Trouserpress

This morning I strode out my front door into bright new Hatoyama land and headed for the station.
Yesterday, Japan’s voters emphatically booted out 50-year incumbents the LDP, and voted in the DPJ under Mr Hatoyama, a man who promises a new way of doing things and more money in the pockets of the ordinary people (not that that was in any way a motivation to vote for his party, oh no). Such was the scale of the DPJ’s victory we are surely now living in a different country, and certainly the media razz would have it so.
Actually, the morning was overcast and grey, but I was confident that had the LDP won the election it would have been greyer and more overcast.
There was a warm, gelatinous breeze — harbinger of the winds of change? It was not too hard to imagine that the typhoon now sweeping by this nation’s shores is the actual storm of revolution.
Certainly, the elderly of the neighbourhood were out in numbers, sweeping leaves and examining their morning glory, which surely was a sign of the elderly sweeping leaves and examining morning glory, unless the profundity of the change meant graves had opened and the dead returned.
Indeed, no such epochal change has come to Japan since, well, since Prime Minister Koizumi (LDP) came to power as far back as 2001. He was arguably Japan’s first populist prime minister and he arrived on a platform of demolishing the old structures and replacing them with new ones and saying that he would “smash” — his word, not mine — anyone who got in the way. He was the self-styled lion of Japanese politics, presumably because he didn’t bother cutting his hair, and wore his neckties so long they dangled below his trouser belt, which I felt may have been a political statement of its own, but which was definitely irrationally irritating. He presided over five years of boisterous declamations in which time nothing worthwhile got done, and no one’s life changed in any way, until he disappeared up his own rhetoric.
So, it is with familiar fanfare that Hatoyama sweeps into power. To be fair, Mr. Hatoyama and his people have some proposals that are long overdue and uncharacteristically humane — free high school and child allowance, for example. They have no plan that would pay for their changes but they are pressing the right popular buttons. (I would not be surprised at a rise in the sales tax to pay for these innovations, giving with one hand while taking with the other.) I reflect while waiting for my commuter train taking me to my soul destroying job that modern political campaigns and policies have become part of The Spectacle (see Debord, et al) — a whirl of beguiling media lights and action rather than a whirlwind of change.

Poignantly, yesterday was the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. I was woken at 8:15 by the town’s PA system reminding us that this was the moment the bomb detonated and calling us to remembrance. (Public address systems set to broadcast through and entire town from the town hall are not rare in Japan.)

I turned over and went back to sleep.

Every anniversary of Hiroshima these announcements are broadcast across Japan, the TV and press is full of memorial events and kids are recalled from their school holidays to watch films about Hiroshima.
The bombing was undeniably a horrific and unjustifiable thing, and has led, at least among ordinary people to a genuine desire for peace and a hope that no one else on the planet will ever have to endure what the people of Hiroshima, and a few days later, Nagasaki had to endure.

For sure, these bombs were unprecedentedly awful in the amount of death they could inflict in one go and the particular horrors they inflicted on the human body. There is no doubt in mind that the US was partly motivated by wanting to make a display of strength to the Soviet Union and by simply wanting to test this new technology. There were other ways to proceed with winning the war.

However, Japan’s narrative of the bombs and peace is curious. It goes: we must never have war again because we suffered terribly through these bombings.

There is no space in this narrative for the atrocities committed by the Japanese across Asia. There is no mention of the 2 million people who died through forced labour, torture, indiscriminate killing, starvation, human experiments and so on. I am not arguing that the bombings were in any way justified by what the Japanese did to Asia. I am saying there is no mention of what led to the bombings in the national narrative: not on the TV, in the newspapers, and certainly not in the schools where the period of war leading up to the bombings is almost air brushed from history. The more conservative narratives go so far as to present Japan as the victim of the war, brutalized by stronger powers.

Indeed, many younger Japanese do not know by whom the war was fought or why. One acquaintance of mine in her twenties thought that the US and Japan were allied against the collected powers of Europe. I asked her about the atomic bombings and got no response but a puzzled look. Perhaps she and the people like her thought the bombing was an unprovoked, random attack. Another young person dismissed the idea that Japan had ever been occupied by the US.

Another part missing from the Japanese narrative of that time is how this nation was close to building its own nuclear weapon, which it would, presumably, have used against the US.

The day before Hiroshima day this year, I came across an interesting article written by a British guy that summarized Japan’s own attempts to build its nuclear weapon, and how they nearly succeeded. Japan worked energetically during the war to create the bomb but the US got there first and we know what happened. The estimates are that Japan was two or three months away from having a working weapon. (The research facility in Korea was overrun by the Soviets who took its secrets home with them thus speeding them on their way to their own weapon.)

That’s just two or three months from being able to nuke the US. Had Japan succeeded in making a nuclear weapon first, do we think that they would have declined to use it on San Francisco or Hawaii or Taiwan? Would they have held back for humanitarian reasons because this was the world’s worst weapon? I don’t think so. And the millions called to reflection yesterday morning simply don’t know.