Abe urged to apologize for aggression

With Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expected to make a statement on the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, Japan is being haunted by its aggression against other Asian nations in the past century. People at home and abroad are still trying to awaken the nation's conscience to face squarely this part of its history, which Abe and his supporters have so far refused to do.

During her Tokyo visit last week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel gave her host, a polite reminder, if not advice, by talking about her country's way of facing up to the crimes carried out under Nazi rule. She added that this was a precondition for reconciliation with the countries and peoples that had suffered from German aggression.

There are loud voices from people in Japan saying similar things.

Addressing a symposium in Tokyo on March 10, Shinichi Kitaoka, president of the International University of Japan, reminded the Japanese government of the "war of aggression" Japan fought against China in the 1930s and 1940s and the "dreadful things" it did.

"I want Mr. Abe to say, 'Japan committed aggression (against China)'," he was quoted as saying in the Asahi Shimbun.

Kitaoka is the deputy chief of the 16-member panel assigned to advise Abe on his statement, which is due to be issued on Aug 15. At the panel's second meeting on Friday, Kitaoka again defined the Japan's actions as "a war of aggression".

The panel is expected to give Abe a report as a "reference" for Abe's statement.

However, Abe gave his advisory panel a list of topics for discussion, which did not specifically include Japan's wartime actions, instead it emphasized Japan's efforts at postwar reconciliation and what kind of future it should carve out.

In an interview with Reuters, former Japanese prime minister Tomiichi Murayama, who issued the 1995 landmark apology for Japan's wartime aggression, warned that Abe risks further alienating Asian neighbors China and South Korea if he does not stick to the substance of his statement.

Abe has tried to claim there is no internationally agreed upon definition of "aggression", raising doubts over whether he will include key phrases from the Murayama statement such as "colonial rule" and "aggression" when he makes his own statement.

Abe argued that what is described as aggression "can be viewed differently" depending on which side one is on.

Responding to Merkel's words on facing the past, Japan's Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida claimed that Japan and Germany have different neighbors, and therefore it "is not appropriate to simply compare" the two countries.

Having different neighbors, however, does not absolve Japan from its war history.

Tokyo's revisionist logic is centered on the premise that Japan was victimized by the Allied powers, most notably in the fire bombings of Tokyo and the devastating atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which resulted in thousands of civilian casualties.

"If Japan is the victim in the Pacific War, as Tokyo would have it, then America must be the aggressor and Harry Truman, not Hideki Tojo, the war criminal," Dennis P. Halpin, a former advisor on Asian issues to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, currently a visiting scholar at the US-Korea Institute at School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University, wrote in National Interest magazine.

Will the politicians and scholars at home and abroad urging Abe to look at the past have his ear?

It is to be hoped they do, for as Spanish philosopher George Santayana cautioned: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

The authoris China Daily's Tokyo bureau chief. caihong@chinadaily.com.cn