JAPANESE
REVOLTED BY U.S. WAR IN VIETNAM
"Top U.S. officials have been hard at work in Japan during the recent weeks in an effort to swing Japanese public opinion about the Vietnam war to the official American position," writes Kiyoaki Murata ‘in the May 20 Japan Times. "These officials included such figures as Walt W. Rostow, Henry Cabot Lodge and Marshall Green. Most recently Ambassador Edwin 0. Reischauer took the trouble of writing a lengthy commentary in rebuttal to the three letters selected out of 1,233 received by the weekly Shukan Asahi and sent to President Lyndon | B, Johnson. -
"Despite such an endeavor, the average Japanese view-on the war in Vietnam and how it should be brought to an end seems to be drifting farther away from what Washington wishes it to be,"
Murata discusses the reasons for this trend in Japanese opinion. It is not the first time, he notes, that a "U.S. war in Asia has met criticisms in Japan." "The Korean conflict was not popular among the Japanese. Nevertheless the criticism then was far less’ open.
An important difference now is that since the end of the | occupation in 1952, the Japanese press is freer. It is not compelled to print the handouts of American military authorities.
Another difference is that Japanese reporters are in position to cover both sides in the conflict in Vietnam and thus to present the facts in a more objective way.
Besides accounts of the war, the mass media in Japan have also been able to provide photographs and documentary films, These ™ have had big impact. Murata cites as an instance the documentary which was recently shown on television and which touched off violent protests throughout the country because of the gruesome scenes. The protest compelled cancellation of the series:.
"Following the war against the Viet Gone with a South Viet= namese marine battalion, the camera showed, among other items, a 14year-old boy, a Viet Cong, being lashed by a husky marine in one scene, followed by a closeup of a bloody gash on his head,
"Then there was the sequence of a 17-year-old Viet Cong, bound up, his execution and his beheading. A South Vietnamese marine carries the severed head along the road but throws it away as though it was too much of a burden. And the head bounces like a pumpkin.
"The TV camera crew claims it had to work under serious restrictions and the station says the broadcast film was only a
small portion.of the entire footage filmed and that it was edited to mitigate the degree of brutality shown. One can well imagine what deleted parts would be like,"
The controversy over this film was one of the "most heated" that has ever occurred in Japan. ‘Some argued that it should be shown in: order to demonstrate to the ycuth that war is neither "glorious nor fashionable but dirty and horrible," Others objected on the ground of taste, "not of the message it carried."
Discussing the Japanese reaction to the film, Murata says that to anyone over forty in Japan the idea of beheading or other-~ wise killing captured prisoners of war is not novel.
"What is found repugnant and shocking is the fact that such brutality is not a product of an abnormal battle-zone psychology but it is conducted with such nonchalance and that filming of these scenes was condoned by the South Vietnamese armed forces,
"All this suggests to the Japanese the level of the civilization of the people involved,
"Tf the U.S. needs the popular support of the Japanese for the prosecution of the Vietnam war at all, then it may be said that the mightiest opposition she faces is the nature of the war itself as portrayed by the mass media in Japan.”