The Electronic Telegraph 25 April 1995 FRONT PAGE

Japan's abiding shame

Will the event strike the right mood for the nation? The Government deserves some sympathy in reconciling the wide range of views between generations about what is appropriate, and indeed whether the Hyde Park occasion should take place at all. First, on the general principle, there is no doubt that it is right to celebrate the victory which ushered in Europe's post-war peace and prosperity. Jubilation needs to be tempered with dignity but, equally, remembrance should not subside into mawkish reverie. It would be improper to slight the sensitivities of veterans whose sacrifices made VE-Day possible, just as the occasion should also seek to engage the sympathies of their children and grandchildren - who need to know more than the government-backed schools video, dismissing Churchill in 14 seconds, which we report on another page.

The Government's task is made immeasurably easier by the fact that Germans, other than the outcast minority on the neo-fascist fringe, acknowledge their country's shame, and for 50 years have made amends. The evil of the Nazis and the necessity of Hitler's defeat are not seriously debated by decent people. Chancellor Helmut Kohl will attend the celebrations in London; there are to be no martial parades or crowing triumphalism, and the abiding theme is to be "reconciliation".

Unfortunately, the same will not be possible in August, when it is time to commemorate victory over Japan. For, while Germany has been honest about its past, Japan's post-war history has been one of shabby evasion, half-truths and outright lies. Tokyo has only recently acknowledged that Hirohito's army massacred 150,000 defenceless civilians in the 1937 Rape of Nanking, and still denies that abominable germ-warfare tests were inflicted on human guinea pigs at experimental clinics across Asia. It was nothing out of the ordinary when, last week, a prominent Japanese MP suggested that Japan had been "brainwashed" into believing it started the war. The truth, of course, is that Tokyo has brainwashed its people into believing Japan is innocent.

This fiction is buttressed by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, which are used to argue that Japan was more sinned against than sinning. Last year, Japanese outrage prompted America to scrap plans for a Hiroshima commemorative stamp. More recently, it took American veterans' outrage to persuade President Clinton to keep the term VJ-Day (Victory over Japan) rather than adopting VP-Day (Victory in the Pacific) to appease Tokyo. Now some Japanese politicians are waxing apoplectic and demanding an apology because Mr Clinton dared to suggest that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were justified.

As the 50th anniversary of VJ-Day approaches, Japanese demands for apologies, revisionist history and a unique victim status can be expected to increase. The city of Hiroshima's commemoration is shaping up to be an exculpatory spectacular. The West must resist the deplorable Japanese efforts to transfer the burden of shame. To succumb to these would disgrace the memory of those who suffered so much to defeat Japanese military tyranny. The dropping of the atomic bombs, which killed more than 200,000 people, could never provide any cause for congratulation. But they ended the war instantly. By even the lowest calculation, 30,000-50,000 Allied soldiers would have been killed in a conventional assault on mainland Japan. After the attacks on Pearl Harbour and Hong Kong, after the inhumanity of Nanking and the Burma Railway, no conceivable apology is due to Japan for the means that were employed to end the dreadful suffering that nation brought upon the world.

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