Remembering:FIGHTING COLLUSIONS OF SILENCE! BREAK THE SILENCE! One Educator's Approach to Memory in Line with Iris Chiang's
Remembering:FIGHTING COLLUSIONS OF SILENCE! BREAK THE SILENCE! One Educator's Approach to Memory in Line with Iris Chiang's
By Kevin Anthony Stoda
Many of us our called to wander the globe and wonder at the good, the unknown, or be witness to evils and changes while rediscovering history on this earth. Many of us are also inspired to educate others.
Some of us have a camera’s eye for detail. Some of us feel a sense of loss at inappropriate silence. Some of us shout our outrage in the midst of silence—or at least support those who do stand up and are speaking for those who cannot any longer speak.
In my life I am blessed to be able to do all these things. I was blessed to be able to make journeys in my days on this earth to Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dachau—and other places of memory and witness. I plan to do so until I die, and I invite you to join me—for this is the millennium for us to really get to know one another!
Let’s dream big! Let this be the century when governments forget to worry about image and stop fearing shame and admit their errors, building a healthier new age of more mature and knowledgeable citizenry for this planet—a planet already wrought with too many wars and civil wars in the very first decade of this new millennium.
MEMORIAL MUSEUM KUWAIT 2007
Although I have already been living in Kuwait for over 3 ½ years, I recently visited for the Memorial Museum: Kuwait House of National Works. It is located not far from the old National Assembly building that looms as a large abandoned monument to the 1990 invasion of the country.
As in continental China these days, new structures are going up extremely quickly in Kuwait. So, it is surprising that the government has chosen to retain such a huge piece of property on Arab Gulf Road, one of the higher demand areas for construction and water front businesses in all of the country. As one looks around and marvels at the many tall cranes and high rise construction projects in Kuwait today, one should somberly recall that only 16 to 17 years earlier the invading Iraqi occupation forces used to hang Kuwait opponents and rebels from those same types of cranes.
As I write this essay, I ponder what museums, there are to memory of war and Massacre in Nanking. I look on line and see that there are such places of memory, and I hope they are not so hidden and out of the way as this memorial museum in Kuwait is.
Less than a mile away from the dilapidated Assembly structure and hidden away in a side street is where the Memorial Museum in Kuwait is located. Outside the building are a few pieces of captured Iraqi military equipment. In the garden is a sculpture of an aerial bomb hitting a small structure. On the blackened projectile is written “Saddam”.
As one enters the museum, the first rooms are dedicated to works of national heroes and to the life of early Kuwait, i.e. an era long before oil—an era of silk road trading, and pearling or fishing ships. It is a simpler time where wars of mass-execution were unknown.
The Kuwaiti residents of that era were also much poorer. Some had to indenture themselves, their children, and their grandchildren as servants just to get by. Alas, as is typical of national museums around the globe, the quasi-slavery of the 18th and 19th century Kuwaiti world is not referred to. (This is, of course not the museum's mission, but silences about history are not unknown throughout Kuwait either.)
Among the various photos of 1990-1991 occupied Kuwait are images of disappeared victims of the occupation of Kuwait. Further, one sees evidence of how the occupiers tried to erase the memory of Kuwait. Streets and townships were renamed after Saddam Hussein or Iraqi heroes.
The message is clear. Upon occupying the territory in August 1990, the Iraqis sought to erase memories of Kuwaiti history and memory as soon as soon as possible. Kuwaiti flags along with photos of the nation’s leaders were banned from public display. Police reports showed that children--as young as six years old--were arrested for carrying such items in the street.
On the walls are photos of women who died in hospitals of Kuwait in 1990. Iraqi government forces had systematically taken medicine and medical equipment from Kuwaiti hospitals as fast as possible—sending the medical supplies to Baghdad and other parts of Iraq. The narration under the photos indicates that these women died because they had been denied medicine and medical treatment. The implication is that a sort of genocide was being practiced in Kuwait by its neighboring occupier.
