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http://www.jcp.or.jp/akahata/aik4/2005-08-16/2005081607_02_3.html
「日本で右翼的動きが増大」
隣国から孤立の恐れ
英字紙が警告
日本敗戦六十年に当たり、パリ編集の国際英字紙インターナショナル・ヘラルド・トリビューン十五日付は、第二次大戦での日本の残酷さを塗り消し平和憲法を書き換えようとする右翼的動きが増大していると指摘し、このままでは日本は他のアジア諸国から孤立してしまうと警告しました。
東京発の記事は「責任になお苦しむ日本」の見出しで、「日本の兵士の勇気を激賞する映画、小説、コミックがあふれ、日本の戦争での残酷さを打ち消して西欧の植民地支配を終わらせた戦争とする学校教科書が使われている」と「戦争を誇りにする動きが増大している」と指摘。「日本を残酷な侵略者と見る（日本以外の）東アジア諸国との認識の差がますます拡大している」と強調しています。
また、東京裁判については「勝利者の復しゅう」と見られ、「日本の指導者はドイツのように自国の戦争責任についてのコンセンサスづくりに指導的役割をはたさなかった」と批判しています。
同記事は「日本の真の誤り」は、「日本の戦争の役割を論議するときに、（日本による）戦争犠牲者の声を拒否してきたことだ」と指摘。「日本の戦争観は日本を隣国から孤立させる恐れがある」「（日本の戦争）犠牲者の意見を真剣に取り入れることだけがアジア諸国の日本の信頼を取り戻すことができる」と結論づけています。
また同紙はシンガポール発の記事で、米国の日本政策研究所のチャルマス・ジョンソン氏の「日本は極端な民族主義へ進もうとしている」「武力行使を禁じた戦後憲法を書き直し、戦時中の軍国主義への謝罪を撤回しようとしている」との発言を引用しています。
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/14/news/VJ-Japan.php
60 years after its defeat, Japan still struggles with responsibility
By Martin Fackler International Herald Tribune
MONDAY, AUGUST 15, 2005
TOKYO On Aug. 15, 1945, the day Japan stopped fighting in World War II,
Tokyo looked like the blasted surface of the moon. Photos show a city
reduced by massive U.S. airstrikes into charred expanses of rubble and
concrete ruins. Arriving Allied troops were stunned by the extent of the
devastation.
Today, towering skyscrapers and gleaming neon signs stand where
firebombs once fell. The scorched earth has sprouted bustling business
districts. Tokyo has been reborn into a vibrant metropolitan area of 33
million inhabitants, and the nerve center of the world's second-largest
economy.
Japan overcame the war's physical devastation with spectacular success.
But 60 years after its defeat, the Japanese are still struggling with
another, less tangible legacy: their own responsibility for the conflict,
which historians say killed three million in Japan and at least six
times that number elsewhere in Asia.
To outsiders, the question of Japanese war responsibility might appear
simple. After all, it was Japan that invaded China, erected a puppet
state in Manchuria in 1932, plundered Nanjing five years later, and
sprung its bombers and torpedo planes on a sleeping Pearl Harbor on Dec.
7, 1941.
In Japan, however, the issue has never been a simple one. For decades, a
bitter fight raged between leftists, who viewed the war as an evil
enterprise, and rightists, who saw it as a noble if mismanaged cause.
Emotions ran so high that most Japanese avoided talking about the war at
all, focusing instead on building their country's postwar economic
miracle.
In recent years, public opinion seems to be creeping toward the right.
While most Japanese still seem to see World War II - known here as the
Pacific War - as a colossal mistake, there is also a growing movement to
find reasons to be proud of the war. A slew of movies, novels and comics
have appeared extolling the bravery of Japanese soldiers and sailors.
Some junior high schools now use textbooks that brush over Japanese
atrocities, but credit the war with ending Western colonial domination
in Asia.
This reassessment of the war runs parallel to a broader effort by Japan
to shed its postwar pacifism in world affairs. Old war-rooted phobias
against strengthening the military started to vanish after North Korea
fired a missile over Japan in 1998 and then admitted a few years later
that it had abducted Japanese citizens. The public now appears willing
to support moves to raise Japan's international profile, such as the
decision by the prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, to dispatch units of
the country's Self-Defense Forces to occupied Iraq - the first Japanese
troops to enter a conflict zone since World War II.
