How should a criminal face the sins he has committed?
In terms of universal humanity, he has only three choices: confess his sins with a repentant attitude, forget the past with an escape mentality, and insist on innocence with a stubborn attitude.
Behind these three choices are three narrative attitudes of personal history.
If a person is like this, how can it be a nation?
By analogy, the Japanese nation, like the criminal I set up at the beginning, has committed the heinous crime of waged a war of aggression against its neighbors in Asia.
In our impression, the contemporary Japanese nation has a stubborn posture - they one-sidedly emphasize the victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but they deny the existence of the Nanjing Massacre, and even take pride in visiting the Yasukuni Shrine.
However, I must say that in fact, the Japanese people's understanding of the history of the invasion of China is divided. If we anthropomorphize Japan, we can even say that Japan is schizophrenic about the history of World War II.
As the Japanese writer Akiko Hashimoto put it in "The Long Defeat": The Japanese people's memories of war take on complex forms from different positions -- perpetrators, victims, and victims.
Wrapped up in online emotions, people gradually fall into a single formatted history, and the flood of emotions drowns out rational criticism, but makes the truth of history and reality blurred.
I hate the Japanese right-wingers' contempt for history, but from the contradictory national psychology of the Japanese people, it is more meaningful to dig out the national nature and establish a critical pluralistic view of history than pure emotional expression.
Akiko Hashimoto named the book "The Long Defeat", but the defeat has long been settled, where did it come from?
In fact, what the long period refers to is that the Japanese nation has never established a widely recognized and consensus-forming narrative version of that bloody history, and in short, it has not constructed a universally recognized view of history.
Far from consensus, but even infighting, the war memories of different groups are divided, contradictory, and hostile to each other.
Akiko Hashimoto did not shy away from her own ethnic "screw-up", she said in "To the Chinese Reader": "Japan's failed culture is chaotic and divided, and people have different interpretations of what has happened and its meaning. ”
The Hashimoto name, based on the spread of mass culture, divides the historical narrative of this division into three categories:
The first category is the "victims" -
Those invading soldiers who lost their lives in the war can be either "victims" of the so-called "loyal and patriotic" or "victims" of "defending their families."
This is the historical narrative we are familiar with, the responsibility of Japan for launching the war of aggression was suspended, and the "sacrifice" of the individual was magnified into the "epitome" of the entire war.
The December 2013 film "Forever 0", about the pilots of the Kamikaze during World War II, is typical of this view of history. The film is adapted from a novel by right-wing writer Naoki Hyakuda. According to statistics, the film was the top box office at the time, with a box office revenue of 8.6 billion yen, and former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was a die-hard fan of the film.
The second category is "victims" -
This view places more emphasis on memory as a "victim of war", the most typical example of which is the description of atomic bombing and large-scale air raids.
In a general sense, this kind of "victim" narrative is also evading the historical responsibility of the aggressor, but this view is the mainstream of the historical narrative of young people in Japan at present, and it seems that a generation that has not experienced war can extract historical baggage from the difficulties of personal and family wars.
Takahata's animated film Tomb of the Fireflies and Nao Katabuchi's animated film In This Corner of the World are both based on this type of historical narrative.
But Akiko Hashimoto pointedly pointed out that "this narrative also tends to divert attention", that is, to consciously or unconsciously ignore the real victims who suffered more from Japanese aggression in the war , such as China.
The third category is "perpetrators", or "perpetrators", to be precise.
However, in historical identity, there are very few people who face the memory of Japanese "criminals", and these people, in my opinion, are real people, people with capital letters.
They confronted Japanese militarism and carried out aggression and inhumane rule in China, the Korean Peninsula and other regions.
The concentrated explosion of this type of work in the 1970s, Saf Yamamoto's "War and Man" trilogy can be regarded as typical.
In the context of history, it is not difficult to deduce that this introspective view of history is inseparable from the surging left movement in Japan at that time.
The division of identity with the history of World War II is only a cross-section of Japanese cultural schizophrenia, and as Akiko Hashimoto predicted, this schizophrenia will drag the Japanese nation into a deeper abyss of identity division in the future.
At the end of the day, apart from facing history head-on, what other way can we restart history?