Rather than trying to refute the arguments of Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 Nobel laureate in literature, a 91-year-old war criminal veteran of the Imperial Japanese Army tried to use the courts to force him to retract and apologize for information about the connection between the Japanese military and suicides by civilians during the fall of Okinawa.

In a closely watched ruling, the Osaka District Court threw out a $200,000 damage suit that was filed by a 91-year-old war veteran and another veteranÂ’s surviving relatives, who said there was no evidence of the militaryÂ’s involvement in the suicides.

The plaintiffs had also sought to block further printing of Mr. Oe’s 1970 book of essays, “Okinawa Notes,” in which he wrote that Japanese soldiers had told Okinawans they would be raped, tortured and murdered by the advancing American troops and coerced them into killing themselves instead of surrendering.

“The military was deeply involved in the mass suicides,” Judge Toshimasa Fukami said in the ruling. Judge Fukami cited the testimony of survivors that soldiers had handed out grenades to civilians to use for committing suicide, and the fact that mass suicides had occurred only in villages where Japanese troops had been stationed.

One more confirmation that the Japanese militarists who plunged Asia (and America) into war in the 1930s and 1940s were engaged in acts of unspeakable brutality and inhumanity. And also proof that there remains to this day an element of the Japanese population that does not want to deal with those historical truths.

Posted by: Greg at 12:00 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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