Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan

Ian Buruma's The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan is a major work of comparative cultural history and similar in content to Hein and Seldon's engagement in Censoring History. The theme in this work is the memory of World War II and the complex and dissimilar uses Germany and Japan have employed. Buruma compares the official stories of the former East Germany against the one foisted by West Germany in relation how each tries to effect closures vis-à-vis the Holocaust. As per Japan, Buruma looks into the polarized debate between those who wish to deny or forget as opposed to those who constantly remind us of Japanese atrocities in Asia as a harbinger against renewed Japanese militarism. Buruma puts the contemporary historical battle into a political context, saying for example that the 1982 textbook controversy -- the one that really started it all -- was little more than China's Deng Xiaoping trying to disrupt friendlier economic relations between Japan and Taiwan. Citing Buruma, "it was in Deng's interest to embarrass the Japanese, to twist the knife a little." The controversy erupted just as the two were signing trade accords. Buruma also explains at length the attempt by some in Japan (Ienaga Saburo) to liberalize Japanese textbooks and not whitewash history. Buruma does not apologize for the Japanese; in fact, he interviews some soldiers who committed atrocities. Unlike Chang in Rape of Nanking, Buruma denies that the Rape of Nanking was genocidal, as some, like Iris Chang, have claimed (the inevitable conclusion of many comparative historians). He believes it was many massacres on a smaller scale, but that there was no genocidal ideology. Buruma's wide-ranging description of Germany and Japan and their vastly different but interconnected narratives and their efforts to come to terms with their respective pasts asks painful but important questions about issues like who is responsible and how the answers to these questions impact national identity. The lack of closure on the Japanese side leaves everyone distrustful of Japanese capacity and intent.

Buruma does an exemplary job of examining the respective societies ways of dealing with war memory. Of course, most amateur historians are familiar with the German obsession with war guilt (specifically atonement for the Holocaust) while the Japanese politicians prefer to make themselves out either as innocent martyrs to American nuclear barbarity or as being equally culpable members of a war-mongering human race. But Buruma's tome is strongest when interviewing the heroic few who have persisted in questioning the standard memory-ideologies of both. In the case of the Japanese, the quest for responsibility or accountability is more quixotic, when faced with an indifferent polity, but here the struggle is more direct and linear. In the case of Germany, the trial is more subtle; German collective guilt is undeniable, but local innocence is still a conforting facade. Occasionally, as in the case of Anna Rosmus and the "outing" of her hometown's complicity with Nazism, the ugly truth makes some of her countrymen revert to stereotypical form. But Buruna misses the opportunity (recognizing his book is limited to Germany and Japan) to widen the net of war time guilt; America's role in provoking Japan into war is unmentioned, as is British and French capitulation at Munich, and he softpedals to the point of silence the US Army's acquisition of biowar expertise from the notorious (and eventually whitewashed) Unit 731. Still, minor quibbles indeed in a fine book that investigates a complex subject. In the end, Sherman's maxim still holds true, with the addition that one way to remember hell is way to call sulfur fumes perfume.

Author of God's Dust, Buruma, a native of Holland, examines in this work how Japan and Germany have dealt with and manipulated their collective memories of World War II. In spite of the Dutch experience during the War, Buruma concludes that Germany has faced the past honestly and directly; Japan, on the other hand, continues to try to ignore or rewrite it. In school in the common language of modern Germany, young people are well attuned to and aware of the issues of the past. Young Japanese are either ignorant or indifferent to what their grandparents took part in. Buruma examines the issues of chauvinism, the history of nationalism, contemporary pacifism, and how Auschwitz and Hiroshima have been remembered and memorialized. Drawing on his childhood in Holland and the ten years he spent in Japan, Buruma is well positioned to comment on modern Germany and Japan. Highly recommended.

Ian Buruma takes a look at the various ways in which the people of Germany and Japan have dealt with the legacy of the atrocities committed by their countries during World War II. His book was especially timely in the case of Germany because he began writing it shortly after the unification of the Federal Republic and the GDR, when discussion of Germany's past was widespread both at home and abroad. Buruma is also well qualified to comment on Japan because he lived there for many years and speaks the language.To summarise, the "The Wages of Guilt" finds that the German people, at least in the western part, have been more ready to come to terms with their war legacy than the Japanese. There are Nazi sympathizers and Holacaust deniers aplenty in Germany, but they seem to be confined to the fringes. In Japan, however, rightist elements remain powerful and the official line is to portray the war as an economically driven power struggle in which any excesses committed by the armed forces occurred in the heat of battle, thus denying any similarity to the behaviour of the Nazis. Moreover, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are viewed as atrocities on par with any act committed by the Axis powers; racism and a perverted scientific curiosity are among the motives attributed to America in its decisions to drop the bombs. Buruma explores the efforts to re-examine the war through the prism of German and Japanese reactions to Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Nanking, the war crimes trials, etc. and the result is a troubling and thought provoking meditation on the power of history and the psychology of escape. Check this one out, it's worth a look.