/jp/ - Otaku Culture

THE farce has some distinctly Japanese elements, not all of them necessarily clarified in the retelling. The first is that a hotel and condominium developer would think to sponsor a tasty ¥3m ($30,000) prize for an essay competition on the subject of “The True Outlook for Modern and Contemporary History”.

A bland enough title, perhaps. Except that in Japan “true” is a code word among right-wing nuts for a revisionist interpretation of the wartime past which denies that Japan was an aggressor or that it committed atrocities. Quite astounding is that the competition winner, Toshio Tamogami, was the head of Japan’s air force. His offering is a barely warm hash of thrice-cooked revisionism. Japan’s was a war of self-defence, protecting its perfectly legal territories of Manchuria (North-East China) and Korea against Communist conspirators. Pearl Harbour was a trap laid by the Americans. Japan’s colonial rule was more than benevolent; it was a liberation of Asia from the yoke of Western imperialism—indeed, neighbours look upon wartime Japan with affection. Japan must “reclaim its glorious history”, General Tamogami concluded, with a barrel-rolling flourish and a glorious lack of irony, “for a country that denies its own history is destined to fall.”

Then there is the prime minister himself. In the past, Mr Aso, in a shoot-from-the-hip way, has echoed many of the same right-wing views. He has, for instance, praised Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea from 1910-45—though the Aso mining company from which the family’s fortunes derive used Korean slave labour during the second world war. Since he became prime minister, however, Mr Aso has been on his best behaviour. His government, like its predecessors, endorses fulsome apologies, first formulated in the mid-1990s, accepting Japanese guilt and remorse. But the day he sacked the general, Mr Aso could not resist picking up a volume of similar views from a Tokyo bookstore.