits was miyabi, reflected in a fundamental preference on the part of the Japanese for the elegant, the restrained, and the subtly suggestive.
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  • “Nothing in the West can compare with the role which aesthetics has played in Japanese life and history since the Heian period”; and “the miyabi spirit of refined sensibility is still very much in evidence” in modern aesthetic criticism.9
  • there has run through history the idea that the Japanese are, in terms of their original nature (that is, their nature before the introduction from the outside of such systems of thought and religion as Confucianism and Buddhism), essentially an emotional people. And in stressing the emotional side of human nature, the Japanese have always assigned high value to sincerity (makoto) as the ethic of the emotions.
  • If the life of the emotions thus had an ethic in makoto, the evolution of mono no aware in the Heian period provided it also with an aesthetic.
  • Tsurayuki said, in effect, that people are emotional entities and will intuitively and spontaneously respond in song and verse when they perceive things and are moved. The most basic sense of mono no aware is the capacity to be moved by things, whether they are the beauties of nature or the feelings of people,
  • One of the finest artistic achievements of the middle and late Heian period was the evolution of a native style of essentially secular painting that reached its apex in the narrative picture scrolls of the twelfth century. The products of this style of painting are called “Yamato [that is, Japanese] pictures” to distinguish them from works categorized as “Chinese pictures.”
  • The Fujiwara epoch, in literature as well as the visual arts, was soft, approachable, and “feminine.” By contrast, the earlier Jōgan epoch had been forbidding, secretive (esoteric), and “masculine.”
  • Despite the apparent lust of the samurai for armed combat and martial renown, much romanticized in later centuries, the underlying tone of the medieval age in Japan was from the beginning somber, pessimistic, and despairing. In The Tale of Genji the mood shifted from satisfaction with the perfections of Heian courtier society to uncertainty about this life and a craving for salvation in the next.
  • Despite political woes and territorial losses, the Sung was a time of great advancement in Chinese civilization. Some scholars, impressed by the extensive growth in cities, commerce, maritime trade, and governmental bureaucratization in the late T’ang and Sung, have even asserted that this was the age when China entered its “early modern” phase. The Sung was also a brilliant period culturally.
  • the fortuitous combination of desire on the part of the Sung to increase its foreign trade with Japan and the vigorous initiative taken in maritime activity by the Taira greatly speeded the process of transmission.
  • The Sung period in China, on the other hand, was an exceptional age for scholarship, most notably perhaps in history and in the compilation of encyclopedias and catalogs of art works. This scholarly activity was greatly facilitated by the development of printing, invented by the Chinese several centuries earlier.
  • In addition to reviving interest in Japanese poetry, the use of kana also made possible the evolution of a native prose literature.
  • peasantry, who formed the nucleus of what came to be known as the True Sect of Pure Land Buddhism. Through the centuries, this sect has attracted one of the largest followings among the Japanese, and its founder, Shinran, has been canonized as one of his country’s most original religious thinkers.
  • True genre art, picturing all classes at work and play, did not appear in Japan until the sixteenth century. The oldest extant genre painting of the sixteenth century is a work, dating from about 1525, called “Views Inside and Outside Kyoto” (rakuchū-rakugai zu).
  • the aesthetic principles that were largely to dictate the tastes of the medieval era. We have just remarked the use of sabi. Another major term of the new medieval aesthetics was yūgen, which can be translated as “mystery and depth.” Let
  • One of the basic values in the Japanese aesthetic tradition—along with such things as perishability, naturalness, and simplicity—is suggestion. The Japanese have from earliest times shown a distinct preference for the subtleties of suggestion, intimation, and nuance, and have characteristically sought to achieve artistic effect by means of “resonances” (yojō).
  • Amidism was not established as a separate sect until the time of the evangelist Hōnen (1133–1212).
  • But even in Chōmei we can observe a tendency to transform what is supposed to be a mean hovel into something of beauty based on an aesthetic taste for “deprivation” (to be discussed later in this chapter) that evolved during medieval times.
  • Apart from the proponents of Pure Land Buddhism, the person who most forcefully propagated the idea of universal salvation through faith was Nichiren (1222–82).
  • Nichiren held that ultimate religious truth lay solely in the Lotus Sutra, the basic text of the Greater Vehicle of Buddhism in which Gautama had revealed that all beings possess the potentiality for buddhahood.
  • At the time of its founding in Japan by Saichō in the early ninth century, the Tendai sect had been based primarily on the Lotus Sutra; but, in the intervening centuries, Tendai had deviated from the Sutra’s teachings and had even spawned new sects, like those of Pure Land Buddhism, that encouraged practices entirely at variance with these teachings.
  • Declaring himself “the pillar of Japan, the eye of the nation, and the vessel of the country,”14 Nichiren seems even to have equated himself with Japan and its fate.
  • The kōan is especially favored by what the Japanese call the Rinzai sect of Zen, which is also known as the school of “sudden enlightenment” because of its belief that satori, if it is attained, will come to the individual in an instantaneous flash of insight or awareness. The other major sect of Zen, Sōtō, rejects this idea of sudden enlightenment and instead holds that satori is a gradual process to be attained primarily through seated meditation.
  • Fought largely in Kyoto and its environs, the Ōnin War dragged on for more than ten years, and after the last armies withdrew in 1477 the once lovely capital lay in ruins. There was no clear-cut victor in the Ōnin War. The daimyos had simply fought themselves into exhaustion,
  • Yoshimasa was perhaps even more noteworthy as a patron of the arts than his grandfather, Yoshimitsu. In any case, his name is just as inseparably linked with the flourishing of culture in the Higashiyama epoch (usually taken to mean approximately the last half of the fifteenth century) as Yoshimitsu’s is with that of Kitayama.
  • The tea room, as a variant of the shoin room, evolved primarily in the sixteenth century.
  • Shukō’s admonition about taking care to “harmonize Japanese and Chinese tastes” has traditionally been taken to mean that he stood, in the late fifteenth century, at a point of transition from the elegant and “aristocratic” kind of Higashiyama chanoyu just described, which featured imported Chinese articles, to a new, Japanese form of the ceremony that used native ceramics,
  • the new kind of tea ceremony originated by Shukō is called wabicha, or “tea based on wabi.” Developed primarily by Shukō’s successors during the sixteenth century, wabicha is a subject for the next chapter.
  • The Japanese, on the other hand, have never dealt with nature in their art in the universalistic sense of trying to discern any grand order or structure; much less have they tried to associate the ideal of order in human society with the harmonies of nature. Rather,
  • The Chinese Sung-style master may have admired a mountain, for example, for its enduring, fixed quality, but the typical Japanese artist (of the fifteenth century or any other age) has been more interested in a mountain for its changing aspects:
  • Zen culture of Muromachi Japan was essentially a secular culture. This seems to be strong evidence, in fact, of the degree to which medieval Zen had become secularized: its view of nature was pantheistic and its concern with man was largely psychological.
  • Nobunaga’s castle at Azuchi and Hideyoshi’s at Momoyama have given their names to the cultural epoch of the age of unification. The designation of this epoch as Azuchi-Momoyama (or, for the sake of convenience, simply Momoyama) is quite appropriate in view of the significance of castles—as represented by these two historically famous structures—in the general progress, cultural and otherwise, of these exciting years.
  • Along with architecture, painting was the art that most fully captured the vigorous and expansive spirit of the Momoyama epoch of domestic culture during the age of unification. It was a time when many styles of painting and groups of painters flourished. Of the latter, by far the best known and most successful were the Kanō,
  • Motonobu also made free use of the colorful Yamato style of native art that had evolved during the Heian period and had reached its pinnacle in the great narrative picture scrolls of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
  • what screen painting really called for was color, and it was this that the Kanō artists, drawing on the native Yamato tradition, added to their work with great gusto during the Momoyama epoch. The color that these artists particularly favored was gold, and compositions done in ink and rich pigments on gold-leaf backgrounds became the most characteristic works of Momoyama art.
  • there could hardly be a more striking contrast between the spirits of two ages than the one reflected in the transition from the subdued monochromatic art of Japan’s medieval era to the blazing use of color by Momoyama artists, who stood on the threshold of early modern times.
