by Ken Liu
and it is not just the Japanese government . Individual Japanese citizens
have done heroic work in bringing these atrocities to light throughout
the years, almost always against government resistance and against the
public's wish to forget a nd move on . And I offer them my heartfelt
thanks .
The truth cannot be brushed away, and the families of the victims
and the people of China should not be told that justice is not possible,
that because their present government is repugnant to the government
of the United States, that a great injustice should be covered up and
hidden from the judgment of the world . Is there any doubt that this
non- binding Resolution, or even much more stringent versions of it,
would have passed without trouble if the victims were a people whose
government has the favor of the United States? If we, for “ strategic”
reasons, sacrifice the truth in the name of gaining something of value
for short - term advantage, then we will have simply repeated the errors
of our forefathers at the end of the War.
It is not who we are. Dr. Wei has offered us a way to speak the
truth about the past, and we must ask the government of Japan and
our government to stand up and take up our collective responsibility to
history .
When I was finishing my doctorate in Boston, Evan and Akemi
often had my wife and me over to their place. They were very friendly
and helpful, and made us feel the enthusiasm and warmth that
America is rightly famous for. Unlike many Chinese Americans I met,
Evan did not give off a sense that he felt he was superior to the Chinese
from the mainland . It was wonderful to have him and Akemi as life -long friends, and not have every interaction between us filtered
through the lens of the politics between our two countries, as is so
often the case between Chinese and American scholars.
Li Ruming, Director of the Department of History, Zhejiang University,
The People's Republic of China:
Because I am his friend and I am also Chinese, it is difficult for me
to speak about Evan's work with objectivity, but I will try my best.
When Evan first announced his intention to go to Harbin and try
to travel to the past, the Chinese government was cautiously
supportive. As none of it had been tried before, the full implications of
Evan's destructive process for time travel were not yet clear. Due to
destruction of evidence at the end of the War and continuing
stonewalling by the Japanese government, we do not have access to
large archives of documentary evidence and artifacts from Unit 731,
and i t was felt that Evan's work would help fill in the gap by providing
first - hand accounts of what happened . The Chinese government
granted Evan and Akemi visas under the assumption that their work
would help promote Western understanding of China's historica l
disputes with Japan.
But they wanted to monitor his work. The War is deeply
emotional for my compatriots, its unhealed wounds exacerbated by
years of post- War disputes with Japan, and as such, it was not
politically feasible for the government to not be involved. World War
Two was not the distant past, involving ancient peoples, and China
could not permit two foreigners to go traipsing through that recent
history like adventurers through ancient tombs.
But from Evan's point of view—and I think he was just ified in his
belief—any support, monitoring, or affiliation with the Chinese
government would have destroyed all credibility for his work in
Western eyes.
He thus rejected all offers of Chinese involvement and even called
for intervention by American dip lomats . This angered many Chinese
and alienated him from them . Later, when the Chinese government
finally shut down his work after the storm of negative publicity, very
few Chinese would speak up for him because they felt that he and
Akemi had—perhaps even intentionally —done more damage to
China's history and her people . The accusations were unfair, and I'm
sorry to say that I do not feel that I did enough to defend his
reputation.
Evan's focus throughout his project was both more universal and
more atomistic than the people of China . On the one hand, he had an
American devotion to the idea of the individual, and his commitment
was first and foremost to the individual voice and memory of each
victim. On the other hand, he was also trying to transcend nations , to
make people all over the world empathize with these victims, condemn
their torturers, and affirm the common humanity of us all .
But in that process, he was forced to distance his effort from the
Chinese people in order to preserve the political credibility of his
project in the West . He sacrificed their goodwill in a bid to make the
West care. Evan tried to appease the West and Western prejudices
against China . Was it cowardly? Should he have challenged them
more? I do not know.
History is not merely a private matter . Even the family members of
the victims understand that there is a communitarian aspect to history .
The War of Resistance Against the Japanese Invasion is the founding
story of modern China, much as the Holocaust is the founding story of
Israel and the Revolution and the Civil War are the founding stories of
America. Perhaps this is difficult to understand for a Westerner, but
to many Chinese, Evan, because he feared and rejected their
involvement, was stealing and erasing their history . He sacrificed the
history of the Chinese people, without their consent, for a Western
ideal . I understand why he did it, but I cannot agree that his choice
was right.