Some experts say it is natural for Japan to re-examine the war because a
more self-assertive nation needs a stronger sense of patriotism. Critics,
however, say conservatives in the government are pushing a revisionist
agenda to whittle away at public support for Japan's American-written
postwar Constitution, which bars Japan from having a full-fledged
military.
"The conservatives are trying to wipe out antiwar sentiment so Japan can
have a stronger military," said John Dower, a historian who wrote the
Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Embracing Defeat," published by W. W.
Norton and Company, about the war and its aftermath in Japan. "There is
a culture war, and the right wing is winning."
The more positive views of the war are also worsening an already yawning
perception gap with much of the rest of eastern Asia, where wartime
Japan is still commonly seen as a cruel invader. In April, these
resentments exploded into violence in several Chinese cities, where
stone-hurling protesters surrounded Japanese businesses and diplomatic
missions in outrage over visits by Koizumi to the Yasukuni shrine, a
Shinto religious site honoring Japan's war dead, including those hanged
for war crimes.
Japan's changing view of the war is on display at the newly opened
Yamato Museum, which sits among the busy dry docks and cranes in Kure, a
former navy base turned commercial shipyard near Hiroshima. Inside,
exhibits describe how Japan built a modern navy to fend off greedy
Western powers, while omitting mention of Japan's own colonies in Asia.
The museum's centerpiece is a 26.3-meter-long, or 86-foot-long, replica
of the Yamato, the largest battleship ever built and the flagship of the
Japanese fleet until it was sunk by U.S. warplanes in 1945.
The curator, Kazushige Todaka, said such a museum would not have been
possible just a decade ago because of antiwar feelings. But as the
generations who experienced the war pass away, younger Japanese want a
different view.
"Schools have told us that we're bad, that our fathers and grandfathers
were bad. We want to show a different side," Todaka said. "Japan wasn't
all bad."
These ideas are striking a chord: museum attendance is far above
expectations. Since it opened in April, it has had 430,000 visitors,
more than Todaka's projections for the entire first year.
Keisuke Nakagawa, 27, an office worker from the nearby city of Mihara,
leaned on a museum railing to inspect the mini-Yamato's gun turrets.
"People my age think there are some things to regret, but also some
things to be proud of," he said, talking about the war. "Some older
women in my city lost relatives on Yamato, so they refuse to come."
One source of Japan's difficulties in dealing with the war has been a
failure to reach a national consensus on the extent of the country's
responsibility. The only formal attempt to pursue Japanese war guilt,
the Allied-run 1946-48 Tokyo war crimes trials, is viewed here
skeptically as a case of victors' vengeance. Japanese leaders have also
failed to take a leading role in creating a national sense of remorse,
as German leaders did to help guide their country's public opinion.
Many Japanese bristle at comparisons of their country with Germany. They
say Japan did nothing as criminal as the Holocaust. Experts caution that
this thinking can lead easily to denials of Japan's own atrocities like
the Rape of Nanjing in 1937.
At the same time, historians say it is inaccurate to cast Japan as a
nation of unrepentant revisionists. It was Japanese scholars who
originally exposed many of their country's most heinous deeds.
But for most Japanese, though, the war remains long been a semi-taboo
topic.
Even textbooks written by leftist educators tended to gloss over it in a
few pages. The silence helped feed a widespread perception here that the
war was a calamity beyond Japan's control, like a natural disaster.
One result has been that many Japanese, even leftists, have come to see
themselves not as the war's perpetrators, but its victims. Visitors to
the atomic bombing museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki get a gruesomely
detailed recounting of the horrors of nuclear war, but hear nothing
about the involvement of those cities' residents in Japan's war machine.
The diverging views of the war in Japan and the rest of Asia threaten to
isolate Japan from its neighbors. Experts say that a lot of the
anti-Japanese rhetoric in China is the work of the Communist government,
which has been seen as using it for political gain. But much of the
outrage is genuine, reflecting a deep-seated distrust of Japan, experts
say.
This anger tends to take the form of endless demands for apologies from
Japan. Japanese leaders have apologized, though often with only lukewarm
sincerity. But experts say Japan's real failure is not an inability to
apologize. Rather, it is Japan's refusal to include outside voices,
particularly those of its former victims, as it discusses its own role
in the war. Experts say that taking the victims' perspectives seriously
is the only way Japan can convince the rest of Asia to trust it again.
"The debate has to be extended to all Asia," said Wang Zhixin, a Chinese
national who has researched Japanese textbooks as an education professor
at Miyazaki Municipal University in Japan. "It can't take place only
within Japan."
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