Who Is Responsible? The Yomiuri Project and the Legacy of the Asia-Pacific War in Japan

ASIANPERSPECTIVE, Vol. 31, No. 1, 2007, pp. 177-191. Review WHO IS RESPONSIBLE? THE YOMIURI PROJECT AND THE LEGACY OF THE ASIA-PACIFIC WAR IN JAPAN* Tessa Morris-Suzuki James E. Auer ed., Prom Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor: Who Was Responsible?, Tokyo, Yomiuri Shimbun, 2006, ISBN 4-643-06012-3. Debating War History and Responsibility in Japan When, in mid-2005, Japan's Yomiuri newspaper began to publish a series of articles on the question of "war responsibili­ ty," the event attracted nationwide and even international inter­ est. Now the newspaper series has become a book, published in a two-volume version in Japanese and in a one-volume abridged English translation entitled From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Har­ bor: Who Was Responsible? There can be no doubt that these pub­ lications mark an important moment in the long and vexed his­ tory of East Asia's "history wars"—the ongoing conflicts between Japan and its neighbors (particularly China and both Koreas) about memory of and responsibility for Japan's twentieth-century military expansion in Asia and the Pacific. * In accordance with normal East Asian practice, Japanese and Chinese names cited in this article are written with the family name first, except when citing English-language publications where the name order is reversed. 178 Tessa Morris-Suzuki To assess the significance and impact of the Yomiuri project, though, it is important to see it in the context of history writing in Japan and of contemporary Northeast Asian international relations. Before beginning to assess the content of the Englishlanguage volume, therefore, it is worth emphasizing what is not new about this work. There is nothing novel or unusual in Japanese historians or journalists publicly debating the problem of war responsibility. They have been doing so, with much pas­ sion and soul-searching, for more than sixty years. During a recent visit to Tokyo, a Japanese colleague showed me the cover of a journal he had unearthed from the early 1950s, published by a group affiliated with the Japanese Communist Party. The cover featured a striking cartoon of Emperor Hirohito standing atop a mountain of skulls. Such graphic imagery is cer­ tainly highly risque in the Japanese political context, where a miasma of taboo still surrounds critical comment on the person of the emperor. It is almost impossible to imagine any major journal agreeing to publish such an image. But its presence on the cover of this long-forgotten small-circulation magazine pro­ vides a stark reminder of the fact that questions of war responsi­ bility, including those of the responsibility of Emperor Hirohito himself, have been ongoing topics of heated discussion in Japan. Indeed, for historians of twentieth-century Japan, a key task has been the search for an understanding of the processes that led to the "Manchurian Incident," the war in China, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, and Japan's disastrous defeat in war. One of the most influential early attempts to address this conundrum was the best-selling paperback Showashi (A History of Showa—Showa being the reign of the Emperor Hirohito), published in 1955, which sold more than 100,000 copies in the six weeks following its publication. The book generated a pro­ longed public controversy now remembered in Japan as the “Showashi Debate." Written by the eminent Marxian historians Toyama Shigeki, Imai Seiichi, and Fujiwara Akira, Showashi's approach was very different from that of the current Yomiuri volume. It sought, not so much to judge personal war guilt, as to define the underlying social and economic forces that led to war.1 1. Toyama, Shigeki, Imai, Seiichi and Fujiwara, Akira, Showashi (A History Who Is Responsible? 179 The popular success of Showashi is a reminder of the power­ ful influence that Marxism exerted on postwar Japanese intellec­ tual (though not political) life. However, searching criticisms of war responsibility were of course not confined to Marxists. Criti­ cal liberal intellectuals such as Maruyama Masao made pro­ found contributions to the debate—Maruyama's work focusing particularly on the aspects of Japanese social structure and pat­ terns of thought that had created fertile ground for the rise of militarism.* 2 In the 1950s and 1960s, war responsibility...