During the occupation, thousands of houses and buildings in Kuwait had been ransacked of their furniture, office supplies, jewelry, artwork, cultural artifacts, electronics, and anything considered of value. The large scale looting of the Kuwait National Museum and its humongous collection of Islamic memorabilia is just one example of what the occupiers did
In recent years, there has been a positive trend to put the Kuwait experience into a larger context of the ruthlessness of war and suppression of minorities in neighboring Iraq. This is reflected in the by the efforts at the Kuwaiti Memorial Museum to link its memories of occupation and rape of the homeland to the other abuses of Saddam Hussein, such as the gassing and chemical bombing in the 1980s in Kurdish areas Inside there is a vivid display of life-sized figures of villages who are left slaughtered and gassed in their Kurdish townships.
The focus of such a memorial museum is first of all to serve as a witness to what the people in Kuwait in their current mad-paced attempt to build a new world in the post Saddam era are likely to forget—that is, not pass on to their offspring in decades ahead.
The second focus is to remind visitors of the alliance that really did create for Kuwaitis a New World in February 1991: This is a world described in one brochure as a place “that discards the theory of survival of the fittest or the weak being eaten by the strong.” The founders of the museum want to remind the peoples of the world and their national leaders that in the end there is no room in this world for tyranny and dictators.
AMERICAN, GERMAN, AND JAPANESE MEMORIES 2007
As alluded to above, I am a life-long historian and educator who has had the opportunity to teach in many countries, including public schools or universities in Germany, Japan, Nicaragua, Mexico, the USA, and several Middle Eastern lands over the past two decades.
My sojourns have taken me to many places of memory over the same period. My most recent stop was to Cambodia, which is still trying to recover from the loss of millions of its citizens in the great genocide campaigns there in the 1970s. Some months earlier, I had visited Indonesia where so many had died in the anti-communist and ethnocidal programs of the mid-1960s.
Naturally, back in Europe, I observed the buildings of many new monuments in the 1980s to the atrocities of Nazi-era and fascist occupation of most of the continent in the 1930s and 1940s.. Many of these new monuments, including one at the entrance to the railway station nearest my apartment in Wuppertal City, Germany commemorated the holocaust and trainloads of local Jews who were loaded into box cars there in the 1940s and shipped to Poland.
In the 1980s and 1990s, I admired the growth in public consciousness in Germany of what had transpired under the Nazi Empire of the earlier part of the 20th Century. I also admired the fact that shame no longer seemed to drive the populace in Germany. That is, the Germans whom had seen themselves in the U.S. occupation period (from 1945-1953) primarily as victims of history were no longer doing so.
Long years of silence had ended by the time I arrived in Germany to teach part-time in 1986. In those years, the Parliament in Germany discussed the facts of history again and again—trying to deal with horrible things done in the name of nationalism and fascism. Throughout Germany governments at the town-, city-, state-, and federal levels have continued investing money, time, debate, and critical thought into how to remember and be witness to crimes against humanity. The new holocaust memorial in Berlin near the former Reichstag is just one manifestation of such public thought.
In contrast, as an American, I have often been dismayed at how such evolution of historical memory and historical debate had been missing in U.S. public debate, especially since April 30, 1975—when my own junior high school teacher told us students that Americans would remember that day and its infamy forever.
For that particular instructor, who had served in the Vietnam War flying helicopter, the loss of that war by America was a shame that we Americans would always remember. Even at that time, I didn’t buy that naive version of history of America in war. This is because as a teenager I was already pursuing an ideologies of pacifism and non-violence. My heroes were Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Sadly, most Americans were out of step with me.
While I spent my first freshman year at college in 1980 writing a paper on the vast use of chemical weapons in the Vietnam War, most Americans were being led into supporting the biggest arms build-up in American history to that date. This is why, despite having a very painful Vietnam War experience, Americans likely falsely perceived that the end of the Cold War in the 1989-1991 period was the result of America’s willingness to threaten, bully and defeat others through superiority in weapons.
Meanwhile, I had the honor of climbing over the Wall at Brandenburg Gate and walking down the Unter-den-Linden Street on December 31, 1989. At that time, I knew through my own activities in the Peace Movement that the collapsing of the East block had more to do with (1) bad economic planning in the East and (2) a common and uniting desire for peace demonstrated on both sides of the Iron Curtain in the 1980s. In that decade millions had marched in the West against the escalation of weaponry. Thousands more were working for peace on both sides of Iron Curtain through people-to-people public diplomacy to create a sense of trust among the European actors as that very decade ended. In short, it was when the politicians and military leaders got out of the way of the people that the walls came down.
