In the United States, most schools teach their students about the catastrophic effects caused by the two atomic bombs that their country dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, there is some misinformation about the massacre that Japan unleashed on the Chinese city of Nanjing. Most do not know what happened in that city during the bloody battle that took place in 1937.
Japanese politicians have been insisting ever since that what happened in Nanjing was a hoax and an inventionEvents that never really happened. And one of the reasons this has happened is because of how Japan dealt with its post-war crimes. The Japanese government, unlike the German government (which is often used as a paradigmatic example), has never assumed itself, nor Japanese society, as being responsible for the crimes that occurred both in the city of Nanjing and throughout the devastated territory. . As a result, Japan continues to treat war crimes like if they had been isolated actions of soldiers or even events that never happened (Chang, 2016: 266).
In 1990, Ishihara Shintaro, one of the leaders of Japan’s conservative Liberal Democratic Party, told a Playboy magazine interviewer: “People say the Japanese made a holocaust there, but that’s not true. It is a story fabricated by the chinese. He has tarnished the image of Japan, but it is a lie” (Chang, 2016: 267).
The entire Japanese educational system suffers from selective amnesia. Until 1994, Japanese students were educationally unaware that Hirohito’s army was responsible for the death approximately twenty million allied soldiers and asian civilians during world war II. This is because all textbooks used in Japanese schools must pass through the filters of the country’s Ministry of Education. Although this is common, in this case the authorities carried out a historical review that practically manipulated history (Chang, 2016: 272-273).
For example, in 1977 the Ministry reduced a section on World War II in a history book from several hundred pages to just six, consisting mainly of photographs of the American firebombing of Tokyo, of the ruins of Hiroshima, and a statistical of Japanese war casualties. The text did not mention the casualties of the opposing side, the Japanese war atrocities, or the forced evacuations of Chinese and Korean prisoners to labor camps in Japan (Chang, 2016: 272-273).
Ienaga Saburo, a Japanese historian, wrote a widely used textbook in 1952. After four years the Ministry of Education decided that the text was too “biased”, too negative regarding the Japanese war in Asia. He was asked several times to rewrite the original, and in 1964 Ienaga sued the government for unconstitutional conduct. In the 1980s, he was asked to remove passages about the Nanjing massacre, rapes by Japanese soldiers, and Japan’s medical experiments in Manchuria. Ienaga argued that the censorship of textbooks went against the post-war Constitution, which guaranteed freedom of expression (Buruma, 2010: 222-223).
In 1970, justice agreed with Ienaga. The Tokyo District Court magistrate ruled that the ministry’s review of textbooks should not go beyond correcting gross errors and misprints. The censorship of substantial aspects of the content was unconstitutional, and this was established in the case of Ienaga. But in 1974 another judge recognized that the review process had been “excessive”, but not unconstitutional (Buruma, 2010: 231-232).
The spread of the textbook controversy accomplished two things. First, the dismissal of Japan’s education minister, who had defended the ministry’s policy of sugarcoating the history of World War II. Second, a greater awareness within the ministry that the Nanjing massacre was something they could no longer ignore (Chang, 2016: 276).
But in order to clearly understand the conflict that broke out on the Asian continent between China and Japan, and what happened later during the trials that took place in Tokyo after World War II, we have to go back to the second half of the 19th century. , when Japan came out of the autarky in which it was plunged, with the Meiji Restoration, to become a power comparable to those of the West.
Background: Japan of the Meiji Era (1868-1912)
The Meiji era (1868-1912) is the stage of Japanese history that begins after the resignation of the shōgun Tokugawa Yoshinobu and ends with the death of Emperor Mutsuhito on July 30, 1912. It will be a moment marked by the Japanese opening to the outside world after from a long period of isolation. In that time frame, Japan will go from being an eminently feudal society to a modern, industrialized nation greatly influenced by the West. The model of society that will be taken as an example will be that of the liberal Prussia of William II.
The events of January 1868 brought about the sudden demise of the Tokugawa shogunate and they created a new center of authority under the symbol of the emperor (Hall, 1973: 243).
