by Ian Buruma
But not everything was gone. Yachita pointed to a cluster of shabby-looking barracks. This was where the American POWs had been housed. I asked him whether they had also worked in the mine. “No,” he said, “we Japanese always take good care of white people.” His mouth tightened in a grim little smile. I smiled back. I thought of all the stories I had heard about the Burma Railroad and the “Jap camps” in the Dutch East Indies. But, comparatively speaking, Yachita was surely right.
He also pointed out the road on which the Chinese had escaped into the hills. There remained a dense cluster of wooden houses along the road. Yachita said that older people still remember the muffled sound of bare feet passing by on the night of the escape. He mimicked the sound: pata pata, pata pata. In 1945, the Chinese workers no longer had shoes.
We visited the cemetery, where two stone memorials stood out. One commemorated the “loyal spirits” of Japanese soldiers who died in the war. The other was in memory of the “martyrdom of the Chinese heroes.” It was erected in 1963, after a certain amount of agitation, by the city of Odate, the Dowa Mining Company, and Kajima Kensetsu. In 1985, the socialist mayor of Odate decided to declare June 30 a Day of Peace, and a ceremony is held at the memorial each year. But the monument looked neglected. There was a bunch of dead flowers wrapped in plastic on the ground, and a plastic container of long-decayed rice balls lay open at the base of the monument.
Near the river, where the Chinese, as well as Koreans, had worked and often, as a result of beatings, hunger, and exhaustion, died, was another, much smaller memorial stone. The words were hard to read. The stone was cracked like broken glass. Tin cans and the remains of snacks offered to the dead souls littered the ground. The inscription read: “A Buddhist memorial to the Chinese dead.” The story of the monument is as sordid as the history it commemorates. When the Kajima employees had been caught digging up the bones of Chinese workers, they were asked to build a proper Buddhist crypt to store them in. They refused and instead they buried them on this little hill behind a Buddhist temple. In 1949, more bones were discovered near the old Chinese camp. The newly discovered remains were buried with the other bones and the stone memorial was hastily erected. In recent years, Kajima Kensetsu has offered to erect a new, larger memorial. But the small organization fighting for the rights of the Chinese survivors refused the offer, until proper compensation is paid and a museum built. “They are good at putting up memorial stones,” said Yachita, “but when it comes to historical research and financial compensation, we have had no help at all.”
Odate is about seven and a half hours by train from Tokyo, roughly the same time it takes to get from Berlin to Passau. The northeast, especially Akita, is still strikingly shabby, even poor, when compared with the central and southern parts of Japan. The town centers are dark and charmless: raw concrete buildings and dingy shopping streets with plastic roofing to keep the snow from blocking the shops in winter. Rubbish is carelessly strewn around wooden houses on the outskirts of town, houses that are often little more than shacks. The only color in Odate, apart from the ubiquitous advertising, which is the same all over Japan, is provided by small drinking establishments where the men get drunk at night.
The northeast has always been poor, in spite of being the rice bowl of Japan. Before the war, especially during the depression, farmers were so poor they often had to sell their daughters. Japanese and even Southeast Asian brothels were always well stocked with northeastern girls. And while the eldest sons would inherit the farms, their brothers would frequently join the army, where life was brutal but at least they were fed. The harsh life in the northeast bred resentment against politicians and businessmen, who were regarded, not entirely without reason, as greedy and corrupt. The Communist novelist Kobayashi Takiji was born near Hanaoka, and grew up even farther north, in Hokkaido. He was tortured to death by the police in 1933 for spreading dangerous thoughts. I felt that Yachita’s leftism and his Korean friends’ political identification with North Korea (even though they had been born in the south) were part of this tradition. They were not doctrinaire Marxists. They were against graft, discrimination, and greed, which they identified as “capitalism.” For the same reason, radical right-wing “agriculturalism” was popular before the war.
