What should we make of the offer by Japanese authorities
of a collection of letters from WW2 Kamikaze pilots to the UNESCO World
Heritage ‘Memory of the World’ document collection? Unsurprisingly,
the offer has not been well received by some of Japan’s WW2 adversaries, China
describing it as a glorification of Japanese militarism.
In view of
China’s enormous losses in the 1930s and the 1940s, and present tensions
between the respective states, this is hardly surprising. But we
still might ask whether this is an appropriate criterion to apply to the
preservation of documents and artefacts, which might have historical, or
legal/moral significance, in the matter of the way we view war.
