"Dedicate Your Life to the Country !"

     A number of documentary films on the last war are broadcast in the month of August every year, as it is the month when we surrendered.  Particularly so this year, it being the 70th anniversary.  Here is one of them I saw recently.  A hair-splitting one.

     Suicide bombing is not the monopoly of the political Islamists.  It was started by the Japanese naval air force(we had no independent air force at the time) during the war, particularly when the tide of the war had definitely turned against us, toward the end of 1944, and we were apparently fighting a losing battle.  Mostly(as I understand) it was the fighter planes that tried to crush into the enemy warships armed with a bomb, something a fighter plane was not supposed to carry with it.

     Certainly it was very much of a crazy act, and thousands of lives were lost in vain.  But what about this?  They(the navy) hit upon an idea of manufacturing a two-stage bomber, in the sense that the lower part of it, a kind of a one-seater plane, was to be attached to a usual plane, mostly a two-engine middle-range bomber, as it was too heavy for a fighter to carry.  When the enemy ship came into sight, the lower part was to be cut off from the parent plane and to fly on its own toward the ship.  The hair-splitting part of the project was that the lower part was mostly consisting of explosives, and had no wheels.  The death of the pilot was certain.

     One may wonder if such could have been practicable.  But the film shows that several hundreds of them actually took off, and mostly got shot down into the sea.  The parent planes also were the easy prey of the enemy, as they were flying with heavy loads.

     How would we to describe the death of those hundreds, or thousands?  We have a phrase 'inujini', dying like a dog, meaning to die for a useless purpose.  Many nationalists deny that it was inujini.  They say they dedicated their life to the country.  As a matter of fact they are among those enshrined at the controversial Yasukuni War Shrine, and help give a reason to those like PM Abe to visit the shrine to offer their prayer.

     I believe their death was inujini.  I mean, as they stand now.  But if we learn proper lessons from the war, we can turn it to something else, something more valuable.  Can we?  "Yes, we can."        

Abe's Anniversary Speech

     Not that I had expected to hear many meaningful things from his speech.  But still it was a great disappointment not to hear almost anything substantial from our Prime Minister in the evening of 14 August, to commemorate the 70th Anniversary of Japan's surrender in 1945.  It was not his personal one, but had been approved by the Cabinet.

     To begin with, I was surprised to hear him say that 'The Japan-Russia War gave encouragement to many people under colonial rule from Asia to Africa.'  True, there were favourable references to that War by those nationalists at the time, but they were sooner rather than later to be disillusioned with Japan's imperialist design.  And was it not a War over the Korean Peninsula?

     Abe said very little on the cause of the series of Wars Japan fought in the half century from 1894 to 1945.  On the 15-year War since 1931, he seems to emphasize that it was due to 'the Western countries launching economic blocs by involving colonial economies'.  And 'Japan gradually transformed itself into a challenger to the new international order that the international community sought to establish after tremendous sacrifices(of World War I)'.  Japan also participated in building blocs, and when it did not work well she resorted to military might.

     On the victimization during the War years, he referred to 'women behind the battlefields whose honour and dignity were severely injured'.  This sentence was almost repeated later in the speech.  This was apparently with the "comfort women" in South Korea and elsewhere in mind who have been protesting the Japanese Government for many years by now.  Abe missed a great opportunity here.  If he had made some courageous statement as to the cause of the existence of such women, made some clear apology to them, he could have made a break-through. Probably his rightist constituencies prevented him from doing so, and he himself was not inclined to do such.

     Talking of apologies, he said that 'Japan has repeatedly expressed the feelings of deep remorse and heartfelt apology for its actions during the war...Such position articulated by the previous cabinets will remain unshakable into the future'.  But the case of the above women alone will show that this is not true, and a lot is left to be desired in this field.  Abe spoke several times in his speech on the lessons of history, or facing the history, but he himself is not true to his words.  In the Press Conference, a very short and disappointing one, he repeated what he had said on many occasions that he will leave it to the judgement of history whether the Wars Japan fought were those of aggression.  Apparently he does not think so.  On the next day of the speech, 15 August, two of his Ministers(both women) were among those who offered prayer at Yasukuni, the War Shrine.

     One thing to be noted is that he said 'we shall never again resort to any form of the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes', almost a quotation from the Clause 1 of the Article 9 of our Constitution, although ignoring the Clause 2.  May we hope, even against hope, that he will be true to his words at least here?