A stunning article that reveals the self-centredness of the reappraisal of the war. In Kagoshima a "town government" (sic) in Japan spent 400 million on a museum to commemorate, of all people, a convicted war criminal. Togo was the foreign minister who took that portfolio under the military government in October 1941, and had that position during Pearl Harbor, the Pacific War and took it up again in 1945, appealed for the acceptance of the Allied (USA, GB, USSR) Potsdam peace demands. There is little doubt the Japanese government's initial forthright rejection of those simplified the atomic bombers’ planning. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison at the Tokyo War Crimes tribunal in 1945 and died in prison. It may be rightists’ objective is to show that the war crimes trials were arbitrary and unfair in their application to him.
The justification: that a man who knowingly entered a cabinet composed of those who had imposed brutal war on China worked to prevent war with America and eventually gave up his Foreign minister’s post ( though his post-war pronouncements ( Saboru Ienaga The Pacific War, p31 chapter .3) indicate his acquiescence and his sharing of their desire for victory and ( opt cit. p134-135) his essential desire was not to see a Japanese victory. With assurances, he was perfectly willing to let hostilities commence. In fact his communiqués to the diplomats negotiating with the Americans made plain that the negotiations were intentionally insubstantial and the aim was not to find what concessions in China the US would accept, but to attempt to get the US to agree a form of words which would concede China. (Gordon W. Prange, At Dawn We Slept: the untold story of Pearl Harbor:(Penguin USA, 1981) p.34-335).
This attitude remains: his actions to support the ending of the war are not o be praised in themselves one council member suggests but "the way was opened for the nation’s post-war prosperity." Togo would perhaps in other circumstances been a man capable of growth into a real leader. Korean potter, amongst a family of craftsmen accepted in older days officially into the higher ‘samurai’ echelons of Japanese society.
Of course a museum that inevitably will offer interpretation etc. of the war and in the process serve to defeat any objective of reconciliation. Of course the chance exists for some of the inequity of the trials to be shown, but these are worrying politics. They suggest obviously complicity in waging war may be forgotten, if that person tries to stop his country losing. As if being merely an ineffective worker towards the support of the Potsdam agreement’s acceptance in Japan. Before the A-bombs, and presumably a willing face of the Japanese. He had been an ambassador for the Japanese in Russia and his implicit acceptance of the 1937 and 1939 undeclared invasions of Russia that led to Japanese defeat and thereby the neutrality pact that protected Japan’s northern flank for its southward adventures, and thus knew full well of the army’s wanton aggression
The leaders of this community as others in Japan have so uniformly failed to get it. Perhaps I am too harsh, after all France's nazi collaborators went to their graves, the popular leaders still with respect. Each country needs a hero and perhaps one that changed his mind could do some good,, as he tried to do, for the nation that grew him but always remembered he was an outsider.The maintenance of a social system which is so organised to permit the kind of outrage committed there has manifestly not altered, any television show for popular viewing reveals elements of the implicit and explicit control and exploitation patterns that continue to underlay Japanese society. Humiliation, and the power to impose it, are still desirable aspects enhanced by their subject’s willing acknowledgement of the need for this ritual.
In such a system, Togo’s ritual resistance and actual acceptance of his role as patsy ( a civilian foriegn minister in a military government which loved nothing so much as to leave its ministers in the dark. He knew where he was but he chose his role and his sanction, o back a government that was unenforceable. His role as foreign minister was like a conductor on a bus driven by a blind drunk driver that wrecked a own.. His townspeople say he is to be praised for occasionally shouting at the driver to stop the bus and getting a successful reaction a few metres short of killing all the passengers. All those around suggest that as an official face there must have been something he could have done, otherwise he would have surely have organised the passengers in order to jump, jumped off the bus himself,. But that is not a good analogy, for the conductor would have had to have been the public face telling everyone that the driver’s actions were good for them. .Such a person, no matter what his motive would, most likely, end up in jail.
"All of us have been discriminated against as ’ Koreans’ a neighbourhood woman (sic)(a resident of Higashi-ichiki’s Miyama area), said "Despite all that Togo did all he could to advance the interests of the nation. But the museum is not what he would have wanted," she continued.
"The town hall built it to promote tourism. Keeping his house in order should have been enough." © TR 17th/10/ 98
© Teal Ray... (with acknowledgement to Steve Hartley, Uzbekistan and the camels for inspiration)...