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Now a new bill that would enable Japanese military personnel to take part in U.N. peacekeeping missions is likely to pass. And despite gulf-war frictions, formal U.S.-Japanese relations are in excellent shape. Few trade disputes remain, and an emotion-fraught effort to open Japan to rice imports may be settled by the current round of worldwide trade talks. Foreigners still do not find it easy or cheap to do business in Japan, but the markets are mostly open. Japan's trade surplus? Despite a recent bulge, it has been in decline for three years.
But for many nations, what remains troubling about Japan is a sense that its economic engines are escaping history at full steam. They fear that the lessons of Pearl Harbor and the other traumas that attended Japanese militarism have never been squarely faced, let alone digested.
All nations embroider their history to some extent. In Hungary schoolchildren are taught that Attila the Hun, hardly history's most sympathetic character, introduced uplifting elements of Roman culture to his court. Britain turned the painful retreat from Dunkirk into a triumph of the spirit. Americans remember the Alamo as a heroic episode, though the war for Texas was a land grab by gringo interlopers. In recent decades Japanese officials, abetted by political and business conservatives, have subtly but systematically diluted the facts about Japanese aggression in Asia from 1931 to 1945. The tampering is reflected in school textbooks and popular literature, films and television, and has rendered some of the war's tragedies almost benign.
Japan's ruthless invasion of China is termed an "advance." The 1937 rape of Nanking, in which imperial troops massacred thousands of Chinese civilians, is deemed problematic because of "muddled factual data." Other harsh episodes like the Bataan death march are wholly ignored, perhaps in hopes that dodging the unpleasant will somehow make it disappear.
But the bitter memories will not go away, and Japan is too pivotal and wealthy a global power to be allowed -- or to allow itself -- the luxury of historical amnesia. Increasingly, Asian neighbors demand that it deal more forthrightly with its past, especially if it hopes to play a leading regional role. Many Japanese scholars, exasperated by Tokyo's studied forgetfulness, are joining foreign critics in insisting on the same thing. "Without a deep understanding of the many facets of the war," says Makoto Ooka, a prominent poet, "the Japanese people cannot regain their sense of dignity in the world."
Almost imperceptibly, that view is gaining acceptance beyond a limited circle of intellectuals. The need to air the topic, if only for the benefit of audiences in Asia and the West, has nudged discussion along. The recently replaced Prime Minister, Toshiki Kaifu, did his part. On trips abroad, he was direct in addressing Japan's wartime transgressions. In the Netherlands he expressed "sincere contrition" for the "unbearable sufferings and sorrow" the Japanese army inflicted on Dutch nationals in what is now Indonesia. In September the new Emperor, Akihito, carried similar messages to Southeast Asia.