Recovering Japan's wartime past - and also the USA's

The price Japan might have paid, in 1951 or later, as atonement for its crimes would, presumably, have been high. Perhaps Dulles's public policy was best. But it may also be that Japan, and even the United States, are paying a different sort of price for the amnesia and secrecy that both countries chose after the war. An American group of former prisoners of war, for example, has pledged to protest the conferences and commemorative galas. These veterans are pursuing financial relief for having been enslaved in wartime by Japanese corporations, notably Mitsui and Mitsubishi. The P.O.W.'s have already lost one case in California. The judge, Vaughn Walker, decided that because of the success of the San Francisco Peace Treaty and of Japan in becoming a strong ally and partner of the United States, the waiver of individual rights to pursue private parties in Japan was justified. This has been the argument in the dozens of suits brought in Japan and a smaller number of cases in American courts. And the argument has so far prevailed.

Judge Walker did recognize that Japan's reparations deals with some countries might present the opportunity for the signatory nations of 1951 to bring their own claims, as provided for in Article 26 of the treaty. However, "the question of enforcing Article 26," he wrote, is "for the United States, not the plaintiffs, to decide." The failure to support war claims is one of the reasons Japan is still struggling with other nations over its history. The Germans - at least, West Germans - have engaged in five decades of public debate about Hitler and the Holocaust. And Germany and other European countries have accepted the need, for their governments or their corporations, to pay reparations for crimes very similar to those committed by Japan and Japanese companies in the same period. The Japanese, however, have not witnessed the court cases and public debates that would help shape a shared understanding of history among Japanese and their neighbors. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visit last month to the Yasukuni shrine - which honors the souls of Japan's war dead, including the souls of war criminals - and the relentless efforts of some Japanese textbook writers to minimize Japan's wartime aggression against Korea and China have further aggravated regional tension over Japan's official history. Because Japan is so ill at ease with debate about its past, other nations understandably distrust a more powerful Japan.

What we know only today is that the State Department arranged a deal that arguably allows Americans and others to pursue personal claims against Japan or Japanese firms - but tried to keep the agreement quiet. The State Department even filed briefs in the California court against the former American prisoners of war. Of course, it was the State Department that once advanced the claims of Dutch citizens.

Japan clearly deserves criticism for its inability to debate its past openly. However, the United States, as evidenced by the emerging controversy about the terms of the San Francisco Treaty, has also played a role in Japan's historical amnesia. By withholding documents on American foreign policy, the United States has contributed to a failure of memory that will continue to have consequences for all of us.