ESSAY · ASIA'S SECOND-WORLD-WAR GHOSTS
The unquiet past
Seven decades on from the defeat of Japan, memories of war still divide East Asia
The Economist
THERE can be no more pleasing spot in Tokyo on
a July evening than the Yasukuni shrine. The cicadas murmur as you pass along
the avenue of ginkgo trees framing the great shinmon gate, fashioned out of
dark balks of cypress. The chrysanthemum drapes of the worship hall flutter alluringly;
lanterns line the way, and the crowds are in a holiday mood and summer robes.
Parties chant with gusto as they parade past with the palanquins housing their
neighbourhood deities.
Yasukuni’s summer celebrations reach their climax on August
15th, the anniversary of Japan’s defeat in the second world war. As the date draws
closer the avenue expands into a Bartholomew Fair of stalls and revelry. Not
everyone is jolly. Sombre groups that include some of Japan’s few surviving war
veterans and their families remember fallen friends. There are chin-jutting
Yakuza thugs in suits a size too small, and strutting military fantasists
kitted out with officers’ swords or
And there are ghosts. Without them Yasukuni would have no
purpose. The shrine honours the souls of those who have died protecting the
emperor; they are revered as
The first
By the tenets of the shrine, all these spirits are equal. To the
world at large, they are not. No one objects to a nation honouring its war dead,
even if the cause for which they fought was a bad one. But in 1978 the priests
of Yasukuni surreptitiously enshrined 14 political and military leaders,
including General Hideki Tojo,
the wartime prime minister, who had been found guilty by the Tokyo War Crimes
Trial of planning or prosecuting the military aggression of the 1930s
and 1940s. All 14 had either been executed by Japan’s new American overlords or
died in prison. For many—including many in Japan—granting divine honour to such
men went beyond the pale. Emperor Hirohito, in whose name millions died, stopped visiting
Yasukuni; the current emperor, Akihito,
has upheld the boycott. Yet visits by conservative nationalist politicians,
including the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, have increased, drawing admonishment
in much of the world and stoking anger in China and South Korea.
There are other spirits that stand out, too—less infamous, but
more poignant. One is that of Lee Sa-hyon, who was a native of the city that
today is Seoul but from 1910 to 1945 was Keijo, the capital of
Japanese-occupied Korea. By the time Lee Sa-hyon was growing up in the 1930s,
most of his hometown’s city walls and royal palaces had been razed; there was
just enough left to make tour parties from Japan think that they were taking in
something exotic (Korean brothels were on the tourist trail, too). The huge
dome of the governor-general’s palace dominated the city centre. The Imperial
Subject Oath Tower, built for the celebrations in 1940 of the (wholly
fabricated) 2,600th anniversary of the Japanese imperial family, housed written
vows of loyalty to the emperor from 1.4m Korean students.
Lee Hee-ja, Lee Sa-hyon’s daughter, was born in 1943, a time
when Japan’s prospects were looking grave. The Americans were fighting their
way up through the country’s Pacific-island possessions. The war against China
that had begun in 1937, and which the Japanese had expected to be a relatively
short affair, had developed into a long struggle on an epic scale thanks to the
resistance of the ascetic Christian generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek, and his
Kuomintang (KMT). The demands of the war effort stripped Korea and occupied
Manchuria to its north of both resources and people. Thousands of Korean women
were tricked and abducted into military brothels; tens of thousands of men were
forced into labour in mines and on industrial sites, mainly in Japan. And from 1944
many were conscripted into the army. Lee Sa-hyon became one of those
conscripts. In June 1945, just a few weeks before the war’s end, he was killed
in Guangdong, in southern China.
His daughter is now 72. Like all East Asian septuagenarians she
has lived through times of startling disruption. Like China, Ms Lee’s country
was wracked by civil war and divided into two; like Japan and Taiwan, and later
China itself, it was also transformed by remarkable economic growth. Its
population has tripled, its GDP risen by a factor of 50. It has become, for the
first time in its history, a democracy. From the far end of a lifetime of such
profound change the war might be expected to seem distant—as it does, for the
most part, in America and Europe. But in ways both great and small, in the
details of individual lives and in the relations between states, the war that
ended 70 years ago still shapes East Asian worldviews, animating its
politics—and its ghosts.
