Glorifying a War Criminal

Every nation has its naysayers, but a new Japanese movie portraying Hideki Tojo as a misunderstood grandfather rather than the war criminal he was reaches a new and chilling level. It comes from a major studio, has a big-name star and, especially disturbing, has been warmly embraced in advance of its release by Japanese rightists, including more than two dozen members of Parliament.

More than 50 years after World War II, of which Gen. Tojo was Tokyo’s main architect, many Japanese still insist on denying the facts. Revisionists say that the death toll in the infamous “Rape of Nanking” was exaggerated, not the 250,000 Chinese killed that independent sources claim. Revisionists say that Japan’s infamous Unit 731 did not conduct biological warfare experiments in China, though members of the unit have testified that they did. The naysayers claim that the invasions of Indonesia and Singapore were intended to expel Western colonizers, not to replace them with Japanese colonizers hungry for oil.

For far too long Japanese textbooks omitted mention of Japan’s true role in World War II. Where it could not be glossed over completely, euphemisms abounded: The government forced authors who dared to write “invasion” to change the term to “advance.” Only last year did the Japanese Supreme Court overrule the Education Ministry on its attempts to rewrite history.

Tojo proudly joined Hitler and Mussolini as a leader of the Axis powers, and paid the price. He was convicted of war crimes by a court of the allied powers and hanged, a just end to the violence he wrought in Asia and ultimately brought upon the Japanese themselves.

Fortunately for the sake of the country, the rightists do have some opposition--Japanese who insist that their countrymen learn what happened in the war, even if some cannot bring themselves to apologize. Their Asian neighbors have not forgotten, nor should they.