I’ve been listening to an audio version of Stephen Ambrose’s posthumously published To America: Personal Reflections of a Historian. In the book he praises America (and Germany for that matter) for owning up to past injustices and atrocities. He also makes a claim similar to the following (the wording may not be precise, but the context is identical):
This seems a rather bold and incendiary statement: is there any truth to it or is it a complete exaggeration?
Just curious-
Unfortunately, this statement is more true than false. Having spent almost three years in Japan, I learned first hand how very little the Japanese know about the atrocities their country committed during WWII. Unlike Germany which has confessed its sins of the past, the Japanese way seems to be to sweep it all under the rug.
Check out the forum on www.gaijinpot.com. You could even post this same question their and see how the ESL teachers respond. Japan still has a long way to go.
The Japanese certainly aren’t happy about the whole A-bomb thing and I doubt anyone believes the US was justified in using nuclear weapons, but the Japanese I know certainly do not believe the US attacked their country for no reason. Of course, the Japanese people I’m able to discuss such things with are ones who speak English well, and fluent English speakers tend to be more liberal and internationally-minded than average. So my sample is biased. Still, almost everyone I know is willing to admit they were on the wrong team during WWII. The sole exception is one young man who I think was just trying to get a rise out of me as an American.
Elderly men who were schoolboys during the war have told me that they spent their childhoods being groomed for military service and didn’t know real freedom until the American occupation. A young woman I know said that the Japanese of that time period were “Crazy, like the Nazis.”
However, it does seem to be true that the average Japanese person knows little about the brutal actions of the Japanese military in China during WWII. Anecdotally, when I was an undergrad I took a course in Chinese cinema, and there were several exchange students from Japan in the class. After we watched Red Sorghum (which contains a graphic scene of a Japanese soldier torturing a Chinese man) they were in tears, and said they’d had no idea the Japanese were so cruel to the Chinese during the war. One told me her grandfather had served in China, but that he never talked about it. They all seemed genuinely shocked, so I think Japanese war atrocities really were news to them. But to their credit, they were willing to accept that the Japanese really had done such things.
I don’t have any textbooks available, but my impression is that while that exact claim probably isn’t the case (or at least not a common case. There are many different school-use history textbooks produced, with a range of biases and oversimplifications), it’s not all that far off from actuality. The war is often presented in terms of ‘we attacked Pearl Harbor, then America retaliated by obliterating Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe and most of the rest of the Japan before dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During this time, Japanese soldiers fought bravely, but did nothing controversial. The end.’
Sadly, things like the Rape of Nanking, the ‘comfort women’, Unit 731, slave labor, and treatment of prisoners have met with offical government responses ranging from silence to outraged denial, and these are the people who have final say in approving what goes into public school textbooks. To this day, many leading politicians (most notably Tokyo gov. Shintaro Ishihara) state that many of these atrocities never happened. The leading newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun (with its English version The Daily Yomiuri) shares this view, using terms like “the so-called ‘Nanking Massacre’” in their editorials.
There are, however, a significant number of Japanese NGO’s pushing to have the events of WWII publicized and taught in schools, so these views are far from universally held throughout Japan.
Actually, this reminded me of a CNN article that I read a while back that stated that as history goes on, the US tends to lean that it was not justified, but many Japanese historians have leaned toward the thought that it was justified.
Anyway, I am NOT arguing whether they were or were not justified, that is GD land, I was just stating that even in Japan it is an issue with people on both sides.
Quote from article:
“While American scholarship has undercut the U.S. moral position, Japanese historical research has bolstered it. The Japanese scholarship, by historians like Sadao Asada of Doshisha University in Kyoto, notes that Japanese wartime leaders who favored surrender saw their salvation in the atomic bombing. The Japanese military was steadfastly refusing to give up, so the peace faction seized upon the bombing as a new argument to force surrender.”
You can read the article here.
Thanks Derleth. Ah, the ways in which I mess things up, shall I count them one by one?
