Prime minister, Mr. Koizumi still visits the shrine. Everytime he makes a comment about a visit, surrounding countries don't agree with him. Is it fun for Mr. Koizumi to get same reactions from themover and over again? I personally think that it is just a time to adjust recognitions of the history we shared between the countries. Why can't he start it now before he make whatever comments?
I have never been to the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo. I want to visit the shrine that was a place like Mecca for the wartime imperial Japan and I will when I am in Tokyo. I want to see what is there.
I may also go to visit Hiroshima because I have never been to the atomic bomb dome and the museum.
It is always good to have sensitive moments about our own history.
4 comments:
I think the solution rests with Japan disinterring the war criminals' bodies from the shrine cemetary (literally or symbolically) and in doing so more publicly renouncing the atrocities carried out. And not to self-flagellate but to more vigorously (more sincerely, perhaps) apologize to the victim countries -- in this instance, the Koreas and China.
I know there is some element in this issue of Japan having been on the losing side in WWII -- no one asks the Allied Countries to apologize for Dresden or Hiroshima, for example (nor, however do the former Allies try to glorify or ignore those events) -- but the very act of praying at a shrine which glorifies all those to whom it was built (including, at the moment, the war criminals) is to ignore the fact that very, very bad (beyond the regular badness of war) things were done in the name Japan by those who are given the same respect (by their inclusion at the shrine) as other war dead.
Like I say, dig up the war criminals' remains, offer a dignified but ignoble reburial and in doing so "cleanse" the shrine (and a nation's collective past, perhaps) so that when one prays there or otherwise pays homage to the war dead (as is their due!) then one is not giving that same respect to the war criminals, and thus not offering historical salt into the wounds of the victims of Japan's war atrocities.
while I agree with you Steve, the problem is that there is not so clearcut a line between the war dead and the war criminal in Japan. In part because they never went through the same purge that the Germans were forced through at Nuremburg, and so never had the opportunity to make those distinctions. Things were left this way for a variety of reasons to be sure, but it's that incompleteness with their past that leaves them confused.
I totally agreed what you have commented here. (You are a native speaker! I have to check the meanings of words in my dictionary, lol)
Actually, some of the Japanese politicians are thinking that it is better to have a national war memorial facility outside of the Yasukuni and non-religious.
After Japan lost in the war, because of the character of the imperial Japan, the head of state and Shintoism were the same, unlike Germany or Italy, we couldn't blame on just the political parties and the leaders.
Under the U.S. occupancy, the U.S. government didn't take the Emperor Showa to the war criminals court. Instead, the U.S. made the emperor to declare that he was not a god anymore. That was one of the U.S. strategies in the occupied Japan not to panic Japanese people.
The imperial family and the emperor remained as a symbol of unification in Japan and non-religious head of state.
This was another U.S. strategy that the U.S. wanted Japan as wall to the communism in the Soviet Union and China. In 50's, after Japan recovered its independence from the U.S., Peace treaty between countries were made in San Francisco.
It's getting just history description, not a comment anymore... :P
Anyway, retrospectively (and this is not impossible, but) people in 40s after the war and 50s might have done a better job to clarify facts and incidents during the wartime.
Excellent to hear there is a move to build a separate war memorial --by simply doing that the country has to answer "why" such a separate facility is required and dialogue is furthered.
But still, until Japan "deals" with the question of war ciminality there can be no reconcilliation within the country itself or with the victim countries' need for real apology (acknowledgment of wrong doing).
Mark, there is no need to identify to the letter all war criminals and legally determine if those selected for the list were indeed technically war criminals.
Nurembourg was not really a court of law, it did not identify war criminals. It formalized the punishment of them. The alternative was arbitrary execution of those already identified as war criminals. A document was declasified in the U.K. this week in which it was shown that Churchill wanted to summarily execute Hitler once he was found. It was already known that the same approach was Churchill's original option for all war criminals -- once they were found they were to be shot at once.
Nurembourg did save a few war criminals from the gallows, and I guess in that sense mimicked a court determining level of guilt or innocence. It had little to do with finding the truth as to whether one was or was not a war criminal and all to do with articulating to the world what atrocities had taken place -- there was no, for example, allowance that the defendants could use the forum to present their positions (or, bluntly, point to war criminality by the countries on the prosecution side).
To "disinter" Japan's war criminals from the shrine (and an actual removal of bodies of war criminals would prove incredibly symbolic and should be included) would, again as with the building of a secular, non-grave site memorial, only truly be accomplished by Japan raising the questions and answering them.
That is the very basis of so-called truth and reconcilliaton processes which are today the rage (because they work) and which predate even Nurembourg.
Simply, Japan has to talk about what it did, acknowledge it, hear the other side. The Prime Minister's actions are utterly counter to that sentiment. His actions are that of historical denial.
Post a Comment