Tessa Morris-Suzuki: Who Was Responsible ... From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor
[Tessa Morris-Suzuki is Professor of Japanese History, Convenor of the Division of Pacific and Asian History in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, and a Japan Focus associate. Her book Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan's Cold War has just been published at Rowman & Littlefield ]
When, in mid-2005, Japan’s Yomiuri newspaper began to publish a series of articles on the question of “war responsibility”, the event attracted nationwide and even international interest. Now the newspaper series has become a book, published in a two-volume version in Japanese and in a one-volume abridged English translation entitled Who Was Responsible? From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbour. There can be no doubt that these publications mark an important moment in the long and vexed history of East Asia’s “history wars” – the ongoing conflicts between Japan and its neighbors (particularly China and both Koreas) about memory of and responsibility for Japan’s 20th century military expansion in Asia.
To assess the significance and impact of the Yomiuri project, though, it is important to see it in the context of history-writing in Japan and of contemporary Northeast Asian international relations. Before beginning to assess the content of the English-language volume, therefore, it is worth emphasizing what is not new about this work: There is nothing novel or unusual in Japanese historians or journalists publicly debating the problem of war responsibility. They have been doing so, with much passion and soul-searching, for more than sixty years.
During a recent visit to Tokyo, a Japanese colleague showed me the cover of a journal he had unearthed from the early 1950s, published by a group affiliated to the Japanese Communist Party. The cover featured a striking cartoon of Emperor Hirohito standing atop a mountain of skulls. Such graphic imagery is certainly highly risqué in the Japanese political context, where a miasma of taboo still surrounds critical comment on the person of the Emperor, and it is almost impossible to imagine any major journal agreeing to publish such an image. But its presence on the cover of this long-forgotten small-circulation magazine provides a stark reminder of the fact that questions of war responsibility, including those of the responsibility of Emperor Hirohito himself, have been ongoing topics of heated discussion in Japan. Indeed for historians of twentieth century Japan, a key task has been the search for an understanding of the processes that led to the “Manchurian Incident”, the war in China, Pearl Harbour, Hiroshima and Japan’s disastrous defeat in war.
One of the most influential early attempts to address this conundrum was the best-selling paperback Showashi [“A History of Showa” – Showa being the reign of the Emperor Hirohito], which was published in 1955, sold more than 100,000 copies in the six weeks following its publication, and generated a prolonged public controversy now remembered in Japan as the “Showashi Debate”. Written by the eminent Marxian historians Toyama Shigeki, Imai Seiichi and Fujiwara Akira, Showashi’s approach was very different from that of the current Yomiuri volume. It sought, not so much to judge personal war guilt, as to define the underlying social and economic forces that led to war. [1]
[This article goes on at length. Click on the SOURCE link to continue reading.]
Read entire article at Japan Focus
When, in mid-2005, Japan’s Yomiuri newspaper began to publish a series of articles on the question of “war responsibility”, the event attracted nationwide and even international interest. Now the newspaper series has become a book, published in a two-volume version in Japanese and in a one-volume abridged English translation entitled Who Was Responsible? From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbour. There can be no doubt that these publications mark an important moment in the long and vexed history of East Asia’s “history wars” – the ongoing conflicts between Japan and its neighbors (particularly China and both Koreas) about memory of and responsibility for Japan’s 20th century military expansion in Asia.
To assess the significance and impact of the Yomiuri project, though, it is important to see it in the context of history-writing in Japan and of contemporary Northeast Asian international relations. Before beginning to assess the content of the English-language volume, therefore, it is worth emphasizing what is not new about this work: There is nothing novel or unusual in Japanese historians or journalists publicly debating the problem of war responsibility. They have been doing so, with much passion and soul-searching, for more than sixty years.
During a recent visit to Tokyo, a Japanese colleague showed me the cover of a journal he had unearthed from the early 1950s, published by a group affiliated to the Japanese Communist Party. The cover featured a striking cartoon of Emperor Hirohito standing atop a mountain of skulls. Such graphic imagery is certainly highly risqué in the Japanese political context, where a miasma of taboo still surrounds critical comment on the person of the Emperor, and it is almost impossible to imagine any major journal agreeing to publish such an image. But its presence on the cover of this long-forgotten small-circulation magazine provides a stark reminder of the fact that questions of war responsibility, including those of the responsibility of Emperor Hirohito himself, have been ongoing topics of heated discussion in Japan. Indeed for historians of twentieth century Japan, a key task has been the search for an understanding of the processes that led to the “Manchurian Incident”, the war in China, Pearl Harbour, Hiroshima and Japan’s disastrous defeat in war.
One of the most influential early attempts to address this conundrum was the best-selling paperback Showashi [“A History of Showa” – Showa being the reign of the Emperor Hirohito], which was published in 1955, sold more than 100,000 copies in the six weeks following its publication, and generated a prolonged public controversy now remembered in Japan as the “Showashi Debate”. Written by the eminent Marxian historians Toyama Shigeki, Imai Seiichi and Fujiwara Akira, Showashi’s approach was very different from that of the current Yomiuri volume. It sought, not so much to judge personal war guilt, as to define the underlying social and economic forces that led to war. [1]
[This article goes on at length. Click on the SOURCE link to continue reading.]