To
mark the 66th anniversary of Japan's World War II surrender,
men
dressed in Imperial Japanese Navy uniforms march toward
the
alter of the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where the nation's war
dead
- and a number of war criminals - are memorialized.
Asahi Shimbun, Japan
Japan Learned Nothing
from its WWII Defeat
"Have
we achieved progress? Did we wake up? Have we been saved? Japan's wartime elite
were mainly professional soldiers interested only in raising their rank, sparing
little thought for how they should conduct themselves for the sake of their
country and people. … The pattern was repeated after the war all the way to Fukushima."
Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet of the Japanese Imperial Navy: Just as it was during the war, rule by unelected "elite" bureaucrats is leading failure in Japan.
A young officer muttered, "Those
who fail to make progress never win under any conditions. A defeat is the best
thing that could happen to us now. If we don't wake up now, how will we be ever
be saved?"
In the spring of 1945, the Japanese
battleship Yamato was ordered to embark on a kamikaze mission. The words
of the young officer were jotted down by one of his shipmates, Mitsuru Yoshida,
in his book Requiem
for Battleship Yamato. His country had effectively forced himself and
other young officers into a meaningless death, but it seems that at least this officer
still clung to hope.
So have we achieved progress?
Did we wake up? Have we been saved? August 15 marked the 66th anniversary of
Japan's defeat in World War II.
In August, shortly before
Japan's defeat, a young student drafted as an officer trainee found himself on
the Satsuma Peninsula in Kagoshima Prefecture. He was in command of soldiers
preparing for a final showdown with U.S. forces.
They were defending an area
they called "Ichikoro Jinchi" [easily overran trench]. They
had four artillery pieces and just 72 rounds. The ammunition would only last
minutes during a firefight. When he asked his superior officer, a major,
"How will we fight with this?," the major quickly replied, "When
the battle comes, we'll have plenty of shells."
After the war, the young
trainee officer joined the Ministry of Finance and became a so-called bureaucratic
elite. Ritsuo Isobe, now 89, once headed the National Tax Agency. His perception
of Japan's wartime elite, who were mainly professional soldiers, "interested
only in raising their rank, and sparing little thought for how they should conduct
themselves for the sake of their country and people."
In those days, the country
sought a new enemy, despite already being caught up in the quicksand of the
Sino-Japanese War. Since the United States was Japan's supplier of oil and
other resources, it was unthinkable for Japan to dive headlong into a war
against that country.
Yet it was military
professionals who self-servingly changed the narrative, calling it a war of
survival and self-defense. They rallied the country around such slogans. Citizens,
whipped up into a frenzy by earlier victories, answered the call and rallied
around their military leaders.
Why did they enter into such
a destructive war? In December, the movie Isoroku Yamamoto will be
released. Actor Koji
Yakusho plays Isoroku
Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet of the Japanese Imperial Navy.
When we asked Yakusho for his
views after having played Yamamoto, he answered, "This country has a
history of allowing elites to run things as they see fit, and thinking that's OK.
The same thing is happening now. On the other hand, the public tends to focus
on money and business and forget more important things."
The pre-war pattern was
repeated after the war.
In the case of the bubble
economy, responsibility lay with bureaucrats, who ignored an excess in the
money supply; and with the public, where people capitalized on a boom in assets
by snatching up real estate and stocks, thereby inflating prices far beyond their
actual value. As a result, prices for these assets plummeted, thereby creating
a huge number of non-performing loans. But bureaucrats were reluctant to
release this information, which in turn delayed a solution.
"We were defeated, but we
do have roads." Spending on public works projects skyrocketed. Wasteful
investments were made one after another, turning farm roads into airstrips,
erecting opulent public buildings, and so on. But after the spending spree, we
were left with an enormous fiscal deficit.
And now we have the accident
at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Wasn't that caused by overconfidence in
the "nuclear village" of electric power companies, pro-nuclear
bureaucrats and academics?
Despite being one of the most
earthquake-prone countries on earth, Japan built 54 nuclear reactors,
apparently ignoring the fact that massive tsunamis are known to strike. There
were even plans to build up to 14 additional reactors by 2030 and increase our
reliance on nuclear energy to 50 percent or higher. Our excessive reliance on
nuclear power was accepted and left unchecked.
The Ministry of Economy,
Trade and Industry, along with power companies, closed their eyes to the
realities of our quake-prone country. They released self-serving information
that concealed inconvenient data. They also staged fake question and answer
sessions to manipulate public opinion. This is just as bad as the wartime
military propaganda that consisted of lie after lie about the war situation. It
is a shame.
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
But is this just the fault of
the "nuclear village"?
Tatsuhiro Kamisato, an associate
professor at the University of Tokyo, is a member of the Japan Forward Committee
set up by the Asahi Shimbun. He says the real cause of the nuclear
crisis lies in the fact that, "we failed to carry out a fully-fledged
democratic debate about nuclear energy," and that, "both the closed
system of experts" and "the lack of interest among most of the
public" were complicit in allowing the accident to occur.
National defense and securing
stable energy supplies are vital government functions. But citizens are in
error simply entrusting their lives and property to bureaucrats, who at times
do nothing but stand by, and at others scramble frantically simply to make profits.
Perhaps it is this national habit of dependency and irresponsibility that is at
the root of the failures that our country has repeatedly experienced.
Each and every citizen should
seek to protect life and property. It is only then that they will be able to
elect people to act on such intentions and work for us. There is no choice other
than to create a system in which the public and political leaders accurately
evaluate benefits and risks of a given issue. This essentially amounts to building
a better and more legitimate democracy.
Information is especially
vital. Alex Kerr, a researcher
into Japanese culture, says that information has been dominated by bureaucrats
and a handful of experts, and it has been up to them to make decisions. By all rights,
that should be the job of political leaders and citizens, but he says they have
neglected their role.
In
his 2002 book, Dogs
and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Modern Japan, Kerr writes about
the way pork-barrel politics, bureaucrat-led policymaking and the manipulation of
information by the "nuclear village" constitutes the dark side of
Japan. According to him, "This structure hasn't changed from the time of
the war all the way up to Fukushima. The only way out of this paradigm is to
break the monopoly on information." [translated quote].
Healthy and independent
journalism has an important responsibility and a major role: to prevent
bureaucrats from monopolizing or manipulating information and ensure that
everyone whose life or assets may be threatened is permitted to share that
information. We seek to fulfill our mission without forgetting our history of
failure.
Only after having doing so
can we finally reply to that young officer on the Yamato. "Finally,
we have taken a step forward, we have awoken and can be saved."
