Remembrance

Remembering can be a tricky business. We are warned against opening old wounds. But we are also constantly reminded of George Santayana’s warning that those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Each year on Aug. 15 there are fewer people with personal memories of the end of World War II, marked by the signing of unconditional surrender terms by Japan.

Every Aug. 15, for many years now, Tokyo issues an apology for Japan’s wartime aggression and reaffirms its commitment to promoting world peace.

But on every anniversary of the end of the war, the Japanese also remember their three million war dead, nearly a tenth of whom were killed in the only two atomic bomb attacks ever launched. The remembrance includes visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shinto shrine, which honors Japan’s war dead including military officers convicted of wartime atrocities.

As in previous commemorations, the 60th anniversary of the Second World War, marked around the world from Monday until yesterday depending on the time zone, opened old wounds between the Japanese and its wartime enemies, the Chinese and Koreans.

This time Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi did not visit the Yasukuni shrine, but at least one Cabinet member and some 50 other lawmakers did.

Should the world begrudge the Japanese their day of mourning for their war dead? Perhaps they are simply making sure they won’t forget so they won’t repeat their mistakes. As Koizumi said last Monday, "Japan must never again take the path to war… I am determined not to allow the lessons of that horrible war to erode, and to contribute to the peace and prosperity of the world without ever again waging a war."

Perhaps the Japanese simply do a better job of remembering.

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Filipinos, on the other hand, do a great job of forgetting. On the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, there were no ceremonies here to honor our war dead — 100,000 in Manila alone during liberation; thousands more during the Death March and at the hands of the brutal Japanese secret police during the occupation. The few remaining Filipino veterans of that war are neglected. Why, there is even a shrine here dedicated to Japanese general Tomoyuki Yamashita, whose fabled war booty continues to be the subject of numerous treasure hunts in Northern Luzon.

Oh, this year we do have a Hollywood movie about the rescue of Allied POWs in the Philippines: The Great Raid, now playing in a theater near you. Not exactly a tribute to our war dead, but at least a reminder to Filipinos about the horrors of war.

We have largely forgotten the war, but Beijing and Seoul are not about to make Tokyo forget Japan’s wartime atrocities.

Thousands of women across Asia — including a handful of survivors in the Philippines — are still demanding compensation from Tokyo for being used as sex slaves or "comfort women" by Japanese occupation forces during the war.

Compared with the endless sniping by Beijing and Seoul over a war that ended 60 years ago, Tokyo probably prefers the short memory of Manila. For international harmony, letting bygones be bygones is a virtue. Filipinos do this exceptionally well.

The only question is how soon we should allow collective amnesia to set in.

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"Japan’s post-war history has indeed been six decades of manifesting its remorse on the war through actions," Koizumi said.

Japan’s post-war generation now exceeds 70 percent of the population, he said. The percentage is probably higher for the Philippines, and this country has no problem with Koizumi’s remarks.

In the past 60 years Japan has presented a benign image to the world. Aided by its pacifist constitution and billions of dollars in assistance to needy countries, Japan is seen as the land of sushi, animé, ikebana, affordable cars and consumer electronics. If younger generations are told that Japan has a wartime past, they think of Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, not those Japanese pilots in Tora! Tora! Tora!

Japan is now one of the staunchest allies of its former archenemy the United States in the war of the 21st century, against Osama bin Laden and his soldiers of hate.

Japan’s post-war generation thinks it’s time to move on and make the country a normal one, responsible for its own defense. That is generating concern in a region that thinks the Japanese could quickly revert to its militaristic past, especially when its recent history books whitewash the country’s wartime aggression.

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How far back should we remember?

Germans and Nazi collaborators in Europe are still haunted by the Holocaust. Arabs and Israelis are invoking history in the past three millennia to stake their respective claims on homelands in the Middle East. The Chinese also have long memories, ignoring international treaties on territorial waters and instead invoking ancient demarcation lines to stake its claim on all the spits of rock and coral jutting out of the South China Sea. The name says it all; it’s south of China so its theirs, get it?

My generation remembers World War II vicariously, through stories handed down by people who are now senior citizens. They remember houses in Tondo, Manila where Japanese occupation forces fermented soy sauce in massive vats. Nearby were houses where the kempeitai or secret police tortured prisoners. Survivors of the war remember a lot of bowing and scraping, and being slapped when they failed to do so before Japanese soldiers.

For a while my parents kept a small bag of wartime bills — "Mickey Mouse money" — as souvenirs. The bills disappeared together with my childhood, perhaps left behind as we changed residences over the years.

When I meet a Japanese, I don’t see an aggressor. These days Filipinos dream of working as japayukis in the land of the (not so mighty) yen.

An American was in Manila recently, selling software that teaches people how to improve their memory. Business could be better if he sold software to make people forget ugly memories.

There is a case to be made for remembering, however, even at the risk of opening old wounds over and over. If only to remind the world that war is hell, the risk is worth it.