Horrible histories
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By John Burton
There are a series of books published in the U.K. called Horrible Histories that detail gruesome events from the past, with such titles as Angry Aztecs and Vicious Vikings, to amuse schoolboys. It’s proof of the old adage that tragedy plus time equals comedy.
Most periods of history are viewed dispassionately if they are not subject to near total public apathy. Few Europeans nowadays are concerned about the appalling devastation of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), which killed an estimated 8 million people. Koreans do not protest against China about the Manchu invasions of Korea in 1627 and 1637. It’s history.
But other periods of history attract abnormal attention, dominate the public consciousness and are no laughing matter.
These tend to be recent traumatic events such as military defeats, civil conflict or political oppression that are within the living memory of at least some of the population. The resulting feelings of loss, humiliation or injustice promote a moralistic view of the events in the belief that “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it” as famously stated by the philosopher George Santayana. It is history that is viewed through the lens of “good versus evil” rather than being normally accepted as the Thirty Years War and the Manchu invasions have been.
For Westerners, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust fall into this category and are still used as a moral touchstone to help frame public debate about a variety of issues. Just in the past week, the Russians have suggested the Ukrainian protests were being led by right-wing “Nazi” thugs, while North Korea was compared to Nazi Germany in the U.N. report on Pyongyang’s human rights violations. “Nazi” is the ultimate term of moral condemnation in our age.
For Northeast Asia, the equivalent historical event is Japanese imperialism during the first half of the 20th century. Relations among China, Korea and Japan remain strongly shaped by Japan’s colonization of Korea (1910-1945), the Japanese invasion of China (1931-1945) and Tokyo’s refusal to accept full responsibility for Korean comfort women and the Nanjing massacre.
The emotions aroused by the moral debates about these issues have the potential of renewing another regional conflict. It is interesting to note that the intensification of the debate in the past year over Japan’s wartime role underscores the importance of living memory in keeping historical disputes alive since the heightened rhetoric coincides with the arrival of new leaders in all three countries who have direct personal connections with that period.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe regards his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi, a former prime minister, as his political hero, although Kishi was jailed as a suspected war criminal after World War II for serving as the most senior bureaucrat in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in northeast China in the late 1930s and in Tojo’s wartime cabinet.
Former Korean President Park Chung-hee, the father of current President Park Geun-hye, was accused by some of being a Japanese collaborator because he joined the Manchukuo Imperial Army in the 1940s. The father of Chinese President Xi Jinping was a leading Communist Party figure in fighting the Japanese in China in the 1930s.
So how long will it take until Northeast Asia is able to take a more clinical historical assessment of Japan’s actions? Will Seoul and Beijing ever reach the point where they regard these events with the same relative degree of equanimity as Taiwan does the Japanese colonization of the island in 1895, for example? Can Japan ever fully acknowledge the extent of its war crimes?
It normally takes from 80 to 100 years for the vivid collective memories of a traumatic event to disappear from society as those who experienced it and their immediate descendants who heard their accounts die out.
The period from 1937 to 1945 may be seen as the epicenter of the current contested versions of history because it includes the Sino-Japanese War and Japan’s resulting wartime mobilization of Korean society. Based on that assumption, it may take another 30 years before the events are defined not only in moral terms.
How to assess historical events also depends on where one is sitting. Asians cannot fully grasp the emotions associated with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust that Westerners feel because they were not affected by these events. Likewise, Westerners did not fully understand the moral outrage driving such disputes as the Dokdo Islets or demands for compensation for the comfort women.
It is noteworthy, however, that other traumatic events in the modern history of Northeast Asia such as the Great Leap Forward or Cultural Revolution in China, which killed millions, has not attracted the same sense of moral opprobrium. In this regard, it will be interesting to see how South Koreans will view and treat the criminality of the North Korean regime once it collapses.
John Burton, a former Korea correspondent for the Financial Times, is now a Seoul-based independent journalist and media consultant. He can be reached at john.burton@insightcomms.com.