What the War Left Behind — Memory and Lessons

Up to this point, over nine installments, we have traced why Japan moved toward war and why it could not turn back. The impatience of modernization, the side effects of victory, the runaway action of the army in the field, international isolation, the decision for a war it could not win, the reality of the home front, the calamity of the battlefield, the structure that could not bring things to an end, and defeat and occupation. What the final installment asks is what this long war ‘left behind.’ That is not a tidying-up of the past, but also a question to us ourselves, who live in the present. Rather than rushing to easy conclusions, building a foothold for continuing to think is the role of this installment.

Behind the Numbers, Each Single Person

In the recent great war, the Japanese war dead are said to number roughly 3.1 million. This is an approximate figure that the government has treated as its object of mourning, with a breakdown showing about 2.3 million military personnel and military employees, and about 800,000 civilians who died in air raids, the atomic bombs, and the like. Depending on the method and scope of tabulation, the figures have a range and cannot be treated as a single fixed value; even so, the magnitude of loss that this scale tells of does not change.

And what must not be forgotten is that this is the figure on the Japanese side. As we have confirmed repeatedly in this series, Japan’s war brought immense harm to the neighboring countries of Asia, beginning with China. The people of the regions that became battlefields, the people placed under colonial rule, prisoners and civilians — the numbers on the side of the perpetrator, too, must be looked at without being separated from the numbers of the victims. Harm suffered and harm inflicted are not two opposing stories, but realities born of one and the same war, both of which should be faced directly.

But what matters most is that none of these are merely ‘numbers.’ Behind each one of the figure of 3.1 million there was a name, a family, and a future that was never fulfilled. There was a mother who received word of a son’s death in battle, a child who grew up never knowing a father’s face, and bereaved families who lived through the postwar years without even the remains being returned. Their postwar did not end with the Jewel Voice Broadcast. The first, and heaviest, thing the war left behind lay precisely within the lives of the people left in this way.

Reconciliation, a Work Without End

Postwar Japan has taken on the long and difficult work of re-forging relations with those it had wounded. Through the Japan–Korea Basic Treaty of 1965 and the Japan–China Joint Communiqué of 1972, relations were normalized, and exchanges in economy and culture were built up. On the 50th anniversary of the war’s end in 1995, Prime Minister Murayama issued a statement that clearly expressed remorse and apology for the damage and suffering that colonial rule and aggression had inflicted on the people of neighboring countries. This statement is said to have been broadly carried on by successive cabinets thereafter.

Even so, reconciliation is not a completed event but a process that continues even now. Differences of position over historical understanding, the interpretation of postwar compensation and individual claims, the debate over Yasukuni Shrine, the question of textbooks and of how memory is shaped — on these points, assessments diverge sharply, both between nations and within the country. On one side there is the view that apology and remorse have already been shown sufficiently; on the other, the view that reconciliation comes into being only when the other party is satisfied, and so has not ended. Both positions have a logic and a historical course that support them.

This series does not force either conclusion upon the reader. Yet there is one thing that is certain. Both turning one’s eyes away from the fact that friction exists, and making light of the other’s pain, push reconciliation further away. To take on difficulty as difficulty, and not to close off dialogue — that itself may be the homework the war has set us.

The Peace Constitution, and the Choice to Keep Questioning

Among the things the war left behind, the greatest as an institution is, perhaps, the ideal of the renunciation of war symbolized by Article 9 of the constitution. This article, which a Japan that rose from the scorched earth of defeat raised up as a vow never again to walk the same path, has long defined the form of the postwar nation.

That said, the debate over Article 9, too, is not something that has been settled. Over how to reconcile it with the realities of national security, and how the article should be interpreted, or perhaps revised, positions are greatly divided. Here, too, rushing to a conclusion and siding with one position is not the role of this series. What is important is to not forget that at the root of that debate lie the 3.1 million lives lost in that war and the memory of the harm brought to neighboring countries. The question of how to protect peace is inseparably bound to the question of how to remember the past.

Not Drawing a Conclusion, as a Conclusion

For those who hoped for a single tidy line of moral lesson from this series, a sense of unfulfillment may remain. Yet we will say neither ‘therefore Japan was wrong’ nor ‘therefore Japan was right.’ Either simple conclusion would conceal the complex structure we have seen until now.

The impatience that hurried modernization, the arrogance that victory brought, the institution that lacked a mechanism to stop, the organization that begins to move while the locus of responsibility stays ambiguous, the people who lived amid fervor and control, the harm inflicted and suffered that crossed at the front and on the home front — none of these were the fault of particular villains alone, nor were they fate. Ordinary people, each in their own place, were swept little by little toward a direction from which there was no turning back. That accumulation was that war. For this very reason, rather than reassuring ourselves by condemning the people of the past from afar, it is important, we think, to keep imagining what we ourselves could have done had we been in that same current.

The greatest thing the war left behind may, perhaps, be the question itself: ‘keep on thinking.’ Memory weathers away, and those who knew that time grow fewer year by year. For this very reason, rather than memorizing an answer, taking on the question and handing it on. If this series could become even a modest occasion for that, there is no joy that surpasses it.

Thank you so very much for staying with us this far. To each and every one who read through this long journey of ten installments to the very end, we offer our heartfelt gratitude. May this series become a small entrance to your own time of continuing to question.

【The War the Textbooks Don’t Tell: Japan’s Hidden History — End】