yoMAMA
09-04-2004, 09:16 PM
It's time for the Japanese government to face up to its war past and apologize for the atrocities commited during WW2. :mad:
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September 5, 2004
One Japanese on a Quest of Atonement
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
HARBIN, China - There are details that Ichiro Koyama has forgotten about his arrival in China as a young Japanese conscript in 1940 during the chaos of war.
Then there are details that Mr. Koyama, now 84, will never forget. He was sentenced to death by a Chinese tribunal, but released in an act of clemency after 11 years in prison, first in Siberia after his capture by the Soviet Army and later in northeastern China.
Among his first actions in China, Mr. Koyama recalled, he and other young Japanese recruits were ordered to execute eight or nine Chinese prisoners.
With Mr. Koyama trembling and uncertain of his ability to kill, the executions became a gruesome scene. "You miss and you start stabbing again, over and over," he said, relating the horror.
Mr. Koyama said he had no idea how many Chinese he killed in five years of brutal fighting. A staple of Japanese strategy in its former Manchurian colony was to encircle settlements suspected of harboring resisters and open fire.
"There were not so many battles opposing Japanese and Chinese armies," said Mr. Koyama, the repentant veteran returning to the region of his depredations. "Most of the Chinese victims were just ordinary people. They were killed, or they were left without homes and without food."
China was the biggest prize in Japan's drive to conquer all of Asia, an effort that unleashed atrocities and devastation across the continent.
Mr. Koyama returned to Japan in 1956 to take up a trade making tatami mats. He has spent much of his time since speaking and writing unsparingly about imperial Japan's attempted conquest of China. He says the subject has been less and less well received in his homeland, where discussions of war guilt have been tortured and vague, and the talk is increasingly of putting the past behind.
Over the years, Mr. Koyama has returned to China several times.
His visit in July, however, was the first time he had returned with a group of any size - 39 Japanese. He took the group from place to place relating his experience and knowledge of the war.
The days were grueling and often emotional, but Mr. Koyama, unusually hale and always ready with a remembrance and a smile, left even those travelers who were decades younger flagging.
"No one wants to remember these things," said Mr. Koyama, a former Japanese Army sergeant. "They leave you with an awful feeling. The problem is that, if we don't dwell on these acts, we may someday be forced to relive them."
Given the group's itinerary, it seemed unlikely that any of its members would ever forget what they saw. The stops here included the former headquarters of the infamous Unit 731, where the Japanese Army perfected biological weapons through tests on live subjects, and developed, among other gruesome weapons, bombs containing the bubonic plague bacterium.
After the war, many of the unit's leaders returned to Japan and escaped prosecution. The unit's biological weapons research was seized by the United States during the postwar occupation and has never been released to the public.
Mr. Koyama's group also stopped in Shenyang, where the Japanese military began the conflict in 1931 by staging an attack on one of its own trains as a pretext for full-scale war. Another stop was in nearby Fushun, at a monument to the massacre of an estimated 3,000 villagers in Pingding in 1932.
If reconciliation is built on an accumulation of small acts, there were parcels of hope at each point along the way. The Japanese visitors were visibly moved, for example, after a tour of the detailed exhibits at the Unit 731 site.
"There are facts, of course which cannot be denied," said Ken Yaguchi, a district government employee from Tokyo. "The history we are commonly taught ends before the war. Germany and Italy have faced the truth. It is only Japan that holds out with vague language about our past."
At a war museum in Shenyang, a middle-aged Japanese couple clutched each other, agonized by two large photographs. One showed a Chinese prisoner held in a contraption resembling a large lobster trap, standing upright, with sharp nails embedded in its ribs. The other photograph showed a dozen or so Chinese heads neatly arrayed in a line after beheadings.
"What kind of country were we?" the woman murmured. "What we did was unbelievably disgusting. It was atrocious."
At some stops, the Japanese visitors planted trees, bowed deeply at memorial sites, and sang songs about Japanese-Chinese friendship.
