The Wages of Guilt Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE WAGES OF GUILT

  “It would be difficult to find anyone better suited than Ian Buruma to reflect upon the questions of why these national attitudes should be so different…. He is thoroughly familiar with the politics and culture of both Japan and Germany, has traveled widely in both countries, and speaks their languages fluently.”

  —The New York Review of Books

  “Will fascinate readers even as it recalls painful images…. [Buruma] is less interested in finding heroes and villains than in teasing out nuances of national character.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “The Wages of Guilt augments [Buruma’s] body of cultural criticism with a brilliant lucidity that guides the reader through a thicket of varying responses to the historical black hole that has been deemed inconceivable.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “His knowledge of cultural and intellectual life is impressive…. This book reflects interestingly on why Japanese and German attitudes differ so remarkably.”

  —The Economist

  “Highlights the elusive nature of historical truth, which often takes a backseat to the myth-making needed to soothe the collective conscience.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “A clear portrait of two peoples trying to come to terms with their own unspeakable behaviors.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  Copyright © 1994 by Ian Buruma

  Preface copyright © 2015 by Ian Buruma

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  Published by The New York Review of Books, 435 Hudson Street, Suite 300, New York NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Buruma, Ian.

  The wages of guilt : memories of war in Germany and Japan / by Ian Buruma.

  pages cm. — (New York review books collections)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-59017-858-4 (alk. paper)

  1. World War, 1939-1945—Moral and ethical aspects. 2. World War, 1939-1945—Influence. 3. Germany—Moral conditions. 4. Japan—Moral conditions. 5. Guilt. 6. Shame. 7. Ethnopsychology. I. Title.

  D744.4.B87 2015

  940.53′1—dc23

  2014041582

  Cover images: Japanese schoolgirls celebrating the capture of the Chinese city of Nanjing in front of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, December 1937 (PhotoQuest/Getty Images); German girls waiting to greet Adolf Hitler, Berlin, September 1938 (© Bettmann/Corbis)

  Cover design by Evan Johnston

  ebook ISBN 978-1-59017-859-1

  v3.1

  FOR MY FATHER

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PREFACE TO THE 2015 EDITION

  INTRODUCTION TO THE 1995 EDITION: THE ENEMIES

  PART ONE

  War Against the West

  Romance of the Ruins

  PART TWO

  Auschwitz

  Hiroshima

  Nanking

  PART THREE

  History on Trial

  Textbook Resistance

  Memorials, Museums, and Monuments

  PART FOUR

  A Normal Country

  Two Normal Towns

  Clearing Up the Ruins

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Preface to the 2015 Edition

  SOCCER, ESPECIALLY IN Europe, can be a useful way to gauge the state of nations. In 2006, the World Cup was staged in Germany. Apart from Zinedine Zidane’s head-butt in the final, the occasion was remarkable for the unselfconscious, festive outpouring of German patriotism. Germans, for good reasons, had been hesitant before to wave their national symbols in the face of the world. This time they did so in such a friendly spirit that no one could mistake it for anything sinister. In 2006, even though their team failed to reach the final, people seemed happy to be German.

  It used to be, if you were Dutch, French, Czech, or Polish, that losing to Germany was like being invaded all over again. And the rare victories over Germany were celebrated as sweet revenge. More than half a century after the end of World War II, this feeling seems at last to have evaporated. When Germany won the World Cup in 2014, most Europeans even rejoiced. But then the country visibly was no longer what it once was. The team included two players born in Poland, as well as men of Tunisian, Turkish, Ghanaian, and Albanian descent.

  Changing attitudes come with fading memories, even though some historical memories can be lethally tenacious. But I believe there was more to it in this case. When I wrote The Wages of Guilt in 1994, there was still a good deal of fear and distrust of Germany—the economic powerhouse of Europe—whose recent reunification was celebrated in the streets of Dresden, Leipzig, and Berlin with raucous cries of “We are one people!” This sounded ominous to people whose memories had not yet faded, not least to some Germans themselves. But by 2006, Günter Grass’s famous remark that the memory of Auschwitz should have kept Germany divided forever sounded even more absurdly self-flagellating than it had in 1989. Germany had been such a good European, safely embedded for many decades in European institutions and NATO, that it seemed churlish to distrust a generation of Germans who were not yet alive when their country was at war. But the main reason why Germans were more trusted by their neighbors was that they were learning, slowly and painfully, and not always fully, to trust themselves.

  In the western half of Germany, at any rate, novelists, historians, journalists, teachers, politicians, and filmmakers had already considered the monstrosities of recent Germany history, sometimes obsessively, but often with remarkable openness and honesty. Few German schoolchildren were unaware of their country’s horrors. If anything, some had begun to resent the relentless fashion in which they were sometimes pushed down their throats. There were still, in the twenty-first century, instances of public figures making dubious or tactless statements about the war, but they would be very swiftly taken to task by other Germans. Demonstrations against immigrants, especially Muslim immigrants, were swiftly countered by demonstrations against racism or xenophobia.

