Kamm on Kyuma and the atomic bomb

ONE OF THE WEBSITES I frequent is that of the author and Times of London columnist Oliver Kamm. He is one of those commentators whose numbers are dwindling: his politics are left of center, but he favors a robust defense. I do not always share his opinions, but I read his articles with interest because they are intelligent and well-written, and his positions are cogently argued.

Unfortunately, that last clause does not apply to his most recent article in the New Republic on the controversial comment made by former Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma regarding the American use of atomic weapons on Japan during the Second World War. (The article can be accessed through his post here, or it can be accessed directly at the New Republic site here. It requires registration, but that is easily done and is free.)

In fact, it is one of the most puzzling pieces I’ve ever read. I agree entirely with his argument for the necessity of nuclear deterrence, yet disagree entirely with the means by which he arrived at his conclusion. His interest in and knowledge of Japan, its politics and history, and the political dynamics of northeast Asia seem sketchy at best.

Mr. Kamm’s previous writings suggest that he is an Atlanticist. He is on solid ground when presenting arguments from that perspective, but quickly moves into water over his head by making the mistake of thinking that expertise is transferable.

Let’s start with his conclusion:

“Nuclear weapons are absolute evil,” declared one Japanese politician from within the governing coalition this week. No, they are not: It depends who has them. Nuclear weapons have been instrumental in defeating and containing totalitarianism. For the foreseeable future, it is unlikely that civilized states can do without an ally, even an implicit one, who possesses them.

This is undeniable on the face of it; nuclear weapons are essential for the reasons Mr. Kamm states (though one hopes he has a more thorough appreciation than he displays here of how the effects of nuclear weapons differ from conventional ones).

Now to the problems:

Engrained in Japan’s political culture is the notion that in 1945 the country was a victim rather than an aggressor.

This statement ignores entirely that part of the Japanese political dialogue centered on the awareness that the country was an aggressor nation in the first half of the 20th century. The books and papers written on this topic in Japan would fill a small library. That some overseas observers are not aware of this aspect of the country’s political culture is due to the unavailability of this material in English. Regrettably, this lack of awareness doesn’t prevent those overseas observers from assuming that it doesn’t exist.

Absent from the piece is an understanding of why some Japanese—or anyone placed in a similar position, for that matter—might consider themselves victims in 1945. For example, Japanese do not complain about being victimized by the extensive conventional bombing that the Americans conducted that year, when they were in control of Japanese airspace.

Rather, their complaints are about being attacked with a weapon of destructive capabilities entirely unlike those of conventional weapons, whose effects are exponentially more gruesome than those of conventional weapons, and whose victims were largely civilians, at a time when most Japanese knew the end was near anyway.

If Mr. Kamm understood the conditions on the ground in Nagasaki on August 9th, instead of viewing events with the perspective and passion of a Rand Corporation analyst, he might not find the Japanese position so objectionable.

Note that I am not supporting the specific view to which he objects. I am simply saying that a person with a modicum of awareness of the facts might understand why some Japanese would remain stunned by an unprecedented event more than a half-century after it occurred.

The mayor of Hiroshima accused him (Kyuma) of trampling on the sentiments of the survivors.

Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba—he does have a name—is one of the last people I would use to support the piece’s implicit assumption that Japan denies responsibility for its militaristic past. There are a substantial number of Japanese (often, but not always of the Left) who both loathe the idea of Imperial Japan and who think that Japan was victimized by the use of nuclear weapons. The reality in Japan is more complex than some suspect, but these ideas are of course not incompatible.

Mr. Akiba, for what it’s worth, is of the opinion that Japan would have surrendered by November 1945 anyway, and cites American sources for this belief.

Japan has never offered the equivalent of, say, German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s symbolic act of contrition before the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto.

Perhaps that’s because in Japan—unlike Germany—genocide was not an official state policy.

Additionally, the Japanese are well aware that a gesture of this sort would not mark an ending, as it presumably did with Germany and Poland, but would rather encourage the Chinese and South Koreans to escalate their complaints, as has been the case in the past. Some Koreans, for example, are now demanding that Japan pay reparations to individuals, despite the 1965 treaty normalizing relations by which Japan paid 800 million dollars in reparations, and the South Koreans renounced their right to demand individual compensation.

In 1994, Ian Buruma wrote a remarkable work of reportage, Wages of Guilt, contrasting attitudes in Germany and Japan to memories of World War II. He noted that the Japanese have two days of remembrance: August 6, marking the bombing of Hiroshima, and August 15, the date of surrender.

