Past strife still haunts present discord

By Harvey Stockwin

As American, French and British troops held their small but symbolic farewell parade in Berlin on Sept. 8, and as German troops -- somewhat controversially -- held their first ceremonial torch-carrying parade in the heart of what will soon be once again the capital city of Germany, it seemed to some that World War II was finally over. Jakarta Post Asia correspondent analyses some of the ways in which the war lives on in Asia today. This is the first of two articles.

HONG KONG (JP): Fifty years on, World War II still casts a deep shadow across global politics. That tremendous upheaval from 1931 to 1945 was arguably the defining event for the twentieth century. Even now, it still exerts great influence in all manner of ways throughout Asia.

In one forgotten corner of Asia, World War II is not yet over, shots are still being fired, and prisoners taken.

World War II was formally ended on Sept. 2, as the Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur took the Japanese surrender on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri.

After that, all over East and Southeast Asia, and throughout the South and West Pacific, the armed forces of the victorious allies turned their attention to taking the surrender of countless Japanese garrisons and to rescuing the hundreds of thousands of emaciated prisoners, Asian as well as Allied, nearly all of whom had been cruelly treated by the Japanese. This huge mopping-up exercise was to continue well into 1946.

Unnoticed at the time, the surrender ceremony did not end all the fighting. On Sept. 3 and 4, the last-minute Russian blitzkrieg through Manchuria, Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands, which had only started on Aug. 8, was still sputtering to a close in the islands off the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.

The Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was thinking of doing to Japan in Hokkaido what he had been able to do in Europe in East Germany -- carving out a Soviet zone of occupation. He backed off when both U.S. President Harry Truman and MacArthur subsequently said "no".

Even so, the Allies had only promised Stalin the Kurile chain of islands. Stalin also grabbed the islands close to Hokkaido, which Japan refers to as its Northern Territories.

The legacy of that act lives on. No peace treaty has ever been signed between Japan and the Soviet Union or Russia because of what the Japanese regard as the Soviet, now Russian occupation of Japanese territory.

Since November 1993 there have been three shooting incidents just north of Hokkaido. Russian naval vessels have fired upon Japanese fishing boats, accusing them of "poaching". So far this year the Russians have taken six boats and 49 fishermen into custody. The six boats and nine fishermen have yet to be released.

The latest such incident happened only two weeks ago. Frosty notes were once again exchanged between Moscow and Tokyo. In 1993, twelve Japanese boats and 43 crew members were apprehended by the Russians for poaching.

But for that last moment of post-surrender Soviet aggression in 1945, the fishermen would have been in Japanese waters, rather than in the waters adjacent to the Habomai island chain, part of the Northern Territories, which the Russians still occupy.

Typically Eurocentric, Germany claimed the final end of World War II as first the Russian troops and then the French, British and American garrisons held their farewell parades in Berlin. But that final moment will only come when the Russians leave the Habomais, Shikotan, Kunashiri and Etorofu, and the Japanese flag flies over those islands once again.

But this is one final retreat which, so far at least, Moscow has been extremely reluctant to order.

In the last few months there have been several other pointed reminders of how past conflict affects present discord.

First, as the world gets ready in 1994-1995 to commemorate the closing stages, and the ostensible end of World War II fifty years ago, the Japanese government has not yet come to terms with how World War II started.

This is true in two ways, the second of which I have already mentioned in these columns.

First, few Japanese clearly see their invasion of Manchuria in 1931, and their setting up of the puppet state of Manchukuo, as the moment when the global struggle began.

The fact that it did begin then was not all Japan's fault. Tokyo's original aggression was quickly followed by the first bad bout of Western appeasement. The League of Nations, set up to maintain the peace after World War I, failed to deal with the crisis caused by Japanese aggression against China. Rather than face verbal censure, the Japanese walked out of the League. By the time Hitler rose to power in Germany two years later, the League was already incapable of restraining his far-reaching ambitions.

To this day, most Japanese divide that era into two -- their war in China, and the Greater East Asian War -- and see no strong connection between the two. The fact that Japan's further aggression in late 1941 finally intensified the global struggle into a universal conflict is similarly glossed over.

Secondly, this was brilliantly illustrated last May, as Japanese bureaucrats and politicians made sure that Emperor Akihito did not visit the USS Arizona Memorial to the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor during his State visit to the United States in June.

In the longer view, this will be seen as a major blunder, with far-reaching implications for U.S.-Japan relations. Whether previous prime minister Morihiro Hosokawa or present Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama would have made this amazing mistake seems unlikely. Hosokawa originally arranged for the Emperor to visit the Arizona Memorial. Murayama has demonstrated, by his recent visit (the first by a Japanese prime minister) to the Singapore Memorial to Singaporeans massacred by the Japanese, that he recognizes the political value of a gesture of atonement.

Unfortunately, in between these two leaders, there was the brief premiership of Tsutomu Hata. Neither Hata, nor his close adviser Ichiro Ozawa, had the courage of their ostensible convictions that Japan must face up to its wartime record. So the Emperor's visit to the Memorial was canceled amid spurious excuses such as that the U.S. must apologize for Hiroshima and Nagasaki before Japan apologizes for Pearl Harbor.

Neither apologies nor the allocation of blame were, or are, the real issue. The crucial point of contention is that, today, the U.S. and Japan are supposed to be allies. The Pearl Harbor attack remains a scar on the American psyche, a nagging resentment which makes trusting Japan very difficult. It is in Japan's political self-interest to exorcise this malignancy in the relationship.