Time Travel: Recent Trips

by Paula Guran

  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."

  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 read 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.

  Rowe: Dr. Wei, I have to say, those do sound like apologies to me.

  Wei: 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 specifics, not empty platitudes.

  But since Ambassador Yoshida has decided to bring up the issue of apologies, let's look closer at them, shall we?

  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 government 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: 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.

  It wasn't until 2005, in response to a lawsuit 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.

  Since then the Japanese government has consistently stated that there is insufficient evidence to confirm exactly what experiments were carried out by Unit 731 or the details of their conduct. Official denial and silence continue despite the dedicated efforts of some Japanese scholars to bring the truth to light.

  But numerous former members of Unit 731 have come forward since the 1980s to testify and confess to the grisly acts they committed. And we have confirmed and expanded upon those accounts with new eyewitness accounts by volunteers who have traveled to Pingfang. Everyday, we are finding out more about Unit 731's crimes. We will tell the world all the victims' stories.

  Yoshida: I am not sure that "telling stories" is what historians should be doing. If you want to make fiction, go ahead, but do not tell people that it is history. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And there is insufficient proof for the accusations currently being directed against Japan.

  Wei: Ambassador Yoshida, is your position really that nothing happened at Pingfang? Are you saying that these reports by the American occupational authority from immediately after the War are lies? Are you saying that these contemporaneous diary entries by the officers of Unit 731 are lies? Are you really denying all of this?

  There is a simple solution to all this. Will you take a trip to Pingfang in 1941? Will you believe your own eyes?

  Yoshida: I'm—I am not—I'm making a distinction—It was a time of war, Dr. Wei, and perhaps it is possible that some unfortunate things happened. But "stories" are not evidence.

  Wei: Will you take a trip, Ambassador?

  Yoshida: I will not. I see no reason to subject myself to your process. I see no reason to undergo your "time travel" hallucinations.

  Rowe: Now we are seeing some fireworks!

  Wei: Ambassador Yoshida, let me make this clear. The deniers are committing a fresh crime against the victims of those atrocities: not only would they stand with the torturers and the killers, but they are also engaged in the practice of erasing and silencing the victims from history, to kill them afresh.

  In the past, their task was easy. Unless the denials were actively resisted, eventually memories would dim with old age and death, and the voices of the past would fade away, and the denialists would win. The people of the present would then become exploiters of the dead, and that has always been the way history was written.

  But we have now come to the end of history. What my wife and I have done is to take narrative away, and to give us all a chance to see the past with our own eyes. In place of memory, we now have incontrovertible evidence. Instead of exploiting the dead, we must look into the face of the dying. I have seen these crimes with my own eyes. You cannot deny that.

  [Archival footage of Dr. Evan Wei delivering the keynote for the Fifth International War Crimes Studies Conference in San Francisco, on November 20, 20__. Courtesy of the Stanford University Archives.]

  History is a narrative enterprise, and the telling of stories that are true, that affirm and explain our existence, is the fundamental task of the historian. But truth is delicate, and it has many enemies. Perhaps that is why, although we academics are supposedly in the business of pursuing the truth, the word "truth" is rarely uttered without hedges, adornments, and qualifications.

  Every time we tell a story about a great atrocity, like the Holocaust or Pingfang, the forces of denial are always ready to pounce, to erase, to silence, to forget. History has always been difficult because of the delicacy of the truth, and denialists have always been able to resort to labeling the truth as fiction.

  One has to be careful, whenever one tells a story about a great injustice. We are a species that loves narrative, but we have also been taught not to trust an individual speaker.

  Yes, it is true that no nation, and no historian, can tell a story that completely encompasses every aspect of the truth. But it is not true that just because all narratives are constructed, that they are equally far from the truth. The Earth is neither a perfect sphere nor a flat disk, but the model of the sphere is much closer to the truth. Similarly, there are some narratives that are closer to the truth than others, and we must always try to tell a story that comes as close to the truth as is humanly possible.

  The fact that we can never have complete, perfect knowledge does not absolve us
of the moral duty to judge and to take a stand against evil.