For most in the tour, however, and for those who drew near enough to hear his translated exchanges with museum guides and others, it was Mr. Koyama's experience that had the most meaning. Few were unmoved by his planned reunion in Fushun with Cui Renjie, a former prison guard, now 79, whom Mr. Koyama befriended during his detention there.
"If a prisoner was going to have a bad attitude, you could tell it from the very first glance," said Mr. Cui, who spoke with relish in polished Japanese, learned during his childhood under Japanese colonial rule.
"Koyama was special," Mr. Cui added. "He was mild and open from the very first."
Daiichi Nakagawa, a Japanese traveler, drew this lesson from the two men's rapport: "We Japanese have never been able to say we made a mistake. Mr. Koyama, though, was punished, even sentenced to death, and yet understood the truth of this tragedy."
Mr. Koyama said his strong antiwar sentiments and sense of mission grew out of prison reflections, beginning with his incarceration in Siberia, where temperatures sometimes reached minus 40.
"We had beaten the Chinese and executed people but they didn't beat us," he said. "I often sat wondering why that was."
The answer, he said, lay in culture and education, with the Japanese being taught they were a race apart. "We thought the Chinese and people of Southeast Asia were inferior to us," he said. "We knew they were human, but they were a lower class."
Asked how he could countenance killing civilians, Mr. Koyama said: "We were taught from a young age to adore the emperor, and that if we died in battle our souls would go to Yasukuni Jinja. We just didn't think anything of killing, of massacres or atrocities. It all seemed normal."
Relations between China and Japan, Asia's two biggest powers, have been strained for years, repeatedly poisoned anew by acts on each side. Japan's school textbooks, for example have glossed over most of the nation's worst atrocities, while China has used education to keep anti-Japanese passions strong.
Yasukuni Jinja, a Shinto shrine in Tokyo that according to tradition is the repository of the souls of Japan's war dead, including a number of soldiers found guilty of war crimes, has figured in Japan's troubled relations with China in recent years.
The Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, has made annual visits to the shrine, offending millions of Chinese.
"For me, going to Yasukuni is a sad experience," Mr. Koyama said. "Giving your youth over to an experience that consists entirely of war, just to be glorified, is such a waste. I speak from personal experience. There is nothing like peace."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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September 5, 2004
One Japanese on a Quest of Atonement
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
HARBIN, China - There are details that Ichiro Koyama has forgotten about his arrival in China as a young Japanese conscript in 1940 during the chaos of war.
Then there are details that Mr. Koyama, now 84, will never forget. He was sentenced to death by a Chinese tribunal, but released in an act of clemency after 11 years in prison, first in Siberia after his capture by the Soviet Army and later in northeastern China.
Among his first actions in China, Mr. Koyama recalled, he and other young Japanese recruits were ordered to execute eight or nine Chinese prisoners.
With Mr. Koyama trembling and uncertain of his ability to kill, the executions became a gruesome scene. "You miss and you start stabbing again, over and over," he said, relating the horror.
Mr. Koyama said he had no idea how many Chinese he killed in five years of brutal fighting. A staple of Japanese strategy in its former Manchurian colony was to encircle settlements suspected of harboring resisters and open fire.
"There were not so many battles opposing Japanese and Chinese armies," said Mr. Koyama, the repentant veteran returning to the region of his depredations. "Most of the Chinese victims were just ordinary people. They were killed, or they were left without homes and without food."
China was the biggest prize in Japan's drive to conquer all of Asia, an effort that unleashed atrocities and devastation across the continent.
Mr. Koyama returned to Japan in 1956 to take up a trade making tatami mats. He has spent much of his time since speaking and writing unsparingly about imperial Japan's attempted conquest of China. He says the subject has been less and less well received in his homeland, where discussions of war guilt have been tortured and vague, and the talk is increasingly of putting the past behind.
Over the years, Mr. Koyama has returned to China several times.
His visit in July, however, was the first time he had returned with a group of any size - 39 Japanese. He took the group from place to place relating his experience and knowledge of the war.
The days were grueling and often emotional, but Mr. Koyama, unusually hale and always ready with a remembrance and a smile, left even those travelers who were decades younger flagging.
