Honor and the Japanese Government

Honor, is a concept not much in vogue today, but its origins can be traced back to the Iliad. In our society, it has become merely a title used primarily to address judges.

The decline of the use of the term honor is, I suspect, because so few of us in modern society possess it. Since the rise of the “Me First” generation and the current do-anything-to-get-ahead, commercial culture, where celebrities and Chief Executives of large corporations are convicted of felonies , and two-star generals are regularly replaced for dereliction of duty, it is no wonder the notion of personal honor has just about disappeared from our society.

Recent articles in the New York Times reported that Shinzo Abe, the Prime Minister of Japan, has denied that, during World War II: (a) the Japanese Imperial Army employed female sex slaves throughout the lands they occupied and (b) knowingly deceived trusting civilians into committing suicide during final days of the battle for Okinawa. Mr. Abe went so far as to have the Ministry of Education revise the current school text books to delete references to these dishonorable acts.

We should not be surprised at these attempts to re-write history. For as Earl St. Vincent, First Lord of the British Admiralty in 1805, noted, honor may be compared to the chastity of a woman, and, when once lost, may never by recovered.

Of course the Japanese government must deny such a loss of honor. Today, the Japanese people and their government have remade their country and their culture. They are justly proud of their accomplishments. But, the Japanese government, and by association, the Japanese nation, have no honor and cannot recover it. So they deny the loss.