Japan Forum Revisionism, Reaction and The

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Revisionism, reaction and the 'symbol emperor' in post-war Japan R. Kersten a a Leiden University.

To cite this Article Kersten, R.(2003) 'Revisionism, reaction and the 'symbol emperor' in post-war Japan', Japan Forum, 15: 1, 15 — 31 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/0955580032000077711 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0955580032000077711

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Revisionism, reaction and the ‘symbol emperor’ in post-war Japan

R. KERSTEN

Recent scholarship on the Sho¯wa Emperor has presented us with a conundrum. In the face of increasingly visible, if intellectually unconvincing, neo-nationalism in contemporary Japan, scholars such as Herbert Bix and Takahashi Tetsuya have sought to undermine this revisionist trend with a clarion call to history. This history, according to Bix and Takahashi, highlights the inescapable logic of accountability that rests at Hirohito’s door. For Bix, it is the accountability that must accrue to Hirohito as an informed, interested and interventionist Supreme Commander of the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy for the duration of World War II in Asia and the Pacific (Bix 2000). For Takahashi, it is the accountability that rests at the door of Hirohito as a dissembler who, when faced with the inevitability of defeat, dallied in order to secure his own personal and institutional survival, with catastrophic consequences for the peoples of Hiroshima and Naga- saki, the thousands of Japanese left behind in Manchuria, China and the Soviet Far East and many non-Japanese victims (Takahashi 1999a, 1999b, 2001b, 2002). Through reappraising interpretations of Hirohito and the war through the rubric of accountability, both Bix and Takahashi seek to do more than reinforce an already familiar critique of the Sho¯wa Emperor’s wartime role.1 Their real Downloaded By: [Australian National University] At: 00:37 15 December 2009 target is the integrity of the post-war symbol emperor system, upon which the substance of post-war Japan’s democracy has been painstakingly grafted. The uncomfortable symbiosis between the notion of the symbol emperor, on the one hand, and the legitimacy of post-war Japanese democracy, on the other, has served over time to highlight the ambivalence of both. As mutually antagonistic as they are mutually reinforcing, the symbol emperor and democracy appear as flimsy edifices in post-war Japan because their historical foundations are built on the ahistorical – even anti-historical – fiction of wartime imperial victimhood. Though another scholar, Kenneth Ruoff, argues that the fudging of imperial façade and democratic substance in post-war has enticed the Right grudgingly to accept post-war democracy, the irony of democracy being made palatable

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through the new transcendentalism of the symbol emperor is hard to ignore. Ruoff valiantly argues that the tortuous attempts to lend legitimacy to the post- war notion of the symbol emperor are ultimately useful. Through creating a narrative of pre-war and wartime ‘symbol emperor’ continuity, the more positive fiction of post-war democracy can be embraced as something that is more than merely a received product of defeat. If the symbol emperor is a product of tradition and not defeat, then the democracy it coexists with is less soiled by the circumstances of its inception (Ruoff 2001: 142). Here we encounter the conundrum implied by Bix and Takahashi, and embraced by Ruoff. The defining institutions of post-war Japan are revealed as little more than companion concepts born of contrary fictions. History is over- looked in the name of creating plausible narratives for the post-war era, and barely survives either as method or context. In the midst of this creative dispensation of the wartime past, one uncomfortable coincidence continues to poke through to the surface. The moment of fictional invention is consistently identified as the moment of defeat in August 1945. While Bix and Takahashi have their eyes trained on a revisionist surge in contemporary Japan – notably, the contest over the content of high-school history textbooks and the writing of ‘comfort women’ and events such as the Nanjing Massacre into post-war Japan’s historical consciousness – they both locate the actual act of ‘revision’ in the past, not in the present. Both Bix and Takahashi claim that post-war attempts to rewrite or rehabilitate the Sho¯wa Emperor are responsible for undermining post-war democracy. At the same time, they identify so-called ‘defeat revisionism’ as the original manifestation of this historical distortion. History was revised before it was ‘history’, when it was still ‘present’. The implications of this idea are considerable. If the symbol emperor is a product of defeat revisionism, then how can we make sense of post-war revisionism? The very idea of defeat revisionism inverts the temporal logic of post-war revisionism. If, in the post-war era, we are assailed with notions that simply invoke a view of history that has already been revised, then it is merely a repetition of an earlier distortion. Moreover, it conveys the logic of reaction rather than that of revisionism in the post-war period. Could it be that post-war revisionist forays Downloaded By: [Australian National University] At: 00:37 15 December 2009 into interpreting the Sho¯wa Emperor’s locus in Japan’s wartime history actually represent a desperate attempt on the part of reactionaries to retrieve ascendancy for defeat revisionism? Are Bix and Takahashi fighting a battle that has already been won? Takahashi Tetsuya (b. 1956), trained as a philosopher with a specialization in French philosophy, emerged in the 1990s as one of the leading analysts of contemporary political thought, particularly debates over war responsibility. Identified clearly as an opponent of neo-nationalist groups such as the ‘Liberal School of History’ and the ‘Atarashii rekishi kyo¯kasho o tsukurukai’ (hereafter referred to as ‘Tsukurukai’; Society for History Textbook Reform), Takahashi has become a central figure in Japan’s contemporary debate culture. Through

