Seventy years ago today, representatives of the Empire of
Japan boarded the battleship USS Missouri
in Tokyo Bay, and signed the instrument of surrender to the Allies, effectively
ending the Second World War.
It was a rather pathetic end to their dreams of conquest;
of establishing overlordship over much of Asia; of pushing back the empires of
Britain, America and Russia; and of taking (in the words of yet another
imperial wannabe) their rightful place in the sun. They’d started out more than
ten years before, with incidents in Manchuria along the Soviet border
(actually, more than 20 years before, if you count the invasion and occupation
of Korea), and expanded into China, Southeast Asia and vast swaths of the
Pacific.
And they ended with their naval and armies incapable of effective
defense (much less major attacks), their homeland in ruins and two of their
cities smoldering under nuclear clouds. And thereby agreeing to the terms of
unconditional surrender in a formal ceremony on an enemy warship anchored practically
at the doorstep of the Imperial palace.
Just about right up to the end, the Japanese government had
been living in cloud cuckoo-land with respect to their geopolitical reality.
Even when they realized that it was a nuclear bomb that the US had dropped on
Hiroshima, they calculated that we couldn’t produce more
than one or two more, and therefore their malnourished,
ill-equipped and sporadically-led people could fight on in such a way that they
could still make an invasion too costly for us to consider. It took the second
attack on Nagasaki and Harry S Truman’s promise of “a rain of ruin from the air”
to focus their minds on their changed status.
Interestingly, it seems evident that they’ve never quite
lost that vague disconnect with reality—even today they refuse to acknowledge
any responsibility for the atrocities they committed as a matter of policy in
every country they invaded in World War II. Their eyes lose focus and slide
away from any picture of mass murder, biological warfare, forced prostitution
and a whole host of other violations of human decency standards. Most recently,
to mark the 70th anniversary a couple of weeks ago of Japan’s
announcement that it would surrender, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expressed “deepest
remorse” and “sincere condolences” to the empire’s victims, but lectured the
world not to expect future generations of Japanese to “be predestined to
apologize.”
Well, you know, I’d be more inclined to let those future
generations off the hook if past and present ones—the ones within living memory
of the crimes committed by the government and military of Japan—had manned up
and first admitted to their actions; then acknowledged they were wrong, wrong,
wrong without any mitigation whatsoever; and then proclaimed multiple times that
they are heartily ashamed of those collective crimes and vow never to go down
that path again.
This they have none of them done. It’s that old “mistakes
were made” shrug, followed by turning the conversation to a new topic.
And that new conversation topic these days is Abe’s
attempt to expand Japan’s military remit beyond the defense-of-the-home-islands
restrictions that were placed on them 70 years ago. For obvious reasons.
You know, I understand that you could get uneasy looking
over your shoulder at China; it’s not a settling kind of view. But it might be
less imposing if you’d owned up to the dreadful things your government did to
their people, instead of pretending that nothing ever happened under your
watch.
So it’s 70 years on from that much-photographed ceremony
on the Missouri. But I wonder how far
we’ve progressed since then? How far can we if some of us are still in denial?
