Before the confetti hit the floor on New Year’s 2015, people have been looking to August 15 and speculating how Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe would handle the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II. The wait’s over: the day is nearly upon us.
As Abe gives his address, he will be torn between his conservative beliefs —that unceasing demands for Japan to apologize are unfair and will weaken his country —and the need to reassure Japan’s neighbors at a time when, given his ambitious security agenda, it would be wise to do so.
On the former point, many commentators, and South Korean and Chinese leaders, have been urging Abe to use the same language used in the 50th and 60th statements (delivered by Prime Ministers Murayama and Koizumi, respectively). Nobody thinks that Abe, a conservative, is going to lead Japan in a national campaign of atonement. However his use of such language, people argue, would show that he is not seeking to overturn the conciliatory course that previous leaders set for Japan.
But Abe has for years opposed language of “apology” and “aggression.” Two decades ago, he was one of many conservative parliamentarians opposing the left’s push for such language in the 50th anniversary Diet Resolution. Japan’s conservatives believe that national strength comes from emphasizing positive history, and that true friends don’t demand apologies and are willing to move forward.
And “aggression?” Abe and other conservatives resent that given all the imperialist behavior in the early twentieth century, only Japan is asked to apologize for its violence in East Asia—violence that they loath to call “aggression” because they see it as motivated in self-defense against Western imperialism. So for a variety of reasons conservatives blanche at what the Chinese and Koreans want Abe to say on the 15th.
Even if Abe disagrees philosophically with this language, the pragmatist in him knows that all eyes are upon him — at a time when his security ambitions, and coy relationship with the Japanese constitution, have rattled nerves. Abe might take a cue from Yasuhiro Nakasone, that influential conservative prime minister who wanted to pray for the soul of his brother at Yasukuni–but understood that doing so would be alarming as he led Japan toward a more active role in regional security.
Ultimately Abe’s statement, while important, is only part of the story. On this anniversary we should widen our gaze beyond his podium to ask, do Japan’s people understand the suffering they inflicted on other peoples; do their leaders show a commitment to remembering that suffering, and are the people educated about it? We should expect a leading liberal country –not just Japan, but any liberal country–to explore and understand its terrible past human rights abuses: both as a way to encourage empathy and cooperation with its former victims, and as a way of reinforcing its current, laudable, commitment to promoting human rights around the world.