60 Years Ago This Week

[Undertoad]

An Anniversary to Forget (NY Times, reg. reqd)

Since reg is reqd, here is most of the article. By Joichi Ito from Chiba, Japan.

At bottom, the bombings don't really matter to me or, for that matter, to most Japanese of my generation. My peers and I have little hatred or blame in our hearts for the Americans; the horrors of that war and its nuclear evils feel distant, even foreign. Instead, the bombs are simply the flashpoint marking the discontinuity that characterized the cultural world we grew up in.
...
My grandmother often spoke about the defeated voice of the emperor over the radio and how this shook the foundations of their beliefs, but signaled the end of a traumatic era. With the fall of the emperor, the Shinto religion also collapsed, since it had been co-opted from the decentralized animism of its roots into a state-sponsored war religion.

My mother used to talk about the American occupation of our hometown in northern Japan when she was a child. Our house, the largest in the area, was designated to be the Americans' local headquarters. When the soldiers arrived, my great-grandmother, nearly blind at the time, was head of the household, my grandfather having died during the war.

My great-grandmother and my grandmother faced the occupiers alone, having ordered the children to hide. The Japanese had been warned that the invading barbarians would rape and pillage. My great-grandmother, a battle-scarred early feminist, hissed, "Get your filthy barbarian shoes off of my floor!" The interpreter refused to interpret. The officer in command insisted. Upon hearing the translation from the red-faced interpreter, the officer sat on the floor and removed his boots, instructing his men to do the same. He apologized to my great-grandmother and grandmother.

It was a startling tipping-point experience for them, as the last bit of brainwashing that began with "we won't lose the war" and ended with "the barbarians will rape and kill you" collapsed.

Just one year later my uncle sailed to the United States to live in a Japanese ghetto in Chicago and work in a Y.M.C.A. Eventually his strivings led him to become the dean of the University of Detroit Business School. My mother followed my uncle, making the United States her base.

Postwar Japan followed a similar trajectory of renewal. The economy experienced an explosion of growth from the rubble of flattened cities, led by motivated entrepreneurs and a government focused on rebuilding Japan. The United States, in its struggle to keep communism in check, became a strong supporter of Japan and opened its markets to Japanese products. The Liberal Democratic Party thrived under the protection of the United States and pushed its simple party line of "growth, growth, growth," stomping out opposition, including efforts to educate Japanese about the war. No one had the opportunity to look back at the past, and by the time I can remember anything, Japan was about the bullet train, the 1970 Expo in Osaka, world-class electronics and automobiles, and even a vibrant Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

My grandparents' generation remembers the suffering, but tries to forget it. My parents' generation still does not trust the military. The pacifist stance of that generation comes in great part from the mistrust of the Japanese military.