Of all the peoples of Asia, the Japanese were among those who most admired Western civilization. The Oath Letterthe first of the reforms of the new system of the Meiji Restoration, had placed westernization, along with the creation of a powerful state, as the two main objectives of the new regime (Hall, 1973: 263).
One of the first reforms that Japanese society underwent was the abolition of the four class system in 1869. Courtiers and daimyo they were made nobles, the samurai were classified as gentry or soldiers, and all other classes formed a conglomerate of common citizens (Hall 1973: 259).
The Meiji elite adopted many of the styles and tastes of the Victorian West. In domestic architecture, this is particularly seen in the interiors of “Western-style” pavilions and reception rooms. This style, however, cannot be interpreted in any simple sense as Western. Most of these houses were built by Japanese carpenters and reveal the construction techniques that the native craftsmen were used to. The rooms were often decorated with furniture of domestic and foreign manufacture. Japanese, Chinese, and other Asian antiques were placed in them, arranged and designed according to contemporary Japanese conceptions of Western taste.
The integration of Western cultural forms with a supposedly intact native Japanese spirit was characteristic of Meiji society, especially at the higher levels, and represented Japan’s quest for a place within a new world power system dominated by empires. European colonials (Sand, 2000: 637).
The new world that was offered to the Japanese, especially the young, was one of support for the entrepreneurship of new industries. The government encouraged industrial development, since it had not escaped the fact that the most powerful nations were also the richest, and that they had become rich through industry (Bolitho, 1991: 30). But more important than industrial development was the promptness with which the government provided industry with the means it needed to prosper: railroads, a postal system, a telegraph network, and a telephone system, as well as roads, bridges, and port facilities. (Bolitho, 1991: 33).
The first railway opened between Tokyo and Yokohama in 1872, developing rapidly throughout Japan well into the 20th century. The introduction of rail transport led to more efficient production due to lower transportation costs, thus allowing manufacturing companies to move to more populated inland regions. The railway also allowed new access to raw materials that had previously been too difficult or expensive to transport (Tang, 2014: sp).
In the 1880s, Japan grew accustomed to foreigners. Even Japanese schoolchildren did not find it strange to be taught by teachers from the United States and Britain. Contact with foreign ideas became an everyday occurrence, helping the printing industry develop from the first Japanese newspaper published in 1872 to more than 600 newspapers and magazines by the 1890s (Bolitho, 1991: 35 -37).
The small rural towns remained unchanged for a long time, but in the streets of the big cities, the old Japan disappeared in the twenty years of the Restoration. Imposing western buildings appeared, designed by foreign architects. Horses and carriages could be seen, and further on, the horse-drawn tram (Bolitho, 1991: 39).
The people had also changed. The food was much more varied than it had ever been. The monotonous diet of Tokugawa Japan, based on rice, pickled radishes, soybean derivatives, and green tea, was now supplemented by other foods, such as apples, grapes, strawberries, cauliflower, asparagus, meat, etc. (Bolitho, 1991: 39). The Emperor himself set the tone for other changes when he appeared in 1873 dressed in trousers and a blazer, instead of heavy breeches, and his hair cut and parted in the Western style, not tied back in a bun (Bolitho, 1991: 41).
Assimilation to European nations and the figure of the emperor
It is often claimed that the behavior of the Japanese during World War II was caused by their being a cruel and fanaticized people, due to their submission to a military code that encouraged torture. Also, as a result of being conditioned by the adoration of the figure of the emperor. However, these claims are shaken if one takes into account that the actions of the Japanese in other battles prior to this war clearly disprove it (Rees, 2009: 17).
For example, during World War I, the Japanese took 4,600 men from the German colony of Tsintao as prisoners of war. These prisoners were treated with a fairly lax prison regime. As stated by Hans Kettle, the grandson of one of the prisoners, “in the camp they had a lot of free time. They cooked their own sausages, they had a gym club, and they put on a lot of musicals.” Photographs of prisoners of war in the Bando camp affirm this good attitude towards the Germans. In 1905, during the Russo-Japanese War, Mackenzie, a special correspondent for The Daily Mail, wrote that there were no words to extol the care and attention of the Japanese people towards wounded enemies (Rees, 2009: 18).
This attitude can be explained by the…