Barely half a year into his premiership, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is provoking anger across Asia and mixed feelings in his country's key ally, the US. But will the administration of US President George W. Bush use its influence to nudge Abe away from his inflammatory behavior?
Before Abe, former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi was a mold-breaking leader, reviving Japan's economy, reforming the postal savings system and smashing the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party's faction system. But Koizumi also legitimized a new Japanese nationalism, antagonizing China and South Korea by his annual visits to the Yasukuni shrine. If anything, Abe is even more committed to building an assertive and unapologetic Japan.
Anyone who believes that the Yasukuni controversy is an obscure historical matter that Chinese and Koreans use to badger Japan for political advantage has probably never spent much time there. The problem is not the 12 Class-A war criminals interred at the shrine; the real problem is the Yushukan Military Museum next door.
Walking past the Mitsubishi Zero, tanks, and machine guns on display in the museum, one finds a history of the Pacific War that restores "the Truth of Modern Japanese History."
It follows the nationalist narrative: Japan, a victim of the European colonial powers, sought only to protect the rest of Asia from them. Japan's colonial occupation of Korea, for example, is described as a "partnership." One looks in vain for any account of the victims of Japanese militarism in Nanjing or Manila.
One might be able to defend the museum as one viewpoint among many in a pluralist democracy. But there is no other museum in Japan that gives an alternative view of Japan's twentieth-century history. Successive Japanese governments have hidden behind the Yushukan museum's operation by a private religious organization to deny responsibility for the views expressed there.
That is an unconvincing stance. In fact, unlike Germany, Japan has never come to terms with its own responsibility for the Pacific War. Although socialist prime minister Tomiichi Murayama officially apologized to China in 1995 for the war, Japan has never had a genuine internal debate over its degree of responsibility, and has never made a determined effort to propagate an alternative account to that of Yushukan.
My exposure to the Japanese right came in the early 1990s, when I was on a couple of panels in Japan with Watanabe Soichi, who was selected by my Japanese publisher -- unbeknownst to me -- to translate my book The End of History and the Last Man into Japanese. Watanabe, a professor at Sophia University, was a collaborator of Shintaro Ishihara, the nationalist politician who wrote The Japan that Can Say No and is now the governor of Tokyo.
In the course of a couple of encounters, I heard him explain in front of large public audiences how the people of Manchuria had tears in their eyes when the occupying Kwantung Army left China, so grateful were they to Japan. According to Watanabe, the Pacific War boiled down to race, as the US was determined to keep a non-white people down. Watanabe is thus the equivalent of a Holocaust denier. But unlike his German counterparts, he easily draws large and sympathetic audiences. I am regularly sent books by Japanese writers "explaining" that the Nanjing Massacre was a big fraud.
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