Alas, that is not how American media and textbooks have taught such recent history. Due to this inadequate approach to history and memory, America recently tried to march into the Middle East and Afghanistan in the first decade of the 21st century with the peculiar expectation that firepower can rights all wrongs and creates peace.
Just over 70 years earlier, the Japanese Empire had marched into Asia—believing as well that firepower would bring Asia a Pax-Nipponia. Naturally, the methods of bullying and using firepower-over-all were not only inappropriate to tasks of building any sense of peace and stability in the region. Japan was soon itself left a smoldering ruin by 1945.
In the early 1990s, I taught in Japanese high schools and returned again to study and do research there in 1995. On the one hand, I had a happy experience teaching in Japan in what was the largest teacher exchange program in the world— a program bringing over 5000 teachers to Japan from various lands around the world as part of an officially suported public diplomacy effort to have more and more Japanese coming in contact with non-Japanese views of life and of our planet. The focus on peace and getting to know one-another’s cultures was very appealing to me as an educator in history and the social sciences. I met many Japanese who were interested in Peace issues and who were saddened by the educational practices and diplomacy inspired by its government.
As a person fascinated by the need to commemorate and invigorate oneself in the wake stopping further crimes against humanity, I have been disappointed by the public image portrayed by government leaders in their political acts related to the WWII era. They don't seem to realize how Imperialist Japanese history of the first half of the 20th Century was still affecting (1) how the average Japanese was educated and cultivated to relate to foreigners and (2) how foreign relations and national policies were failing to create an image of a matured Japan. The silent façade to memory revealed by the lack of critical textbooks and supported by insincere government pronouncements cover up shameful actions in China and a dozen other neighboring countries.
I recall the fact that when I was living in Japan, I had gained in a few days more information from what one-aged Japanese veteran of campaigns in China than his children or grandchildren had ever acquired. In short, the whole country of Japan at times appears to have had numerous skeletons in its closets that only the neighbors or neighboring peoples can see.
This façade of historical memory isn't due only to a culture of silence--driven by a tradition that runs from shame. This is the result political leadership putting up false images of what honor and dishonor mean. It also has to do with the fear of rocking the boat in a society that praises harmony—even if harmony is built on a false foundation: erasing of memory.
Compounding this silence in most corners of Japan has been a constant campaign to paint Japan as primarily a victim of history and of anti-Japanese crusades during recent decades. This focus on Japan as victim of history is certainly what drove Japanese nationalism at the birth of its imperialist efforts in the 1890s when Japan first faced off in Asia taking land from Russia and other neighboring countries in ensuing decades.
My country, the United States of America, also has played the victim card after the
11th September 2001--and naturally deserved this role to some small degree-- but the problem of always seeing oneself as victim is that one never grows up and takes responsibility for one’s actions. Therefore, one never seriously tries to correct the faulty logic, faulty steps of acculturation and misdirected educational processes which led a people astray in creating Nanking Massacres in the first place.
This linking of imperialist Japanese memory and American war memories came full-circle in the April 2, 2007 publication of an editorial by a Japanese historian (and advisor to two Japanese prime ministers), Hideaki Kase. Kase’s writing, called “The Use and Abuse of the Past” was an example of an almost official Japanese policy to rewrite again and again Japanese war crimes of the 20th Century.
NANKING’S MEMORY
The key quote expressing the sentiment of the author, Hideaki Kase, concerning the recent debate of war memories in Japan (and its affect on official Japanese diplomacy) was:
“The harder outsiders push Japan for an apology. The harder Japan may start pushing back.”
Moreover, Kase claims or implies falsely:
(1) No Japanese military occupier ever forced women to serve as prostitutes or “comfort women”.
(2) There is much evidence to indicate that no Nanking Massacre ever took place.
(3) Japanese politicians only ask forgiveness from its neighbors if it is good for business.
(4) Japanese textbooks have often “incorrectly” called what happened in Nanking as a rape or massacre.
As I read these claims, I thought to myself, “This is an outrageous series of claims to the world to be making in such a widely circulated magazine as Newswek!”
