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The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan
In this now classic book, internationally famed journalist Ian Buruma examines how Germany and Japan have attempted to come to terms with their conduct during World War II—a war that they aggressively began and humiliatingly lost, and in the course of which they committed monstrous war crimes. As he travels through both countries, to Berlin and Tokyo, Hiroshima and Auschwitz, he encounters people who are remarkably honest in confronting the past and others who astonish by their evasions of responsibility, some who wish to forget the past and others who wish to use it as a warning against the resurgence of militarism.
Buruma explores these contrasting responses to the war and the two countries’ very different ways of memorializing its atrocities, as well as the ways in which political movements, government policies, literature, and art have been shaped by its shadow. Today, seventy years after the end of the war, he finds that while the Germans have for the most part coped with the darkest period of their history, the Japanese remain haunted by historical controversies that should have been resolved long ago. Sensitive yet unsparing, complex and unsettling, this is a profound study of how people face up to or deny terrible legacies of guilt and shame.
Buruma explores these contrasting responses to the war and the two countries’ very different ways of memorializing its atrocities, as well as the ways in which political movements, government policies, literature, and art have been shaped by its shadow. Today, seventy years after the end of the war, he finds that while the Germans have for the most part coped with the darkest period of their history, the Japanese remain haunted by historical controversies that should have been resolved long ago. Sensitive yet unsparing, complex and unsettling, this is a profound study of how people face up to or deny terrible legacies of guilt and shame.
344 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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About the author
Ian Buruma
89 books251 followersIan Buruma is a British-Dutch writer and academic, much of whose work focuses on the culture of Asia, particularly that of 20th-century Japan, where he lived and worked for many years.
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August 21, 2023
Ian Buruma, a Dutch writer with British and Jewish roots, describes growing up in 1950's Netherlands. The nearby Germans had evolved from comic book villains to genocidal fascists in his mind. Buruma also has connections to Japan, studying and working there, with two Japanese marriages and children. In this 1994 book he contrasts German and Japanese responses to history after the war. Each turned out quite differently. While Japan recalls suffering in Manchuria, China, Phillipines, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, German war guilt tempered resentment in the victims of Allied victory.
Germany
Buruma explores German politics and opinions in 1991 Berlin after reunification, during the Gulf War. War demonstrations were complicated by missiles fired at Israel. He compares the attitudes of those who had lived through WWII to those born afterwards. The war generation had denied complicity in the Holocaust, the next generation compensated with pacifism and political remorse. West Germany joined NATO and the European Community. Denazification ended, ex-Nazis were back in business. East Germans, now freed from communist limbo, emerged eager capitalists and extreme conservatives.
Japan
Buruma meets pacifist and militarist thinkers in Tokyo. The left felt betrayed by later western wars, the right by loss of sovereignity. Anti-US opinion thrived as it did in Germany. Nanking Massacre guilt had been overcome by pride in Pearl Harbor but compromised by cultural accretions of imported chewing gum, jazz and democracy. In WWII the Japanese emperor renounced divinity and accepted a constitutional government forbidding a military. Security was transferred to the US. By 1950 the politically banished returned to their old jobs and communist purges replaced imperialist ones.
Crimes
Buruma visits Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nanking to recover past war memories and finds the places sanitized or erased. German film and literature didn't portray Auschwitz, based on sensitivity of the topic, and failed to depict lives lost. In Hiroshima the Japanese compare themselves to the Jews of Auschwitz. At the Yakasuni Shrine, a locus of Chinese and Korean angst, Shinto priests describe the Pacific War as a fight to free Asia. The Rape of Nanking is a more appropriate analogy but is censored in Japanese schools. Buruma meets with veterans involved in the killing of civilians in China.
Trials
Buruma attends war crime trials in Germany where courts are used to teach lessons to students. Often German judges had worked in the Third Reich. The left saw the Nuremberg trials as divine justice, the right as a political show. Tokyo trials, denounced as western or leftist plots, did not offer cathartic relief. They were seen as a tool of control rather than redress. In Japan, a noble struggle against American oppression lost, revisionist views were enshrined in books. Conflating crimes against peace with crimes against people, trials presumed war was illegal when in fact it was not.
Memory
Buruma speaks with historians who have tried to set the record straight in Japan. Their texts were removed from school curricula. Chinese and Koreans were outraged by government denials but censorship lived on. In Germany monuments were erected in public spaces to warn of past events. In the '50s former Nazi sites were demolished by conservatives, but in the '60s those that remained were preserved by liberals. A genocide was absent in Japan but racial supremacy theory was not. Democracy chafed in the east as a foreign value system imposed by the victors.
Amnesia
Buruma talks with people who have tried to move past the earlier responses to the war. A president of the Bundestag makes a speech on Kristallnacht explaining ordinary citizens behavior and is forced to resign. A Nagasaki mayor says the Emperor bears responsibility. Igniting right wing protests he is shot in the back. Hitler could be blamed for everything and Hirohito nothing, acquitted from guilt by MacArthur and the Americans. Some cite a Japanese shame culture leading to an evasion versus a German guilt culture able to be absolved by confession. Buruma suggests political explanations instead.
Buruma is an illuminating author who has improved in over forty years of writing. He weaves together history, religion and politics with cultural themes from plays, novels, art and movies. As an astute social critic he has insights into group thinking. He challenges the nationalist idea 'history is in our blood' with 'it is in us as human beings'. It's a disturbing but valid question in regards to war. Political spectrums change but views of the left and right rarely coincide. The ideologies described are difficult to reconcile and the outcome is still unresolved. Buruma concludes with neo-Nazi riots in 1992.
Germany
Buruma explores German politics and opinions in 1991 Berlin after reunification, during the Gulf War. War demonstrations were complicated by missiles fired at Israel. He compares the attitudes of those who had lived through WWII to those born afterwards. The war generation had denied complicity in the Holocaust, the next generation compensated with pacifism and political remorse. West Germany joined NATO and the European Community. Denazification ended, ex-Nazis were back in business. East Germans, now freed from communist limbo, emerged eager capitalists and extreme conservatives.
Japan
Buruma meets pacifist and militarist thinkers in Tokyo. The left felt betrayed by later western wars, the right by loss of sovereignity. Anti-US opinion thrived as it did in Germany. Nanking Massacre guilt had been overcome by pride in Pearl Harbor but compromised by cultural accretions of imported chewing gum, jazz and democracy. In WWII the Japanese emperor renounced divinity and accepted a constitutional government forbidding a military. Security was transferred to the US. By 1950 the politically banished returned to their old jobs and communist purges replaced imperialist ones.
Crimes
Buruma visits Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nanking to recover past war memories and finds the places sanitized or erased. German film and literature didn't portray Auschwitz, based on sensitivity of the topic, and failed to depict lives lost. In Hiroshima the Japanese compare themselves to the Jews of Auschwitz. At the Yakasuni Shrine, a locus of Chinese and Korean angst, Shinto priests describe the Pacific War as a fight to free Asia. The Rape of Nanking is a more appropriate analogy but is censored in Japanese schools. Buruma meets with veterans involved in the killing of civilians in China.
Trials
Buruma attends war crime trials in Germany where courts are used to teach lessons to students. Often German judges had worked in the Third Reich. The left saw the Nuremberg trials as divine justice, the right as a political show. Tokyo trials, denounced as western or leftist plots, did not offer cathartic relief. They were seen as a tool of control rather than redress. In Japan, a noble struggle against American oppression lost, revisionist views were enshrined in books. Conflating crimes against peace with crimes against people, trials presumed war was illegal when in fact it was not.
Memory
Buruma speaks with historians who have tried to set the record straight in Japan. Their texts were removed from school curricula. Chinese and Koreans were outraged by government denials but censorship lived on. In Germany monuments were erected in public spaces to warn of past events. In the '50s former Nazi sites were demolished by conservatives, but in the '60s those that remained were preserved by liberals. A genocide was absent in Japan but racial supremacy theory was not. Democracy chafed in the east as a foreign value system imposed by the victors.
Amnesia
Buruma talks with people who have tried to move past the earlier responses to the war. A president of the Bundestag makes a speech on Kristallnacht explaining ordinary citizens behavior and is forced to resign. A Nagasaki mayor says the Emperor bears responsibility. Igniting right wing protests he is shot in the back. Hitler could be blamed for everything and Hirohito nothing, acquitted from guilt by MacArthur and the Americans. Some cite a Japanese shame culture leading to an evasion versus a German guilt culture able to be absolved by confession. Buruma suggests political explanations instead.
Buruma is an illuminating author who has improved in over forty years of writing. He weaves together history, religion and politics with cultural themes from plays, novels, art and movies. As an astute social critic he has insights into group thinking. He challenges the nationalist idea 'history is in our blood' with 'it is in us as human beings'. It's a disturbing but valid question in regards to war. Political spectrums change but views of the left and right rarely coincide. The ideologies described are difficult to reconcile and the outcome is still unresolved. Buruma concludes with neo-Nazi riots in 1992.
December 25, 2021
The experience of a mixed-race citizen in Japan....
https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dv4...
======
Sharp contrast between Germany and Japan. Germany very repentant for its war crimes and prison camps, the older generation in Japan, not so much.
There is still racism and there's enough pressure for the Prime Minister of Japan to visit the war shrine once a year. Japan portrays itself as victims because of the bombs. Even if you disagree with the bombings, Japan is still not owning up to what they did. They're a shrinking country because of an aging population, low birth rate, and strict anti-immigration stance. I once volunteered in a senior care center near my house. The staff were all immigrants: Costa Rica, Mexico, Fiji, China. They won't have those folks in Japan. This is why they are developing ambulatory robots which can lift old people out of beds, etc, at nursing homes. After the War, many Japanese moved to Peru and some came back to Japan. The government paid them to leave so they would not pollute the true Japanese.
In 2016, we made a trip to Japan and had some time with a good friend who has spent his whole career living in Tokyo. He is married to a Japanese. He covers the energy industry in Asia. But he had never been to the Yasukuni War Museum just down a hill from the war shrine. He hadn't even heard of it. Once inside, he translated the Japanese in the exhibit. It was much more strident than the English version. For example, it justified the invasion of Manchuria and the rape of Nanking as payback for the Chinese "insulting us."
this passage from the book explains what the museum is....
"In front of the museum is a well-maintained display of vintage machine guns, a World War II tank, a howitzer, a torpedo, a Japanese Zero airplane and the first railway engine to pass along the Burma Railroad. This is what the museum pamphlet describes as “sacred ground.” And the weapons on exhibit had been “used with love and care” by “the deities of the shrine.” Their “sacred relics” are shown in the museum.
There, in the first room, the visitor is confronted by a large oil painting, in a heavy gilt frame, of Emperor Hirohito visiting the Yasukuni Shrine in the 1930s. He is dressed in military uniform and flanked by bowing priests in white robes. A sacred sword is shown too, forged by priests attached to the shrine. And there are various items left by soldiers who fought in the wars against China and Russia, just before and after the turn of the century.
Other relics on display are a “human torpedo”— a steel sausage with enough room for one man, who would sacrifice his life by steering its explosive charge into an enemy ship. There are battle flags, signed by soldiers in their own blood, the names now barely more than faded brown smudges. There is a replica of a “cherry blossom” plane, used in kamikaze attacks. Letters from soldiers to their mothers or wives are preserved in glass cases. The torn, bloody shirt of a soldier who died in the Philippines is exhibited among the stained battle flags, as well as a cracked picture of his mother which he had with him when he died.