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examining the assumptions buried in Takahashi’s interpretation of the symbol emperor system and its consequences for post-war democracy, I shall endeavour to shed light on the actual nature of revisionism, and reaction, in post-war Japan. The objective of this exercise is to develop a better and more insightful under- standing of revisionism as a formative idea in the writing of modern Japanese history in general, and Japan’s WWII history in particular.

Revisionism and reaction As Takahashi indicates in the introduction to his book Rekishi/Shu¯seishugi, the act of revision is integral to the writing of good history (Takahashi 2001a: iii). Revi- sionism can reflect a reappraisal of history in light of new information; alternatively, it can reflect the changing values of society over time (as in the case of feminist history). In the post-war world, historical revisionism has become primarily a pejorative term, often implying a deliberate intent on the part of authors to misrepresent or distort history. In some cases, such as in ‘Holocaust denial’ or ‘Nanjing Massacre denial’, uncertainty over statistics or the inability to provide exact details has been extrapolated to imply uncertainty over the event as a whole. The antecedents of revisionism as a notion partly explain this predominance of negative connotations, but the late twentieth-century concerns with rehabilitating the contemporary ‘nation’ through WWII history writing is another decisive factor in how revisionism has developed as a political phenomenon in recent times. While some scholars, such as Ueno Chizuko, regard this as a phenomenon particular to a post-Cold War context (Ueno 1998: 62, 65, 74–5), it is evident that an enhanced concern with national or communal subjectivity has become a significant driver of contemporary historical revisionism. Contemporary revisionism also embraces a clear reactionary element, whereby contemporary concerns and conflicts are catalysts for a reflex return to the past, in search of a history that is more ‘suitable’ for those with specific interests in this contested present. History is reinforced as an indispensable factor in establishing contemporary national and political legitimacy in the process. In modern political history, revisionism emerged as an expression of dissent Downloaded By: [Australian National University] At: 00:37 15 December 2009 against the interpretation of Marxism as an orthodox, inflexible body of thought. Since the death of Marx, attempts to establish a legitimate line of philosophical connection with the originator of Marxist philosophy led to the denigration of anyone who attempted, even in a mild way, to deviate from this orthodox interpretation. The implication that Marxism comprised ‘a body of inherited truths, frozen beyond revision by the pedigree of its authorship’ (Bottomore 1991: 475) imbued revisionism with a flavour that has endured. Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932), arguably one of the first so-called ‘revisionists’, attempted the equivalent of loyal dissent by seeking to reconcile what he saw as the gap between Marxist theory, and the socio-industrial reality of 1890s Europe. Rapid indus- trialization in Germany, the relative prosperity of the working classes and the

