Page 1 of 2 SPEAKING FREELY The general has it wrong
By Maurice O'Brien
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When General Toshio Tamogami published an essay entitled "Was Japan an
Aggressor Nation?" in October 2008, the reaction of the Japanese government was
to relieve him of his duties. After all, his stance on Japanese war
responsibility conflicted with the government's official position. Tamogami was
chief of staff of the Air Self Defense Force and had strong ties to right-wing
politicians.
His essay focused on three central arguments: that Japan's colonial rule in
Asia was moderate and based on legally recognized treaties, that the attack on
Pearl Harbor was carried
out purely in self-defense, and that Japan was not an aggressor during World
War II. The aim of this article is to weigh the evidence and submit a
counter-narrative that shows the weaknesses in his arguments.
Tamogami makes a number of unsubstantiated statements, but the essence of what
is erroneous about his essay is the sheer scale of what he omits.
Let's begin with his assertion that Japan's colonial rule in Asia was attained
"on the basis of treaties" and that "Japan obtained its interests in the
Chinese mainland legally under international law ... " [1] This assertion is
technically correct, according to the internationally accepted methods of
"legally" annexing territory at that time. Tamogami insists that Japan's
seizure of territory "was not a unilateral advance without the understanding of
those nations". But the "understanding" of those nations was obtained by
military force, and if there was any understanding, it was simply an
acknowledgment that Japan's advance could not be stopped.
Tamogami concedes this point when he admits that Japan "applied pressure", but
adds that "there were no treaties signed without some amount of pressure". This
is not necessarily true. The Anglo-Japan military co-operation treaty of 1902
was not signed under any kind of duress whatsoever. The same could be said of
the Franco-Russian alliance or the alliance of Germany and Austria prior to
World War I.
Tamogami's view that Japan's rule of Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan was
"completely different from the colonial rule of the major powers" is also
highly suspect. He asserts that, unlike in European colonies, Japan's colonized
subjects were allowed to undergo Japanese military training, as if that somehow
demonstrates a fundamentally fairer manner of rule. But it was hardly a
privilege to be conscripted for labor or military service, and he neglects to
mention that Asians who refused to bow in the direction of the Japanese emperor
were beaten and even killed for the insult. No European colonialists forced
such impositions on their subjects.
Moreover, the forced labor prevalent in Japan's Asian colonies does not suggest
a rule that was more enlightened than that of Europeans. Britain outlawed
slavery in the early 19th century, but the Japanese military regarded it to be
legitimate until 1945. True, British and French colonialists at times
perpetuated forced labor into the 20th century, since it was often considered
essential to the building of infrastructure in their colonies, [2] but their
coercion did not approach the scale implemented by the Japanese army.
Seven-hundred thousand Korean civilians were brought to Japan to work for
private firms in the 1930s and 1940s, and hundreds of thousands of other
Koreans were forced to perform harsh labor elsewhere in Japan's empire or
conscripted into the Japanese military. [3]
Reading the accounts of Asians during the early 1940s doesn't at all suggest a
rule more mild or humane than that of Europeans. Read, for example, what one
Chinese survivor of Japan's rule in Hong Kong recently remarked: "No food.
Martial law on the street. If you're careless, you don't realize martial law is
on, they open fire without warning. You're dead on the street ... Did they
treat Hong Kong people like normal human beings? Of course not, they treated
Hong Kong people like animals." [4] Since British rule in Hong Kong was never
described this way, it's fair to wonder why Tamogami chooses to deliberately
blind himself to the testimony of Asians who lived under Japanese rule.
He goes further than this, however, stating that "many Asian countries take a
positive view of the Greater East Asia War", and that "many of the people who
had direct contact with the Japanese Army viewed them positively ... ". We can
only guess at how Tamogami can possibly conclude this, since a parade of Asian
leaders have repeatedly said the opposite. In 1992, for example, the prime
minister of Singapore, Goh Chok Tong, said that Japan's occupation was a period
of "terror, fear and atrocities". [5] And only two weeks after Tamogami was
relieved of his duties, Taiwan's parliament adopted a resolution seeking an
apology and compensation from Japan for forcing women into sexual slavery
during the war. The resolution was passed by a unanimous vote. A similar
resolution was passed by South Korea's National Assembly a few weeks before.
