Pride and Confidence

Some modernising elements of Japanese society have decided to take a leaf out of Gordon Brown's book of courage and stop apologising for empire. The education ministry has ordered the publishers of high-school textbooks to remove references to the actions of the Imperial Japanese Army in Okinawa, where a number of civilians were allegedly induced to indulge in acts of asymmetrical warfare against the United States. Last month, a hundred and thirty or so Japanese politicians called the Nanking massacre of 1937 a Chinese fabrication and claimed that the death toll had been vastly exaggerated. Even Tojo's granddaughter has decided she has a mission to restore "pride and confidence" by running in elections as an independent. "If my grandfather is to be blamed for anything, it is not that he started the war but that we lost it," she proclaimed, demonstrating an unconscionable cynicism about the civilising zeal which motivated the western powers. The rape of Nanking, as is well known, caused such disgust and outrage in the western world that the president of the United States called it "a date which will live in infamy" and declared war on Japan in 1937 rather than in 1941 as previously scheduled. An American congressional committee recently called on Japan to "acknowledge and apologise for forcing an estimated 200,000 mainly Chinese and Korean women to work in frontline brothels". During the American presence in south-east Asia, of course, the native women who serviced the troops did so purely voluntarily and in the interests of spreading democracy. Fortunately, the death toll of the British empire has never been reliably calculated, and in any case was a price well worth paying, particularly for those who paid it. Certainly, one rarely hears them complain.