History and Iris Chang: Bill Ratliff
Bill Ratliff writes: On the basis of the evidence I have seen so far, I will suggest that intransigent Japanese types by the back door have taken their revenge on Iris Chang for telling so much of the truth about them to a public that for a while listened with at least one ear. Several years after her book documenting the Rape of Nanking, she began extensive interviewing of aging U.S. military veterans who had suffered as POWs in Japanese captivity during World War II. This (and who knows what else in her personal life and/or the world today) sent her into a depression that led to her being hospitalized for some time. But it was too little care too late, or perhaps we should say too much Japan too often. The truth she uncovered about the far limits of human depravity, as represented by Japanese actions before and during World War II, drove her mad and she seems to have decided her only escape was suicide. I doubt it helped her state of mind that her "new" country, the United States, in her judgment had unjustly locked up Chinese-American scientist Wenho Li and treated him most shabbily.
I once read an interview with Chang recounting how she decided to write Rape of Nanking. She and her parents lived in Northern California. As I recall it, they had an old grandmother living with them who never said anything, but always sat quietly in a corner of the kitchen. One day Chang, in her mid- to late-20s, remarked that she didn't understand why some people were critical of the Japanese, whereupon the old woman leaped out of her chair and exploded into a lecture on the crimes the Japanese had committed against the Chinese people. She then sat down and never spoke again. Chang thought she had better look into what had so enraged her mild little grandmother. As the research progressed, she found that it was all true and the result was her book.
One of the most offensive Japanese-related exhibitions I have ever seen personally occurred about ten years ago when I was taking a rather small Chinese ship east on the Yangzi River out of Chongqing, China's wartime capital. Except for me, the 50 or so passengers were about evenly divided between Chinese and Japanese. As we left the city the Japanese took over the stern of the ship for a big celebration. I don't speak Japanese so I can't say what they were so noisily toasting as they and we looked back on the receding city, and no Chinese I spoke to could understand them either. But their actions at that particular place, seen in the light of Japan’s actions there during World War II, sent a message of extreme insensitivity, or more precisely callousness if not barbarity. For years neither rain nor clouds nor human decency had stopped Japanese planes from flying west on the Yangzi over the spot of the toast to where the rivers parted and the Japanese pilots knew they could unload their tons of bombs on Chongqing, the city that had become the capital after the Chinese government had been driven city by city up the Yangzi River by such actions as the rape of Nanjing. (I might add that some of the materials used in building the Japanese planes and bombs had been sold to the Japanese, until 1940, by the United States.) The Japanese are renowned for their at least surface good manners, but this stunt came close to setting a new low for any civilization. Edwin Reischauer, Harvard historian and John Kennedy’s ambassador to Japan, suggested in his book The Japanese Today that Japan’s ethical system, stressing relativism and specific relationships over abstract principles of right and wrong, can leave a Japanese unsure what to do in an unfamiliar situation. “Certainly there seems to have been an especially wide gap,” he wrote, “between the brutalities of the Japanese army in World War II and the gentleness and orderliness of life in Japan. (p. 148)”
Now, I must offer an alternative position on the Japanese advocacy of peace in the wake of the atomic bombs. I have not been to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial with what has been described as its message of peace, so I have nothing to say about it. I have, however, just returned from the memorial museum in Nagasaki. Only in the most Japanese self-serving sense could it be considered peace-affirming. Indeed a very long wall that purported to present a time-line leading to the bomb was a blatant example of the routine Japanese cop-out, that refusal to see the truth and accept responsibility that seems to have helped drive Iris Chang mad and thus launched this WAIS discussion. The bomb time-line begins with the United States. No, not with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, but after that sneak attack. The time-line doesn't mention Pearl Harbor at all, and it doesn't mention Japan's invasion of China in 1937, including the Rape of Nanjing or any of the other horrendous things done there between 1937 and 1945, and it doesn't mention Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931, including the rape of that region and Korea during the years that followed, and it doesn't mention the internationally sanctioned Japanese occupation of parts of China (including the birthplace of Confucius) after World War I, and it doesn't mention Japan's wars against China and Russia at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Perhaps there is another very long wall in the museum that lists all of the above history that preceded and contributed in various ways U.S. involvement in the war and development of the bomb, accompanied by admissions of Japanese responsibility for at least something in this historical progression. Perhaps someone else who has been to the Nagasaki museum can assure me that I just didn't see the other wall with its honest and forward-looking messages of peace on earth and good will to men. If so I will retract my critical comments above, but only with respect to war museums.