Throughout Kase\s insensitive and offensive writing—which was incidentally published in the special Newsweek magazine issue about memories of American soldiers and their families in occupied Iraq (2003-2007)—, Kase consistently implies that the Japanese are victims of a historical anti-Japanese campaign.
As a concerned cross-cultural educator and peacemaker, I responded to that article of Hideaki’s by writing an editorial of my own and published it in several free on-line blogs and websites criticizing his victimization of Japan and its distortions of memory and popular culture.
Wherever history and memory are manipulated by government officials, their backers and official histories, I have to stand up. This is the way I desire to honor Iris Chiang and her lifelong work. Iris Chang passed away a few years back but she is my ideal as an educator and a historian. She is famous for the revealing work: The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.
This approach of mine to education and history as a lifelong struggle is the only way that the memory of what happened in Nanking will be remembered where it counts most—in the land of Japan that once tried to benefit from the massacre.
I desire that Japan (as well as America) grows into a country that can counter the worst tendencies in Asia now which continue to lead toward tyranny and dictatorship. So far, although at the people-to-people level in Japan, relationships between the Japanese and Chinese have been improving over the last two decades, the last 70-years of post-Imperial history have not shown significant change at the government level in Japan.
Mutual empathy and an educated understanding of how nations are linked historically across cultures is what we all need to have in order to connect and remain vigilant to misguided historians while reminding both our elders and our children of the fact that internalization of history is not always simply a duty or source of pride but is also a duty of peace.
Works Referred to:
Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.
New York: Basic Books, 1997.
Iris Chang Memorial Fund, http://www.irischangmemorialfund.org/Mission_Statement.htm
Kase, Hideaki, “The Use and Abuse of the Past”, (Special Edition) Newsweek,
April 2, 2007, p. 15.
Kuwait National Memorial Museum, http://www.pbase.com/bmcmorrow/kuwaitmemorial
Stoda, Kevin, "The Use and Abuse of Newsweek: Was that a Japanese Government plant
in Newsweek in April or was that just Bad History?", http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_kevin_an_070616_the_use_and_abuse_of.htm
Stoda, Kevin, "Japan, please Stop the Whitewashing of Memory, Japan!", http://alone.gnn.tv/blogs/23731/Japan_please_STOP_THE_WHITEWASHING_OF_MEMORY_JAPAN
By Kevin Anthony Stoda
Many of us our called to wander the globe and wonder at the good, the unknown, or be witness to evils and changes while rediscovering history on this earth. Many of us are also inspired to educate others.
Some of us have a camera’s eye for detail. Some of us feel a sense of loss at inappropriate silence. Some of us shout our outrage in the midst of silence—or at least support those who do stand up and are speaking for those who cannot any longer speak.
In my life I am blessed to be able to do all these things. I was blessed to be able to make journeys in my days on this earth to Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dachau—and other places of memory and witness. I plan to do so until I die, and I invite you to join me—for this is the millennium for us to really get to know one another!
Let’s dream big! Let this be the century when governments forget to worry about image and stop fearing shame and admit their errors, building a healthier new age of more mature and knowledgeable citizenry for this planet—a planet already wrought with too many wars and civil wars in the very first decade of this new millennium.
MEMORIAL MUSEUM KUWAIT 2007
Although I have already been living in Kuwait for over 3 ½ years, I recently visited for the Memorial Museum: Kuwait House of National Works. It is located not far from the old National Assembly building that looms as a large abandoned monument to the 1990 invasion of the country.
As in continental China these days, new structures are going up extremely quickly in Kuwait. So, it is surprising that the government has chosen to retain such a huge piece of property on Arab Gulf Road, one of the higher demand areas for construction and water front businesses in all of the country. As one looks around and marvels at the many tall cranes and high rise construction projects in Kuwait today, one should somberly recall that only 16 to 17 years earlier the invading Iraqi occupation forces used to hang Kuwait opponents and rebels from those same types of cranes.
As I write this essay, I ponder what museums, there are to memory of war and Massacre in Nanking. I look on line and see that there are such places of memory, and I hope they are not so hidden and out of the way as this memorial museum in Kuwait is.
Less than a mile away from the dilapidated Assembly structure and hidden away in a side street is where the Memorial Museum in Kuwait is located. Outside the building are a few pieces of captured Iraqi military equipment. In the garden is a sculpture of an aerial bomb hitting a small structure. On the blackened projectile is written “Saddam”.
