If you walk around Hiroshima in Japan you can experience a particular history. There is the one the ground beneath your feet speaks of in the form of absence: where once searing flames roared across the landscape, burning people, dogs, buildings, and possessions; where atomic winds blew through wooden houses and the people within them. You can stand outside the ruins of one landmark building that wasn’t felled: a heavy stone hall of industry, still there with its broken dome and blackened walls, and get an ever-insufficient sense of the terror and devastation. The information on display around the memorial park tries to give direction to your senses: it tells of staggering loss, of how many and how much, and of a great tragedy for humanity. Yet there it stops. The direction refuses to go further. It never says sorry on behalf of Japan; neither does it ever exactly say the Americans shouldn’t have done it. Instead, it tells of war as awful results, not of causes. It does not admit origins, blame, guilt, or culpability.
Hiroshima seems in fact to be a memorial in denial, a place where a history is told which seeks to exist simultaneously as a thing to regret, and as no action to be regretted.
Across Asia wounds remain, and the distinction has often been observed, that whereas in Europe, Germany hung its head, weighed heavy with accepted blame, Japan has been consistently reluctant to fully do likewise.
In a 1995 Sunday Times article on the semi-autobiographical, Empire of the Sun, J.G. Ballard gave a profound endnote to his novel of a young boy starving in a Japanese prison camp near Shanghai:
“American power had saved our lives, above all the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not only our lives had been spared, but those of millions of Asian civilians and, just as likely, millions of Japanese in the home islands. I find wholly baffling the widespread belief today that the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was an immoral act, even possibly a war crime to rank with Nazi genocide.
During their long advance across the Pacific, the American armies liberated only one large capital city, Manila. A month of ferocious fighting left 6000 Americans dead, 20,000 Japanese and over 100,000 Filipinos, many of them senselessly slaughtered, a total greater than those who died at Hiroshima.
How many more would have died if the Americans and British had been forced to fight for Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong and Shanghai?
… Some historians claim that the war was virtually over, and that the Japanese leaders, seeing their wasted cities and the total collapse of the country’s infrastructure, would have surrendered without the atom-bomb attacks. But this ignores one all-important factor – the Japanese soldier. Countless times he had shown that as long as he had a rifle or a grenade he would fight to the end. The only infrastructure the Japanese infantryman needed was his own courage, and there is no reason to believe that he would have fought less tenaciously for his homeland than for a coral atoll thousands of miles away.
The claims that Hiroshima and Nagasaki constitute an American war crime have had an unfortunate effect on the Japanese, confirming their belief that they were the victims of the war rather than the aggressors. As a nation the Japanese have never faced up to the atrocities they committed, and are unlikely to do so as long as we bend our heads in shame before the memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
With the war in Europe concluded several months previously, the United States had given serious thought to sending more of its bombers to the far east. They decided against it and in favour of the two atomic weapons. Had they instead doubled the size of their conventional bombing capabilities over Japan, then that nation’s cities would have suffered far greater total devastation and loss of life than the two targeted but profound warheads brought. Had they chosen the slow, protracted attrition of fighting island by island, then young boys in prisoner-of-war-camps would likely have starved, or been executed as the defeat and humiliation crept up on Japanese soldiers.
Should the innocent have died in these camps, rather than the two bombs have been dropped? In this horrific situation some people had to die, and in huge number, before Japan would surrender. Can we reach any other conclusion than to say the dead ought to have been Japanese rather than American, the wrongful aggressors, rather than the wrongfully attacked?
There is though, an argument sometimes heard, that Germany, Japan, and Italy, have been hard-done-to by the narrative of western history. Were they not the last of the colonial expansionists, doing largely what others had benefited from before them? Were they not unfortunate to find themselves at a turning point of history, when aggression was out of vogue and the immutable nation state was in? The British had established the American colonies, Australia, South Africa, Indian rule, and more; they had relocated, and fought indigenous populations; Germany had formerly colonised Rwanda, Botswana and other African countries, as well as Pacific islands (they were governed by other powers after defeat in World War I, and the Treaty of Versailles). Belgium had made a disaster of the Congo. France. The Netherlands. Spain, Portugal. Everyone who was anyone had colonised.
Two and a half millennia ago the Greeks had found the farming on their narrow coastland insufficient for growing populations and had settled colonies around the Mediterranean. On the Island of Thera, each Greek family had watched one adult son sail away to the African coast, founding Cyrene. Across the shores of modern day Italy, Spain, and France, colonies struggled and thrived. Massalia (Marseilles) is one colonial name to survive. When the Roman Empire eventually wrapped the Mediterranean coastline, it was essentially an imperial collection of ancient colonies. And when Rome built their own straight roads and blood-spilling amphitheatres, founding Florence, Bonn, London, and numerous other cities, they continued the imperative of colonialism. In fact, it is highly likely that you are reading this from the location of a famous colony. It could even be argued that the spread of human civilisation and culture is effectively synonymous with the action of colonisation.