As a Chinese, I do not share Evan's utter devotion to the idea of a
personalized sense of history . Telling the individual stories of all the
victims, as Evan sought to do, is not possible and in any event would
not solve all problems.
Because of our limited capacity for empathy for mass suffering, I
think there's a risk that his approach would result in sentimentality
and only selective memory. More than sixteen million civilians died in
China from the Japanese invasion . The great bulk of this suffering did
not occur in death factories like Pingfang or killing fields like Nanjing,
which grab headlines and shout for our attention; rather, it occurred in
the countless quiet villages, towns, remote outposts, where men and
women were slaughtered and raped and slaughtered again, their
screams fading with the chill wind, until even their names becam e
blanks and forgotten . But they also deserve to be remembered.
It is not possible that every atrocity would find a spokesperson as
eloquent as Anne Frank, and I do not believe that we should seek to
reduce all of history to a collection of such narratives .
But Evan always told me that an American would rather work on
the problem that he could solve rather than wring his hands over the
vast realm of problems that he could not.
It was not an easy choice that he made, and I would not have
; chosen the same way . But Evan was always true to his American ideals.
It has often been said that since everybody in China knew about
Unit 731, Dr. Wei had nothing useful to teach the Chinese, and was
only an activist campaigning against Japan. That's not quite right. One
of the more tragic aspects of the dispute between China and Japan over
history is how much their responses have mirrored each other. Wei’s
goal was to rescue history from both.
Bill Pacer, Professor of Modern Chinese Language and Culture, University
of Hawaii at Manoa:
In the early days of the People's Republic, between 1945 and 1956,
the Communists' overall ideological approach was to treat the Japanese
invasion as just another historical stage in mankind's unstoppable
march towards socialism. While Japanese militarism was condemned
and the Resistance celebrated, the Communists also sought to forgive
the Japanese individually if they showed contrition —a surprisingly
Christian/Confucian approach for an atheistic regime. In this
atmosphere of revolutionary zeal, the Japanese prisoners were treated,
for the most part, humanely . They were given Marxist classes and told
to write confessions of their crimes. (These classes became the basis for
the Japanese public’s belief that any man who would confess to
horrible c rimes during the War must have been brainwashed by the
Communists.) Once they were deemed sufficiently reformed through
“ re - education, ” they were released back to Japan. Memories of the War
were then suppressed in China as the country feverishly moved to
build a Socialist utopia, with well - known disastrous consequences.
Yet, this generosity towards the Japanese was matched by Stalinist
harsh treatment of landowners, capitalists, intellectuals, and the
Chinese who collaborated with the Japanese. Hundreds of thousands
of people were killed, often on little evidence and with no effort given
to observe legal forms.
Later, during the 1990s, the government of the People’s Republic
began to invoke memories of the War in the context of patriotism to
legitimize its elf in the wake of the collapse of Communism . Ironically,
this obvious ploy prevented large segments of the populace from being
able to come to terms with the War—distrust of the government
infected everything it touched.
And so the People's Republic's approach to historical memory
created a series of connected problems . First, the leniency they showed
the prisoners became the ground for denialists to later question the
veracity of confessions by Japanese soldiers . Second, yoking patriotism
to the memory of the War invited charges that any effort to remember
was politically motivated. And lastly, individual victims of the
atrocities became symbols, anonymized to serve the needs of the State.
However, it has rarely been acknowledged that behind Japan's
post- War silence regarding wartime atrocities lay the same impulses
that drove the Chinese responses. On the left, the peace movement
attributed all suffering during the War to the concept of war itself, and
advocated universal forgiveness and peace among all nations without a
sense of blame . In the center, focus was placed on material
development as a bandage to cover the wounds of the War . On the
right, the question of wartime guilt became inextricably yoked to
patriotism . In contrast to Germany, which could rely on Nazism—
distinct from the nation itself—to absorb the blame, it was impossible
to acknowledge the atrocities committed by the Japanese during the
War without implicating a sense that Japan itself was under attack.
And so, across a narrow sea, China and Japan unwittingly
converged on the same set of responses to the barbarities of World
War Two: forgetting in the name of universal ideals like “ peace” and
“ socialism ” ; welding memories of the War to patriotism; abstracting
victims and perpetrators alike into symbols to serve the State . Seen in
this light, the abstract, incomplete, fragmentary memories in China
and the silence in Japan are flip sides of the same coin.