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emergence of labour unions and parliamentarianism suggested to him that perhaps some revision of Marxist precepts was required: It is idle to attempt to reconcile the unreconcilable. The vital thing is to be clear as to where Marx is still right and where he is not. If we jettison the latter, we serve Marx’s memory better than when . . . we stretch his theory until it will prove anything. Because then it proves nothing. (Bernstein, quoted in Steger 1997: 75) Bernstein’s dissent ultimately proved unacceptable to the bearers of orthodoxy in the Marxist fold, and in the process exposed Marxism as a movement that was unable to incorporate dissent into its theoretical identity. This intolerance of organic dynamics within the body of thought known as Marxism, and between this body of thought and its changing socio-historical context, contributed to the consolidation of an image of ‘revisionism’ as something that connoted ‘betrayal’ or ‘disloyalty’ and, with it, the absolute certainty of being ‘incorrect’. In the post-WWII world, revisionism has emerged as a phenomenon that displays an uncommon fascination with the writing and re-writing, interpretation and re-interpretation of this global conﬂict from distinctly national perspectives. A cursory list of such debates soon reveals the pervasiveness of this tendency: for example, the 1980s historikerstreit in Germany, where Jurgen Habermas and others featured in a debate with Ernst Nolte and the government of Helmut Kohl over whether or not the Holocaust was being ‘relativized’ and ‘normalized’ in history;2 the late 1970s debates over collaboration with the Nazis in wartime France and the Netherlands prompted by Renzo de Felice’s 1976 study of fascism; the emergence of the ‘Liberal School of History’ movement in Japan in reaction to the 1997 inclusion in school history textbooks of what they saw as unpatriotic accounts of Japan’s actions in WWII; and the reactions to Iris Chang’s ﬂawed study of the Nanjing Massacre3 in the 1990s are just some of the instances of what has become known as WWII revisionism. The dynamic of ‘reaction’ revealed in the abbreviated list above comes more to the fore in another popular variant of post-WWII revisionism. The 1990s debates on Zionist historiography over the origins of the state; the discussions in Downloaded By: [Australian National University] At: 00:37 15 December 2009 Hong Kong history education before and after reversion to the PRC in 1997; the ‘black armband view of history’ controversy in Australia following Paul Keating’s 1993 Redfern Speech where he advocated acknowledging the wrongs perpetrated against indigenous Australians through an apology; these are just some of the instances where the past has become embroiled in what are primarily contemporary political debates.4 The interrelationship of historical revisionism and reaction is one striking aspect of post-WWII revisionism. Interestingly, this is very much in keeping with the ‘original’ manifestation of revisionism, where ‘revisionism’ implied a tension between theory and lived reality that ultimately led to that theory being challenged. In the 1990s, reaction to political catalysts in the present – notably the

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fiftieth anniversary of WWII – has prompted attempts to stretch versions of the past in order to fit and reflect partisan contemporary concerns. In the case of post-war Japan, this has entailed not merely ‘revision’, but also rehabilitation, of a past that is disconcertingly national in scope. In many instances, this project of rehabilitation has focused on the depiction of the state in history, as part of a wider project to rehabilitate the state in contemporary society and thereby legitimize patriotism. For this reason, what is called ‘revisionism’ in contemporary Japan is often associated with nationalism or neo-nationalism (Ueno 1998: 74; Kersten 1999: 199–200; Hein and Selden 2000: 86).

