Ban-zai?

A former kamikaze pilot -- yeah, there are a few left (some guys missed) -- turns out to be in possession of quite a  number of letters written by fellow World War II suicide pilots just before they got in their planes and did their thing.  Their "thing," of course, was a one way trip to oblivion.  Funny; hidden behind the grainy textures of black and white, given enough distance between now and then (seventy years or so) and made part of the mystical experience of a "great generation" (Second World War twenty-somethings), kamikazes don't seem so dangerous.  What's funny about it is that we get the pants scared off of us today when a generation of young men wraps headbands around their foreheads and dictates their last testaments.  Jihad; glory to the Emperor -- where does the difference lie?

Tadamasa Itatsu is in possession of some extremely unique documents:  the writings of young men who knew they were about to die in a fruitless, last ditch attempt to defend Japan from a country (the U.S) to whom it knew it was going to lose (kamikaze flights started in 1944 -- the last year or so of the War).  The letters are remarkable; they are to families, friends and loved ones, expressing last thoughts.  They tell why one chose to do what one was going to do.  They made manifestations of personal philosophy.  Some letters jar -- strident defenses of empire and glory.  Other letters are remarkable in their acknowledgement of the Japanese system as corrupt and outdated.  Some ask for more universal, democratic principles.  The power of the state and culture, though, was such that the few guys taking the last positions got into planes and flew themselves into the sides of boats anyway (well, decks, mostly).

The Japanese city of Minami Kyushu is asking UNESCO -- the UN's educational and cultural organization -- to grant the letters world heritage status.  World heritage status grants a kind of canonized status to cultural, and sometimes natural, artifacts.  World heritage sites and artifacts are protected by the Geneva convention.  No bombing that stuff.  The Chinese don't like the smell of it.  As with almost anything concerning Japan in the Second World War, China feels Japan should keep away from self-celebratory gestures, if not adopt positions of virtually eternal apology.  Westerners can do well to remember that from Chinese perspectives, the Second World War started in 1937 -- not 1939.  What would eventually happen in Poland had been well underway in China for a couple of years before Hitler swung into action, if not before.

Questions of historical memory are sticky.  The Chinese regularly get annoyed with the Japanese in that department -- over school textbooks, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visiting the Yasukuni Shrine; the one that memorializes Japan's war dead, including some ugly characters from the 1930s and '40s.  In relation to the Crimea situation, the Russians are throwing around the word "fascist" like it's summer 1941.  The Simon Wiesenthal Center is still hunting Nazis.  Morally valid actions?  No doubt.  I don't know if there should be a statute of limitations on human rights violations.  Occasionally, however, it can be worth remembering the power of being the ones who won -- you won.  No quarter should be given to the Slobodan Milosevices or Ratko Mladices of the world; they should be tried and jailed (though not put to death; that violates the same principles for which they should be brought to trial -- questions of the right to life).  There is, though, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty years later an invisible line one crosses where the cause of world peace and the best possible conditions for human rights are served by forgetting.  Forgetting not what happened, but the anger that causes one to condemn.  Condemning happens in the present.  As time goes by, historical pictures gets blurred; things become more complicated than they appear.  The letters Mr. Itatsu wants to bring to the world's attention are like that -- the stories of men, some brainwashed by an over-zealous empire, some trembling in fear at what they were about to do, some knowing it was wrong.  I don't know about world heritage artifact.  It seems, though, there is undoubtedly an artifact there to be preserved, and one that could perhaps even be utilized as a site of forgiveness.  Sometimes you have to say "Banzai!" and jump into the letting go.