Sudden changes in historical perspective
By Kyung Moon Hwang
It seems I have read many news items recently, from the United States, South Korea, Japan, and even Germany, about the powerful, and sometimes surprising, workings of history.
In late June, there was yet another gun massacre in the U.S., which in America is all too common. But there was a very surprising outcome this time. I am not speaking of the outpouring of communal grief, the renewal of the bitter debate about America’s puzzling gun culture, or even President Barack Obama’s arrival at the site of the shooting to deliver a speech. Since these mass shootings have been so frequent, such events in the aftermath have become regular occurrences.
What has been quite unexpected, though, is the abrupt change in views by political and social leaders in the American south regarding the old flag of the Confederate States of America. This was the name for the dozen or so southern states in the 1860s that broke away from the United States to start the American civil war.
Any serious student of American history can point to mountains of evidence that this was a conflict over the south’s refusal to abolish slavery. The southern states did not secede from the United States in order to preserve their southern identity, except the part about that identity's dependence on brutal human bondage.
Until a couple of weeks ago, however, most white southerners continued to claim that this flag, which one can see easily in the south today, even on government property, was a proud symbol of their regional heritage. They also needed to assert that this flag had nothing to do with slavery, which most of them now acknowledge was a bad thing.
What appears to have triggered the about-face in perspective were images of the southern white supremacist who murdered the nine African Americans in their church. He had uploaded pictures of himself proudly holding the Confederate flag. Suddenly, southern leaders, and even some presidential candidates in the Republican Party, seem eager to publicly call for removing the flag from public display.
In other words, a couple of photographs of a racist mass murderer did what overwhelming historical evidence could not do in 150 years: persuade southern whites to abandon their adherence to that symbol. Those pictures, in this sense, were the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
I go into detail about this non-Korean issue because of the Japanese government’s recent attempt to have the United Nations, meeting in Germany, designate factories of the Meiji period (1850-1910) as UNESCO World Heritage sites. These sites are said to demonstrate the extraordinarily rapid industrialization and modernization of Japan, which probably does deserve recognition.
What the Japanese bid failed to mention was that these same factories also deployed coerced and even slave labor during the Asia-Pacific War of World War II, which Japan pursued in its quest for empire while invading, colonizing, and killing millions of people in Asia. But this more disturbing aspect of Japanese imperialism cannot be divorced from the story of Japanese industrialization, as the South Korean government said in opposing this UNESCO recognition.
The most fundamental problem is that, like the white southerners of the United States, much of the Japanese population appears to hold a very incomplete view of their national history. Unlike the southern whites, however, who are driven considerably by an ingrained racism, the Japanese over the past 70 years have been victimized by the willful denial of knowledge and responsibility by their political leaders, which stands in clear contrast to what happened in Germany.
Thus many Japanese people today seem easily manipulated by extremist nationalist elements, which exist in every country, and are indignantly surprised when their Asian neighbors object.
It’s risky to generalize like this, but my own observations suggest that Japanese society is mostly unaware of the negative aspects of Japan’s national history, or, like the American south, chooses to ignore it.
Of course there are plentiful exceptions among individual Japanese, many of whom I’ve met in academic circles, but in the larger population, the denial of the darker side of their history (which, again, every country has) ultimately leads to these ongoing problems in their relations with their neighbors.
One does not even have to point to 20th century history to find this. One of my most memorable experiences was visiting, several years ago, the splendid Osaka Castle, which on the inside is actually a museum for Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the Japanese leader who launched the devastating invasions of Korea back in the 1590s. The ensuing seven-year war between Japan, Korea, and China resulted in countless killed or maimed.
Yet in this museum exhibit, which took up several floors of the castle and dozens of displays, coverage of Hideyoshi’s role in starting and directing this war over the last years of his life amounted to one short paragraph. This paragraph began by referring to the invasion as an “advance into Korea,” like it was a military training exercise. And then abruptly, the last two sentences, which obviously had been pasted over the previous wording, changed the tone completely and spoke of the “genocide visited upon the Korean people.”
It was as if something happened, like seeing the online pictures of the American murderer, to shock people into a sudden change in perspective. Perhaps this kind of thing is what it will take for a broader shift in awareness to come about in Japan.
Kyung Moon Hwang is associate professor in
the Department of History, University of
Southern California. He is the author of “A
History of Korea — An Episodic Narrative”
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).