  The war was never a laughing matter to Germans, nor should it have been. But the fact that a comedy film, entitled Mein Führer, made by a Swiss-Jewish director, was a hit in 2008 was probably a healthy sign too. Laughter at their own country’s expense is surely preferable to self-flagellation. To the extent that the darkest chapters in history can be “coped” with, the Germans, on the whole, had coped.

  Why can’t the same thing be said with equal confidence about Japan? The Japanese also hosted a World Cup, together with Korea, in 2002. And young Japanese celebrated the unexpected victories of their team of hip young players with the same carnival spirit as the Germans did four years later. Yet the distrust of Japan, in Korea and other neighboring countries, did not go away. For while the flag-waving young looked innocent of bellicose thoughts (or any thoughts about history at all, which was part of the problem), some of their elders, in government and the mass media, still voice opinions about the Japanese war that are unsettling, to say the least. Conservative politicians still pay their annual respects at a shrine where war criminals are officially remembered. Justifications and denials of war crimes are still heard. Too many Japanese in conspicuous places, including the prime minister’s office itself, have clearly not “coped” with the war.

  It should have been easier for the Japanese. The war in Asia was savage, to be sure. The sackings of Nanking and Manila, the slaves worked to death on the Thai�
�Burma railroad, the brutal POW camps from Manchuria to Sumatra, the millions of dead in China: these have left permanent scars on the history of Asia. But unlike Nazi Germany, Japan had no systematic program to destroy the life of every man, woman, and child of a people that, for ideological reasons, was deemed to have no right to exist.

  Perversely, this may actually have made it harder for the Japanese to come to terms with their history. After the fall of the Third Reich, few Germans outside a deranged fringe could condone, let alone be proud of the Holocaust. “We never knew,” a common reaction in the 1950s, had worn shamefully thin in the eyes of a younger generation by the 1960s. The extraordinary criminality of a deliberate genocide was so obvious that it left no room for argument.

  The Japanese never reached the same kind of consensus. Right-wing nationalists like to cite the absence of a Japanese Holocaust as proof that Japanese have no reason to feel remorse about their war at all. It was, in their eyes, a war like any other; brutal, yes, just as wars fought by all great nations in history have been brutal. In fact, since the Pacific War was fought against Western imperialists, it was a justified—even noble—war of Asian liberation.

  Few Japanese would have taken this view in the late 1940s or 1950s, a time when most Germans were still trying hard not to remember. It is in fact extraordinary how honestly Japanese novelists and filmmakers dealt with the horrors of militarism in those early postwar years. Such honesty is much less evident now. Popular comic books, aimed at the young, extol the heroics of Japanese soldiers and kamikaze pilots, while the Chinese and their Western allies are depicted as treacherous and belligerent. In 2008, the chief of staff of the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force stated that Japan had been “tricked” into the war by China and the US. In 2013, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo publicly doubted whether Japan’s military aggression in China could even be called an invasion.

  Why? It has often been assumed that there must be a cultural explanation. Shame, to the Oriental mind, has to be covered in silence, or denial, and so forth. I rather dismissed this claim when I wrote The Wages of Guilt, and I still do. The Germans are not a morally superior people, with a keener sense of guilt, or shame, than the Japanese. Evasions, there too, were once the order of the day.

  The fact is that Japan is still haunted by historical issues that should have been settled decades ago. The reasons are political rather than cultural, and have to do with the pacifist constitution—written by American jurists in 1946—and with the imperial institution, absolved of war guilt by General Douglas MacArthur after the war for the sake of expediency.

  The end of the Third Reich in Germany was a complete break in history. Japan, even under Allied occupation, continued to be governed by much the same bureaucratic and political elite, albeit under a new, more democratic constitution, after the emperor was made to renounce his divine status. Since there had been no equivalent of the Nazi Party in Japan, and thus no Führer, Japanese militarism was blamed on “feudal” culture and the samurai spirit. Like a reformed alcoholic who cannot be trusted with another sip of the hard stuff, Japan was constitutionally banned from using military force, or indeed from maintaining its own armed forces. Henceforth, the US would be responsible for Japanese security.

  Even though most Japanese were more than glad to be relieved of martial duties, and the constitution was soon fudged to allow for a Self-Defense Force, a number of conservatives felt humiliated by what they rightly saw as an infringement of their national sovereignty. Henceforth, to them, everything from the Allied Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal to the denunciations of Japan’s war record by left-wing teachers and intellectuals would be seen in this light. The more “progressive” Japanese used the history of wartime atrocities as a warning against turning away from pacifism, the more defensive right-wing politicians and commentators became about the Japanese war.

  Views of history, in other words, were politicized—and polarized—from the beginning. To take the sting out of this confrontation between constitutional pacifists and revisionists, which had led to much political turmoil in the 1950s, mainstream conservatives made a deliberate attempt to distract people’s attention from war and politics by concentrating on economic growth.