While I agree with the Doper below that this is a GD, I have to interrupt to say "I TOTALLY believe the A-bomb was justified and that it saved hundreds of thousands more American lives than it took. There were too many kamikaze craft in caves, too many trained soldiers still around, Iwo Jima and Okinawa had been way too bloody to repeat, the propaganda machine was in such full force that even women and children were prepared to fight to the death and Japan was not going to surrender- it was the right thing IMO.
Ambrose’s statement is pure BS. While Japanese textbooks certainly have a slant to them, they do cover the era of Japanese imperialism (and Nanking, albeit briefly). I think it would be fair to say that they cover the events leading up to Pearl Harbor in more detail than American schools do; I walked into a classroom after a history class had finished to see a discussion of the ABCD encirclement of Japan on the board, a topic that I definitely don’t remember covering in any detail in my 9th grade history course. I’m not arguing that the Japanese don’t receive a softened take on the Imperial Army’s actions or that they don’t really internalize that information. But claims that they aren’t taught anything about WW2 are simply garbage.
It’s also worth noting that Japanese textbooks are currently in a trend towards liberalization. In a well-written and detailed chapter in his book The Victim as Hero, James Orr describes how Japanese textbooks can be split up into three eras: an initial period of relatively progressive textbooks under the American occupation, an “apologist interlude” from 1957 to the mid-1970s during which the Japanese government first asserted control over the production of textbooks, and a final period in which censorship has been softened due to an increase in the international importance of China and the lawsuits of Ienaga Saburo. There’s also a good chapter on Japanese textbooks in Hein and Selden’s Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States.
I live in Japan and I’ve encountered some pretty wild versions of history from students, but I haven’t run into that one yet.
Here’s the view of 20th century history that I find it most common in Japan:
“In the 1930’s, Japan was expanding its colonial sphere of influence just as England, France, the US, and other colonial powers had been doing. Since this was unpopular in Europe, Japan had to ally itself with Germany so that it could enjoy the same imperial rights the Europeans had been enjoying for centuries. To provide a pretext for attacking Japan, Roosevelt allowed the Japanese Navy to attack Pearl Harbor. A couple of uninteresting things happened in the intervening years. Then, in 1945, when Japan was utterly helpless, the US dropped 2 bombs on them for no reason whatsoever. Many women and children died, and people still suffer the effects to this day. Today Japan is safe and secure from all external threats because of its peaceful attitude toward other nations.”
That’s a paraphrase of what they generally say about it. To be sure though, we Allies have not owned up to our own atrocities in WW2 such as the bombing of Dresden and other population centers in the war. And it’s true that the A-bomb was dropped for no other reason than it cost a billion dollars to build and had to be used, the US wanted Japan to surrender to the US only and without conditions, and Truman wanted to scare the pants off the Russians. We knew that Japan had no warmaking capability and that they were making secret overtures for peace to the Russians.
I highly recommend that you read Downfall, by Richard Frank. It’s probably the most up to date reputable work on the fall of the Japanese empire (as far as I know, he’s the only scholar to have made use of recently declassified ULTRA military intercepts rather than just the MAGIC diplomatic intercepts). He pretty thoroughly debunks most of what you just said (which sounds very much like the arguments of Gar Alperovitz and Ronald Takaki).
You’re forgetting one very important reason: It was estimated that invading Japan conventionally could cost the US hundreds of thousands of lives, with probably millions of Japanese deaths. The A-bomb seemed like a good deal in comparison.
All in all, these seem like perfectly good reasons for the time!
In any case, doesn’t the US sphere of cultural influence extend to Japan? Don’t they see WWII movies? Yeah, yeah, fiction vs. real life, but very often there are actual events portrayed. Do they view this as propoganda of the type we’d see coming from the old USSR?
Uh, didn’t you start this thread to ask what the Japanese thought about WWII? I mean, I can’t accuse you of hijacking your own thread, but I don’t see what your personal opinion of the A-bomb has to do with anything, since you aren’t Japanese. It has been my experience that the Japanese do not believe it was justified, although Hermitian has a different perspective.
This thread makes me wonder what is taught about WW2 in other countries, besides Japan. I mean what everyone learns as part of a mandatory curriculum, not in optional courses taken by students interested in history. It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s not much; the purpose of mandatory history courses is to teach students the most basic, important parts of their nation’s history, and it’s easy to give less emphasis to certain periods.
