Perhaps these exercises will be less frequent?
In Japan, a voice of conservatism reassesses WWII
The leading newspaper takes a surprising stance in revisiting the nation's dark wartime record.
By David Pilling, Financial Times
January 1, 2007
Pinpointing the true source of power in Japan is a notoriously slippery task. In a society where decisions tend to emerge through consensus, even prime ministers are sometimes little more than figureheads, articulating policies engineered by out-of-the-limelight officials and businesspeople.
One man who has achieved undisputed influence is Tsuneo Watanabe, the 80-year-old chairman and editor in chief of the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, which, with a circulation of 10 million, is the world's largest daily.
Watanabe, who took charge of the Yomiuri empire in 1991 after starting as a political reporter, has long had the ear of prime ministers, business leaders and elite bureaucrats, including other "shadow shoguns" who have helped shape Japan.
The country's most powerful media executive, who is also the force behind the Yomiuri Giants, the nation's most successful baseball team, has wielded his enormous influence to promote a consistently conservative agenda.
The wealth he has amassed, unusual for someone who came from the reporter ranks, has invited criticism. So have the uses to which he has put his power, which some argue have lent respectability to the strident nationalism heard increasingly in Japan these days.
His causes have included a long public campaign, now closer to fruition than ever, to rewrite the post-World War II pacifist constitution. His newspaper has been a champion of Japan's armed forces and an advocate of the country standing taller in international affairs.
This made all the more remarkable a recent about-face by Watanabe, often referred to as God by his awestruck underlings at the Yomiuri. It began last year, when the Yomiuri shook the political establishment by decrying in an editorial then-Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, where 2.5 million war dead, including 14 Class A war criminals, are honored.
Those visits were unnecessarily provocative to China and showed a willful ignorance of Japan's dark wartime history, the newspaper thundered.
Shortly afterward, Watanabe went further, forming a special investigative committee and commissioning a yearlong series of articles on Japan's wartime record. Just as the conservative mainstream that his paper had long backed was arguing that Japan had apologized enough, his team was busy digging up uncomfortable facts about the disastrous imperialist efforts of the 1930s and 1940s.
The conclusions are not pretty. As they invaded sovereign countries, Japan's wartime leaders treated human life with contempt, sacrificing even Japanese citizens as they might toss out "a pair of worn-out shoes," the paper said. The articles have been gathered into a book, "From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor: Who Was Responsible?"
So why has Watanabe made such an apparently dramatic about-face? And what does the epiphany of an elderly man demonstrate about the current state of Japan, a country said by some to be drifting dangerously to the right? Watanabe says he felt compelled to step into a void left by the politicians.
"I thought that we needed to verify facts of our recent history with enough sincerity so that Chinese people would understand," he said. "Unless we do that, Chinese leaders will not be willing to build favorable relations with Japan. This is something political leaders have failed to grasp. And if political leaders don't do that, we in the media have to do that."
He sidesteps any suggestion that he is seeking to douse nationalist sentiment that his own conservative newspaper helped set aflame. But he does say that, for many reasons, this is the right moment for personal as well as national reflection. One reason has to do with the passage of time.
"I am 80 years old. All of the members of our reexamination team were born after the war. I was the lowest-ranking private during the war 61 years ago, and most of the military officers who served the country at that time are dead. I thought that, while even a very few … are still alive, we should research as deeply as possible."
If history of that period is slipping away from living memory in Japan, it is kept vividly alive in China, where the Communist Party uses it to stir patriotic sentiment with an anti-Japanese flavor.
Whereas former European enemies reconciled after the Second World War, in Asia history has been frozen. That is partly because Japan and China, the biggest Asian powers, quickly found themselves on opposite sides of the Cold War. With that ideological battle settled (apart from the Korean peninsula) and with China gaining economic and political confidence, long-postponed questions about wartime responsibility have come back to life.
Japan and China can't continue their standoff, Watanabe argues, if only because of the pressing need to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis, one of several regional flashpoints.
"It is more realistic to depend on China than the U.S. Even a stupid prime minister could understand that much," he said, employing his legendary bluntness. "China has a long border with North Korea, and if China stopped sending oil and food, it would have a devastating impact."
A supporter of Japan's security alliance with the U.S., Watanabe nevertheless argues that some problems must be resolved within the region.
North Korean leader "Kim Jong Il may eventually go mad and resort to nuclear weapons. The U.S. is too exhausted with Iraq and cannot take serious measures with North Korea, so we have to be really mindful of having constructive relations between Japan and our Asian neighbors," he said.
To do that, he argues, there has to be a historical reckoning. In common with many on Japan's right (and some on the left), he regards the Tokyo Tribunal of 1946-48 — Asia's version of the Nuremburg trials — as far from "fair and just."
If anything, the Yomiuri has been more damning than the Tokyo Tribunal, attributing blame to many who escaped formal conviction. "We committed acts of aggression in the continent and we need to study these in detail and leave the results to posterity," Watanabe said.
In Japan, publication of the Yomiuri series has not induced the sort of right-wing backlash that some had feared. Watanabe said there have been no visits from the loudspeaker-equipped black trucks that the ultra-right uses to spread nationalist propaganda. The largely positive public response contradicts the common perception that Japan is drifting to the right, he says.