In 1959 the spirit of Lee Sa-hyon was quietly enshrined at Yasukuni;
having died fighting for the emperor, he became one of his divine protectors.
When his daughter found this out, in 1996, she became determined to have his
name, and
Moving a soul in Japan proves to be not so easy. Yasukuni’s
priests were polite but firm. Once a spirit has joined the
Along with others eager to liberate relatives from
Yasukuni—including some Japanese—Ms Lee has turned to the courts. They have
offered no joy. In the latest set of cases, one of the names for removal is
that of an elderly plaintiff, the reports of whose death have clearly been
exaggerated—yet even being alive, it seems, does not get you struck from the
list of the
Why, Ms Lee asks, does Japan’s establishment not understand the
humiliation of families like hers, one it would be so easy to redress? Japanese
prime ministers have apologised for their country’s aggression; its government
has acknowledged its culpability in enslaving women in brothels. And the
Japanese know what it is to have people taken from them. Mr Abe made his
political reputation when, more than a decade ago, he stood up to North Korea
over a number of Japanese citizens kidnapped in the 1970s and 1980s to serve
the brutal regime as translators and spies. Every day Mr Abe wears a blue
ribbon in his lapel as a reminder of them. Can he not see, Ms Lee says, that
her father was abducted too?
But no name has ever been removed from Yasukuni.
The Meiji
Restoration initiated a bout
of modernisation the like of which the world has never seen elsewhere. Not even China’s transformation
since 1978 compares to it. In less than two generations an insular feudal
shogunate became a modern power—not just an
economic power, but a military one. Japan’s leaders never forgot the indignity
of American gunships forcing open what Herman Melville called their
“double-bolted land”. Fukoku
kyohei, went the rallying cry: “rich country, strong army”.
In the 70 years since 1945 Japan has fired not a
bullet in anger. In the 70 years before that, war was central to its progress. Its
expansionism began in 1874, when it launched a first punitive expedition to
Formosa (now Taiwan). In 1879 it annexed the peaceful Ryukyu kingdom—modern-day
Okinawa. A war against the Qing dynasty in 1894-95, fought largely on the
Korean peninsula, ended in humiliating defeat for China; its centuries-old
dominance of East Asia was usurped. In 1905, in the greatest naval victory
since Nelson’s at Trafalgar 100 years before, Japan sent nearly the entire
Russian fleet to the bottom in the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan,
setting the scene for its subsequent uncontested annexation of Korea.
Given the condemnation Japanese militarism was later to receive,
it is worth recalling the admiration Japan’s military modernisation inspired in
these early decades. It dressed its imperial adventures abroad in a cloak of
righteousness, legalism and brute force—just as Western imperial powers did.
Impressed, those Western powers could hardly deny their pupil a place at the
top table—even if the new member of the club was quick to detect racist slights.
Asian nationalists, too, admired this new Japan—among them Sun
Yat-sen, the future founder of republican China. Radicals and intellectuals
flocked to Tokyo to learn from an Asian power that could foster pride and
prosperity at home while standing up to the West abroad. The admiration even
extended to Yasukuni, embodying as it did the virtues of loyalty,
self-sacrifice and patriotism. In the early 1890s Wang Tao, a Chinese
intellectual and reformer, wrote approvingly that it was “easy to understand
the intention behind the Japanese government’s enshrining of the war dead: the
enthusiasm of the masses will flourish, and their loyalty will never be found
wanting.” Imperial China’s defeat at Japanese hands followed shortly thereafter.
Like the imperialism of the European powers it sought to emulate,
Japan’s colonialism was rooted in violence and, often, racism. But by
the early 1930s it had also become oddly chaotic—the result not so much of a
strategic aim to further national greatness as of a lack of control over
adventurism. The last of the oligarchs who had wielded power after the Meiji
Restoration, and who had a restraining influence on the armed forces, shuffled
off the stage. In 1931 a clique of army officers presented their occupation of
Manchuria to the government as a fait accompli. After the League of Nations
condemned the move, Japan withdrew from the body and entered a pact with Nazi
Germany in the name of fighting communism. In 1937 a flare-up between Chinese
and Japanese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing precipitated a
“war of annihilation”, as Japan’s prime minister, Fumimaro Konoe, called it,
down the length of China’s eastern seaboard.