As one enters the museum, the first rooms are dedicated to works of national heroes and to the life of early Kuwait, i.e. an era long before oil—an era of silk road trading, and pearling or fishing ships. It is a simpler time where wars of mass-execution were unknown.
The Kuwaiti residents of that era were also much poorer. Some had to indenture themselves, their children, and their grandchildren as servants just to get by. Alas, as is typical of national museums around the globe, the quasi-slavery of the 18th and 19th century Kuwaiti world is not referred to. (This is, of course not the museum's mission, but silences about history are not unknown throughout Kuwait either.)
Among the various photos of 1990-1991 occupied Kuwait are images of disappeared victims of the occupation of Kuwait. Further, one sees evidence of how the occupiers tried to erase the memory of Kuwait. Streets and townships were renamed after Saddam Hussein or Iraqi heroes.
The message is clear. Upon occupying the territory in August 1990, the Iraqis sought to erase memories of Kuwaiti history and memory as soon as soon as possible. Kuwaiti flags along with photos of the nation’s leaders were banned from public display. Police reports showed that children--as young as six years old--were arrested for carrying such items in the street.
On the walls are photos of women who died in hospitals of Kuwait in 1990. Iraqi government forces had systematically taken medicine and medical equipment from Kuwaiti hospitals as fast as possible—sending the medical supplies to Baghdad and other parts of Iraq. The narration under the photos indicates that these women died because they had been denied medicine and medical treatment. The implication is that a sort of genocide was being practiced in Kuwait by its neighboring occupier.
During the occupation, thousands of houses and buildings in Kuwait had been ransacked of their furniture, office supplies, jewelry, artwork, cultural artifacts, electronics, and anything considered of value. The large scale looting of the Kuwait National Museum and its humongous collection of Islamic memorabilia is just one example of what the occupiers did
In recent years, there has been a positive trend to put the Kuwait experience into a larger context of the ruthlessness of war and suppression of minorities in neighboring Iraq. This is reflected in the by the efforts at the Kuwaiti Memorial Museum to link its memories of occupation and rape of the homeland to the other abuses of Saddam Hussein, such as the gassing and chemical bombing in the 1980s in Kurdish areas Inside there is a vivid display of life-sized figures of villages who are left slaughtered and gassed in their Kurdish townships.
The focus of such a memorial museum is first of all to serve as a witness to what the people in Kuwait in their current mad-paced attempt to build a new world in the post Saddam era are likely to forget—that is, not pass on to their offspring in decades ahead.
The second focus is to remind visitors of the alliance that really did create for Kuwaitis a New World in February 1991: This is a world described in one brochure as a place “that discards the theory of survival of the fittest or the weak being eaten by the strong.” The founders of the museum want to remind the peoples of the world and their national leaders that in the end there is no room in this world for tyranny and dictators.
AMERICAN, GERMAN, AND JAPANESE MEMORIES 2007
As alluded to above, I am a life-long historian and educator who has had the opportunity to teach in many countries, including public schools or universities in Germany, Japan, Nicaragua, Mexico, the USA, and several Middle Eastern lands over the past two decades.
My sojourns have taken me to many places of memory over the same period. My most recent stop was to Cambodia, which is still trying to recover from the loss of millions of its citizens in the great genocide campaigns there in the 1970s. Some months earlier, I had visited Indonesia where so many had died in the anti-communist and ethnocidal programs of the mid-1960s.
Naturally, back in Europe, I observed the buildings of many new monuments in the 1980s to the atrocities of Nazi-era and fascist occupation of most of the continent in the 1930s and 1940s.. Many of these new monuments, including one at the entrance to the railway station nearest my apartment in Wuppertal City, Germany commemorated the holocaust and trainloads of local Jews who were loaded into box cars there in the 1940s and shipped to Poland.
In the 1980s and 1990s, I admired the growth in public consciousness in Germany of what had transpired under the Nazi Empire of the earlier part of the 20th Century. I also admired the fact that shame no longer seemed to drive the populace in Germany. That is, the Germans whom had seen themselves in the U.S. occupation period (from 1945-1953) primarily as victims of history were no longer doing so.
