JAPAN

Sorry Is the Hardest Word

The failure of Japanese leaders to come to terms with the country's wartime past mystifies many. But the reason is surprisingly straightforward: old-fashioned politics

By Velisarios Kattoulas/TOKYO

IN AN ALL-TOO-FAMILIAR GAFFE, on a trip to South Africa in January, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori refers to the Pacific War as the "Greater East Asia War," and to the Sino-Japanese War as the "China Incident."

Barely a month later, Hosei Norota, a former defence chief, blames Japan's entry into World War II on the United States. "Faced with oil and other embargoes, Japan had no choice but to venture southward to secure natural resources," the senior politician tells a meeting of supporters. "In other words, Japan had fallen prey to a scheme of the United States."

Predictably, Chinese and Korean leaders are furious, incensed yet again by the seemingly never-ending attempts of leading politicians from Japan's governing Liberal Democratic Party to justify and downplay their country's wartime brutality.

While such spats are all too common, to survivors and descendants of the 3.5 million people that historians say were enslaved or slaughtered by Japanese forces during the war, they remain impossible to fathom. Since the 1980s, victims around the region like the sex slaves, or "comfort women," have launched more than 50 legal battles to force Japan to unequivocally apologize and pay compensation to individuals for wartime atrocities. Yet, despite the mounting international furore--or, perhaps because of it--Japan adamantly refuses to bow to its accusers. Officials in Tokyo regularly dismiss compensation lawsuits as frivolous, declare that the issue of reparations was settled years ago by international treaty and claim that the statute of limitations for wartime atrocities has long expired.

In the West, many have rationalized this stubborn stance by reverting to caricatures of buck-teethed Japanese soldiers bayoneting everything in sight. In his otherwise excellent 1994 book Wages of Guilt, Ian Buruma (formerly with the REVIEW) suggests that postwar Japan failed to match Germany's show of remorse--both public and financial--because on some preternatural level the Japanese are immoral.

"It was important that the Japanese accept responsibility for their savage behaviour during the war," writes Buruma, citing Hitoshi Motoshima, a respected former Nagasaki mayor. "And responsibility was a question of morality. And morality was a matter of religion. The problem with the Japanese was that 'they worship nature. But they have no religious or philosophical moral basis.'"

As an explanation, it's nothing if not neat. But a careful examination of the reasons for Tokyo's intransigence reveals a more mundane force at work: domestic politics. The conservatives who have dominated Japanese politics since 1945 can't push Japan to take further responsibility for its war crimes because of their reliance on far-right extremists and nationalist religious groups. These links, far more extensive than is widely understood, are a vital source of financial support and key to the survival of many LDP careers. Until they are broken, Japan will continue to struggle with its past, and fail to heal the rifts with its neighbours.

"IT'S SAD TO SAY,but the offices of conservative Diet members are swarming with nationalists," says Akira Yamada, a history professor at Meiji University in Tokyo, who has written extensively about Japanese war guilt. Cemented at the turn of the 19th century, conservative politicians' ties to the far right have proved remarkably resilient. Today, the bulk of the LDP's leadership relies on right-wing thugs as fixers. What is more, as a weak economy has cut into campaign donations, the entire party has grown more dependent on money from single-issue religious groups dedicated to glorifying Japan's military past.

In recent months, allegations of such links have hit some very senior LDP figures. In October, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hidenao Nakagawa was forced to step down in part because a magazine, Focus, ran photos of him at a karaoke bar with a prominent rightist. Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, meanwhile, is suing another weekly magazine, Shukan Gendai, which ran photos of him at a karaoke bar with a right-wing extremist.

Of course, not everyone in the LDP keeps close ties to right-wing thugs. With exceptions, the former bureaucrats and "second-generation" politicians who dominate the left and the centre of the party belong to high-powered Old Boy networks--or inherit well-oiled political machines--and typically shun rightists. By stark contrast, at the start of their careers, the mainly self-starters on the right of the LDP struggle to gain their footing, and often turn to extremists for support. "For such politicians, ties to extremists are a tool they can use in intra- and inter-party skirmishes," says Yoshibumi Wakamiya, the author of The Postwar Conservative View of Asia, an authoritative study of the LDP's attitudes toward the war in Asia, and a deputy managing editor at the Asahi Shimbun, a national newspaper. "At least starting out, for many it's the only tool they have."

One such politician is "X." Without a seat to inherit, or powerful friends to smooth his path, he first ran for national office in his early 40s, and took help from wherever it came. One of his most enthusiastic supporters was a high-school classmate who briefly joined the yakuza, or gangsters, but left to found his own right-wing group and dedicate himself to corporate extortion. A weathered chain-smoker in his 50s, the classmate says he personally handed hundreds of ¥10,000 ($86 in current terms) banknotes to voters in the politician's first election campaign, in the late 1980s.

"Once, the police photographed me handing over money," the politician laughs. "But when they pulled me in, there was nothing they could do because I told them the money was omimaikin," a cash gift for an ill relative. Today, the politician sports his own finely honed political machine and holds a senior post in the LDP. But he still turns to his friend for help in solving squabbles with other party hacks. In one incident witnessed by this reporter, he accepted information that could be used to embarrass a rival who was stalling his rise through the LDP's ranks.

Despite such cases, it's hard to gauge the true impact of the LDP's nebulous links to Japan's 100,000 right-wing extremists. It is clear, though, that both hold remarkably similar views of Japan's wartime history. True, only extremists publicly dismiss comfort women as money-grabbing, old prostitutes. But many extremists and right-wing politicians openly question whether Japan should linger over its past.

