Atoning for World War II, 60 years later

A symbol of Japan as victim
In the south, 600 miles from Hanaoka, ground zero in Hiroshima symbolizes a view of the war long engraved in Japanese hearts: that of Japan as victim.

It was here, after all, that Japan faced the apocalypse of nuclear destruction in the blinding flash that wiped out the city on Aug. 6, 1945.

That a single bomb could kill 140,000 people — and another on Nagasaki three days later could kill 80,000 — obliterated from Japanese consciousness the history of much of what preceded it: Japan’s invasions of Asia, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

Indeed, Hiroshima’s monuments are often criticized for lacking the context of the bombing, though the main museum here has been expanded and revised in recent years to include the history of the war and the city’s value as a military target.

But the rhetoric here focuses on how all wars are brutal, rather than on how imperial Japan behaved.

Itsuo Inouye / AP Minoru Hataguchi, director of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, speaks in front of a photo panel of the "mushroom cloud" at the museum in Hiroshima in July. "If there is a nuclear war, then humanity will be extinguished, that's what Hiroshima and Nagasaki need to tell people," he said.

“For example in China, I know that we invaded, so I think that Japan did something that was not good. But if you use nuclear weapons, you don’t know whether humankind will be extinguished,” said Minoru Hataguchi, director of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. “We just want to say that atomic bombs should not be used.”

Outside the city there is the Holocaust Education Center, a museum founded by a Christian minister to teach Japanese about Nazi atrocities.

Its operators insist they are making no connection between the Holocaust and Hiroshima, but the museum’s location resonates deeply with the Japanese view of the bombings as a slaughter of innocents.

Its displays offer a broad context for Hitler’s rise to power and detailed information on the Final Solution, including a prominent section on a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, who issued the visas that saved 6,000 Jews.

But nowhere does the museum mention that Japan was Germany’s ally during the war, or that Japanese soldiers, like the Nazis, perpetrated mass killings and medical experiments on human beings.

Akio Yoshida, the center’s deputy director, said such issues were far beyond the scope of the museum.

“This is our way of establishing peace in the hearts of the children of Japan,” he said.

Compared with Germany, Japan found lacking

The comparison with Germany is not a welcome one in Japan.

Whenever Japan’s perceived failure to fully atone for the war comes up, critics hold Germany up as the model of a repentant nation — and find Japan lacking.

Indeed, the Japanese have done nothing to match the image of Willy Brandt, then the West German chancellor, on his knees in atonement at the former Warsaw Ghetto in 1970. Germany has given billions in reparations and in payments to Holocaust survivors. Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany.

Japan’s stock response has been to say that what the Nazis did — the extermination camps, the atrocities on an industrial scale — far overshadow the haphazard, disorganized way that Japan ran roughshod over its victims.

But a key to the difference between postwar Japan and Germany is that Japan still has not brought itself to fully renounce the prewar regime. The emperor system remains intact, and many important figures in wartime Japan were dusted off and brought back into power — one even becoming prime minister — after the American occupation.

Conservatives in Japan even go so far as to suggest that for Japan to renounce its wartime system is to renounce its own culture and identity.

“In a sense, they (the Germans) could put everything on the Nazis. They could say that the Nazis were bad, as if the people who did those things were a completely different people called Nazis,” Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura said in Parliament in the spring when asked about the comparison.

“But you cannot apply such classification to Japan easily,” he added. “The circumstances were different, what happened before the war was different and what happened after the war was different. In that sense, I wonder if simply comparing Japan with Germany is right.”

But not everybody in Japan buys that reasoning.

For people like Togashi in Hanaoka, only openness and honesty will move the country beyond its tortured history.

Kiyoko Nakano, taking photographs with her husband one evening beside the ruins of the Hiroshima dome, draws the standard Japanese lesson from the bombing of her hometown: that all killing of innocents is a crime and should be condemned.

But, unlike many of her countrymen, she includes her own country among the list of criminals — and bitterly criticizes forces in Japan who have sought to obscure Japan’s wrongdoing.

“They always want to hide those bitter experiences,” she said. “But if we don’t face ourselves, Japan can never progress.”

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