Scholarly Review:

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Interpretations of Japan’s involvement in the Pacific War and its war crimes have changed over time, and corresponding changes in social and political contexts both within and outside Japan have influenced these evolving interpretations. Today the people of Japan are far from a consensus over the meaning of the Asia-Pacific War (1931-45), and disputes relating to such topics as the Nanjing Massacre, Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea and Taiwan, and the sexual enslavement of the so-called Comfort Women continue to haunt the national memory. However, the current divisions over the significance of the war did not always exist. To the contrary, in the immediate postwar period the Japanese came to a consensus that the war was unjust and reckless. Many expressed their atonement for the atrocities committed during the war, and a strongly prevalent climate of peace activism replaced the wartime culture of militarism. Since the end of American Occupation in 1952, revisionists have tried to urge the nation’s citizens to see the war in a positive light. Nevertheless, the influence exerted by these revisionists over the public was relatively marginal until the mid-1990s. A history of disputes over the Asia-Pacific War, including issues regarding Japan’s war crimes, underscores the ever changing public perception of the Asia-Pacific War from the defeat of Japan in 1945 to the present.

 I. War Memory in the Early Postwar Years (1945 - 1971)

As the American occupational forces entered Tokyo in 1945, they found no widespread knowledge of Japanese wartime atrocities, nor any great evidence of collective guilt among the general public in Japan. Therefore, the Civil Information and Education Section (CIE) of the SCAP launched the “war guilt program” at an early stage of the occupation. The program included the publication of the Allies-slanted “History of the Pacific War” in Japanese national newspapers, a radio series titled “Now It Can Be Told,” and the creation of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE). [1]

To draft its history of the Pacific War, which appeared in Japanese national newspapers on the day of the fourth anniversary of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, CIE relied on such sources as America’s Far Eastern Policy by Thomas Bisson (1945), Time, and Newsweek. The prologue of the English version stated that reports of the crimes committed by the militarists “will be released from time to time and documented by unimpeachable sources until the story of Japanese guilt has been fully bared in all its details without censorship or deference to the persons involved.” [2] The prologue urged the people to “know the full story of the war in order that they may understand how defeat came and why they must endure the suffering engendered by militarism.” [3] CIE believed that informing Japanese about their country’s wartime atrocities was necessary to reconstitute Japan as a peaceful nation.

Through various media, many Japanese were consistently exposed to the stories of the Japanese wartime atrocities that SCAP considered important. Such atrocities included the story of Nanjing in 1937, where the Japanese troops killed tens of thousands of Chinese civilians and non-combatants, the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the inhumane treatment of Allied prisoners throughout the war. On the other hand, CIE censorship prohibited the Japanese media from criticizing the Allied wartime and occupational policies toward Japan, including the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Unquestionably somewhat influenced by carefully filtered information that was released to them, many Japanese embraced the reforms initiated by SCAP, including IMTFE, and editorials and letters from readers printed in newspapers often expressed deep remorse and heartfelt wishes to atone for Japanese atrocities. [4]

Examples of Japanese remorse can readily be found in the popular reaction to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. For example, after witnesses testified the atrocities in Nanjing before the court in July 1946, the editorial of the Yomiuri newspaper stressed that Japanese correspondents bore a certain responsibility for not reporting the crimes committed by the Japanese military in Nanjing. The editorial went on to urge its readers to acknowledge various crimes committed by the militarists during the war. [5] A farmer in the Chiba prefecture sent an op-ed to the Asahi newspaper, arguing that the Japanese people should sign a non-aggression covenant to atone for the crimes committed in Nanjing by the military. [6]

The court issued its judgment in November 1948, including seven death penalties and sixteen sentences to life imprisonment. During the three years that followed the judgment, SCAP analyzed newspaper editorials and articles reacting to the court’s actions. It found that an overwhelming number of them supported the judgment and that, in general, any expression of sympathy toward the war criminals sentenced to death received general criticism in Japanese society. [7] The verdict of the tribunal supported the narrative that a small number of war criminals had dragged Japan to the reckless war and that this handful of villains were responsible for the suffering and misery now being felt by the people. The images of Imperial Japan and of its military dwindled, and, in the immediate postwar period, few Japanese were willing to argue publicly that Imperial Japan had fought for the good of Asia.

Even a critic who, in the 1980s, was to accuse the trial of imposing victors’ justice and demonizing Imperial Japan, was more apologetic when he wrote in the 1950s. Immediately after the occupation ended in April 1952, Tanaka Masaaki published On Japan’s Innocence: The Truth on Trial (Nihon muzai ron shinri no sabaki). Tanaka offered a Japanese translation of a dissenting opinion of Radhabinod Pal, an Indian judge who concluded that all of the accused war criminals were not guilty. While Tanaka implicitly questioned the legitimacy of the trial by invoking Pal’s words, he refrained from asserting his own judgment as to whether the tribunal was just or unjust. At the time he also admitted that Japan, to a certain degree, had planned and waged an aggressive war. [8]

Critical observations of Japan’s conduct of the war can be found in early issues of the newsletter published by the Association of War-Bereaved Families. Today this group is known as an organization that supports the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (established in 1955) and has striven to elevate the controversial Yasukuni Shrine from its current status as a private religious site to the government-sponsored national institution that it was before Japan’s defeat. In December 1949, the newsletter printed a letter from a World War II veteran who expressed his resentment toward the wartime society that, he argued, had deprived Japan of freedom of speech. The writer urged the members of the Association to build a new Japan. He admitted that, although he had always regarded Japan’s war with China as neither just nor winnable, he had lacked the courage to speak out at the time and had instead joined the military. Perhaps trying to placate other readers who were still grieving over the deaths of their loved ones, the veteran insisted that by denouncing the war he was not disrespecting the Japanese soldiers who had given their lives for the empire. [9]

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