Defeat revisionism ‘Defeat revisionism’ emerged out of the consensus between conservative Japanese political elites and the US authorities concerned with the administration of occupied Japan, to safeguard Emperor Hirohito from prosecution as a war criminal in the early post-war years. The justiﬁcation for this was implied by General Douglas MacArthur with typical melodrama: ‘Destroy him and the nation will disintegrate’ (Takeda 1988: 127). Retaining not only the institution of the Emperor but the individual who occupied that position before and during WWII required considerable powers of invention in order to justify this kind of physical and symbolic continuity into the post-war era. Above all, accountability for Japan’s actions during the war could not be associated with the person – and thus the institution – that would be used to legitimize post-war democratization. The component ﬁctions of defeat revisionism highlight the democratic schizo- phrenia that accompanied this arrangement. The Emperor had followed the precepts of constitutional monarchy in wartime by following the advice given to him by his cabinet. However, in 1945, he was able to intervene in favour of accepting the terms of the Potsdam declaration because he had been invited to do so by his Supreme War Council. This version of the emperor’s historical role as deliverer of peace, and a victim of war, was restated for posterity by Prime Minister Takeshita Noboru in his eulogy for the Sho¯wa Emperor in January 1989: ‘He resolutely brought to an end the war that had broken out in spite of his Downloaded By: [Australian National University] At: 00:37 15 December 2009 wishes, out of a determination to prevent further suffering of the people, regard- less of the consequences to his own person’ (Takeshita 1989). Hirohito had been unable to intervene to prevent war because, under the 1889 Meiji Constitution, he was a constitutional monarch; but the symbol emperor of the 1947 constitution was politically neutered by the parallel transference of sovereignty from the throne to the people. Responsible but not accountable before the war; safely irresponsible and unaccountable post-war, the kind of democracy embodied in the constitution delivered its own kind of continuous utility where the Emperor was concerned. Newly fashioned in the 1947 Consti- tution as ‘the symbol of the State and the unity of the people’ (Hook and McCormack 2001: 189), in post-war Japan, the Emperor nonetheless could claim

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essential continuity through associating post-war democracy not with the Occu- pation, but instead with the Meiji Emperor himself. The direct descendant of the Meiji Emperor and the bridge between war and post-war was meant to convey democratic continuity, not authoritarian continuity. The 1 January 1946 denial of divinity statement read by the Emperor underscored a business-as-usual message for the Imperial House that contra- dicted the assumption of essential discontinuity that accompanied the demilita- rization/democratization agenda of the Occupation by restating the Charter Oath of 1868 and declaring the desire to ‘reafﬁrm the principles embodied in the charter’ (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, Government Section 1949: 470). With Meiji as the foundation for post-war democracy, and the post-war incarnation of the Emperor achieved through denying divinity alongside sovereignty, the stage was set for a post-war discourse that made accountability in association with the Emperor tantamount to challenging the logic of post-war democracy itself. This political complication has successfully interfered with a more nuanced discourse on responsibility where the Emperor is concerned. Certainly, the clarity of ethical accountability in association with the Sho¯wa Emperor and WWII has been obscured by the overriding political priority of ethical disassociation. In his writings on the Emperor in post-war Japan, Takahashi argues that the severance of democracy and accountability has been preserved and institutional- ized in the post-war symbol emperor system. Further, he argues that this continues to have damaging consequences for post-war Japanese democracy. Takahashi attributes the lack of resolution in post-war debates on war responsibility to the Emperor’s exemption from guilt in the late 1940s; he likewise implies that, without resolving the question of imperial war guilt, war guilt will remain unresolved and distorted in Japanese society at large, and post-war democracy will remain under threat. The advent in the 1990s of active neo-nationalist movements such as the ‘Tsukurukai’, the visits by Prime Minister Koizumi to the Yasukuni Shrine in 2001 and 2002, and the reluctance to provide legal acknowledgement and compensation for Japan’s war victims in a succession of war- related lawsuits in the 1990s are just some of the manifestations of his fears. Downloaded By: [Australian National University] At: 00:37 15 December 2009 If we examine the assumptions made by Takahashi concerning the post-war consequences of symbol emperor syndrome, the pedigree of what he assumes to be post-war historical revisionism becomes less clear. Indeed, the dynamics of post-war debates on WWII and the Emperor suggest more possibilities, and perhaps more optimism, than the determinism inherent in his reading of the symbol emperor construct.

