Memories of World War II are far more fraught in Northeast Asia than in Southeast Asia. Japan's wartime record continues to be a serious complication to its relations with China and South Korea. It barely figures in Tokyo's relations with the 10 member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Yet the Imperial Japanese Army behaved with great brutality throughout Asia. What accounts for the difference?
The experience of occupation was not the same for all the countries of Southeast Asia. Thailand was Japan's wartime ally. Japan's army played an important role in nurturing Burmese and Indonesian nationalism. But even in Singapore, where tens of thousands -- the exact number will never be known -- of innocent civilians were killed by the army during the Sook Ching "cleansing" massacres, there is no abiding animosity toward Japan.
The Japanese occupation is part of Singapore's history; a valuable reminder that if we are unable or unwilling to defend ourselves, nobody else can be relied upon to do so. The British, preoccupied with the threat from Nazi Germany, denied Singapore the most advanced defense technology and sent only ill-trained troops. One Australian general, Gordon Bennett, even fled the battlefield, leaving his soldiers to suffer and die as prisoners of war. But while we do not forget, Singapore long ago decided to forgive. We look forward and not backward in our relations with Japan. This was a deliberate political choice; a choice also made by the other members of ASEAN.
Northeast Asia has chosen neither to forget nor to forgive. China and South Korea have repeatedly professed themselves dissatisfied with apologies offered by Japanese governments, which they dismiss as insincere. Weekly demonstrations to protest the use by Japanese forces of so-called comfort women are staged in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. In China, bitter memories are fanned and kept alive by the government, which, among other things, has accused Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of revising history and again leading Japan down the path to militarism.
Are they right? Is Japan in a state of denial about its wartime record? The issues are more complicated than perhaps generally realized. After World War II the Tokyo war crimes tribunal, established by the victorious Allies, accused leading Japanese officials of three categories of war crimes. Two were straightforward: Class-B offenses were "conventional war crimes," such as the murder and mistreatment of prisoners of war. Those categorized as class-C were alleged "crimes against humanity," such as the massacres of civilians carried out at Nanking and Singapore. But class-A war crimes, defined as "crimes against peace" by waging aggressive war, were and remain deeply problematic.
Victors' justice
War is a legitimate instrument of state policy. Whether a particular war can be characterized as "aggressive" will always be a subjective ex post facto judgment by the victors. Those charged with class-A war crimes were specifically indicted for having engaged in a "conspiracy" to wage a "war of aggression" from 1928 to Japan's surrender in 1945, a period of almost 18 years. Yet most recent Western scholarship concurs that rather than a grand conspiracy, it was a series of ill-considered ad hoc decisions that led Japan to disaster.
Some right-wing Japanese claim that Japan fought to liberate Southeast Asia from colonial rule. In fact, Japan's intention was to establish colonies in China and Southeast Asia. Colonialism is today condemned, but was once acceptable. Imperial Japan's objectives were in principle little different from, say, the wars of conquest fought by the British in Burma, now known as Myanmar, by the Dutch in what is now Indonesia, by the French in Indochina (now Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) and by the Americans in the Philippines. And all of this was little different from the Qing Dynasty's incorporation of Tibet and Xinjiang into China.
None of those executed as class-A war criminals or charged with "crimes against peace" was in power throughout the 18-year period during which the "conspiracy" allegedly took place. The only person in authority during this entire period, and the person in whose name Japan's war was waged, was Emperor Hirohito. Once it was decided to spare the emperor to preserve social and political stability in postwar Japan, the indictment of his subordinates became questionable.
The claim that Abe is revising history to lead Japan down a militaristic path is patently absurd. Contemporary Japan is politically, sociologically, economically and culturally a different country from prewar Japan. Even if that were his intention, it would be bound to fail. His limited attempt to reinterpret the constitution to allow Japan to carry out a wider range of military operations -- which is overdue -- has proved highly controversial.
Northeast Asia's refusal to accept history as past is politically motivated, at least in China. The Chinese Communist Party today relies on nationalism for legitimacy. As a party that still calls itself communist, it cannot base its nationalism on China's imperial past. If the past was so glorious, why was the revolution needed? The party has an ambivalent attitude toward its own revolutionary history, toward its former leader Mao Zedong, and toward such episodes as the disastrous famine caused by the Great Leap Forward and the many lives lost or wrecked during the Cultural Revolution. Chinese nationalism must therefore be outwardly directed, lest awkward questions be asked internally about the party itself.
Chinese nationalism is today targeted at Japan. But it was not always so. Consider this statement: "As you have formally apologized for the debts you incurred in the past, it is not reasonable to ask you for payments of those debts. You cannot be asked to apologize every day, can you? It is not good for a nation to feel constantly guilty." This is not an excuse by some right-wing Japanese politician -- it is what Mao told a delegation of Japanese lawmakers in 1955. And when Mao met former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka in 1972, he brushed aside Tanaka's attempts to apologize, saying he was grateful to Japan because without the war the Communist Party would not have been able to seize power.
No more class struggle
Under Mao, the party's primary claim to legitimacy was class struggle. It emphasized that its defeat of the rival Kuomintang nationalist forces represented the end of feudal China. But once China embraced the market economy this narrative became increasingly unsustainable. Since 2002, when businessmen working in private enterprises -- otherwise known as "capitalists" -- were allowed to join the party, class struggle has lost all credibility as a means of legitimizing communist rule. The emphasis has since been on the party's defeat of Japan and Japan's wartime record.
That prosecutions for class-A war crimes were questionable does not excuse the atrocities that Imperial Japan committed in China, Korea and Southeast Asia. Those hanged as class-A war criminals may have richly deserved execution, but not for the hastily defined "crimes against peace" for which they were convicted. The problems raised by those ill-considered charges have contributed to the inability of Japan to come to terms with its past. They allow some Japanese to stress Hiroshima and Nagasaki over Nanking in Japan's historical memory.
The formal apologies or expressions of remorse or regret that several Japanese leaders, including emperors Hirohito and Akihito, have made about World War II should be accepted, and a line drawn under the unhappy history of the period. But Japanese governments have not yet done enough to dissociate themselves from extreme statements or arguments made by right-wing politicians or public figures in private capacities who have, for example, quibbled over the exact numbers killed at Nanking or the Imperial Japanese Army's precise role in recruiting "comfort women."
The absence of explicit and official disavowals of such arguments enables those whose intentions toward Japan are not benign to conflate and confuse official statements with offensive arguments, and in effect makes Japan complicit in political misuses of history. The resulting controversy sets back Japan's wish to become a "normal" country and complicates the more active diplomatic role Japan ought to play.
History extracts a price from those who use it as a political tool. It has not been lost on ASEAN that since the target of Chinese nationalism has been politically determined, it can shift to other targets as the Communist Party's political needs change. This does not help to assuage anxieties or to build trust. And since public opinion is a double-edged sword, should an accident occur between China and Japan, say over the disputed Senkaku Islands (which China calls the Diaoyu Islands), Beijing may be trapped by its own manipulation of history. It could be forced by an emotional public opinion, which it both fears and uses, down paths that it does not really want to take. How is this in anybody's interest?
Bilahari Kausikan is a former permanent secretary of Singapore's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and currently serves as ambassador-at-large; these are his personal views.
