Paul Harris

[Ed. Note: The author is a barrister in Hong Kong and a member of the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor. The headline was added by the editor.]

The historian George Santayana wrote: "Whoever forgets the past is doomed to relive it."

Striking contrasts can be seen between different countries in their attitudes toward learning about the past, especially where the past contains horrific atrocities and crimes against humanity, the reality of which is difficult to face.

In Europe, the postwar West German government paid millions of dollars in compensation to the victims of Nazism, and successive West German leaders publicly apologised for crimes committed by Germany under Nazi rule. The West German school curriculum also included compulsory study of the Nazi atrocities. Schoolchildren were taken to visit concentration camps so that they would understand the horror of what was done. This has continued to be the approach to the past of unified Germany since 1989.

In Japan, however, whose military leadership between 1931 and 1945 was responsible for millions of murders of Chinese people, Southeast Asians and others in its "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," much of the truth has been suppressed. For much of the period since World War II (the "Pacific War" as it is known in Japan), most Japanese children have not been taught at school about the war crimes for which Japan was responsible.

These war crimes include the Rape of Nanjing in which hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of China's then-capital city were systematically raped, murdered and mutilated by the Japanese army in a deliberate attempt to break the spirit of China's resistance to the Japanese invasion; Unit 731 near Harbin in Manchuria, a large-scale research establishment for medical experimentation on living humans at which prisoners were routinely vivisected (cut up while alive), injected with organisms of deadly diseases and frozen to death; the use of hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos and European prisoners of war as slave labourers, thousands of whom died of hunger or disease or in insupportable conditions on "hellships"; thousands of Chinese, Korean and other women forced into prostitution for the Japanese army; and thousands of prisoners of war who were murdered, often as part of the Japanese army tradition of testing the "officer calibre" of new junior officers by requiring them to execute a prisoner of war with their sword.

The attitude of most post-World War II Japanese governments has been to present Japan as a victim of the war with a heavy emphasis placed on the suffering caused by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nothing is ever said though about Japan's own atomic bomb programme in what is now north Korea, which is believed to have been close to completion of an atomic bomb at the time that the American bombs were dropped. Minimal or no compensation has been paid to victims of Japanese atrocities, the Japanese government always stating that it is absolved from paying compensation by the terms of the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty which formally ended the state of war between Japan and the wartime Allies. Successive Japanese governments led by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) have resolutely refused to apologise for any of Japan's wartime actions.

A Japanese socialist prime minister, Tomiichi Murayama, did publicly apologise for Japan's wartime actions. However, the outcry against this apology in Japanese government circles was so great that Murayama was pressured into qualifying the apology by stating that he made it in a personal capacity. This has not prevented later Japanese governments, however, from claiming that Japan has now apologised.

A key battleground in Japan has been over the issue of what is included in school textbooks. The Japanese government has always reserved to itself the right to censor school textbooks. For a few years during the American occupation after World War II, school history and current affairs textbooks told children about what had happened during the war. However, this approach changed as soon as the occupation ended; and during the 1950s, censorship of all references to Japanese crimes against humanity became progressively more comprehensive.

One historian and author whose textbooks were particularly affected by the censor's deletions was Saburo Ienaga, an academic whose books were repeatedly censored by the removal or softening of truthful descriptions of atrocities. A notable example was the government's insistence that references to the Nanjing Massacre had to be mentioned as "what happened in confusion," although the massacre, in fact, involved the systematic killing of hundreds of thousands of people over a period of weeks. Another issue in dispute was the government's insistence that all textbooks avoid the negative expression "aggression" in relation to the Japanese army's occupation of China and instead use only the term "military advance." In 1965 and 1967, Prof. Ienaga initiated two court cases against the Japanese government based on the argument that screening textbooks violated the freedom of expression and freedom of education guaranteed in the Japanese Constitution and thus were unconstitutional and illegal.

Ienaga eventually lost both of these lawsuits after numerous appeals. The first suit lasted 27 years until 1993, and the second case lasted 22 years from 1967 to 1989. In 1984, he initiated a third suit arising from nine screening comments made by the government on his draft textbooks from 1980 to 1983. In 1989, a lower level court ruled against most of his arguments. He then appealed to the High Court, which ruled that three of the nine screening comments were illegal. Since the government did not appeal the High Court decision, these three screening comments, which included those relating to the description of the Nanjing Massacre and acts of brutality by the Japanese army, remained established as being illegal.

In 1997, Ienaga's appeal on the remaining six points in his third case finally reached the Japanese Supreme Court, which ruled 3-2 in his favour that the Education Ministry had acted illegally when it removed from one of his textbooks a description of Japan's biological experiments at Unit 731 (the existence of which has never been acknowledged by the Japanese government, although it is documented because of the later confessions by some of the doctors involved in the activities there).

However, despite the battle by Ienaga and a group of supporters for more than 35 years, his victory in 1997 was only partial. The Supreme Court rejected claims that seven other portions of his book had been illegally censored, including a passage that had been deleted which described the rape of Chinese women by Japanese soldiers during the Second World War.

This partial victory reflects a continuing divide in Japan between those, like Prof. Ienaga, who want the truth about World War II to be known and revisionists who claim that well-documented war crimes and atrocities did not occur. These revisionist claims are often used by right-wing militarist groups and their sympathisers which continue to exercise an insidious influence on Japanese society. Those like Prof. Ienaga who have spoken out for the truth have often been physically attacked by extremists or otherwise penalised. When Ienaga first gained a victory in one of his textbook lawsuits in 1970, for instance, right-wing extremists issued death threats against him (as well as against the judge and the lawyers involved in the case), and his house was surrounded day and night by thugs who kept him awake by shouting slogans and banging pots and pans. The actions of those who have fought for the truth have required courage as well as determination and persistence.

This year, in a cynical change of approach, the Japanese government announced the end of censoring textbooks but has supported the preparation of a new textbook which suppresses Japan's wartime atrocities. Under intense pressure from China and south Korea, some changes have been made to this new textbook, but it remains an example of "revisionist" history designed to conceal, rather than illuminate, the past.

Meanwhile, claims for compensation in the Japanese courts by victims of these atrocities are almost always dismissed. An action by former slave labourers for the Japanese industrial corporation Nishimatsu is currently in progress; but if past precedent is any guide, the claim will again be rejected.

Many Japanese World War II atrocities are not fully known. This lack of information is because at the end of World War II- between the Japanese surrender and the occupation of Japan and Japanese-held territories by the Allies-enormous numbers of Japanese government documents were deliberately destroyed to prevent them from falling into Allied hands.

In Hong Kong, for example, all government records of the Japanese occupation, apart from a small number of land transactions, were completely destroyed and have never been found. It is almost certainly due to this destruction that so little is known now about the Japanese occupation government's deliberate attempt to exterminate part of the population of Hong Kong in order to increase Hong Kong's defensibility as a military fortress. Large numbers of people were stopped in the street, driven into camps, then forced onto ships which were towed out to sea and then sunk, burned or the passengers forced into the water to drown. No one now knows how many people died during these operations, but the number certainly runs into the thousands.

Unless the Japanese government frankly acknowledges the enormity of what Japan did from 1941 to 1945 and takes active steps to help establish the truth and provide some redress to the surviving victims, there cannot be true reconciliation in Asia. If, instead of following the path of reconciliation, the Japanese government takes steps which give comfort and support to right-wing militants, there will be a danger that, in Santayana's expression, history will be relived-a repetition of history that would be a catastrophe for Asia and the rest of the world.