The Asianist

I don't know what the problem is with some of these conservative Japanese politicians. I agree with their foreign policy and strong alliance with the US. I agree with their economic policy (postal savings privatization). But for reasons I cannot fathom, they continue to insist on honoring war criminals, with the predictable result that surrounding Asian nations, particularly China and Korea, use it as an excuse for political and economic conflict and xenophobic nationalism.

OneFreeKorea echos my thoughts almost exactly:

I'm not suggesting that men who died for their country in wars not of their own choosing don't deserve to be remembered. I'm saying that the war criminals should be moved to another place, and the museum--if it needs to be there at all--needs to tell a more balanced story than its current theme than its present theme that Japan was an innocent victim.

Imperial Japan was anything but a victim. My reading of the British historian Paul Johnson's Modern Times showed some remarkable parallels between psychology of the Japanese leadership in the 1930s and of North Korea today. In both situations, the leaders competed with each other to be more radical, more bellicose, more irrational, and more ruthless . . . in part because being perceived as rational had proven to be so dangerous.

As I have repeated tirelessly, Japan ought to be the leading nation in East Asia, but its politico-military role will always be subject to questions about past imperialism unless Japan's society faces some unpleasant truths about its history.

Unlike Germany that went through a deep national soul-searching in 1970's and 1980's about Nazism, Japan never went through a similar process. So no matter how much Japan's leaders apologize about its aggression and abuses before and during World War II, the people of surrounding nations will always remain wary of any assertiveness from Japan, simply because they believe -- likely correctly -- that most Japanese still see themselves as victims of World War II rather than perpetrators of some of the most heinous acts during the war.

Rather than continual expressions of "regret" for past misdeeds from Japanese politicians, what must happen for Japan to be able to "move on" regarding this issue is a nation-wide movement to re-examine its wartime history. That also means no more revisionist text books that portray Japanese imperialism as a benign movement to rid fellow Asians from European domination.