Defender of Japan’s War Past

TOKYO — Name: Nobukatsu Fujioka. Age: 53. Occupation: Professor of education, Tokyo University. Appearance: Unimposing, wears dark suits and forgettable ties. Manner: Quietly deliberate. Rhetoric: Incendiary.

Meet the leader of Japan’s neoconservative backlash. Just when Japanese liberals have started winning their 30-year battle to force a recalcitrant Japan to admit and atone for its World War II aggression, Fujioka has burst onto the scene, insisting that Imperial Japan’s sins have been overstated and demanding a rewrite of the nation’s “masochistic” textbooks to instruct Japanese children in a more “cheerful” view of their history.

Those views have made him the most controversial--and possibly despised--intellectual in Japan today, yet have propelled two of his books onto bestseller lists and earned him surprising mainstream support.

Among his assertions:

* That Japanese were “brainwashed” by the United States to accept the “Tokyo War Crimes Trials view of history,” judging the United States’ conduct during World War II entirely correct and Japan’s wholly wrong. He does not defend the Pearl Harbor attack but argues that Japan behaved no worse than the other combatants.

* That far fewer people were slaughtered in the 1937 Rape of Nanking than the Chinese claim, and that most of them were guerrillas, not civilians.

* That the Asian “comfort women” who supplied sex to Japanese troops were not “military sex slaves” dragooned by the Imperial Army but ordinary prostitutes, and that Japan should therefore retract the apologies it has offered its Asian neighbors, delete the incident from its history textbooks and clear its blackened name.

“I am completely opposed to having the Japanese state branded a sex criminal,” Fujioka said. Children who study history texts that portray Japan as an “evil” and “barbaric” country “will surely despise Japanese history, hate Japan and look upon Japanese people [including themselves] with contempt,” he argued.

Unlike the geriatric right-wing politicians who have long shown a penchant for trying to whitewash Japanese militarism--and sometimes their own wartime records--Fujioka is an apostate leftist from a postwar generation educated under the American occupation.

He spent a year studying at Rutgers University in New Jersey in 1991 and claims that his political conversion to the right came after watching America fight the Persian Gulf War while Japan sat on the sidelines.

Symbol of a Nation Sick of Apologizing

This revisionist crusader cannot be dismissed as a hatemonger, a harbinger of resurgent Japanese militarism or a crank. Rather, his movement reflects Japan’s wounded nationalism, its pervasive gloom, its conflicted relationship with America and its unfulfilled quest for the comfortable national identity that it has failed to find even five decades after World War II.

To many, Fujioka is the symbol of a Japan that is sick of apologizing for its wartime past.

Despite his controversial views, Fujioka is not a fringe character. His allies include 62 lawmakers from Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto’s Liberal Democratic Party; some conservatives from the opposition; the Sankei newspaper, one of Japan’s largest dailies; more than 60 opinion leaders, including prominent writers, critics, psychoanalysts and academics; a famous comic-book author who has launched an Internet home page to promote Fujioka’s agenda; some members of an archconservative Shinto religious group; and senior executives of the blue-ribbon Fujitsu and Ajinomoto companies.

His enemies are equally distinguished. They include leading intellectuals, heavyweight historians and Tokyo University colleagues who paint him as a failed scholar trying to resuscitate a moribund career by transforming himself into a poster boy for the Japanese right. Four influential highbrow journals have devoted acres of newsprint to rebutting his facts and attacking his views.

“It is because I say things bluntly that people perhaps find me odious,” Fujioka said. He has received death threats and been shouted down by hecklers when he has tried to speak in public, and claims that this infringement of his freedom of speech shows that even after five decades, frank discussion of Japan’s wartime role remains taboo.

At stake in this debate is not only whether Japan will at last come to terms with its ugliest episode and regain the trust of its Asian neighbors. More broadly, the Fujioka fight is also about what kind of national identity Japan will adopt for the 21st century.

Critics say Fujioka and his right-wing allies are deliberately distorting the history of Japanese wartime aggression to promote a conservative nationalist agenda.

“I think he decided that the nationalism issue is taboo in Japan, and that by breaking a taboo, you get a huge reaction. He succeeded,” said Manabu Sato, a Tokyo University colleague-turned-critic. “He has opened up a very dangerous road--for Japan and for himself.”

