Remembering Hiroshima - and more

The San Francisco Chronicle has been running a number of articles around the Hiroshima anniversary.  Such as: HIROSHIMA: Reconciling the Memories/Wrestling with ghosts of war/New attacks on Japan's atrocities - conservatives tired of apologies by Charles Burress 08/03/05.

East Asia, unlike Europe and the United States, is still wrestling with the ghosts of World War II.

I imagine that that will come as surprising news to many Europeans!  But the article's focus is on the Japanese experience:

The 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bombing on Saturday, of the Nagasaki bombing on Tuesday and of the war's end in Asia next weekend find Japan under renewed attack from activists who say the country never faced up to the atrocities its army committed before and during the war.

Japan's ruling conservatives in the Liberal Democratic Party are fighting back on multiple battlefronts: a war shrine that extols the World War II heroism of Japan's soldiers, including 14 found to be war criminals; a new middle school history textbook that critics accuse of whitewashing wartime atrocities; and proposed revision of Japan's "Peace Constitution." Imposed by the United States in 1947, the Constitution's Article 9 renounces war and prohibits Japan from maintaining forces for waging war.

Complaining that liberal war-guilt since 1945 has given the nation a masochistic self-image, conservatives are pushing to revise the nation's basic education law to instill more patriotism in the nation's youth. Education Minister Nariaki Nakayama said in a June speech that the curriculum under the nation's left-leaning teachers "has overemphasized that Japan is a bad country, " the Associated Press reported.

The politics of memorializing the past can be fascinating.  Especially when the past is still so much present:

Unlike the 50th anniversary of the war's end, when Socialist Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama issued a full apology, and a sharply divided Parliament passed an equivocal apology after prolonged debate, this anniversary has a low profile among national government ranks.

Most of the planned commemorations have been organized by nongovernmental organizations and activists, while local governments in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are participating in events there.

As is frequently the case in these discussions of how to officially observe controversial but important elements of a country's past, current political tensions both stem from the issue itself and are fed by the emotional intensity of current conflicts:

Japan recently has moved gingerly toward a more active military, in large part under pressure from the United States. It is cooperating with the American government on an anti-missile shield, and last year it sent troops to Iraq in noncombat roles, the first dispatch of soldiers to a combat zone since 1945. A few ardent conservatives have even raised the possibility of Japan's acquiring nuclear arms, largely in response to North Korea's nuclear threat.

The current turmoil may be just the latest quake along a deep fissure that has ruptured many times. But both Japan and China display signs of rising nationalism fanned by government support while Japan's relations with South Korea and China are plummeting.

"It's the lowest point," said Hisayoshi Ina, a columnist and editorial writer for the Nihon Keizai business daily.

Public opinion polls in China and Japan have shown significant increases in each population's negative feelings toward the other.

"The young generation -- they hate each other," said Ma, the Osaka University of Education professor.