Sorry seems to be the hardest word for Japan

By Phar Kim Beng

BOSTON: Finding an exact explanation for Japan's reluctance to account for its wartime actions can be taxing.

To begin with, there is a need to overcome the morass of what constitutes the equivalent of an "apology". Is it verbal, or does it have to be in written form too? If the former comes about in the absence of the latter, does it count as an "apology"?

To some Japanese, this issue has been resolved in 1995, when then Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama admitted clearly and verbally to Japan's aggression during World War II.

The word he used was nci owabi mtr -- which could be rendered into English as "sincere apology".

In October 1998, when South Korean President Kim Dae-jung visited Japan, then Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi did not fudge from apologizing openly to Korea for Japan's previous colonial aggression.

Once again, a verbal apology was offered, using the same word.

In the following month, when China's President Jiang Zemin came to Japan, Obuchi again delivered what amounted to a clear apology.

However, when China attempted to put Japan's apology and acknowledgement of its war guilt into a joint document, Japan refused to sign it. Although the document was issued, China was not pleased. The Japanese government, in turn, insisted that it was still valid without the signature.

As a result of this episode, the region still cannot make out whether Japan has apologized or not.

As it is, although subsequent Japanese governments have since adopted the 1995 Murayama nci danwa mtr (speech) as a guideline in Japan's diplomatic relations with its neighbors, the issue of Japanese war guilt has not been resolved satisfactorily.

Invariably, how the issue may be understood or tackled eventually depends not on how words were used by the Japanese government, but on the entire scope of Asian history.

In addition, there is a need to gain greater clarity of Japanese culture and its political system, coupled with the role of the United States and other Asian countries.

In this context, there are numerous theories that attest to the seeming recalcitrance of Japan in facing up to its past.

In Hirohito And The Making Of Modern Japan, Herbert Bix, a Harvard historian now teaching at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, argues that the emperor himself was responsible for Japan's initiation and conduct of the Pacific War.

Since Emperor Hirohito was forgiven by Gen. MacArthur, it allowed some loyal Japanese to believe that if the emperor was blameless, so were they.

From a religious standpoint, Japan's rejection of culpability, both direct and assumed, also stemmed from its being steeped in Confucian-Shinto ethos.

Since deference to one's ancestor is considered a virtue, making an apology for Japan's wartime actions would have amounted to "spitting" on one's lineage. This is considered a social taboo of the highest degree.

While religious creed or cultural ethos may well explain the indigenous character of the resistance, the very precariousness of Japan's geo-political position before the outbreak of the Pacific War adds to the moral uncertainty too.

In the 1940s, Japan was practically ringed by what Akira Iriye, a leading authority on Asia-Pacific relations, referred to as an "ABCD Cordon".

So when Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, followed by waves of invasion into the Asian heartland, it was done with the aim of breaking free from four countries: American forces stationed in the Philippines, the British battalions based in Malaya and Myanmar, an increasingly prominent China under the rule of the Kuomintang and the Dutch army located in Indonesia.

The French, meanwhile, were controlling Indochina.

Seen from this standpoint, Japan's action in starting the war verges on being a geo-political necessity.

Indeed, by subjecting Japan's needs for oil to a "case-by-case review" -- a policy adopted by the Roosevelt administration prior to the break-out of the war in the Pacific -- Japan was led to believe that force was inevitable.

Since what was "inevitable" was not "immoral", some Japanese have argued that the Japanese government's willingness to offer an apology, albeit a verbal one, already constitutes a major admission of guilt.

Be that as it may, Japan's difficulty in squaring with its past also has to do with the fact that much of what constitutes "aggressions" was not committed in its midst.

Unlike Germany, which has the gas chamber in Auschwitz in neighboring Poland to remind people of the atrocities of the Nazi Party, there are no visible remnants of war in Japan.

The Nanjing Massacre, for one, was committed in distant China, as were Japan's aggressions in Korea and other parts of Asia.

Moreover, unlike West Germany, which was integrated into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Japan was not brought under any collective system of alliance to undergo more thorough reforms.

If anything, North Korea's invasion of Seoul on June 25, 1950, made Japan an indispensable ally of the United States almost overnight.

According to Saburo Ienaga, an anti-war education activist, this had the unfortunate effect of reversing Japanese "rehabilitation" just as it was proceeding apace. Due to the communist threat posed by China and the Soviet Union for the larger part of the Cold War, the United States also turned Japan into its de facto "unsinkable aircraft carrier", hence removing Japan further from dealing with its history.

Furthermore, high-ranking Japanese military officers, including Gen. Tojo, were prosecuted in the Tokyo War Crime Tribunals.

Since these officers were not elected by the Japanese public -- unlike top members of the Nazi Party, who were voted into office as early as 1933, of which Hitler was the most prominent -- Japanese society, as a whole, has not felt compelled to examine its own role.

Moreover, the trial also had the unfortunate effect of "individualizing" Japan's wartime action as caused by top cadres of the military alone. In all, seven Class A criminals were sentenced to death.

Ostensibly satisfied with the outcome of the trial, the Tokyo War Crime Tribunals conveniently allowed some Japanese to draw a line between aberrations committed abroad and the support that they gave Imperial Japan invariably from within.

The difficulty faced by Japan in admitting to its war guilt is also a testament to the heterogeneity of the Asian region.

While Japanese rule in Asian countries was invariably brutal across the board, such brutality was also selective in its execution.

Citizens of Chinese descent, for example, bore the brunt of Japanese aggression. Non-Chinese were not punished severely or arbitrarily.

In Malaya, the political causes of the indigenous Malays were even supported by Japan.

Thus, latter-day Asians have found it difficult to form a coalition to compel Japan to offer an outright apology, as they themselves are divided on the exact nature of Japanese misrule.

Ironically, it was Asian women who confronted Japan with the "comfort women" issue successfully, as Japan agreed eventually to form an Asian Women Fund to compensate the women in the Philippines, Korea and Taiwan who were forced by the Imperial Army into prostitution.

In all, there is a lot more than meets the eye when it comes to the issue of "Japanese apology".

For Japan to reform to the satisfaction of East Asian countries, especially China, scholars and analysts alike have to look at the broader picture as to why Japan can apologize verbally, yet hold back constantly from giving a written one.

-- The Straits Times / Asia News Network