By STEVEN C.
CLEMONS
WASHINGTON — Celebrations this Saturday of the 50th anniversary of the San
Francisco Treaty of Peace, which established the postwar relationship between
Japan and the world, will focus on Japan's emergence as a pacifist market
economy under the tutelage of its conqueror and later ally, the United
States. Little attention will be paid to questions of historical memory or of
liability for Japan's
behavior during the war. The 1951 treaty, largely through the efforts of America's
principal negotiator, John Foster Dulles, sought to eliminate any possibility
of war reparations. This undoubtedly cemented Japan's
alliance with the United States
and helped its economic rebirth. But Dulles's and Japan's
strategy also fostered a deliberate forgetfulness whose consequences haunt us
today.
Dulles had been a United States
counsellor at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919,
with special responsibility for reparations. He had opposed, without much
success, the heavy penalties imposed by the Allies on Germany.
These payments were widely seen as responsible for the later collapse of Germany's
economy and, if obliquely, for the rise of Nazism. After World War II, Dulles
feared that heavy reparations burdens would similarly cripple Japan,
make it vulnerable to Communist domination and prevent it from rebuilding. It
was crucial to Dulles that Japan
not face claims arising from its wartime conduct.
The San Francisco Treaty has been used to this day, by Japan
and America,
as a shield against any such claims. Nonetheless, when he had to, Dulles
allowed an exception, one that has remained largely hidden. The signatories
to the San Francisco Treaty waived "all reparations claims of the Allied
Powers, other claims of the Allied Powers and their nationals arising out of
any actions taken by Japan
and its nationals in the course of the prosecution of the War." But
recently declassified documents show that Dulles, in negotiating this clause,
also negotiated a way out of it.
Dulles had persuaded most of the Allied powers to accept the treaty. One
major nation that refused to sign was Korea,
because of its enmity against Japan
for colonizing the Korean Peninsula.
India, China
and the Soviet Union also declined to sign.
For a brief while it appeared that the Netherlands
would do likewise. Only days before the treaty was to be signed, the Dutch
government threatened to walk out of the convention because it feared that
the treaty "expropriated the private claims of its individuals" to
pursue war-related compensation from Japanese private interests. Tens of
thousands of Dutch civilians in the East Indies had
lost their property to Japanese companies, which had followed Japan's
armies to the Indies. They wanted compensation, and
they had political power in Holland.
European opinion mattered to Dulles, who feared that a Dutch exodus might
lead the United Kingdom,
Australia and
New Zealand
to drop out as well. On the day before and the morning of the signing
ceremony, Dulles orchestrated a confidential exchange of letters between the
minister of foreign affairs of the Netherlands,
Dirk Stikker, and Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida of
Japan.
Yoshida pledged that "the Government of Japan does not consider that the
Government of the Netherlands by signing the Treaty has itself expropriated
the private claims of its nationals so that, as a consequence thereof, after
the Treaty comes into force these claims would be non-existent."
Article 26 of the treaty states that, "should Japan
make a peace settlement or war claims settlement with any State granting that
State greater advantages than those provided by the present Treaty, those
same advantages shall be extended to the parties to the present Treaty."
This is why the letters had to be confidential: they preserved the rights of
some Allied private citizens, in this case Dutch citizens, to pursue
reparations.
Such an agreement, if publicized, could have opened the way for other
claims -- reparations was a huge and emotional issue
after the war. These letters were not declassified until April 2000, by which
time most potential claimants were probably dead.
In 1956, the Dutch did successfully pursue a claim against Japan
on behalf of private citizens. Japan
paid $10 million as a way of "expressing sympathy and regret."
Japan had been slow about making its deal with the Netherlands, and the
United States had to remind the Japanese that, as a declassified State
Department document puts it, the United States had "exerted considerable
pressure on the Netherlands representatives with a view to their signing the
Peace Treaty," and "one of the arrangements was assurance that the
terms of the Yoshida-Stikker letters would be
honored."
A year before, the British noted two other instances in which governments
had made deals with Japan for reparations: a settlement with Burma that
provided reparations, services and investments amounting, over 10 years, to
$250 million; and an agreement with Switzerland that provided
"compensation for maltreatment, personal injury and loss arising from
acts illegal under the rules of war."
The British Foreign Ministry elected not to take any action on behalf of
British nationals -- and chose not to publicize the information. The United
States concurred, with one official
commenting, "Further pressure would be likely to cause the maximum of
resentment for the minimum of advantage." Nonetheless, the Stikker-Yoshida letters and the Burmese and Swiss
agreements could all be used to make Japan,
under Article 26 of the San Francisco Treaty, offer similar terms to the
treaty's 47 signatories.
The price Japan
might have paid, in 1951 or later, as atonement for its crimes would,
presumably, have been high. Perhaps Dulles's public policy was best. But it
may also be that Japan,
and even the United States,
are paying a different sort of price for the amnesia and secrecy that both
countries chose after the war. An American group of former prisoners of war,
for example, has pledged to protest the conferences and commemorative galas.
These veterans are pursuing financial relief for having been enslaved in
wartime by Japanese corporations, notably Mitsui and Mitsubishi. The P.O.W.'s have already lost one case in California.
The judge, Vaughn Walker, decided that because of the success of the San
Francisco Peace Treaty and of Japan
in becoming a strong ally and partner of the United
States, the waiver of individual rights to
pursue private parties in Japan
was justified. This has been the argument in the dozens of suits brought in Japan
and a smaller number of cases in American courts. And the argument has so far
prevailed.
Judge Walker did recognize that Japan's
reparations deals with some countries might present the opportunity for the
signatory nations of 1951 to bring their own claims, as provided for in
Article 26 of the treaty. However, "the question of enforcing Article
26," he wrote, is "for the United
States, not the plaintiffs, to decide."
The failure to support war claims is one of the reasons Japan
is still struggling with other nations over its history. The Germans -- at
least, West Germans -- have engaged in five decades of public debate about
Hitler and the Holocaust. And Germany
and other European countries have accepted the need, for their governments or
their corporations, to pay reparations for crimes very similar to those
committed by Japan
and Japanese companies in the same period.
The Japanese, however, have not witnessed the court cases and public
debates that would help shape a shared understanding of history among
Japanese and their neighbors. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visit last
month to the Yasukuni shrine -- which honors the
souls of Japan's
war dead, including the souls of war criminals -- and the relentless efforts
of some Japanese textbook writers to minimize Japan's
wartime aggression against Korea
and China
have further aggravated regional tension over Japan's
official history. Because Japan
is so ill at ease with debate about its past, other nations understandably
distrust a more powerful Japan.
What we know only today is that the State Department arranged a deal that
arguably allows Americans and others to pursue personal claims against Japan
or Japanese firms -- but tried to keep the agreement quiet. The State
Department even filed briefs in the California
court against the former American prisoners of war. Of course, it was the
State Department that once advanced the claims of Dutch citizens.
Japan
clearly deserves criticism for its inability to debate its past openly.
However, the United States,
as evidenced by the emerging controversy about the terms of the San Francisco
Treaty, has also played a role in Japan's
historical amnesia. By withholding documents on American foreign policy, the United
States has contributed to a failure of
memory that will continue to have consequences for all of us.
Steven C. Clemons is executive vice president of the New America
Foundation.