Published in the Nikkei Asian Weekly 5/8/2015
As practically everyone on the planet must know by now, August 15th marks the 70th anniversary of the Japanese surrender in 1945 and thus the end of World War II.
At least, that is what the conflict is always called in Europe. In Japan it is also known as the Great East Asian War and in the US as the Pacific War. In China the government uses a longer appellation – the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War. Needless to say, these different names reflect radically different perspectives.
“Seventy” has no special connotation as a number, yet the scale of the commemoration and controversy generated are much greater than on the 60th and 50th anniversaries. The further these events recede into the past, the larger they seem to loom.
Why should this be so? There are a number of plausible reasons, all related to wrenching changes taking place in today’s world. As ever, the past is interpreted to suit the priorities of the present and, specifically, the priorities of those doing the interpreting. The ceremonies and speeches and indeed the whole gamut of “historical disputes” that have been brought to our attention this year are only nominally about the past. Their real role is as part of the struggle for the future as the major powers compete to control the global narrative.
Wittingly or not, historians are bit-players in this drama.
WHOSTORY?
As the name suggests, history is a form of narrative created from the otherwise unassimilable chaos of bygone events, thereby satisfying the basic human need for patterns and structure.
In the words of Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal, “in the same way that plankton isn’t aware that it’s tumbling through salt water, we humans aren’t aware that we are constantly moving through story; from novels, to films, to religious myths, to dreams and fantasies, to jokes, pro wrestling, and children’s make believe.”
As shown by Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel prize-winning psychologist and father of behavioral economics, information framed as narrative is more powerful than in other formats and has the capability of overriding rational judgement. Political leaders know this instinctively and have harnessed the past to their agendas since ancient times.
Historians have often gladly joined in; either by legitimizing ethnic and nationalist movements or by subscribing to overarching theories such as Marxism or its liberal equivalent, the Whig Theory of History, which takes the inevitable march of progress as its key motif. The contemporary variant of the latter was visible in the “open letter” of rebuke that several hundred mainly U.S. and U.K.-based scholars addressed to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe earlier this year. History, the letter grandly declared, needs to be “just” in order to achieve its fundamental goal of “aspiring to improve the human condition.”
Not all historians accept the role of moral arbiters that these letter writers have claimed. The French Annales school, for example, dedicates itself to researching minute details of ordinary life in the medieval period. But particularly in the U.S. and U.K., the combination of pressure on university budgets and increasing competition are validating an instrumentalist approach that requires academic research to be directly useful and “relevant.” Almost by definition, recent events are more relevant than the dim and distant past; hence the boom in modern history and areas such as war memory that can plausibly be linked to contemporary disputes.
You would have to be very naïve to believe that any words uttered by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, President Xi Jinping or U.S. President Barak Obama at the various memorial events will have any influence on the course of relations between the three countries over the coming decades. In reality it is the clash of interests today that generates the historical disputes, not the other way round. But few professional historians of the World War II period are likely to agree, any more than instant noodle vendors would admit that their product has little nutritional value.
NAZIS ARE BAD
There is another important feature of the events of 70 years ago which adds piquancy to this year’s commemoration. In a world of multifarious viewpoints and cultural perspectives, in which old certainties have disintegrated and moral absolutes become almost unthinkable, there is one proposition that commands almost universal assent. Nazi Germany was a horror and its defeat is to be celebrated. In contrast to this comforting black-and-white narrative, many other military conflicts, including those taking place in today’s world, seem distressingly grey-hued, with the distinction between “the good guys” and “the bad guys” impossible to discern.
Politically, it makes perfect sense for modern-day China and Russia to hitch their wagons to the anti-fascist narrative, but in doing that they cannot help but blur the lines. If the good guys’ team includes two of the 20th century’s most ruthless dictators, Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse Tung, the morality tale starts to lose credibility.
According to British commentator Geoffrey Wheatcroft, the war in the Pacific was a conflict of imperialisms: “the Japanese had no right to be in the Philippines or Malaya or Java, but what right had the Americans or British or Dutch?” This is similar to the view of Japanese right-wingers. Such alternative narratives will likely gain ground as the trend towards global history, with its shift away from Euro-centricity, gathers momentum. In modern-day India, for example, there are parks and streets named after independence fighter Chandra Bhose. The fact that he sought an alliance with Hitler and ended up fighting alongside the Imperial Japanese Armyhas not delegitimized him in the eyes of millions of admirers. The recent debate at the Oxford Union about British reparations for colonizing India may be a taste of what is to come.
As the world changes, the past will change too. In all probability, the 80th, 90th and 100th anniversaries of the end of World War II will be very different affairs, featuring voices and opinions so far little heard. Yet it is surely time to retire the old bromide “those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.” If anything, the reverse may be true. Inhabitants of some of the most troubled regions — such as the Middle East, the Balkans and, until recently, Ireland — are all too familiar with terrible events of long ago.
Indeed it would be a sign of a more peaceful and stable world if the anniversaries of old conflicts came and went with hardly anyone noticing and historians concentrated on the laborious job of studying the past on its own terms.