  Victor P. Lowenson, Professor of East Asian History, Director of the Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley:

  I have been called a denialist, and I have been called worse. But I am not a Japanese right-winger who believes that Unit 731 is a myth. I do not say that nothing happened there. What I am saying is that, unfortunately, we do not have enough evidence to be able to describe with certainty all that happened there.

  I have enormous respect for Wei, and he remains and will remain one of my best students. But in my view, he has abdicated the responsibility of the historian to ensure that the truth is not ensnared in doubt. He has crossed the line that divides a historian from an activist.

  As I see it, the fight here isn't ideological, but methodological. What we are fighting over is what constitutes proof. Historians trained in Western and Asian traditions have always relied on the documentary record, but Dr. Wei is now raising the primacy of eyewitness accounts, and not even contemporaneous eyewitness accounts, mind you, but accounts by witnesses out of the stream of time.

  There are many problems with his approach. We have a great deal of experience from psychology and the law to doubt the reliability of eyewitness accounts. We also have serious concerns with the single-use nature of the Kirino Process, which seems to destroy the very thing it is studying, and erases history even as it purports to allow it to be witnessed. You literally cannot ever go back to a moment of time that has already been experienced— and thus consumed—by another witness. When each eyewitness account is impossible to verify independently of that account, how can we rely on such a process to establish the truth of what happened?

  I understand that from the perspective of supporters of Dr. Wei, the raw experience of actually seeing history unfold before your eyes makes it impossible to doubt the evidence indelibly etched in your mind. But that is simply not good enough for the rest of us. The Kirino Process requires a leap of faith: those who have witnessed the ineffable have no doubt of its existence, but that clarity is incapable of being replicated for anyone else. And so we are stuck here, in the present, trying to make sense of the past.

  Dr. Wei has ended the process of rational historical inquiry and transformed it into a form of personal religion. What one witness has seen, no one else can ever see. This is madness.

  Naoki, last name withheld, clerk:

  I have seen the videos of the old soldiers who supposedly confessed to these horrible things. I do not believe them. They cry and act so emotional, as though they are insane. The Communists were great brainwashers, and it is undoubtedly a result of their plot.

  I remember one of those old men describing the kindness of his Communist guards. Kind Communist guards! If that is not evidence of brainwashing, what is?

  Kazue Sato, housewife:

  The Chinese are great manufacturers of lies. They have produced fake food, fake Olympics, and fake statistics. Their history is also faked. This Wei is an American, but he is also Chinese, and so we cannot trust anything he does.

  Hiroshi Abe, retired soldier:

  The soldiers who "confessed" have brought great shame upon their country.

  Interviewer:

  Because of what they did?

  Hiroshi Abe:

  Because of what they said.

  Ienaga Ito, Professor of Oriental History, Kyoto University:

  We live in an age that prizes authenticity and personalized narratives, as embodied in the form of the memoir. Eyewitness accounts have an immediacy and reality that compels belief, and we think they can convey a truth greater than any fiction. Yet, perhaps paradoxically, we are also eager to seize upon any factual deviation and inconsistency in such narratives, and declare the entirety to be mere fiction. There's an all-or-nothing bleakness to this dynamic. But we should have conceded from the start that narrative is irreducibly subjective, though that does not mean that they do not also convey the truth.

  Evan was a greater radical than most people realized. He sought to free the past from the present so that history could not be ignored, put out of our minds, or made to serve the needs of the present. The possibility of witnessing actual history and experiencing that past by all of us means that the past is not past, but alive at this very moment.

  What Evan did was to transform historical investigation itself into a form of memoir writing. That kind of emotional experience is important in the way we think about history and make decisions. Culture is not merely a product of reason but also of real, visceral empathy. And I am afraid that it is primarily empathy that has been missing from the post-War Japanese responses to history.

  Evan tried to introduce more empathy and emotion into historical inquiry. For this he was crucified by the academic establishment. But adding empathy and the irreducibly subjective dimension of the personal narrative to history does not detract from the truth. It enhances the truth. That we accept our own frailties and subjectivity does not free us to abdicate the moral responsibility to tell the truth, even if, and especially if, "truth" is not singular but a set of shared experiences and shared understandings that together make up our humanity.

