I was surprised when my daughter told me that AP U.S. history in high school is a two-year course. I asked jokingly,
“Why do you need two years? American history is less than two hundred fifty years.”
But of course, Americans become Americans through education as not everyone was born in the U.S. and not everyone’s parents grew up in the U.S. With so much diversity in ethnicity, religions and way of living, children of this country need to learn what it means to be an American.
Sadly, that part of education is missing in Japan. Sure, we learn when Buddhism came to Japan and when the Tokugawa shogunate started. Commodore Matthew Perry came to Japan in 1853 and forced Japan to open its ports to the world after an era of isolation that lasted for more than 200 years. The Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War. World War I and Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations.
Right there, somehow history teachers in my middle and high schools realized that they didn’t have much time left. We rushed through the textbook pages, and then found ourselves in 1945 when Japan lost the war and 1946 when Japan’s new constitution was drafted. Therefore, strangely, most Japanese know more about Tokugawa era than the years of World War II.
Occasionally, I meet a Japanese client who says,
“When World War II comes up as a topic in conversation, I don’t know how to react.”
“How do you feel about the war?” I always ask, and then hear the same answer.
“I don’t know. We didn’t learn about it in school.”
They’re looking for a politically correct answer. Even though everyone is entitled to his or her own view, the problem is that they don’t have enough knowledge to develop a perspective.
Japanese tiptoe around the war related subjects. Free discussions are still rare today in Japanese classrooms, and when I went to school, teachers taught and students took notes. We were not encouraged to ask questions. This was especially true about the war. One history teacher sounded as if he was proud of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
“Wasn’t it against the war conventions?” I wanted to ask, but I knew an ice cold silence would shatter the classroom windows. So, instead, I read magazine articles, watched special TV programs that came on during the summer on the anniversaries of the two atomic bombs and the end of the war. But I always felt something was amiss.
If you grow up in Japan, you’ll encounter situations where everyone else has already settled on one view before you join in, and that agreed upon premise is very hard to change. That was what I sensed in those magazine articles and TV programs. And I didn’t get answers to my questions either. Why the war that Japan started as the Great East Asia War somehow transformed into the Pacific War over a couple of pages in the textbooks? And why were people in Asia so mad at us; what exactly did we do to them?
So, I knew I needed to learn about the war from different sources other than those that were available in Japan or in Japanese.
Around the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor last year, an email from the Japan Society informed me of John Dower’s book “Embracing Defeat”. It’s a masterpiece of over five hundred fifty pages and its subtitle is “Japan in the wake of World War II”. This seemed a perfect book, but I had to look up the word “wake” in the dictionary to be sure. I felt already exhausted before I opened the cover.
Before I read this book, I had a belief that things, in general, would settle as they were supposed to. In other words, things and people would find their places and their ways, and that an individual’s manipulation here and there wouldn’t matter much in the end. This belief was a source of comfort for me; no matter how bad things seemed, they would unfold and reach the destination they should arrive at. But this book taught me that sometimes in history, minor changes can make big differences down the road.
I’d always wondered why Koreans and Taiwanese were subtly but clearly discriminated in Japan. It would make sense if Japanese provided more accommodation for those whom imperial Japan brought to Japan and their descendants. Or was this a case where victims were getting further victimized?
In “Embracing Defeat,” I learned that Americans had intended to affirm, in the new constitution that they drafted, that “all persons” are equal before the law. However, this was changed to “Japanese nationals” in Japanese translation and provided the basis for discriminatory legislation governing nationality passed in 1950. Although it seemed to be a technical change on the surface, it prevented Japan from developing a fairer and more inclusive society, and better relationships with neighboring countries.
I also learned that SCAP (Supreme Command for the Allied Powers) forbade Japanese to call their war the Great East Asia War. Instead they were required to call it the “Pacific War”. According to the author, the new term gave unmistakable primacy to the conflict between Japan and the United States. This new frame along with Japanese tendency to honor the agreed upon view, pushed our national memory of our atrocities in Asia in to the darkness of oblivion.
These were some of the missing puzzle pieces that I needed to understand our history better. I was born in 1962, ten years after US occupation ended following the San Francisco Peace Treaty in 1951.
I now feel I’ve found a piece of me that was stowed away. I learned many history lessons in this book, but most of all, it made me realize that history is not what has happened to us. It is what we’re making every day. Sometimes a word can shift people’s behaviors slightly, and that seemingly insignificant change could have a lasting effect in the coming years.