Responsibility For War Research Articles

Decolonialization and assumption of war responsibility

(2000). Decolonialization and assumption of war responsibility. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 71-83.

Comment on Hanasaki Kohei: decolonalization and the assumption of war responsibility

Comment on Hanasaki Kohei: decolonalization and the assumption of war responsibility

A message from the Showa emperor

The American occupation of Japan following World War II lasted from 1945 to 1952 and produced a mixed legacy. Initially, the Americans promoted a progressive and even revolutionary agenda of “demilitarization and democratization.” As the cold war intensified, however, a “reverse course” policy assumed center stage, in which U.S. policy-makers threw their support behind the reconstruction of Japan as a conservative cold war bastion against the rise of communism in Asia.In his recent book Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, John W. Dower assesses these developments, paying particular attention to how the Japanese people themselves responded to defeat and the multiple challenges of creating a new society. The essay that follows below expands on one of the themes in Embracing Defeat: “oxymoronic democracy.” One aspect of this was the “bureaucratic democracy” that the U.S. occupation authorities promoted through their own authoritarian, top-down modus operandi. Another manifestation of “oxymoronic democracy”—that focused on in this article—was the peculiar “emperor-system democracy” that General Douglas MacArthur and his top aides ensured by not only retaining the Japanese imperial institution, but also insisting that Emperor Hirohito, whose reign defined the “Showa era” (1926-1989), be exonerated from war responsibility and retained on the throne. This article introduces (and reproduces in full) a formerly top-secret “message” from Emperor Hirohito to the Americans that Professor Dower came upon after completing Embracing Defeat.Embracing Defeat won the 1999 National Book Award in nonfiction, and was awarded the 1999 John K. Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association (for best historical study dealing with Asia since 1800).This present article was originally published in the September 1999 issue of the Japanese journal Sekai (and later cited as one of the “best articles of 1999” in the newspaper Asahi Shimbun). A slightly abridged version in English, titled “The Showa Emperor and Japan's Postwar Imperial Democracy,” was published by the Japan Policy Research Institute (Cardiff, Calif.) as IPRI Working Paper no. 61 (October 1999). BCAS is grateful to Chalmers Johnson of the JPRI for permission to reproduce this original version of the text.

Doing the Right Thing: relief agencies, moral dilemmas and moral responsibility in political emergencies and war by HUGO SLIM Upsala: Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency and Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1997. Pp. 18. £5.95 (pbk.).

Doing the Right Thing: relief agencies, moral dilemmas and moral responsibility in political emergencies and war by HUGO SLIM Upsala: Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency and Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1997. Pp. 18. £5.95 (pbk.). - Volume 37 Issue 4

The Politics of Memory: Nation, Individual and Self

The Japanese political world has splintered to pieces in the aftermath of the cold war. The same splintering has occurred among intellectuals as well, as one distorted claim invites another, until one hasn't a clue who is conservative and who is progressive. The present focus of the confusion is the so-called comfort women problem. Holocaust revisionism has created scandals in the past in Japan as elsewhere, but this time the fire has ignited on our own doorstep. With the emergence of a Japanese version of historical revisionism, the comfort women issue has become a litmus test of attitudes about war responsibility and the construction of public memory.

The Japanese movement to “correct” history

Why is it that in Japan the question of war responsibility seems to have become more acute as time passes? Following the end of the cold war globally and of Liberal Democratic Party hegemony in the Diet domestically, a particularly sharp debate ensued in the media, Diet, courts, and in the national community in general. As the 1995 commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the war approached, a national consensus in favor of apology, admission of the aggressive and colonial character of the war, and compensation to the victims, gradually took shape. In reaction, a counterforce, repudiating apology and reconciliation and insisting on the absolute purity of the national cause, also emerged. The treatment of the wartime “comfort women” issue became central. This paper considers considers the evolution of the Liberal View of History Study Group and the Society for the Making of New School Textbooks in History. What does it mean that these groups represent themselves as “liberal” and what support do they enjoy? The paper concludes that the movement these organizations represent may be intellectually incoherent, but it possesses a considerable emotional force as the voice of a repressed nationalism, and as such deserves close attention.

