As Cold War tensions in East Asia diminished from the 1980s onwards and as
the events of the Asia-Pacific War receded, it might have been assumed that
memories of war and colonialism would also fade. Instead, the opposite has
happened. Unresolved issues of historical justice and restitution have
smouldered and, fanned by the winds of rising nationalisms, emerged as sparks
which threaten to ignite new regional antagonisms.
In the past two years
particularly, the governments of the region have staged a series of contending
political performances to enshrine or to erase the memory of particular
historical events, particularly events associated with Japan’s early twentieth
century imperial expansion and the Asia-Pacific war. The December 2013 visit by
Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to the Yasukuni Shrine —
the Shinto shrine to the war dead in which executed war criminals are also
venerated — evoked fierce criticisms from Korea and China.
These criticisms were
amplified in mid-2014, when the Japanese government appointed a committee to
re-examine the process that led to the issuing of the 1993 Kono Declaration,
which is the Japanese government’s most significant apology to women from Korea
and elsewhere coerced into military brothels during the war. The committee’s
report is widely perceived as having undermined public confidence in
the declaration and undone much of the good achieved by the 1993 apology.
Meanwhile, in January 2014 a
new museum was opened inside railway station in the Chinese city of Harbin, the
site of the assassination in October 1909 of Japanese elder statesman and
former resident-general of Korea Ito Hirobumi. The memorial, proposed during
the meeting of South Korean President Park Geun-hye with Chinese president Xi
Jinping in 2013, was greeted with expressions of outrage from the Japanese
government and from many sections of the media in Japan, for it honours the
memory not of Ito but of his assassin, prominent Korean nationalist Ahn
Jung-geun, who was subsequently executed for the crime by the Japanese Kwantung
military administration. Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary, Suga Yoshihide,
lodged official objections with the South Korean and Chinese governments,
describing Ahn as ‘a terrorist who was sentenced to death for killing our
country’s first prime minister’. The memorial’s proponents, on the other hand,
retort that Ahn was not a mere assassin but a political idealist and the author
of a visionary (though incomplete) plan for peace in East Asia.
But it is perhaps a small
incident, little reported in the global media, that most poignantly highlights
the destructive, and self-destructive, nature of these conflicts. In 2004, a
group of concerned citizens from Japan’s Gunma prefecture erected a monument to
Korean forced labourers in a local park. The monument commemorates Koreans who
were forcibly brought to Japan during the war to work in mines and on
construction sites, where many died. It is a simple stone structure, whose
inscription includes the words ‘remembrance, reflection and friendship’ in
Japanese, Korean and English. Memorial ceremonies at this site have brought
together Japanese locals and members of the Korean community in Japan in shared
acts of commemoration.
The Gunma monument is just
one of many small-scale local efforts by Japanese citizens and Korean residents
in Japan to inscribe the memory of war in public consciousness and to promote a
better shared understanding of wartime history between Japan and its
neighbours. Dozens of similar citizens’ initiatives have emerged over past
decades in a number of local communities from Hokkaido in the north to Kyushu
in the south. Japanese academics, publishers, schoolteachers and others have
also initiated a wide range of cross-border networks with counterparts in China
and South Korea in an effort to create better common understandings of history.
Though these grassroots
actions have had relatively little effect on government policy, and have rarely
been reported by the media inside or outside Japan, they demonstrate a
widespread and sincere popular Japanese recognition of the wrongs of the past
and a hope for peaceful relationships with the other peoples of the region.
But now, with the rise in
nationalist emotions in Japan and the region more widely, the Gunma memorial
has come under attack from a variety of right-wing groups whose members have
bombarded the prefectural government with complaints that the monument is
‘anti-Japanese’. In July 2014, the prefectural authorities announced that they
would not renew the planning permission that allows the Gunma monument to
remain in place, forcing the citizens who created this symbol of reconciliation
and goodwill to remove it. Elsewhere, similar attacks on the work of
reconciliation groups are gathering force.
Reading news reports on the
Gunma monument, one wonders how world opinion would react if complaints from
German far-right groups led to the destruction of that country’s monuments to
its forced labourers. The removal of the Gunma memorial, if it goes ahead, will
not change the facts of history nor will it make the world forget those facts.
The Japanese authorities,
rather than trying to undo the decades of good work that has been done by their
own citizens to build bridges to Asian neighbours, should be celebrating and
supporting that work. Japan’s rich tradition of grassroots reconciliation
action has generated a wealth of networks and knowhow that political leaders
could use and learn from. The Gunma memorial and others like it should be
preserved and embraced as small but precious monuments, not just to the victims
of imperial violence and war but also to the goodwill of the many Japanese
citizens who long for regional peace, cooperation and understanding.
Tessa Morris-Suzuki is an
ARC Laureate Fellow based at the School of Culture, History and Language, at
the College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.
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