Do They Really Feel Remorse?

The museum, replete with historical maps and legal documents, convincingly demonstrates that Dokdo has been part of Korea for its entire recorded history. (The islands, known in English as the Liancourt Rocks, are 46 miles from the Korean mainland and about 100 from Japan.) But what it doesn’t explain to outsiders is why the status of the uninhabited volcanic outcrops is so important to so many Koreans.

Korean angst over Dokdo is a genuinely widespread, grassroots phenomenon. In 2005, a Japanese prefecture passed a resolution proclaiming Dokdo Japanese territory and establishing an annual “Takeshima Day.” The provocation came on the heels of the Japanese ambassador to Korea making a public statement that “Takeshima” was part of Japan. In response, businesses across Korea put up signs proclaiming Dokdo “our land.” Mass protests followed. A friend of mine in Seoul had theretofore been a dedicated smoker of Japan’s Mild Seven cigarettes; in the wake of the incident, he switched to a domestic brand.

So why the hullabaloo? While Japan’s claims to the islands are plainly illegitimate, Dokdo serves as a synecdoche for far deeper concerns. To many Koreans, the Japanese stance on Dokdo indicates that, though it largely became a “normal” country after World War II, Japan still refuses to accept the territorial sovereignty of its neighbors. (Korea, of course, was a brutally administered Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945.) Tokyo’s intransigence over Dokdo also raises uncomfortable questions about how sincere the country’s professed “remorse” over its behavior in the first half of the twentieth century really is. Those questions will come to the fore this month, when Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, a strident nationalist, marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Asia with a highly anticipated address. Koreans are keenly interested to see how Prime Minister Abe will handle the occasion.

Since at least the 1950s, Japanese prime ministers have periodically issued ritualistic expressions of “remorse” for their country’s brutal pre-1945 behavior. Yet, as one Korean academic put it to me, there’s an established pattern of the Japanese professing regret and then turning around and reneging. Consider the Yasukuni Shrine. Junichiro Koizumi—prime minister from 2001 to 2006 noted for his resemblance to Richard Gere and affinity for the music of Elvis Presley—was one of the many premiers who expressed his country’s “deep remorse” for the suffering it caused during World War II. Yet Koizumi also made annual pilgrimages to Yasukuni, which honors 14 class-A war criminals (along with 2.5 million Japanese war dead) and features a “historical” museum that makes Japan out to be the victim in World War II. (It blames the Pearl Harbor attack on the U.S. oil embargo against Japan, for example.) Prime Minister Abe and his wife have also made widely condemned visits to Yasukuni, raising hackles across Asia. (It should be noted that a not insignificant number of Japanese protest these visits as well.)

Faulkner’s adage about the past not being past has become a cliché. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong, especially in Asia. More than the Yasukuni provocations, the issue of “comfort women”—young women and girls from occupied territories who were forced into sex slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army—is still an acutely painful one for many Koreans. In 1993, after decades of denials, the Japanese government finally admitted that it had forced tens of thousands of women into military-run brothels. In 1995, the Japanese government set up a private fund to pay compensation to some of the women, though the state itself did not contribute. Prime Minister Abe, meanwhile, is an on-the-record denier; in 2007, he claimed that “there is no evidence to prove there was coercion,” parroting a slander that the comfort women had elected to work as prostitutes. Abe later apologized, and he has said he has no intention of altering the 1993 apology.

But even when apologizing, the Japanese still find a way to offend the Koreans. Late last month, Mitsubishi became the first private Japanese company to express remorse for its conduct during World War II; it issued an apology to the American POWs who were forced into slave labor for the company. But you know who Mitsubishi didn’t apologize to? The thousands of Koreans who were forced into slave labor over the same period. (This oversight, shall we say, was not lost on most Koreans.)

Japan’s significance to Korea’s export-dependent economy is declining. Today, South Korea’s trade with China outstrips its trade with Japan and the United States combined. Korea’s conservative president Park Geun-hye seems to have made the strategic decision that managing relations with China successfully is far more important, at this juncture, than remaining on cordial terms with Japan. Tokyo, by repeatedly kicking dust in the eyes of the Koreans, has been happy to oblige.

In a masterpiece of subtle diplomacy, German chancellor Angela Merkel implicitly contrasted her country’s post-World War II behavior with that of Japan on a visit to Tokyo earlier this year. At a speech that was widely covered by everyone except the docile Japanese media, Merkel lauded Germany’s decision to “face our past,” a process that largely began under Willy Brandt’s chancellorship from 1969 to 1974. Abe has an opportunity to spark similar soul-searching with his anniversary statement. As seasoned Asia-watcher Sean King of Park Strategies put it to me, “Abe can be Willy Brandt here, but I doubt he’ll take that chance.” Abe’s political base, after all, is highly nationalistic and would be antagonized by any statement that could be viewed as too “masochistic.” It remains unlikely that, come August 15, we’ll be asking how to say “Sister Souljah” in Japanese.

Ethan Epstein is an associate editor at The Weekly Standard. He traveled with a group as guests of the South Korean foreign ministry.