Many conservative Japanese nationalists still see the beauty of
that period. Mr Abe believes that Japan’s pursuit of
To take such a position is not to deny that Japan did wrong.
John Delury, a historian of East Asia at Yonsei University in Seoul, argues
that, instead, it is to believe that imperial Japan behaved in war little
differently from other countries. And other countries did grievous wrong.
Witness the smouldering aftermath of the firebombing of Tokyo, in which 100,000
died; witness the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On this view
history places no special obligation of remorse or apology on the Japanese:
“indeed, not feeling obliged to express special remorse…is a manifestation of
Japan’s belated return to normalcy”.
Back at Yasukuni, the shrine is bathed in beautiful lies. A
visit to its associated museum, the Yushukan, finds the militarism that brought
Japan to its knees still glorified. Grim engines of death have pride of place,
including the
When Mr Abe paid his respects at Yasukuni in late 2013 he
fulfilled a campaign promise and generated a diplomatic storm. Around the world
China’s diplomats took to op-ed pages with the aim of stoking anti-Japan
sentiment. In Britain’s Daily
Telegraph the
Chinese ambassador to London, Liu Xiaoming, called Yasukuni a “kind of horcrux,
representing the darkest parts of [Japan’s] soul”. He expected his readers to
know that, in the world of Harry Potter, a horcrux stores a fragment of a
sundered soul in hope of immortality, and can be created only by murder. He
hoped they would infer that Mr Abe was the new Lord Voldemort.
It was a smart stroke of rhetoric. It was also more than a
little disingenuous. China’s Communist Party has a horcrux of its own on which
until not long ago it pinned all hopes of immortality—the corpse of Mao Zedong.
His violent rule saw the murder in purge and famine of millions of his
countrymen. Yet since his death in 1976 his remains have lodged under a huge
and ugly mausoleum in Tiananmen Square, the symbolic centre of Chinese power,
embalmed but very slowly putrefying.
Mao is a necessary source of legitimacy for China’s rulers, but
no longer a sufficient one. There is enough awareness of the violence and
misrule that he oversaw that even the Communist Party has had to avow that his
rule was only “70% good”. And as China’s economic and diplomatic clout grow,
prestige matters to its rulers in ways that never really interested Mao, and
which his legacy can do nothing to promote. So a reinvigorated nationalism has
joined economic growth and military strength as part of the “Chinese Dream”—a
nationalism defined above all in opposition to wartime Japanese aggression.
President Xi Jinping clearly sees the memory of that struggle as a tool for
shaping Chinese identity.
China’s leaders think memories of its role in the war should matter
abroad, too. America’s claim to a Pacific presence rests on its defeat of
Japan. China’s claim to leadership in its region rests on its role in that same
defeat—a role for which, after all, it was at the time rewarded with one of the
permanent seats on the UN Security Council reserved for the victors. In Mr
Liu’s horcrux op-ed he referred to Chinese soldiers standing “shoulder to
shoulder” with Allied troops. Last month he sent this correspondent an
invitation to a 70th anniversary commemoration of August 15th that refers to
“the Victory of the World Anti-Fascist War and the Chinese People’s War against
Japanese Aggression”.
China’s contribution to the second world war certainly deserves
a reappraisal, as Rana Mitter of the University of Oxford argues in a recent
book on the Sino-Japanese war, “Forgotten Ally”. From the outbreak of
hostilities at the Marco Polo Bridge in 1937 to December 7th 1941, when Japan’s
attack on Pearl Harbor forced America into the war, China fought Japan alone.
