Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi

Modern Japanese thought

1. Introduction B. T. Wakabayashi 2. Japans turn to the West Hirakawa Sukehiro (translated by B. T. Wakabayashi) 3. Meiji conservatism Kenneth B. Pyle 4. Socialism, liberalism, and Marxism, 1901-31 Peter Duus and Irwin Scheiner 5. Japanese revolt against the West: political and cultural criticism in the twentieth century Tetsuo Najita and H. D. Harootunian 6. The postwar intellectual history of Japan Andrew Barshay.

Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice by Barak Kushner (review)

Barak Kushner deserves thanks for this informative, stimulating monograph. Multifaceted and wide ranging, it will spark contention among specialists on post-1945 Japan, the Republic of China (ROC) before and after its move to Taipei, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Citing an impressive array of titles from secondary scholarship, examining declassifi ed archival sources, boldly straddling the politically contrived TaiwanPRC border, and paying due heed to ethnic Chinese and Koreans in Japan, Kushner sheds light on decolonization, B and C class war crimes trials, cold war politics, and expedient shifts in memory that fuel acrimony in East Asia today about historical correctness. His account of B-C class trials—for conventional war crimes as opposed to A class trials of high-level leaders for crimes against peace—is the most detailed we have in English, and he deftly meshes it within “a triangular analysis” of “legal memory” (pp. 22, 27) in Japan, the ROC under the Kuomintang (KMT), and the PRC. Kushner is highly thought provoking. He made me refl ect on the normative assumptions I bring to the topic and on my professed aims as a historian which entail openness to rightwing Japanese scholarship, however distasteful, so long as it accords with empirically verifi ed fact. As Kushner graciously observes, “Wakabayashi does not deny atrocities; he corrects inaccuracies [in their depiction]” (p. 339). By contrast, Kushner is less concerned with verifying alleged war crimes such as the Nanking 100man killing contest than with showing how the memory of it got exploited, distorted, or forgotten. He practices a type of history espoused by leftist Japanese academics to change society for the better. This is discernible, for instance, in his claim that Japan was loath to admit defeat in China, which obstructed atonement for war crimes, without which “real peace” is unachievable (p. 44). This idea is central to the “1931–45 fi fteen-year AsiaPacifi c war thesis”—that Japan invaded, despoiled, and lost to China before attacking the United States in December 1941—which historians such as Ienaga Saburō and Fujiwara Akira advanced for other than dryly academic reasons. In the Vietnam and cold war eras, they sought to “revise” prevail-

War Memory, Nationalism and Education in Postwar Japan, 1945–2007: The Japanese History Textbook Controversy and Ienaga Saburō's Court Challenges (review)

atrocities. Nonetheless, Lind argues convincingly that contrition is critical, especially in displaying benign intentions that can reduce fear of a former enemy’s strategic capabilities. In both Europe and East Asia, public contrition has sparked conservative backlash which serves to diminish the credibility of statesmen’s apologies. Lind is ill-advised in asserting that apology causes backlash, and here one should distinguish between root causes and immediate causes. With regard to postwar Korea, two issues deserve more attention in this study. One is the political advantages that promotion of distrust of Japan gave to the autocratic governments that ruled South Korea into the 1980s. This matter is given admirable treatment by Alexis Dudden. More also needs to be said about the importance of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the Republic of Korea mix. The ongoing contest for regime legitimacy requires South Korean politicians to make continuous use of all the hot-button symbols of Korean nationalism, with anti-Japan sentiment ranking at the top. Moreover, many Koreans, in theory desirous of reunifi cation, fi nd it acceptable to vent their frustrations toward Japan rather than across the demilitarized zone. At a time when nations and societies around the world are engaging in remarkable new means to restore comity in the aftermath of violence and brutality, detailed and comparative studies of national successes and failures in reconciliation are sorely needed. Jennifer Lind’s work will stand as a valued contribution in this humane project.