Ottawa Citizen, Canada
December 28, 2007 Friday
Final Edition
Wars of remembrance
Pg. A14
The struggle over how we confront painful events in our collective
history can be almost as agonizing as the original events themselves.
It can take generations of divisive conflict to come to terms with
the past. The U.S. ended slavery in the mid-19th century, but it
would be another 100 years before Americans truly accepted their
founding creed that all men are created equal.
Turkey still rejects the historical consensus that its persecution of
Armenians during the First World War constituted genocide. The Roman
Catholic Church needed centuries before finally addressing, at
Vatican II, some of the ugly moments in its political and theological
history. Such reckonings do not come easily.
No collectivity is struggling with these issues more than today’s
Japanese. Japan is a highly civilized and productive society, and its
people have a hard time acknowledging the barbarism that their
fathers and grandfathers committed during the Second World War.
Some Japanese have tried to deny, for example, that their country
forced Korean women into sexual slavery. The Japanese political and
academic establishment continues to fight a civil war over
custodianship of wartime memories.
It’s worth noting this week a small victory for the forces of truth.
The Japanese Education Ministry announced it will allow textbooks to
acknowledge that the country’s military encouraged mass suicide of
Japanese civilians during the battle of Okinawa.
This was near the end of the war, when Japanese soldiers spread false
propaganda to their countrymen in Okinawa warning of American
atrocities and suggesting that death was preferable to surrender.
There’s even evidence that grenades were distributed to civilians to
facilitate their suicide.
A shameful episode, to be sure. But the education ministry is right
to have it taught in today’s classrooms. Burying the past does not
make it go away, but instead, festering, produces an even greater
poison.