Mr Mitter argues that, had China surrendered in 1938, as seemed all too likely
at the time, East Asia might have been a Japanese imperium for decades. Instead
it fought on, at enormous cost. Perhaps 15m Chinese soldiers and civilians died
in the war of 1937-45, with 100m made refugees; of the other nations at war
only the Soviet Union suffered losses on a similar scale. True, China failed in
the end to beat the Japanese. But its dogged resistance tied down hundreds of
thousands of Japanese troops.
This is the legacy that Mr Xi insists be recognised. But there
is an inconvenient truth. For decades the official Communist Party narrative
had little space for the KMT and Chiang Kai-shek; if they were mentioned at
all, it was as anti-communist forces too cowardly, corrupt or unpatriotic to
take on the Japanese. China’s “liberation” came not in 1945 but in 1949—that
is, with the Communists’ defeat of the nationalists in the civil war that
followed Japan’s collapse. Communism’s victory over nationalism was thus framed
as the end point of its victory over fascism.
Yet it was in fact the armies of the anti-imperialist, fiercely
nationalist KMT that offered the chief resistance to Japan’s army, drawing it
ever deeper into the mire. It was they who shared in the suffering, hardship and
endurance on the part of hundreds of millions of Chinese civilians that marked
the eight wartime years beyond the relatively small and secure Communist base
areas. It is quite possible that, had the KMT not spent so much of its force in
that struggle, Chiang would have won the subsequent civil war.
Viciously suppressed in the decades following the war, this part
of the country’s history is now being cautiously and selectively rehabilitated
as part of the new nationalism through which China is expressing its regional
and global aspirations. Among other things, this serves the purpose of uniting
the stories of Taiwan—to which Chiang and the KMT fled in 1949—and mainland
China, stressing the common struggle of the Chinese against Japanese aggression
rather than their division by civil war. Beyond reasons of state, though, it is
also bubbling up from below, as regions of China previously marginalised
manifest a new desire to tell their own war stories.
In a large apartment in a brand-new suburb of Chongqing, a city
in China’s south-west, Wang Suzhen, a diminutive lady in floral pyjamas,
disappears into a vast faux-leather sofa surrounded by three generations of her
family. Opposite, a television covering the entire wall pumps out a reality
programme devoted to parental indulgence: a father takes a girl in a tutu to a
ballet lesson; a little emperor in sunglasses drives a scale model of a BMW.
Outside, Chongqing is Dickensian in its smog and nearly hellish in its summer
heat, the Yangzi river winding brown and swollen at the feet of its steep
hillsides.
Chiang Kai-shek retreated to Chongqing with his government in
1938, the year after Nanjing, then the capital of the Republic of China, fell
to the Japanese amid great slaughter—an infamous victory which put the invaders
in control of nearly all of China’s coast, including Shanghai. Millions of
Chinese followed Chiang to Chongqing; it was the provisional capital until the
end of the war.
They were seven hard years. Though geographical remoteness and
mountain topography offered the city a degree of protection, the war was always
present. Many civilians died in air raids; on June 5th 1941 some 1,500
civilians died from suffocation in a single shelter. Boatmen were paid half a
kilo of rice per body to take the corpses out of the city.
The Wang family did better than most. Living outside Chongqing
in a town called Shilong, they escaped the air raids. Just six days before the
defeat of Japan, Ms Wang was born. Soon after the family moved to Chongqing
proper where they made a living selling the silk embroidery they made in the
city’s wholesale markets. But the Communist victory in the civil war changed
the city. Chongqing’s sense of itself as a centre of resistance, and its price
in its wartime experience, were suppressed. Its Monument to Victory in the
Anti-Japanese War was renamed the Liberation Monument. People with a “bad”
class background—that is, evil “landlords” and nationalists who had come to the
region with Chiang Kai-shek—were stigmatised. Ms Wang’s family was forced out
of the city and into the countryside.
One political campaign after another washed over the
agricultural collective where Ms Wang’s mother struggled to feed eight
children. Ms Wang remembers a cow being brought to the production team in
winter, but having no hay with which to feed it. Then people started eating
grass themselves, leading to bloating and sometimes starving all the same.
Later, during the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards dragged evil “landlords”
outside and beat them. “We didn’t ask questions,” Ms Wang says. “We didn’t dare
speak, or we’d get beaten too.”
