From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 397-400:
ON AUGUST 17, 1945, three days after the emperor announced on the radio Japan’s total defeat, Prince Higashikuni became the first (and most probably the last) prime minister chosen from the imperial house. It was up to him to disarm the nation, hand over the country to the Allied occupation forces, sign the document accepting Japan’s unconditional surrender, and, most critically, raise the morale of the thoroughly devastated nation.
The prince was a good orator who spoke simply and convincingly. On September 5, addressing a parliamentary session that included American GIs in the audience, Higashikuni insisted that the Japanese not dwell on the question of how the war was started and instead look forward. He proposed that the whole nation of one hundred million was to blame and so the whole nation had to repent. This was the same nation that had been told, until very recently, to fight until the bitter end, armed only with spears and helmets of bamboo. Higashikuni’s argument had some merit, especially in the late summer of 1945, when so much work lay in front of the Japanese people. But his words set the tone for Japanese leaders as well as those who followed them to overlook the most basic question of responsibility: Who was responsible for starting the war? The suggestion that the war might have been unnecessary was too difficult for any Japanese to accept, having lost so much and so many in the war. But this neglect, legitimized as a matter of official policy, in turn encouraged the general temptation to do away with various other kinds of responsibility, such as coming to terms with its war crimes and remembering the war after it was over.
This, of course, does not mean that people could forget what they had lived through. Contrary to received opinion, some serious attempts have been made in Japan to examine aspects of the country’s wartime past. Soldier U, who lived to be eighty-four, had enough time to reflect, discreetly and quietly, on his experiences. Though he never discussed any of them in his lifetime, he cared enough to leave a written record, unbeknownst even to his family.
Yet by claiming that every Japanese was to blame for the war, Higashikuni implied that nobody was to blame, fudging and diluting the real responsibility of the leaders who brought Japan to that momentous decision. Prince Konoe, who resurfaced as a public figure in Higashikuni’s cabinet, was doubtless the first to support this line of argument. Conservative politicians, in power for most of the postwar period, were only too happy to inherit such a partial and incomplete rendering of Japan’s past. Despite the efforts of some individual citizens, academics, and journalists to have a more honest debate, it is difficult to deny that Japan’s official impulse has been to look away from what is undesirable and unpleasant in its history. And this pattern was perpetuated as much, if not more, by what Kafu had so astutely noted on the eve of Pearl Harbor as the fundamental indifference to politics among many Japanese, absorbed as they were by their “primary pursuit … to pass one day at a time without encountering too much trouble,” as by the misplaced desire of some politicized right to impart glory to Japan’s lost war.
In 1952, Gone with the Wind was finally released to general audiences in Japan, and it became a huge box-office hit. Many Japanese identified with the spirited, impetuous, and indomitable southern belle Scarlett O’Hara, who remained determined to rise above any obstacles, even after having lost almost everything that mattered to her. Her celebrated last words, “After all, tomorrow is another day,” resonated with the generation of postwar Japanese trying to glimpse a better future through the wreckage of war. That was exactly what Japan opted to do—and that is why the past, with its improbable story of how the war came to pass, became another country.
I remember seeing two U.S.-made war films during my youth in Japan. The first was in 1959 or so in Aomori, where my brother and I went (by ourselves by train) from Kyoto to visit another missionary family with boys our age. The film was about the Korean War, maybe Pork Chop Hill, and I remember wondering whom the Japanese audience members might have felt more sympathy for: the Americans, the South Koreans, the North Koreans, or the Chinese. In the mid 1960s, I remember seeing The Bridge Over the River Kwai in a Japanese theater in Kobe, where I was in high school. I wondered how many survivors of the wartime generation, if any, were in the audience. Among my very earliest wartime-related memories in Japan was the sight of Japanese army veterans dressed in white but wearing their green field caps (略帽), perhaps missing a limb, begging from passersby in inconspicuous sheltered places, like pedestrian underpasses. Japan’s veterans who survived their wars in Asia and the Pacific received very little public support. See my blogpost on Rehabilitating Japanese War Veterans.
