"Vietnam was constantly involved in wars for 45 years out of the roughly 60 years since the end of World War II in 1945. It was only about 15 years ago that peace came to us," recalled Dinh Quang, a Vietnamese man of culture, during a recent meeting with a cultural mission from Japan. Quang added calmly, "We have just begun facing up to the big cultural and social issue of how to heal the deep scars of war, to which we committed ourselves wholeheartedly in order to secure our survival."

In other words, the Vietnamese people now feel it is necessary to redefine the meaning of the war at an individual level, not merely as a war to achieve the national objective of unifying its people.

There are almost countless literary works in the United States that examine the so-called Vietnam War from the point of view of the impact that it had on the minds of individual people. In Vietnam, however, it was only from around the latter half of the 1980s to the early 1990s that saw the appearance of novels which faced up to the cruelty and inhumanity of the "sacred war" and described the impact the war had on individual minds. Such novels include Le Luu's "A Time Far Past" and Bao Ninh's "The Sorrow of War."

It is ideologically difficult to describe the war in a way that places emphasis on the minds of individuals because doing so could eventually lead to discarding the sacred veil of the revolutionary war. Furthermore, another serious issue arising out of the war is that it ripped Vietnamese families and their relatives apart.

"Of my five sons, two fought as South Vietnamese soldiers against the Communist army, one became a regular soldier in the North Vietnamese Army and one joined the liberation front in South Vietnam. Only one remained in Hue," said an elderly Vietnamese woman.

The Vietnamese War was a civil war far more than it was a war against the United States. The war was not a simple version of the East-West confrontation introduced into Vietnam. It represented a confrontation between a traditional society rooted deeply in the structure of northern farm areas and a southern society that was superficially westernized. It was also in the south a conflict between democratic forces and a dictatorial regime. In addition, participation in the national front meant the severance of links with, and in some cases flight from, one's family.

"In the battlefield, no one criticizes others' families. If one can free oneself from family restrictions, it would be much better... (partly omitted) if difficulties as severe as confronting death are lying in wait (from "A Time Far Past"(Thoi Xa Van) translated by Norio Kato).

The process of individualizing and humanizing a war, as well as separating it from history and politics, is the basis for establishing peace. However, when a war is both a civil and an external war, and when it begins taking on an aspect of turning into an arena where parents, children and brothers kill one another, it becomes extremely difficult to individualize or humanize such a war.

World War II, for Japan, was basically (militarily) a war against China as well as a war against the United States and Britain, and a war against the Soviet Union. However, for China, the war was, more than anything else, an internal war. The Chinese themselves fought against, and killed, one another. Moreover, compared with facets of an external war, the old scars of an internal war are far harder to view objectively and represent an issue that requires a lot of time before an accurate historical assessment can be made.

The Chinese have not yet had the composure to look back calmly and objectively in the true sense at the scars of the last war. They are not ready to see "human" aspects in their enemy and to find a way of "humanizing" the war by giving more thought to miserable individual experiences rather than to the aspect of a fight between nations. The only point that combines these two aspects of the war at present is the fact that "the Chinese people were the victims of Japanese militarism."

It still seems to be a taboo to mention the fact that there were among the Chinese those who cooperated with Japan during the war, and that certain conflicts broke out because of provocations by the Chinese Communist Party. In this sense, "humanization" of the war has not been realized yet in that country.