Throngs of people incessantly crisscross the foot of the 240-meter-high Sunshine 60 skyscraper complex in the Higashi-Ikebukuro district of Tokyo.
A corner of the complex, one of the busiest commercial districts in Japan, is dedicated to a park, which is a world away from all the hustle and bustle. Only a handful of visitors were resting in the shade of trees in the park on one afternoon in July.
In a northern section of the park, flowers are dedicated to a big stone monument, with the letters, “Wishing for everlasting peace,” engraved.
The monument indicates that the plot of land once contained Sugamo Prison, which held Japanese military and political leaders who had been arrested on suspicion of war crimes by the United States and other countries after Japan’s defeat in World War II in 1945.
Among the inmates, 18 top Imperial Japanese Army and Navy leaders, five diplomats and five others, including Cabinet members, were named Class-A war criminals for “crimes against peace” by rulings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.
Seven of them, including Army Gen. Hideki Tojo, who served as prime minister when Japan opened the war on the United States in 1941, and Koki Hirota, who was foreign minister when the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, were hanged on the premises of Sugamo Prison.
Critics of the so-called Tokyo Tribunal have continued to argue that victorious nations brought a defeated Japan to a one-sided and retaliatory trial, and that the use of atomic bombs and the Great Tokyo Air Raid of 1945 also constituted war crimes.
The fact that the Japanese did not punish their war leaders with their own hands sowed the seeds of clashes of opinion that have continued to this day.
In addition, an entanglement of opinions both at home and abroad intensified further when Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo enshrined the executed Class-A war criminals alongside the general war dead. No solution appears likely any time soon.
That has also generated an unfortunate situation in which the emperor has never visited Yasukuni Shrine since the enshrinement of the Class-A war criminals was brought to public attention.
Would Tojo and others, who hoped that their deaths would serve as a “monument to everlasting peace” themselves, have desired such a situation? I am, at best, very skeptical.
'MORAL CORNERSTONE FOR WORLD PEACE'
Kanazawa Station is the prospering terminal of the recently extended stretch of the Hokuriku Shinkansen Line. Just a little more than a 10-minute walk from the station stands an octagonal building with a stark resemblance to the Yumedono hall at Horyuji, a famed temple in Nara Prefecture that is believed to have been opened by Prince Shotoku (574-622).
Shotokudo, the look-alike octagon, is part of Sorinji, a temple of the Jodo Shinshu sect of Buddhism.
Shinsho Hanayama (1898-1995) was the head priest of this temple two head-priesthoods ago. When he was a professor with the University of Tokyo and studied the way Buddhism was preached by Prince Shotoku, Hanayama also served as a chaplain at Sugamo Prison.
He attended the last moments of the seven Class-A war criminals who were executed on Dec. 23, 1948, and had them sign their last autographs. These and other related materials, which are preserved at the temple, became available for public viewing this year.
Hanayama’s memoir of his experience at Sugamo is featured in the book “Heiwa no Hakken” (The Way of Deliverance: Three Years with Condemned Japanese War Criminals; enlarged Japanese edition). It carries Tojo’s “last will and testament” that the chaplain wrote down on the basis of what the former general told him on that occasion.
“I believe that greed must be taken away from humans in order to eradicate war,” Tojo said, according to the book. “As a matter of fact, however, nations of the world are all centered on their own existence or on ways to ensure their self-defense rights. ... But they will eventually end up ruining themselves while arguing for self-defense.
“I hope our executions will provide an opportunity for holding a major memorial service for all peoples and sufferers of the world, including in enemy, friendly and neutral nations. That, I hope, will serve as a moral cornerstone for world peace.”
Those lines seem to exude the strength of a person who, after losing all his titles and honor, faced up to his grave responsibility and gave thought to the happiness of future Japanese. That appears especially true today, when public opinion is divided over Japan’s exercising the right to collective self-defense.
We are left to wonder if everlasting peace will always remain an unfulfilled dream.
BETTER STEP TOWARD EVERLASTING PEACE
I argued in an Asahi Shimbun column in August 2013 that the Class-A war criminals should be de-enshrined from Yasukuni Shrine so the facility can revert to what it should have been in the first place: a venue to pray for the repose of souls.
I also pointed out that the only person who could make that happen was Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who argues, “It is all too natural to express respect for the spirits of dead soldiers, who lost their precious lives for the sake of the nation.”
Koki Hirota was the only civilian among the seven executed.
“I learned about the enshrinement (of my grandfather) only after it made headlines,” said Kotaro Hirota, grandson of Koki. “We, in the Hirota family, were never consulted beforehand. In fact, we would have declined if we had been. I want the enshrinement to be annulled.”
The 76-year-old added, “It is quite natural for the prime minister and others to visit (Yasukuni Shrine) for the sake of the dead soldiers, but I strongly feel at odds with the fact that my grandfather, who was not a military officer, is enshrined alongside servicemen.”
Taro Kimura, the oldest son of Gen. Heitaro Kimura, who served as vice minister of war in the Tojo Cabinet, also had some words to say on the matter.
“In addition to China and South Korea, even the United States expressed displeasure at Abe’s visit (to Yasukuni Shrine) at the end of 2013, which made me feel sad as a family member,” the 84-year-old said. “I asked Yasukuni’s head priest if (my grandfather) could be de-enshrined, only to be told that was difficult. But I am still hoping for things to be straightened out so that the emperor could visit (Yasukuni Shrine).”
I do not believe that the idea of returning the shrine from a target of contention to a venue that allows anyone to remember those killed in battle would go against the wishes of the Class-A war criminals, who keenly realized their responsibility for bringing an unprecedented defeat to their homeland.
Doing so would represent a better step toward everlasting peace than the Abe Cabinet’s decision last year to lift Japan’s self-imposed ban on exercising the right to collective self-defense.
By TSUYOSHI KOMANO/ Senior Staff Writer
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