The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan

Chapter 6 Compensating Victims: The Politics of Victimhood

137 Chapter 6 Compensating Victims The Politics of Victimhood This memorial service [for the war dead] signifies the entire nation’s sober desire to offer its sincere tribute to the more than 3 million whose sacrifice has given us today’s peace and development. —Kurogane Yasumi, Chief Cabinet Secretary (August 1963) t noon on August 15, 1963, people in public places across Japan observed a moment of silence for the war dead. At Hibiya Hall in Tokyo, for only the third time since independence from the U.S. Occupation eleven years earlier, the government sponsored a memorial ceremony.1 With the empress at his side, the emperor read a message of regret, condolence for bereaved families, and appreciation to the dead. After one year at Yasukuni Shrine in 1964, the annual ceremony has been held every year since in the Nippon Budòkan. The Japan Bereaved Family Association, an organization of families of military who died in the war, had been pressuring the government for years to institute a ceremony to publicly recognize their dead relatives’ wartime service to the state. The wholesale condemnation of Japan’s wartime aggression and the general pacifist sentiment in postwar Japan had prevented the government from sanctioning such ceremonies, but now the constraints on official expressions of patriotic sentiment were easing. Emerging pride in Japan’s economic recovery in the 1950s and 1960s—a period of high economic growth now enshrined as the defining experience of contemporary Japan— was slowly evolving into a kind of economic nationalism, especially among government bureaucrats and the business managerial class. This pride differed from the earlier pride in atomic victimhood precisely because it was based on accomplishment. Kano Masanao has A 138 The Victim as Hero described two forms of this new consciousness. First, Japan’s history was reevaluated in the positive light of modernization theory, most clearly evident and known to American scholars from the Hakone Conference and its subsequent publications. Second, the 1960s witnessed a bureaucratic emphasis on a “national essence” theory (kokutairon ) that revealed itself in government actions commemorating the Meiji centennial, reintroducing an ethics curriculum from 1958, and institutionalizing components of that theory as holidays in the official calendar—setting a “National Founding Day” on the traditional date of the founding of the imperial dynasty (proposed 1957, adopted 1967), for example, and reintroducing the imperial reign name calendar (proposed 1970, implemented 1979).2 The birth of new nations in Asia and Africa, as well as intellectual soul-searching after the security treaty riots of 1960, contributed to a new discourse over nationalism in which most agreed on its desirability, if not its character , as a basis for national independence and democratic development .3 As the Asahi shinbun noted in its August 15, 1963, editorial, there was a new consciousness of self as Japanese: a new awareness of the country as Japan.4 It was now publicly acceptable for the government to establish an annual memorial service for compatriots who had died in the war. The conservative government tried to encourage pride in Japanese accomplishment and raise awareness of nationhood through subtle manipulation of textbook histories—as discussed in an earlier chapter—and by decorating individuals for exceptional service to the nation beginning in 1963, conducting state ceremonies like the August 15 memorial to the war dead, sponsoring the Olympic pageant in 1964, and celebrating the Meiji centennial in 1968. These actions were received by many with not a little suspicion. For while pride in Japan was growing, distrust of state power remained strong, especially among political progressives. The press questioned conservative motivations in reinstituting decorations for national service and warned that reintroducing status distinctions via the eight-tiered system of state honors would undermine the democratic fiber of postwar Japan.5 There was strong resistance to the government’s celebration of the centennial in 1968, especially among progressive historians who complained that it glossed over the class antagonisms and aggressive foreign policies they regarded as Meiji’s legacy. At the time of the memorial service in August 1963 this deep ambivalence over the character of the prewar polity—and over the state’s role in supporting it—prevented any official statement on whether the war dead Compensating Victims 139 had died for their country’s sins or for its honor. But there was no disagreement over revering the memory of war victims as victims. In the announcements and interviews in the days...