The search for normality: national identity and historical consciousness in Germany since 1800

Berger, Stefan. The Search for Normality: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany since 1800. Providence: Berghahn. 1997. 307 pp. $59.95 This is a rich and informative analysis of the obsession of German historians with the nineteenth-century concept of nation as the guidepost for their professional work and identity. The inclusion of in the title is somewhat misleading: the book is not a treatise on the search for social and cultural normality that has been a preoccupation in twentiethcentury German society and is beginning to be studied as an important clue to the debate about modernization in this country. Instead Berger defines normality as the state of grace to which nineteenth-century historians such as Treitschke elevated their idea of the nation both as the telos of German history and as the rationale of their professional identity, providing a powerful scenario for twentieth-century German historians in their quest for relevance. In this scenario, the year 1945 and the subsequent division of Germany into two states represent the nadir of a nationally conceived historiography while the unification of 1990 allows the reinstatement of traditional conceptions of the of a unified German nation. Berger is primarily concerned with the developments in the West German academy since 1945, with valuable insights and an excellent chapter (7) on the fights over the history and historiography of the GDR, the second German dictatorship. Contrary to the volume's title, national identity and historical consciousness in Germany are not analyzed since 1800 but rather since 1945, with short outlooks on imperial, Weimar and Nazi Germany. Berger makes no bones about his sympathies with the liberal Left in their critique of the national paradigm of the German historical profession which was hardly broken by the impact and aftermath of National Socialism. He assails German historians in their insistence on the supreme relevance of the nation, pointing to the fact that nation is a constructed rather than an organically or naturally grown unit of social bonding. The historian, instead of propagating and extending the myths of nation and nationalism, should deconstruct them in order to overcome the nationalist obsession that contributed so much to the human misery of the twentieth century. Of course, applying insights from recent research on nationalism risks fostering unhistorical perceptions of historical developments. However, with his focus on post-1945 historians, Berger can draw on the obvious necessity to rethink the national paradigm after its terrible misuse under Hitler. Berger demonstrates how little historians, in the shadow of Gerhard Ritter and Friedrich Meinecke, re-conceptualized their narrative of the German nation after World War II. He discusses with good arguments how the Fischer controversy in the 1960s-about Germany's responsibility for World War I-triggered a rethinking of the national narrative for which the development of quantifiable social history, lead by Hans-Ulrich Wehler and the Bielefeld School, provided new scholarly impulses. It is not exactly a secret that the profession of history in Germany, despite its great scholarly tradition, has tended to turn into an academic parasite of political nationalism. …

Doing the right thing: relief agencies, moral dilemmas and responsibility in political emergencies and war.

In recent years a new generation of relief workers and relief agencies has become embroiled in the heat of civil wars and political emergencies, and the humanitarian community has had to revisit its fundamental principles and address the ethics of what it does. This paper sets out to continue this important debate by emphasising that ethical analysis should always be an essential part of humanitarian practice. The paper seeks to recognise the difficult moral choices relief agencies are facing today and gives some practical guidelines to relief agency staff when confronting the ethics of a given situation. In particular, it hopes to introduce some ethical principles into the debate about humanitarianism and contribute to the moral vocabulary which is being developed to improve relief agencies' ethical analysis. The paper starts by looking at the essential characteristics of a moral dilemma, and the way in which other types of tough choice can masquerade as moral dilemmas. It then introduces some basic moral principles surrounding the key ethical notions of action consequences and moral responsibility in an effort to show how relief agencies might begin to develop a process of ethical analysis in their work. Finally, it explores how relief agencies might develop a more intuitive form of ethical analysis based on an organisational conscience and moral role models.

