Watanabe Shōichi

Shōichi Watanabe (渡部 昇一 Watanabe Shōichi, 15 September 1930 – 17 April 2017) was an English scholar and one of Japan’s foremost cultural critics. He was born in Tsuruoka, Yamagata Prefecture. A graduate of Sophia University, where he obtained his Master’s degree, he completed his doctorate at University of Münster in 1958. Two volumes of autobiography on his years in Germany narrate his varied experiences during this period. Returning to his alma mater, he became successively lecturer, assistant professor and full professor, until his retirement. He served as emeritus professor at the same university until his death. A passionate book-collector, he was chairman of the Japan Bibliophile Society. His personal collection of books on English philology (see Bibliography) was perhaps his most important contribution to the field of English philology in Japan, containing many rare items.

Historical revisionism

A conservative opinion-leader affiliated to the openly revisionist organization Nippon Kaigi, Watanabe was known for his dismissal of the Nanking Massacre as a historical delusion, attributing the known killings to the standard revenge of regular soldiers in war against guerrilla combatants whom they have captured. As he later clarified, in his view, the concept of massacre in war should properly be reserved for atrocities against a civilian population, where the numbers roughly exceed the range of 40–50 victims, as opposed to the wholesale killing of irregular insurgents. Generally Watanabe's perspective closely echoes the line taken by Japanese generals before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial of 1948.

Again, with regard to the Japanese history textbook controversies, which followed on Saburo Ienaga's suit against the Japanese Education Ministry, Watanabe was almost alone in controverting the general consensus of editorialists writing for the Japanese mainstream press (Mainichi Shinbun, Asahi Shinbun), and upholding the Ministry's prerogative to intervene directly in the content of textbooks used in Japanese primary and secondary schools.

In Watanabe's view, the decisive incident leading to Japan's full-scale war on the Chinese mainland, namely the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937, is to be read as an underhand Chinese Communist Party plot against Japan, and the versions of history taught in pre-war Japanese school textbooks are more reliable than those available today to students.

Watanabe remained a controversial figure, but predominantly on the Japanese scene. He was little known abroad, even in his own academic area of specialization. He disconcerted foreigners by telling them that Japan's "racial purity" was to be cherished. His prolific writings include a number of books on the "Japanese spirit".

Hata Ikuhiko has claimed that Watanabe's book on the German General Staff is characterized by wholesale plagiarism from a German source.