Fleeing The Past?

By BARRY HILLENBRAND and JAMES WALSH

- For Americans, the day Pearl Harbor went up in smoke was Dec. 7. For Japanese, on the other side of the International Date Line, it was Dec. 8. A small point, perhaps, but one with symbolic dimensions. It illustrates how the two giants focus differently on their shared history. Americans remember Dec. 7 as a day of infamy. Japanese, when they think of Dec. 8 at all, tend to dismiss the date as mizu ni nagasu: water under the bridge. Many Americans see Japan's economic juggernaut as a continuation of war by other means. Japanese protest that they are tagged as rapacious when they are merely successful. When Wall Street recalls that Tokyo time is 14 hours ahead, it wonders if Japan has cornered the future. Some Japanese consider that they might be running away from their past.

The two societies agree on one important thing. Fifty years after the Pacific war's outbreak, they wonder whether they are on some critical new collision course. A broad range of Americans, knowledgeable and temperate ones at that, see Japan as insensitive and arrogant. Washington is abuzz these days not about Japanese car sales and real estate purchases in the U.S., but about what is seen as a budding growth market in Japan for blatantly anti-American screeds.

Readers of U.S. newspapers and magazines have noted a new word: kembei, a telescoped term roughly translated as "resentment of America." They have seen reports of querulous Japanese best sellers like The Japan That Can Say No, journalist Shintaro Ishihara's provocative manifesto of his country's superiority in all ways over the U.S. They have seen a screenwriter, Toshiro Ishido, quoted as exclaiming, "I have nothing but contempt for America!" and an unnamed Japanese professor predicting that the U.S. will become "a premier agrarian power, a giant version of Denmark."

To a nation that brought democracy to Japan and still guarantees its defense, those are not only ungracious sentiments but fighting words. They seem to confirm the implications of occasional opinion surveys that reflect a new degree of threat both countries sense in each other. Gennadi Gerasimov, the former Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman, phrased the development in a joking way last year. On a visit to Washington, he said "The cold war is over, and Japan won." In some views Japan is already achieving economically what it failed to win by force of arms: a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

If all that were true, Pearl Harbor's anniversary might mark an ominous ! turning point in trans-Pacific relations. But truth has a way of being much less dramatic. If Japan is shifting much investment and production to its Asian neighbors, it is doing no more than U.S. multinationals have done for decades. Japan's economic output may top America's GNP in 10 years if current growth rates persist, but large numbers of Japanese who struggle with skimpy retirement benefits and cramped homes still look up to the American way of life. Kembei books amount to little more than curiosities. The very term kembei is so new as to be virtually unknown.

A poll figure that foreigners rarely cite is the share of Japanese who like and admire the U.S., which has long ranked No. 1 in Japanese eyes. Last month, in a Yomiuri survey rating public trust in various countries, a record 56.3% of Japanese gave the U.S. the top slot. When Americans are asked the same thing, 13.5% pick Japan.

For every gadfly who voices contempt for the U.S. and its ills, countless Japanese evince tremendous fondness for their only military ally and premier trading partner. It would be hard, perhaps, to find any nation anywhere so besotted with things American -- from the music, books and movies Japanese absorb to the clothes they wear and hamburgers they eat. Millions of Japanese tourists visit the U.S. every year, while tens of thousands who return from working in America gush about how they loved their stay.

Does all this reflect unalloyed good attitudes? Well, no. In detecting evidence of trouble in the U.S. that Americans themselves see, many Japanese react with sorrow more than anything like contempt. Explains Kazuo Ogura, a senior Foreign Ministry official and expert on U.S.-Japanese relations: "Because Japanese like America and want to admire it, they are frustrated. When they look at America, they see disintegration of the family, drugs, AIDS, middle-class values collapsing. Traditional values are what many Japanese still respect and think important."

Highly sensitive to what foreigners think of them, Japanese chafe under a constant buzz saw of American complaints. A country that emerged from the smoking ruins of 1945 to achieve the free, modern and prosperous society that their conqueror wanted is now blamed for being too good at the game. Says a senior official, Chief Cabinet Secretary Koichi Kato: "Americans told us to be diligent and work hard. We followed that advice. Now we are criticized for our virtue. There is a smoldering frustration about that." Sensitivity extends to the way Japanese reporters minutely track U.S. opinions of their country, in an almost masochistic zeal to record any bad views.

In part, though, the attitude may also be compensation for what some Japanese historians consider to be their country's biggest defect before World War II: a failure to read properly what the rest of the world thought of Japan. Militarists at the time preached and probably believed, for example, that China would welcome them as liberators. Today the Japan that has constitutionally renounced war is awakening to the need for greater responsibility in world affairs. The shift has been slow, however, and underwent a sharp setback during the gulf war.

In a society that may be the most pacifist on earth, the government's failed attempt to circumvent constitutional curbs in order to send noncombat personnel to the Persian Gulf at American behest provoked widespread outrage. More irritating still was the carping from Washington after Japan pledged $13 billion in aid to the allied effort. Says a high Japanese official: "First Americans taught us that pacifism was a good thing, and then they called us cowards when we did not send troops. Oh, Americans did not say that directly, but we felt that was what they were thinking."

Now a new bill that would enable Japanese military personnel to take part in U.N. peacekeeping missions is likely to pass. And despite gulf-war frictions, formal U.S.-Japanese relations are in excellent shape. Few trade disputes remain, and an emotion-fraught effort to open Japan to rice imports may be settled by the current round of worldwide trade talks. Foreigners still do not find it easy or cheap to do business in Japan, but the markets are mostly open. Japan's trade surplus? Despite a recent bulge, it has been in decline for three years.

