A Very Lonely Japan

A Very Lonely Japan
The country‘s inability to come to grips with its past has long infuriated the region. But now it‘s starting to threaten Tokyo‘s once unquestioned influence.
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By Christian Caryl
Newsweek International
Oct. 31, 2005 issue - The Japanese tend to expect diplomatic bouquets from even the most insignificant of their foreign visitors. So imagine the audience reaction when German ex-chancellor Helmut Schmidt, invited to give a lecture in Tokyo last month, treated his hosts to an exercise in bluntness. He accused the Japanese of soft-pedaling their country‘s responsibility for its wartime past—and came to a devastating conclusion: "Sadly, the Japanese nation doesn‘t have too many genuine friends in the world outside." It was a syndrome he blamed on "the ambiguity of the Japanese public when it comes to acknowledging the conquests, the start of the Pacific war and the crimes of the past history." His listeners didn‘t appear to find much consolation in Schmidt‘s concession that his own country had committed "even worse crimes within Europe."
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Small wonder, perhaps, that no Japanese media picked up on the content of the speech. But the Japanese had better get used to dire verdicts on their handling of history, because there‘s plenty more to come. After Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi last week paid yet another visit to Yasukuni Shrine—the Tokyo war memorial that honors 2.47 million wartime dead, including 14 class-A war criminals—his country can look forward to a deepening of the remarkable diplomatic isolation that has enveloped it in recent years. China and South Korea expressed their anger in fiercely worded statements and canceled planned diplomatic meetings in protest. Even some of Japan‘s erstwhile allies in Asia, Malaysia and Singapore, also registered their disapproval.
Sixty years after the end of World War II, Japan‘s wartime past has never mattered so much. Last week‘s Yasukuni visit didn‘t prompt ferocious street protests as previous ones had, but each such incident further cements the widespread view that Japanese expressions of regret over the war are insincere. Beyond that, Japan has territorial disputes with almost all of its neighbors, a situation unique among the leading industrialized nations; a dispute with China over drilling in the East China Sea flared just last week. And perhaps most bitter of all for Tokyo‘s bureaucrats is the resounding failure of Japan‘s recent bid to win a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council—an ambition that no significant Asian nation supported, despite the billions in investment and aid Tokyo has spread around the region in the last half century. "To be honest I was totally surprised," says leading diplomatic commentator Yoichi Funabashi. "It was a complete disaster."
Until recently, Japan could to a certain extent ignore the suspicion and resentment it inspired across Asia. The country was an economic powerhouse, bolstered by its alliance with the United States. But now that animosity threatens Japan‘s further progress, at a time when the country finds its claim to regional leadership increasingly challenged by the rising might of Beijing. In effect, the country that spent most of the 20th century aspiring to a leadership role in East Asia now finds itself virtually relegated to a corner for bad behavior. And that‘s the last thing the region needs at a time when there is already plenty of instability to go around, thanks to a rapidly modernizing Chinese military, a nuclear-armed North Korea and a variety of potentially explosive territorial disputes. "The wounds of war remain and haven‘t been healed in neighboring Asian countries," says Tomiichi Murayama, the former Japanese prime minister whose 1995 apology to the victims of Japanese wartime conquest set the gold standard for all future public expressions of remorse. "They still lack confidence in Japan."
Why is that? Hasn‘t the country‘s postwar pacifism become so deeply rooted that a resurgence of Japanese militarism is unthinkable? And hasn‘t Japan apologized for its wartime actions over and over again? True enough. Tokyo University scholar Sven Saaler points out that public-opinion surveys consistently show that most Japanese accept the description of their country‘s military campaigns from 1931 to 1945 as "wars of aggression." Meanwhile, a new museum devoted to the fate of foreign women recruited as sex slaves by the Japanese Army during the war opened in Tokyo at the beginning of August. And on the anniversary of the Pacific war‘s end this summer, the very same Koizumi who can‘t stay away from Yasukuni gave a much-noted speech reaffirming his country‘s readiness to acknowledge its responsibility for the war.
And yet a significant portion of the Japanese population does not agree on the precise parameters of Japan‘s war guilt. Koizumi‘s visit certainly destroys any good will occasioned by his Aug. 15 speech. For every Japanese bureaucrat or politician who expresses remorse for the war, there is another who will make an inflammatory remark. During the past year, Education Minister Nariaki Nakayama has several times lauded a revisionist history textbook that minimizes the Japanese military‘s role in forcible wartime prostitution. Notes Jeff Kingston, a professor at Temple University in Tokyo: "The bottom line is that there is no consensus in Japan on war responsibility. If there‘s no consensus on memory, you can‘t assume responsibility—and without responsibility, you can‘t move to reconciliation."
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