Japanese Hypocrisy Towards India

[Guest guest]

The Great Japanese Hypocrisy

FRANCOIS GAUTIER

 

When Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh visited Japan last month,

Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi urged India to sign the global

nuclear test ban treaty, "so as to remove, he said, a lingering

thorn in Indo-Japanese relations". What he implied was that Tokyo,

one of India'###### aid donors, will otherwise not resume all the

loans and aids which it had cut off after India's nuclear explosions

in May 1998.

 

Japan makes it out as if its rigid moral stand against India – the

harshest in the Industrialized World after Pokhran II – stems from

the horrendous memories it has of the two nuclear bombs dropped in

1945 by the US Air Force on the cities of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki. "Never again this monstrosity of man upon man", they say.

And to illustrate their painful point, a ruin has been left standing

in Hiroshima and periodical exhibitions are taken all over the

world, showing the unbearable photos of what nuclear weapons do to

humans beings and cities. Adversaries of nuclear armament within

India, such as Prafulla Bidwai in his forthcoming book "South Asia

on a short fuse", also repeatedly use the Japanese example to

proclaim : "see what kind of world we are giving to our children"...

 

Yet, one has to go a little beyond appearances so as to take a fresh

look at the real facts. Firstly, the Japanese are not as goody-goody

as they would like us to believe. Right from the beginning of the

century, Japan displayed a natural bend for expansionism and

colonialism, acquiring for instance Formose, occupying Manchuria or

Korea and massacring thousands of civilians in the Chinese city of

Nanking, a genocide, which still stands out for its sheer

unwarranted barbarism. The atrocities committed by the Japanese

during the Second World War, where they sided with the Nazis against

most of the Free World, are as horrendous if not more, than the

effects of the two nuclear bombs dropped on them. In 1941, they

attacked the United States by treachery in Pearl Harbor, destroying

the entire US fleet and killing thousands of people. The Japanese

were also known to be extremely cruel to their prisoners of war,

starving and beheading many of them, or using "slave" prostitutes

for the pleasure of their soldiers (many of whom were Korean women

and are still alive today). The Japanese soldiers were fanatical to

the point of absurdity - remember how the "kamikaze" pilots would

throw their planes against American ships, taking their lives, along

with many others ? They were disciplined to the point of being

robots of war : until recently, lone Japanese soldiers would still

come out of hiding in remote jungles, forty or fifty years after the

end of the war, because nobody had given them the order to surrender

(and note that they were welcomed as heroes, not as nitwits. Indeed,

many present Japanese politicians still consider that Japan did no

wrong during the 2d World War). Furthermore, India seems to have

forgotten that the Japanese invaded her borders 54 years ago and

killed many in Assam.

 

Quite a few historians believe that in 1945, after four painful

years of war, Japanese morale was still so exalted and its high

command had such a an inexhaustible reservoir of soldiers ready to

die for their country, that that the two nuclear bombs dropped on

Hiroshima and Nagasaki shortened the war by TWO years. It is true

that they created unspeakable mayhem, killing 150.000 people in

Hiroshima and 80.000 in Nagasaki, but they probably saved four times

that amount of lives and allowed the world to go back to peace and

start reconstructing. We all know that there is no "good" nuclear

bomb and that we have to move quickly towards a denuclearized world

if we want lasting peace. But in the spirit of the Bhagavad Gita,

force is sometimes "dharma", duty - when it is to defend one's

children or borders, or when it helps shorten wars. The two bombs of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have sprung from that sense of dharma;

and even India's nuclear deterrent makes such sense, when one knows

about China's hegemonic ambitions and the ninety ballistic missiles

it has placed in Tibet, most of them pointed towards Indian cities,

or the "Islamic" Bomb in the hands of volatile Pakistan.

 

Thus, in the light of Japan's not-so-ancient violent past, it could

be asked to the Japanese who they are to give moral lessons to India

after Pokhran II ? Because it is also obvious, for those who know

contemporary Japan, that the old hegemonic spirit is not fully dead –

it has partly reincarnated itself in other fields and its

expansionism might be waiting to manifest itself anew. Japan today

has shown us, for instance, how business can be conducted as a war…

and also in a spirit of revenge for their humiliating defeat by the

Americans. The ruthlessness of the Japanese can still be perceived

in their over-competitive system of education, which leads many of

their children to commit suicide. It is also said that Japanese tend

sometimes to be racists : they particularly look down on colored

races… such as Indians ! Militarily, their navy is beginning to flex

its muscles and it may be only because they are forbidden to have

nuclear weapons by the US, that they have not tried their hand at it

(and why they vent their frustration on India for having done so !).

 

Finally, compare Japanese bloody and war-like history with

India's.India's armies never invaded other nations to colonize them;

India has always been a land of tolerance, accepting in its fold all

persecuted communities of the world, be it the Parsis from Iran, the

Jews, or the Christians from Syria; and India never committed

genocides on other communities, like the Japanese did on the

Chinese. Finally, Japan should be a little more grateful to India

from whom it got Buddhism, its martial arts (kalaripayat), or even

the concept of the Samurais (kshatriya) !

 

FRANCOIS GAUTIER