U.S. National Archives: Japan has apologized to no one for its war crimes
As I noted in today’s news link post, the U.S. National Archives has released a gigantic collection of documents relating to Japan’s war crimes during the Pacific War:
The declassification is a result of a thorough investigation by several U.S. government agencies for classified records remaining in their files, pursuant to the requirements of the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Disclosure Acts. The declassified records include a range of materials from the Office of Strategic Services ( OSS ), CIA, the State Department, Army Intelligence, FBI, and other agencies, and cover many aspects of the Pacific conflict and postwar relations between the United States and Japan. In general, however, only a small portion of these records specifically pertains to Japanese war crimes. The records are open and available at the research room of the National Archives at College Park, Maryland.
As a result of the interagency government search, the IWG learned that there were millions of pages of previously declassified or unclassified records related to Japanese war crimes already available at the National Archives. The U.S. Government has been steadily releasing records with information about Japanese war crimes since the 1950s, with the bulk of the material declassified by the 1970s. Only a small portion of these records, however, have been examined by researchers, as they are spread across various collections.
It’s a truly exciting thing for historians, and will definately lead to the creation of many new works of scholarship in the coming years. It almost makes me wish I was back in the States, so I could spend days pouring through the documents and conducting some good ol’ research. However, I do have one problem with their document release: On page 5 of the introduction to their Researching Japanese War Crimes guidebook, they state the following:
Ian Burumas the Wages of Guilt (1994) compares responses to war crimes in postwar Germany and Japan. According to Buruma, Germany publicly accepted responsibility for the evils perpetrated by the Nazi regime and educated future generations by discussing its sordid Nazi history in school textbooks and classes. Germany apologized to various European nations and Israel. Conversely, Japan rejected responsibility, downplayed the historical evidence of aggression and atrocity in its schools with sophistry and euphemism, and apologized to no one. Worse yet, ultra-conservative Japanese commentators insisted the war crimes, if they happened at all, were exaggerated to embarrass the Japanese people.
As I have never read Buruma’s book, I cannot be sure whether it contained a statement claiming that Japan “apologized to no one” for its war crimes. This might just be the case of an overzealous NARA writer, who has spent countless hours working with Japanese war crimes documents, but apparently never reading the lost list of Japan’s apologies on Wikipedia, adding his/her interpretation of Buruma’s work. It’s one thing to claim that Japan’s official apologies have been insufficient or insincere. However, simply stating that Japan has “apologized to no one” is simply bad scholarship. Unfortunately,some researchers who go to the National Archives to conduct research for books about Japan’s war crimes are going to see that statement in the introduction and accept it as credible, which will result in further works of bad scholarship. I really hope that somebody corrects this error soon.
[Hat tip to Cesar]
