Basic HTML Version
PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, SEPTEMBER 3, 1982
PAGE 10
brutality, the aggression, the wrong committed by the country
that they are also expected to love. To understand the effect of
these rewritings on Asians (an estimated 18 million of whom died
in World War II), just imagine how we would respond if the Japan
ese began to teach their children that on Dec. 7, 1941, the
Imperial Air Force "advanced" on Pearl Harbor.
The entire incident is in many ways a textbook case. It's a text
book case on the complicated role that history plays in our
lives, our understanding of our world, country, families. It's a
textbook case on the manipulation of history in the service of
politics. What happened in Japan is not all that unusual. In
some way or other, every culture--every country--struggles with
its past. To this day, there are even heated arguments in the
United States about whether our early history should be taught as
national heroics, led by profiles in courage, or with a more
earthy ambiguity.
The more uneasy we are about that past, the more tarnished it
seems to us, the more trouble we have telling it to our children.
The Japanese have subtly muted their own blame. The official
Egy,tian guide who led a group of friends to the Pyramids three
years ago described how they were built by "volunteer labor."
For generations we have had extraordinary difficulty in teaching
children about the realities of slavery or the myths of cowboys
and Indians••••
But the national autobiography of aggression and guilt is subject
to the most peculiar revisions. Germany doesn't rest any more
easily on its recent past than does Japan. It took until 1962 for
German schools to teach children about the death camps. Today
there are new "historians" who assault those dead with grotesque
rewrites of Nazi reality, calling the Holocaust a hoax.
It is as hard for nations as it is for parents to talk about their
wrongs. They want respect from the young, and want to instill
self-respect in the young. But we can't teach false pride. When
we expunge guilt, pretend that it didn't happen, we are tainted
by it, committing the ultimate assault on the victims.
Combined with hints now that some government officials want to "break the
budget barrier" in military spending (until now set at one percent of
Japan's GNP) one can see why Japan's neighbors are showing more concern
than ever over Japan's future course.
--Gene H. Hogberg, News Bureau