In the mandatory Canadian history course I took, about two or three weeks were devoted to both world wars. The causes of both wars were discussed, along with a few of the battles in WW1 where Canadian involvement was significant, such as Vimy Ridge. The WW1 section was largely about a domestic event, the Conscription Crisis (where French Canadians strongly opposed a draft). The WW2 section, was mostly about the causes of the war, the internment of people of Japanese origin, and the Holocaust. For both wars, there’s a lengthy discussion of bad things that Canada did, which is interesting if some people claim that Japanese students don’t learn much about the bad things that Japan did. (This fits in with the general theme of Canadian history as I learned it in school: English people did bad things to French people, aboriginals and other minorities.)
What I mean to say, though, is that I didn’t really learn much at all about WW2 in school. I’m not sure how it is, say, in the US or the UK or Germany (or Japan, for that matter), but it would be easy to turn WW2 into a minor part of a nation’s long history to downplay its negative aspects.
I learned almost nothing about World War One in school. Ever.
It might be worth your while to get your hands on the book History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History
That’s an interesting point, Roches. Although I think the claim quoted in the OP is an exaggeration, it may be fair to say that the Japanese school curriculum downplays Japan’s role in WWII. (I don’t really know since I’ve never seen a Japanese history textbook, and it would do me little good if I had – my Japanese reading ability can barely get me through a menu.) However, I think it would also be an exaggeration to say that the US, Germany, or any other country was really all that good at presenting a balanced and honest view of their own history in the public school textbooks. This is especially true for things a country might want to forget, like atrocities it committed and wars it didn’t win.
For instance, thinking back to the required history courses I had as a student in the American public school system, we learned essentially nothing about the Vietnam War, the Korean War, or even the War of 1812. There was a thread here a while back on the War of 1812 where I learned more than I ever did in school. As I mentioned then, I think the impression most American kids would get from what little is said about it in school is that those fiendish Brits just couldn’t accept that we’d whupped them during the Revolutionary War, so they came back over here in 1812 for payback but we whupped them again. Go USA!
I suspect Canadian schools portray things a little differently.
Thinking of WWII, although I can’t back this up with any cites I did have a German language professor in college who said that when she was working in Austria she was surprised by the extent to which the Austrians downplay their role in the war. She said they like to paint themselves as innocent victims of the invading Germans, and that many young Austrians aren’t even aware that Hitler was Austrian.
Or, to finally be brief after all this nattering on, I don’t think glossing over negative parts of your own history or trying to paint your past in the best possible light is a Japanese problem. It’s a human problem.
The discussion on whether dropping the atomic bomb on Japan was justified or not is clearly GD territory and has in fact been done over there at least twice I know of.
Here are links to them if anyone is interested.
How many American lives were saved with the dropping of the atomic bomb
Was dropping the bomb on Japan unnecessary?
It is worth noting that there is no clear consensus on this issue…makes for an interesting debate.
I agree completely. And I would like to add that if a culture refuses to come to terms with its past, it is up to the rest of the world to hold them to it.
The best example of this denial that I can come up with is the Armenian Genocide of 1915. This is really the first instance of genocide before the Holocaust. In fact, when Hitler’s advisers were not sure they could get away with the genocides, Hitler told them “who remembers the Armenians?” I confess that I knew nothing of the 1.5 million Armenians murdered by the Turks until I read Black Dog of Fate by Peter Balakian (excellent book, read it). Even today, many Turks deny the genocide ever occurred and that this is all a history conspiracy cooked up by Armenians. I don’t know how wide-spread that belief is, but I’m pretty sure the Turkish government has refused to acknowledge it; it’s definately more prevalent in Turkey than those who say the Holocaust never happened in America.
Also, there is Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, the memoirs of an American ambassador in Turkey during the genocide (Balakian often quotes him). Interestingly, there is a complete online version of the book here: Morgenthau
I don’t mean to hijack, but I figure this is a good as any place to mention this stuff. I never knew about it, no one ever taught it to me, and I liked history.