A friend and I have been discussing a New Yorker article on the assassination of Shinzo Abe. The article fits hand-in-glove with my blog posting yesterday in which I reflected on my grandmother's assertion that there are good people and bad people everywhere - her explanation for why a country that she loved could do such bad things. So I'd like to continue for a bit, and hopefully expand on what I said yesterday, and not simply repeat my assertions.
On one level, the worldview that the world is made up of good guys and bad guys is a child's world view, and when any adult puts it forth it screams innocence (if you're being generous) or naiveté. A childish oversimplification which bypasses adult responsibility for seeking justice by rewarding heroes and punishing villains. Most people don't feel they have the time, or the brain power to assess world leaders and engage in what amounts to practical international relations. They shrug it off, move on to more banal activities.
My argument was I think we have a moral obligation to ourselves to act in justice, and that includes keeping an eye on what goes on in the world and recognizing when the collectives we belong to - our nation, for example - are being represented by the good guys and when they are being represented by the bad guys. And that our collective, like any collective, has good guys and bad guys, and that at any historical moment one or the other can take over. And when the bad guys do, we need to speak out.
Most Americans couldn't care less who Shinzo Abe was. It's only because of his victimization that we went back and looked at his thoughts and his role in Japanese history. But I found the man reprehensible. I know, I know, grandma, it's not nice to talk bad about the dead. But he was a politician. I think we need to make an exception with politicians.
I found a profound disconnect when I lived in Japan between the average Japanese citizen and their government. For almost the entire time I lived there the country was governed by the Liberal Democratic Party (about whom it was regularly said it is neither liberal nor democratic, but that's another story.) It was as if the average Hitoshi had determined that it was not simply difficult to involve himself in politics, but unnecessary, that government was the job of professional politicians and the average person should mind their own business and let them get on with it.
At the same time - and this will sound contradictory - I heard a lot of discussion about Japan's role in the world and commonly I got no argument when I pronounced Japanese as essentially apathetic about politics. Usually they would explain this away by telling me that since America had written their constitution, it had taken away any sense of Japanese responsibility for what went on in the world. Why bother pretending that you had a say in things, they would argue, when America was going to have the final say?
That used to piss me off. It was so (to me) obviously wrong. The Americans may have come up with the idea that Japan should have a peace constitution (Article 9: we can't go to war!) but over the decades since it was imposed it had become a kind of "comfortable burden" to most people, a relief to the naturally peacefully inclined, which most Japanese had become after viewing the devastation in 1945, including the two atomic bomb attacks. It had become japanized. It was not a foreign notion. More Japanese embraced it than did not.
I like to compare it to the embrace of symphonic music by Southeast Asians, many of whom now lead the world in talent. Consider Bruce Liu, the Canadian of Chinese origin who came out on top in the Chopin Competition last October. Or Yunchan Lim, the Korean who many are saying played the best performance they had ever heard of Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Houston this year - at the age of 18 no less. This music belongs to them as much as anybody from countries where so-called "Western" symphonic music originated. And there is nothing American about the idea of an agreement never to go to war again. Ideas are embraced by any human being and can become part of their identity. Ideas are good or bad, not Japanese or American.
I was profoundly moved in 1995 when I read an article in Der Spiegel relating how many Germans were regarding 1945 as a time of victory for Germany, victory being defined as the defeat of Naziism - so that Germany could get on with the normal business of life. I was living in Japan at the time and found the German/Japanese contrast remarkable. Germans were separating themselves into good guys and bad guys and trying to figure out how exactly modern-day Germans should behave politically, how much responsibility they had for things done before they were born. The short answer evolved that they should begin by not shying away from historical fact, and go from there. On an international level, the Germans became strong supporters of the State of Israel, for example. And on a local level they created Stolpersteine, "stumbling stones" in the street in front of apartments where Jews once lived. It couldn't bring back those Jewish lives, but it could keep their memory alive. They also rebuilt synagogues, welcomed Jewish immigrants, and did a lot to try to restore the important place Jews once had in German history.
By contrast, what I was encountering in Japan was either shame or denial. Most people were thinking collectively. It was the "Japanese" who attacked Pearl Harbor and Singapore, who perpetrated the Rape of Nanking, who colonized Korea for half a century. So they were ashamed. Or they were people like Shinzo Abe, less inclined toward shame, more toward denial. It didn't happen. "Comfort Women" - pressing countless women into prostitution to service the Japanese soldiers? Didn't happen.
Right wing nationalist Germans fault fellow Germans for assuming too much guilt for World War II. Right wing nationalist Japanese fault Japanese for doing the same. Right wing Americans love to tell you that the American slaves lived better lives than if they had stayed in Africa. All of these groups want to see their nations as a single body with a single mind. A group that can do no wrong. (And shame on your for thinking that they ever did.) Taking that approach leaves you with no choice but to rush to your group/collective/country's defense when "misrepresented" or maligned. It's intellectual folly and a morally corrupt way of going about things. The solution is to get clear-eyed about who among us are the good guys and who are the bad guys - and stress that every large organization or collective has both - and go from there. Not come to some puerile defense of the whole as if we still lived in tribal times.
There are times when one can take pride in one's nation. 98% of Denmark's Jews survived the Nazi invasion of their country. Only 8% of the Jews of the Netherlands were so lucky. I'm sure there is a complex story there. I'm still going to claim that there are good guys and bad guys in both those countries. Denmark should get all the credit it deserves. But that credit should be accompanied with a clear-eyed analysis of exactly how it was that they succeeded in keeping the good guys among them in charge, and how exactly it was that Holland wasn't able to do likewise - and not conclude that "the Danes are good guys and the Dutch are not."
Note that I said "the Nazi invasion" of Denmark, and not "the German invasion." I'm aware that I tend to make a distinction, and that distinction would suggest the Nazis are the bad guys and the Germans are the good guys. The truth is obviously more complex than that. I'm not Donald Trump. I don't see good guys among the Nazis. But I do see Germans as a complex mix of all sorts, and I'm suggesting that this is an example of how we can get tripped up my the language we use, without intending to. We are forced, linguistically, into generalizing here in order to make a point. And it takes no small bit of effort to unpack those generalizations. But it's a necessary effort, in my view, if we're going to stay honest.
It's a terrible thing that Shinzo Abe was assassinated. Nobody should ever be assassinated, including Holocaust deniers and their analogues. That's what Abe was - a denier of responsibility. That will forever be his legacy.
I have German friends who have a love affair with France. And I have British friends who have a love affair with France. Historically France was a bitter enemy at various points of both Germany and Britain. Things change. Good guys can take over. There's nothing in the essential nature of any of these countries which makes them behave the way they do. It's when we stop listening to the likes of Shinzo Abe and his denials and reach out across historical dividing lines to other good guys to make common cause that there is reason to believe we're not permanently forced to bob helplessly on the waves.
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