There are more oil paintings, all in the same pompous nineteenth-century manner as the picture of the emperor at Yasukuni— paintings of Japanese troops at the Great Wall of China fraternizing with grateful Mongolians and paintings of human torpedoes or cherry blossom planes engaged in their fatal missions. There is a large model, resembling a miniature garden, depicting the hopeless battles in Burma and the Philippines, with little plastic suicide tanks rolling off felt cliffs.
The texts between the exhibits, explaining the background of the war, are straight wartime propaganda. The annexation of Manchuria in 1931 was a necessary move to protect the Asian continent from Soviet Communism and Chinese rapaciousness. The war in China was inevitable, because Chinese rebels were being spurred into anti-Japanese activities by the British and the Americans. The war with America was a matter of national survival. And the suffering of Japanese POWs, as well as millions of others, at the hands of Communist regimes proved that Japan had been on the right side all along. In short, to quote from a history booklet sold at the museum bookshop, “the Greater East Asian War was not a ‘war of invasion,’ but just the opposite: it was a holy war to liberate the world from Communism.” [sounds like America's rationale for the Vietnam War]
The tone of the museum and indeed the entire shrine is summed up by a large bronze plaque put up by the Association to Honor the Special Attack Forces (kamikazes). It was unveiled in 1985, on the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
It was customary for these pilots to write a farewell letter to one’s loved ones. The letters contain the hackneyed sentiments one would expect: patriotic phrases about the glory of dying for the emperor and his sacred land, pride in doing a soldier’s duty, and so on. But these were conventions, written because they were required, like the pathetic apologies to parents for failing to repay one’s filial debt. Many letters also include, in more or less similar phrases, a request to parents and siblings not to cry or be sad, but to raise a cup of sake and rejoice in the manner of the soldier’s honorable death.
In a small room next to the main shrine, I spoke to a young priest whose crisp white robe denoted the purity of his office. He was no more than thirty years old. His father had been a Shinto priest before him. After exchanging name cards and pleasantries, I asked him what he thought of the Pacific War. First, he said, it was a big mistake to call World War II the Pacific War; it was the Great East Asian War. It was also a mistake to think that the Great East Asian War was a war of invasion. “We had no choice. It was purely a matter of national survival. Besides, the idea was to liberate Asia. The Asian people are still grateful …"
----------
More on the museum....
https://www.theatlantic.com/internati...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dv4...
======
Sharp contrast between Germany and Japan. Germany very repentant for its war crimes and prison camps, the older generation in Japan, not so much.
There is still racism and there's enough pressure for the Prime Minister of Japan to visit the war shrine once a year. Japan portrays itself as victims because of the bombs. Even if you disagree with the bombings, Japan is still not owning up to what they did. They're a shrinking country because of an aging population, low birth rate, and strict anti-immigration stance. I once volunteered in a senior care center near my house. The staff were all immigrants: Costa Rica, Mexico, Fiji, China. They won't have those folks in Japan. This is why they are developing ambulatory robots which can lift old people out of beds, etc, at nursing homes. After the War, many Japanese moved to Peru and some came back to Japan. The government paid them to leave so they would not pollute the true Japanese.
In 2016, we made a trip to Japan and had some time with a good friend who has spent his whole career living in Tokyo. He is married to a Japanese. He covers the energy industry in Asia. But he had never been to the Yasukuni War Museum just down a hill from the war shrine. He hadn't even heard of it. Once inside, he translated the Japanese in the exhibit. It was much more strident than the English version. For example, it justified the invasion of Manchuria and the rape of Nanking as payback for the Chinese "insulting us."
this passage from the book explains what the museum is....
"In front of the museum is a well-maintained display of vintage machine guns, a World War II tank, a howitzer, a torpedo, a Japanese Zero airplane and the first railway engine to pass along the Burma Railroad. This is what the museum pamphlet describes as “sacred ground.” And the weapons on exhibit had been “used with love and care” by “the deities of the shrine.” Their “sacred relics” are shown in the museum.
There, in the first room, the visitor is confronted by a large oil painting, in a heavy gilt frame, of Emperor Hirohito visiting the Yasukuni Shrine in the 1930s. He is dressed in military uniform and flanked by bowing priests in white robes. A sacred sword is shown too, forged by priests attached to the shrine. And there are various items left by soldiers who fought in the wars against China and Russia, just before and after the turn of the century.
Other relics on display are a “human torpedo”— a steel sausage with enough room for one man, who would sacrifice his life by steering its explosive charge into an enemy ship. There are battle flags, signed by soldiers in their own blood, the names now barely more than faded brown smudges. There is a replica of a “cherry blossom” plane, used in kamikaze attacks. Letters from soldiers to their mothers or wives are preserved in glass cases. The torn, bloody shirt of a soldier who died in the Philippines is exhibited among the stained battle flags, as well as a cracked picture of his mother which he had with him when he died.
There are more oil paintings, all in the same pompous nineteenth-century manner as the picture of the emperor at Yasukuni— paintings of Japanese troops at the Great Wall of China fraternizing with grateful Mongolians and paintings of human torpedoes or cherry blossom planes engaged in their fatal missions. There is a large model, resembling a miniature garden, depicting the hopeless battles in Burma and the Philippines, with little plastic suicide tanks rolling off felt cliffs.
The texts between the exhibits, explaining the background of the war, are straight wartime propaganda. The annexation of Manchuria in 1931 was a necessary move to protect the Asian continent from Soviet Communism and Chinese rapaciousness. The war in China was inevitable, because Chinese rebels were being spurred into anti-Japanese activities by the British and the Americans. The war with America was a matter of national survival. And the suffering of Japanese POWs, as well as millions of others, at the hands of Communist regimes proved that Japan had been on the right side all along. In short, to quote from a history booklet sold at the museum bookshop, “the Greater East Asian War was not a ‘war of invasion,’ but just the opposite: it was a holy war to liberate the world from Communism.” [sounds like America's rationale for the Vietnam War]
The tone of the museum and indeed the entire shrine is summed up by a large bronze plaque put up by the Association to Honor the Special Attack Forces (kamikazes). It was unveiled in 1985, on the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
It was customary for these pilots to write a farewell letter to one’s loved ones. The letters contain the hackneyed sentiments one would expect: patriotic phrases about the glory of dying for the emperor and his sacred land, pride in doing a soldier’s duty, and so on. But these were conventions, written because they were required, like the pathetic apologies to parents for failing to repay one’s filial debt. Many letters also include, in more or less similar phrases, a request to parents and siblings not to cry or be sad, but to raise a cup of sake and rejoice in the manner of the soldier’s honorable death.
In a small room next to the main shrine, I spoke to a young priest whose crisp white robe denoted the purity of his office. He was no more than thirty years old. His father had been a Shinto priest before him. After exchanging name cards and pleasantries, I asked him what he thought of the Pacific War. First, he said, it was a big mistake to call World War II the Pacific War; it was the Great East Asian War. It was also a mistake to think that the Great East Asian War was a war of invasion. “We had no choice. It was purely a matter of national survival. Besides, the idea was to liberate Asia. The Asian people are still grateful …"
----------
More on the museum....
https://www.theatlantic.com/internati...
September 3, 2015
This is a very moving book. It explains how the two nations that precipitated World War II, Germany and Japan have coped – and in particular how they have struggled with the guilt of the atrocities they committed against the people and countries they occupied.
The author spent considerable time in both countries and speaks German and Japanese.
History is complex and war, and particularly its aftermath, more so. The author points this out on several occasions so we do not come out with stereo-typed impressions. Neither country has unison as to its responsibility and guilt.
Japan, however, has a long path to travel to atone for its’ role – but there are exceptions within the country. When those exceptions speak out they are not only socially ostracized, but sometime physically threatened. In one of the last chapters in the book we are provided with two examples. A young woman, Anja Rosmus, in a small German town decided to unearth the truth of the supposedly anti-Nazis who lived through the Hitler years. In a northern town in Japan, Yachita Tsuneo, was five years old in 1945 when Japanese civilians beat and even killed several Chinese slave workers at a nearby factory. He was haunted by this and in his adulthood wanted the truth to come out and a memorial made to these slave workers. The factory, where the slaves worked, was strongly opposed.
After the Nuremberg trials many Germans came to the realization that something had gone horribly wrong.
Page 149 (my book) Hellmut Becker
“It was most important that the German population realized that crimes against humanity had taken place and that during those trials it became clear how they had taken place.”
Page 196
In 1989 a Communist member of the Japanese parliament asked the Prime Minister, Takeshita Noboru, whether Japan had been guilty of aggression in World War II. Takeshita answered that this “should be left up to future historians to judge.”
Not only the answer, but even the question itself, would be inconceivable in the German parliament in this day and age.
Hindering Japanese efforts at culpability and reconciliation was the exemption of Emperor Hirohito in any trials related to World War II. Omitting the Emperor helped to omit the Japanese people from any participation in war atrocities. In Japanese textbooks the word “aggression” was replaced by the term “military advance” (page 195-96). Mention of sex slaves from Korea, China and the Philippines are omitted. Mention of Unit 731, which carried out fatal medical experiments on prisoners of war, are omitted (page 194).
At the Yasukuni Shrine, among other things, there is a large commemorative plaque to honor the six thousand kamikaze pilots. Where the pilots trained is a “Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots”. As the author points out the name itself is an oxymoron.
Japan often uses Hiroshima and Nagasaki to proclaim victimhood. This is done much more vocally than admitting, for example, what Japanese soldiers did in Nanking in 1937 or Manila in 1945. Some Japanese even make a comparison between Auschwitz and Hiroshima – this is very discordant.
Even though this book was published in 1994 I believe it is still very relevant today. In fact, from what I understand, Japan has not improved its admission of war guilt. Also, given the time frame, there is much discussion on the differences between East and West Germany. And very importantly the author has spoken with several veterans and those who were children during the war years. Now, in 2015, there numbers are rapidly diminishing.
This is a very powerful book presenting us with a multitude of viewpoints.
The author spent considerable time in both countries and speaks German and Japanese.
History is complex and war, and particularly its aftermath, more so. The author points this out on several occasions so we do not come out with stereo-typed impressions. Neither country has unison as to its responsibility and guilt.
Japan, however, has a long path to travel to atone for its’ role – but there are exceptions within the country. When those exceptions speak out they are not only socially ostracized, but sometime physically threatened. In one of the last chapters in the book we are provided with two examples. A young woman, Anja Rosmus, in a small German town decided to unearth the truth of the supposedly anti-Nazis who lived through the Hitler years. In a northern town in Japan, Yachita Tsuneo, was five years old in 1945 when Japanese civilians beat and even killed several Chinese slave workers at a nearby factory. He was haunted by this and in his adulthood wanted the truth to come out and a memorial made to these slave workers. The factory, where the slaves worked, was strongly opposed.
After the Nuremberg trials many Germans came to the realization that something had gone horribly wrong.
Page 149 (my book) Hellmut Becker
“It was most important that the German population realized that crimes against humanity had taken place and that during those trials it became clear how they had taken place.”
Page 196
In 1989 a Communist member of the Japanese parliament asked the Prime Minister, Takeshita Noboru, whether Japan had been guilty of aggression in World War II. Takeshita answered that this “should be left up to future historians to judge.”
Not only the answer, but even the question itself, would be inconceivable in the German parliament in this day and age.
Hindering Japanese efforts at culpability and reconciliation was the exemption of Emperor Hirohito in any trials related to World War II. Omitting the Emperor helped to omit the Japanese people from any participation in war atrocities. In Japanese textbooks the word “aggression” was replaced by the term “military advance” (page 195-96). Mention of sex slaves from Korea, China and the Philippines are omitted. Mention of Unit 731, which carried out fatal medical experiments on prisoners of war, are omitted (page 194).
At the Yasukuni Shrine, among other things, there is a large commemorative plaque to honor the six thousand kamikaze pilots. Where the pilots trained is a “Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots”. As the author points out the name itself is an oxymoron.