  • aware, which, as we saw in Chapter 3, connotes the capacity to be moved by things. In the period of the Shinkokinshū, when Saigyō lived, this sentiment was particularly linked with the aesthetic of sabi or “loneliness” (and, by association, sadness). The human condition was essentially one of loneliness;
  • During the sixteenth century the ceremony was further developed as wabicha, or tea (cha) based on the aesthetic of wabi. Haga Kōshirō defines wabi as comprising three kinds of beauty: a simple, unpretentious beauty; an imperfect, irregular beauty; and an austere, stark beauty.
  • The alternate attendance system also had important consequences in the cultural realm, contributing to the development for the first time of a truly national culture. Thus, for example, the daimyos and their followers from throughout the country who regularly visited Edo were the disseminators of what became a national dialect or “lingua franca” and, ultimately, the standard language of modern Japan.
  • They also fostered the spread of customs, rules of etiquette, standards of taste, fashions, and the like that gave to Japanese everywhere a common lifestyle.
  • “[Tokugawa-period] statesmen thought highly of agriculture, but not of agriculturalists.”6 The life of the average peasant was one of much toil and little joy. Organized into villages that were largely self-governing, the peasants were obliged to render a substantial portion of their farming yields—on average, perhaps 50 percent or more—to the samurai, who provided few services in return. The resentment of peasants toward samurai grew steadily throughout the Tokugawa period and was manifested in countless peasant rebellions
  • Although in the long run the seclusion policy undeniably limited the economic growth of Tokugawa Japan by its severe restrictions both on foreign trade and on the inflow of technology from overseas, it also ensured a lasting peace that made possible a great upsurge in the domestic economy, especially during the first century of shogunate rule.
  • Both samurai and peasants were dependent almost solely on income from agriculture and constantly suffered declines in real income as the result of endemic inflation; only the townsmen, who as commercialists could adjust to price fluctuations, were in a position to profit significantly from the economic growth of the age.
  • We should not be surprised, therefore, to find this class giving rise to a lively and exuberant culture that reached its finest flowering in the Genroku epoch at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. The mainstays of Genroku culture were the theatre, painting (chiefly in the form of the woodblock print), and prose fiction,
  • The Japanese had, of course, absorbed Confucian thinking from the earliest centuries of contact with China, but for more than a millennium Buddhism had drawn most of their intellectual attention. Not until the Tokugawa period did they come to study Confucianism with any great zeal.
  • One of the most conspicuous features of the transition from medieval to early modern times in Japan was the precipitous decline in the vigor of Buddhism and the rise of a secular spirit.
  • The military potential and much of the remaining landed wealth of the medieval Buddhist sects had been destroyed during the advance toward unification in the late sixteenth century. And although Buddhism remained very much part of the daily lives of the people, it not only ceased to hold appeal for many Japanese intellectuals but indeed even drew the outright scorn and enmity of some.
  • it was the Buddhist church—and especially the Zen sect—that paved the way for the upsurge in Confucian studies during Tokugawa times. Japanese Zen priests had from at least the fourteenth century on assiduously investigated the tenets of Sung Neo-Confucianism, and in ensuing centuries had produced a corpus of research upon which the Neo-Confucian scholarship of the Tokugawa period was ultimately built.
  • Yamaga Sokō is generally credited as the formulator of the code of bushidō, or the “way of the warrior.”4 Certainly he was a pioneer in analyzing the role of the samurai as a member of a true ruling elite and not simply as a rough, and frequently illiterate, participant in the endless civil struggles of the medieval age.
  • The fundamental purpose of Neo-Confucian practice is to calm one’s turbid ki to allow one’s nature (ri) to shine forth. The person who achieves this purpose becomes a sage, his ri seen as one with the universal principle, known as the “supreme ultimate” (taikyoku), that governs all things.
  • Neo-Confucianism proposed two main courses to clarify ri, one objective and the other subjective.7 The objective course was through the acquisition of knowledge by means of the “investigation of things,” a phrase taken by Chu Hsi from the Chinese classic The Great Learning (Ta hsüeh). At the heart of things to investigate was history,
  • Quite apart from any practical guidance to good rulership it may have provided, this Neo-Confucian stress on historical research proved to be a tremendous spur to scholarship and learning in general during the Tokugawa period;8 and, as we will see in the next chapter, it also facilitated the development of other, heterodox lines of intellectual inquiry.
  • the subjective course appeared to have been taken almost directly from Buddhism, and in particular Zen. It was the course of “preserving one’s heart by holding fast to seriousness,” which called for the clarification of ri by means remarkably similar to Zen meditation.
  • The calendrical era of Genro ku lasted from 1688 until 1703, but the Genroku cultural epoch is usually taken to mean the span of approximately a half-century from, say, 1675 until 1725. Setting the stage for this rise of a townsman-oriented culture was nearly a century of peace and steady commercial growth.
  • places of diversion and assignation, these quarters were the famous “floating worlds” (ukiyo) of Tokugawa fact and legend. Ukiyo, although used specifically from about this time to designate such demimondes, meant in the broadest sense the insubstantial and ever-changing existence in which man is enmeshed.
  • ukiyo15 always carried the connotation that life is fundamentally sad; but, in Genroku times, the term was more commonly taken to mean a world that was pleasurable precisely because it was constantly changing, exciting, and up-to-date.
  • the Tokugawa period was not at all like the humanism that emerged in the West from the Renaissance on. Whereas modern Western humanism became absorbed with people as individuals, with all their personal peculiarities, feelings, and ways, Japanese humanism of the Tokugawa period scarcely conceived of the existence of true individuals at all; rather, it focused on “the people” and regarded them as comprising essentially types, such as samurai, farmers, and courtesans.
  • there is little in the literature as a whole of that quality—character development—that is probably the single most important feature of the modern Western novel.
  • Although shogunate authorities and Tokugawa-period intellectuals in general had relatively little interest in the purely metaphysical side of Chu Hsi’s teachings, they found his philosophy to be enormously useful in justifying or ideologically legitimizing the feudal structure of state and society that had emerged in Japan by the seventeenth century.
  • With its radical advocacy of violent irrationality—to the point of psychosis—Hagakure has shocked many people. But during Japan’s militarist years of the 1930s and World War II, soldiers and others hailed it as something of a bible of samurai behavior, and the postwar nationalist writer Mishima Yukio was even inspired to write a book in praise of its values.
  • It is significant that many of the leading prose writers, poets, and critics of the most prominent journal of Japanese romanticism, Bungakukai (The Literary World, published from 1893 until 1898), were either converts to or strongly influenced by Protestant Christianity, the only creed in late Meiji Japan that gave primacy to the freedom and spiritual independence of the individual. The absolutism embodied in the Meiji Constitution demanded strict subordination of the interests of the individual to those of the state;
  • The feeling of frustration engendered by a society that placed such preponderant stress upon obedience to the group, especially in the form of filial piety toward one’s parents and loyalty to the state, no doubt accounts for much of the sense of alienation observable in the works of so many modern Japanese writers.
  • These writers have been absorbed to an unusual degree with the individual, the world of his personal psychology, and his essential loneliness. In line with this preoccupation, novelists have perennially turned to the diary-like, confessional tale—the so-called I-novel—as their preferred medium of expression.
  • In intellectual and emotional terms, the military came increasingly to be viewed as the highest repository of the traditional Japanese spirit that was the sole hope for unifying the nation to act in a time of dire emergency.
  • The enemy that had led the people astray was identified as those sociopolitical doctrines and ideologies that had been introduced to Japan from the West during the preceding half-century or so along with the material tools of modernization.
  • If there is a central theme to this book, it is that the Japanese, within the context of a history of abundant cultural borrowing from China in premodern times and the West in the modern age, have nevertheless retained a hard core of native social, ethical, and cultural values by means of which they have almost invariably molded and adapted foreign borrowing to suit their own tastes and purposes.
mcginnisca