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Assumption 1: If the Sho¯wa Emperor is not guilty, then no one is. Collective accountability depended on Hirohito’s acknowledgment of war guilt. With Hirohito’s death, collective accountability can never properly be realized in Japan In ‘The Emperor standing at ground zero’ (2001b), Takahashi relates how, in their recent alternative textbook, the ‘Tsukurukai’ sought to entrench an emotional identification between the Sho¯wa Emperor and the Japanese as a whole, through victim consciousness. Specifically, the ‘Tsukurukai’ told of a female hibakusha’s (nuclear-irradiated person) positive feeling of identification and empathy with the Emperor at the time of the Sho¯wa Emperor’s death. In Takahashi’s reading, this is an attempt to create a community of victimhood that embraces the entire Japanese populace, in a manner that transcends generations. Through producing and inventing memory, he argues, the ‘Tsukurukai’ is promoting the fallacy that the emotional foundation of the Emperor’s identification with the people rests on their shared wartime victimhood. In this way, any kind of positive feeling towards Hirohito in post-war Japan necessarily involved a denial of his culpability. Takahashi clearly suggests that this is essentially a self- interested act on the part of the post-war Japanese. In disassociating Hirohito from any kind of war responsibility, the Japanese are giving themselves permission to see themselves in the same light. This community of victimhood also invokes an ethical spectrum. Takahashi writes: ‘any war experience of a Japanese national would be imagined to be positioned somewhere between that of the Emperor and of the hibakusha’. If we assume that the hibakusha, being female and thus a civilian and non-combatant, represents ‘absolute innocence’, and that the atomic bomb therefore represents ‘absolute evil’, then, according to Takahashi, ‘the war experience of other Japanese nationals would be placed somewhere between these two ends or extremes in severity and proximity to evil’ (Takahashi 2001b: 108). Takahashi’s arguments concerning the nature of Hirohito’s guilt, and its scope, focus on the human trauma that resulted from the Emperor ignoring the Konoe Memorial of February 1945, and the delay in accepting the terms of the Potsdam

Downloaded By: [Australian National University] At: 00:37 15 December 2009 Declaration. The fact that some hibakusha could identify with Hirohito even after information on the Emperor’s connection with decision making during the last year of the war was more widely known was, in Takahashi’s view, evidence of a willingness on the part of some hibakusha to regard Hirohito as a victim of circumstance. Moreover, Takahashi states that the ‘Tsukurukai’ is thereby engaging in ‘an act of creating historical memory’ for post-war generations (Takahashi 2001b: 108). However, at the same time Takahashi acknowledges that the ‘Tsukurukai’ does not so much ‘invent’ this memory, as it capitalizes on an entrenched distortion in an amorphous collective war memory that is already pervasive enough to make the ‘Tsukurukai’’s position credible: ‘it is a “distortion” in conformity with the

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actual war memory woven by an overwhelming majority of post-war Japanese nationals’ (Takahashi 2001b: 108–9). In other words, it is an example of contemporary reinforcement of a former distortion or, alternatively, of defeat revisionism. However, it is a revisionism that extends its logic beyond the speciﬁc concern of removing Hirohito from the realm of legal culpability for wartime deeds. While deploring the phenomenon of victimhood by association, Takahashi implicitly accepts that the continuity of this revisionist history into the present condemns war responsibility discourse to remain within the parameters of this revisionist logic. With Hirohito’s death, instead of collective accountability being released from this interpretative prison, Takahashi argues that collective war responsibility will be forever handicapped. This reading of the present as a passive recipient of a static discourse that was distorted or misrepresented in the past can only encourage reactionaries such as the ‘Tsukurukai’. Without attacking the logic of defeat revisionism, which assumes a certain kind of association between state and society, between individ- uals and the collective, and between history and memory, defeat revisionism will not effectively be challenged or supplanted. Nuances of responsibility, including the ethical, political, collective and individual, can only become a driver of war responsibility discourse if these bedrock assumptions behind defeat revisionism are rejected outright.5