Japan often uses Hiroshima and Nagasaki to proclaim victimhood. This is done much more vocally than admitting, for example, what Japanese soldiers did in Nanking in 1937 or Manila in 1945. Some Japanese even make a comparison between Auschwitz and Hiroshima – this is very discordant.
Even though this book was published in 1994 I believe it is still very relevant today. In fact, from what I understand, Japan has not improved its admission of war guilt. Also, given the time frame, there is much discussion on the differences between East and West Germany. And very importantly the author has spoken with several veterans and those who were children during the war years. Now, in 2015, there numbers are rapidly diminishing.
This is a very powerful book presenting us with a multitude of viewpoints.
October 26, 2013
Interesting and enlightening book about how both of the major antagonists of the Western allies have dealt with their wartime atrocities since 1945. Both Germany and Japan invaded their immediate neighbors and created terrible suffering, inviting destruction of their countries, yet they have mostly chosen different paths of remembrance; Germany turned to hand-wringing self-loathing and got close to Israel, all the while blaming the worst atrocities on Hitler, who was conveniently dead. Japan mostly wiped the slate clean and seemed to pretend the whole thing didn't happen, or if it did, was simply misunderstood, a philosophy which drives Japan's neighbors, (China, Korea, the Philippines, etc.) to volcanic fury. A very good book.
June 24, 2019
Plata za krivicu po obimu i pristupu liči na naučnu studiju, ali je ustvari mešavina istorije i sociologije, sa elementima putopisa i novinarstva. Koja se odlično čita. Dokumentarni format, kakav danas bolje prolazi na Netflixu, ipak ostavlja mnogo bolji utisak u formi knjige.
Holandski publicista Jan Buruma početkom 90-ih obilazi Nemačku i Japan, razgovara sa ljudima različitih starosti, staleža i funkcija i pita se (ih) na koji način su njihove nacije prihvatile krivicu za drugi svetski rat. Piše o dešavanjima za vreme rata, ali pre svega se fokusira na 'godinu nula' i period posle nje. "Za većinu ljudi u Nemačkoj i Japanu te prve posleratne godine bile su vreme čiste patnje. Ali, kada se pogleda unazad, nisu bile vreme beznađa. Malo amnezije, nešto poistovećivanja sa Zapadom i mnogo energije kanalisane u privredni oporavak."
Prećutkivanje zločina u Nemačkoj posle rata ('gde su nestali svi nacisti'); neinsistiranje Zapada na priznavanju krivice zbog novog crvenog neprijatelja; ali na kraju, ipak, stid koji su osećale generacije Nemaca rođene nakon rata. Šta su 30/40-ih radili njihovi roditelji?
Buruma uzima Aušvic kao glavni simbol rata za Nemce, i zaključuje da on u njima budi osećaj krivice, ponekad i preterane. Međutim, za Japance je taj simbol Hirošima. U tom najuzvišenijem simbolu Pacifičkog rata je sadržana sva patnja tog naroda. Hirošima je za njih simbol apsolutnog zla, često upoređivan sa Aušvicom. "Smrt tih nedužnih ljudi simbolizovala je opštu sirovost rata. Crni leševi naveli su Japance da se osećaju kao glavne žrtve rata. U jedan glas su vikali: 'Nikad više Hirošima!' Skoro da se činilo kako nikakvog drugog rata, osim izbacivanja atomske bombe, nije bilo." Zbog toga je u Japanu bio nemoguć potpuno čist raskid sa predratnim i ratnim godinama. "Mnogi od ljudi koji su upravljali Japanom pre rata, nastavili su to da rade za vreme rata, a ostali su i kada se završio. Bili su to oprezni autokratski birokrati i konzervativni političari. Nulti čas je iluzija."
Treći simbol je pokolj u Nankingu, i Buruma se tu dosta bavi načinom na koji Japanci nisu priznali zločine koji su se tamo dešavali. Da li bi nama, koji možemo da se zapitamo šta kod nas učimo o Srebrenici, logoru Omarska ili opsadi Sarajeva, trebalo da bude razumljivije to njihovo ponašanje? Da li i mi koristimo fraze koje su decenijama koristili Japanci: "Mnoge grozote bile su neizbežne, jer su ih diktirali zločini koje je počinio protivnik." Na svim balkanskim stranama to nekako liči na ovo: 'mi' nismo (toliko) krivi - krivi su 'oni'. Ovo je bitna poruka Plate za krivicu, ali i to da treba zaboraviti na simplifikaciju i stereotipe. Ne postoje 'dobri i loši narodi', sve se može desiti posredstvom loše politike.
Buruma intervjuiše ljude sa iskustvom iz rata. Prepričava anekdote iz tog i posleratnog razdoblja. Obilazi spomen-mesta i razgovara sa ljudima koji se bore protiv zaborava. Zaključuje da kod Nemaca prevladava 'kultura krivice', a kod Japanaca za Aziju češća 'kultura srama'.
Često pominje Bela (Bilijar u pola deset) i još češće Limeni doboš 1-2 Gintera Grasa, ali iako 300 strana na ovu temu zvuči mnogo, Plata za krivicu se jednostavno bolje čita od ova dva romana. Jedna od boljih knjiga koje sam čitao ove godine.
Holandski publicista Jan Buruma početkom 90-ih obilazi Nemačku i Japan, razgovara sa ljudima različitih starosti, staleža i funkcija i pita se (ih) na koji način su njihove nacije prihvatile krivicu za drugi svetski rat. Piše o dešavanjima za vreme rata, ali pre svega se fokusira na 'godinu nula' i period posle nje. "Za većinu ljudi u Nemačkoj i Japanu te prve posleratne godine bile su vreme čiste patnje. Ali, kada se pogleda unazad, nisu bile vreme beznađa. Malo amnezije, nešto poistovećivanja sa Zapadom i mnogo energije kanalisane u privredni oporavak."
Prećutkivanje zločina u Nemačkoj posle rata ('gde su nestali svi nacisti'); neinsistiranje Zapada na priznavanju krivice zbog novog crvenog neprijatelja; ali na kraju, ipak, stid koji su osećale generacije Nemaca rođene nakon rata. Šta su 30/40-ih radili njihovi roditelji?
Buruma uzima Aušvic kao glavni simbol rata za Nemce, i zaključuje da on u njima budi osećaj krivice, ponekad i preterane. Međutim, za Japance je taj simbol Hirošima. U tom najuzvišenijem simbolu Pacifičkog rata je sadržana sva patnja tog naroda. Hirošima je za njih simbol apsolutnog zla, često upoređivan sa Aušvicom. "Smrt tih nedužnih ljudi simbolizovala je opštu sirovost rata. Crni leševi naveli su Japance da se osećaju kao glavne žrtve rata. U jedan glas su vikali: 'Nikad više Hirošima!' Skoro da se činilo kako nikakvog drugog rata, osim izbacivanja atomske bombe, nije bilo." Zbog toga je u Japanu bio nemoguć potpuno čist raskid sa predratnim i ratnim godinama. "Mnogi od ljudi koji su upravljali Japanom pre rata, nastavili su to da rade za vreme rata, a ostali su i kada se završio. Bili su to oprezni autokratski birokrati i konzervativni političari. Nulti čas je iluzija."
Treći simbol je pokolj u Nankingu, i Buruma se tu dosta bavi načinom na koji Japanci nisu priznali zločine koji su se tamo dešavali. Da li bi nama, koji možemo da se zapitamo šta kod nas učimo o Srebrenici, logoru Omarska ili opsadi Sarajeva, trebalo da bude razumljivije to njihovo ponašanje? Da li i mi koristimo fraze koje su decenijama koristili Japanci: "Mnoge grozote bile su neizbežne, jer su ih diktirali zločini koje je počinio protivnik." Na svim balkanskim stranama to nekako liči na ovo: 'mi' nismo (toliko) krivi - krivi su 'oni'. Ovo je bitna poruka Plate za krivicu, ali i to da treba zaboraviti na simplifikaciju i stereotipe. Ne postoje 'dobri i loši narodi', sve se može desiti posredstvom loše politike.
Buruma intervjuiše ljude sa iskustvom iz rata. Prepričava anekdote iz tog i posleratnog razdoblja. Obilazi spomen-mesta i razgovara sa ljudima koji se bore protiv zaborava. Zaključuje da kod Nemaca prevladava 'kultura krivice', a kod Japanaca za Aziju češća 'kultura srama'.
Često pominje Bela (Bilijar u pola deset) i još češće Limeni doboš 1-2 Gintera Grasa, ali iako 300 strana na ovu temu zvuči mnogo, Plata za krivicu se jednostavno bolje čita od ova dva romana. Jedna od boljih knjiga koje sam čitao ove godine.
July 2, 2023
This is my favorite read of the year so far, and one of the best-written history books I've ever read.
The book was written in the early nineties, right after German reunification. In the East, they were taught to identify with the Communist resistance against Nazi rule. They saw the Nazi period through the eyes of the victims, and they accused West Germany of being the real Nazi successor state. There's some truth to this; East Germany was much harsher to its former Nazis than the West, and many former Nazis went on to become quite powerful in the West. One of the most important goals for the Nazis was to protect Western Europe against Marxism, and it seemed that the anti-communism of Western Germany was directly linked to the anti-Communism of the Nazis. But of course, East Germany was a dictatorship with a secret police, and West Germany was a prosperous liberal democracy and many West Germans thought East Germany was the real heir to the Nazis.
In West Germany, the relationship with the Nazis was more complicated. Everyone struggled to make sense of the Holocaust and how it related to Germany. Was there something uniquely German about the Holocaust, or was it something that showed the evil nature in all of humanity? Was there something in the German psyche or spirit that led to the Holocaust, something that Germans should always be scared of? Who should bear responsibility for it: just Hitler and Nazi top brass, or all of Germany? Different people had different answers to these questions, but almost all Germans had an overwhelming sense of guilt for the Nazi period. It was so bad that Germans didn't really mourn their own losses, like their soldiers who were killed or German civilians who were bombed. It makes sense; mourning the loss of German lives after the Holocaust would be deeply insensitive to the people the Nazis killed.
In Japan, it's a different story. To the Germans, the enduring symbol of the war is Auschwitz, with Germany as the villain. To the Japanese, the enduring symbol of the war is the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, with Japan as the victim. A Japanese professor, Saika Tadayoshi, called Hiroshima "the worst sin committed in the twentieth century," which seems veryyyyyy insensitive given what Japan did during the war. At the time this book was written, most Japanese textbooks had only one sentence dedicated to the Rape of Nanjing. Japanese textbooks didn't say there was an "invasion" of China, only an "advance into" China. It is a widely held belief in right-wing Japanese circles that Japan fought a war to liberate Asia from racist European colonialism and that any atrocities committed were part of the normal flow of war. The Japanese prime minister regularly visits the Yasukuni Shrine, where Japanese war criminals are celebrated as heroes, and Japan's involvement in the war is praised as "a holy war to liberate the world from Communism."
Of course, there are a ton of people in Japan who are committed to pacifism and making sure their country never forgets what it did. The book has plenty of stories about all sorts of Japanese people who fought to make sure their country is remembered as an aggressor, not as a victim. But still, it's shocking to read about how gruesome Japan's war crimes were and how popular it is to deny/downplay them.
Quotes
“Objects must be organized according to ideas. Without stories history is unintelligible. Which is not to say there is no truth and all stories are propaganda. But to catch the truth there must be conflict, debate, interpretation, and reinterpretation—in short, a discourse without end. The problem is how to show this in a museum.”