In 1987 Ms Wang and her family left the commune and prospered
growing their own crops for market. The government gave her daughter, a
teacher, a flat, into which they all moved. In 1989 they got their first
television, and a fridge. In 2005 they bought their first car. No one in the
family imagined that things could change so fast. A few years ago Ms Wang found
spiritual comfort, too. It happened when an elderly relative died, leaving
behind her troubled ghost. A Taoist master was called in to appease the ghost
but it did not work. “Then some Christian friends said that their kind of
prayers could bring peace, and they did.” The ghost no longer troubles the
family; Ms Wang goes to church each week.
In her spiritual development Ms Wang is somewhat unusual; in her
family’s enrichment she is quite typical of her city. And as the south-west has
grown richer, so it has started to tell the story of its wartime experience
more openly. On August 15th Chongqing’s newspapers used to spout the same
national narrative one might read in Beijing. Now they celebrate local wartime
heroes. The air-raid shelter that suffered the disaster of 1941 has been
designated as a memorial site. In Chiang Kai-shek’s hilltop hideout of
Huangshan visitors are welcomed by a young actor decked out in the
generalissimo’s scholarly gown and thin moustache.
If Chongqing is reclaiming its past—and China as a whole coming
to acknowledge the role of nationalism, and not just communism, in fighting the
forces of imperialism—what does that mean for relations with the Japanese?
There are signs it may improve them; a more nuanced view of Chinese history
permits a more nuanced view of its adversary.
On the face of it, Ms Wang still sees things the old way: the
Japanese, she says, are cruel and she dislikes them. Has she ever met one? No,
she admits, but—nodding at the television—she sees them all the time. Reminded
that the Japanese in the war movies on television are Chinese actors in
costume, she laughs. “It’s just propaganda, I know,” she says, before becoming
absorbed along with the rest of the family in the girl in the pink tutu.
Mr Xi’s use of old antagonisms to buttress a modern nationalist
identity is a worrying one. But there is a lot else shaping the ideas of a richer
society than any China has known. As if to underline the point Ms Wang murmurs,
as much to herself as to this correspondent, “Who would miss the past?”
The spirits of Yasukuni are not the only ones with whom Mr Abe
communes. After his election victory in 2012 he went straight to the tomb of
his grandfather to make a promise. Like his grandson, Nobusuke Kishi rose to be
prime minister, serving from 1957 to 1960. A fervent nationalist, he had
nonetheless accepted, in the face of Japan’s surrender to the United States and
its neutered post-war role as little brother, that the restoration of wealth
had to come before the resumption of power. But—and Kishi was clear on this
point—this was to be only a temporary expedient.
In 1965 Kishi argued that rearmament was necessary as “a means
of eradicating completely the consequences of Japan’s defeat and the American
occupation. It is necessary to enable Japan finally to move out of the post-war
era and for the Japanese people to regain their self-confidence and pride as
Japanese.” The words could have come from Mr Abe’s manifesto. The promise Mr
Abe made by his grandfather’s grave was that he would “recover the true
independence” of Japan.
This is not to say that Mr Abe is anti-American. Like his
grandfather, he needs America to ensure his country’s security. He has
strengthened the countries’ military alliance, agreeing to revised defence
guidelines in April in the face of a rising China. But he feels deeply
America’s role in “the history of Japan’s destruction”—by which he means not
the physical devastation of the war, but the subsequent period of
American-imposed order. He hates the war-crimes tribunal that sat in Tokyo:
what hypocrisy to hang the Japanese leaders who conquered Asia at the same time
as the Western powers were reasserting their rule in Asian colonies. He sees
the constitution imposed on the country as constraining Japan’s legitimate
ambitions. A left-wing conspiracy in education inculcates war guilt and an
aversion to patriotism.
