[A-List] Japan: When Anti-War Is Not So Anti-War

[Jim Craven]

Why an anti-war film created an opposite effect and calls for peace only aroused unpleasant feelings? The reason, perhaps, lies on the way the story is narrated more on Japan's ambiguous attitude towards history in the real world. 
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Response: Last time when I was in China and the Chinese Government was vigorously protesting the visits of the Japanese PM to the Yasakuni Shrine and while masses of Chinese were protesting private clubs in Beijing and elsewhere that only allow Japanese and/or Chinese who speak Japanese and are brought in by a Japese person, I asked some of my friends about popular stentiment in China about Hiroshima and Nagasaki--did they regard them as war crimes and atrocities?

I was told that many, certainly not all Chinese, regard Hiroshima and Nagasaki as having been necessary and as events that saved a lot of lives--including Japanese ones--by ending the war that could have continued to drag on. They argued that the Japanese imperialists, in addition to their Unit 731 stuff with anthrax, botulism, plague, typhus, colera etc--experiments on live prisoners--were also working on their own atom bomb and would have certainly used it had they developed it. This was the same position my father took (he served in China and Myanmar during World War II with the 14th Air force fighting against Japanese imperialists--along with Kuomintang traitors who collaborated with them--and he thought that not enough atom bombs had been dropped on Japan--a position he gave up shortly before his death).

So imagine if the Chinese government were to erect a "memorial" to Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually celebrating these bombings as a necessary and good thing "for all of humanity" and instrumental in saving millions of Chinese lives. Do you think some of the fascists in Japan so enamored with visits to the Yasakuni Shrine and maintaining their ugly and revisionist textbooks in Japanese schools might have something to say about that? Do you think they would regard such memorials and celebrations by the Chinese as simply an internal matter and no one's business outside of China? I doubt it.

Jim C.





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