Dec. 7, 1991: a date that will live in anxiety. Few subjects cause more hand-wringing in Japan than the approaching anniversary of Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto’s surprise attack on the heart of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. The Japanese are “hypersensitive” about it, says a Western diplomat in Tokyo. AERA, a widely read Japanese newsweekly, just ran an exhaustive article on the anniversary, and last Thursday the popular Tokyo Shimbun bore a headline that screamed: FIFTY YEARS SINCE PEARL HARBOR, REEMERGENCE OF THE NIGHTMARE!
A single thread runs through such stories: with the future strength of U.S.-Japanese relations already in question, Americans are about to be bombarded with images of “sneaky” sucker-punching Japanese. The history of Japanese mistreatment of prisoners of war may be revived. Some Americans may seize the occasion to point out how the carpet-bombing of Hawaii with yen in the late 1980s proved more effective in securing beachfront property than all the iron warheads Yamamoto dropped. Others will undoubtedly ask who really won the war, given Japan’s huge economic success and America’s perceived decline since then. The effect could be to stir up latent anti-Japanese sentiment. “It’s the fear of the bashers unbound, the protectionists cut loose,” says Tokyo University professor Takashi Inoguchi. “The government is deathly afraid there’s going to be some big American backlash when Pearl Harbor Day rolls around.”
These fears are not unfounded; “calendar journalism” is a fact of life in the U.S. press, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor is etched permanently on the consciousness of any American old enough to remember it. But it’s more than just dread of overseas hostility. Unlike Germany, Japan has never fully come to terms with its role in World War II. Critics contend that history courses in Japanese schools give the subject short shrift. Among the Japanese who lived through the war and the ensuing U.S. occupation, anger mingles with guilt. For many, the war is a topic best left unexamined.
Japanese who do think about the war often take a distinctively different view from the one commonly held in the United States. Most Americans see it in stark terms: Japan brought the war on itself through its unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor; everything that followed, including the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki four years later, was a direct consequence of that one act. The Japanese assessment is more ambiguous. For them, both Pearl Harbor and the unleashing of nuclear weapons belong to a dialectic of war, in which the idea of “blame” is fudged nearly into nonexistence. How deep a notion this is among some Japanese became evident to one high-powered group of Americans last year, when a senior Japanese politician attended a dinner at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Sure enough, the subject of how to commemorate Pearl Harbor came up. Among the dignitaries at the table was Bruce K. MacLaury, the president of Brookings, who listened approvingly as his Japanese guest said it would be a nice gesture if Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu laid a wreath at the memorial for the sunken battleship Arizona and then spoke about how far both nations had come and how important they were to each other now. Everyone nodded. But that wasn’t the end. On the same day or soon after, the Japanese official continued, George Bush could go to Hiroshima, lay a wreath and make a similar speech. However well intentioned, the stab at moral equivalence, according to one source at the table, nearly caused MacLaury to choke on his soup. “He told him very politely that that probably wouldn’t go over too well in the United States,” says one American present at the dinner.
While few on either side of the Pacific relish the idea of a full-throated debate over who was to blame for the war, some critics in Japan contend that official skittishness has already turned the event into more of a media circus than it otherwise would have been. As long ago as last summer, during a grass-roots tour of small towns in Japan, Foreign Ministry bureaucrats asked the Japanese to try to offset inevitable Pearl Harbor-related Japan-bashing by doing their bit to help relations between the two countries (say, by buying a few imports now and then). As one puzzled young Japanese bureaucrat puts it, “Why you go out of your way to tell people to deal with something that wasn’t even an issue yet is a mystery to me.”
That thought may now finally be sinking in at higher levels. A senior government official in Tokyo acknowledged this week that the Foreign Ministry and other elite bureaucracies may soon start “informal” meetings with the Japanese press in the hope of getting it to ease off a bit on anniversary coverage. The message will be: please ignore Pearl Harbor Day. Will the press take heed? It might if the government follows the same advice.
