THE CHIEF of staff of Japan’s air force is to be sacked after he claimed the country had been drawn into the second World War by the US and denied it had been an aggressor during its occupations of the Asian mainland.
In an online essay entitled Was Japan an Aggressor Nation? General Toshio Tamogami yesterday claimed that Japan had been provoked by the then US president Franklin D Roosevelt, and that many of Japan’s wartime victims took “a positive view” of its actions.
The claims drew a swift rebuke from politicians. Defence minister Yasukazu Hamada said he would dismiss the general immediately. “I think it is improper of the air force chief of staff to publicly state a view that clearly differs from that of the government,” he said. “It is inappropriate for him to remain in this position.”
The prime minister Taro Aso, a nationalist who has upset Japan’s neighbours with ill-judged comments about the war, described Tamogami’s views as “inappropriate, even if they were made in a personal capacity”. In the essay, which is likely to spark outrage in China and South Korea, Tamogami wrote: “Even now there are many people who think that our country’s aggression caused unbearable suffering to the countries of Asia during the Great East Asia War.”
Japanese nationalists use the term Great East Asia War to support their view that Japan entered the conflict to free Asian countries from western colonialism. “But we need to realise that many Asian countries take a positive view of the [war]. It is certainly a false accusation to say that our country was an aggressor,” he wrote.
He said the Korean peninsula had been “prosperous and safe” under Japan’s 1910-1945 occupation and that Roosevelt had “trapped” Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor in December 1941. He went on to accuse Roosevelt of being a puppet of the Comintern, the international communist movement founded in Moscow in 1919.
Tamogami called for Japan to reclaim its “glorious history”.
He said: “A nation that denies its own history is destined to pursue a path of decline.” – (Guardian service)