Long years of silence had ended by the time I arrived in Germany to teach part-time in 1986. In those years, the Parliament in Germany discussed the facts of history again and again—trying to deal with horrible things done in the name of nationalism and fascism. Throughout Germany governments at the town-, city-, state-, and federal levels have continued investing money, time, debate, and critical thought into how to remember and be witness to crimes against humanity. The new holocaust memorial in Berlin near the former Reichstag is just one manifestation of such public thought.
In contrast, as an American, I have often been dismayed at how such evolution of historical memory and historical debate had been missing in U.S. public debate, especially since April 30, 1975—when my own junior high school teacher told us students that Americans would remember that day and its infamy forever.
For that particular instructor, who had served in the Vietnam War flying helicopter, the loss of that war by America was a shame that we Americans would always remember. Even at that time, I didn’t buy that naive version of history of America in war. This is because as a teenager I was already pursuing an ideologies of pacifism and non-violence. My heroes were Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Sadly, most Americans were out of step with me.
While I spent my first freshman year at college in 1980 writing a paper on the vast use of chemical weapons in the Vietnam War, most Americans were being led into supporting the biggest arms build-up in American history to that date. This is why, despite having a very painful Vietnam War experience, Americans likely falsely perceived that the end of the Cold War in the 1989-1991 period was the result of America’s willingness to threaten, bully and defeat others through superiority in weapons.
Meanwhile, I had the honor of climbing over the Wall at Brandenburg Gate and walking down the Unter-den-Linden Street on December 31, 1989. At that time, I knew through my own activities in the Peace Movement that the collapsing of the East block had more to do with (1) bad economic planning in the East and (2) a common and uniting desire for peace demonstrated on both sides of the Iron Curtain in the 1980s. In that decade millions had marched in the West against the escalation of weaponry. Thousands more were working for peace on both sides of Iron Curtain through people-to-people public diplomacy to create a sense of trust among the European actors as that very decade ended. In short, it was when the politicians and military leaders got out of the way of the people that the walls came down.
Alas, that is not how American media and textbooks have taught such recent history. Due to this inadequate approach to history and memory, America recently tried to march into the Middle East and Afghanistan in the first decade of the 21st century with the peculiar expectation that firepower can rights all wrongs and creates peace.
Just over 70 years earlier, the Japanese Empire had marched into Asia—believing as well that firepower would bring Asia a Pax-Nipponia. Naturally, the methods of bullying and using firepower-over-all were not only inappropriate to tasks of building any sense of peace and stability in the region. Japan was soon itself left a smoldering ruin by 1945.
In the early 1990s, I taught in Japanese high schools and returned again to study and do research there in 1995. On the one hand, I had a happy experience teaching in Japan in what was the largest teacher exchange program in the world— a program bringing over 5000 teachers to Japan from various lands around the world as part of an officially suported public diplomacy effort to have more and more Japanese coming in contact with non-Japanese views of life and of our planet. The focus on peace and getting to know one-another’s cultures was very appealing to me as an educator in history and the social sciences. I met many Japanese who were interested in Peace issues and who were saddened by the educational practices and diplomacy inspired by its government.
As a person fascinated by the need to commemorate and invigorate oneself in the wake stopping further crimes against humanity, I have been disappointed by the public image portrayed by government leaders in their political acts related to the WWII era. They don't seem to realize how Imperialist Japanese history of the first half of the 20th Century was still affecting (1) how the average Japanese was educated and cultivated to relate to foreigners and (2) how foreign relations and national policies were failing to create an image of a matured Japan. The silent façade to memory revealed by the lack of critical textbooks and supported by insincere government pronouncements cover up shameful actions in China and a dozen other neighboring countries.
I recall the fact that when I was living in Japan, I had gained in a few days more information from what one-aged Japanese veteran of campaigns in China than his children or grandchildren had ever acquired. In short, the whole country of Japan at times appears to have had numerous skeletons in its closets that only the neighbors or neighboring peoples can see.
This façade of historical memory isn't due only to a culture of silence--driven by a tradition that runs from shame. This is the result political leadership putting up false images of what honor and dishonor mean. It also has to do with the fear of rocking the boat in a society that praises harmony—even if harmony is built on a false foundation: erasing of memory.