Marxist Views Shaped Early Years

Born in 1943, Fujioka grew up in the remote town of Shibecha in sparsely populated eastern Hokkaido. His first name, Nobukatsu, means “belief in victory,” one of the names that patriotic Japanese families gave sons born during the war years.

Despite his growing celebrity and frequent television appearances, Fujioka’s background remains largely unexplored. He claims that his views have been distorted by the Western press, and before agreeing to an interview, he demanded copies of all recent Los Angeles Times articles concerning Japan’s attempts to come to terms with its World War II history.

During two interviews, he gave patient, detailed explanations of his political views but snapped when asked about his personal history. Queried about his name, for example, he said his parents had never discussed it with him.

“You must have read the abuse written about me in the magazines,” Fujioka said. “I think you are trying to portray me as a villain. Otherwise, what relevance would my name have?”

His family was poor, according to Sato, who has known Fujioka for more than a decade and watched his transformation from mousy, obscure professor to famous intellectual kamikaze. His father worked in the local town hall and often lectured his son about what a “nasty” country the Soviet Union was; the son became a committed Marxist.

In 1962, Fujioka entered prestigious Hokkaido University--a hotbed of student radicalism. According to former classmates and professors, he was an extremely bright and serious student who became one of the “top-level” leaders of the Stalinist wing of the student movement and was allegedly brave enough to join the Japanese Communist Party.

Fujioka denied that he was ever a leftist leader. “I was never a true believer,” he said.

But Hideo Sato, who met him in the late 1960s, when Fujioka had graduated and gone to work as assistant professor of education at Hokkaido Education University, described him as a “fundamentalist Communist,” a rigid and humorless ideologue.

Fujioka’s political loyalty paid off when he was recruited to the preeminent Tokyo University by a left-leaning education professor, Sato said, noting: “People who were rightists in those days had no career prospects. The left controlled the education departments of all the best universities.”

Once at Tokyo University, Fujioka published little and never completed his doctorate, despite a research stint at Rutgers, Manabu Sato said.

Fujioka said he became disillusioned with socialism in the 1970s, but his “awakening” came during the Gulf War, when he realized that Japan’s pacifism--dictated by its U.S.-written constitution--made it impossible to defend its national interests even when the Kuwaiti oil that was Japan’s economic lifeblood stopped flowing.

Now Fujioka heads a group of conservative teachers and scholars devoted to rewriting modern Japanese history. Their work has been serialized in the Sankei newspaper, then released as two volumes edited by Fujioka titled “The History That Isn’t Taught in Japan.” Together, the two books have sold 800,000 copies, their publisher said.

The books consist of short, easily digested essays on themes such as unsung Japanese heroes, revisionist takes on incidents leading to the Japanese invasion of Asia, an article asserting that the Rape of Nanking--in which about 300,000 Chinese were slaughtered by Japanese invaders--was not a massacre, and other historical episodes that paint Japan in a favorable light.

But it is Fujioka’s attacks on Japan’s texts that have drawn the most attention--and public support.

Exhibit A in his arsenal of educational “masochism” is a drawing in a government-approved sixth-grade text depicting a Japanese soldier slicing off the nipple of a naked Chinese woman tied to a stake.

“To use such a sadistic picture in a sixth-grade textbook is unforgivable,” Fujioka said. It is also seemingly dishonest. Fujioka has a copy of the original drawing, a propaganda piece by Chinese youth activists designed to spur their countrymen to fight the Japanese invader. However, the activists’ signature is covered by a map in the textbook, leaving the impression that the drawing was a rendition of an actual event.

Use of Asian ‘Comfort Women’ Denied

Fujioka also claims that no documents have surfaced to support claims by aging women from Taiwan, Korea, China, Indonesia and other Asian nations that they were abducted and forced into sexual slavery. Moreover, he said, a widely read book by a Japanese author describing “slave-hunting”-style abduction of 200 Korean women has been debunked by Japanese and Korean researchers. And though tens of thousands of women were supposedly taken against their will, these kidnappings have never been substantiated, he said.

“Why aren’t there any witnesses? It is because the Koreans were paid by merchants for their daughters,” Fujioka said. “The same thing happened in Japan,” where prostitution was then legal.

The Japanese government has issued several apologies to former comfort women, beginning in 1993, and a semiprivate fund has been set up to compensate them. In a 1996 letter to the women, Hashimoto acknowledged “the involvement of the Japanese military authorities” at the time and declared Japan to be “painfully aware of its moral responsibility.”