But for many nations, what remains troubling about Japan is a sense that its economic engines are escaping history at full steam. They fear that the lessons of Pearl Harbor and the other traumas that attended Japanese militarism have never been squarely faced, let alone digested.

All nations embroider their history to some extent. In Hungary schoolchildren are taught that Attila the Hun, hardly history's most sympathetic character, introduced uplifting elements of Roman culture to his court. Britain turned the painful retreat from Dunkirk into a triumph of the spirit. Americans remember the Alamo as a heroic episode, though the war for Texas was a land grab by gringo interlopers. In recent decades Japanese officials, abetted by political and business conservatives, have subtly but systematically diluted the facts about Japanese aggression in Asia from 1931 to 1945. The tampering is reflected in school textbooks and popular literature, films and television, and has rendered some of the war's tragedies almost benign.

Japan's ruthless invasion of China is termed an "advance." The 1937 rape of Nanking, in which imperial troops massacred thousands of Chinese civilians, is deemed problematic because of "muddled factual data." Other harsh episodes like the Bataan death march are wholly ignored, perhaps in hopes that dodging the unpleasant will somehow make it disappear.

But the bitter memories will not go away, and Japan is too pivotal and wealthy a global power to be allowed -- or to allow itself -- the luxury of historical amnesia. Increasingly, Asian neighbors demand that it deal more forthrightly with its past, especially if it hopes to play a leading regional role. Many Japanese scholars, exasperated by Tokyo's studied forgetfulness, are joining foreign critics in insisting on the same thing. "Without a deep understanding of the many facets of the war," says Makoto Ooka, a prominent poet, "the Japanese people cannot regain their sense of dignity in the world."

Almost imperceptibly, that view is gaining acceptance beyond a limited circle of intellectuals. The need to air the topic, if only for the benefit of audiences in Asia and the West, has nudged discussion along. The recently replaced Prime Minister, Toshiki Kaifu, did his part. On trips abroad, he was direct in addressing Japan's wartime transgressions. In the Netherlands he expressed "sincere contrition" for the "unbearable sufferings and sorrow" the Japanese army inflicted on Dutch nationals in what is now Indonesia. In September the new Emperor, Akihito, carried similar messages to Southeast Asia.

Still, Japanese schools have done a highly inadequate job of teaching the facts about the country's aggression. This year, for example, the Education Ministry insisted that a textbook passage that said "over 70,000 people were reportedly killed by the Japanese imperial army" in Nanking be changed to "a large number of Chinese people were killed." Many Japanese scholars are appalled at such censorship. Over the years they have sued to protect their books, while the teachers' union, a bastion of liberalism, has fought to reinstate some text cuts. At times they win, generally after foreign protests, but progress is slight.

Some teachers do attempt to strike a more balanced view. Shinji Mikabe, a faculty member at the Matsubara High School in Tokyo, devotes time in a course on discrimination to telling students what they should have learned in history class. "To understand discrimination," says Mikabe, "they must begin with the historical background, and that includes the war." His students consistently admit that they know little about what the Japanese army did in China and Southeast Asia. They are, by contrast, familiar with the U.S. atom- bombing of Hiroshima and the bloody battle for Okinawa.

Lack of balance is also evident in popular treatments of the war. In movies and TV documentaries, a few scenes from black-and-white newsreels seem to appear over and over again: the damage from Americans' fire-bombing of Tokyo, U.S. Marines using flamethrowers to clear Japanese troops out of Okinawa bunkers and foxholes, the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, imperial army generals on trial in Tokyo. The images convey the sense that the Japanese people were the war's real victims -- of both the Allies and the militarists who led the nation into disaster. Seldom is there a hint that Japan victimized others.

Confronting the past is hard partly because of Japan's headlong rush, since the mid-19th century, toward modernization. Says Junichi Kyogoku, president of Tokyo Women's University: "We always look ahead. So the Japanese people are not particularly self-reflective." Asked about Pearl Harbor's anniversary, one Japanese official replied testily, "It's a historical fact. We can't deny it, but let's move on."

Japanese who were youngsters in 1945 recall how politicians and teachers who had been extolling the Emperor and Japan's war aims one day turned into instant democrats and peace lovers the day after surrender. It smacked of betrayal and helped spawn the cynical, rebellious generation that marched through Tokyo in the '50s and '60s. Defeat and disillusion also weighed heavily upon the older generation. They passed the blame, considering it best simply to avoid the past -- especially after U.S. occupation authorities rehabilitated some key wartime politicians and businessmen with hardly a question asked.

Antipathy to war of any kind took root deeply. The Self-Defense Forces now are well below their authorized strength of 274,000 because of trouble in recruiting young people. So desperate are the forces to fill officers' billets that in September, for the first time ever, women were allowed to take the entrance exam for the National Defense Academy, a striking concession in a nation where most men still prefer women to hold jobs that allow them to do little more than serve tea.

The relative insensitivity of some Japanese men to the hardships of women and ethnic minorities has antagonized some U.S. communities where Japanese companies have set up shop. Yet a growing number of Japanese, especially younger ones, are more aware of that shortcoming. The Social Democratic Party is set to begin a series of symposiums examining Japan's wartime exploits. Kembei is not a word used in these circles, which are peering through the smoke of war memories and postwar trade frictions to find a durable basis for relations with their trans-Pacific partner in destiny. They only hope that Americans see fit to join them.

With reporting by DAVID AIKMAN/WASHINGTON