Facing history

    Any Asian visitor to World War II memorial sites in Germany may, intentionally or not, contrast the apologetic national attitude toward the war to the unapologetic stance of the Japanese government. I was not an exception.

    On my visit to this country for the first time, my teacher friends who were born some three to four decades after the fall of Nazi rule told me how they took their students to memorial sites every year to educate them about the painful lessons of history. Isn't it too heavy a subject for children? The history is sad, but our next generation must learn and face it, my friend said.

    After parting from my old and new friends in Hannover, I carried on my journey to Weimar. There I met a middle-age Japanese lady who had been living in Germany for years.

   We sat down in the comfortable café in our hostel, along with a fellow traveller from another part of Germany. From pleasantries to lighthearted chats about our travels. Then everybody turned sad when the discussion topic turned to where I was visiting next.

    Our young people do not know what our country did in the war, said the Japanese lady, bitterly. Our governments and schools never tell our students of the country’s past wrongdoing, and when they do talk about the war, they always talk about our nation as a victim in Nagasagi and Hiroshima, she told me.

    Are Asians, or at least Asian politicians, particularly bad at facing history? I asked myself.

    With this journey in mind, I found it particularly ironic for the new Chinese premier Li Keqiang to warn Japan against ‘denying history’ a week ahead of the 24^th anniversary of the ‘turbulence between spring and summer in 1989’, when he talked on the historic Potsdam site on his German trip. Is his government facing history?

In the crematory of the former Buchenwald Concentration Camp