This week, Barack Obama became the first serving American President to visit Hiroshima, the site of the first atomic bomb to be dropped on a city on 6 August 1945 – a weapon used, of course, by the Americans. A lot of the media coverage mentioned that Obama did not apologise for the bombing, but that would have been wholly inappropriate and quite wrong.<\/p>\n
It is easy – and indeed totally right – to be horrified by the death and destruction that was wreaked that day and the deaths and injuries that followed up to this day. \u00a0But what most media reports failed to highlight was Japan’s culpability for this event and the country’s continued failure to acknowledge the role it played in the Second World War.<\/p>\n
In October 1998, I was a member of \u00a0a trade union delegation to Japan that visited Tokyo and Kyoto. Afterwards I stayed on in the country for a few more days on my own because I wanted to go to Hiroshima. I spent a whole day in the city and some three hours at the Peace Memorial Museum.<\/p>\n
Of course, I was horrified by the photographs and films that I viewed and the statistics for death and injury that were displayed. But I was also disturbed by the account presented in the displays, all of which were in English as well as Japanese. The whole emphasis of the narrative up to the dropping of the bomb was one of the Japanese as innocent victims rather than as ruthless aggressors.<\/p>\n
In effect, the Second World War did not begin with German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938 or German invasion of Poland in 1939, but with Japanese occupation of Manchuria in China in 1931. What the Chinese understandably call ‘the rape of Nanjing’ by Japanese soldiers in December 1937-January 1938 was played down at the museum with the figures for Chinese deaths being disputed.<\/p>\n
Then, when it came in the museum’s description of the start of the war between Japan and the USA in December 1941, this occurrence was represented as some kind of accidental outbreak of hostilities rather than an unprovoked and undeclared attack on Pearl Harbor with the substantial loss of American lives.<\/p>\n
The museum gives little attention to the well-substantiated fears at the time that an American land invasion of mainland Japan would have resulted in months of further war and hundred of thousands of further American (and Japanese) deaths. \u00a0All the evidence of Japanese resistance on island after island made it clear that the Japanese would have fought long and bitterly with massive further casualties and only the clear demonstration of the effect of the atomic bomb prevented this scenario.<\/p>\n
In some ways, the most memorable thing I saw in Hiroshima was not in the Peace Memorial Museum; it was in one of the nearby parks; it was a monument to the Korean victims and survivors of the bombing. The English label explains that, of the roughly 200,000 people who were killed that day, some 20,000 were Korean. What were they doing in a Japanese city? Well, Japan had ruthlessly occupied Korea since 1910 and forced Koreans into both military and civilian service in the war effort.<\/p>\n
The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 but it took until 1970 for this monument to the Korean victims to be erected. Could it be that the Japanese valued Japanese lives above Korean lives?<\/p>\n
What I am describing here is part of a much bigger picture: the failure of so much of Japanese society even today to acknowledge their culpability for what happened in the Pacific theatre of war. School text books present a whitewashed version of the Japanese role in the war and some Japanese politicians still attend ceremonies at the burial site of Japanese war criminals.<\/p>\n
This is in stark contrast to the situation in post-war Germany where, to their credit, Germans have acknowledged the horrors of Nazism and freely discuss and debate all aspects of Germany’s actions in the war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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