"No one wants to remember these things," said Mr. Koyama, a former Japanese Army sergeant. "They leave you with an awful feeling. The problem is that, if we don't dwell on these acts, we may someday be forced to relive them."
Given the group's itinerary, it seemed unlikely that any of its members would ever forget what they saw. The stops here included the former headquarters of the infamous Unit 731, where the Japanese Army perfected biological weapons through tests on live subjects, and developed, among other gruesome weapons, bombs containing the bubonic plague bacterium.
After the war, many of the unit's leaders returned to Japan and escaped prosecution. The unit's biological weapons research was seized by the United States during the postwar occupation and has never been released to the public.
Mr. Koyama's group also stopped in Shenyang, where the Japanese military began the conflict in 1931 by staging an attack on one of its own trains as a pretext for full-scale war. Another stop was in nearby Fushun, at a monument to the massacre of an estimated 3,000 villagers in Pingding in 1932.
If reconciliation is built on an accumulation of small acts, there were parcels of hope at each point along the way. The Japanese visitors were visibly moved, for example, after a tour of the detailed exhibits at the Unit 731 site.
"There are facts, of course which cannot be denied," said Ken Yaguchi, a district government employee from Tokyo. "The history we are commonly taught ends before the war. Germany and Italy have faced the truth. It is only Japan that holds out with vague language about our past."
At a war museum in Shenyang, a middle-aged Japanese couple clutched each other, agonized by two large photographs. One showed a Chinese prisoner held in a contraption resembling a large lobster trap, standing upright, with sharp nails embedded in its ribs. The other photograph showed a dozen or so Chinese heads neatly arrayed in a line after beheadings.
"What kind of country were we?" the woman murmured. "What we did was unbelievably disgusting. It was atrocious."
At some stops, the Japanese visitors planted trees, bowed deeply at memorial sites, and sang songs about Japanese-Chinese friendship.
For most in the tour, however, and for those who drew near enough to hear his translated exchanges with museum guides and others, it was Mr. Koyama's experience that had the most meaning. Few were unmoved by his planned reunion in Fushun with Cui Renjie, a former prison guard, now 79, whom Mr. Koyama befriended during his detention there.
"If a prisoner was going to have a bad attitude, you could tell it from the very first glance," said Mr. Cui, who spoke with relish in polished Japanese, learned during his childhood under Japanese colonial rule.
"Koyama was special," Mr. Cui added. "He was mild and open from the very first."
Daiichi Nakagawa, a Japanese traveler, drew this lesson from the two men's rapport: "We Japanese have never been able to say we made a mistake. Mr. Koyama, though, was punished, even sentenced to death, and yet understood the truth of this tragedy."
Mr. Koyama said his strong antiwar sentiments and sense of mission grew out of prison reflections, beginning with his incarceration in Siberia, where temperatures sometimes reached minus 40.
"We had beaten the Chinese and executed people but they didn't beat us," he said. "I often sat wondering why that was."
The answer, he said, lay in culture and education, with the Japanese being taught they were a race apart. "We thought the Chinese and people of Southeast Asia were inferior to us," he said. "We knew they were human, but they were a lower class."
Asked how he could countenance killing civilians, Mr. Koyama said: "We were taught from a young age to adore the emperor, and that if we died in battle our souls would go to Yasukuni Jinja. We just didn't think anything of killing, of massacres or atrocities. It all seemed normal."
Relations between China and Japan, Asia's two biggest powers, have been strained for years, repeatedly poisoned anew by acts on each side. Japan's school textbooks, for example have glossed over most of the nation's worst atrocities, while China has used education to keep anti-Japanese passions strong.
Yasukuni Jinja, a Shinto shrine in Tokyo that according to tradition is the repository of the souls of Japan's war dead, including a number of soldiers found guilty of war crimes, has figured in Japan's troubled relations with China in recent years.
The Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, has made annual visits to the shrine, offending millions of Chinese.
"For me, going to Yasukuni is a sad experience," Mr. Koyama said. "Giving your youth over to an experience that consists entirely of war, just to be glorified, is such a waste. I speak from personal experience. There is nothing like peace."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company