I haven’t read Mr. Buruma’s work, but I’ve already noted that a comparison between Germany and Japan might not be an apt one. I wonder if Mr. Buruma also included a comparison of the stated war aims of both Germany and Japan. It might prove fruitful.

Of interest in this regard is a state visit by Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi to India in the late 1950s. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru told him in front of a large audience that the Japanese defeat of the Russians in 1905 inspired him as a young man to achieve his own ideals.

But one can understand why the English might want to overlook that. Come to think of it, have any of England’s leading politicians, much less the royal house, made an overt “act of contrition” for their behavior on the Indian subcontinent or in Africa?

Though I’m unfamiliar with Wages of Guilt, I have watched live broadcasts and news summaries of the memorial ceremonies at Hiroshima, as well national coverage of the ceremonies on the date of surrender, without needing the assistance of an interpreter. Does Mr. Kamm actually think that the people sitting on the dais during the Hiroshima ceremonies are ignoring the reason for its occurrence? Is there some more appropriate date for the Japanese to reflect on what their behavior wrought?

Last year, then-Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi provoked Korean and Chinese protests by paying respects at the Yasukuni Shrine, which is dedicated to the souls of Japan’s war dead. Among those venerated are 14 Class-A war criminals, including the wartime prime minister, Hideki Tojo.

This strikes me someone conveying superficial knowledge recently acquired, which is atypical of Mr. Kamm. There is no sense that he is aware Mr. Koizumi visited the shrine not just last year, but six different times, or that other prime ministers have visited without sparking any serious overseas protests, such as Zenko Suzuki on three occasions (1980-1982) and Masayoshi Ohira in 1979. There is no sense he understands that the protests, especially in China, were carried out largely by young people for whom the war is just a story, not a reality, or that they were stirred up by the governments in both countries for domestic considerations, or that in China, they were at least partially financed by the government. Nor is there any sense that he realizes the Japanese have demonstrated by their behavior over the years the absurdity of concerns that they would revert to their Imperial past.

As there is much more going on here than Mr. Kamm seems to be aware of, perhaps he should just leave this aspect of the story well enough alone.

The Asahi newspaper last week cursorily acknowledged that Japan had caused “huge damage to many other countries” in World War II. It then got into its editorial stride. “Utterly appalled” by Kyuma’s remarks, the newspaper declared them “tantamount to forgetting history and subserviently accepting the US justification of the attacks.”

As is the case with Mayor Akiba of Hiroshima, the Asahi Shimbun would be the last media outlet I would choose as an example of whitewashing the Japanese Imperial past. (Japanese readers might well be laughing out loud at the idea of this.) Mr. Kamm has spoken admiringly on his website of The Guardian newspaper in Britain; the Asahi’s editorial position is roughly comparable. Instead of providing a long laundry list of details, it should be sufficient to note that for the Asahi, any reason to find fault with the United States is a good one.

The Ministry of Education’s annual screening of textbooks resulted this year in a particularly egregious softening of references to the Imperial Army’s conduct in the Battle of Okinawa.

One of the laudable aspects of Mr. Kamm’s approach to an argument is that he always presents the facts to support his statement. Well, almost always—he fails to mention here what this softening of references entailed. Considering the context, his omission entices the reader to conceive lurid mental pictures of possible scenarios without knowing what actually happened.

He is also precise in the use of language, so it is curious that he finds “egregious” by itself to be insufficient and inflates it to “particularly egregious”. One wonders why the adverb is necessary when the meaning of the adjective is quite forceful in itself.

Were the references egregiously softened? Perhaps they were, but Mr. Kamm is forcing us to take his word for it.

The notion that President Truman used the atomic bomb primarily to intimidate the Soviet Union was popular on the American New Left in the 1960s, remains influential in Japan, and in a more circumspect form has even begun to creep back into American debate. But it remains unsupported by evidence.

This is an excellent point that deserves to be made, and made repeatedly. Yet the problem here is not what Mr. Kamm said, but rather what he did not say. Had he more fully understood Mr. Kyuma’s speech, he would have known that the former defense minister also referred to the Soviet Union in the sentence before the comment that led to his resignation. According to this BBC report (which should be easy for Mr. Kamm to access):

The US, he said, must have thought the bombs “could prompt Japan’s surrender, thus preventing the Soviet Union from declaring war against Japan”.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that had Mr. Kamm known this, he would have used it in the passage quoted above to buttress his argument. That he didn’t use it suggests he wasn’t aware of it, which further suggests he wrote the article on the basis of one translated sentence and partially digested conventional wisdom.