Japan and South Korea Settle Dispute Over Wartime 'Comfort Women' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-women-south-korea-japan.html

japan south korea dispute new york times politics US

shared by mcginnisca on 07 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • South Korea and Japan reached a landmark agreement on Monday to resolve their dispute over Korean women who were forced to serve as sex slaves for Japan’s Imperial Army.
  • The so-called comfort women have been the most painful legacy of Japan’s colonial rule of Korea, which lasted from 1910 until Japan’s defeat in 1945
  • “We are not craving for money,” said Lee Yong-soo, 88, one of the women. “What we demand is that Japan make official reparations for the crime it had committed.”
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  • The United States has repeatedly urged Japan and South Korea to resolve the dispute, a stumbling block in American efforts to strengthen a joint front with its Asian allies to confront China’s growing assertiveness in the region, as well as North Korea’s attempt to build a nuclear arsenal.
  • “The issue of ‘comfort women’ was a matter which, with the involvement of the military authorities of the day, severely injured the honor and dignity of many women,”
  • the Japanese government will give the $8.3 million to a foundation that the South Korean government will establish to offer medical, nursing and other services to the women. Japan initially offered considerably less
  • Historians say that at least tens of thousands of women, many of them Korean, were lured or coerced to work in brothels from the early 1930s until 1945. The Korean women who survived the war lived mostly in silence because of the stigma, and many never married. Only in the early 1990s did some of them begin speaking out.
  • Japan has maintained that all legal issues stemming from its colonial rule of Korea were resolved with the 1965 treaty.
  • “The women were missing from the negotiation table, and they must not be sold short in a deal that is more about political expediency than justice,”
oliviaodon

Japan's Endless Search for Modernity - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...549536

japan

shared by oliviaodon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Since the morning of January 3, 1868, Japan has struggled to answer one question: What does it mean to be modern and Japanese? It was on that date that a group of mid-level samurai and imperial courtiers announced the formation of a new government to be ruled by the 16-year old Meiji emperor, thus ending two-and-a-half centuries of control by the Tokugawa samurai family.
  • several generations of growth and development have not erased the feeling that Japan remains in the midst of a transformation pitting tradition against modernity.
  • Perhaps even more so today, 25 years since their economy cratered, Japanese people question what kind of society they want, how much to incorporate Western concepts of individualism, how much capitalist disruption to permit, and how to deal with the threat posed by hostile foreign countries—the same questions unleashed by the events of 1868.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The Meiji Restoration upended centuries of domestic stability that began in 1600, following a century of civil war.
  • By the late 19th century, this carefully calibrated system was coming apart. Under the Tokugawas, Japan developed a thriving domestic economy. But over time, merchants gained the upper hand, and many samurai, who received their pay in rice, found themselves impoverished by the shift to a cash-based economy.
  • Into this fervid environment sailed the American Commodore Matthew Perry, who was dispatched to Japan in 1853 to compel it to allow U.S. ships to land at Japanese ports.
  • In these early post-feudal years, Japanese thinkers struggled to locate their country in a world that had suddenly and dramatically expanded.
  • While remaining a largely culturally conservative nation, Japan’s commitment to democracy, the rule of law, gender equality, and the like, places it firmly in the camp of liberal nations.
  • Yet a slow move towards greater political participation was inevitable, presaged by the growth of parties and the slow expansion of male-only suffrage
  • All this disrupted Japan’s social, economic, and political fabric. The Meiji legal codes limited individual rights and treated persons as subordinate parts of legal family units, while the demise of the feudal economic system led to the rise of rural landlords, who effectively kept large swathes of the populace as tenant farmers. The government captured religion, creating a centralized State-Shinto apparatus that glorified the emperor and subordinated his subjects to a mission civilisatrice that pulled the rest of Asia into a Japanese-dominated modernity.
  • The end of World War II and the retribution visited upon Japanese militarists unleashed a second wave of socioeconomic and political dislocation. The triumphant Americans, occupying the islands for seven years after the war, enforced universal suffrage and breathed new life into a socialist movement that had been suppressed before the war. They ensured universal education for females as well as males. The Meiji law codes were rewritten to place the individual, not the family, as the central unit of society, and the great landlords were dispossessed of their rural holdings, allowing tenant farmers to buy land. Perhaps most significantly, the emperor was stripped of his semi-divinity, and allowed to continue only as a constitutional figurehead. While arguments about whether the Americans went too far in restraining the Japanese elite persist, the extraordinary liberation that took place in the post-war years is undeniable.
  • Considerable uncertainty over national and individual identity in Japan was subordinated to the project of post-war rebuilding. The country soon became the engine for the new Asian workshop of the world and its second-largest economy by the late 1970s. Yet all that collapsed in 1989, when the asset-price bubble burst, sending Japan into a generation-long stagnation from which it has yet to recover. Now surpassed by China in size, strength, and influence, Japan again finds itself facing nations more powerful than itself and questioning where it goes from here. Its unprecedented demographic decline raises questions about how it will keep its economy going, not to mention how the state will pay for its generous entitlement programs, which cost over $1 trillion in 2016, or how it will defend itself or exercise influence abroad.
  • Not surprisingly, it was Japan’s urban areas that most readily embraced  modernity. The elite did its best to midwife a competitive industrial economy, while simultaneously preventing real political liberalization.
  • Abe’s recent economic, political, and security efforts, are gambles that Tokyo can help provide some of the public goods that shape how a liberal, open international system is supposed to work, but to which Japan largely abstained from for 70 years after World War II. Viewed in light of the Meiji-era renovation, Japan seems once again to be trying utilize global norms to carve out a leading role abroad.Combined with his economic reforms at home, Abe appears to be betting on an alchemic reaction that transmutes Japan’s inherent insularity and domestic inefficiencies into a revitalized society, renewed national strength, and a recovered influence abroad. One hundred fifty years on from the Meiji Restoration, the renovation of Japan continues, as does the search for its modern identity.
hannahcarter11

