Postwar Germany and Japan
Sixty years on, the end of the war against Japan is generally regarded by British historians very differently from the way they view the end of the war against Germany. Despite the firestorms in German cities, despite the murder and rape of millions of German women and children by the advancing Soviets, the defeat of Nazi Germany is still seen in terms that are morally unambiguous.
'There is no such acceptance of war guilt in Japan.'
In 1945 Hitler’s regime was seen as the embodiment of human evil - and all the evidence that has emerged since that time has merely served to confirm that judgement. Any means that could bring Nazi rule to an end could be justified, which is why a statue of Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris now stands in Whitehall.
The vast majority of Germans today accept the guilt of the ‘Hitler time’, and are determined that nothing like it will ever occur again. Sometimes to non -Germans this national confessional even seems to go to an absurd extent - for example when the great furore erupted over the recent film depicting Hitler as an inadequate, demented human being, rather than the embodiment of Satanic evil.
There is no such acceptance of war guilt in Japan. It was only with the greatest difficulty that China managed to secure a grudging acknowledgement that ‘regrettable’ things may have happened in Nanking in December 1937, when Japanese troops went on the rampage - looting, raping and burning, and killing some 200,000 Chinese. Japanese school text-books still refer to the total war Japan waged against China between 1937 and 1945, in which some 20 million Chinese died, as the ‘China incident’.
Similarly, the government of South Korea is making little progress in securing an apology from Japan for the enforced prostitution of tens of thousands of Korean girls as ‘comfort women’ for the Imperial armed forces. Most Japanese see themselves not as the perpetrators of a barbarous expansionist war in Asia and the Pacific, but as hapless victims of overwhelming and brutal American power. It is not, perhaps, surprising that collective denial should be the response of a defeated people; what is surprising is that the Japanese view is also widely held in the countries of the west that fought against Japan, namely the United States, and Britain and her Commonwealth.
Published: 2005-06-22
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