Essay of the week: V-J Day – We must never forget. But should we forgive?

Some of those thoughts coursed through my mind yesterday afternoon as I sat in the Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh as part of the congregation for the 70th anniversary service commemorating victory over Japan. A handful had taken part in that victory, which brought the Second World War to an end and finally put a stop to the killing of an estimated 57 million people but they are now a dwindling number and for the rest of us it was a time of commemoration and contemplation.

That forgotten war in the Far East certainly touched my family. Seventy years ago my father was preparing for Operation Zipper, the seaborne invasion of Malaya which was abandoned when the war ended, while his younger brother had fought at Kohima, the great killing battle which halted the Japanese advance in Burma in the summer of 1944. Both had cause to welcome the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not just because the fighting was over but also because it meant that there would no repetition of the mayhem at Okinawa, the bloodiest battle of the war, in which the Japanese lost 110,000 casualties and the Americans 80,000, just two months before the bombs were dropped.

At the time, no-one really knew that the decisive blow had been struck by the Soviet advance into Manchuria which forced the Japanese Emperor Hirohito to “endure the unendurable” by declaring his willingness to accept unconditional surrender. There was no other option, even though some members of Japan’s hierarchy could not accept this disgrace to their divine homeland. The emperor’s war minister, Korechika Anami, took the traditional exit of the Samurai warrior by dying with honour rather than falling into the hands of his enemies. To do this Anami committed seppuku, disembowelling himself with a sharp knife as he sat cross-legged in his house in Tokyo facing the Imperial Palace.

His story brings me back to the idea of forgiveness and what it means to different people. In the aftermath of Japan’s surrender, which was announced to a disbelieving nation at noon on August 15, 1945, the allies and the Japanese had to come to terms with the carnage that had been caused during the years of fighting. It soon became clear that during the war, the Japanese Army had committed atrocities which were not only impossible to catalogue but which challenged humanity. As Meirion and Susie Harris explained in the last chapter of Soldiers Of The Sun, their fair-minded history of the wartime Imperial Army, it had taken them not only time but also strength of character to complete the writing of the history, astonishingly the first account to be published in the West when it appeared in 1991: “The number and the hideous variety of the crimes defy even the most twisted imagination: murder on a scale amounting to genocide; rapes beyond counting, vivisection; cannibalism, torture; American prisoners-of-war allowed to drown in excrement in the hell ships taking them back to Japan for use as forced labour.”

And so it goes on, a litany of brutality and casual indifference that seems to make a mockery of the fact that those involved were fellow human beings and not some form of alien life. In a clumsy attempt to bring coherence to the unimaginable, some Western observers sought to explain the brutality by assuming that the Japanese were simply a cruel race devoid of redemption, that it was in their nature to bury people alive or to carry out dissections without anaesthesia and that they were racially indifferent to suffering. Others resorted to psycho-babble or fell back on dodgy history such as the importance of the bushido code, which guided the lives of samurai warriors. One commentator quoted by the Harrises argued that the reason for the cruelty could be found in the claim that traditionally, the Japanese have little knowledge of animal husbandry and therefore “had little experience of slaughtering”.

According to this theory Japanese soldiers were whipped into frenzy at the sight of blood because they had never been forced to kill animals for food. It’s an interesting hypothesis – vegetarianism was common in Japan for many years – but it does not deal with the moral dimension. During the war crimes tribunals which dealt with the main offenders, very few of those being tried expressed any regret for what they or their fellow soldiers were accused of doing. Furthermore they could not see anything particularly wrong in their actions; it was almost as if acting according to conscience was a foreign concept to the Japanese soldier. This was not a case of dumbly obeying orders given by a superior officer – the of-repeated excuse which many Nazi soldiers tried to use during similar war crimes trials – but it provides an interesting sidelight on the moral imperatives which guided the Japanese Army between 1937 (the attack on China) and 1945.

From the outset of the war crimes process, US interrogators and prosecuting counsels made it clear that they would not accept any defence based on “orders are orders” that have to be obeyed, presumably on pain of death. This placed responsibility on the individual but it also ignored a different social and cultural system in an army in which the ultimate authority was the figure of the Emperor Hirohito. His divine status gave the Japanese certain obligations and during the war he was a personification of national patriotism, not as a god to be worshipped – as many Westerners thought – but as a divine afflatus who guided people’s actions.

