July 3, 2007
Kyuma’s Fate Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:25 PM EST A New York Times story reveals that Fumio Kyuma, Japan’s defense minister, has been forced to resign over what the Times calls a “gaffe.” Wikipedia defines the word gaffe with admirable clarity: “A gaffe is a verbal mistake made by a company or individual, usually in a social environment. The mistake comes from saying something that is true, but inappropriate.” What inappropriate truth did Fumio Kyuma utter? According to the Times, “In a public appearance on Saturday—the unofficial start of the campaign for the upcoming election—Mr. Kyuma said that dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 ‘ended the war,’ adding, ‘I think that it couldn’t be helped.’ Otherwise, Mr. Kyuma said, the war would have dragged on and the Soviet Union would have ended up occupying northern Japan.” It is possible, although unlikely, that Mr. Kyuma, a politician on Japan’s right, was simply sucking up to Japan’s chief ally—unlikely because the former Minister did not apparently make a habit of saying things Americans wanted to hear. For example, according to the same article, “Mr. Kyuma himself also once called America’s war in Iraq a mistake, angering Vice President Dick Cheney, who pointedly refused to meet him during a visit to Japan in February.” It is also possible that Mr. Kyuma’s misfortune indicates a certain convergence between some American and most Japanese views of the Second World War. The Japanese have long focused, to a degree Chinese and Koreans find maddening, on a view of Japan as the Second World War’s chief victim; in this narrative, the uniqueness of being the target of nuclear weapons has a very conspicuous role in establishing Japan’s moral purity as supreme victim nation. On the evidence of Mr. Kyuma’s fate, this view is not about to change anytime soon. So I think convergence with (some) American views of the war may have arrived by a different route: I am afraid that I just about can imagine an untenured American academic imperiling his or her job by insisting that the use of nuclear weapons against Japan was crucial in ending the war, and probably unavoidable.
|
