He thus rejected all offers of Chinese involvement and even called for intervention by American diplomats. This angered many Chinese and alienated him from them. Later, when the Chinese government finally shut down his work after the storm of negative publicity, very few Chinese would speak up for him because they felt that he and Akemi had—perhaps even intentionally—done more damage to China’s history and her people. The accusations were unfair, and I’m sorry to say that I do not feel that I did enough to defend his reputation.
Evan’s focus throughout his project was both more universal and more atomistic than the people of China. On the one hand, he had an American devotion to the idea of the individual, and his commitment was first and foremost to the individual voice and memory of each victim. On the other hand, he was also trying to transcend nations, to make people all over the world empathize with these victims, condemn their torturers, and affirm the common humanity of us all.
But in that process, he was forced to distance his effort from the Chinese people in order to preserve the political credibility of his project in the West. He sacrificed their goodwill in a bid to make the West care. Evan tried to appease the West and Western prejudices against China. Was it cowardly? Should he have challenged them more? I do not know.
History is not merely a private matter. Even the family members of the victims understand that there is a communitarian aspect to history. The War of Resistance Against the Japanese Invasion is the founding story of modern China, much as the Holocaust is the founding story of Israel and the Revolution and the Civil War are the founding stories of America. Perhaps this is difficult to understand for a Westerner, but to many Chinese, Evan, because he feared and rejected their involvement, was stealing and erasing their history. He sacrificed the history of the Chinese people, without their consent, for a Western ideal. I understand why he did it, but I cannot agree that his choice was right.
As a Chinese, I do not share Evan’s utter devotion to the idea of a personalized sense of history. Telling the individual stories of all the victims, as Evan sought to do, is not possible and in any event would not solve all problems.
Because of our limited capacity for empathy for mass suffering, I think there’s a risk that his approach would result in sentimentality and only selective memory. More than sixteen million civilians died in China from the Japanese invasion. The great bulk of this suffering did not occur in death factories like Pingfang or killing fields like Nanjing, which grab headlines and shout for our attention; rather, it occurred in the countless quiet villages, towns, remote outposts, where men and women were slaughtered and raped and slaughtered again, their screams fading with the chill wind, until even their names became blanks and forgotten. But they also deserve to be remembered.
It is not possible that every atrocity would find a spokesperson as eloquent as Anne Frank, and I do not believe that we should seek to reduce all of history to a collection of such narratives.
But Evan always told me that an American would rather work on the problem that he could solve rather than wring his hands over the vast realm of problems that he could not.
It was not an easy choice that he made, and I would not have chosen the same way. But Evan was always true to his American ideals.
Bill Pacer, Professor of Modern Chinese Language and Culture, University of Hawaii at Manoa:
It has often been said that since everybody in China knew about Unit 731, Dr. Wei had nothing useful to teach the Chinese and was only an activist campaigning against Japan. That’s not quite right. One of the more tragic aspects of the dispute between China and Japan over history is how much their responses have mirrored each other. Wei’s goal was to rescue history from both.
In the early days of the People’s Republic, between 1945 and 1956, the Communists’ overall ideological approach was to treat the Japanese invasion as just another historical stage in mankind’s unstoppable march toward socialism. While Japanese militarism was condemned and the Resistance celebrated, the Communists also sought to forgive the Japanese individually if they showed contrition—a surprisingly Christian/Confucian approach for an atheistic regime. In this atmosphere of revolutionary zeal, the Japanese prisoners were treated, for the most part, humanely. They were given Marxist classes and told to write confessions of their crimes. (These classes became the basis for the Japanese public’s belief that any man who would confess to horrible crimes during the War must have been brainwashed by the Communists.) Once they were deemed sufficiently reformed through “re-education,” ?They were released back to Japan. Memories of the War were then suppressed in China as the country feverishly moved to build a socialist utopia, with well-known disastrous consequences.
Yet, this generosity toward the Japanese was matched by Stalinist harsh treatment of landowners, capitalists, intellectuals, and the Chinese who collaborated with the Japanese. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, often on little evidence and with no effort given to observe legal forms.
Later, during the 1990s, the government of the People’s Republic began to invoke memories of the War in the context of patriotism to legitimize itself in the wake of the collapse of Communism. Ironically, this obvious ploy prevented large segments of the populace from being able to come to terms with the War—distrust of the government infected everything it touched.
And so the People’s Republic’s approach to historical memory created a series of connected problems. First, the leniency they showed the prisoners became the ground for denialists to later question the veracity of confessions by Japanese soldiers. Second, yoking patriotism to the memory of the War invited charges that any effort to remember was politically motivated. And lastly, individual victims of the atrocities became symbols, anonymized to serve the needs of the state.
However, it has rarely been acknowledged that behind Japan’s postwar silence regarding wartime atrocities lay the same impulses that drove the Chinese responses. On the left, the peace movement attributed all suffering during the War to the concept of war itself and advocated universal forgiveness and peace among all nations without a sense of blame. In the center, focus was placed on material development as a bandage to cover the wounds of the War. On the right, the question of wartime guilt became inextricably yoked to patriotism. In contrast to Germany, which could rely on Nazism—distinct from the nation itself—to absorb the blame, it was impossible to acknowledge the atrocities committed by the Japanese during the War without implicating a sense that Japan itself was under attack.
And so, across a narrow sea, China and Japan unwittingly converged on the same set of responses to the barbarities of World War Two: forgetting in the name of universal ideals like “peace” and “socialism”; welding memories of the War to patriotism; abstracting victims and perpetrators alike into symbols to serve the state. Seen in this light, the abstract, incomplete, fragmentary memories in China and the silence in Japan are flip sides of the same coin.
The core of Wei’s belief is that without real memory, there can be no real reconciliation. Without real memory, the individual persons of each nation have not been able to empathize with and remember and experience the suffering of the victims. An individualized story that each of us can tell ourselves about what happened is required before we can move beyond the trap of history. That, all along, was what Wei’s project was about.
Crosstalk, January 21, 20XX, courtesy of FXNN
Amy Rowe: Thank you, Ambassador Yoshida and Dr. Wei, for agreeing to come on to Cross-Talk tonight. Our viewers want to have their questions answered, and I want to see some fireworks!
Ambassador Yoshida, let’s start with you. Why won’t Japan apologize?