“Identification with the Jewish victims could not be done with real conviction; identification with the persecutors—that is, with your parents, your grandparents, or yourself—was too painful.”
“To imagine people in the past as people of flesh and blood, not as hammy devils in silk capes, is to humanize them. To humanize is not necessarily to excuse or to sympathize, but it does demolish the barriers of abstraction between us and them. We could, under certain circumstances, have been them.”
The book was written in the early nineties, right after German reunification. In the East, they were taught to identify with the Communist resistance against Nazi rule. They saw the Nazi period through the eyes of the victims, and they accused West Germany of being the real Nazi successor state. There's some truth to this; East Germany was much harsher to its former Nazis than the West, and many former Nazis went on to become quite powerful in the West. One of the most important goals for the Nazis was to protect Western Europe against Marxism, and it seemed that the anti-communism of Western Germany was directly linked to the anti-Communism of the Nazis. But of course, East Germany was a dictatorship with a secret police, and West Germany was a prosperous liberal democracy and many West Germans thought East Germany was the real heir to the Nazis.
In West Germany, the relationship with the Nazis was more complicated. Everyone struggled to make sense of the Holocaust and how it related to Germany. Was there something uniquely German about the Holocaust, or was it something that showed the evil nature in all of humanity? Was there something in the German psyche or spirit that led to the Holocaust, something that Germans should always be scared of? Who should bear responsibility for it: just Hitler and Nazi top brass, or all of Germany? Different people had different answers to these questions, but almost all Germans had an overwhelming sense of guilt for the Nazi period. It was so bad that Germans didn't really mourn their own losses, like their soldiers who were killed or German civilians who were bombed. It makes sense; mourning the loss of German lives after the Holocaust would be deeply insensitive to the people the Nazis killed.
In Japan, it's a different story. To the Germans, the enduring symbol of the war is Auschwitz, with Germany as the villain. To the Japanese, the enduring symbol of the war is the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, with Japan as the victim. A Japanese professor, Saika Tadayoshi, called Hiroshima "the worst sin committed in the twentieth century," which seems veryyyyyy insensitive given what Japan did during the war. At the time this book was written, most Japanese textbooks had only one sentence dedicated to the Rape of Nanjing. Japanese textbooks didn't say there was an "invasion" of China, only an "advance into" China. It is a widely held belief in right-wing Japanese circles that Japan fought a war to liberate Asia from racist European colonialism and that any atrocities committed were part of the normal flow of war. The Japanese prime minister regularly visits the Yasukuni Shrine, where Japanese war criminals are celebrated as heroes, and Japan's involvement in the war is praised as "a holy war to liberate the world from Communism."
Of course, there are a ton of people in Japan who are committed to pacifism and making sure their country never forgets what it did. The book has plenty of stories about all sorts of Japanese people who fought to make sure their country is remembered as an aggressor, not as a victim. But still, it's shocking to read about how gruesome Japan's war crimes were and how popular it is to deny/downplay them.
Quotes
“Objects must be organized according to ideas. Without stories history is unintelligible. Which is not to say there is no truth and all stories are propaganda. But to catch the truth there must be conflict, debate, interpretation, and reinterpretation—in short, a discourse without end. The problem is how to show this in a museum.”
“Identification with the Jewish victims could not be done with real conviction; identification with the persecutors—that is, with your parents, your grandparents, or yourself—was too painful.”
“To imagine people in the past as people of flesh and blood, not as hammy devils in silk capes, is to humanize them. To humanize is not necessarily to excuse or to sympathize, but it does demolish the barriers of abstraction between us and them. We could, under certain circumstances, have been them.”
May 5, 2014
Buruma, visits and talks to survivors, historians and general populace in both Germany and Japan to discuss how they feel about the Second World War. The book was written in 1994, so Germany had just been unified and the Showa era had recently came to an end in Japan. The reverberations of both these changes had not been fully felt, and World War 2 veterans, citizens and children were still very much driving the agenda in their respective countries. In what was Western Germany, this was based on guilt, in Eastern Germany, less guilt, and more blame of the capitalists, and in Japan a sense of resentment of ‘Victors Justice’.
Germans have, it seems, mostly come to terms with their past, the Japanese, while strongly pacifist given the choice, are less inclined to take the blame; after all it was not the Japanese who destroyed Hiroshima, so how come the Americans were never held to account for this war crime? The Showa God-Emperor was also never held accountable for his culpability so it could not have been the nations fault right? Some Japanese would argue, what have they got to come to guilty about? The Americans forced them to open their borders to the world, and they found it to be a world of empires, colonization, and ‘might is right’ what were they supposed to do? All fair points.
Twenty years after this book, we can see where we are now. Germany is the heart of Europe – still guilty and paying for the French, but probably more forgiving of itself. Japan is still arguing about Nanking and ‘Comfort Women’. However, the second world war generation in in its twilight, the new generations in Germany are less bothered, and in Japan, no one is really that fussed what the current emperor is thinking – he is just a figurehead. Time is the great healer.
Germans have, it seems, mostly come to terms with their past, the Japanese, while strongly pacifist given the choice, are less inclined to take the blame; after all it was not the Japanese who destroyed Hiroshima, so how come the Americans were never held to account for this war crime? The Showa God-Emperor was also never held accountable for his culpability so it could not have been the nations fault right? Some Japanese would argue, what have they got to come to guilty about? The Americans forced them to open their borders to the world, and they found it to be a world of empires, colonization, and ‘might is right’ what were they supposed to do? All fair points.
Twenty years after this book, we can see where we are now. Germany is the heart of Europe – still guilty and paying for the French, but probably more forgiving of itself. Japan is still arguing about Nanking and ‘Comfort Women’. However, the second world war generation in in its twilight, the new generations in Germany are less bothered, and in Japan, no one is really that fussed what the current emperor is thinking – he is just a figurehead. Time is the great healer.
January 13, 2016
Since moving to Japan, I got more and more interested in history, especially the recent history of the 20th century. The book I just finished, Ian Buruma (Wiki, home page) Wages of Guilt - Memories of War in Germany and Japan (Independent, NYRB), has been a revelation for me. As an Austrian living in Japan, I am experiencing the discrepancy between these two countries with respect to their treatment of war legacy practically daily, and many of my blog entries revolve around the topic of Japanese non-reconciliation.
The comparison of Germany and Japan with respect to their recent history as laid out in Buruma's book throws a spotlight on various aspects of the psychology of German and Japanese population, while at the same time not falling into the easy trap of explaining everything with difference in the guilt culture. A book of great depth and broad insights everyone having even the slightest interest in these topics should read.
Only thinking about giving a halfway full account of this book is something impossible for me. The sheer amount of information, both on the German and Japanese side, is impressive. His incredible background (studies of Chinese literature and Japanese movie!) and long years as journalist, editor, etc, enriches the book with facets normally not available: In particular his knowledge of both the German and Japanese movie history, and the reflection of history in movies, were complete new aspects for me (see my recent post (in Japanese)).
The book is comprised of four parts: The first with the chapters War Against the West and Romance of the Ruins; the second with the chapters Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Nanking; the third with History on Trial, Textbook Resistance, and Memorials, Museums, and Monuments; and the last part with A Normal Country, Two Normal Towns, and Clearing Up the Ruins. Let us look at the chapters in turn:
War Against the West
This chapter sets the stage in two parts, Bonn and Tokyo, by comparing the reaction in these countries to the Iraq war. The German "Betroffenheit" (To be betroffen implies a sense of guilt, a sense of shame, or even embarrassment.) as the core of German post-war politics, literature, and media is introduced. On the Japanese side the difficult and diverse situation and attitudes towards the Iraq (and other) wars, as well as the necessary bits of post-war history and development of the Japanese constitution.
Romance of the Ruins
This chapter focuses on the war and immediate post-war period with references to the specific literature and movies emerging out of the circumstances of destroyed countries who have lost the war.
Auschwitz
The psychological construction of war memorials in both Germanies, which focuses on the religious aspects, is discussed, followed by an excursion through post-war German literature and the long-term ignorance of anything related to the Holocaust.
Hiroshima
Paralleling the previous chapter, Hiroshima introduces the simplistic and reduced focus of the Hiroshima memorials, mostly ignoring the foreign victims, many of them being Koreans forced to work in Japan, and concentrating on the Japanese martyrdom. Focusing on the atomic bomb event everything else is removed from the field of view.
Nanking
The history and aftermath, as well as the attempts of rejection and refutation of the Nanking massacre are described. The Tokyo Trials and their critique by governmental scholars are touched, as well as bit of fresh air blowing through the Japanese society after the death of Hirohito, which lead to the publication of the records of Nanking by Azuma Shiro 東 史郎.
History on Trial
One of the central chapters in my opinion. It discusses and compares the two post-war trials: The Nurnberg trials in Germany and the Tokyo trials in Japan. In both cases the juridical value is questioned, focusing on the winner-looser situation of post-war times.
Also, the differences in war trials in East and West Germany is compared. The East Germany Waldheimer trials, as well as the thorough purge of Nazis from East German jurisdiction and politics, which was in stark contrast to both West German's very restricted trials, as well as Japan's absolute non-purge of criminals.
Textbook Resistance
This chapter compares the representation of war and post-war times in the textbooks in West and East Germany and Japan. The interesting case of Ienaga Saburo 家永 三郎 and the year-long trials (1965-1993) around his history textbook are recounted. The ministry of education had forced a redaction of his history textbook to conform with the revisionist view onto history, deleting most passages that are critical of the Japanese position during the first half of the 20th century. This was one of the very few cases in Japanese post-war history where someone stood up against this revisionist view.
Memorials, Museums, and Monuments
This chapter returns to war memorials: The change of meaning from post WW-1, which were memorials, to post WW-2 ones which became warning monuments, indicating the shift of attention and evaluation of war history in Germany. In contrast to this, Japan's quasi non-existence of war museums till the late 90ies, as well as the existence of the Yasukuni shrine honoring and celebrating besides other several A-class war criminals as deities.
A Normal Country
This chapter discusses the slow normalization of post-war situation after the 90ies, and all the hurdles that needed to be overcome: In the case of Germany the speech of Philipp Jenninger, then president of the Bundestag, is recounted. 50 years after the Kristallnacht he tried to give a speech of "historicization", only to be find himself shunned and expelled due to the lack of Betroffenheit.
On the Japanese side the case of Motoshima Hitoshi 本島 等, who dared to question Hirohito:
which led to hitherto unseen of demonstration of extreme-right-wing groups issuing death treats that lead to a failed assassination of Motoshima, all under the completely complacent Japanese police and politics letting the right-wingers play their game.
Two Normal Towns
This chapter focuses on two rare cases of civil courage and political commitment: Anja Rosmus, who stepped forth as school child to rewrite the history of Passau. She unveiled the truth about deep involvement into the NS crimes of many inhabitants of Passau, a fact that was up to then covered up and purged from knowledge. She, too, received many death threads, including nailing a killed cat onto her door. The response of the head of the tourist office in Passau, Gottfried Dominik, speaks about the very peculiar attitude:
A similar incident is recounted on the Japanese side, the Hanaoka incident (detailed article) and its unveiling by Nozoe Kenji, where 800 Chinese slave workers, after escaping from a forced-work camp for the Kajima Corporation, where rabbit-hunted down and slaughtered. He, too, got death threats, and was virtually expelled from his home area because he dared to publish his findings.