The core of Wei's belief is that without real memory, there can be
no real reconciliation. Without real memory, the individual persons of
each nation have not been able to empathize with and remember and
experience the suffering of the victims. An individualized story that
each of us can tell ourselves about what happened is required before we
can move beyond the trap of history. That, all along, was what Wei's
project was about.
“ Cross- Talk,” January 21, 20XX, courtesy of FXNN
Amy Rowe
Ambassador Yoshida, let's start with you. Why won't Japan
apologize?
: Thank you, Ambassador Yoshida and Dr. Wei, for
agreeing to come on to Cross- Talk tonight . Our viewers want to have
their questions answered, and I want to see some fireworks!
Yoshida
This is from a statement by Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama,
on August 31, 1994 . “ Japan's actions in a certain period of the past not
only claimed numerous victims here in Japan but also left the peoples
of neighboring Asia and elsewhere with scars that are painful even
today. I am thus taking this opportunity to state my belief, based on
my profound remorse for these acts of aggression, colonial rule, and
the like caused such unbearable suffering and sorrow for so many
people, that Japan's future path should be one of making every effort to
build world peace in line with my no - war commitment. It is imperative
for us Japanese to look squarely to our history with the peoples of
neighboring Asia and elsewhere.”
: Amy, Japan has apologized. This is the whole point.
Japan has apologized many many times for W orld War Two . Every
few years we have to go through this spectacle where it's said that
Japan needs to apologize for its actions during World War Two. But
Japan has done so, repeatedly. Let me read you a few quotes.
And again, from a statement by the Diet, on June 9, 1995: “ On the
occasion of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, this
House offers its sincere condolences to those who fell in action and
victims of wars and similar actions all over the world . Solemnly
reflecting upon many instances of colonial rule and acts of aggression
in the modern history of the world, and recognizing that Japan carried
out those acts in the past, inflicting pain and suffering upon the
peoples of other countries, especially in Asia, the Members of this
House express a sense of deep remorse. ”
I can go on and r ead you dozens of other quotes like this. Japan has
apologized, Amy .
Yet, every few years, the propaganda organs of certain regimes
hostile to a free and prosperous Japan try to dredge up settled
historical events to manufacture controversy. When is this going to
end? And some men of otherwise good intellect have allowed
themselves to become the tools of propaganda . I wish they would wake
up and see how they are being used.
R
owe: Dr. Wei, I have to say, those do sound like apologies to me.
Wei
But since Ambassador Yoshida has decided to bring up the issue
of apologies, let's look closer at them, shall we?
: Amy, it is not my aim or goal to humiliate Japan . My
commitment is to the victims and their memory, not theatre. What
I'm asking for is for Japan to acknowledge the truth of what happened
at Pingfang . I want to focus on specifics, and acknowledgment of
specifi cs, not empty platitudes.
The statements quoted by the Ambassador are grand and abstract,
and they refer to vague and unspecified sufferings. They are apologies
only in the most watered - down sense . What the Ambassador is not
telling you is the Japanese government's continuing refusal to admit
many specific war crimes and to honor and remember the real victims.
Moreover, every time one of these statements quoted by the
Ambassador is made, it is matched soon after by another statement
from a prominent Japanese politician purporting to cast doubt upon
what happened in World War Two . Year after year, we are treated to
this show of the Japanese gover nment as a Janus speaking with two
faces.
Yoshida : It's not that unusual to have differences of opinion when
it comes to matters of history, Dr. Wei . In a democracy it's what you
would expect.
Wei
It wasn't until 2005, in response to a law suit by some relatives of
Unit 731's victims for compensation, that the Tokyo High Court
finally acknowledged Japan's use of biological weapons during the
War. This was the first time that an official voice of the Japanese
government admitted to that fact. Amy, you'll notice that this was a
decade after those lofty statements read by Ambassador Yoshida. The
Court denied compensation.
: Actually, Ambassador, Unit 731 has been consistently
handled by the Japanese government: for more than fifty years the
official position was absolute silence regarding Unit 731, despite the
steady accumulation of physical evidence, including human remains,
from Unit 731's activities . Even the Unit's existence was not admitted
until the 1990s, and the government consistently denied that it had
researched or used biological weapons during the War.
Since then the Japanese government has consistently stated that