[Buddha-l] Re: Greetings from Oviedo

[Dan Lusthaus]

>  Without benefit
> of access to all the surviving primary sources, it would seem plausible
that
> the both the US and Japan would have a vested interest in presenting a
> somewhat different account of these peace overtures, each favouring and
> justifying their own perspective.  But as they say, it's the victors who
> always write the history.

Stephen, as is well known, the Japanese have engaged in very creative
rewriting of the history of the War years. Everything except Hiroshima is
forgotten; therefore Japan was a victim of the war, not the aggressor.
Victims elicit a lot more sympathy than brutal aggressors. It's an image
makeover that has proved very successful in the West and in generations of
post-War Japanese raised on textbooks whose meager and distorted accounts
have been a scandal, even in Japan. The Japanese Ministry of Education and
the Japanese Supreme Court have effectively blocked all efforts to present
more accurate textbooks. The other Asian countries, however, have never
bought it for a minute, as the outcries in the two Koreas, PRC and elsewhere
last spring remind us.

Hirohito said virtually nothing about the war. When asked a question about
the war by a reporter he responded: "I wouldn't know about that -- I'm just
a simple botanist." That was the first and last time he was ever asked (or
explained) anything about the War in public. The rest of Asia awaited his
apology until his death, but it never came (the present Emperor has offered
something, but still falling short of the apology expected.

But the best way to cure yourself of that cynical nonargument about
"victors" pretending to be an argument, here's a simple test. Check the
syllabus of any Japanese professor or instructor who is teaching Japanese
history in a Western University. You will discover that history mysteriously
ends in 1935 and magically recommences in 1945. The years in between are a
black hole. (Education in Japan is pretty similar -- apart from some
self-serving autobiographies, mixing the requiste amount of remorse with a
denial that it was really that bad. Victoria nails that literature pretty
accurately). The new image of Zen (war years ignored for a new pacifistic
spirituality) was part of the selling of that image overseas (that part of
the makeover has not had much impact at home.

Dan Lusthaus