Clearing Up the Ruins
The last chapter tries to round up all the previous chapters, and look into the most recent history and near future. While not completely pessimistic with respect to Japan, the final chapter leaves clear statements on the current state of Japanese society and politics:
His description of current Japanese society, written in 1995, is still hauntingly true in 2016:
The boook somehow left me with a bleak impression of Japanese post-war times as well as Japanese future. Having read other books about the political ignorance in Japan (Norma Field's In the realm of a dying emperor, or the Chibana history), Buruma's characterization of Japanese politics is striking. He couldn't foresee the recent changes in legislation pushed through by the Abe government actually breaking the constitution, or the rewriting of history currently going on with respect to comfort women and Nanking. But reading his statement about Article Nine of the constitution and looking at the changes in political attitude, I am scared about where Japan is heading to:
While there are signs of resistance in the streets of Japan (Okinawa and the Hanako bay, the demonstrations against secrecy law and reversion of the constitution), we are still to see a change influenced by the people in a country ruled and distributed by oligarchs. I don't think there will be another Nanking Massacre in the near future, but Buruma's books shows that we are heading back to a nationalistic regime similar to pre-war times, just covered with a democratic veil to distract critics.
(this review first appeared on There and back again - Ian Buruma: Wages of Guilt
Willy Brandt went down on his knees in the Warsaw ghetto, after a functioning democracy had been established in the Federal Republic of Germany, not before. But Japan, shielded from the evil world, has grown into an Oskar Matzerath: opportunistic, stunted, and haunted by demons, which it tries to ignore by burying them in the sand, like Oskar’s drum.
Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt, Clearing Up the Ruins
The comparison of Germany and Japan with respect to their recent history as laid out in Buruma's book throws a spotlight on various aspects of the psychology of German and Japanese population, while at the same time not falling into the easy trap of explaining everything with difference in the guilt culture. A book of great depth and broad insights everyone having even the slightest interest in these topics should read.
This difference between (West) German and Japanese textbooks is not just a matter of detail; it shows a gap in perception.
Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt, Romance of the Ruins
Only thinking about giving a halfway full account of this book is something impossible for me. The sheer amount of information, both on the German and Japanese side, is impressive. His incredible background (studies of Chinese literature and Japanese movie!) and long years as journalist, editor, etc, enriches the book with facets normally not available: In particular his knowledge of both the German and Japanese movie history, and the reflection of history in movies, were complete new aspects for me (see my recent post (in Japanese)).
The book is comprised of four parts: The first with the chapters War Against the West and Romance of the Ruins; the second with the chapters Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Nanking; the third with History on Trial, Textbook Resistance, and Memorials, Museums, and Monuments; and the last part with A Normal Country, Two Normal Towns, and Clearing Up the Ruins. Let us look at the chapters in turn:
War Against the West
This chapter sets the stage in two parts, Bonn and Tokyo, by comparing the reaction in these countries to the Iraq war. The German "Betroffenheit" (To be betroffen implies a sense of guilt, a sense of shame, or even embarrassment.) as the core of German post-war politics, literature, and media is introduced. On the Japanese side the difficult and diverse situation and attitudes towards the Iraq (and other) wars, as well as the necessary bits of post-war history and development of the Japanese constitution.
What is so convenient in the cases of Germany and Japan is that pacifism happens to be a high-minded way to dull the pain of historical guilt. Or, conversely, if one wallows in it, pacifism turns national guilt into a virtue, almost a mark of superiority, when compared to the complacency of other nations.
Romance of the Ruins
This chapter focuses on the war and immediate post-war period with references to the specific literature and movies emerging out of the circumstances of destroyed countries who have lost the war.
Hitler’s doom and the emperor’s speech, the end of one symbol and the odd continuity of another. Whatever their symbolic differences, both would be associated forever with ruins—ruined cities, ruined people, ruined ideals.
Auschwitz
The psychological construction of war memorials in both Germanies, which focuses on the religious aspects, is discussed, followed by an excursion through post-war German literature and the long-term ignorance of anything related to the Holocaust.
Here the past had fossilized into something monumental or, as Adorno would have put it, museal.
Hiroshima
Paralleling the previous chapter, Hiroshima introduces the simplistic and reduced focus of the Hiroshima memorials, mostly ignoring the foreign victims, many of them being Koreans forced to work in Japan, and concentrating on the Japanese martyrdom. Focusing on the atomic bomb event everything else is removed from the field of view.
The problem with this quasi-religious view of history is that it makes it hard to discuss past events in anything but nonsecular terms. Visions of absolute evil are unique, and they are beyond human explanation or even comprehension. To explain is hubristic and amoral. If this is true of Auschwitz, it is even more true of Hiroshima. The irony is that while there can be no justification for Auschwitz unless one believes in Hitler’s murderous ideology, the case for Hiroshima is at least open to debate. The A-bomb might have saved lives; it might have shortened the war. But such arguments are incompatible with the Hiroshima spirit.
Nanking
The history and aftermath, as well as the attempts of rejection and refutation of the Nanking massacre are described. The Tokyo Trials and their critique by governmental scholars are touched, as well as bit of fresh air blowing through the Japanese society after the death of Hirohito, which lead to the publication of the records of Nanking by Azuma Shiro 東 史郎.
Yet the question remains whether the raping and killing of thousands of women, and the massacre of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of other unarmed people, in the course of six weeks, can still be called extreme conduct in the heat of battle. The question is pertinent, particularly when such extreme violence is justified by an ideology which teaches the aggressors that killing an inferior race is in accordance with the will of their divine emperor.
History on Trial
One of the central chapters in my opinion. It discusses and compares the two post-war trials: The Nurnberg trials in Germany and the Tokyo trials in Japan. In both cases the juridical value is questioned, focusing on the winner-looser situation of post-war times.
The Nuremberg trials were to be a history lesson, then, as well as a symbolic punishment of the German people—a moral history lesson cloaked in all the ceremonial trappings of due legal process. They were the closest that man, or at least the men belonging to the victorious powers, could come to dispensing divine justice.
Also, the differences in war trials in East and West Germany is compared. The East Germany Waldheimer trials, as well as the thorough purge of Nazis from East German jurisdiction and politics, which was in stark contrast to both West German's very restricted trials, as well as Japan's absolute non-purge of criminals.
As long as the emperor lived, Japanese would have trouble being honest about the past. For he had been formally responsible for everything, and by holding him responsible for nothing, everybody was absolved, except, of course, for a number of military and civilian scapegoats, Officers and Outlaws, who fell “victim to victors’ justice.
Textbook Resistance
This chapter compares the representation of war and post-war times in the textbooks in West and East Germany and Japan. The interesting case of Ienaga Saburo 家永 三郎 and the year-long trials (1965-1993) around his history textbook are recounted. The ministry of education had forced a redaction of his history textbook to conform with the revisionist view onto history, deleting most passages that are critical of the Japanese position during the first half of the 20th century. This was one of the very few cases in Japanese post-war history where someone stood up against this revisionist view.
The judges and some of the counsel for the ministry sat back with their eyes closed, in deep concentration, or fast asleep. Perhaps they were bored, because they had heard it all before. Perhaps they thought it was a pointless exercise, since they knew already how the case would end. But it was not a pointless exercise. For Ienaga Saburo had kept alive a vital debate for twenty-seven years. One cussed schoolteacher and several hundred supporters at the courthouse might not seem much, but it was enough to show that, this time, someone was fighting back.
Memorials, Museums, and Monuments
This chapter returns to war memorials: The change of meaning from post WW-1, which were memorials, to post WW-2 ones which became warning monuments, indicating the shift of attention and evaluation of war history in Germany. In contrast to this, Japan's quasi non-existence of war museums till the late 90ies, as well as the existence of the Yasukuni shrine honoring and celebrating besides other several A-class war criminals as deities.
The tragedy is not just that the suicide pilots died young. Soldiers (and civilians) do that in wars everywhere. What is so awful about the memory of their deaths is the cloying sentimentality that was meant to justify their self-immolation. There is no reason to suppose they didn’t believe in the patriotic gush about cherry blossoms and sacrifice, no matter how conventional it was at the time. Which was exactly the point: they were made to rejoice in their own death. It was the exploitation of their youthful idealism that made it such a wicked enterprise. And this point is still completely missed at the Peace Museum today.
A Normal Country
This chapter discusses the slow normalization of post-war situation after the 90ies, and all the hurdles that needed to be overcome: In the case of Germany the speech of Philipp Jenninger, then president of the Bundestag, is recounted. 50 years after the Kristallnacht he tried to give a speech of "historicization", only to be find himself shunned and expelled due to the lack of Betroffenheit.
It was not an ignoble enterprise, but he should have recognized that Historisierung, even forty-three years after the war, was still a highly risky business. For a “normal” society, a society not haunted by ghosts, cannot be achieved by “normalizing” history, or by waving cross and garlic. More the other way around: when society has become sufficiently open and free to look back, from the point of view neither of the victim nor of the criminal, but of the critic, only then will the ghosts be laid to rest.
On the Japanese side the case of Motoshima Hitoshi 本島 等, who dared to question Hirohito:
Forty-three years have passed since the end of the war, and I think we have had enough chance to reflect on the nature of that war. From reading various accounts from abroad and having been a soldier myself, involved in military education, I do believe that the emperor bore responsibility for the war.
which led to hitherto unseen of demonstration of extreme-right-wing groups issuing death treats that lead to a failed assassination of Motoshima, all under the completely complacent Japanese police and politics letting the right-wingers play their game.
By breaking a Japanese taboo, Motoshima struck a blow for a more open, more normal political society, and very nearly lost his life. Jenninger, I like to think, wanted to strike a blow for the same, but failed, and lost his job. Perhaps he wasn’t up to the task. Or perhaps even West Germany was not yet normal enough to hear his message.
Two Normal Towns
This chapter focuses on two rare cases of civil courage and political commitment: Anja Rosmus, who stepped forth as school child to rewrite the history of Passau. She unveiled the truth about deep involvement into the NS crimes of many inhabitants of Passau, a fact that was up to then covered up and purged from knowledge. She, too, received many death threads, including nailing a killed cat onto her door. The response of the head of the tourist office in Passau, Gottfried Dominik, speaks about the very peculiar attitude:
I asked him again about the local camp and the small hidden memorial. Dominik showed signs of distress. “It was difficult,” he admitted, “very difficult. I know what you mean. But let me give you my personal opinion. When you have a crippled arm, you don’t really want to show it around. It was a low point in our history, back then. But it was only twelve years in thousands of years of history. And so people tend to hide it, just as a person with a crippled arm is not likely to wear a short-sleeved shirt.”
A similar incident is recounted on the Japanese side, the Hanaoka incident (detailed article) and its unveiling by Nozoe Kenji, where 800 Chinese slave workers, after escaping from a forced-work camp for the Kajima Corporation, where rabbit-hunted down and slaughtered. He, too, got death threats, and was virtually expelled from his home area because he dared to publish his findings.
I think it is this basic distrust, this refusal to be told what to think by authorities, this cussed insistence on asking questions, on hearing the truth, that binds together Nozoe, Rosmus, and others like them. There are not many such people in Japan, or anywhere else for that matter. And I suspect they are not much liked wherever they live.
Clearing Up the Ruins
The last chapter tries to round up all the previous chapters, and look into the most recent history and near future. While not completely pessimistic with respect to Japan, the final chapter leaves clear statements on the current state of Japanese society and politics:
The state was run by virtually the same bureaucracy that ran the Japanese empire, and the electoral system was rigged to help the same corrupt conservative party to stay in power for almost forty years. This arrangement suited the United States, as well as Japanese bureaucrats, LDP politicians, and the large industrial combines, for it ensured that Japan remained a rich and stable ally against Communism. But it also helped to stifle public debate and stopped the Japanese from growing up politically.