  It largely worked. Japan became increasingly wealthy, and a rather oppressive stability was found under the continuous rule of one large conservative party, the Liberal Democrats (LDP). And yet history refused to go away. Resentment over the postwar deal continues to fester in the nationalist right wing of the LDP. At a cruder level, it is voiced, or rather shouted, by thuggish young men in quasi-military uniforms blaring wartime military marches from flag-bearing sound trucks—not at all in the festive spirit of the football fans in 2002.

  For several decades, the chauvinistic right wing, with its reactionary views on everything from high school education to the emperor’s status, was kept in check by the sometimes equally dogmatic Japanese left. Marxism was the prevailing ideology of the teachers union and academics. Like everywhere else in the world, however, the influence of Marxism waned after the collapse of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s, and the brutal records of Chairman Mao and Pol Pot became widely known.

  This collapse resulted in the ascent of neoconservatism in the US. In Japan, the consequences have been graver. Marginalized in the de facto one-party LDP state and discredited by its own dogmatism, the Japanese left did not just wane, it collapsed. This gave a great boost to the war-justifying right-wing nationalists, who even gained strength in such bastions of progressive learning as Tokyo University. Committees sprang up to “reform” history curriculums by purging textbooks of all facts that might stand in the way of healthy patriotic pride.

  The Japanese young, perhaps out of boredom with nothing but materialistic goals, perhaps out of frustration with being made to feel guilty, perhaps out of sheer ignorance, or most probably out of a combination of all three, are not unreceptive to these patriotic blandishments. Anxiety about the rise of China, whose rulers have a habit of using Japan’s historical crimes as a form of political blackmail, has boosted a prickly national pride, even at the expense of facing the truth about the past.

  Briefly, just after The Wages of Guilt was first published, I thought that things were moving in a more positive direction. For the first time since 1955, the LDP had been replaced in government by a coalition of liberal-left parties led by the socialist prime minister Murayama Tomiichi. One of the first things this very decent man did was apologize unequivocally for Japan’s military atrocities on the fiftieth anniversary of the Pacific War.

  Many Japanese were in sympathy with Murayama. His clear repudiation of Japan’s wartime behavior would surely make it easier to talk about Japanese security and revising the constitution in a rational manner. Alas, expectations of a break with the postwar order proved to be premature. Murayama was not able to change anything in the political landscape. By 1996, the LDP was back in power, the constitutional issue had not been resolved, and historical debates continue to be loaded with political ideology. In fact, they are not really debates at all, but exercises in propaganda, tilted toward the reactionary side.

  Given these differences between Germany and Japan, one might have expected The Wages of Guilt to have been better received in the former country. In fact, the opposite was true. Not only did the book sell more copies in Japan, but it got a more positive reception. I can only speculate about the reasons. The Japanese quite like their country to be compared to Germany—efficient, clean, industrious, disciplined, and so on. Postwar Germans, bent on being model members of the liberal, progressive Western community, are less keen to be compared to Japan. It smacks too much of pre-war admiration for the warrior spirit of “the Germans of the East.”

  If I am right, however, and the differences between the two nations, in terms of historical memory, are less cultural than political, then such German sensitivity is misplaced. It would be naive—and it has proved to be dangerous in the past—to assume that culture doesn’t matter, that all human bein
gs can be cast in the same universal mold. To assume, however, that cultural differences are absolute—what academic theorists like to call “essentializing”—is equally wrong, and indeed dangerous.

  It was partly to test these grounds, to find out how comparable traumas have affected two very different nations, that I wrote this book. My instinct—call it a prejudice, if you prefer—before embarking on this venture was that people from distinct cultures still react quite similarly to similar circumstances. The Japanese and the Germans, on the whole, did not behave in the same ways—but then the circumstances, both wartime and postwar, were quite different in the two Germanies and Japan. They still are.

  Introduction

  THE ENEMIES

  THERE WAS NEVER any doubt, where I grew up, who our enemies were. There was the Soviet Union, of course, but that, from a Dutch schoolboy’s perspective in the 1950s, was rather remote. No, the enemies were the Germans. They were the comic-book villains of my childhood in The Hague. When I say Germans, I mean just that—not Nazis, but Germans. The occupation between 1940 and 1945 and the animosity that followed were seen in national, not political terms. The Germans had conquered our country. They had forced my father to work in their factories. And they had left behind the bunkers along our coast, like great stone toads, squat relics of a recent occupation, dark and damp and smelling of urine. We were not allowed to go inside them. Stories were told of boys who defied this order and were blown up by rusty German hand grenades.

  Our teachers told us stories of German wickedness and their own acts of bravery. Every member of the older generation, it appeared, had been in the resistance. That is to say, everybody except for the butcher on the corner of the high street, who had been a collaborator; one didn’t go shopping there. And then there was the woman at the tobacconist; she had had a German lover. One didn’t go there either.