United States, history and Pacific War

By Dennis Halpin

William Faulkner, the great novelist, famously wrote that "the past isn't dead, it isn't even past." This could be applied equally to the painful manner in which the United States approached its Civil War history as well as to the ongoing debate regarding the Pacific War.

Korean President Park Geun-hye recently told the BBC that there was "no point" in holding a summit meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Abe without an apology for "past wrongdoings." This observation will likely alarm those in Washington who see a pressing need for Seoul, as an American ally, to accept Tokyo's proposed rearmament in support of an American "realignment" to Asia that is cash-strapped by sequestration and defense budget cuts. Such a narrow focus, however, indicates a lack of comprehension of Korean feelings over unresolved war legacy issues.

Americans should recall that the United States took well over a century to address the tortured legacy of race relations after the Civil War. America paid a terrible price for its negligence. The terror of the Ku Klux Klan was tolerated. Lynching was an all too common feature of American life. Jim Crow laws ruled not only in the south but on the federal level, where the Armed Forces were only integrated by executive order of Harry S. Truman after minority members had fought honorably in two world wars.

Perhaps the racial turmoil of the 1960s could have been lessened by an earlier national soul-searching. Federal reconstruction, however, ended in a political deal and segregation. Subsequently, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) led a battle to control textbooks in southern states. The UDC sought to teach young, white southerners of the noble "lost cause" of the confederacy and of the loyal, subservient slave in the antebellum South. This successful textbook effort is credited with producing the generations of white segregationists who violently opposed civil rights. This has a clear lesson for Asia.

Despite the victimization claims, only two persons were executed for war crimes at the conclusion of the Civil War, the nation's greatest armed conflict. By comparison, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) in Tokyo ordered the execution of seven "Class-A'' war criminals. Those historic revisionists in Japan who claim "victor's justice" should contemplate the number ― likely in the thousands ― of allied leaders who would have faced execution following a Japanese victory.

This mythology of a noble "lost cause" arose in both the defeated confederacy and imperial Japan. The confederate myth was promoted decades after the war in Hollywood movies like "Gone with the Wind." It was the South that was seen as the victim, despite the Fort Sumter attack. If the South's romanticized victimization had "Gone with the Wind" as its Bible, Tokyo has its equivalent in the Yasukuni Shrine and Yushukan Museum. There, imperial Japan is not an aggressor who attacked the United States, but a nation of samurai warriors like ‘'the knights" in "Gone with the Wind." The devastation of the Yankees' burning of Atlanta has its equivalent in the atomic bombings. Pearl Harbor, like Fort Sumter, is conveniently rationalized as an act triggered by Yankee duplicity ― whether by the election of Lincoln or the imposition by Roosevelt of the oil embargo.

World War II was America's war. Pacific horrors included the Bataan Death March, the comfort women, prisoner of war and other slave labor, the rape of Nanking, Unit 731, and the sacking of Manila. Tojo, whose spirit tablet is now enshrined at Yasukuni, infamously ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor ― the greatest such attack on Americans, with 2,400 dead, before Sept. 11 surpassed it with almost 3,000 casualties. Can Americans ever sanction paying homage to such a man any more than to Osama bin Laden? Are not the Koreans and Chinese justified in raising objections to such a practice?

In one more parallel to the post-reconstruction South, present day Japan has its own racial extremists. The fanatics in the sound trucks on Tokyo streets are not harmless. I have been informed that they have verbally threatened the brave Japanese women who administer the Women's Active Museum of War and Peace (WAM) in Tokyo, dedicated to the comfort women and other victims of sexual violence in armed conflict. They have visited Korea and New Jersey to physically deface comfort women memorials. They have sent a disgusting CD to a Korean shelter for comfort women, defaming them as "prostitutes." And they have shown up at rallies in Korean neighborhoods in Japan, screaming "kill Koreans!" and advocating sexual assault on Korean women.

Similar reprehensible acts, once tolerated against minorities in the United States, ultimately produced hate crime legislation. Perhaps the Japanese Diet should consider equivalent legislation. And it is time to refute the mythology that imperial Japan fought to liberate fellow Asians from Western imperialism. Japan's Asian neighbors have made it clear what they think of that fabrication. America should actively join in advancing healing in Asia, as it did with the Holocaust issue in Europe. As our own troubled post-Civil War history demonstrates, burying our heads in the sand will only lead to counterproductive results. And pushing Korea into a corner on a choice between Abe's Japan and Xi Jinping's China may lead to a result not to Washington's liking. For the past isn't dead in the Pacific; it is very much alive.

Dennis Halpin is a former Peace Corps volunteer in Korea, former U.S. consul in Busan, and former staff member, advising on Asian issues for more than 12 years, on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He is currently serving as a visiting scholar at the U.S.-Korea Institute at SAIS (Johns Hopkins).