The author, a member of the People's Liberation Army, studied in Japan in 2007 and 2008. He believes Japan’s militarist rightist tendency is on the rise and the Chinese military must stay alert.
After World War II, the Japanese reflected on their militarism, but with the emphasis not on the catastrophe the country had caused. Rather, the thinking centered on why it lost.
People in the Japanese defense system told me the country cooled down after the war, thinking deeply about why everybody went crazy, including Isoroku Yamamoto, who knew that the Empire could not possibly win a two-front war, but instead abandoned his views and personally led the attack on Pearl Harbor. That led to a bigger war with more enemies and eventually defeat.
For example, a Pacific War research society comprised of Japanese and U.S. experts, observed in recent years that Japan crossed the Shanhai Pass before fully digesting Manchuria, initiated the Marco Polo Bridge incident before fully controlling North China and bombed Pearl Harbor before taking China down.
An official with Japan’s Ministry of Defense wondered what would have happened if the 21 demands to the Republic of China in 1915 were less harsh, the Kwantung Army had stayed inside Northeast China, or the Imperial Army had focused on taking the wartime capital of Chongqing instead of Pearl Harbor.
Militarism by definition involves waging wars and escalating them, I told him, so once Japan was on the road of militarism, it could not have stopped at invading only China and Korea because that fell short from conquering the world, which is a never-ending stream with no turning back.
I have been in contact with many Japanese over the past five years and their thinking was about the loss of the war, not peace. A lack of a guilt culture in the Japanese nation is partly to blame: past generations’ atrocities are forgiven and they are not held accountable once they pass away. More noticeably, as Japan’s economy performed poorly in recent years especially since the Global Financial Crisis, right-wing forces，the prevalence of bushido and emperor worship had a deep impact on the self-defense forces.
Rome was not built in a day. Since the Nobusuke Kishi administration revived Japan’s militarist education, the right wing has openly propagated emperor worship and Kimigayo, the flagship anthem of wartime Japan. They also cast militarists who advocate aggression as models of the nation, to feature in movies and novels and to be invited to schools to speak to students. With such manipulation of history, the foundation of militarism has formed as Japanese politics accelerated to the right. The Yasukuni Shrine, which commemorates class A war criminals, became a hotbed of swelling nationalism. China, South Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea have made multiple representations about Yasukuni to the Japanese government, which covered up its militarist nature by insisting worship there was a purely religious matter.
As to why the class A war criminals enshrined there have not been removed, the granddaughter of Hideki Tojo once remarked that doing so would be an acknowledgment that Japan was a war-waging aggressor.
In a clear comparison to Yasukuni’s 6 million visitors per year, the peace museum at Ritsumeikan University, with its detailed exhibition of Japan’s war crimes, including the use of biochemical weapons, sexual abuse of women, forced labor and pictures of the Nanjing Massacre, receives only around 30,000 visitors a year. That speaks for itself on Japan’s problem in dealing with its history.
In a discussion about security mechanisms between China and Japan with retired Japanese generals, I said that everything the Shinzo Abe administration had been doing leaned towards militarism.
You need to know that 70 percent of the Japanese population support Abe’s actions, they replied.
Those actions include denying the Nanjing Massacre, in which Japanese troops killed as many as 300,000 Chinese, visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, reinvestigating the Kono Statement that found the Japanese Imperial Army had forced women to work in military-run brothels, setting out more dangerous National Defense Program Guidelines, weakening the three principles of arms exports, proposing to change of Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between Japan and the United States, disestablishing the post-war system of Japan, initiating the renaming of the Self-Defense Forces into a full army and advocating amending the constitution.