The cold north nurtured a self-image of stoic virtues: loyalty, honesty, hard work, and so on. In front of the Odate station is a statue of one of Japan’s favorite icons, the loyal dog Hachiko, who would turn up faithfully every evening to meet his master at the station. One day his master died before reaching the station, but Hachiko refused to budge from his usual place. The dog stayed at his post until the day he died. The neck of Hachiko’s stone head is still decorated with fresh flowers—fresher and more copious tributes than at any of the memorials for the Chinese workers.
The villages and towns of the northeast are celebrated in folk songs. They are also a favorite territory for the Japanese version of Heimat or furusato stories. Filmmakers searching for roots have often used the northeast as a location. Akita and Aomori still have an air of primitive mystery. The northeast, to use a popular expression of urban intellectuals, “reeks of mud.” People who were born there would often long to escape, and frequently did, but to writers, artists, and poets in Tokyo the same furusato (literally “old village”) could be viewed through the warm haze of nostalgia, a long-lost muddy Japanese Heimat.
Oshin, the heroine of the most popular television soap opera ever made in Japan, was born in a village in the northeast. The series, entitled Oshin, was broadcast by NHK, the semi-national television network, in 1984 and 1985, precisely when Heimat was shown in Germany. The 297 fifteen-minute episodes were aired every morning (63 percent ratings) and repeated in the afternoons (20 percent ratings). In style, Oshin was very different from Heimat. The German film was a personal work of art; Oshin was a well-crafted melodrama. And although Oshin was, like Heimat, a celebration of traditional rural values and a lament for their loss, the Japanese heroine leaves her village early on, when her family is unable to feed her. The loss of Heimat is literal, as it has been for so many people during the industrialization of Japan (and Germany, and pretty much everywhere else). But the idea of home does not have to be regional. In Oshin, the whole country becomes a kind of Heimat. The war years, especially, are seen from the perspective of home, as they were in Reitz’s Heimat. Both the German film and the Japanese TV melodrama were local answers to the Hollywood version of history. It was history as “we,” the national family, remember it. Herein lay much of their appeal.
As in Heimat, where the bedrock of the family history is the mother, Oshin functions as a repository of supposedly traditional values. She represents the conservative Japanese ideal: long-suffering, hardworking, honest, cheerful, and polite, gentle in her manners and disciplined in her habits. She is soft-spoken and respectful, but also tough; everyone depends on her. If Edgar Reitz was part of a wave of leftist nostalgia, Oshin is what might be called the officially authorized memory of the past. Oshin is a peaceful woman. She is opposed to war. But she could not do anything about it. Her duty, as the narrator’s voice tells us more than once, was “to take care of her family.” The series loudly proclaims its pacifism, while celebrating at the same time the sincerity with which most Japanese supported the war.
All the Japanese soldiers in the story are handsome, sincere, courteous, upright men, even Oshin’s brother-in-law, a militant patriot who urges her to send her son to the military academy. Oshin’s husband, Ryuzo, becomes caught up in militarist propaganda, too. His opportunism is not disguised; his business prospers because he supplies the army. But he becomes increasingly authoritarian toward his wife and children, and chauvinistic in his views. In a way, the official Japanese soap opera is harder on its characters than Reitz is on his. The good people of Schabbach are neither fanatical nor chauvinistic; only the bad SS man is shown to be that way. And yet, Oshin’s husband is not an unsympathetic character. He is a good man who sincerely believes in his country. (
To present a good and sincere Nazi is obviously more difficult to do.) When Oshin protests that supplying the army means collaborating in the war, Ryuzo tells her that when Japan goes to war, every Japanese must do his duty.
The fall of Nanking is cause for celebration. In a beautifully contrived scene, shot in slow motion, we see the town turn out for a lantern parade. The slowly laughing faces look eerie, almost monstrous. Oshin, despite her pacifist views, is pleased too. The voice of the female narrator tells us that Oshin “felt the enormous power that was forging the future of Japan. She didn’t know the nature of this power. Nanking had been conquered and the whole family turned out for the parade. Oshin, too, was one of the happy Japanese.”