[6]
The mere fact that both Taiwan and South Korea felt it necessary in 2008, a
full 63 years after the war ended, to pass formal resolutions asking Japan to
apologize and offer compensation is evidence enough that Tamogami is mistaken
in his assertion that "many Asian countries take a positive view of the Greater
East Asia War".
Tamogami states, without convincing evidence, that in comparison to other
countries, "Japan's colonial rule was very moderate." The evidence he cites in
justifying this opinion is that the populations of Manchuria and Korea both
almost doubled during the period of Japan's sovereignty. This, he says, is
"proof that Korea under Japanese rule was ... prosperous and safe", and that
Japanese rule in Manchuria was moderate and beneficial, because "People would
not be flocking to a place that was being invaded."
But this is nonsense. Large numbers of Chinese flocked to Hong Kong throughout
British rule there, but the arrival of workers in a colony during foreign rule
does not legitimize that rule. Tamogami would agree that European colonialism
was morally wrong, but then do a striking u-turn and deny that same wrongness
wherever Japan's rule was concerned. Why was Japanese rule so beneficial to
Asians but British rule not?
Tamogami then outlines the benefits of Japan's rule, including the building of
railways, the establishment of schools and the creation of industry. In
Manchuria and Korea, he writes, "The people in these areas were released from
the oppression they had been subjected to up until then, and their standard of
living markedly improved." Two points here: the standard of living in Korea and
Manchuria could have improved without Japan (as has occurred in the past 30
years), and whether Manchurians and Koreans were "released from oppression" as
soon as Japan appeared is dubious to say the least. In the opinion of many
Koreans, the oppression began when Japan arrived.
As for the building of schools, other colonial powers did the same. Take, for
example, Britain in India. British historian Peter Moss has written that the
British government "allocated a huge amount of money for uplifting education in
1813", and that there was "a great emphasis on primary education and high
schools" in the 1840s. Four universities had been established by 1882. [7] As
for infrastructure, Britain built India's first railway in 1853. India's
railway network consisted of 61,000 kilometers of track in 1920, and the
British also established large-scale irrigation systems in the Indian
countryside. [8] Did these advancements legitimize British colonial rule in
India? No, and neither did they in the case of Japan's rule in East Asia.
And here Tamogami is again unsure of his facts. He writes that Britain in India
"did not provide education for the Indian people", which is false.
Worse, he then makes the outrageous claim that the decline of overt racial
discrimination in the international arena is somehow to be credited to Japan's
military exploits. He writes that "if you look at the world today, it has
become the kind of world that Japan was urging at the time". Japan urged the
European powers to treat it as an equal, but it's false to say that the real
aim of this drive to achieve equality was an altruistic notion of a world
without racial discrimination. According to Tamogami, after the war a "world of
racial equality arrived", and this, he writes, was due to Japan's war effort:
"If Japan had not fought the Greater East War at that time, it may have taken
another one hundred or two hundred years before we could have experienced the
world of racial equality that we have today." So the Civil Rights Movement in
the United States in the 1960s achieved nothing? And exactly how did Japan's
wars in Asia in the 1940s lead to the decline of racism?
Tamogami purposely ignores Japan's overtly racial propaganda directed at other
Asians at the time. The nationalistic ideology that gained prominence in Japan
in the late-19th century has attracted little attention in Japan, but it bears
analysis precisely because it is so often ignored. In the pre-World War II era,
Japan's education system was modeled on Germany's, and the glorification of
unique racial characteristics and an emphasis on militarism were concepts
lifted directly from the propaganda of German ultra-nationalists.
It was taught that the Japanese race had a divine mission, in fact a "holy
task", to liberate Asia from the colonial powers of the West. It was depicted
as a "hundred year war" and a "struggle between the races". [9] During World
War II, official government
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