The role of that post-war order in the subsequent seven decades
of peace, prosperity and democracy from which Mr Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party
has been a great beneficiary is passed over in such analysis. Yet America is in
no position to call Japan’s nationalists out on the grounds of double
standards. It was, after all, General Douglas MacArthur who chose not to
prosecute Emperor Hirohito for the crimes that were committed in his name and
by a political system to which he was central, on the unprovable but
implausible grounds that a crushed people would be more biddable with their
emperor still in place. That decision made it harder for Japan to examine its
actions, and make a full accounting of them, both to its victims and to itself.
The cold war, for which America needed experienced, conservative allies in
Japan, removed any lingering chance of such a reckoning. Almost immediately
after the Tokyo tribunal handed down its first batch of sentences, the other
people indicted for Class A crimes were released from Tokyo’s Sugamo prison and
put in positions of authority.
Notable among them was the mastermind of Japan’s Manchurian
puppet state, known as Manchukuo, in north-east China. By harnessing private
capital to a heavily state-directed economy, he had turned Manchukuo into the
engine of Japan’s war machine. Mark Driscoll of the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill has written of the system’s “necropolitical” vision of
dehumanised Chinese labour. Yet the brutal human cost of this experimental,
hyper-modern state is now largely forgotten, while its marriage of private
capital and heavy state direction was a direct inspiration not just for Japan’s
post-war development, but also, subsequently, for that of South Korea—and
China, too. And the mastermind behind this? Nobusuke Kishi himself.
Mr Abe’s
uncritical belief that his country’s essence is inextricably bound into the
institutions of the Meiji
Restoration and all that they
went on to spawn is wrongheaded. But
it is equally wrong to decry all aspects of continuity between Japan’s pre-war
and post-war. On all sides ghosts are kept locked away. Instead they should be
allowed to speak and also to listen—to hear and voice the complex truths of
war, responsibility and victimhood.
Xu Ming remembers the first time she found herself outside
without her mother holding her hand. She asked a group of children if she could
play. “ ‘No’, said one. ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘Because you’re a
Ms Xu was born in Heilongjiang province in north-east China,
part of Manchuria, in 1944—three years after Kishi had been recalled from his
position there to serve as industry minister in Tokyo. She was an only child
brought up by loving and protective parents. And she was badly bullied. When
she was seven her class were taken to see a war film that showed Communist troops
in glorious battle against the murderous, evil Japanese. The children around
her starting shouting “Down with the Japanese”. And then they were spitting at
her. After the film the teacher held a roll call, but Xu Ming was missing. The
teacher found her crouched under her chair, her eyes red with crying. She
scolded the class: Xu Ming, she said, is only a child; and the film is only a
film. That day, Xu Ming determined to be a teacher.
A year later an officer from the Public Security Bureau came to
her house. Xu Ming was sent outside but craned to hear the conversation. The
officer was shouting: “You had better admit it: the child is Japanese and you
adopted her.” Her mother burst into tears. Xu Ming ran in to comfort her.
Mother and daughter cried so much that the officer gave up any further
questioning.
It was then that Xu Ming asked: “I’m Japanese, aren’t I?”
“Yes”, her mother replied, “you are.”
According to John Dower, there were over 6m Japanese stranded
overseas when the war ended. Their story is strangely little told, even in
Japan. Something over half of the stranded were servicemen, many wounded,
malnourished or diseased. The rest were administrators, bank clerks,
railwaymen, farmers, industrialists, prostitutes, spies, photographers,
barbers, children. For them and for their families and friends back home, just
as for conscripted and exiled Chinese and Koreans in similar situations, August
15th was far from a definitive end. A year after its defeat 2m Japanese had
still not made it home. Many never did. A national radio programme, “Missing
Persons”, was launched in 1946. It went off-air only in 1962.
The Allies took advantage of surrendered servicemen. The
Americans used 70,000 as labourers on Pacific bases. The British, in a supreme
irony, made use of over 100,000 Japanese to reassert colonial authority over
parts of South-East Asia that had just been “liberated”. In China tens of
thousands of Japanese fought on both sides of the civil war.
