Cameron Thomas

For the avoidance of doubt, this speech comes from a place of deep appreciation for post-war Japan and for the enrichment it has given so many of us through its automotive and technological innovations and through global cultural phenomena such as “Godzilla”. It is starkly different from the Japan fought by our greatest generation. Less than a decade after the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “Godzilla” was created as a metaphor for nuclear weapons and their destructive power, but 2023’s “Godzilla Minus One”—greater and more destructive still—was also a metaphor for national guilt. For everything we love about Japan today, it has never undertaken the societal reckoning with its past that Germany did following the fall of the Nazis. Across Germany stand the horrifying relics of the Holocaust. In Hiroshima, the A-bomb dome is a memorial to the victims of the atomic bomb. In the land of the rising sun, it is far more difficult to find such an open recognition of its wartime torture of prisoners of war or its atrocities against civilians, such as by Unit 731. In 1936, under the direction of senior army surgeon Ishii Shiro, Japan focused on making disease a silent ally through human experiments and the study of biological and chemical weapons. Prisoners were kidnapped men, women—including pregnant women—children and even babies born of rape by staff within the compounds. They included political prisoners and anybody who had expressed to any degree anti-Japanese sentiment. Victims were predominantly Chinese, but included a significant minority of Russians. Experiments included withdrawal of half a litre of blood every two or three days until death. Some prisoners were frozen to death in experiments into frostbite or had limbs frozen and then shattered. Vivisection was regularly carried out to harvest organs from live victims, including pregnant women, who had been exposed to diseases and bacteria, sometimes under the guise of vaccination. Tens of thousands more were killed through engineered epidemics, with pathogens dropped over Chinese cities by Japanese aircraft. That is the context, Madam Deputy Speaker. On this coming anniversary of Victory over Japan Day, let us consider the path that led to war and review the actions that led to its conclusion. Let us lament the terrible loss of life through the strategic bombing, firebombing and atomic bombing of Japan. But we owe it to our finest generation to do so in the full context. Perhaps someday our Japanese friends can finally lay Godzilla to rest.