However, academia and the media now routinely proclaim that ‘colonialism’ is something to be regretted, to be stopped, to be fought against and opposed. If someone is ‘colonial’ it is meant as a slur; if a nation behaved colonially, however long ago, it needs to repent in the present. Colonial statues need to be torn down. The descendants of colonists need to pay reparations. According to this understanding, Germany and Italy and Japan were wrong in the twentieth century because they had a colonial, racist and fascist ideology (these terms often being used interchangeably). ‘Colonial’ equals criminal by default.
But, if ‘colonialism’ is at heart something so integral to human culture as, ‘leaving home and setting up a new home somewhere else,’ then we cannot reasonably state that the wrongs of World War II were attributable to this word and be done and dusted with the case.
Even if we use a narrower definition, and frame the sin of colonialism as, rather, ‘the taking of land or home which belongs to someone else, without their due consent,’ we don’t reach anything which can rationally hold water. Instead we immediately get into a quagmire of self-refutations because we must argue ‘human rights,’ ‘land laws,’ and rules and obligations of ‘nations,’ which may seem universal, but are very much derived from western culture. We are in effect criticizing long dead colonisers using concepts which neither they nor those who lived in colonised lands would have adhered to. The case falls apart.
Is the taking of land where someone else lives, a guaranteed crime?
Take, as example, the now much-maligned British Empire. It is a blind-man’s broad-brush stroke that seeks to delineate British colonialism under the same sweep as Japanese – though that is now commonly what is done. It is not that the British Empire was not guilty of great wrongs – few historians would evade this admission – but that it is not reasonable to compare its conduct or intent with that of the Japanese or German empires:
The British Empire brought trains and institutions of governance to the world; the Indians still use those British railways lines, and many parts of the world rely on British parliamentary and civil service derived institutions. India, and numerous other countries, also retained English as an official state language long after colonialism’s end. As examples of law and order, justice and civilian life, the British hunted down and wiped out the Thugee cult – murderous robbers who strangled travellers across India and made any journey life-threatening – and put an end to ‘sati,’ the widespread practice whereby women were expected to set fire to themselves on their husband’s funeral pyre. Christian missionaries were often key to such beneficial changes, and journeyed beyond the empire’s boundaries, telling the gospel to diverse cultures.
The Japanese also took trains – British-derived technology – to parts of Asia and Korea, alongside Japanese governance. The Koreans still use the Japanese railway routes, but not much else from those days of the Empire of the Rising Sun. The Japanese attempted to supplant and eradicate Korean names and the Korean language, but Koreans returned to their own language as quickly as possible at the end of occupation. Attendance at State Shinto shrines had been made compulsory, but shrines were soon brought down. The ‘Korean National Shrine’ in Seoul was removed after war’s end, and notably a Christian Seminary was constructed where it had stood.
Is it not the qualities of the culture to be colonised and of that which does the colonising, which define how the action and its result are to be appraised? Teach Polynesian cannibals about the message of the Bible, and lands where men gnawed human bones can become lands where hymns and spires point to heaven. But, construct ‘comfort’ houses of prostitution for occupying soldiers and you strip souls beside the train tracks.
It is extremely counter-cultural these days to say what is obvious, but plainly, no two cultures are equal. Cultural relativism can only be the proclamation of someone in denial of real, historical and experienced culture – it is itself a particular ‘correct’ and ‘unrelative’ view, which claims it knows best: a self-defeating argument like so many others from postmodernity. For history does not reveal a story of purely materialist oppression upon oppression as Marx said, nor of relativism nudging harmlessly against relativism, where all cultures are of equal value – and thereby, no discernible value. What history shows is a story of cultures of different values battling for what is valuable, and of claims as to the good or evil of those cultural values. It’s about right and wrong.
This is what most of us actually know deep down. Should a wife die on a funeral pyre, or live free? Should a road be built between cities, or people remain isolated? Should medicine be brought to an Amazonian tribe, or disease reign? Should devilish cannibalism rule an island, or the authority of Jesus Christ? Should fascism rule Europe, East Asia, or ultimately America? These are questions of value and truth; they involve that truth being taken from one place and person to another. Or not being.
Japan and Germany and Italy were truly wrong before and during the Second World War, not because of their ‘colonialism,’ but because of the heart with which they conducted it. A colonial outlook is not necessarily a mistake.
After all, it was the vast British Imperial Empire and its colonised cousin, America, which were able to hold back and ultimately defeat the colonising Japanese and German Empires. You are free to agree or disagree because the colonials with the better values, won.
Copyright © 2018 by Dominic Graham
