WARNING: this whole post is basically an angry rant about war and hypocrisy. Hint: I'm against both. The next post will be more fun, I promise. It'll be a temples and castles and adorable Japanese children so feel free to skip reading this one and wait for the pleasantness to come.
So I kind of lied. We're on our way back from Kyoto but the thing I was thinking about the whole time was something I experienced in Tokyo before we left for Kyoto. Hence contrary to what I said in the last post this one is about Tokyo. Kyoto will have to wait.
It turns out that Matthew and Aki live a couple of train stops away from the famous/infamous Yasukuni Shrine. This is where Japan pays homage to their war heroes, which wouldn't be a big deal but a handful of them just so happen to be war criminals. As in they were convicted of war crimes after WWII by a criminal court so they are proper War Criminals.
You can tell how bellicose Japan is feeling by how high ranking an official they send to the shrine on their equivalent of Memorial Day. When they send the vice-under-secretary of postal history they don't want to ruffle any feathers. When they send the Secretary of Defense things are tense. And when the Prime Minister himself goes it's a proper international incident. The last time that happened was 2006. So, naturally, Mom, Spectra, Matthew and I went. Before I continue I want to clarify my feelings on war: human beings should never do it and it's never really 'justified' even when they seemingly have no other recourse for a couple reasons.
WARNING: what follows is a rant about the hypocrisy of war that, if you’ve known me for any length of time, will sound familiar and if you haven’t known me that long might be offensive. Please feel free to skip it.
First the more we learn and understand about what happens in war the better we understand that all sides do things that people who aren't fighting wars find abominable. Rape, murder, torture, accidentally/intentionally drop bombs on civilians because they have the misfortune of being close to enemy targets and the like. Normal human beings in terrible circumstances do terrible things. You may think you’re better than that and you wouldn’t but I recommend continuing to count your lucky stars that you won’t have to find out. We definitely know enough about humans of different races and creeds around the world to say that none of us unfailingly walk the path of righteous and just all the time. If you think your race or creed does please let me know and I’ll assemble a list of of things for you to feel ashamed about.
Second is the terrorist/freedom fighter/history-is-written-by-the-victor problem. When a nation wins a war all the terrible stuff it did is washed away in support of the cause of fighting the good fight. So the United States indiscriminately bombs Japanese cities in an effort to break the will of its people so they'll end the war to save our troops and in the process kills between half a million and a million civilians. Guess how many Brits died in the infamous and heralded Blitz? Something just shy of 70,000. Sound, I don’t know… disproportionate? Don’t worry about it because it’s fine. The United States won and Japan got what was coming to it. Lose a war and every terrible thing you did is trotted out as the proof that you were evil and wrong and needed to be destroyed. Win a war and your sins are forgiven. That's unambiguous bullshit.
Here’s the part where I wish I could say that I’m a pacifist but I’m not. It appears that from time to time thanks to a variety of circumstances wars are necessary. But what I mean by that is from time to time there’s something so evil going on that it needs to be combated with forces committed to being less evil. Firebombing entire cities, incinerating hundreds of thousands of adults and children alike is a damnable sin but it’s less damnable than exterminating people. I wish that weren’t so but it is. Sometimes atrocities are necessary to end even larger atrocities but it's all atrocious and all sides lose. It's just a matter of how much and that takes me back to the Yasukuni Shrine.
END WARNING: the anti-war rant is over.
We didn’t actually approach the shrine or throw some change in the basket before praying. We just milled around and watched other people do that before strolling through the (you guessed it) immaculate and beautiful grounds. In addition to the shrine there is, in effect, a museum dedicated to wars throughout the history of Japan starting with Samurai and ending with WWII. In the lobby there was the famous Zero fighter plane and a couple of cannons (they're probably not called cannons but whatever) from WWII.
