In a recent survey of four books that document genocide and ethnic wars, Istvan Deak proposes that “the driving forces in genocide and ethnic cleansing are generally modern governments, armies, police, administrators, clerics, politicians, medical doctors, historians, writers, poets, and other creative individuals.”[11] Given the typically sensationalist and confusing media coverage of genocide, it is essential that we understand the critical analyses Gourevitch, Deak, and other students of genocide provide. Their writings, among other sources, lead me to conclude that a specific list of preconditions must be established before war is unleashed against civilians: (1) aggressive propaganda against the intended victims; (2) a call to an inviolate national or tribal identity to be vindicated by murdering the “enemy”; (3) provisions of arms by those in power in cases when the aggressor population remains unarmed; and (4) explicit guarantees of immunity for any acts of aggression conducted in the name of the nation or tribe.
In China, Rwanda, Bosnia, and so many seemingly disparate cases, civilian massacres were precipitated not by explosive tribal or ethnic hatreds, but by leaders who deliberately manipulated such historical tensions between people in an effort to consolidate power. Careful scrutiny of Japanese Devils reveals that the above list of conditions corresponds exactly to the strategies implemented by the Imperial Army of Japan in China in the 1930s. They were also key elements of Milosevich’s gambit to expand his power in the 1990s.
Asking Questions
After an exhausting but cathartic question-and-answer session, we emerged into the broad Sarajevan daylight to find Samira bantering lightheartedly with the Serbian driver whose silent presence had tormented her only the day before. I drew her aside to ask her if all was well. Her reply startled me:
I found him standing outside the theater, so I went up to him and confronted him, point-blank. I said, “During my tour yesterday, you stayed in your Land Rover the whole time. Did you have a problem with what I said?” He answered that throughout the war he had stood by helpless as his countrymen, crazed with rage, had destroyed our people. He felt so humiliated by what his people had done to mine, he didn’t have the courage to face me. He said he was sorry for what had happened to Sarajevo. When I repeated Samira’s story to several local Bosnians, they were skeptical, but Samira was obviously mollified. After our chat, she resumed her conversation with the Serbian driver.
Samira had the courage to ask an apparent “aggressor,” in no uncertain terms, on which side he stood. Is it possible that that’s all it takes? To be willing to ask and to answer the simple question Matsui had never dared ask his father: “What did you do in the war?” The question few Americans have had the guts to ask of our Vietnam veterans, perhaps because we’re afraid to hear the stories they might tell. Stories some veterans may still be waiting to tell, to anyone who would ask that simple question.
This question was the crux of the exchange between the Japanese Devils and their Communist wardens in the reeducation camps. Well before he faced Matsui’s camera, Tominaga Shozo, a graduate of Tokyo University, who went on to lead the former war criminals’ organization, Chukiren, recalled in an interview, In time my eyes got used to the darkness [of my cell] and I made out writing on the wall. “Down with Japanese Imperialism! “Devils of the Orient!” All of it was abusive language about us Japanese. Written in blood. When I saw these, a chill went up my spine. [Chinese] prisoners who were about to die had written these words in desperate, hopeless defiance. For the first time, I understood the minds of those prisoners. Up to that moment, I’d excused myself from responsibility on the grounds that I [had been] ordered to commit such acts by my commanders. From the point of view of those murdered, though, it didn’t matter whether the act of killing was [voluntary or compulsory].[12]
In Japanese Devils, Tominaga, a wizened old man with large ears, surrounded by books, recalls arriving in China to complete his training as an officer and lead a platoon of battle-hardened men. When after a week of training, his commander ordered him to decapitate a Chinese prisoner, Tominaga faltered. When his turn came, he asked himself: “Can this really be allowed to happen?” But realizing that he had no other choice, he sliced off his victim’s head. Fifty years later, he reflected: “After all, I’d read my Kant, his Critique of Pure Reason, and was familiar with the idea of personal responsibility. I’d considered myself something of a humanist.” A liberal intellectual, a humanist, confronted with the choice of his life or another’s, joins the ranks of “the wild beasts” with the single stroke of a blade.
Tominaga died in February 2002. In April, I attended a joint memorial service for Tominaga and Jin Yuan, his principal Chinese reeducator. The two men had died within a year of each other in Tokyo and Beijing, respectively. In honor of their longstanding friendship, their families had chosen to hold a joint memorial service. The hall was overflowing, with more than fifty reeducation camp veterans among the mourners. Tominaga’s widow and daughter were present, as were Jin Yuan’s widow and a retinue of Chinese involved in preserving the memories of the reeducation camps. The ceremony took place in Japanese and Chinese.
No one but the Chinese reeducators and their Japanese wards can attest to what actually happened between them,[13] but any contradictions that may inhere to postwar relations between them seemed swept away by the emotions of the moment. It was apparent that both Jin Yuan and Tominaga had won the deep and reverent respect of the other veterans. Transcending their opposing roles during the war, the two men had achieved some kind of a personal understanding in the decades that followed.
Perhaps one reason Tominaga and the other veterans felt free to testify on camera is that, unlike most lower-ranking soldiers involved in Japanese war crimes, they had actually been tried, albeit in China, by a Special Military Tribunal convened in 1956. The footage from these trials is unforgettable, with Chinese peasants stripping to reveal scars as they shriek accusations at the weeping Japanese defendants. Of the 1,062 Japanese prisoners the People’s Republic of China incarcerated for war crimes, only forty-five were indicted at trial. The rest were repatriated immediately after the trials.