His description of current Japanese society, written in 1995, is still hauntingly true in 2016:
There is something intensely irritating about the infantilism of postwar Japanese culture: the ubiquitous chirping voices of women pretending to be girls; the Disneylandish architecture of Japanese main streets, where everything is reduced to a sugary cuteness; the screeching “television talents” rolling about and carrying on like kindergarten clowns; the armies of blue-suited salarymen straphanging on the subway trains, reading boys’ comics, the maudlin love for old school songs and cuddly mama-sans.
The boook somehow left me with a bleak impression of Japanese post-war times as well as Japanese future. Having read other books about the political ignorance in Japan (Norma Field's In the realm of a dying emperor, or the Chibana history), Buruma's characterization of Japanese politics is striking. He couldn't foresee the recent changes in legislation pushed through by the Abe government actually breaking the constitution, or the rewriting of history currently going on with respect to comfort women and Nanking. But reading his statement about Article Nine of the constitution and looking at the changes in political attitude, I am scared about where Japan is heading to:
The Nanking Massacre, for leftists and many liberals too, is the main symbol of Japanese militarism, supported by the imperial (and imperialist) cult. Which is why it is a keystone of postwar pacifism. Article Nine of the constitution is necessary to avoid another Nanking Massacre. The nationalist right takes the opposite view. To restore the true identity of Japan, the emperor must be reinstated as a religious head of state, and Article Nine must be revised to make Japan a legitimate military power again. For this reason, the Nanking Massacre, or any other example of extreme Japanese aggression, has to be ignored, softened, or denied.
Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt, Nanking
While there are signs of resistance in the streets of Japan (Okinawa and the Hanako bay, the demonstrations against secrecy law and reversion of the constitution), we are still to see a change influenced by the people in a country ruled and distributed by oligarchs. I don't think there will be another Nanking Massacre in the near future, but Buruma's books shows that we are heading back to a nationalistic regime similar to pre-war times, just covered with a democratic veil to distract critics.
(this review first appeared on There and back again - Ian Buruma: Wages of Guilt
August 24, 2021
#Re-read 2021
This book has a really stood the test of time. I read it when I first came out in 1994 and it profoundly informed my own two decades in Japan. Re-reading it now I’m surprised how much of it I had retained over the past 30 years. At the time it came out, I considered it to be one of the best done books of its kind. Extraordinary journalism--though it shocked me profoundly when it first came out. Of course, being American, I think I had a good idea about what happened during the Holocaust. I used to have nightmares about it as a child and I vividly recall learning about it in junior high school in a way that did not pull too many punches. I had no idea, however, what happened under the Japanese in Asia--especially I had not heard of the Rape of Nanking or the massacres in Manila.
The wages of guilt, which is the title of the book, is really a meditation into traumatic memory. We can all recall the image of Willy Brandt on his knees as the image of German atonement. Japan has taken a different road. Buruma explores the differences and then considers how that affects things to this day (which was in the early 90s of course). I would say all the issues he wrote about in terms of Japan continue still-- which is not surprising. Addressing wrongs is crucial --not just for victims-- but for everyone.
Japan's case is complicated beyond a cultural aversion but further because it was itself a victim. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. I think Buruma is outstanding on pulling apart the various strands and clarifying the issues.
Quote:
“When Kim Young Sam, the first democratically elected civilian President of South Korea, was asked by Japanese journalists what the Japanese government should do to compensate the former Korean sex slaves of the Imperial Japanese Army, he answered: “It is not your money we want. It is the truth we want you to make clear. Only then will the problem be solved.””
Amen.
I think Buruma must really love Japan to write this book.
#re-read 2021
This book has a really stood the test of time. I read it when I first came out in 1994 and it profoundly informed my own two decades in Japan. Re-reading it now I’m surprised how much of it I had retained over the past 30 years. At the time it came out, I considered it to be one of the best done books of its kind. Extraordinary journalism--though it shocked me profoundly when it first came out. Of course, being American, I think I had a good idea about what happened during the Holocaust. I used to have nightmares about it as a child and I vividly recall learning about it in junior high school in a way that did not pull too many punches. I had no idea, however, what happened under the Japanese in Asia--especially I had not heard of the Rape of Nanking or the massacres in Manila.
The wages of guilt, which is the title of the book, is really a meditation into traumatic memory. We can all recall the image of Willy Brandt on his knees as the image of German atonement. Japan has taken a different road. Buruma explores the differences and then considers how that affects things to this day (which was in the early 90s of course). I would say all the issues he wrote about in terms of Japan continue still-- which is not surprising. Addressing wrongs is crucial --not just for victims-- but for everyone.
Japan's case is complicated beyond a cultural aversion but further because it was itself a victim. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. I think Buruma is outstanding on pulling apart the various strands and clarifying the issues.
Quote:
“When Kim Young Sam, the first democratically elected civilian President of South Korea, was asked by Japanese journalists what the Japanese government should do to compensate the former Korean sex slaves of the Imperial Japanese Army, he answered: “It is not your money we want. It is the truth we want you to make clear. Only then will the problem be solved.””
Amen.
I think Buruma must really love Japan to write this book.
#re-read 2021
November 3, 2018
A friend put this down as a book she wants to read and it matched up with a historical methods research project. That was an interesting annotation for my bibliography. The professor specifically wanted to know where and how we found each source for the paper, not sure if she expected the source to be Goodreads. This book also led me to other sources and contained a source I already read.
This book did a beautiful job of showing the parallels between Germany and Japan in reference to WWII. It also provided insight into how the collective of any culture develops and is stunted. My research is how language shapes what individuals and groups believe and how that language will determine actions that have consequences that are passed down through the generations.
This book did a beautiful job of showing the parallels between Germany and Japan in reference to WWII. It also provided insight into how the collective of any culture develops and is stunted. My research is how language shapes what individuals and groups believe and how that language will determine actions that have consequences that are passed down through the generations.
September 11, 2015
Ian Buruma, born in Holland and spending some of his formative years in Japan, has almost the perfect CV to have written this book. Born into a country that was vicitm of the Nazi terror during World War II, but having an understanding of the language and culture of Germany, he also - through his time in Japan - has a similar understanding of their language and culture.
I feel sure that it his experience of both cultures that led him to write this book - a meditation on the reactions of both nations to their twentieth century history, focused on the War and the years immediately preceding it, and how that history has played out into their modern-day realities. It is a meditation on guilt versus shame, and how different accidents of history can change the way a country looks backwards and forwards.
Buruma tackles the subject by looking at themes that go across both Germany and Japan: remembering, teaching, memorialising. And what he finds is that although there are major differences in the way that Germany and Japan look back on their war years, there are also some similarities.
How to account for the differences? Buruma in not prescriptive, but he does have some theories, which I think make sense. One is the culture of shame versus the culture of guilt. Japan, by virtue of its history and religious outlook, is a country that has a shame culture rather than a guilt culture. The shame culture suggests that (and of course these are generalisations) on the whole Japan wishes to hide the sins of its past, and not bring them up in any forum. This has led to the Japanese having a distorted picture of the war - highlighting the bad that happened to them (atomic bombs, Okinawa), but having no contextual information to place those tragedies within the wider sphere of Japanese aggression, as that story is hidden from view, via selective memorialising, textbooks and a general frowning on openness.
By contrast, Germany's guilt culture, by virtue of its history and religious outlook, predisposes the country to look at past wrongs and try to face them. This may not be done by the perpetrators, and tends to have been begun by the generation born after the War. Buruma charts a history where the perpetrator's generation tried to forget, the children of that generation accused their fathers of all crimes, and the current generation has spent more time trying to find the truth, and is interested in the history of the time in a more holistic manner.
Which is not to say that those people who work to expose the truth in Germany are immune from any backlash. Buruma writes about Anja Rosmus from Passau, who started to look at the Nazi history of her town and to find skeletons in cupboards. She became an outcast for her actions, being shunned by her neighbours, and worse from those who thought the past was best left un-looked at. Buruma speaks to the other side of this debate too, to those who see the likes of Rosmus as people who besmirch the reputation of their town and country by undertaking this research. Of course the truth is the truth, it's what one does with it that matters.
Those that travel down such a path in Japan are liable to suffer worse than their compatriots in Germany. Buruma relates the stories of several Japanese who have tried to expose some of the history of Japan's war years, or to talk openly about the guilt of the Emperor, and while the stories of the Germans involve harassment, those of the Japanese involve gunshots and death threats. The path to truth by those Japanese who have the mind to find these things out (interestingly, many of whom are Christian) is made harder by the way the Americans absolved the Emperor of any blame for the war - his re-creation into a passive observer while the military ran the country has created confusion in the Japanese body politic: whereas in Germany it was clear that Hitler was the source of evil, and Germans can question the way they accommodated or reacted to his rule, Japan found itself after the war with no narrative of loss that they could cling to, and an occupying power that almost wanted them to forget.
Of course this review skates the surface of Buruma's arguments, which are more nuanced than their description here and which are backed up by many examples. However, in some ways what he uncovers fits the standard narrative of both countries since the War - that Germany as a country has accepted its crimes and tried to assimilate and deal with the consequences of that, while individual perpetrators have tried to escape punishment, and that Japan has - for a number of reasons - not yet been able to face its past in a way that assists in helping it move forward.
If you are at all interested in this question, this book is well worth reading.
Check out my other reviews at http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au/
I feel sure that it his experience of both cultures that led him to write this book - a meditation on the reactions of both nations to their twentieth century history, focused on the War and the years immediately preceding it, and how that history has played out into their modern-day realities. It is a meditation on guilt versus shame, and how different accidents of history can change the way a country looks backwards and forwards.
Buruma tackles the subject by looking at themes that go across both Germany and Japan: remembering, teaching, memorialising. And what he finds is that although there are major differences in the way that Germany and Japan look back on their war years, there are also some similarities.
How to account for the differences? Buruma in not prescriptive, but he does have some theories, which I think make sense. One is the culture of shame versus the culture of guilt. Japan, by virtue of its history and religious outlook, is a country that has a shame culture rather than a guilt culture. The shame culture suggests that (and of course these are generalisations) on the whole Japan wishes to hide the sins of its past, and not bring them up in any forum. This has led to the Japanese having a distorted picture of the war - highlighting the bad that happened to them (atomic bombs, Okinawa), but having no contextual information to place those tragedies within the wider sphere of Japanese aggression, as that story is hidden from view, via selective memorialising, textbooks and a general frowning on openness.
By contrast, Germany's guilt culture, by virtue of its history and religious outlook, predisposes the country to look at past wrongs and try to face them. This may not be done by the perpetrators, and tends to have been begun by the generation born after the War. Buruma charts a history where the perpetrator's generation tried to forget, the children of that generation accused their fathers of all crimes, and the current generation has spent more time trying to find the truth, and is interested in the history of the time in a more holistic manner.
Which is not to say that those people who work to expose the truth in Germany are immune from any backlash. Buruma writes about Anja Rosmus from Passau, who started to look at the Nazi history of her town and to find skeletons in cupboards. She became an outcast for her actions, being shunned by her neighbours, and worse from those who thought the past was best left un-looked at. Buruma speaks to the other side of this debate too, to those who see the likes of Rosmus as people who besmirch the reputation of their town and country by undertaking this research. Of course the truth is the truth, it's what one does with it that matters.
Those that travel down such a path in Japan are liable to suffer worse than their compatriots in Germany. Buruma relates the stories of several Japanese who have tried to expose some of the history of Japan's war years, or to talk openly about the guilt of the Emperor, and while the stories of the Germans involve harassment, those of the Japanese involve gunshots and death threats. The path to truth by those Japanese who have the mind to find these things out (interestingly, many of whom are Christian) is made harder by the way the Americans absolved the Emperor of any blame for the war - his re-creation into a passive observer while the military ran the country has created confusion in the Japanese body politic: whereas in Germany it was clear that Hitler was the source of evil, and Germans can question the way they accommodated or reacted to his rule, Japan found itself after the war with no narrative of loss that they could cling to, and an occupying power that almost wanted them to forget.
