A western friend of mine told me he was rather surprised to learn of the Japanese making use of Hiroshima to portray the nation as an ultimate victim of modern chemical warfare in my article.

In response, I informed him that it was not my intention to downplay the suffering and the trauma of the folks in Hiroshima, and I do strongly believe that innocent lives deserve to be mourned and remembered.

Meanwhile, it has long been my hope that the Japanese will also reflect more deeply upon their nation's militarist past, and do something to stop the increasingly jingoistic and bellicose Koizumi administration from going overboard.

Thanks to the atomic bombs, Japan became an occupied territory of the victorious United States after World War II. However, Washington's knowledge of the Japanese nation was, to say the least, non-existent. To look for a theoretical basis on which US rule could be premised, the Americans found themselves having to undertake a more concrete analysis of Japanese culture.

Ruth Benedict, being a prominent cultural anthropologist, was therefore entrusted with the task of 'analysing' the Japanese for the political consumption of the ruling elites. She did not disappoint her political masters. Her seminal book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, is arguably the most influential in post-war Japanese studies in the US.

As I wrote before, although Benedict supplied a wealth of detail and insight to her subject that might make some readers amaze at her grasp of Japanese culture and ethos, the book has come under heavy criticism for its reductionistic analysis, particularly the simplistic dichotomy between two cultural patterns: guilt and shame.

It must be cautioned here that Benedict's effort, although laudable, is nevertheless an outcome of an instruction by the US Office of War Information to "use all the techniques (she) could as a cultural anthropologist to spell out what the Japanese were like". In other words, the classic authored by Benedict was never meant to be an independent project, but a product of political assignment.

Pre-WWII American politics was characterised by its scepticism and mistrust of the Asians on US soil. Even Jack London, the world-renowned novelist and once staunch socialist, was vehemently against the 'heathen' Chinese found in California during his days. In 1942, a survey was carried out by the Office of Public Opinion Research for war purposes, in which 73 percent of the American respondents described the Japanese as "treacherous", while 56 percent of them believed Japan, as a nation, was "cruel".

Racial prejudice

The negative images of Japan were, no doubt, informed to a considerable extent by Pearl Harbour that had happened in December 1941. The racial prejudice of white Americans again manifested in the Internment policy, which targeted specifically Japanese Americans but not the Italians and the Germans. Earl Warren, Governor of California of the time, cannot have been more forthright by admitting that he was in an entirely different field when dealing with the Japanese, hence his inability to form a sound opinion about them.(1)

Benedict's contribution to the field of Japanese studies in the US is no doubt tremendous. But would such analysis, much cited by the Chinese media the world over to prove the inability of the Japanese to face up to WWII atrocities, be sufficient in explaining the sharp contrast between Japan and Germany in terms of historical memories?

It appears that no nation in the world would take the initiative to deal with its ugly past, Germany being no exception. Ian Buruma, a Dutch writer of culture and history, recollects in his book Wages of Guilt a scene that he witnessed when visiting the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland:

The tourists looked stricken as they silently shuffled from one outrage to the next a woman of about 60 went up to the guide and clutched her arm: "You must understand wir haben nichts gewusst (we knew nothing about it)".

What Buruma seeks to address is that confession is hard even for the Germans, who have largely been credited with their willingness to make reparations and commemorate the war dead under Hitler's rule. By denying her knowledge of the Nazi atrocities, the German woman was using the words that "too many Germans had used before". (2)

In studying war memories and responsibility in Japan and Germany, one must not overlook the geographical factor. As far as Japanese militarists are concerned, the war front stretched from mainland China to Southeast Asia. In other words, the nefariousness of Nanjing Massacre, the Death Railway and the Sook Ching in Singapore took place outside of Japan, at a time when the ordinary Japanese were being mobilized to fight, under the 'divine leadership' of Emperor Hirohito, against western imperialists in order to 'liberate' the Asian peoples.

Atomic bombs

Therefore, the two dates that continue to shape the Japanese psyche are none other than August 6 and 9, 1945, when the atomic bombs landed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively, engulfing the two cities in nuclear infernos. The atomic brutality gave rise to the unique Japanese perception of victimhood. That Japan is the only and unprecedented target of atomic bombing also clouds the Japanese people from the aggressor role of the militarists in the first half of the 20th century.

By contrast, Adolf Hitler, being a populist, single-handedly created the myth of the Herrenvolk (master race), and was never tired of inciting the ordinary Germans to root out the Jews in their neighbourhoods. Reckless and without inhibition, Hitler was bent on eliminating the Jews and the oft-forgotten Gypsies by sending them en masse to concentration camps and eventually gas chambers that he had instituted across Germany and Europe.

It is therefore most impossible for the Germans of the Nazi era to wash their hands of the atrocities committed by the state. With the evidence of the Holocaust abounding, as well as the close proximity of the concentration camps such as Auschwitz in Poland and Dachau in the outskirts of Munich, the Germans clearly cannot deny their role as victimizers. In fact, many of them do admit that their silence or acquiescence did make the termination of the innocent lives possible.