  Of course, drawing attention to the importance and primacy of eyewitness accounts unleashed a new danger. With a little money and the right equipment, anyone can eliminate the Bohm-Kirino particles from a desired era, in a specified place, and so erase those events from direct experience. Unwittingly, Evan had also invented the technology to end history forever, by denying us and future generations of that emotional experience of the past that he so cherished.

  Akemi Kirino:

  It was difficult during the years immediately after the Comprehensive Time Travel Moratorium was signed. Evan was denied tenure in a close vote, and that editorial in the Wall Street Journal by his old friend and teacher, Victor Lowenson, calling him a "tool of propaganda," deeply hurt him. Then, there were the death threats and harassing phone calls, every day.

  But I think it was what they did to me that really got to him. At the height of the attacks from the denialists, the IT division of the Institute asked me if I would mind being de-listed from the public faculty directory. Whenever they listed me on the web site, the site would be hacked within hours, and the denialists would replace my bio page with pictures where these men, so brave and eloquent, displayed their courage and intellect by illustrating what they would do to me if they had me in their power. And you probably remember the news reports about that night when I walked home alone from work.

  I don't really want to dwell on that time, if that's all right with you.

  We moved away to Boise, where we tried to hide from the worst of it. We kept a low profile, got an unlisted number, and basically stayed out of sight. Evan went on medication for his depression. On the weekends we went hiking in the Sawtooth Mountains, and Evan took up charting abandoned mining sites and ghost towns from during the gold rush. That was a happy time for us, and I thought he was feeling better. The sojourn in Idaho reminded him that sometimes the world is a kind place, and all is not darkness and denial.

  But he was feeling lost. He felt that he was hiding from the truth. I knew that he was feeling torn between his sense of duty to the past, and his sense of loyalty to the present, to me.

  I could not bear to see him being torn apart, and so I asked if he wanted to return to the fight.

  We flew back to Boston, and things had grown even worse. He had sought to end history as mere history, and to give the past living voices to speak to the present. But it did not work out the way he had intended. The past did come to life, but when faced with it, the present decided to recast history as religion.

  The more Evan did, the more he felt he had to do. He would not come to bed, and fell asleep at his desk. He was writing, writing, constantly writing. He believed that he had to single-handedly refute all the lies, and take on all his enemies. It was never enough, never enough for him. I stood by, helpless.

  "I have to speak for them, because
they have no one else," he would tell me.

  By then perhaps he was living more in the past than in the present. Even though he no longer had access to our machine, in his mind he relived those trips he took, over and over again. He believed that he had let the victims down.

  A great responsibility had been thrust upon him, and he had failed them. He was trying to uncover to the world a great injustice, and yet in the process he seemed to have only stirred up the forces of denial, hate, and silence.

  Excerpts from The Economist, November 26, 20__

  [A woman's voice, flat, calm, reads out loud the article text as the camera swoops over the ocean, the beaches, and then the forests and hills of Manchuria. From the shadow of a small plane racing along the ground beneath us we can tell that the camera is shooting from the open door of the airplane. An arm, the hand clenched tight into a fist, moves into the foreground from off-frame. The fingers open. Dark ashes are scattered into the air beneath the airplane.]

  We will soon come upon the ninetieth anniversary of the Mukden Incident, the start of the Japanese invasion of China. To this day, that war remains the alpha and omega of the relationship between the two countries.

  [A series of photographs of the leaders of Unit 731 are shown. The reader's voice fades out and then fades back in.]

  The men of Unit 731 then moved on to prominent careers in post-War Japan. Three of them founded the Japan Blood Bank (which later became the Green Cross, Japan's largest pharmaceutical company) and used their knowledge of methods for freezing and drying blood derived from human experiments during the War to produce dried-blood products for sale to the United States Army at great profit. General Shiro Ishii, the commander of Unit 731, may have spent some time after the War working in Maryland, researching biological weapons. Papers were published using data obtained from human subjects, including babies (sometimes the word "monkey" was substituted as a cover-up) -- and it is possible that medical papers published today still contain citations traceable to these results, making all of us the unwitting beneficiaries of these atrocities.