Eisenhower's Ideology in World War II

Eisenhower's antifascist sentiments were first expressed nearly one and one-half years into the war in response to a specific incident. His more basic ideological commitment, expressed throughout the war, was to voluntary self-restraint and obedience to duty, which he called the first tenet of his religion, as the foundation of social order. His apocalyptic view of the war was based on a dualism that pitted the selfish against the selfless. He saw the war largely as a spiritual struggle within the Allied camp between these two forces. Civilians as well as soldiers were exhorted to sacrifice personal interests for the sake of total mobilization, which meant exercising the virtue of selflessness. When he eventually expressed opposition to fascism, he interpreted fascism as a manifestation of selfishness and social disorder. This ideological foundation is vital for understanding Eisenhower's views and policies as president, including his attitude toward the military-industrial complex.

Sir Hersch Lauterpacht: An Appraisal

Despite our family connections,1 I was never closely associated with Hersch Lauterpacht I recall him as a kind and considerate uncle to my children, with whom he established close relations, and of course his renown as a giant in the field of international law culminating in his accession to the International Court of Justice in the Hague. Despite his lifelong connection with Zionist affairs and with Israel, Hersch Lauterpacht must be remembered as an international lawyer of universal outlook. The third of a century from the publication of his first book in 1927 to his untimely death in 1960 was a period largely unaffected by the North-South, anti-colonialist and East-West divisions that marked the following thirty years from 1960 to 1990. Nor were the massive substantive developments of those years, particularly in the fields of the environment, the law of the sea, the extension of protection of human rights, disarmament and confidence-building measures, foreseeable during his lifetime. But although he wrote during a time when international law was relatively static, set in a mould formed more than half a century before his immersion in the subject, he wrote with a unique sense of legal principle and especially a novel, even in his time daring, belief in the position of the individual as a subject of international law. This belief was translated into a proposal, published in 1945, for the establishment of an international bill of human rights. This document had an immediate impact upon the emerging European commitment to the formal protection of individual rights in the shape of the European Convention on Human Rights concluded in 1950. Lauterpacht's ideas on this subject began to evolve even in his student days in Vienna. There, as a leader of the Jewish student movement, he took a particular interest in the then recently developed concept of the 'mandate' in relation to Palestine and other Turkish and German colonies. This led to his first book on Private Law Sources and Analogies of International Law (1927). The loss of his own family in Poland during the Holocaust undoubtedly influenced the development of his ideas regarding individual responsibility for war

How tojibunshi: Making and Marketing Self-histories of Shōwa among the Masses in Postwar Japan

The death of Emperor Hirohito on 7 January 1989, followed more recently by the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, has indeed incited a degree of historical awareness among Japanese from all walks of life. In the wake of an enigmatic period of social self-restraint (jishuku) during the final months of the Shōwa period (1926–89), fettered reflections of Shōwa Japan inundated the media. Despite a few outspoken critics at the margins, retrospectives appearing on Japanese television and in mainstream print media after Hirohito's death have largely glossed over touchy subjects such as war atrocities, war responsibility, and the continued existence of the emperor system in the postwar era. No doubt that threats of right-wing terrorism aimed at even the mildest of critics of Japan's involvement in the Fifteen-Year War (1931–45) have done their share in encouraging such self-censorship. By most accounts, such efforts have proved effective in diffusing critical public opinion and in pruning public memory. Yet, the ending of the era has provided an extra impetus and a rhetorical rationale for a reckoning of everyday life in Shōwa Japan by the masses whose lives coincided with it: it is over, so now we can tell its story.