Such peculiar climate has also resulted in the difficulties of the Germans in coming to terms with their nation's Nazi past (Vergangenheitsbewaeltingung). The most extreme example can be found in Guenter Grass, the prominent novelist and a Nobel Prize laureate who continues to believe a unified Germany will only present Europe with new calamities. His latest novel Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk) expresses to the full his anxieties over the resurgence of neo-Nazi phenomenon across the eastern part of the country following a decade of economic stagnation and massive unemployment of the youths. In his view, Germany is like a crab that can never learn to walk straight, the relentless effort to that effect notwithstanding.

It is also a well acknowledged fact that the thorough de-Nazification process that was initiated by the occupying powers of the US, Britain, France and the former Soviet Union has done much to weed out the remnants of the Nazi regime from Germany's post-war political institutions.

McArthur's failure

However, a similar initiative to clean Japanese politics of the militarists was put to an abrupt end by the MacArthur administration when the domestic politics in Japan turned leftward between 1947 and 1948, paving the way for the rightwing elites, who had been active and closely involved in the militarist regime of the 1930s and the early 1940s, to make a quick and successful comeback under prime minister Shigeru Yoshida.

MacArthur's failure to prosecute Emperor Hirohito as a war criminal also threw a lifeline to the rightwing forces in post-war Japan. As a result, they were able to continue to revolve their beliefs around Hirohito as a spiritual leader. Herbert P Bix, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the author of Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, writes in a recent article that "the decision to preserve the monarchy and retain Hirohito served US interests of preserving stability... but it delayed the Japanese people's confrontation with their wartime past, contributed to the censoring and falsification of wartime history, and ultimately acted as a brake on democratisation".

Ichiyo Muto, a leading figure in international movement for peace, has repeatedly called for the abolition of the blueprint that was imposed on Japan by the Americans, which is guided by three principles that contradict one another: identification with the US global-Asian hegemonic design, constitutional pacifism, and the continuity from the imperial past (failure to deal with Hirohito's wartime role). For five decades, Muto has been adhering to the view that without addressing the first and the third principles, the principle of pacifism as promulgated by Japan will always remain an illusion.

In the wake of the Sept11 attacks, the Bush administration has been making conscious effort to test the public opinion in Japan with regard to Article 9, with a view to realising a constitutional amendment that could see the Japanese troops fighting alongside the Americans. Muto is clearly a far-sighted man in every sense of the word.

Mao's remark

As far as China is concerned, Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek were both happy to keep Hirohito on the throne for political calculations. When Japanese prime minister Kakuei Tanaka tried to apologise directly to Mao for WWII in 1972, Mao brushed him off, saying the 'help' provided by Japan's invasion of China made possible the Communist victory in 1949, and there was nothing that Japan should be apologetic about.

Some have tried to defend Mao by arguing that his words should be taken as an expression of sympathy for the Japanese, who had been traumatised to the extreme by the atomic bombs. Such argument is no doubt ludicrous and shaky, befitting no one but riffraff. Given that the Japanese have been unable to develop their historical consciousness beyond Hiroshima, one must help them by putting the war issue in perspectives, instead of giving dubious messages and seeking to absolve the Japanese nation of its responsibility as Mao shamelessly did.

Finally, one must not overlook the significance of the so-called '68ers' - the generation born at the end of the war and politicised by the student rebellion of the late 1960s. They protested against the Vietnam War and the invasion of the Soviet troops in Prague, deriving from their action a deeper reflection upon their nation's recent past.

Finding themselves insatiable for knowledge about WWII, the 68ers began to plague their parents' generation with questions such as 'where were you when the innocent lives were being sent to Auschwitz?' and 'were you a member of the Hitler Youth?', forcing many intellectuals who had lived through the Nazi regime to break their silence and confront the issue more thoroughly.

In sharp contrast, the massive student movement against the US-Japan Security Treaty in 1960 failed to grow out of the 'victim complex' engendered by Hiroshima, inhibiting the ability of the students to look deep into Japan's military past and its atrocities against the neighbouring countries. All this had perhaps predestined the bleak end to Japan's leftwing student movement.

By and large, the thoroughness of the Germans in dealing with the Nazi history is commendable, and it certainly took tremendous courage for Willy Brandt, the Chancellor from the Social Democratic Party, to kneel down at the monument of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and apologise unequivocally for Nazi atrocities.

Still, in analysing the attitudinal differences between Germany and Japan towards WWII, one must take into account the historical backgrounds and social conditions of the time in order to secure a rational outcome.

After all, if the Orientalist approach as exemplified by Benedict's work is questionable, it is questionable. And it does not suddenly become 'incisive' and 'ingenious' simply because the subject happens to be one's 'enemy'.

1. Robert A Wilson and Bill Hosokawa, East to America: A History of the Japanese in the United States, New York: William Morrow & Co., 1987, p. 197.

2. Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt: Memories of War In Germany and Japan, London: Vintage 1994, p. 76.