One of the cannons was huge. The barrel was something like 15 or 20 feet long and the tripod apparatus thing it was on was another 10 or so feet. It's all steel and thick and just the mass of it made me uncomfortable. The cannon had been painted so it was that military shade of green but in various places there were these weird little gashes in it. Almost as though a little god came by with sword heated to some unfathomable temperature and went around poking and stabbing at the thing. The mystery of these little gashes forced my unease aside as I wondered what they were. Then I found out.
The plaque explained that the cannon had been used on Okinawa and all those scars were the result of gunfire from American planes strafing the Japanese guns. I looked at the scars in this new light, amazed at the power that was required for those shells to do that to that steel and then the thought settled in, "If those shells did that to this steel imagine what it was doing to the men standing there shooting back at those planes. It would have pulverized them." The tangible reality of those scars was almost more than I could take. The noise and body parts and the confusion and the horror of what was going on overwhelmed me and it took every ounce of willpower I could muster to not burst into tears.
On the wall behind the canon there was a bunch of framed children's art. In guessing the artists in question were in mid-elementary school and there were something like 20 paintings. Each painting featured a piece of WWII era military equipment: Zero planes, tanks, battleships, cannons, etc. The paintings were recent and some had ribbons on them, the winners of whatever contest was sponsored by Japan's equivalent of the Republic party (I'm guessing) and then I started to cry all over again.
When an American kid goes to the Air & Space Museum in DC and ogles the WWII fighter jets—like I did once upon a time—nobody bats an eye. It's right or just or something for that kid to revere those weapons and the people who used them in order to win a just war. But what's a Japanese kid supposed to feel when he looks at their planes from the same war? Is he or she supposed to feel ashamed of his or her forbearers or even their actual grandparents? Would you look an eight-year-old in the eye and tell him that he should be ashamed of his great-great-grandfather who was just some random guy who served in the military when his country told him he needed to? But he happened to be Japanese instead of American? That's insane and yet that's the adult version of what’s going on when everyone gets so fussed about Japanese officials visit the shrine commemorating their war dead. Unless the offended party comes from a nation that’s sworn off war and stopped venerating its war heroes it's hypocritical bullshit.
Should Native Americans get bent out of shape every Presidents Day in the United States because, what?, about half of the Presidents either tacitly or directly supported their extirpation? Should African Americans do the same? I actually think they should. Because until we start calling bullshit wherever and whenever it rears its head, no matter how sacred that head may be, then we're lying to ourselves about who we are and how we got here which enables us to be even more hypocritical in the future. We're all hypocritical bastards and until we come to terms with that the Japanese government has just as much right to gloss over the more unsavory bits of its history as every other nation does.
So worship your heroes and ignore their misdeeds. But be careful. Facts may not change but context does and today’s hero can be tomorrow’s villain. Choose your idols carefully or you just might find an alien shedding the tears you can’t on your behalf someday.
Le May admitted that had the US lost the war, he and his associated would have been tried as war criminals. I think it may have been Nimitz who said that Admr. Dönitz should not have been charged with war crimes because we had conducted unrestricted submarine warfare in exactly the same way.
ReplyDeleteOur histories mention such things. That's how you and I know about the bombing of Japan and Dresden, for instance. However, you will not likely find anything dwelling on Nanking in Japanese history books. They treat WWII as two empires colliding, rather like Rome and Parthia, but don't develop the idea that their government at the time was Fascist, and was pursuing the extra-ruthless policies characteristic of such an ideology. They've tried to make Tojo into a martyr without considering the implications of his accepting the tenets and political philosophy of Fascism. As to bombing cities, the Japanese and German were pretty enthused about it when they could do it with impunity, but sung a different tune when it was turned against them. They should not have embraced the political system that admires ruthlessness as a form of strength. Much loss of life in Japan owes to the impatience of democracies. We could have cut off Japan completely by submarines alone, and concentrated bombing on industrial facilities. In time they would have starved out, like an ancient castle under siege. However, this would have taken several years, which was considered too long. On the other hand, is it really better to die in a famine or in an air raid?
Richard Dieterle