PERCEPTIONS OF HISTORY

Originally two articles were due to be included in this section on reappraising Japan’s historical ties with its closest neighbors. Unfortunately we were unable to get permission from O Sonfa, author of “Nani ga katarare, nani ga katarare nai ka, seikatsusha kara mita ‘Nittei shihai’” (What Has and Has Not Been Told: “Japanese Imperial Rule” as Seen by Those Who Lived Under It), which appeared in the April 2001 issue of Seiron. Thus only Mo Bangfu’s piece is included. Nevertheless, I would like to give my reasons here for having wanted to carry the two articles.

Mo looks back in his essay on the activities of the Ôhira School, set up with the aim of promoting the study of the Japanese language in China, and demonstrates that Japan’s official development assistance to China, although currently undergoing a revaluation, has played a useful role in enhancing mutual understanding between Japan and China. O Sonfa’s piece argues that there is a tendency to simplify the 36 years of Japanese colonial rule to a period when “the Japanese did terrible things to the Koreans.” But unless we examine how Koreans and Japanese actually lived in Korea under Japanese rule, we will not understand why a pro-Japanese tendency is strongest among those who experienced colonial life, and an anti-Japanese tendency is strongest among those without this experience. O believes that a dispassionate look at actual conditions is crucial to a true friendship between Japan and Korea.

Textbooks describing Japan’s prewar and wartime actions have reemerged as a major political issue in Japan-South Korea relations. At the same time, Japan-China relations have grown cooler since the November 1998 visit to Japan by President Jiang Zemin, when he persistently called attention to the issue of Japan’s wartime responsibility. Temperatures chilled further following the May 2000 Japan-China Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, when Japan suggested that ODA to China might be reconsidered. It seems fairly certain that relations will deteriorate further as a result of the recent controversy over the screening of middle school history textbooks and the invocation of safeguards against imports from China. The issuance of a visa enabling former Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui to undergo medical treatment in Japan in April 2001 further strained ties with Beijing.

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Thus the “textbook problem,” or in more general terms the problem of historical perception, is an issue that looms large in relations with both South Korea and China. History has always been prone to divergent interpretations. It is not the case that all Japanese were domineering during the period of Japanese rule in Korea. Nor is it the case that Koreans were always oppressed and exploited by the Japanese. In that period, as in all periods, apart from the officially recognized relationship between the two nations, there were ordinary Japanese and Koreans who each developed their own particular set of personal relationships with one another. It is not thinkable, moreover, that Japan’s ODA to China has been a complete waste and unappreciated by that country; not a few projects and programs funded by Japan’s ODA have made major contributions to mutual understanding, and they have changed not a few people’s lives. It was from the simple conviction that official histories always contain “lies” and that what actually transpired at the personal level was much richer and more complex that an attempt was made here to bring back a sense of equilibrium, no matter how slight, to the consideration of Japan’s relations with Korea and China. This was the immediate reason for wanting to include the two articles in this section.

This leads us to a larger question of the textbook controversy. Since this is a topic that should be addressed more fully in a future issue, let me here briefly relate my own thinking in this regard, referring to some notable treatments of this issue that have been published recently.

As I mentioned above, the “textbook problem” is a thorn in Japan’s relations with Seoul and Beijing, but it should not be forgotten that it is also a major domestic issue for Japan. Why?

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Fujiwara Kiichi writes as follows in his excellent Sensô o kioku suru, Hiroshima, Horokôsuto to genzai (Remembering the War: Hiroshima, the Holocaust, and the Present) (Tokyo: Kôdansha, 2001): “Everything begins with the suffering caused by war. Whether one has been on the battlefield oneself, has lost one’s family through war, has experienced occupation, has been exposed to slaughter, or has had one’s home made into a battlefield through bombing, at the heart of one’s memory of the war are unbearable violence and suffering. . . . However biased they may be, underlying people’s memories of war are their intensely felt individual experiences, and this cannot be taken away from them.

“But the tales of such individual experiences get told as part of a bigger tale of national experiences. Many of them are memories of past sufferings, but they also include accounts of heroes or the sufferings of heroes. On the other hand, memories of betrayal by a senior officer, memories of being abandoned on the battlefield by a comrade in arms, distrust and hate of the politicians who started the war—such memories and thoughts hinder the formation of an official account.

“In the process of transforming private experiences into a shared ‘public experience,’ certain social stereotypes and ideologies are built in. Inasmuch as they include value judgments concerning war, they constitute systematic views of war. They are expressions of national unity joining together the individual and the state through the medium of wartime experiences. Sometimes they may even incorporate a bias towards foreign elements. However biased they may be, though, because these value judgments have a strong bearing on the meaning of life for those people, they are not open to debate. This is how the ‘war of memories’ is born.”

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Such a war is being fought right now both within Japan and with its Asian neighbors. It is a battle between history as told by the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, for instance, and history that demands redemption for wartime aggressions as a matter of national responsibility. To ensure that there is no misunderstanding, let me say here that I do not believe that there is, or can be, a “correct” memory of a war. Nor do I believe that, in this age of globalization and regionalization, it is still the task of history to help fashion a national image. Be that as it may, there is no denying that conservatives and progressives have clashed over the question of Japan’s national image as seen through the eyes of history, and at present the fighting continues in the debate over whether to focus on the history of the nation or the history of individual people.

So what should one do? Kariya Takehiko offers very useful comments on this theme in his article “‘Rekishi kyôkasho’ ronsô o shibaru kokka gensô” (The State Delusion Constraining the History Textbook Controversy) (Chûô Kôron, May 2001). My reading of his ideas is as follows:

There is currently a big confrontation in Japan between history as the story of a nation and that as a means of redeeming its past conduct. Both, though, consider history’s task to be the search for a national image. Because the current textbook authorization system lends public authority to the task of creating a national history, the textbook screening process has escalated into a political issue in relations with South Korea and China. Thus what is needed in the textbook authorization system is not a guarantee of fairness but a significant easing—or even abolition—of the system itself and the introduction in its place of minimal checks by third-party institutions. If Japan’s future in the twenty-first century depends on the country being a viable member of Asia and the international community, then surely what is called for now is an attempt to share historical perspectives with its neighbors and jointly create regional textbooks that go beyond the framework of the nation-state. Judging from the fact that history is a controversial topic domestically as well, the parallel use of textbooks should be recommended. It would be instructive, for example, to teach why the edition published by the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform is different from those of other textbook publishers, what kind of act it is to recount history, and what fictions there are in history. Such instruction would get students to think about the nature of history.

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Pramoedya Ananta Toer is an Indonesian writer of immense stature. During the Suharto era he was exiled for over 10 years as a communist sympathizer, and all of his works were banned. The Asahi Shimbun (March 15, 2001; evening edition) reports an interview with Pramoedya on the subject of the period of Japan’s occupation of Indonesia. Nagaoka Noboru, the Asahi correspondent in Jakarta, asked him whether the Japanese army was a liberator or an aggressor. His response is described as follows: “He merely sighed. No doubt he meant to say that to try to define that war in such simplistic terms was an act of foolishness.”

I could not agree with him more. (Shiraishi Takashi, Professor, Kyoto University)

© 2001 Japan Echo Inc.