The Iran-Iraq War: The Politics of Aggression

Iraqi Attitudes and Interpretation of the 1975 Agreement, Ibraham Anvari Tehrani Analyses of the Risks of War - Iran-Iraq Discord, 1979-1980, Keith McLachlan The Wars of the Cities, S. Taheri Shemirani Cultural Identity in Danger, Mehdi Hojjat The Impact of the War on Iraq, Laith Kubba War Responsibility - Governments or Individuals?, Abdolrahman Alem The USSR and the Iran-Iraq War - From Brezhnev to Gorbachev, Mohjaddin Mesbahi Saudi Arabia and the United States - Partnership in the Persian Gulf, A. Reza Sheikholeslami US Reflagging of Kuwaiti Tankers, Elizabeth Gamlen and Paul Rogers International Law - Observations and Violations, Bahman Baktiari The UN Secretary-General - Attitudes and Latitudes, Paul Tavernier The Inherent Right of Individual Self-Defence in the Iran-Iraq War, Djamchid Momtaz The Problem of Retaliation in Modern Warfare from the Point of View of Fiqh, Hamid Algar Morale versus Technology - The Power of Iran in the Persian Gulf War, James A. Bill Aggression in Historical Pespective, Richard Bulliet The Need for Modification and Development of the Laws of War in Modern International Law, Saeid Mirzaee Yengejeh.

Errata: The Showa Emperor's "Monologue" and the Problem of War Responsibility

Errata: The Showa Emperor's "Monologue" and the Problem of War Responsibility

Legacies and Ambiguities: Postwar Fiction and Culture in West Germany and Japan (review)

Reviewed by: Legacies and Ambiguities: Postwar Fiction and Culture in West Germany and Japan Yoshio Iwamoto Ernestine Schlant and J. Thomas Rimer , eds. Legacies and Ambiguities: Postwar Fiction and Culture in West Germany and Japan. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center P; Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991. 323 pp. No price given. Early in the introduction to this collection of essays, Ernestine Schlant makes plain that the book's purpose is not to furnish close comparative analyses of significant issues of the sort one might expect in a book dealing with the postwar literature and culture of West Germany and Japan, two countries that share a number of striking similarities in their prewar and postwar developments. The thirteen essays, prepared for a conference held in 1988 to explore World War II's legacies to the two countries, address specific topics with reference to either West Germany or Japan (not both). "At this juncture in the project, it was clear that true comparative studies [End Page 991] by any of the participating scholars could not yet be undertaken." By juxtaposing essays representing the German and Japanese points of view on chosen topics, the conference organizers hoped to generate discussion of ideas and issues that would stimulate full-fledged comparative work in the future. The topics comprise the six major sections of the book: "Historical Overviews;" "The Postwar Intellectual Climate;" "Literature Under the Occupation;" "Postoccupation Literary Trends;" "The Critic and Critical Institutions in the Postwar Era;" and "The Writer as Public Conscience." The essays, all by eminent specialists in German or Japanese history, literature, and culture, are highly informative and brimming with provocative insights, touching on a whole gamut of questions, from the predictable issue of war responsibility to the impact of Occupation censorship on cultural matters. Perhaps unavoidably, as hinted at by the words "overviews," "climate," and "trends," most of the essays tend toward the general, delineating broad outlines of their subjects. Schlant's opening essay, presumably based at least in part on the conference discussions, attempts "to establish some rudimentary guideposts for comparisons." She notes, for instance, the possibility for fruitful comparative study of the phenomenon of literary withdrawal, of avoiding history and taking refuge in nature, seen in the early postwar literature of both Germany and Japan, as reported in a few of the essays. A host of other potential comparative topics come to mind—for instance, the seemingly pervasive role of left-wing ideology in both Germany and Japan, mentioned by many of the essayists, in shaping the course of postwar history and culture in the two countries, even as they democratized under the American presence. By focusing on just two writers, Wolfgang Koeppen and Ernst Jünger, who stand at opposite poles in the literary spectrum, Dagmar Barnouw's essay is one of the few that gives a substantive sense of the literary texts behind the discussion. While her aim is to demonstrate, by reference to these two authors, the shifts over the past forty years in critical perceptions of novels concerned with guilt, many of her remarks suggest avenues for comparative study. Among other things, her comments about Ernst Jünger's elitism, aestheticism, and cultural conservatism call up the figure of the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. As an initial foray into the daunting area of postwar German-Japanese comparative literary studies, this volume amply fulfills its promise of challenging the reader "to participate in making the comparisons." [End Page 992] Yoshio Iwamoto Indiana University Copyright © 1992 Purdue Research Foundation