Nor was Japan ready to surrender before Hiroshima (or even Nagasaki).

We’ve seen the word egregious used; that describes the final three words here. I fail to see any reason for their inclusion at all. A second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki roughly 75 hours after the first was used on Hiroshima. No community in the world at that time was capable of comprehending the unique effects of that bomb—the very essence of shock and awe. In fact, not all of its effects were immediately apparent. Some people thought they had survived unharmed, until they started losing their hair to radiation poisoning two days later. And this weapon was used on a country whose infrastructure was already in a shambles after continuous American bombing. (The Nagasaki correspondent for the Mainichi Shimbun had to use carrier pigeons to inform his editors in the Kansai region of the second attack.) After Hiroshima, rumors had circulated about a terrible new weapon, but no one knew much about it.

Yet to hear Mr. Kamm tell it, those fanatical Japanese were still in fighting fettle after the first bomb. In retrospect, it’s obvious that they hadn’t yet grasped what hit them. But they still didn’t move fast enough for the author.

The Allied powers did terrible things in World War II in order to defeat unmitigated barbarism.

Such as the Tokyo firebombing of March 1945, for which Curtis LeMay designed bombing patterns to purposely cut off civilian escape routes to the river. Gen. LeMay himself is reported to have said that had America been defeated, he would have been tried as a war criminal. Does that not give resonance to the Japanese complaint of “victor’s justice”? Does that not lead to a better understanding of why some Japanese might still feel they were victims in 1945?

It has long been the task of America’s friends abroad to convince our compatriots how important–not for America, but for them–is a transatlantic alliance founded on nuclear deterrence.

Ironically, this position is precisely that of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has clearly stated it in several public speeches, as well as his book. It is astonishing that Mr. Kamm would not bring it up—unless he is unaware of it.

But to be accurate, it is not precisely Mr. Abe’s position. He would not use the word “transatlantic”, and therein lies another problem. Mr. Kamm is applying arguments from a country about which he is not fully informed and seldom writes to a situation on the other side of the world more suited to his own interests.

Would it not behoove commentators to desist from trying to use their insufficient knowledge of Japan and East Asia as a tool for their own agenda in other matters? Indeed, they might consider refraining from commenting about Japan altogether until they had devoted sufficient time to a proper study of it.

Yet, as memories of the catastrophe wrought by Imperial Japan recede, it would take little mutation in Japan’s constitutionally mandated pacifism for it to become anti-American. The current protest over Kyuma’s remarks exemplifies this ugly undercurrent.

This assertion is presented with absolutely no support, and it borders on the meaningless. How exactly would constitutionally mandated pacifism so quickly mutate into anti-Americanism, if it hasn’t done so already after more than 60 years? How would this be different than the considerably more virulent European strain of anti-Americanism, which didn’t have to mutate from constitutionally mandated pacifism to become manifest? And how would Mr. Kamm know about the extent of anti-Americanism in Japan?

The diplomatic posturing and misrepresentations of the last few days could do with a terse American dismissal, for all our sakes.

Old colonial habits die hard, evidently.

In other words, The Superpower should slap down its impertinent vassal state for daring to have an opinion contrary to received wisdom. Have they no gratitude for what’s been done for them? Don’t they realize who gave them their Consitution?

No matter that Japan’s economy and population would immediately make it the most important country in Europe, if it were located there. One wonders what Mr. Kamm’s attitude would be if the United States were to take that approach with Britain.

And this from a country whose former prime minister, Tony Blair, was criticized as George Bush’s lapdog.

As I stated at the beginning, I agree with Mr. Kamm’s conclusions about the necessity for maintaining a nuclear deterrence. This necessity is unlikely to disappear in the foreseeable future, if ever.

The problem is that the arguments he presents here are based on a Japan of the imagination, rather than the Japan of reality, a large and powerful country whose diversity of opinion and self-examination of its past have always been more extensive than some give it credit for.

The author recently stated in another of his posts:

A few weeks ago I noted the oddity that The Guardian had commissioned a piece castigating the Foreign Minister of France from someone who has no expertise in French politics and is unable to read French.

That oddity didn’t stop him from writing a piece about Japan.