Of course this review skates the surface of Buruma's arguments, which are more nuanced than their description here and which are backed up by many examples. However, in some ways what he uncovers fits the standard narrative of both countries since the War - that Germany as a country has accepted its crimes and tried to assimilate and deal with the consequences of that, while individual perpetrators have tried to escape punishment, and that Japan has - for a number of reasons - not yet been able to face its past in a way that assists in helping it move forward.
If you are at all interested in this question, this book is well worth reading.
Check out my other reviews at http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au/
June 14, 2022
This is a book I’ve been meaning to read for a couple of years now. It’s a subjective but fascinating consideration of how Germany and Japan remember World War II. I enjoyed the emphasis on interviews with specific citizens and politicians that were used to flesh out the picture Burama was trying to paint. They added a human quality to the proceedings that was desperately needed. Burama is a journalist, and the writing here reads like great journalism.
November 19, 2020
Ian Buruma is my favorite kind of non-fiction author. Trained as a journalist, he explores conceptually nuanced ideas through a mixture of history lesson, field trips, interviews, and his own insightful commentary on all of the above. It feels like going on a quest with a very well educated, thoughtful interpreter, who will “debrief” with you along the way to process/discuss the encounters you’ve just had together. Other authors who use this approach can sometimes come off as didactic or occasionally dismissive (Michael Pollan, though I agree with him, springs to mind). Even with his most ridiculous interviewees, Buruma is genuinely sensitive that he is asking people to wrestle with painful and complex ideas about identity, collective responsibility, and historic interpretation. The material that he has set out to probe is exceedingly elusive; his ability to (a) identify concrete touchpoints (monuments, museums, textbooks, films, novels, political kerfuffles, etc) that will permit him to (b) psychoanalyze two peoples (three if you count East v West Germany) is as audacious as it is thoughtful.
I am fascinated by how ideas – especially myths – are created and evolve, which is essentially the subject of this book. Collective responsibility for war crimes is an incredibly difficult concept to live with, and Buruma explores the myriad of ways that Germans and Japanese have found to “either turn away or beat their breasts.” Conservative Japanese politicians either justify or whitewash the past, afraid that national identity and pride could not survive admitting to the rape of Nanking. In communist East Germany, trite doctrine glorified leftist resistance and flattened the Third Reich’s crimes to class oppression, the inevitable outcome of materialism. Japanese memorials to the war are cloyingly sentimental, with little more thoughtfulness than a beauty queen’s wish for “an end to war and peace on earth.” West Germany exhibits a neurotic fear of amnesia, which translates into anxious philosemitism, collective self-doubt, mawkishly morbid shrines to the victims, and an inability to acknowledge the sufferings of ordinary Germans during that time period – attributes that 21st century Americans might label political correctness run amok. “Sentimentality, after all, is a substitute for feeling.”
I love that, in addition to studying various monuments, museums, and textbooks (or lack thereof), Buruma also looks to the evolution in popular novels, TV shows, and films for insight into how the different cultures processed their history. At the same time, he notes that both countries resist approaching the WW2 time period using conventional historians’ tools: a plurality of interpretations stemming from analysis of structural, political, and cultural systems. Instead, the war is firmly confined to the realm of political morality tales. “The almost universal refusal to deal with the Final Solution outside of the shrine, the museum, or the schoolroom, suggests a fear of committing sacrilege. It is as though […] any attempt to draw the image of the unimaginable or inexpressible [N: aka, historical analysis] would trivialize its sacred nature.”
Buruma’s exploration per force touches on many related ideas, each worth ruminating on in their own right. Examples include: the legacy of foreign occupation. National pride. National identity. Why do we teach history? The romantic elevation of self-sacrifice. Rewriting national myths after German unification. The most effective mediums for conducting a national debate/national reflection (A: soap operas are surprisingly effective). Feelings towards previous generations. The tenuousness of Guilt by Association. The warm glow of identification with victims – so easy and so presumptuous.
Two more quotes for good measure:
“Speaking in religious terms about the past are the easier options.”
“The temptation for those who grew up among the aggressors would not be to seek identification, but, on the contrary, to keep a distance, through silence, cliché, denial, abstraction, scholarship, busyness, or gestures of ritualized penance.”
I am fascinated by how ideas – especially myths – are created and evolve, which is essentially the subject of this book. Collective responsibility for war crimes is an incredibly difficult concept to live with, and Buruma explores the myriad of ways that Germans and Japanese have found to “either turn away or beat their breasts.” Conservative Japanese politicians either justify or whitewash the past, afraid that national identity and pride could not survive admitting to the rape of Nanking. In communist East Germany, trite doctrine glorified leftist resistance and flattened the Third Reich’s crimes to class oppression, the inevitable outcome of materialism. Japanese memorials to the war are cloyingly sentimental, with little more thoughtfulness than a beauty queen’s wish for “an end to war and peace on earth.” West Germany exhibits a neurotic fear of amnesia, which translates into anxious philosemitism, collective self-doubt, mawkishly morbid shrines to the victims, and an inability to acknowledge the sufferings of ordinary Germans during that time period – attributes that 21st century Americans might label political correctness run amok. “Sentimentality, after all, is a substitute for feeling.”
I love that, in addition to studying various monuments, museums, and textbooks (or lack thereof), Buruma also looks to the evolution in popular novels, TV shows, and films for insight into how the different cultures processed their history. At the same time, he notes that both countries resist approaching the WW2 time period using conventional historians’ tools: a plurality of interpretations stemming from analysis of structural, political, and cultural systems. Instead, the war is firmly confined to the realm of political morality tales. “The almost universal refusal to deal with the Final Solution outside of the shrine, the museum, or the schoolroom, suggests a fear of committing sacrilege. It is as though […] any attempt to draw the image of the unimaginable or inexpressible [N: aka, historical analysis] would trivialize its sacred nature.”
Buruma’s exploration per force touches on many related ideas, each worth ruminating on in their own right. Examples include: the legacy of foreign occupation. National pride. National identity. Why do we teach history? The romantic elevation of self-sacrifice. Rewriting national myths after German unification. The most effective mediums for conducting a national debate/national reflection (A: soap operas are surprisingly effective). Feelings towards previous generations. The tenuousness of Guilt by Association. The warm glow of identification with victims – so easy and so presumptuous.
Two more quotes for good measure:
“Speaking in religious terms about the past are the easier options.”
“The temptation for those who grew up among the aggressors would not be to seek identification, but, on the contrary, to keep a distance, through silence, cliché, denial, abstraction, scholarship, busyness, or gestures of ritualized penance.”
August 1, 2025
This is an exceptional fine, intelligent and fair examination of the remarkable different ways that Germany and Japan have dealt with their WWII. It is easy to say that Japan does not come out well But Buruma, since he speaks and reads Japanese and has been an intelligent observer, and writer about Japan for many years (for example see his review here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20.... It will tell a great deal about Buruma intelligence and knowledge). This doesn't mean he gives Japan a pass, he places what happened and ongoing Japanese attitudes in context. Most importantly he recognises there is no universal 'Japanese' position. Thhere are very many Japanese who don't believe that Japan is innocent of guilt.
It is far to long since I read this book to provide the sort of analytic review I would like to so I quote the following from a Kirkus review:
"As in God's Dust (1989), Buruma takes a psychological and cultural voyage into nationalism, guilt, and self-delusion — in this case, of two of WW II's defeated Axis powers. Exploring the cliche that Germany is a culture of guilt and Japan a culture of shame, the author indeed finds that whereas Germany has engaged in a protracted collective mourning over its war crimes, Japan has no war monuments at all except to its own dead. Yet these two societies' chauvinism in this century has been similar, with Japan imitating German racial nationalism just as it imitated German education and industry. In both countries, contemporary pacifism and anti-war rhetoric have a strong anti-American flavor — a case, he thinks, of a failure to come to terms with the past. "Pacifism," Buruma notes, "turns national guilt into a virtue."...Buruma's easy familiarity with Japan enables him to dig under the skin of national attitudes in a way that is rare for a Western commentator...At the end of the book he compares two towns: Passau, a picturesque town in which Hitler spent his childhood, where surviving Nazi sympathies sometimes lead bakers to make bread in the shape of swastikas; and Hanoaka, a similarly tranquil Japanese place where Chinese slave workers were lynched in 1945. In both places he finds "public indifference to painful truths." All in all, a thoughtful, patiently assembled book that probes carefully and with moral toughness into precisely those painful truths."
The full review is at: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-re....
This is book a highly recommend, as I do all of Mr. Buruma's books.
It is far to long since I read this book to provide the sort of analytic review I would like to so I quote the following from a Kirkus review:
"As in God's Dust (1989), Buruma takes a psychological and cultural voyage into nationalism, guilt, and self-delusion — in this case, of two of WW II's defeated Axis powers. Exploring the cliche that Germany is a culture of guilt and Japan a culture of shame, the author indeed finds that whereas Germany has engaged in a protracted collective mourning over its war crimes, Japan has no war monuments at all except to its own dead. Yet these two societies' chauvinism in this century has been similar, with Japan imitating German racial nationalism just as it imitated German education and industry. In both countries, contemporary pacifism and anti-war rhetoric have a strong anti-American flavor — a case, he thinks, of a failure to come to terms with the past. "Pacifism," Buruma notes, "turns national guilt into a virtue."...Buruma's easy familiarity with Japan enables him to dig under the skin of national attitudes in a way that is rare for a Western commentator...At the end of the book he compares two towns: Passau, a picturesque town in which Hitler spent his childhood, where surviving Nazi sympathies sometimes lead bakers to make bread in the shape of swastikas; and Hanoaka, a similarly tranquil Japanese place where Chinese slave workers were lynched in 1945. In both places he finds "public indifference to painful truths." All in all, a thoughtful, patiently assembled book that probes carefully and with moral toughness into precisely those painful truths."
The full review is at: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-re....
This is book a highly recommend, as I do all of Mr. Buruma's books.
September 17, 2020
How should a nation be held accountable for its history? That a people can and should collectively experience remorse, guilt, or atonement, is a post-war phenomenon. Ian Burumas book ‘Wages of guilt’ asks this question. Buruma paraphrases the Polish film director Anderzej Wajda: “Germany will continue to mean, among other things, Auschwitz. That is to say: Goethe and genocide, Beethoven and gas chambers, Kant and jackboots. All this belongs to the German heritage” Buruma returns several times to Paul Celans Death fuge poem of the Holocaust ‘Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland’ Burumas knowledge of cultural and intellectual life is impressive and it is fascinating to read how the national attitudes of associated with guilt could be so different in Germany and Japan. Germany and Japan attempted to come to terms with their conduct during World War II in very different ways. This was a war that they aggressively began and humiliatingly lost, and in the course of which they committed monstrous war crimes. As he travels through both countries, to Berlin and Tokyo, Hiroshima and Auschwitz, he encounters editors, intellectuals, writers, artists, activists who are remarkably honest in confronting the past and others who astonish by their evasions of responsibility, some who wish to forget the past and others who wish to use it as a warning against the resurgence of militarism. Buruma explores these contrasting responses to the war and the two countries’ very different ways of memorializing its atrocities, as well as the ways in which political movements, government policies, literature, and art have been shaped by its shadow. Today (1994), he finds that while the Germans have for the most part coped with the darkest period of their history, the Japanese remain haunted by historical controversies that should have been resolved long ago. I would very much have liked to see an afterword to this book, his analysis of the period after the mid 1990s. This is however an excellent book of cultural history and analysis
July 9, 2014
This is the third work I have read by Mr. Buruma. Unlike the others, this work is more psycho-sociological than historical. Mr. Buruma investigates the attitudes of Germany and Japan today (in the 90s when he wrote it) to their respective roles in World War II. He writes much of the political uses of historical interpretation of history in Japan and Germany ( contrasting attitudes in both Western and Eastern Germany). He also discusses the barriers in both countries to a mature reflection on their individual pasts. Let's be clear, attitudes toward the war and their countries role in it are much different in Germany and Japan, and to some extent different between Eastern and Western Germany. Japan has managed to create a victim mentality on both the left and right, albeit with different consequences. Japan does not admit that they launched an aggressive role and their atrocities were just war, nothing out of the ordinary. Germans on the other hand feel a shame that prevents them also from honestly examining their past. Mr. Buruma has an incredible familiarity with both cultures, having spent much time as an outsider in both Germany and Japan. He also has incredible access to prominent politicians and cultural figures in both countries. I enjoy reading Mr. Buruma's books as he has a knack for taking complicated subjects and writing about them as his own journey of discovery, which makes these subjects easier for us to understand. Mr. Buruma notes what it will take in each country to have a mature, unbiased look at their respective role. However, as long as history is a useful political tool, I doubt that investigation will ever occur.