"I think there is no reason why I should be urged to soul-search about the war," Diet member Sanae Takaichi told the Lower House Foreign Affairs Committee during the testy debate over Japan's official statement to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of the war. "I cannot be said to count among the war generation, and that's why I don't feel remorse."

In any case, LDP links to right-wing extremists are arguably less disconcerting than its links to nationalist religious groups. Of these, one of the most powerful is the million-strong Japan Association of the Bereaved Families of the War Dead. It was founded at the end of the war, and at first its mainly female membership was actually highly critical of Japan's wartime leaders, insisting their husbands, fathers, and sons had been lost due to poor leadership, and demanding compensation. From the early 1950s, though, the association was taken over--some say hijacked--by the relative of an executed war criminal and members of wartime cabinets. Wakamiya in The Postwar Conservative View of Asia refers to "the gradual transformation of the Association of Bereaved Families (ostensibly a peace organization at its inception) into a nationalistic lobby."

These days, far from criticizing the war, the association argues that describing it as an act of aggression is tantamount to saying Japanese soldiers who died spilled their blood for nothing. Under Shinto belief, this would preclude their souls from resting in peace. Some senior LDP figures have echoed this belief: Ryutaro Hashimoto, a former prime minister and one-time chairman of the association, wrote in his 1994 book To Win Back the Seat of Power that he deplored contemplating "how those who live today and cherish the memory of their deceased kinsfolk would feel if they were told, 'That was a war of aggression after all.'"

The LDP has long had ties to the Association of Bereaved Families. But since the end of the Cold War these have grown stronger as support for the party has waned and economic stagnation has bitten into campaign donations. Opinion polls show that only one in three Japanese voters now support the LDP. And according to calculations made by Kyodo News, a Japanese wire service, in 1999 the LDP's local chapters raised ¥25.6 billion in campaign funds, down nearly 30% from the year before.

However, since Japanese campaign-finance law requires parties to disclose only minimal information about donations, and LDP politicians and the association both declined several requests to comment for this article, it is hard to calculate the scope of the relationship between the two. Nevertheless, academics and activists say the association enjoys considerable sway over the party. "It's simple," says Nobunao Tanaka, the co-author of a stinging critique of the association's influence on images of the war in school textbooks and daily discourse. "The War Bereaved Association gets out the vote for the LDP and gives it money, and in exchange the LDP has to swallow the association's ideas."

WHILE IMPERIAL JAPAN'S crimes pale in comparison to those of Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia and Mao's China, they nonetheless retain the power to shock. Among the 3.5 million prisoners of war and civilians that historians estimate Japan slaughtered and enslaved, 200,000 women were forced into sexual slavery; 2 million men were made to work as slaves on an array of projects in Java; and untold thousands were butchered in biological and chemical-warfare experiments and atrocities like the 1937 Rape of Nanjing.

By rights, Japan should have answered for its brutality in 1945. But the U.S., fearing a crackdown could push Tokyo into the Soviet Union's arms, pressured Western nations to drop their support for a far-reaching catharsis akin to the Nazi war trials and sweep the issue under the carpet, where it remained largely ignored for nearly 40 years.

To date, Japan's victims have been on the losing end of virtually every courtroom battle. All the same, they are hopeful of eventually winning their war. To begin with, they look to evidence showing that most Japanese support a more forthright response to the crimes of their ancestors. In the most recent nationwide survey about the subject, in 1994, 72% of respondents indicated they believed compensation paid to victims of Japanese savagery was insufficient. Also, an informal annual poll at Meiji University in Tokyo consistently finds that 70%-80% of undergraduates enrolling to study history believe Japan has yet to properly atone for its wartime crimes--despite the subject's fleeting treatment in school textbooks.

Most important, activists point out that Japan would benefit from settling compensation claims. Magnanimity, they argue, would create goodwill across Asia, and respect for Japan worldwide, and might even bolster Tokyo's campaign for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

Reparations activists can even point to the occasional victory: Last November one of Japan's largest construction companies, Kajima Corp., agreed to pay ¥500 million to settle a lawsuit over killings at its notorious Hanaoka labour camp in Akita prefecture. In July 1945, Japanese troops butchered more than 300 Chinese slaves--many by torture--after five Japanese supervisors were killed at the camp. Activists were quick to hail the agreement as a harbinger of more success, while even mainstream Japan saw it as a hopeful development. "We hope this compromise provides a foothold for extracting the thorn of postwar compensation that has been stuck in Japanese society," the Asahi Shimbun noted in an editorial.

Yet in all likelihood conservative politicians will block attempts to compensate victims directly. For on top of its ties to Japanese nationalists of every stripe, the LDP--and, perhaps, Japan itself--has moved hard to the right since the end of the Cold War. For the most part, the LDP's shift was driven by arithmetic. The bulk of the politicians who bolted the party in the early 1990s to eventually form main opposition groups including the Democratic Party of Japan came from the LDP's left and centre. At the time, their departure was seen as the beginning of the end of the LDP. But after they bungled a brief turn at the helm, their absence from the LDP served only to strengthen the party's right wing.

To Yoshiaki Yoshimi, the history professor at Chuo University near Tokyo who first found documentary proof linking the Japanese government to the establishment of the so-called Comfort Stations (army brothels), the outlook remains bleak: "Since the end of the Cold War, we've witnessed a resurgence of nationalism in many countries, including, I'm afraid, in Japan," he says. "To me, recognizing what you've done wrong, and taking moral responsibility for it so that it never happens again, that would be a source of honour. But the government now believes it would be shameful to take criminal responsibility for Japanese war crimes, that somehow it would represent a loss of national pride."

This article first appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review, March 8, 2001