Stevan Eldred-Grigg: It's time to honour enemies of the past

Opinion

"Where's the memorial for dead and wounded Japanese?" I asked a friend one day recently in Singapore. "All I can see are memorials for the dead and wounded on the winning side."

"Japan was the enemy," said my friend, a citizen of Singapore. "Why would we want to commemorate the enemy?"

"Didn't they suffer, too?"

We were walking through steamy heat in the Singapore War Memorial Park. Singapore, as we all know, was conquered by Japanese forces during the Second World War.

"But it was their fault, they were in the wrong," my friend answered.

"So their sufferings mean less than the sufferings of others?"

We stopped to look at the civilian war memorial. Four smooth curved pillars sprang up into the hot cloudy sky. Each pillar honours one of the four main races of Singapore: Chinese, Malays, Indians and "others" - meaning mostly Europeans and Eurasians. Singapore is a very multicultural city. So multicultural that it seemed to me maybe we could expect to find a monument honouring the Japanese. Almost all the Japanese soldiers who occupied the city were unwilling conscripts, forced into the Army by a tough military dictatorship.

The civilians of Singapore were victims of militarism, but so were the soldiers of Japan. Japanese soldiers were wounded. They lost limbs. They got sick. They suffered psychological trauma. They often died gruesomely and in agony. Yet the poor guys have no memorial in Singapore.

"Japan ruled ruthlessly," said my friend. "They treated us like inferior beings."

"Unlike the British?" was my reply.

My ancestors are British. I've always been well aware of the brutal side of the history of the British Empire. We used whips for centuries to control our empire. We tortured, maimed and killed millions of women and men in a lucrative slave trade which made us vast sums of money.

Japan's exploitation of inferior beings was amateurish compared with the British. Yet we get part of a pillar in the civilian war memorial. Why not the Japanese?

And why haven't memorials to Japanese conscripts been built in China?

China during the past few weeks has attacked Japan for its crimes during World War II. Chinese citizens have marched through the streets, chanting slogans and smashing the windows of Japanese shops.

"Japanese pigs get out," they chant in English.

Where did they learn the phrase "Japanese pigs"? At school. Chinese textbooks use emotive and contemptuous language about anyone thought by the Government to be an enemy. Also they tell lies. Chinese textbooks, to put it bluntly, teach citizens to hate Japan and the Japanese.

How about schools in Japan? Japanese textbooks use calm and balanced language. That's the problem - or so it's claimed in China. Japanese textbooks are sometimes so bland they gloss over the crimes of Japanese military and medical forces in wartime China.

The Chinese say Japan must officially apologise for its crimes in the war. Britain, however, has never officially apologised for the slave trade. The United States has never officially apologised for slavery. Nor has the US officially apologised for the killing of its own native American people, nor for a long list of other killings of "inferior beings", such as half a million or so Filipinos early last century.

As for our own country, it's full of war memorials, just like Singapore. Those from colonial days are often pompous and self-righteous. Those from more recent days are a bit more nuanced.

One of our newest memorials sits on a steep Wellington hillside, looking out over Cook Strait. A marble crescent, it contains soil from a place on the other side of the world called Gallipoli.

Why? Once we were at war with Turkey. We fought bloody, exhausting battles with the Turks. They "won" at Gallipoli. We "won" in Palestine. Generations later, the governments of our two countries got together, along with the Australians, and agreed to honour the sufferings of each others' soldiers.

Turkey built a big monument dedicated to our dead at Gallipoli. We built the marble crescent on a hillside in Wellington.

The inscription on our memorial comes from a speech written not quite 20 years after Gallipoli by Kemal Ataturk, of Turkey: "Those heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives, you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore, rest in peace. You, the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears, your sons are now lying in our bosoms and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they become our sons as well."

Maybe it's now time to build a memorial in our country for Japanese soldiers. Although we're too small a country to harangue the governments of great powers, it would be great if we could be big enough to behave towards all our former "enemies" with generosity and a sense of shared humanity.

Governments are unlikely to regard such behaviour as anything but quixotic. Ordinary people, though, might find it heartening. Ordinary people here, in Singapore, in Japan, in China.

Maybe one day we'll be able to look at a memorial for Japanese soldiers in Singapore, and at another memorial in Shanghai, and Beijing. And maybe, too, a memorial for the wartime sufferings of Chinese civilians and soldiers will gleam one day in the heart of downtown Tokyo.

* Stevan Eldred-Grigg, a New Zealand historian and novelist, has lived recently in Shanghai.