Anniversaries

VP day. I'm, thinking back 60 years to the sheer relief that the war was over. Newsreels of civilians massing in the streets, men dancing, unmitigated joy. I seems so much like a different age, almost a different planet. My mother was still in the UK, a teenage girl who had survived the Luftwaffe. The notorious bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The British Empire was finished. The American and Soviet domination had begun. It was a time of absolute change, of complete breaks.

Today I visited the blog of a Chinese university student. He had taken great pains to translate parts of his original Chinese blog into English, and pretty good English at that. He was a fairly typical kind of guy, enjoyed his studies, social life and looked forward to the future. One of his entries caught my attention, a demonstration against Japan by fellow students. The grievances were unspecified, but the protest looked big, aggressive and nationalistic. He described it as 'our lovely party' and I wondered whether something may have been muddied in translation.

Japan does have a lot to atone for with regard to the first half of the 20th Century. It pursued aggressive colonial policies from an early stage, invading and subduing Korea, then Manchuria, then South-East Asia during WW2. Most armies are violent and leave a trail of misery, but the Japanese Imperial Army seemed especially cruel and malevolent. It seems unlikely that Japan has ever asked why its army behaved so brutishly.

However, Japanese leaders, Prime Ministers and Emporers have repeatedly apologised for the damage and chaos caused during its colonial past. The apology was repeated today by the Japanese Prime Minister. But its clear that, unlike Germany, Japan has yet to find a way to sufficiently demonstrate its contrition to its former adversaries. Visits to war shrines by prominent leaders and ambigious history textbooks haven't helped the matter.

Having lived in Japan for two years and with the hope of returning soon, I have never found anything other kindness and fairness in my relationship with Japanese people. So its distressing for me, and probably many other foreigners who live there, that Japan seems to have been unable to deal properly and openly with its past. Perhaps this anniversary will start a debate, perhaps not.