The statement of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on the 70th anniversary of the conclusion of the Second World War was the focus of profound anticipation throughout Asia. The prime minister was in an extremely delicate position, seeking to balance the need to express contrition to Imperial Japan’s aggrieved neighbors against the robust demands to yield no ground from his nationalist domestic political base. These contradictory forces, not surprisingly, created a statement more memorable for its equivocation than for its eloquence. This was not a Willy Brandt kneeling at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial moment that would forever transform the narrative.
On the positive side, Abe did give assurances that such previous cabinet expressions of “deep remorse and apology” as the benchmark 1995 Murayama statement “will remain unshakable” in the future. The prime minister also expressed “profound grief” for the souls of those who perished at both home and abroad. Such words will be welcomed in Washington where the continued tensions over history between America’s two key allies in a region with a nuclear-armed North Korea and a rising and abrasive China is a cause for increasing concern. Above all, Washington wants its allies to cooperate as team players despite any past grievances.
Still, the special concerns of Korea were given rather minimal attention in the Abe remarks. This is despite an extremely contentious colonial period that began with the brutal assassination with samurai swords of the Korean Queen by Japanese paramilitary forces in 1895. (Americans might reflect on their own reaction if British forces, during the burning of the White House in the War of 1812, had murdered First Lady Dolley Madison.) Pointedly, specific attention was given in Mr. Abe’s remarks to “the Chinese people who underwent all the sufferings of the war” and “the former POWs who experienced unbearable sufferings caused by the Japanese military.” Yet no similar phrase was included regarding the acute sufferings of the Korean people. This omission might be interpreted in Seoul as reflecting past condescending racial attitudes in Japan with regard to Korean people. “Colonialism” was most extensively addressed with regards to the “vast colonies possessed mainly by the Western powers” that “stretched out across the world.” This reference appeared to be a repetition of Japanese nationalist claims, as reflected at Tokyo’s Yushukan Museum, regarding Imperial Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere” (Dai-tō-a Kyōeiken). This was a war-era propaganda campaign used to justify Japan’s military expansionism under the ruse of “liberating” its Asian neighbors from Western imperialism. No specifics were discussed regarding the harsh colonial rule in Korea or the ethnically based campaign to suppress aboriginal people in colonial Taiwan.
The critical issue of the “Comfort Women,” (women and girls, the majority being ethnic Korean, who were coerced into sexual slavery for Imperial Japanese forces), was not addressed at all. The indirect allusion to the issue contained in the phrase “we engrave in our hearts the past, when the dignity and honor of many women were severely injured during wars in the 20th century” assumes no specific responsibility. Mr. Abe’s deliberately evasive statement could be referring equally to women prisoners assaulted in Nazi concentration camps, women who may have been abused by Allied occupation forces as previously raised by the mayor of Osaka, and the women of Bosnia, the Middle East, and Africa who were sexually exploited in late twentieth century conflicts.
Americans, in particular, might wish to take particular note of the prime minister’s heavy emphasis on the victimization of Japan during the war. There were specific references to “the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the air raids on Tokyo and other cities, and the ground battles in Okinawa.” No specific mention, however, was made of Imperial Japan’s acts of aggression that led directly to the Allied retaliation. While the “Manchurian Incident” of 1931 was alluded to, the statement did not note that Imperial Japan’s aerial attack on Chinese civilians in Shenyang during that incident in 1931 was among the first uses of aerial bombardment against an urban center in recorded history. Such war-related crimes as Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March, the Nanking (Nanjing) Massacre, Thai-Burma railway POW slave labor, the “Sook Ching” massacre in Singapore, the sacking of Manila, Unit 731, and the murder of POWs in violation of the Geneva Convention, were not included as precursors to the references to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nor was there any mention, in connection with the firebombing of Tokyo, of the extensive firebombing of Chinese cities for eight years of war (1937-45).
Finally, Mr. Abe’s assertion in his remarks that future generations of Japanese people, who were not even born during the war, should not be “predestined to apologize” is a particular cause for concern. It indicates a possible lack of understanding of the flow of history. America this year marked not only the 70th anniversary of WWII but the 150th anniversary of the end of the American Civil War. The recent killings in an African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, by an accused perpetrator who made symbolic use of the Confederate flag raised once again smoldering historic issues remaining from that long ago conflict. Mr. Abe indicated such a great admiration for Civil War President Abraham Lincoln and the history his life represents that he asked President Obama to take him to the Lincoln Memorial during his recent Washington visit. Yet Mr. Lincoln wrote to Congress during the Civil War these words: “fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.” That applies to Japan as well as to America.
Dennis P. Halpin, a former adviser on Asian issues to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, is a visiting scholar at the U.S.-Korea Institute (SAIS) and an adviser to the Poblete Analysis Group.