The U.S. decision, in 1945, to exempt the emperor from culpability in the Far Eastern War Crimes Tribunal, circumvented any serious examination of individual collaboration and national responsibility. In popular Japanese imagination, the “rogue” militarists behind Japanese aggression had been tried and judged and questions of individual participation abandoned to the postwar realities of hunger and survival. In this context, individuals willing to testify to their own actions were as rare as those who would hear them.
The fact that Tominaga and other witnesses are legally free to speak of their crimes may be compared with the situation in postwar Germany. Today, if former Nazis came forward with comparable testimony, they would find themselves behind bars, regardless of their age or the distance from their crimes. In Germany, which prosecuted its own, there is no statute of limitations for Nazi war crimes. The Japanese witnesses, by contrast, are legally exempt from prosecution and imprisonment, no matter what they admit. The Japanese government has never brought a single veteran to justice for war crimes. The ironic result of this position is that some have used their immunity to speak out vigorously against Japanese militarism and their personal crimes.
Japan has an ancient tradition of kataribe, those who recite oral histories of significant past events. Tomatsu describes the Nagasaki hibakusha kataribe as “those who relate to future generations unforgettable stories from the past, stories which must never be forgotten.”[14] In an eerie parallel, Matsui describes the “terrible truths” we must force ourselves to confront if we are not to repeat the folly of Japanese aggression in China. The stories of both the Nagasaki hibakusha and the veterans who testify in Japanese Devils offer little healing and no redemption, yet we ignore their collective, terrible wisdom at our peril. For as long as we find compelling only the stories of victims, the perpetrators will forever remain at arm’s length, outside the limits of the selves we imagine. What Japanese Devils ultimately teaches us is that we are all potential perpetrators.
In a world of global conflict, constantly bombarded with news of the latest atrocities against civilians, we must confront the twinned destinies of the Nagasaki hibakusha and the Japanese Devil, the Hutu and the Tutsi, the Sarajevan Muslim and the Serbian sharpshooter. When the tables turn abruptly, on which side of the ever-shifting line between aggressor and victim will we stand? As we try to imagine new platforms for bringing aggressors to justice, we need to balance our need for vengeance with our need to hear their stories.
Like amnesiacs
in a ward on fire;
we must find words
or burn.
— Olga Brumas
Notes
1. Tomatsu Shomei, Nagasaki 11:02 (Tokyo: Shaken, 1968). This book of photographs and survivor accounts resulted from Tomatsu’s extensive documentation during the 1960s, of Nagasaki‘s Catholic hibakusha community, which was largely ghettoized after the war.
2. Danis Tanovic, writer, director, No Man’s Land (97 minutes, 2001) – winner of the Best Foreign Picture Oscar in 2002.
3. Peter Maass, Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
4. Ibid., 227
5. Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (New York: Broadway Books, 1999), 68-69.
6. Coco Shrijber, director, First Kill (52 minutes, 2001). Distributed by First Run/ Icarus Films (New York).
7. Bestor Cram and Mike Majoros, directors, Unfinished Symphony (59 minutes, 2001). An emotional, poetic, and lyrical reflection on the VietnamWar, this audience favorite at the Sundance Film Festival employs archival footage of “Operation POW” in 1971, when U.S. soldiers home from combat pointedly retraced Paul Revere’s “freedom ride” between Concord, Massachusetts, and Bunker Hill — resulting in 410 arrests on charges of civil disobedience. In lieu of conventional voice-over narration, the directors use Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs as both a structuring principle and a mournful expression of unspeakable loss. (from City Pages documentary film festival website.)
8. Winterfilm, Inc., Winter Soldiers (95 minutes, 1972).
9. Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Picador, 1998).
10. Ibid., 95.
11. Istvan Deak, “The Crime of the Century,” New York Review of Books 44, no. 14 (26 September 2002): 48-51.
12. Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook, Japan at War: An Oral History (New York: The New Press, 1992), 466.
13. Matsui did not ask survivors to recount their treatment in the reeducation camps, describing their treatment in voice-over narration as: “Following Chou En-Lai’s motto ‘Even war criminals are human, Respect their Humanity,’ the newly created People’s Republic gave these war criminals humane treatment. Staff at both facilities overcame their personal enmity. Any corporal punishment or verbal abuse was forbidden, and prisoners were treated with extraordinary warmth and humanity in every way, from food, medical care and exercise, to education and culture. The war criminals, who had expected severe punishment, were both profoundly moved and remorseful. Their treatment eventually awakened their own consciences. They acknowledged their crimes during the occupation and apologized to the Chinese people.”
14. Tomatsu Shomei, Nagasaki <11:02> August 9, 1945, Linda Hoaglund, trans. (Tokyo, Shinchosha, 1995), 128.
Linda Hoaglund was born and raised in rural Japan where she attended Japanese public schools. She worked as a bilingual news producer for Japanese TV, later joining an independent American film production company as a producer. She currently subtitles Japanese films, represents Japanese directors and artists, and serves as an international liaison for film producers. Email: [email protected]
This article originally appeared in Critical Asian Studies 35:3 (2003).
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