Political Implications of Illegal Arms Exports from the United States

The study of international arms trade has come in bursts. In the 1930s the proliferation of studies coincided with the international attention given the merchants of death and their alleged responsibility for World War I. As the League of Nations and eventually most arms producing nations debated the negative consequences of the private trade in arms, a great deal of light was shed on the patterns, purposes, and effects of this trade.' In the 1970s, as the rise in oil prices and the end of the colonial era led to major changes in the arms trade, academicians, journalists, and policy analysts responded with an outpouring of studies and analyses of governmental arms trade.2 By the mid-1980s, attention was once again drawn to the international trade in arms, but this time to those transactions termed illicit or illegal. Headlines in the United States regularly disclosed indictments for the illegal export of significant military equipment from the United States to the USSR, Eastern bloc countries, Iran, South Africa, the Irish Republican Army, or some other country on the prohibited list. Congres-

The Showa Emperor's "Monologue" and the Problem of War Responsibility

The Showa Emperor's "Monologue" and the Problem of War Responsibility

Peace education and responsibility for war

Peace education and responsibility for war

New Light on the Israeli-Arab Conflict and the Refugee Problem and Its Origins

The partial and limited opening of the Israeli government archives relating to the first years of the state's existence has resulted in a number of surprises among scholars, journalists, and the Israeli public at large.1 Even though the documentation in question is incomplete-many files are still considered ultra-secret-it has been sufficient to shatter several of the myths dear not only to the Israelis but to western opinion in general. One finds, for example, proof that there was a policy favoring new immigrants from the West over their brethren from the Arab and Islamic countries, this contrary to the propaganda of the time. But it is the documents involving the conflict with the Arab world, particularly the Palestinians, that have aroused the greatest interest among researchers. The vast majority of Israelis have always believed that Israel and its leaders have consistently done everything possible to achieve peace with their Arab neighbors. In their view, then, full responsibility for the successive wars, the Palestinian refugee problem, the arms race, and so on, falls squarely on the Arabs. As for the 1948 war, justice was totally and unquestionably on their side. But now, documents of the period-and Israeli documents at thatmake it impossible to view these questions in the same light. It is true that the overwhelming majority of the Palestinians were strongly opposed to the dismemberment of their country. Nonetheless, it is now clear that large

The ‘frozen front’: the Labour government, the division of Germany and the origins of the cold war, 1945–7

Scholars have long argued over the origins, nature and impact of the cold war. 1 During the 1950s and the early 1960s the West was held in thrall by the so-called traditionalist view of the cold war, expounded, in many cases, by those who had been active in government during these years. According to this school of thought, the desire of the Soviet Union to expand across Europe was held in check only by the defensive, protective policy of the United States. The cold war was in essence an American response to a Soviet challenge. During the Vietnam War and the crisis of American self-confidence that ensued, American scholars took a fresh look at the 1940s. These scholars' revisionism led them to depict the early cold war years as a period of the onward march of American capitalism, seeking power, influence and East European and world markets, using the myth of Soviet expansionism to mask the true nature of the United States' own foreign policy. Both these interpretations cast Britain in a supporting rather than a leading role. One reason for this is that Britain is seen in retrospect as a middle-ranking power, unlikely to have been capable of determining the course of events in Europe. It has, however, become increasingly clear since the opening of the relevant British archives that such a view is unhistorical. Whatever happened later, Britain was, and still regarded itself as, a major power in the immediate postwar years.2 This article, based mainly on the official British archives, will argue that to the extent that the cold war began with the division of Germany between East and West, Britain carries the responsibility for the cold war as much as Russia or America. It was not until 1948 that the lines of bipolar confrontation were publicly drawn, symbolized by the European Recovery Programme, the Berlin crisis and the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In the postwar diplomatic negotiations about Germany, negotiations that shaped this superpower confrontation, Britain played a leading part.

Responsibility for War of the Emperor from Legal Standpoints

Responsibility for War of the Emperor from Legal Standpoints