August 15 marks the 80th anniversary of the unconditional surrender in Japan and the end of the Second World War, again emphasizing the calculation of the country’s past. The internal debate in Japan on the formation of stories on the Second World War is so tense that it is often called “History Wars”.
Japan actions during the war are also a painful place in international diplomacy. China and North Korea and the South have bitter memories of life under Japanese occupation and rarely lack an opportunity to remind their neighbor the past.
Inside Japan, which was formerly far -right marginal voices has developed more important in recent years by emphasizing a denying narrative or minimizing the brutality of Imperial Japan during the Second World War. Historical revisionist groups want the victims of the imperial outburst of Japan through Asia and the Pacific eight decades to leave history in the past.
“There are very few people alive today who have known the war in one of these countries, but I do not think they will never stop talking about it because it is an effective tool with which to denigrate Japan,” said Hiromichi Moteki, president of the company based in Tokyo for the dissemination of the atrocities that Japan has committed a story of the actions of Japan during the world war.
“They want to claim high morale in Japan, but all we want to do is have the right to remember and honor our war dead and teach our young generations the history of the nation,” he told DW.
Historical denial in Japan
Moteki’s organization seeks to disseminate its message by translating Japanese nationalist works of historical revisionism in English.
An article Published in the Journal of International Affairs of Georgetown University exploring historical revisionism in Japan describes the organization of Moteki as part of a “nested network of small maisss of vocal lobbies” which emerged in the context of a “denisting movement” in the 1990s.
The other groups with similar objectives include the “International Institute for the Research for Controversial Histoles” or the “Research Committee on Historical Awareness”.
The Moteki group, for example, affirms that the Second World War was not a war of aggression launched by Japan but an act of self -defense against the American and European nations which had colonized Asia. He claims that imperial Japan has “released” the countries it has conquered.
Similar to other nationalist organizations, society also wrongly insists that the euphemist “comforting women”, most of whom came from Korea, were not removed and forced in sexual servitude but were in fact well -remunerated prostitutes. He also argued that allied prisoners of war were well treated and that the workers of Korea and Taiwan voluntarily worked in mines, shipyards or factories during the conflict.
Seeking to make Japan “victim” of foreign plots
At the same time, the group says that the United States has committed war crimes by abandoning atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The negators claim that the hundreds of trials led by the allies pursuing Japanese troops for war crimes were only “Victor justice”.
“These groups share a distinctive method of historical writing similar to the methods of the denial of the holocaust”, writes Tessa Morris-Suzuki, professor emeritus of Japanese history at the college of Asia and Pacific at the Australian National University.
“They enter historical documents which are often relatively obscure and select it for information that supports their cause. These information fragments are then united without contextualization in writing which neglects the reliability of the source, ignores contradictory evidence and false fundamental declarations,” wrote Morris-Suzuki in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs.
“These problems are anchored in a broader and proven vision of Japanese history of the 20th century: that which presents Japan as a victim and attributes negative images of the pre-war and war past in Japan to the conspiracies of international propaganda,” she continues.
Georgetown’s report published in 2021 said that a “substantial number” of conservative legislators “belong to lobbies groups that disseminate revisionist opinions”.
Historical revisionist lobbies groups have also worked with diplomats on propaganda efforts abroad, including monuments opposed to “comforted women” in countries like the United States and Germany.
The history of Japan seen through the eyes of the victims
Yuji Hosaka is a professor of history and politics at Sejong University in South Korea who has long criticized Japan’s failure to honestly tackle his past, or to teach young generations of Japan the truth about the era of war.
“I see a lot on the right in Japan who just want to forget all the bad things that happened when Japan has occupied Korea and invaded China and Southeast Asia,” he said. “These people often say that Japan has brought development and modern technology to help these countries, but it simply puts the inhabitants of Korea.”
Korean historians are largely suitable that after having annexed the 1910 peninsula, Japan has forcefully assimilated the Korean people, prohibited them from speaking their own language, eliminated indigenous culture and exploited the land and its people. The intention was to make Korea part of the Japanese Empire, thousands of Koreans serving in the Japanese army during the war.
Hosaka says that the school books in Japanese history are still shining on the atrocities produced by the Japanese army, often with little or no mention of the Nanjing massacre which killed hundreds of thousands in China, the abuse of civilian workers and prisoners of war, or other crimes for which the Japanese were executed after the war.
“Those who forget the past will inevitably find themselves in a situation similar to the future,” he said. “It is imperative that Japan will learn from the past.”
“In the past, Germany and France have worked together to create common history books for their children,” he added. “I think Japan should reach out in Korea and China and do the same thing.”
An editorial in the July 7 edition of the Daily China The newspaper said: “It is time for Japan should have faced its war crimes and the militarist’s past.”
For China, the Nanjing massacre continues to gain weight today.
According to Chinese historians, 300,000 civilians and soldiers were killed in a frenzy of six weeks of murder, torture, rape, criminal fire and looting after the invasive Japanese army entered Nanjing, then the capital of China, on December 13, 1937. The massacre is also internationally recognized. The British encyclopaedia writes that “the number of Chinese killed in the massacre has been the subject of many debates, most estimates ranging from 100,000 to more than 300,000.”
Those who had ordered the massacre were executed after being found guilty of having committed war crimes by the International Military Court for the Far East in 1948.
Japan should “stop apologizing”
Moteki and others on the right say that successive Japanese leaders have expressed real remorse for what happened almost a century ago, but that other countries always say that the excuses are inadequate or are not sincere.
“It will never change,” said Moteki, born in 1941.
“Japan must defend itself against these criticisms and verbal attacks. But the time has come for Japan to stop apologizing because it does not make sense now.”
On August 15, the anniversary of the emperor announcing in a radio broadcast that Japan was going, Moteki will go to the controversial sanctuary of Yasukuni in the center of Tokyo to pay tribute to War Dead.
It will be surrounded by thousands of others who wish to mark the birthday, in particular by reducing the number of old soldiers, the parents of men who fought and far -right groups in uniforms.
Yasukuni is the last place of rest of more than 2.4 million military and civilian victims of war in Japan since 1869. To other nations, however, Yasukuni is a controversial symbol, because it also honors more than 1,000 people convicted of war crimes.
Published by: Darko Janjevic