April 20, 2021
Seventy years after the war, Japan and Germany had rebuilt their shattered countries and economies... but these nations had take drastically different paths towards recording, remembering and acknowledging their country's actions and war crimes. Journalist Ian Buruma traveled through both countries, to Berlin and Tokyo, Hiroshima and Auschwitz, and interviewed people. He meet with those that want to confront the past, those that evade it and others who use it as a warning against the resurgence of militarism. What made Germany willing and able to confront the Holocaust and made the Japanese unwilling to even say that their actions at Pearl Harbor started the war?
Why I started this book: Eye catching title, and living in Japan I was intrigued to see Buruma's perspective on the differences between Germany and Japan.
Why I finished it: This book was so easy to put down, that it took me almost a month to finished it... which is a crazy long time for me, especially considering the smaller size of the book. Part of my trouble was that this was written in 1989-1990 and while Germany has made 30 years progress, Japan has not.
Reading buddies: I would pair this book with Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil which compares German work at anti-racism and Mississippi's.
Why I started this book: Eye catching title, and living in Japan I was intrigued to see Buruma's perspective on the differences between Germany and Japan.
Why I finished it: This book was so easy to put down, that it took me almost a month to finished it... which is a crazy long time for me, especially considering the smaller size of the book. Part of my trouble was that this was written in 1989-1990 and while Germany has made 30 years progress, Japan has not.
Reading buddies: I would pair this book with Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil which compares German work at anti-racism and Mississippi's.
June 15, 2016
Since this was bothering me almost as badly as the other book I disliked this week I am letting it go as well, for I have been encouraged by the logic of my close friend's link (http://bookriot.com/2014/06/17/13-thi...) that I should not be reading something that I am not actively enjoying for myself.
I DO find the topic interesting. However: upsetting.
I DO find the topic interesting. However: upsetting.
July 30, 2008
Ian Buruma's writing is hard-hitting, concise, thoroughly-researched and real.
Now I know why my history teacher always fawned over him, because while much of his work is historical, it is factual, and journalistically perfect.
And that beats a big, fat history book any day
Now I know why my history teacher always fawned over him, because while much of his work is historical, it is factual, and journalistically perfect.
And that beats a big, fat history book any day
August 9, 2022
Ian Buruma’s The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan remains remarkably insightful and as relevant today as when initially published in 1994. If anything, the passage of another generation—slightly longer than the 24 years or a lifetime that Dr. Faustus asked for in his deal with Mephistopheles—makes a reader ponder with even more urgency the concepts of time passage and amnesia in relation to Buruma’s observations and meditations on Japanese and German society through the early 90’s, an era increasingly appearing as the distant past to many of us. Time erodes all memory.
Few readers not of German or Japanese ancestry, other than those in arcane graduate programs, bother classifying and dissecting how each generation within Germany and Japan has come to terms with losing a world war and having to deal with the humiliation of unconditional surrender, the exposure of ghastly war crimes, and occupation. In the case of Japan, one might add the humiliation of being guinea pigs for two atomic bombs. Buruma’s book reads like a graduate seminar primer, aptly outlining war crime trials, war memorials, and major political legislation either acknowledging or covering up the past. The author’s knowledge of both cultures is ideal for a compare-and-contrast meditation on guilt or—not surprisingly—the lack thereof. Buruma is Dutch by birth and fluent in German. He also lived as an ex-patriot for years in Japan. His observations are perspicacious and subtle. His knowledge of art that deals with the themes he mentions in both cultures is encyclopedic. Although he covers a lot in The Wages of Guilt he reserves his more detailed analyses of how Japanese and German artists coped with guilt and revelations for a book that appeared over twenty years later, Theater of Cruelty: Art Film and the Shadows of War. It is, presumably, every bit as brilliant as The Wages of Guilt.
As an American, who has a strong knowledge of German and a decade-long curiosity about Japan, I cannot help but analyze both these cultures and their reaction to their wartime sins from the perspective of American culture wars and an American inability to truly grapple with the past sins of the genocide of Native Americans, slavery, and futile wars of aggression like Viet Nam. Seen in this light there is nothing shocking about anything Buruma describes. Both the Japanese and Germans are human, all too human. And that is what makes this book so brilliant.
Buruma has a journalist’s knack for making his interview subjects reveal unpalatable ideas and then leaving the reader to judge and form his or her own conclusions. This ability got him into hot water in 2018 when, as editor of the New York Review of Books, he allowed a Canadian talk show host, certainly guilty of sex crimes, to write a mea culpa which was published to immediate outcry. Due to the controversy of the intolerant MeToo ilk, he was removed from his position. Evidently, the very techniques that work so well in portraying different characters in The Wages of Guilt is unacceptable in today’s political climate, even in an admirable publication capable of publishing controversial views like the NYRB.
Few readers not of German or Japanese ancestry, other than those in arcane graduate programs, bother classifying and dissecting how each generation within Germany and Japan has come to terms with losing a world war and having to deal with the humiliation of unconditional surrender, the exposure of ghastly war crimes, and occupation. In the case of Japan, one might add the humiliation of being guinea pigs for two atomic bombs. Buruma’s book reads like a graduate seminar primer, aptly outlining war crime trials, war memorials, and major political legislation either acknowledging or covering up the past. The author’s knowledge of both cultures is ideal for a compare-and-contrast meditation on guilt or—not surprisingly—the lack thereof. Buruma is Dutch by birth and fluent in German. He also lived as an ex-patriot for years in Japan. His observations are perspicacious and subtle. His knowledge of art that deals with the themes he mentions in both cultures is encyclopedic. Although he covers a lot in The Wages of Guilt he reserves his more detailed analyses of how Japanese and German artists coped with guilt and revelations for a book that appeared over twenty years later, Theater of Cruelty: Art Film and the Shadows of War. It is, presumably, every bit as brilliant as The Wages of Guilt.
As an American, who has a strong knowledge of German and a decade-long curiosity about Japan, I cannot help but analyze both these cultures and their reaction to their wartime sins from the perspective of American culture wars and an American inability to truly grapple with the past sins of the genocide of Native Americans, slavery, and futile wars of aggression like Viet Nam. Seen in this light there is nothing shocking about anything Buruma describes. Both the Japanese and Germans are human, all too human. And that is what makes this book so brilliant.
Buruma has a journalist’s knack for making his interview subjects reveal unpalatable ideas and then leaving the reader to judge and form his or her own conclusions. This ability got him into hot water in 2018 when, as editor of the New York Review of Books, he allowed a Canadian talk show host, certainly guilty of sex crimes, to write a mea culpa which was published to immediate outcry. Due to the controversy of the intolerant MeToo ilk, he was removed from his position. Evidently, the very techniques that work so well in portraying different characters in The Wages of Guilt is unacceptable in today’s political climate, even in an admirable publication capable of publishing controversial views like the NYRB.
December 29, 2020
A very strong book. Essential reading for anyone who has lived in Japan and wants to further understand the love/hate relationship Japan has with other Asian countries and the West. The writing on how the US irked both the left (by allowing the emperor and the bureaucracy to carry on governing and not abolishing the military completely) and the right (by saddling Japan with a peaceful constitution and US foreign policy) goes a long way to explaining Japan's infantile growth as a nation. His theory that until Japan throws off the leftovers of WW II it will be unable to mourn and apologize in a meaningful fashion is probably correct. Also an excellent discussion of Japan's problem with history textbooks, lack of context for events like the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and general inability to engage in meaningful discussion on those events. Best one sentence summary I've heard of for the extreme right in Japan as well, paraphrasing here: funny how Japan has to be unique in everything until the military buildup and wartime atrocities are discussed. Then it's all about how Japan didn't do anything the other countries didn't do. Highly recommended, at the very least it will get your brain cells moving in a different direction than before.
April 17, 2024
I really don’t know what to rate this book. The premise was interesting as Buruma analyzes how Germany and Japan handled their WWII guilt for decades after the war was over. However, parts of the book were over explained and repetitive, Buruma often appeared biased against Japan in his analysis, and most of the book’s analysis revolved around Buruma’s opinion based discussion of interviews he did with survivors and witnesses in Germany and Japan. Despite how poor I just made the book sound, I kind of enjoyed it. The premise was interesting and I appreciated having to read it for class, but ultimately I was pretty unsatisfied. I anticipated an all encompassing conclusion where Buruma offered a more in depth analysis of his study but the book ended up just falling flat. Three stars for uniqueness and bearability (I read it in one day) I guess.
July 29, 2017
I found this to be a very interesting and thought provoking study/opinion on the two large wars in the 1940's. Buruma researches the conflicts from a historical standpoint comparing the differences in which the countries of Germany and Japan descendants remember and react to the wars. To me, it ends up being an interesting comparison of different minds, who one wants to blame and what the instigations of the wars were all about. I suppose the readers of the book will add their difference of opinion to the thoughts too!
August 3, 2020
The Wages of Guilt deals with two things, one of which is a lot more interesting than the other. Both Japanese and German hindsight reflections upon the war are dealt with. Having read quite a few books on the WW2 from a western perspective the eastern perspective was something I had earlier been lacking. The insights into the prevalent revisionism in Japan was of great importance. While the Germans to a large extent have dealt with their wartime past the Japanese haven’t even begun. The writing was good overall though a bit too verbose at times.
February 6, 2019
An examination of the responses to their actions during WWII in both Germany and Japan and an attempt to view them as they are similar and how they are different. Many different avenues are examined such as Shame cultures vs Guilt Cultures, religion's impact, Crimes vs Peace vs Crimes vs humanity and so on.
January 17, 2020
This was one of the most thought-provoking books I've read. I started reading it while my wife and I were travelling in Japan. The book provided a very interesting history and context to some of the tourist information foreign travelers get in Japan. The contrast between Japan and Germany post World War II was also fascinating. Highly recommended.
July 20, 2018
Started reading this book with lot of expectation. However I found the book with repetative and not at all interesting. Before you start a chapter it seems like you already know what it will all be about.
December 4, 2022
The approach to the book is interesting, and the writer is careful it to force his own opinions on the reader. Good use is made of interviews, often with people who are not featured in other books on these topics.
February 16, 2021
A good supplement war crimes and interesting read to all the wars books ever written.
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March 5, 2024偷懒看译本是我的错。删除了一些对中共不利的信息。这个简中版本身可谓背叛了作者和“记忆”这个主题，十分具有讽刺意味。本书线索并不清晰，确实也就一本游记，但亦不乏十分感人的部分
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