Skeletons in the Japanese Closet: A Selection from Jared Diamond’s Upheaval (2019)

“Japan’s wartime behavior towards China and Korea continues to poison its current relations with those countries. During and before World War Two, Japan did horrible things to people in other Asian countries, especially China and Korea. Long before Japan’s ‘official’ declarations of war on December 7, 1941, Japan was carrying out a full-scale undeclared war on China from 1937 onwards. In that war, the Japanese military killed millions of Chinese, often in barbaric ways such as using tied-up Chinese prisoners for bayonet practice to toughen the attitudes of Japanese soldiers, killing several hundred thousand Chinese civilians at Nanking in December 1937–January 1938, and killing many others in retaliation for the Doolittle Raid of April 1942. Although denial of these killings is widespread in Japan today, they were well documented at the time, not only by Chinese but also by foreign observers, and by photographs taken by Japanese soldiers themselves. . . . Japan annexed Korea in 1910, mandated that Korean schools use the Japanese language rather than the Korean language for 35 years of Japanese occupation, forced large numbers of Korean women and women of other nationalities to become sex slaves in Japanese military brothels, and forced large numbers of Korean men to become virtual slave laborers for the Japanese army.

As a result, hatred of Japan is widespread today in China and Korea. In the view of Chinese and Koreans, Japan hasn’t adequately acknowledged, apologized for, or expressed regret for its wartime atrocities. China’s population is 11 times Japan’s, while the combined population of South and North Korea is more than half of Japan’s. China and North Korea both have nuclear weapons. China, North Korea, and South Korea all have big, well-equipped armies, while Japan’s armed forces remain minuscule because of the U.S.-imposed Japanese constitution reinforced by widespread pacifism in Japan today. North Korea from time to time fires missiles across Japan, to demonstrate its ability to reach Japan. Yet Japan is locked in territorial disputes with both China and South Korea over uninhabited tiny islands of no intrinsic value themselves but important because of fish, gas, and mineral resources within each island’s marine zone. That combination of facts seems to me to spell big dangers for Japan in the long run.

For an Asian perspective on Japan’s view of World War Two, here is an assessment by Lee Kuan Yew, a keen observer of people who as prime minister of Singapore for several decades became familiar with Japan, China, and Korea and their leaders: ‘Unlike Germans, the Japanese have not had a catharsis and rid themselves of the poison in their system. They have not educated their young about the wrong they had done. Hashimoto [a Japanese prime minister] expressed his ‘deepest regrets’ on the 52nd anniversary of the end of World War Two (1997) and his ‘profound remorse’ during his visit to Beijing in September 1997. However, he did not apologize, as the Chinese and Koreans wished Japan’s leader to do. I do not understand why the Japanese are so unwilling to admit the past, apologize for it, and move on. For some reason, they do not want to apologize. To apologize is to admit having done a wrong. To express regrets or remorse merely expresses their present subjective feelings. They denied the massacre of Nanking took place; that Korean, Filipino, Dutch, and other women were kidnapped or otherwise forced to be ‘comfort women’ (a euphemism for sex slaves) for Japanese soldiers at the war fronts; that they carried out cruel biological experiments on live Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, Russian, and other prisoners in Manchuria. In each case, only after irrefutable evidence was produced from their own records did they make reluctant admissions. This fed suspicions of Japan’s future intentions. Present Japanese attitudes are an indication of their future conduct. If they are ashamed of their past, they are less likely to repeat it.’”—Jared Diamond, Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis (2019)