Unfortunately, this creed was perverted during the 1930s and the resultant belief in the pre-eminence of the warrior code known as bushido made it easier to influence soldiers’ actions so that once brutality was started, it accelerated through the exertion of group pressure. This also meant that no individual could be blamed but instead the fault would be shared amongst equals. As for the emperor, Hirohito was not only supreme but he was untouchable and that helped to keep him out of the frame when fingers were being rapped at the end of the war. Although the Australians wanted to prosecute him as a war criminal and for him to share the same fate as the many soldiers under his command, the Americans thought otherwise. The allied supreme commander General Douglas MacArthur argued that Hirohito should escape prosecution because he was far too important a cog in the administration of post-war Japan and that his co-operation trumped any demand for prosecution. The reasoning was quite simple: Hirohito could not co-operate with the allies in the task of getting Japan back to work if he was facing prosecution as a war criminal.

Later, the release of Japanese wartime records proved that Hirohito was not a powerless figurehead but an active participant in the conflict who was never forced to face up to his role during the war and as a result was never tainted by any complicity in war crimes. From there it was a short step to the belief that if the emperor was innocent, then so too must be the thousands of soldiers who served him. If there was any blame, this was placed conveniently on the heads of leaders such as prime minister Hideki Tojo, who accepted full responsibility for “the war in general” and with six other “Class A” suspects, was executed by hanging in December, 1948. That same year, the first steps were taken to embrace Japan as a Cold War ally and the memory of the exoneration of the imperial family was consigned to history.

But for historical research it might have been forgotten too. Thanks to the labours of Pulitzer Prize-winner, Professor Herbert Bix, of the University of Massachusetts, the truth is now known about the extent of Hirohito’s involvement in the war and the ways in which General MacArthur did his utmost to cover it up, to the long-term detriment of Japan and her people. The country was brought into the US orbit and eventually became a Western and Westernised ally. Within a couple of decades of the war, it had also become an economic superpower and people prospered as a result but at the same time there was an elephant in the room.

While the absolution of the Japanese imperial family helped that process, it meant that Japan never had to confront the reality of its wartime past. Although there have been various apologies over the years, none was considered to be truly adequate and the impression grew that Japan was indifferent to the crimes that had been committed in her name. At the same time, revisionist writers and academics have not only revised that history, they have but frequently glorified it, with the result in 1994 that prime minister Nagao Shigeto was able to claim that “the Pacific War was a war of liberation”. All this is in contrast to German willingness to confront its Nazi past and to acknowledge appalling crimes against humanity such as the Holocaust.

Just as disturbing as Japan's refusal to come to terms with its wartime past, has been the steady increase in the number of right-wing groups which seem to be united by a number of ancient enmities such as hatred of China, an unremitting dislike of Koreans, contempt for all manifestations of socialism and a glorification of the country’s imperial past. Shinzo Abe, the current prime minister, is no wild-eyed right-wing extremist but even he has reached out to conservatives by making conciliatory noises about increasing the country’s defence budget, honouring the Japanese dead of the Second World War (including presumably war criminals), and restoring the status of the controversial Yasukuni shrine in Chiyoda, Tokyo, which commemorates anyone who died in the service of the Emperor of Japan. In April this year, over 100 Japanese parliamentarians caused outrage in neighbouring China and South Korea after making a formal visit to the Shinto shrine because it is still regarded as a reminder of Japan’s refusal to repent for past misdeeds.

All this matters at a time when the war against Japan is being commemorated, not just in this country and in the US but across world in places where people suffered as a result of Japanese militarism. Seventy years separate us from that moment when Emperor Hirohito made his historic declaration and the truth began to sink in that the war was genuinely at an end. Not so long ago, three score years and 10 was supposed to be a human life-span, but nowadays it is just another way of measuring the passing of time. Even so, it is not without resonance as yesterday’s services of commemoration showed.

In that time, many things have changed – for good or for ill – but by the same token, much has also remained the same. That includes our understanding of forgiveness of our enemies, which remains as elusive a concept as ever and will probably continue to do so unless we all come to terms with what happened in the irrecoverable past. Until that happens, we have no option but to live in a bleak continuum in which the only words that make sense are those uttered by the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it.”