Japan's New Leader Sets Goal of Being Carbon Neutral by 2050 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...japan-carbon-neutral.html

japan climate emissions

shared by hannahcarter11 on 26 Oct 20 - No Cached
    • hannahcarter11
      hannahcarter11 on 26 Oct 20
       
      Even if they're just doing this in competition, whatever it takes to clean up the planet!
  • Achieving that goal will be good not only for the world, he said, but also for Japan’s economy and global standing
  • Taking an aggressive approach to global warming will bring about a transformation in our industrial structure and economic system that will lead to big growth
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • major upgrade of its previous commitment to reducing greenhouse gases, and necessary if the world hopes to keep a global temperature rise well below 2 degrees
  • Japan is the world’s fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. It had previously said it would go carbon neutral “at the earliest possible date,” vowing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 205
  • Joseph R. Biden Jr., his challenger in the presidential election, has vowed to restore the United States’ participation in the accord.
  • reinforced just how much of an outlier the United States, the world’s second-largest carbon emitter
  • decision was most likely driven by a combination of domestic and external political pressures
  • As a developed nation, Mr. Kuramochi said, it would be “somewhat embarrassing for Japan to have a net zero emissions timeline later than China.”
  • he would harness the power of “innovation” and “regulatory reform” to transform the country’s energy production and usage
  • The country has made steady progress in reducing its emissions, but still generated 1.06 billion tons of the gas in the one-year period that ended in March 2019, placing it among the top 10 per capita emitters
  • By the early 2000s, Japan had made substantial progress in curbing carbon dioxide emissions through the use of nuclear power. But the meltdown of a nuclear power plant in Fukushima after a devastating earthquake and tsunami in 2011 led to a widespread shutdown of the country’s energy-producing reactors, which had generated roughly a third of Japan’s total power supply. Only a handful of the plants have since restarted.
  • Short on energy sources, Japan decided to reinvest in coal.
  • Japan currently plans to reduce — but not eliminate — its dependence on coa
  • The country has also vowed to end contentious government subsidies for the export of coal-fired power technology to developing nations, where the use of coal for electricity continues to rise
  • Further efforts to decrease Japan’s domestic commitment to coal will likely meet powerful resistance from Japanese industry, which is still heavily dependent on the fuel
  • Japan is already considering a substantial increase in its supply of wind and solar power, and it is also looking at newer, less-established technologies, such as plants that burn ammonia or hydrogen.
  • Mr. Suga said that Japan would continue to develop nuclear power with “maximum priority on safety,”
  • Movement toward the new goal had already started on the local level, where 150 municipal governments have pledged to be carbon neutral by midcentury.
  • But even if Japan achieves its goal, it will not by itself be enough to halt or even slow the current trend of global warming, a goal that requires a global effort
  • Preventing a climate catastrophe will require “a transformation of the energy system that has underwritten modern society,”
  • Japan will be carbon neutral by 2050, its prime minister said on Monday
  • The announcement came just weeks after China, Japan’s regional rival, said it would reduce its net carbon emissions to zero by 2060.
g-dragon

The Kamakura Period: Samurai Rule in Japan - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/amakura-period-in-japan-195288

samurai rule period japan Kamakura

shared by g-dragon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • The Kamakura Period in Japan lasted from 1192 to 1333, bringing with it the emergence shogun rule.
  • Society, too, changed radically, and a new feudal system emerged.
  • Zen Buddhism spread from China as well as a rise in realism in art and literature, favored by the ruling warlords of the time.
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  • cultural strife and political divides eventually led to the shogunate rulership's downfall and a new imperial rule took over in 1333.
  • This system would endure under the leadership of different clans for almost 700 years until the Meiji Restoration of 1868.
  • The revolution in politics during the Kamakura Period was matched by changes in Japanese society and culture. One important change was the increasing popularity of Buddhism, which had previously been limited primarily to the elites in the emperors' court.
  • During the Kamakura, ordinary Japanese people began to practice new types of Buddhism, including Zen (Chan), which was imported from China in 1191, and the Nichiren Sect, founded in 1253, which emphasized the Lotus Sutra and could almost be described as "fundamentalist Buddhism."
  • The greatest crisis of the Kamakura Era came with a threat from overseas. In 1271, the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan  — grandson of Genghis Khan — established the Yuan Dynasty in China. After consolidating power over all of China, Kublai sent emissaries to Japan demanding tribute; the shikken's government flatly refused on behalf of the shogun and emperor.  
  • Kublai Khan responded by sending two massive armadas to invade Japan in 1274 and 1281. Almost unbelievably, both armadas were destroyed by typhoons, known as the "kamikaze" or "divine winds" in Japan.
  • They also ordered two different lines of the Japanese imperial family to alternate rulers, in an attempt to keep either branch from becoming too powerful. 
anonymous

