For those that have visited the Yushukan Museum located adjacent to the highly controversial Yasukuni-jinja Shrine, there is definitely an alternative history of World War II taught in Japan. The majority of people in Japan do believe that the Imperial Japanese militarism was a great folly, but there are people who believe the history taught at the Yushukan Museum that Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was to preempt an American attack on Japan and liberate Asian people from western colonialism:
World War II era Japanese zero fighter aircraft at the Yushukan Museum in Tokyo.
The Pearl Harbor attack that led the United States into WWII is normally a historical footnote in Japan, rarely discussed on anniversaries or in depth at schools.
That changed when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced he would visit Pearl Harbor with President Barack Obama on Dec. 27 to offer “comfort to the souls of the victims.”
Most Japanese today view the war as a great folly. The clause in Japan’s constitution that renounces the nation’s right to wage war has taken root so deeply that even new, restrictive laws allowing Japan to defend its allies were viewed with suspicion last year.
However, some divergent perspectives over history remain among two of the world’s closest allies.
Americans are taught that the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor was an unprovoked sneak attack.
The view among some Japanese, and particularly among some otherwise pro-U.S. alliance conservatives, is that a Western economic embargo forced Japan’s hand.
By 1941, Japan controlled large parts of China and other parts of Asia. In July, its military occupied parts of Southeast Asia, including a key port in what is now Vietnam.
The U.S., Britain and The Netherlands responded by freezing Japanese assets in their countries, which included access to most of Japan’s oil supply.
“Indeed, the oil embargo cornered Japan,” Emperor Hirohito said in an audio memoir recorded shortly after the 1945 surrender. The memoir was found in 1990 by the Bungei Shunju magazine and then translated by The New York Times.
“Once the situation had come to this point, it was natural that advocacy for going to war became predominant,” Hirohito said. “If, at that time, I suppressed opinions in favor of war, public opinion would have certainly surged, with people asking questions about why Japan should surrender so easily when it had a highly efficient army and navy, well trained over the years.” [Stars & Stripes]
You can read more at the link, but the best book I have read about the period before the attack on Pearl Harbor is Eri Hotta’s: Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy. I highly recommend ROK Heads read this book to really understand why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The Japanese had opportunities to keep parts of their Chinese and Korean colonies if they would withdraw from other areas of China and Southeast Asia as demanded by the US and its allies. How different would things be today if Japan had been allowed to continue the colonization of Korea and parts of China?
There was actually a lot of dissenting opinions in Japan, but the militarists eventually were able to convince enough people they could replicate the success of the Russo-Japanese War with a decisive naval victory against the US at Pearl Harbor. As history has shown the bombing of Pearl Harbor became one of the great misjudgments in military history.
Regardless of the history involved it is good to see Prime Minister Abe finally make the visit to Pearl Harbor and hopefully put an end to any remaining hard feelings about World War II.
This is pretty symbolic of how much has changed in 75 years:
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will visit Pearl Harbor with U.S. President Barack Obama at the end of this month, becoming the first leader of his country to go to the U.S. Naval base in Hawaii attacked by Japan in 1941, propelling the United States into World War II.
Monday’s unexpected announcement came two days before the 75th anniversary of the attack and six months after Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit the memorial in Hiroshima for victims of the U.S. atomic bombing of that city at the end of the same war.
Abe, in a brief statement to reporters, said he would visit Hawaii on Dec. 26 and 27 to pray for the war dead at Pearl Harbor and to hold a final summit meeting with Obama before the latter’s presidency ends. [Stars & Stripes]
Hopefully the relationship between Korea and Japan continues to improve where this summit does take place:
President Park Geun-hye plans to travel to Japan for a trilateral meeting with her Chinese and Japanese counterparts, according to Lee Joon-gyu, the nominee for Seoul’s ambassador to Tokyo, Wednesday.
This will be Park’s first trip to Japan since her inauguration in 2013. The visit is expected to spur normalization of the ties between the two countries, according to analysts.
This year, Japan holds the rotating chair of the trilateral talks, expected to take place in November following their foreign ministers’ talks in October, according to Japanese media outlets.
“The trilateral talks between Korea, China and Japan are scheduled to be held in the second half of the year in Japan and President Park’s visit for the meeting is expected to play an important role in bettering bilateral relations,” Lee said in a diplomatic forum.
“Both countries need to take advantage of this visit as an opportunity to advance bilateral ties.” [Korea Times]
It seems like there is some bitterness in Japan over the backtracking in the ROK over the recent comfort women deal:
In this year’s policy speech, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe described South Korea as Japan’s “most important neighbor that shares our strategic interests.” Just like last year, though, he omitted “fundamental values” from this sentence.“At the end of last year, Japan and South Korea brought to an end a long-standing issue with our final and irreversible settlement on the issue of the comfort women,” Abe said during the speech, which he delivered to a joint session of the Diet, Japan’s parliament, on Jan. 22. “Since South Korea is our most important neighbor that shares our strategic interests, we will build a cooperative relationship for a new era in order to ensure peace and stability in East Asia.” […………]
Abe’s decision to describe South Korea as a country that only shares “strategic interests” and not “fundamental values” appears to reflect unpleasant feelings that still remain even after the Dec. 28 settlement of the comfort women issue. In other words, Abe views South Korea not as a friend that shares values but as just a business partner that he must work with in regard to the issues of China’s rise and North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs. [Hankyoreh]
I have to agree that even though the Park-Abe summit did not lead to any breakthroughs, just the fact they met was significant considering all the bickering the past few years. Hopefully this will lead to better future cooperation as long as Prime Minister Abe can keep his political team in check in regards to making controversial comments that inflame tensions with Seoul:
South Korean President Park Geun-hye (R) and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe shake hands prior to their summit talks at the presidential office Cheong Wa Dae in Seoul on Nov. 2, 2015. (Yonhap)
Experts on South Korea-Japan ties welcomed the results of Monday’s summit between President Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, saying the meeting paved the way for better bilateral relations even without producing concrete outcomes.
Park and Abe held their first bilateral talks in Seoul on the sidelines of a trilateral summit with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang. The format was intended to keep the first South Korea-Japan summit in three and a half years as low-key and practical as possible amid disputes over shared history.
A major stumbling block in the two countries’ relations has been the issue of Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery for Japanese troops during World War II. South Korea demands Japan offer a sincere apology and compensation to the victims before they all die, while Tokyo insists all issues related to its 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula were settled under the normalization treaty of 1965. [Yonhap]
