
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, August 18, 1994                   TAG: 9408310014
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A12   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

JAPAN'S AMNESIA

HISTORY IS supposed to be written by the victors, but such is not the case in post-World War II Japan. For many in that insular, tradition-bound society, the history of their terrible defeat is limited to the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

As the only people to have suffered the devastation of an atomic attack, the Japanese are in a singularly strong position to call the world's attention to the unacceptably high price of using weapons of mass destruction. How their position is weakened, though, by their refusal to face up to their role as the aggressor in the war that led to the development and use - against them - of such weapons.

The rest of the world remembers Japan's brutal occupation of China, Indochina and the Pacific islands; the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor; the Bataan Death March; the bloody toll exacted in fighting an enemy bound by the code of bushido - death rather than surrender.

But as a society, Japan seems not to remember. For 50 years, Japan has seen itself as the victim of atomic warfare.

So it was. But so, too, was Japan a fierce aggressor. The world community cannot afford to minimize the horror of the A-bomb - least of all the United States, which alone in human history has employed a weapon of such magnitude. Yet the whitewashed history presented in Japan has ill-served the Japanese people in coming to terms with the events of World War II, their own country's role in it, and their relations with other countries today.

There's a lesson in that for our country, which always has acknowledged its use of atomic weaponry but never really understood the full horror of it. If we are to learn from our past, we cannot afford to sift out the painful, the ugly, the unjust, the horrifying.

Ah, some might argue, but that's the least of our worries here: The political-correctness police have ensured that every wrong is noted, and every ideal undermined with examples of the nation's failure to live up to its founding principles. And indeed, rewriting the history of a proud, prosperous, free nation with a breast-beating list of only such failings would be folly.

Neither, though, would this country be well-served by a jingoistic interpretation of national and world events that expunges the ugly parts of its history. The good and the bad, the pragmatic and the principled, in total, have created the nation we have today. America is imperfect, but good enough to afford itself an unflinching look of what it has been, and how close it is to what it aspires to be. Is Japan?

by CNB