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173 Chapter 7 Beyond the Postwar his book has traced the emergence of the ideology of Japanese war victimhood and shown how its iconography has served various interests in the first three decades since the Asia-Pacific War. As I began this study a decade ago, I thought to excavate the origins of an amnesia over Japanese war aggressions by revealing the emergence of victim consciousness as the major mechanism to that amnesia. At that time, I understood victim consciousness to have become hegemonic in public discourse by the middle 1960s, only to be superseded by a gradually emerging public awareness and then concern with national and personal war responsibility. While I still think this construction of the history of war victim consciousness is useful—and that it is important to reveal how victim consciousness became an accepted attitude toward the national past—I now have a greater appreciation that the amnesia was intermittent and often only partial. In fact, there have always been voices of conscience, just as there have always been incidences of inadvertent and willful neglect of Japan’s aggressive past. Rather than dwell on this amnesia, one needs also to trace the selective and manipulated remembrance of those aggressions. Before ending this study, I want to point out important components from the second act in the amnesia narrative of war responsibility —a tale of a gradually emerging democratic consciousness of the people’s war responsibility up to the 1990s. In this reconstruction, it is usually asserted that the conscientious observations by Itami Mansaku , Òkuma Nobuyuki, and others in the first decade were neglected in the rush to cast blame on the wartime leadership and recover from the war’s material and psychological devastation. In the same period that the mid-1950s atomic bomb victim exceptionalism tended to divert attention from Japanese war responsibility, Yoshimoto TakaT 174 The Victim as Hero aki, Maruyama Masao, Tsurumi Shunsuke, and many others were addressing this very issue in general-interest journals of the day, especially with regard to the war responsiblity of the intelligentsia.1 I have already noted Beheiren’s response in the 1960s to Japanese state support for the American war in Vietnam. Other examples of a rising awareness of a “postwar responsibility” to own up to past and present aggression and complicity can be seen in the Japanese United Church of Christ’s 1967 admission of complicity in wartime Japan, Kaikò Takeshi’s novels of disillusionment in Vietnam, and Honda Katsuichi’s reportage on Japanese aggression in China.2 News of Germany’s “Generation of 1969” provided a model for the Japanese man on the street to reassess the war experience in terms of personal complicity. In the 1970s, in Kita Kyûshû, for example, the citizen’s movement to memorialize that city’s firebombing took pains to emphasize citizens’ wartime support for the Japanese war effort.3 Similarly , efforts were made to include Korean hibakusha in government aid programs, to gain pension benefits for former colonial members of the imperial armed services, and to bring attention to the plight of Koreans left in Sakhalin at the end of the war. The 1970s also saw a rise in academic interest in the situation of zainichi Koreans residing in Japan and in media revelations about such atrocities as Ishii Shirò’s biological weapons experiments in the now infamous Unit 731. In the 1980s and 1990s, Japanese scholars such as Ònuma Yasuaki, Okabe Makio, Yoshimi Yoshiaki, and Yoshida Yutaka began to publish perceptive histories of war responsibility including analyses of the people’s role.4 One scholar has suggested that the early 1980s marked a shift in hibakusha testimony that challenged the nationalist appropriation of their experience. Certainly there is evidence that by the 1990s at the latest the nationalist and guilt-diverting character of the ban-the-bomb movement was recognized within the Japanese scholarly community.5 Moreover, Asian victims of Japanese war aggression began to argue their case in Japan, often bringing suit in Japanese courts to find redress. In the 1990s the plight of the mostly Korean “comfort women,” who were forced to serve in brothels for Japanese servicemen, became an important diplomatic issue that also drew attention to the gendered dynamics of war victimization. Their cause was boosted by an Asahi shinbun forum, “The Women’s Pacific War” (Onnatachi no Taiheiyò Sensò), in which everyday women were invited to write about their own wartime experiences for publication in this major newspaper. Although the early letters...

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