In the very next episode, we are told that Oshin had no idea about the cruelty of the war on the continent (nor, for that matter, does the television audience: the enemy is never shown, let alone what happened to the enemy at the hands of Japanese soldiers). Oshin is worried and depressed when her two sons become fanatical, like their father, and express a desire to die for their country (not for their emperor, note: the emperor is carefully brushed out of NHK’s version of the past). We see Oshin’s maternal anguish, but we are also meant to be impressed by her sons’ youthful enthusiasm, their sincerity, and the purity of their feelings. Their handsome, open faces are lit up, during the patriotic speeches at the family table, in the manner of Hollywood movies showing James Stewart going to Washington. Unlike in Schabbach, there are no rotten apples here, no equivalent of the bad SS man.
This is perhaps the greatest difference between the German Heimat and the Japanese furusato: there were no Nazis in the Japanese village, just soldiers. There were no deportations, or concentration camps nearby. There was no Kristallnacht; neighbors didn’t disappear during the night. People may not have liked the war, or the economic hardships it brought, or the swagger of village pedagogues and military bullies, but virtually everyone did his or her bit. And the war itself, well, that was something that happened elsewhere, far, far away from home. There was one exception. For those who were unlucky enough to live on Okinawa, the war came home with a vengeance in 1945. Okinawans were treated as inferior Japanese and distrusted by the Imperial Army, and many civilians were sacrificed in the battle with the U.S. marines. About 160,000 civilians—more than a third of the local population—were killed in the cross fire, and hundreds died in mass suicides. The experience has left a far greater sense of bitterness on Okinawa than anywhere else in Japan, notwithstanding the bombings of Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.
But Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also the locations of slave labor camps, like the one in Hanaoka. There were such camps all over Japan, and Japanese civilians must have been aware of them. Every day the good people of Hanaoka saw the emaciated figures of Chinese slaves being whipped along the road to work by overseers. And it was the same good people who helped the police go “rabbit hunting” when the slaves escaped. At some point during our drinking expedition in Odate, Yachita told me about his father, who had hated the war so much that he made himself unfit to pass the medical test for military service by drinking a whole bottle of soy sauce. And he tried to stay away from war-related work at home. But when it came to the rabbit hunt, he was there, with the posse, chasing up the hills. He did his duty, just like everyone else. Which is why after the war people did not like to talk about what happened. Before 1979, local history textbooks did not even mention the Incident.
One of the schoolboys told to spit on the Chinks was Nozoe Kenji. He never forgot the experience: “When I question people about the Incident, memories flit through my mind, and I find it hard to speak. I start to shake. I become conscious of having been one of the aggressors.” Yet Nozoe never stopped asking questions. For thirty years he has been piecing together precisely what happened that night. As a result, his family was threatened, his children couldn’t leave the house at night, his windows were smashed, and he received death threats from anonymous telephone callers, usually after midnight. Things got even worse when he published a book about his findings in 1975. Nobody denied the facts, but he was accused of being a traitor to his people, of having besmirched the reputation of his Heimat, his furusato.
I visited Nozoe at his house, in a small town not far from Odate. It was the usual small northeastern town: empty streets, corrugated-iron roofs, seedy houses. The entrance to Nozoe’s house was in a narrow alley behind a dry-goods store. It smelled dank inside, of old wood and blocked drains. His study was on the second floor. We sat on the tatami floor in the midst of piles of books, documents, and periodicals. Nozoe was dressed in an old kimono. His large, round head sprouted great tufts of uncombed gray hair. He has the air of a professor, but in fact he never finished high school. He survived on odd jobs. Poor all his life, he now scrapes by on his books about the Hanaoka Incident (he has written four to date). They are his lifework. It is all he wants to write about.