That said, it is important to add that many Japanese have at least some sense of how badly they behaved before and during World War II and have sought to get their country and people to admit it. Indeed, some former Japanese soldiers have even traveled the world confessing in vivid detail what they and their buddies did during those years to the Chinese, American and many other people. Indeed, on a couple of occasions Japanese courts have even ruled in favor of Chinese plaintiffs in rights violations cases.
Now while we are at it, let us note some of the further consequences, far beyond the "rapes" noted above, of Japan's post-Meiji relations with China. (1) In Chinese domestic affairs, if Japan had not invaded China the fledgling Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek (which Japan clobbered in Nanjing, Wuhan and finally Chongqing) would easily have wiped out Mao Zedong in Yenan and there never would have been a Communist China. Even the late Harvard Sinologist John Fairbank, no apologist for Chiang, thought the Nationalists, not nearly as corrupt at first as they later became under prolonged pressure of war, probably would have gotten the country together and ushered in significant development. Among other things, this means the worst modern atrocities Mao committed against his own people, including but not limited to the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, would never have happened.
And in regional affairs, Japanese actions set up the two most potentially explosive situations in early 21st century Asia: Taiwan and North Korea. (1) After the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95, Japan took Taiwan from China as booty, thus setting the stage for the current bitter dispute over whether Taiwan is part of China or eligible for independence. Had Japan not seized Taiwan, the island would have remained unquestionably part of One China. Of course, if Japan had not taken Taiwan and the US had not decided to defend it after China invaded Korea, Taiwan would never have established the first democracy in the millennia long history of the Chinese people. Finally, it should also be added that the United States, England and other Western countries were themselves colonial powers at the time, though with infinitely greater restraint in their treatment of subjugated peoples. (2) If there had been no Communist China, there almost certainly would not have been a communist North Korea either, so the present and potential conflicts arising from that barbarous government’s relations with its own people and neighbors would never have developed.
Of course no one can say what would have taken place instead in Asia, but there is no question Japan's policies played a critical role in many of the most terrible developments of the 20th century and laid much of the groundwork for what may yet prove to be at least equally terrible developments in the new century. This is particularly regrettable because in so many ways the Japanese are such wonderful people and the Meiji and post-Meiji Japanese reformers did what no other Asians could do for many decades, namely coped in largely constructive developmental terms with the challenge of the much more highly developed and then aggressively imperialistic Western powers.
I am very flexible on how people or peoples accept responsibility for their actions and I agree that we should not wallow in the past (though we should try to understand it) but must look to the future. Some countries like China and Russia just ignore the slaughter of millions in their recent past and aim for the next stage; some like South Africa have had commissions investigate, but rarely punish, which of course is what Chile tried to do after Pinochet until the whole business was reopened by Spanish Judge Garzon; some want to punish all those found to be guilty, at least to the limits of political correctness. Personally, I would let individual countries handle their own pasts as they like so long as when they dragged in other countries and peoples those who perpetrated crimes at least come clean. Several years ago Japan semi-apologized to Korea, and Korea accepted the apology as adequate considering it came from Japanese. When China asked for the same apology, Japan refused. What so angers and frustrates many of us, and seemingly drove Iris Chang to suicide, is those who have been particularly hideous to their neighbors but trivialize or deny their actions and then march around like victims, preaching peace.
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