Donald Trump warns 'dictators' as Japan visit launches Asia tour | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-arrives-in-japan-on-asia-tour

politics US Crisis trump policy japan asia northkorea

shared by anonymous on 05 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump has begun a tour of Asia with a warning that “no dictator” should underestimate America, in a thinly veiled reference to the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un.
  • North Korea marked Trump’s arrival in Japan by warning the “spiritually unstable” president not to make “reckless remarks” about the regime in Pyongyang.
  • In what many believe is a low-risk start to a 12-day visit that will include stops in South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines, Trump praised US servicemen and women and their counterparts from Japan, a “treasured partner and crucial ally”.
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  • North Korea has launched two ballistic missiles over northern Japan in recent months, and has threatened to conduct a hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific Ocean to demonstrate it has developed the means to threaten the US mainland with nuclear weapons.Trump said the US-Japan alliance had been the cornerstone of regional security for the past six decades, adding: “We dominate the sky, we dominate the sea, we dominate the land and space.”
  • Trump’s bellicose rhetoric targeting Kim Jong-un has unsettled Moon, a liberal who this week said no military action should be taken on the Korean peninsula without his consent.Trump defended his provocative remarks about the North Korean nuclear crisis en route to Japan from Hawaii earlier Sunday.
  • Jonathan Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said the trip comes “at a very inopportune time for the president. He is under growing domestic vulnerabilities that we all know about, hour to hour,” he said.
Javier E

Japan's Coronavirus Numbers Are Low. Are Masks the Reason? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...japan-coronavirus-masks.html

response pandemic japan

shared by Javier E on 07 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • As Japan has confounded the world by avoiding the sort of mass death from coronavirus seen in the United States, I began to wonder whether the cultural affinity for masks helped explain some of this success.
  • now a convert, especially since Tokyo was placed under a state of emergency in mid-April. I bought handmade cloth face coverings from a Facebook friend in Okinawa. We wash them daily and line them with coffee filters. Even though the emergency declaration was lifted in late May, I still won’t let anyone in my family leave our apartment without putting on a mask.
  • In the early months of the pandemic, Japan seemed not to follow much of the conventional epidemiological wisdom, deliberately restricting testing and not ordering a lockdown.
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  • Yet a feared spike in cases and deaths has not materialized. Japan has reported more than 17,000 infections and just over 900 deaths, while the United States, with a population roughly two and a half times as large, is approaching 1.9 million cases and 110,000 deaths.
  • Japan, I think a lot of people agree, kind of did everything wrong, with poor social distancing, karaoke bars still open and public transit packed near the zone where the worst outbreaks were happening,” Jeremy Howard, a researcher at the University of San Francisco who has studied the use of masks, said of the country’s early response. “But the one thing that Japan did right was masks.”
  • one of Japan’s most visible responses has been near-universal mask wearing, seen here as a responsible thing to do to protect oneself and others, and as a small price to pay to be able to resume some semblance of normalcy.
  • Dr. Onishi said that early in the 20th century, the Japanese viewed masks as unattractive, but were persuaded to wear them during the 1918 flu pandemic. More recently, the Japanese public has used masks during the SARS and MERS outbreaks — which also left Japan relatively unscathed — as well as to protect against pollution and pollen.
  • During the current pandemic, scientists have found a correlation between high levels of mask-wearing — whether as a matter of culture or policy — and success in containing the virus.
  • “I think there is definitely evidence coming out of Covid that Japan, as well as other countries which practice mask-wearing, tend to do much better in flattening the curve,” said Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunobiology at Yale.
  • The scientific evidence on whether a mask protects the wearer from infection is mixed. But experiments show that masks can be effective in blocking the emission of respiratory droplets that may contain the virus, even when someone has no symptoms of illness. And there is some evidence that infected people with no symptoms can still transmit the coronavirus.
krystalxu

A Look at Gender Expectations in Japanese Society - Japan Powered - 0 views

www.japanpowered.com/...pectations-in-japanese-society

gender role tradition men women equality women role history society Japan culture

shared by krystalxu on 13 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Gender roles are defined by culture more than physical differences between men and women.
  • independence is not considered a desirable trait for a man in China
  • Men were expected to be loyal to their lords; women were to be loyal to their family and husband.
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  • Japan was a fairly equitable matriarchal society until Confucian ideas immigrated from China.
  • women could own and inherit property and family position in feudal Japan.
  • They were encouraged by propaganda to be married to the nation.
  • Poor women were drafted by the Japanese government to sexually service military men.
  • Discrimination based on gender was forbidden by the Japanese Constitution.
  • Modern Japanese gender roles revolve around their vertical society where someone’s identity is a part of their group identity.
  • Both genders are also delaying marriage. The stigma of being single is fading for both genders, most of all for women.
  • Genders should be brought up differently
  • The roles also work within the vertical social structure of senior-junior relations
  • the typical American ideal of the “macho” alpha male is frowned upon in Japanese society.
  • Guys are expected to be well rounded in art, music, literature, and more just like in feudal Japan
  • Girls in anime make a huge deal out of making lunch for their favorite guy because it is a wifely thing.
  • the ideal male character is rather feminine
  • Cooking well shows how the character is well rounded and able to support the woman should she have a career of her own.
  • Sweets are considered unmanly.
  • some bakeries have taken to making huge portion sizes so guys can feel less feminine about having a sweet tooth.
ethanshilling

Japan to Start Releasing Radioactive Water From Fukushima in 2 Years - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ukushima-wastewater-ocean.html

japan fukushima

shared by ethanshilling on 13 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Japan said on Tuesday that it had decided to gradually release tons of treated wastewater from the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant into the ocean, describing it as the best option for disposal despite fierce opposition from fishing crews at home and concern from governments abroad.
  • Disposal of the wastewater has been long delayed by public opposition and by safety concerns. But the space used to store the water is expected to run out next year, and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said during the cabinet meeting on Tuesday that disposing of the wastewater from the plant was “a problem that cannot be avoided.”
  • The Fukushima crisis was set off in March 2011 by a huge earthquake and tsunami that ripped through northeastern Japan and killed more than 19,000 people. The subsequent meltdown of three of the plant’s six reactors was the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
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  • The government will “take every measure to absolutely guarantee the safety of the treated water and address misinformation,” he said, noting that the cabinet would meet again within a week to decide on the details for carrying out the plan.
  • Ten years later, the cleanup is far from finished at the disabled plant, which is operated by the Tokyo Electric Power Company. To keep the three damaged reactor cores from melting, cooling water is pumped through them continuously.
  • There are now about 1.25 million tons of wastewater stored in more than 1,000 tanks at the plant site. The water continues to accumulate at a rate of about 170 tons a day, and releasing all of it is expected to take decades.
  • But the Japanese government’s plan faces strong opposition from local officials and fishing crews, who say that it would add to consumer fears about the safety of Fukushima seafood.
  • Responding to Japan’s decision, the U.S. State Department said in a statement, “In this unique and challenging situation, Japan has weighed the options and effects, has been transparent about its decision, and appears to have adopted an approach in accordance with globally accepted nuclear safety standards.”
proudsa

