We write in response to Gerhard Lehmbruch's discussion of the construction of
public memory in Germany and Japan, and look forward to learning of the results
of the comparative project that he has embarked on with Yoichi Tsutsui.
Several points pertinent to a comparative approach follow: Elements of
political, ideological, and institutional continuity with the imperial and
wartime past seem to us more prominent in Japan than in Germany, where the state
literally disintegrated following the suicide of Hitler and the unconditional
surrender of the Wehrmacht.
Although Japan accepted the Potsdam terms and capitulated unconditionally, the
Japanese imperial state remained intact and its repressive police apparatus
continued to function from mid-August to early October 1945. Japan's "moderate"
civilian oligarchs, with the emperor at the center, continued to rule the state.
Retaining political legitimacy, they proceeded to reconfirm the imperial view of
the past and to reproduce the official wartime propaganda version of the lost
war in which the emperor appeared at the end as a saviour whose benevolence had
brought about peace. In the story of how they accomplished that feat one finds
keys to the problem of public memory in postsurrender Japan and to the different
perceptions of war responsibility in Germany and Japan.
In their crisis of defeat, Japan's ruling elites relied upon the imperial
institution and used it to promote national unity. From the moment of
capitulation, they worked to prepare the nation for occupation, control the
immediate post-surrender situation, and prevent social upheaval.
The Imperial Rescript of August 14, 1945, broadcast to the nation on the 15th,
reconfirmed the justification for war proclaimed in the Imperial Rescript of
December 8, 1941: "we declared war on America and Britain. . . to insure Japan's
self preservation and the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from our
thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark
upon territorial aggrandizement." Half a year later, for reasons of its own, the
United States also presented a view of the Emperor as a pillar of peace and
progress, and General MacArthur declared him to be the foremost democratic in
postwar era.
Gerhard Lehmbruch asserts that "in Japan the crimes committed were essentially
against foreigners, whereas in Germany many of the victims were compatriots."
Japanese aggression against the peoples of Asia, however, coincided at each
stage with stepped up repression against fellow Japanese. The attack on the
United States and Britain was accompanied by the wartime Tojo cabinet's
crackdown on all remaining vestiges of dissent. If the number of Japanese
victims of that decision was relatively small, that was only because earlier
repression had been so successful.
The crime that put the mark of Cain upon the German people is the genocide of
European Jewry, which grew directly out of the German people's radical
anti-Semitism and the radical nihilism of Hitler and the Nazis. In the course of
the Asia-Pacific war, from 1931-1945, Japan committed heavy crimes against Asian
and other peoples. There is, however, no Japanese counterpart to the Hitlerized
German people's biological extermination of whole races. Public memory of war
guilt in Japan, therefore, long pertained mainly to the Asian victims of
Japanese militarism and imperialism, who constituted the largest number of its
victims.
Whereas German officials were forced to accept responsibility for German crimes
against humanity and to provide substantial reparations to survivors and
victims, Japan's conservative political elites have yet to reach agreement on
either the nature of the lost war or the need to pay reparations to all of its
victims.

Herbert P. Bix and Mark Selden