Revisionist history sacks Japan's AF Chief of Staff

NY Times:

A high-ranking Japanese military official was dismissed Friday for writing an essay stating that the United States had ensnared Japan into World War II, denying that Japan had waged wars of aggression in Asia and justifying Japanese colonialism.

The Defense Ministry fired Gen. Toshio Tamogami, chief of staff of Japan’s air force, late on Friday night, only hours after his essay was posted on a private company’s Web site. The quick dismissal seemed intended to head off criticism from China, South Korea and other Asian nations that have reacted angrily to previous Japanese denials of its militarist past.

The defense minister, Yasukazu Hamada, said the essay included an “inappropriate” assessment of the war, adding, “It was improper for a person in his capacity as air force chief of staff to publicly state a view clearly different from the government’s.”

In the essay, General Tamogami, 60, elaborated a rightist view of Japan’s wartime history shared by many nationalist politicians. But it was a rare formulation from inside Japan’s military, which, as Japan has been shedding its postwar pacifism in recent years, has gained a more prominent role.

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General Tamogami wrote that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 and thereby drew the United States into World War II after being caught in “a trap” set by President Roosevelt.

“Roosevelt had become president on his public pledge not to go to war, so in order to start a war between the United States and Japan, it had to appear that Japan took the first shot,” he wrote.

He denied that Japan had invaded China and the Korean Peninsula, arguing that Japanese forces became embroiled in domestic conflicts on the Asian continent.

“Even now, there are many people who think that our country’s aggression caused unbearable suffering to the countries of Asia during the Greater East Asia War,” he wrote, using the term favored by Japan’s right to refer to World War II. “But we need to realize that many Asian countries take a positive view of the Greater East Asia War. It is certainly a false accusation to say that our country was an aggressor nation.”

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There are some in this country who also have this goofy view of the attack on Pearl Harbor. If it was a trap, why did the intelligent Japanese fall for it? The story does not say, probably because the air force chief did not. This story reminds me stories about the South after the Civil War where some tried to say the slaves liked being slaves. It makes about as much sense.

The fact is that the Koreans and other Asians suffered a brutal occupation by the Japanese as did our allies in the Philippines. There is no evidence of a benign Japanese occupation anywhere during this war and considerable evidence of brutality. The Koreans and the Chinese still bear the scares and that is why this kind of essay is so damaging to Japan.

Beyond foreign policy, it is damaging to the Japanese military, which needs to base its concepts and doctrines on reality and not fantasy disguised as history.