Talking to Nozoe, I thought of the man who introduced me to him, a Chinese resident in Japan in his fifties, living in a one-room apartment in Osaka. Chu Hakkai (a name he adopted when forced by Japanese bureaucrats to Japanize his name) drives a truck in a garbage dump and spends his earnings on gathering information on the history of Chinese slave labor during the war. Like Nozoe, he has had no institutional backing. I was told that not one Japanese academic historian has done work on the subject. So, like Nozoe, Chu has had to go to China himself to find documents and talk to survivors.
At first the difficulties for Nozoe were immense. There was no documentation available on the Hanaoka Incident, so all he could do was track down eyewitnesses. The first four or five times, he said, people would slam their doors in his face. Some Called the police to chase him off. Then, reluctantly, peering down the street to make sure the neighbors hadn’t seen, some invited him in for tea. At first they would talk only about inconsequential things. But gradually, after another four or five visits, facts would emerge, names were mentioned, stories told. The process was so slow that it took him more than twenty years to compile enough material for his first book.
“I was never actually beaten up,” he said, “but the Dowa Mining Company hired gangsters to make sure I didn’t prowl around the old camp. And the gangsters were supported by the police.”
He got no help from the company, of course, but the trade union didn’t wish to be involved either. I asked him whether he had been in touch with others who were investigating wartime history. I knew that a network of such people existed, since its members had been helpful to me in furnishing introductions. Mori Masataka, the middle school teacher, knew Chu Hakkai, who put me onto the lawyer representing the Chinese survivors, who knew a man in Nagasaki … and so on. “No,” said Nozoe, “until about three years ago I was alone.”
This might have been a slight exaggeration. Official initiatives to commemorate the Hanaoka Incident had, after all, been taken in the town itself in the mid-1980s, and Yachita had been working on the case too, though not for as long as Nozoe. But talking to the various members of the network, one soon realized that relations were not always smooth; casual remarks revealed jealousies and prickly disputes. It is, of course, always thus in fringe groups, doggedly pursuing an unpopular cause. In any case, the situation eased a bit in the late 1980s, when Chinese, and especially Koreans who had been repatriated after the war to South Korea, were freer to travel to Japan. The Akita Broadcasting Company made a television documentary on the Hanaoka Incident, which won a prize and was shown nationally.
Still, Nozoe was a truly brave man, for he knew his lifework would lead to social ostracism, a fate few Japanese would accept for the sake of a cause. Once again I wondered what drove people like Yachita, or Nozoe, or Ienaga, or indeed Anja Rosmus. What motivated them to carry on their lonely quests? I asked Nozoe, and he answered vaguely that he wished to pass on the truth to the next generation. It was hard to get him to say much more than that. But he has written about his school days: about the schoolmaster who had ordered his pupils to spi
t on the Chinese. He was a bully, typical of the time, who forced the boys to beat one another with sticks to harden their spirits. But after the war was lost, this martinet, who had been so full of belligerent talk about fighting the war against the Anglo-American demons to the end, simply carried on without the slightest indication that he had done or said anything wrong. The same was true of the other teachers, who had supported the war, with the backing of the village notables. “It was for that reason,” wrote Nozoe, “that I developed a visceral distrust for the type of people who call themselves teachers.”
I think it is this basic distrust, this refusal to be told what to think by authorities, this cussed insistence on asking questions, on hearing the truth, that binds together Nozoe, Rosmus, and others like them. There are not many such people in Japan, or anywhere else for that matter. And I suspect they are not much liked wherever they live. If Rosmus was less isolated in Germany than Nozoe and Yachita are in Japan, it is only because the Federal Republic was and still is a more open society. There were always lawyers and newspapers and academics to champion her cause. But in Japan the individual scholar finds much less institutional support.
As far as most people are concerned, however, the difference between nations is less wide than many might imagine. When directly confronted with unpleasant truths, Japanese react pretty much like Germans. Most either turn away or beat their breasts. I was shown a questionnaire prepared for a small exhibition of the Hanaoka Incident held in 1990 in Odate. The visitors were asked to write down their ages, how they knew of the Incident, and what they felt about it. The responses were similar to the ones scribbled in visitors’ books at German memorial places—the same expressions of “national” shame.