DURING THE first fortnight of August, as the Tokyo summer begins getting into its sticky stride, its citizens gear up for a string of painful second World War anniversaries, climaxing on the 15th – the date the nation surrendered.
Fresh controversy invariably flares over how to remember the conflict: as a shameful stain or a futile but honourable attempt to resist foreign aggressors. This year, however, the controversy is set to move to Hiroshima.
The true spiritual home of revisionist debate is Yasukuni, a Shinto temple in the heart of Tokyo that enshrines the nation’s war dead. For many a monument to Japan’s undigested militarism, the shrine is host every year to nationalist speeches praising the war as a glorious episode that helped free Asia from white colonialism. But rarely have the nationalists dared to make those claims in the city that writer Ian Buruma calls “the centre of Japanese victim-hood” – until now.
On Thursday – the 64th anniversary of Hiroshima’s incineration by a US nuclear bomb – former general Toshio Tamogami will break that unspoken rule by giving a speech entitled Casting doubt on the peace of Hiroshima.
Nobody but Mr Tamogami knows what it contains, but it is likely to make headlines: last year he said he might have used nuclear weapons against the US had he been a general in 1945.
Mr Tamogami was sacked from his post as air self-defence force chief last October for saying Japan was a benevolent imperial power in Asia, bringing prosperity to China and Korea, and was “trapped” into attacking Pearl Harbor, starting its disastrous war with the US. He has since become a hero to the revisionist right, championing their cause that the war was just, and that the West’s racism and cruelty climaxed in Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945.
Many hope to stop him before he can pick at those wounds.
“It’s not too late,” said Naoto Amaki, a former Japanese ambassador, who has accused Mr Tamogami of tarnishing Hiroshima. “The government, intellectuals, citizens, supporters of the constitution, proper rightists who love the country, everybody should join hands by going beyond their positions to postpone Mr Tamogami’s speechfor the sake of Japan.”
Mr Tamogami’s speech is expected to go head to head for press attention with Thursday’s peace memorial service. A record 56 countries will be represented, a sign, according to the organisers, that the tide is turning against nuclear weapons – notwithstanding North Korea’s recent test. One man, however, will be absent: US president Barack Obama. A panel of experts at a weekend peace symposium in the city recommended asking him to attend, and even host, a disarmament conference.
“[Hiroshima] would be the right place for a summit of the leaders of all the nuclear states to discuss disarmament,” said Frank von Hippel, an assistant director for national security under former US president Bill Clinton.
Mr Obama’s April speech in Prague, in which he called for the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons, made front-page news in one of the two cities in the world to have suffered a nuclear attack.