“If the government admits it, of course you would think that there must be evidence,” Fujioka said. “But there isn’t.”

Nonsense, distortion and revisionist bunk, retort Fujioka’s critics.

Feminist scholar Yuko Suzuki denounced as “a second rape” Fujioka’s remark that “if you can get money just by saying you were a former comfort woman, it’s like hitting the lottery.”

While liberal historians concede that there is no “smoking gun” in the form of an Imperial Army document ordering the abduction of thousands of young Asian women, they say Fujioka’s insistence that no other proof will suffice is specious.

Gen. Hideki Tojo’s officers “would not leave behind a document ordering the abduction of young women,” said Akira Yamada, a Meiji University military historian. “The question of how the local people procured the women was left up to the locals.”

The Ministry of Education has refused to bow to Fujioka’s demands that references to the comfort women be struck from texts. And far from retracting Japan’s apologies, Hashimoto issued a fresh apology to the comfort women of Indonesia.

Analysts predict that Fujioka’s movement is unlikely to alter government policies, for one key reason: Japan’s exports to Asia now exceed those to the United States, making good relations with its neighbors more vital than ever.

But the crusading professor has clearly struck a chord in some parts of Japanese society--and his grass-roots support appears to be growing. Fujioka and his allies have promised to produce an alternative textbook of their own in a year and claim a support group of 2,500 people for the project.

Eleven local governments have called on Tokyo to delete the mention of comfort women from textbooks. In April, several hundred middle-school pupils and their parents sued the Education Ministry and publishers of “anti-Japanese” texts. And this month, the Miyagi prefecture education board banned the use of a sixth-grade book that describes Japanese atrocities at Nanking, now known as Nanjing.

In many ways, Fujioka is the ideological heir to Shintaro Ishihara, author of the best-selling “The Japan That Can Say No,” an explosive nationalist manifesto published at Japan’s economic zenith in 1989.

In a recent interview, Ishihara said he agrees with Fujioka’s view of a Japan still crippled by its “brainwashing” during the American occupation. Echoing the complaints of many of Fujioka’s supporters, Ishihara said Japan still hasn’t learned to say “No” to Uncle Sam. “We’re still hiding behind America’s skirts,” he said.

Claims That Japan Is Singled Out

The common sentiment uniting Fujioka and other conservatives today is the feeling that Japan’s belated attempts to come to terms with its wartime past--a process that began only in the 1980s--have gone too far. They argue that many nations had expansionist or colonialist periods and aggressive episodes and incidents of aggression--but that only Japan is continually required to apologize to its Asian neighbors.

Part of Fujioka’s appeal is that he articulates the widely held--but rarely stated--view that Japan’s Asian neighbors, especially China, are using Imperial Japan’s World War II sins as a weapon of financial extortion and political containment against the postwar pacifist state. Hence the appeal of his bold declaration that “the comfort women issue is an unfounded scandal created in the 1990s for the political purpose of bashing Japan.”

This nationalist backlash can also be seen in the manga comics of Yoshinori Kobayashi, who has popularized Fujioka’s ideas in one of the few media Japanese youth are likely to notice. Kobayashi rails against spineless Japanese bureaucrats and politicians who won’t stand up to liberals or foreigners. His drawings skewer the mandarins at the Ministry of Education as mealy-mouthed cowards and portray Fujioka as the real defender of Japan’s national interests.

Japanese liberals see nothing demeaning in exhuming and exorcising Japan’s wartime misdeeds. Though Japan’s words of apology since 1982 have been many, liberals see them as vaguely worded sops put out to quell outbreaks of Asian anger and are pushing for their government to offer the kind of heartfelt apologies that could be accepted by their ever-suspicious neighbors.

Some attribute the Fujioka phenomenon to the gloom that has smothered Japan after a long recession, 1995’s fatal poison gas attack on the Tokyo subways and Kobe earthquake, the fear that Japan is being overtaken by its fast-growing Asian neighbors, and growing pessimism about the future of this aging society.

“Things in Japan are not going very well right now,” said Tetsuya Tsukushi, the respected anchor of a TBS television evening news program, and a Fujioka critic. “Everyone is very frustrated. . . .

“We would like to have more pride, but our main point of pride, Japan as No. 1, is gone now. And we’d like to have more pride in our history, but problems like the comfort women and the Nanjing massacre have eroded it. This is why the fires that Fujioka sets burn.”

Chiaki Kitada of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.