The worst fate was to be under Russian “protection”. The Soviet
Union, which entered the war in its last week, accepted the surrender of
Japanese forces in Manchuria and northern Korea. Perhaps 1.6m Japanese soldiers
fell into its hands. About 625,000 were repatriated at the end of 1947, many
having been sent to labour camps in Siberia and submitted to intense
ideological indoctrination. Others were able to make their way south to the
American-controlled sector of the Korean Peninsula. In early 1949 the Soviets
claimed that only 95,000 Japanese remained to be repatriated—leaving, by
Japanese and American calculations, over 300,000 unaccounted for.
In August 1945 there were also 1m Japanese civilians in Manchuria.
Some 179,000 are thought to have died trying to get to Japan in the confusion
and Soviet-perpetrated violence following surrender, or during the harsh winter
of 1945-46. Children returned to Japan as orphans, the family’s ashes in a box
hung around their neck. In Manchuria parents begged Chinese peasant families to
take in their youngest children.
That is what Ms Xu’s natural mother had done. Her father,
serving in the imperial army, had been dragged off to Siberia. Her mother
thought Ming, the youngest of her daughters, would not survive the journey to
Japan. She begged a couple to take the baby. When that couple later had more
children of their own they sold Ming on to the Xu family.
In due course Ms Xu passed as a teacher. She qualified with flying
colours that might have hinted at a stellar career. But the following years
were spent teaching the children of loggers in dismal mobile camps deep in
Heilongjiang’s forests. “There’s nothing you can do about it,” her professor
had said: “You’re Japanese.” In the timber camps they ground up sweetcorn husks
and tree bark for bread, but living in such remote places shielded Ms Xu from
the worst madness of the Cultural Revolution. Back in her home town the
ethnic-Japanese dentist, gentle and diligent, was dragged to the crossroad with
a sign around her neck denouncing her as a Japanese spy. Every time she was
asked whether she was a spy and denied it she was hit. Three days later she was
dead.
In 1972 the Japanese prime minister, Kakuei Tanaka, visited China,
initiating a programme of billions of dollars of bilateral aid for its former
foe. Japanese people started coming to Heilongjiang to look for family members.
A visiting journalist promised Ms Xu he would place advertisements on her
behalf in Japanese publications so that she might find her birth family. An old
soldier in Hokkaido responded to one, certain she was his daughter. In 1981 a
visa was secured for Ms Xu. She was intensely excited to go to Japan; her
meeting with the old soldier was emotional. Then a DNA test showed they were
not related. The old soldier would have no more to do with her.
Japanese bureaucrats threatened to deport Ms Xu: Chinese court
documents affirming her Japanese blood counted for nothing. While fighting
through the courts to stay, she volunteered her help at a local NGO dealing
with the “Manchurian orphans”. One morning, in a nearby café, two Japanese
women on the way to the NGO asked whether they could share her table. Of
course, Xu Ming said, in her still accented Japanese. The women asked whether
she was Chinese and if so from where? Heilongjiang, Xu Ming replied. That’s
where our mother left our sister, the women said. The coincidences grew: the
town, the name of the family, Li, that first adopted Ms Xu, the Li home being
right by the railway track. The three sisters were together again for the first
time since 1945. For Sumie Ikeda, as Ms Xu now knew herself to be, the elation
was tempered only by her learning that their mother had died just months
before. But now her ghost, at least, could rest.
The lives scarred in the second world war are nearing their
ends. The Asian history they are part of continues to shape the worlds of those
people’s children and grandchildren, though. In some places it is distorted, in
others denied. Some victims and some victors are commemorated. Others are
forgotten.
In the 1960s a head priest at Yasukuni more liberal than today’s
put up a tiny shrine in a corner of the grounds to pacify the spirits of fallen
enemies. It is now surrounded by a high metal fence, and out of bounds to
visitors. On its annual feast day in July a young priest unceremoniously places
a bowl of fruit outside the shrine as an offering and shambles off. As for the
Japanese victims of aggression—the young soldiers, let down by their generals,
who died of hunger and disease in New Guinea jungles, the hundreds of thousands
of civilians killed as the war came to the Japanese home islands: they are
nowhere to be seen. Yasukuni remembers only glorious deaths.
“Who would miss the past,” asks Ms Wang, from her sofa in
Chongqing. Who indeed? But the past is not just there to be missed.
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