Compounding this silence in most corners of Japan has been a constant campaign to paint Japan as primarily a victim of history and of anti-Japanese crusades during recent decades. This focus on Japan as victim of history is certainly what drove Japanese nationalism at the birth of its imperialist efforts in the 1890s when Japan first faced off in Asia taking land from Russia and other neighboring countries in ensuing decades.
My country, the United States of America, also has played the victim card after the
11th September 2001--and naturally deserved this role to some small degree-- but the problem of always seeing oneself as victim is that one never grows up and takes responsibility for one’s actions. Therefore, one never seriously tries to correct the faulty logic, faulty steps of acculturation and misdirected educational processes which led a people astray in creating Nanking Massacres in the first place.
This linking of imperialist Japanese memory and American war memories came full-circle in the April 2, 2007 publication of an editorial by a Japanese historian (and advisor to two Japanese prime ministers), Hideaki Kase. Kase’s writing, called “The Use and Abuse of the Past” was an example of an almost official Japanese policy to rewrite again and again Japanese war crimes of the 20th Century.
NANKING’S MEMORY
The key quote expressing the sentiment of the author, Hideaki Kase, concerning the recent debate of war memories in Japan (and its affect on official Japanese diplomacy) was:
“The harder outsiders push Japan for an apology. The harder Japan may start pushing back.”
Moreover, Kase claims or implies falsely:
(1) No Japanese military occupier ever forced women to serve as prostitutes or “comfort women”.
(2) There is much evidence to indicate that no Nanking Massacre ever took place.
(3) Japanese politicians only ask forgiveness from its neighbors if it is good for business.
(4) Japanese textbooks have often “incorrectly” called what happened in Nanking as a rape or massacre.
As I read these claims, I thought to myself, “This is an outrageous series of claims to the world to be making in such a widely circulated magazine as Newswek!”
Throughout Kase\s insensitive and offensive writing—which was incidentally published in the special Newsweek magazine issue about memories of American soldiers and their families in occupied Iraq (2003-2007)—, Kase consistently implies that the Japanese are victims of a historical anti-Japanese campaign.
As a concerned cross-cultural educator and peacemaker, I responded to that article of Hideaki’s by writing an editorial of my own and published it in several free on-line blogs and websites criticizing his victimization of Japan and its distortions of memory and popular culture.
Wherever history and memory are manipulated by government officials, their backers and official histories, I have to stand up. This is the way I desire to honor Iris Chiang and her lifelong work. Iris Chang passed away a few years back but she is my ideal as an educator and a historian. She is famous for the revealing work: The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.
This approach of mine to education and history as a lifelong struggle is the only way that the memory of what happened in Nanking will be remembered where it counts most—in the land of Japan that once tried to benefit from the massacre.
I desire that Japan (as well as America) grows into a country that can counter the worst tendencies in Asia now which continue to lead toward tyranny and dictatorship. So far, although at the people-to-people level in Japan, relationships between the Japanese and Chinese have been improving over the last two decades, the last 70-years of post-Imperial history have not shown significant change at the government level in Japan.
Mutual empathy and an educated understanding of how nations are linked historically across cultures is what we all need to have in order to connect and remain vigilant to misguided historians while reminding both our elders and our children of the fact that internalization of history is not always simply a duty or source of pride but is also a duty of peace.
Works Referred to:
Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.
New York: Basic Books, 1997.
Iris Chang Memorial Fund, http://www.irischangmemorialfund.org/Mission_Statement.htm
Kase, Hideaki, “The Use and Abuse of the Past”, (Special Edition) Newsweek,
April 2, 2007, p. 15.
Kuwait National Memorial Museum, http://www.pbase.com/bmcmorrow/kuwaitmemorial
Stoda, Kevin, "The Use and Abuse of Newsweek: Was that a Japanese Government plant
in Newsweek in April or was that just Bad History?", http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_kevin_an_070616_the_use_and_abuse_of.htm
Stoda, Kevin, "Japan, please Stop the Whitewashing of Memory, Japan!", http://alone.gnn.tv/blogs/23731/Japan_please_STOP_THE_WHITEWASHING_OF_MEMORY_JAPAN
Labels: "Iris Chang" Nanking Asian WWII War Memories Asia Occupation Kuwait museum
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