Obama's Hiroshima Visit Is a Reminder that Atomic Bombs Weren't What Won the War - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...hiroshima-bomb_b_10067434.html

obama hiroshima war politics History

shared by proudsa on 26 May 16 - No Cached
  • opportunity to reconsider some of the myths surrounding the historic decision to use the atomic bomb
  • loss of 135,000 people made little impact on the Japanese military
  • Japan had been willing to sacrifice city after city to American conventional bombing in the months leading up to Hiroshima
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  • The historical record also makes clear that American leaders fully understood this.
  • Japan was likely to surrender with the sole proviso that Japan be allowed to keep its emperor in some figurehead role.
  • The U.S. military had long planned to keep the emperor in such a role to help control Japan during the postwar occupation.
  • they too judged that this would end the war.
  • the United States allowed Japan to keep its emperor as a way to help control Japan during the occupation
  • the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan
  • What can be proved is that the president was advised that the assurances were, in fact, likely to end the war without the bombs
  • So there was plenty time to use the bombs if Japan did not surrender once assurances for the emperor were given.
  • Close attention to some key dates is also instructive.
  • the Red Army attack on or around Aug. 8. Hiroshima was destroyed on Aug. 6 and Nagasaki on Aug. 9.
  • What really happened in the days leading up to the decision to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki may never be known.
  • The only serious answer to the threat of nuclear weapons is an all-out effort to abolish them from arsenals throughout the world
horowitzza

Japan doesn't want the U.S. to apologize for bombing Hiroshima. Here's why - LA Times - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...ma-apology-20160429-story.html

japan u s bombing hiroshima

shared by horowitzza on 30 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • For years, the question has lingered: Should the U.S. apologize for dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima
  • No sitting U.S. president has visited the city since it was largely destroyed in an atomic blast during World War II
  • Secretary of State John Kerry may have foreshadowed what’s to come when he visited Hiroshima this month and called the experience “gut-wrenching.”
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  • Does Japan even want an apology?
  • Likely not. A secret 2009 state department cable published by Wikileaks in 2011 indicated Japan was cool to the idea and worried that it would only serve to energize anti-nuclear activists in the country.
  • the government’s official stance was that it would be more meaningful for the U.S. and Japan to “aim for a peaceful and safe world without nuclear weapons.”
  • An apology also could harden the opposition to using nuclear power in Japan, a sentiment that blossomed after the meltdown at Fukushima. The administration has made nuclear power a major part of its energy policy.
  • “Why doesn’t the Japanese government want Mr. Obama to apologize? Because it tears the scab off a much bigger wound that Japan wants healed,”
  • “If Obama apologizes at Hiroshima, it draws attention to Japanese behavior elsewhere in Asia during the ’30s and ’40s.
  • I think the American people should know that not only the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the firebombing of Tokyo in which thousands died, were illegal acts against humanity. They were civilian massacres.”
  • A 2015 opinion poll by a Russian news agency found that 60% of the Japanese public wanted an apology for the bombing.
  • But what the Japanese government and the public want aren’t always the same.
  • horowitzza on 30 Apr 16
     
    Examines whether or not the US should apologize for the Hiroshima bombings
carolinehayter

Japan Extends 3rd State Of Emergency Weeks Before Olympics : Coronavirus Updates : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...eeks-before-the-olympics-begin

pandemic Culture politics

shared by carolinehayter on 30 May 21 - No Cached
  • Japan's government extended a state of emergency covering major cities until at least until June 20 — roughly a month before the start of the Tokyo Olympics, which polls show an overwhelming number of Japanese do not want to proceed as scheduled.
  • It's Japan's third state of emergency of the pandemic and the second extension since the current emergency began on April 25. The emergency shortens some businesses' hours, and caps attendance at large events
  • The spread in Japan of variant strains of the virus has slowed the decline in case numbers. Some hospitals remain overstretched by COVID-19 patients, and some people have died at home without being able to access medical care.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Japan's vaccine rollout remains the slowest among developed economies with just 6% of residents having received at least one dose.
  • An article this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, meanwhile, questioned organizers' fundamental argument that the games can be held safely. "We believe the IOC's determination to proceed with the Olympic Games is not informed by the best scientific evidence," the authors wrote.
  • International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach told a conference on Thursday that athletes should "come with full confidence to Tokyo and get ready," lauding the Japanese capital as "the best-prepared Olympic city ever."
  • The IOC has asked Olympic athletes to sign waivers absolving the organizers of legal liability for COVID-19-related risks. Bach acknowledged this was an issue of concern for some athletes, but the IOC calls it "standard practice."
  • Japan requires that imported vaccines undergo domestic clinical testing, slowing down the approval process.
  • Japan's second-largest newspaper by circulation, The Asahi Shimbun, became the first major Japanese media outlet to publish an editorial calling for the games to be canceled. The 142-year-old publication, one of Asia's oldest newspapers, is also an Olympic sponsor.
  • Sponsors are especially jittery about the prospect of the games' cancellation, which could cost Japan an estimated $17 billion.
  • another state of emergency in response to a fresh wave of infections after the Olympics could cost the country several times that amount.
Javier E

China at the peak - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion - 0 views