Assumption 2: Victimhood in post-war Japan is represented as a hierarchy based on the criteria of ethnicity and nationality. This needs to be dismantled and transcended if war responsibility discourse is to move forward in contemporary Japan In most of his commentaries and analysis of war responsibility discourse in contemporary Japan, Takahashi’s primary concern is the a priori exclusion of non- Japanese nationals from the category of war victim (see especially Takahashi 1999b). In his incisive critique of this element of war responsibility discourse underpinning the ‘symbol emperor system’, Takahashi makes a singular contri- bution to the debate. Even so, as Yoshida Yutaka and others have argued, a Downloaded By: [Australian National University] At: 00:37 15 December 2009 productive place for national issues might still be found in war responsibility discourse. Takahashi’s views on nationality as a prerequisite for victimhood are most powerfully conveyed through his debates with the high-proﬁle contemporary opinion leader Kato¯ Norihiro (Takahashi 1999a, 1999b; Kato¯ 1997). In the process, Takahashi has become the catalyst for a new stage in post-war historical consciousness and historiography. Known as the Rekishi shutai ronso¯ (Debate on Historical Subjectivity), Takahashi and his peers have mobilized democratic philosophical logic in their resistance to historical revisionism (Komori and Takahashi 1998; Abiko et al. 1999). This lends a distinctly post-defeat revisionism edge to the debate over war history.

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In Takahashi’s view, Kato¯ is attempting to develop a rationale for limiting the war responsibility that might accrue to the Sho¯wa Emperor through privileging Japanese victimhood over Asian victimhood. ‘Kato¯ adopts the strategy of first leaving out responsibility for events that predate the declaration of war, then restricting responsibility for signing the declaration of war only towards the domestic sphere, thus managing to restrict the Emperor’s responsibility towards the soldiers of the imperial army who died’ (Takahashi 1999b: 141). The victimhood hierarchy places Japanese soldiers who died after 1941 first, followed by other Japanese dead and, last of all, the Asian dead. (Takahashi 1999b: 142). The Sho¯wa Emperor thus had responsibility for those who officially died in his name during the Pacific War period (1941–5), but not particularly towards anyone else. If a reconciliation with Japan’s war dead thus defined can be achieved, Kato¯ believes the way would be clear for other limited types of imperial responsibility to be articulated (Kato¯ 1997: 53–62). Kato¯ does not completely omit consideration of Asian victims of war. However, his formulation of the problem as one of a ‘divided post-war personality’ that must be ‘reunified’ through first accepting and acknowledging Japan’s own war dead represents an unacceptable bargain for Takahashi. The depiction of revisionists as conservatives who are ‘internally oriented’ towards Japan’s official war dead, while progressives are exclusively ‘externally oriented’ in their concern for Asian war victims, is a thin rationale for rehabilitating nationalism on the basis of an historical lie. Denying the reality of invasion, aggression and suffering in Asia at the hands of an imperialist Japan for the sake of a rehabilitated Japanese neo-nationalism in the present is abhorrent to Takahashi. Like many of his peers lining up against the ‘Tsukurukai’, Takahashi regards the fact of aggression as fundamental to the entire logic of war guilt. It cannot be pretended that this aggression was not inherently national in character (Takahashi 1999a: 47, 1999b: 157). Accordingly, Takahashi identifies contemporary neo-nationalism, and nationalism per se, as fundamentally counter-productive to the acknowledgment of war responsibility. His opposition to the post-war legalization of the wartime era flag and anthem are consistent with his conviction that nationalism breeds aggression. Kato¯’s notion that changing the words of the anthem to make it more palatable Downloaded By: [Australian National University] At: 00:37 15 December 2009 in a post-war Japan that possesses a distinctly post-war symbol emperor merely underscores Kato¯’s amnesia regarding Asian victims. As Takahashi points out, many Asians would not recall the words, but most of them would certainly remember the tune (Takahashi 1999b: 246–50). ‘Aggression’ has been an emotional touchstone in debates over war responsibility in Japan throughout the post-war period. In legal terms, acknowledgement of aggression is the necessary prelude to allocating accountability and, in turn, soliciting recognition of this from the ‘aggressor’ through prosecution, apology, reparations and/or compensation. And yet, just as war is arguably an act of state, so too is aggression an act of state. By confining war responsibility debates within a victim–aggressor paradigm, the evaluation of victimhood is implicitly subsumed

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once more within the rubric of the state. Articulating the ethical accountability of the Sho¯wa Emperor, and separating individual guilt from that of either the Emperor or the State, cannot succeed unless this paradigm is reconﬁgured. Takahashi’s commitment to a supra-national version of victimhood is an impor- tant step in this process.

