AS THE ghosts of the Pacific war judder back to life in Asia, it seems appropriate to consider how nation states remember, and misremember, the past. Japan’s current tiffs with its neighbours,China and South Korea, are rooted in the march to war and its undigested aftermath, more than 75 years ago. They are inflamed, however, by different narratives of history, and by national media coverage that is often parochial and amnesiac.
近日，在亚洲，太平洋战争的亡魂再次萦绕在人们心头。现在来思考一个民族国家是如何铭记及误记历史的，似乎正是时候。日本最近和中韩两个邻国之间起了种种争执，这都源于75年多以前发动的那场战争和它所带来的尚未平复的创伤。然而，各国对历史的记述不同，国家媒体的报道也往往狭隘而有所回避。因此，这些争执被激化了。
Conflict and memory are the themes that animate this new collection of essays by John Dower, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning “Embracing Defeat” (1999), which looked at Japan after the second world war. Mr Dower is particularly interested in Japan’s sanitisation of its military past, but also the way history in general is often a tool used by the powerful.
冲突和回忆这两种主题为约翰•道尔这本新散文集赋予了生命。他另著有《拥抱战败》（1999），该书研究了二战后的日本，获得了普利策奖。道尔对于日本抹杀其军国主义历史的行为特别感兴趣，但他也同样关注当权者通常是如何利用历史的。
Mr Dower discusses his surprise at hearing his own work cited after 9/11, when American officials evoked the post-war occupation of Japan as a model for post-invasion Iraq. President George W. Bush should have seen that Japan provided “no model” for occupying Mesopotamia, Mr Dower wrote in a strikingly prescient 2002 New York Times op-ed, reproduced here. “To rush to war without seriously imagining all its consequences,including its aftermath, is not realism but a terrible hubris.”
在9.11事件之后，美国官员援引了道尔的作品，要求以战后攻占日本的模式在入侵伊拉克之后攻占该国。道尔表示他听到这一消息以后有些错愕。他在《纽约时报》的社论专栏里极有先见之明地写道：乔治•W•布什总统应该认识到，日本不能为攻占美索不达米亚“提供模式”。“不认真考虑战争的后果、包括可能带来的创伤就匆匆发动战争，这不是现实主义，而是一种可怕的傲慢狂妄。”
He returns to the terrain of “Embracing Defeat”, marvelling at how the vicious racial hatreds of the Pacific wardissipated so quickly, as though “turned off like a spigot”. The lesson for Mr Dower is not only that reluctant civilians must be mobilised by propaganda to fight and die, but also that new realities force new biases.
回到《拥抱战败》 的主题上，道尔惊叹于太平洋战争深刻的种族仇视竟然平息得如此之快，就像“水龙头一样关掉了”。道尔得到了一个教训：问题不仅仅在于不情愿的平民被政府宣传所鼓动才去拼死一战；更在于新的现实形成了新的偏见。
No side, he argues, launched a more sophisticated propaganda blitz than the Japanese, who saw their “mongrel” enemies as biologically inferior. But they were hardly alone. During the war Americans viewed their Asian rivals as “monkeys” or “rats”, but with the start of the occupation, Japan became an ally. The popular racism in the American media more or less stopped, and stayed buried until the 1970s, when Japane merged as an economic superpower. This resurrected Japanese stereotypes of “predatory economic animals” in Western suits who were launching a new “financial Pearl Harbor”. The spigot of racial hatred had been turned back on.
道尔指出，日本人最善于在短时间内对人民进行宣传鼓吹，他们认为那些“杂种”敌人天生就低他们一等。但这种现象并不只出现在日本人身上。战时，美国人把亚洲对手视为“猴子”、“老鼠”；但侵占开始以后，日本就成了他们的盟友。后来，美国媒体中盛行的种族歧视或多或少有所收敛，归于沉寂。直到20世纪70年代，日本以经济超级大国的姿态登上世界舞台，于是西方又老调重弹，把日本视为“掠夺成性的经济野兽”，认为日本正准备发动一场新的“金融珍珠港”之战。种族仇视的水龙头再次拧开了。
When the fighting is finished, history iswritten, inevitably by those in power, observes Mr Dower. The standard American view of the struggle against Japan is that it was just and moral. But this grants little space for the ghastly side of victory, which included the airborne destruction of 66 cities and the incineration of more than half amillion civilians. China and Korea’s political elites have found it endlessly useful to bang the nationalist drum to unite potentially fractious populations against their old enemy. Japanese conservatives have made it easy for them,whitewashing the past and attempting to pass off Imperial Japan’s rampagea cross Asia as a “holy war” against Western colonialism.
道尔做出了这样的评论：当战争结束后，历史将不可避免地由当权者写下。美国人普遍认为对日战争是公正的、合乎道德的。但这份胜利仍然有着极为惨烈的一面——其中日本66座城市遭到空袭破坏，50多万平民灰飞烟灭。中国和韩国的政治精英发现，想要把两个内心愤怒的民族联合起来对抗其共同的宿敌，敲响民族主义这面大鼓最为有效。日本的保守派粉饰历史，试图将日本帝国在全亚洲的暴行伪装成对西方殖民主义的“圣战”——这给中韩两国的政治精英提供了有利机会。
Selective memory is often a harmful feature of children’s education. Japanese high-school textbooks devote impressively little space to the war, reflecting official attempts to “downplay the darkaspects of Japan’s modern history,” writes Mr Dower. For its part, China’s government relies on its struggle against Japanese aggression for itshistorical legitimacy, so memories of wartime atrocities are kept fresh inschools. This helps to explain the strikingly different public reactions to thecurrent island disputes. While the Chinese angrily take to the streets, the Japanese stay at home and watch it on TV.
选择性记忆往往不利于对下一代的教育。道尔写道，日本的中学教科书对战争描述极少，反映了官方试图“淡化日本近代史的阴暗面”。在中国这一方面，政府依靠抗日战争来突出其历史合理性，因此学校教育不断提及日本在战时的暴行。这可以解释为什么对于当下的岛屿纠纷两国的公众反应截然不同。中国人愤怒地走上街头抗议，而日本人却待在家里看电视，电视里正是中国人抗议的镜头。
For a solution, Mr Dower looks to the 20th-century views of E.H. Norman, a Japan expert and Marxist historian. Like Norman, he feels that most countries need a “revolution from below” against any system that “represses freedom, sacrifices life, and retards the creation of true self-government”. All citizens should be able to challenge the narrative sheld by elites. At a tense time of toxic nationalism in Asia, this book is atimely reminder of the uses and abuses of history.
为了寻求解决方案，道尔研究了日本专家、马克思主义史学家 E.H. 诺曼在20世纪提出的观点。和诺曼一样，道尔认为大多数国家需要一次“自下而上的改革”，推翻所有“压抑自由、牺牲生命、阻碍真正实现自治”的体制。所有公民都应当能够质疑社会精英所持的观点。民族主义正在毒害亚洲国家。在这紧张时刻，道尔的这本书及时地提醒了人们历史是如何被利用和滥用的。