www.noahpinion.blog/...china-at-the-peak

china peak economy

shared by Javier E on 07 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • We thus have the privilege of seeing a great civilization at its peak
  • How much greater would China’s peak have been if Deng Xiaoping had sided with the Tiananmen Square protesters, and liberalized China’s society in addition to its economy? How many great Chinese books, essays, video games, cartoons, TV shows, movies, and songs would we now enjoy if it weren’t for the pervasive censorship regime now in place? How much more would the people of the world have learned from Chinese culture if they could travel there freely and interact with Chinese people freely over the internet? Without a draconian autocrat like Xi Jinping at the helm, would so many Chinese people be looking to flee the country? Would the U.S. and China still be friends instead of at each other’s throats?
  • The key fact is that China’s meteoric rise seems like it’s drawing to a close
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • China’s drop was much much bigger; the Japan of the 80s was never the export machine people believed it to be. Both countries turned to investment in real estate and infrastructure as a replacement growth driver — although again, China did this much more than Japan did. Essentially, China did all the the things we typically think of Japan as having done 25 years earlier, but much more than Japan actually did them.
  • Yes, for those who were wondering, this does look a little bit like what happened to Japan in the 1990s
  • Already the country is not growing much faster than the G7, and as the ongoing real estate bust weighs on the economy, even that small difference may now be gone. The country’s surging auto industry is a bright spot, but won’t be big enough to rescue the economy from the evaporation of its primary growth driver.
  • Even if it manages to climb up to 40%, that’s still a fairly disappointing result — South Korea is at 71% and Japan at 65%
  • a re-acceleration would require a massive burst of productivity growth, which just seems unlikely.
  • That means China’s catch-up growth only took it to 30% of U.S. per capita GDP (PPP)
  • There’s one main argument that people make for a quick Chinese decline: rapid aging. But while I don’t want to wave this away, I don’t think it’s going to be as big a deal as many believe
  • This is another example of China’s peak being both awe-inspiring and strangely disappointing at the same time.
  • Now that China has hit its peak, will it decline? And if so, how much and how fast?
  • it seems likely that China’s growth will now slow to developed-country levels, or slightly higher, without much prospect for a sustained re-acceleration
  • when people contemplate Chinese decline, they’re not asking whether its economy will shrink; they’re asking whether its relative economic dominance and geopolitical importance will decrease.
  • If we just casually pattern-match on history, the answer would probably be “not for a long time”. Most powerful countries seem to peak and then plateau. Britain ruled the waves for a century.
  • U.S. relative power and economic dominance peaked in the 1950s, but it didn’t really start declining until the 2000s
  • Japan and Germany had their military power smashed in WW2, but remained economic heavyweights for many decades afterwards.
  • When the Roman Empire declined, it got a lot poorer. But in the modern economy, countries that decline in relative terms, and in geopolitical power, often get richer
  • he total fertility rate has been low since even before the one-child policy was implemented, but recently it has taken a nose-dive. Two years ago, the UN put it at 1.16, which is 40% lower than the U.S. and 22% lower than Europe
  • The country’s total population only started shrinking this year, but its young population started falling sharply 20 years ago, due to the echo of low fertility in the 80s. The most common age for a Chinese person is now about 50 years old, with another peak at 35:
  • The first reason is that power is relative, and China’s rivals have demographic issues of their own. The U.S., Europe, India and Japan all have higher fertility than China, but still below replacement level
  • demographics aren’t actually going to force Chinese power or wealth into rapid decline over the next few decades.
  • third of all, evidence suggests that population aging is really more of a persistent drag than a crisis or disaster.
  • Second, demographics won’t take away China’s biggest economic advantage, which is clustering and agglomeration effects. Asia is the world’s electronics manufacturing hub. It’s also by far the most populous region in the world, giving it the biggest potential market size
  • China will act as a key hub for that region, in terms of trade, supply chains, investment, and so on. China is shrinking, but Asia is not
  • As a result, there are suddenly many fewer Chinese people able to bear children, which is why the actual number of births in China has fallen by almost half since 2016:
  • we’d find that every percentage point of the senior population share that China gains relative to other countries might reduce its relative economic performance by about 1.15%. That’s not a huge number.
  • Now, if we look at the research, we find some estimates that are much larger than this — for example, Ozimek et al. (2018) look at specific industries and specific U.S. states, and find an effect on productivity that’s three times as large as the total effect on growth that I just eyeballed above. Maestas et al. (2022) look at U.S. states, and also find a larger effect. But Acemoglu and Restrepo (2017) look across countries and find no effect at all.
  • On top of that, there are plenty of things a country can do to mitigate the effects of aging. One is automation. China is automating at breakneck speed,
  • A second is having old people work longer; China, which now has higher life expectancy than the U.S., is well-positioned to do this.
  • Finally, aging will prompt China to do something it really needs to do anyway: build a world class health care system
  • this would help rectify the internal imbalances that Michael Pettis always talks about, shifting output from low-productivity real estate investment toward consumption.
  • if not aging, the only other big dangers to China are war and climate change.
  • To realize its full potential, Altasia will need integration — it will need some way to get Japanese and Korean and Taiwanese investment and technology to the vast labor forces of India, Indonesia, and the rest
  • the most likely outcome is that China sits at or near its current peak of wealth, power and importance through the middle of this century at least.
  • Altasia has more people and arguably more technical expertise than China. And it’s the only alternative location for the Asian electronics supercluster.
  • War was the big mistake that Germany made a century ago, so let’s hope China doesn’t follow in its footsteps.
  • The story of whether and how that complex web of investment, tech transfer, and trade develops will be the next great story of globalization.
  • But I think the very complexity of Altasia will lead to its own sort of adventure and excitement.
  • for Western companies looking for new markets, Altasia will potentially be more exciting than China ever was. The Chinese market delivered riches to some, but the government banned some products (especially internet services) and stole the technology used to make others. Ultimately, China’s billion consumers turned out to be a mirage for many. The economies and societies of Altasia, in comparison, are much more open to foreign products.
Javier E

Beate Gordon, Feminist Heroine in Japan, Dies at 89 - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...roine-in-japan-dies-at-89.html

role model feminist japan rights women history

shared by Javier E on 02 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Her work — drafting language that gave women a set of legal rights pertaining to marriage, divorce, property and inheritance that they had long been without in Japan’s feudal society — had an effect on their status that endures to this day. “It set a basis for a better, a more equal society,” Carol Gluck, a professor of Japanese history at Columbia University, said Monday in a telephone interview. “By just writing those things into the Constitution — our Constitution doesn’t have any of those things — Beate Gordon intervened at a critical moment. And what kind of 22-year-old gets to write a constitution?”
  • Beate was educated at a German school in Tokyo and, from the mid-1930s on, after the school became far too Nazified for her parents’ liking, at the American School in Japan. In 1939, shortly before her 16th birthday, she left for Mills College in Oakland, Calif. Her parents remained in Japan. In December 1941, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, it became impossible to contact Japan. Beate had no word from her parents, and no money. She put her foreign language prowess to work: by this time, she was fluent in English, Japanese, German, French, Spanish and Russian.
  • For decades, Ms. Gordon said nothing about her role in postwar Japan, at first because the work was secret and later because she did not want her youth — and the fact that she was an American — to become ammunition for the Japanese conservatives who have long clamored for constitutional revision.
Javier E