Assumption 3: The status of ‘victim’ and the status of ‘aggressor’ are mutually exclusive Buried beneath Takahashi’s passionate advocacy of an inclusive version of victimhood is a somewhat fatalistic assumption that the status of ‘aggressor’ precludes a concurrent status of ‘victim’. This may be an unfair reading of Takahashi’s position; certainly, he does clearly state in his refutation of Kato¯’s Haisengo-ron that progressives who focus on Asian victims do not ignore Japan’s own dead (Takahashi 1999b: 147). Yet he also declares that ‘[i]f all “Japanese nationals” including the Sho¯wa Emperor become victims, there exists no assailant against Asian people. Where there is no assailant, there is no victim’ (Takahashi 2001b: 108). In focusing on the mechanism through which Asian victims are consigned to historical oblivion in revisionist history, Takahashi is once more conforming to the structural logic behind that revisionist discourse. The assumption that the existence of victim consciousness equals a denial of aggressor status in post-war Japan is a mirror image of the inflexible logic behind conservative political thinking. In other words, conservatives cling to the idea that admitting Japan’s aggressor status is tantamount to besmirching the memory and validity of the sacrifice made by Japanese soldiers on the battlefields of WWII. This frozen logic serves only to paralyse the war responsibility debate in post- war Japan. This is why Takahashi displays such desperate concern when he sees the ‘Tsukurukai’’s attempts to associate Hirohito with the victim label beside that of the female hibakusha. If Hirohito is a victim in war memory, then he cannot – Takahashi assumes – ever truly be associated with the mantle of aggressor. Without this, Japan can never atone, and non-Japanese victims can never be Downloaded By: [Australian National University] At: 00:37 15 December 2009 acknowledged. If this is the structure of war responsibility logic, then Takahashi has reason to feel desperate. However, this logic can be recast. The partnering of the concept of ‘victim’ with that of ‘aggressor’ confuses the ethical line of accountability. If aggression is an act of state, this is not comparable with the experience of countless individual victims. When we replace the concept of ‘aggressor’ with that of ‘perpetrator’, we release discourse from its association with the state. At the same time, we highlight new possibilities for combining war guilt with recognition of victims beyond a particularistic realm. Yoshida Yutaka has achieved such a cognitive breakthrough with his work on juninron (logic of forbearance). In Gendai rekishigaku to senso¯ sekinin (1997),

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Yoshida articulated a new way to conceptualize the category of victim. In this view, Japan’s nuclear victims could perform roles other than lending an aura of transcendental victimhood to the Sho¯wa Emperor. He argues that, through challenging the assumptions driving the domestic imperatives behind defeat revision-ism in the immediate aftermath of war, Japan’s own victims could themselves become the instrument for ethical identification with non-Japanese victims. By stressing the universality of victimhood, Yoshida implies, defeat revisionism can be overturned. Juninron refers to the notion that it is normal for citizens to suffer during war. Their suffering is a demonstration of their patriotic participation in the collective national enterprise of war. Consequently, the very idea of compensation for this a priori situation is supposedly absurd. This was part of the deliberate and conscious manipulation of popular feeling in the aftermath of war, when preserving the Emperor was a paramount concern for Japan’s conservatives. In order to deflect adverse criticism of the Emperor by the populace after defeat, proclamations such as the notorious ‘So¯zange’ speech by Prime Minister Higashikuni Naruhiko in August 1945 sought to remind the people of their obligations towards the Emperor. This is none other than the founding logic behind defeat revisionism itself. Yoshida argues that the unique status of Japan’s nuclear victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki provides a window into a reconfiguration of the victim concept. Japan’s status as the world’s first nuclear victim country has conferred special ethical transcendence on post-war Japanese pacifism that resonates around the world. The pacifist clause of Japan’s 1947 constitution enforces this impression still more