About Japan: A Teacher's Resource | Women in Modern Japanese History | Japan Society - 0 views

aboutjapan.japansociety.org/men-in-modern-japanese-history

japan history women

shared by Javier E on 28 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • This paper addresses these assumptions about Japanese women as “behind” and suggests that their lives have been far more varied throughout history and in the present than the stereotypes suggest.
  • Rather than assuming that the west is somehow ahead of the rest of the world, I use what historians call the concept of “coevalness” throughout. By “coeval,” I mean that the situation of women around the world unfolded in relatively similar ways at roughly the same time.
  • I submit that it would be a mistake to blame Japanese women’s supposedly low status on “tradition” or “culture.” This assertion prevents us from seeing the diversity in the historical record and the ways patriarchy—that is, male dominance—was remade and even strengthened in the modern period.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Western visitors drew on the writings of Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and others and used the “low” status of women among other “barbaric” Japanese practices to justify the previously-mentioned series of unequal treaties.
  • The overturning of these treaties was one of the main goals of the Japanese state after 1868, a goal achieved by the mid-1890s. This focus led to considerable discussion and reform across several decades. Government officials, intellectuals, reformers in the Japan and across East Asia focused on the “woman question” as a critical part of modernization, necessary to build a strong state and attain equal status with the western powers. Strikingly, they tended to accept the idea that the status of women in East Asia was low. In the process, commentators of all stripes painted a picture of women’s status in the premodern East Asian past that was static and uniform, a view not at all in line with the richness and diversity of the past, a past where some women were highly educated and produced masterful works of art and literature and others had political power and influence.[4]
  • Let us turn briefly to the period before Japan’s transition to modernity. Until quite recently, scholars have tended to see the preceding Edo/Tokugawa (hereafter Edo) period (1600-1868) as representing the nadir of women’s status. Scholars assumed that warrior rule and Neo-Confucian discourses led to an unparalleled subordination of women. Recent studies have challenged this view and revealed a more complicated and nuanced picture, one where women’s lives varied widely by status, age, locale, and time period. In short, scholars have demonstrated that gender ideals promoted by male scholars that stress women’s inferiority tell us little about the lives of the vast majority of women. Moreover, research shows that merchant women enjoyed more property rights than women of samurai (warrior) and peasant backgrounds.
  • One example that demonstrates the variety of women’s experiences lies in the area of education. Access to education grew dramatically during the Edo period. Particularly notable are the growth of what are sometimes called temple schools, where girls and boys learned basic reading and arithmetic. As a result of this development, Japan had one of the highest literacy rates in the early modern world. Moreover, some women of means had access to quite elite forms of education equivalent to those available to elite men
  • This situation would change dramatically in the modern period, for the advent of the nation-state after 1868 and the establishment of universal education in 1872 would eliminate the variety of potential experiences women had, and replace them with a uniform education deemed appropriate to women. In short, after 1872, a greater number of women had access to education than ever before, but the content of this education was more circumscribed than it had been in the past
  • Modern times saw concrete changes in gender roles within households especially in urban settings. In the Edo period, households in villages were productive units where husbands and wives shared labor
  • But as some people moved to the cities—a trend that accelerated in the modern period—husbands went out to work leaving middle class wives at home. Urban families increasingly lived in nuclear units, rather than in extended family groups. In the process, middle class women’s lives increasingly became defined in terms of motherhood, something that had not been highly valued in the Edo period. From the turn of the twentieth century on, middle class women in particular were called upon to be “good wives and wise mothers” (ryōsai kenbo)
  • For poor women, work in the textile mills and sex work continued to be the main occupations as they had in the preceding period. Some scholars have pointed out that Japan’s successful industrial transformation in the nineteenth century was accomplished on the backs of poor women, especially those who toiled in the textile mills. Meanwhile, some women from the middle class were able to pursue a limited number of professions including work as physicians, nurses, and teachers. As Sally Hastings has demonstrated, state policy actually supported these limited opportunities for women because the work was deemed appropriate to their gender. We should not imagine that all Japanese women before 1945 were wives and mothers; professional women existed in the prewar era. In fact, this group of professional women in the 1920s and 1930s played a role in the prewar suffrage movement. They also helped authorize a public role for women and laid the groundwork for women’s enthusiastic participation in political life in the immediate post World War II years.
  • The 1920s saw the rise of a vibrant women’s rights movement in Japan, one related to the movement for women’s suffrage in the west after World War I when American and British women finally gained the vote. The Japanese government reacted to women’s demands with a gradualist approach. In 1925, it granted universal manhood suffrage and by 1930 and 1931, the lower house of the Diet (legislature) passed bills granting women’s suffrage at the local level. However, as the political situation abroad changed dramatically in the 1930s and the Japanese military began a war in China, the movement to grant women’s political rights went by the wayside. Women’s rights advocates mostly supported the state during the period, hoping that their loyalty would enable them to influence policy on mothers and children.
  • Women’s political rights were granted after the war in 1945. But the story of how they came to be deserves some attention. The main issue here is what Mire Koikari has called the “myth of American emancipation of Japanese women,” for this period has often been misunderstood. In the fall of 1945, the head of the Occupation (SCAP) General Douglas MacArthur presented a list of demands to the Japanese government, including the demand that women get the vote. However, feminist leader Ichikawa Fusae and her fellow activists had already been lobbying the Japanese cabinet to grant women’s suffrage even before the Occupation arrived. Ichikawa did not want a foreign power to be responsible for granting women the right to vote. The Japanese cabinet was supportive of her initiative. Nevertheless, the subsequent course of events—a revised electoral law granting women the right to vote and stand for office was passed in December 1945—meant that the Occupation could take credit for enfranchising women. This view overlooks the efforts of Japanese women as early as the 1920s as well as their activities in the immediate aftermath of war, as well as the Japanese government’s support of their demands.
  • Most familiar to western audiences is the story of Beate Sirota Gordon’s role in proposing the gender equality clauses in the postwar Japanese constitution (Articles 14 and 24). At the time, Gordon, who was born in Vienna to Russian-Jewish parents but grew up in Japan, had returned to work for the Occupation as a naturalized American citizen. She was part of a group of Americans charged with the task of rewriting the constitution. Gordon later published her memoir The Only Woman in the Room (1997) relating her critical role in writing this legislation. She has been celebrated in some western and Japanese circles ever since. Yet Gordon’s story has also been subject to critique from several angles. For example, Mire Koikari sheds lights on Gordon’s participation in “imperial feminism,” since Gordon portrayed herself and was portrayed by others as liberating Japanese women. As Koikari adds, “In drafting women’s rights articles, Gordon tapped into her childhood memory where the Orientalist imagery of oppressed and helpless Japanese women predominated.”[7]
  • The point here is not to ignore Gordon’s contribution to the constitution for she did indeed draft the gender equality legislation, but rather to place her work in a larger context. In fact, as we saw, Japanese women had been working for political rights for decades. The granting of women’s political rights and guarantees of gender equality cannot be seen as a case where a progressive west granted passive Japanese women political rights.  (On a different but related note, acknowledging the agency of Japanese women also means recognizing their complicity in wartime militarism and nationalism, as Koikari emphasizes.)
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