14
ALEXIS DUDDEN
Since the mid-twentieth century, when international war crimes tribunals established the precedent that an individual or a group acting on behalf of a nation could be found guilty of state-sponsored atrocities, victims of such violence have desired official apologies as part of the redress for the wrongs committed against them. Even so, it was not axiomatic that such apologies would become the integral part of human rights discourse that they are today. Victims and their supporters pitched themselves against their own and/or foreign governments to bring about state apologies, making official apology not simply a worthy goal, but something considered by many as a human right. When a government apologizes in some form, victims and their supporters count it as a real achievement. Such apologies, therefore, fuel an ongoing commitment for more, and official statements of sorrow and regret for past atrocities have become indispensable components in legitimating human rights issues in national histories.
In many respects, the 1990s were a decade of international apology politics. Around the world, an outpouring of national remorse for historical atrocities came to shape the language of Germany, Argentina, the United States, South Africa, and Japan. There is even a “Sorry Day” in Australia to draw attention to the country’s past treatment of its aboriginal people. It has become increasingly clear, however, that presidents and prime ministers address historical atrocities to reinforce their own present claims to legitimacy. Relying on formulaic expressions for the past, world leaders describe historical events in future-oriented words that work around the content of the histories at stake. Moreover, as they apologize for wrongs considered abnormal to the international community’s current collective sense of self—racial extermination, slavery, apartheid—they inscribe new histories for the pasts in question. As an historian of the Middle East, Ilan Pappe, observed, such approaches to the past can so rework the content of the historic events involved that they “eliminate” the past from history.1
Official apologies most often refer to events that have been muted within the larger sweep of a nation’s history—the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, for example, before President George H. W. Bush signed the U.S. government’s apology. At the same time, however, the apologies almost never refer specifically to victims’ individual histories, let alone their dignity.2 Once a national leader makes an apology, societies can incorporate the victims’ past into broader, collective, forward-moving narratives, ultimately reconfiguring the same sort of progressive tale that existed before the victims’ voices were heard. In anthropologist Richard Wilson’s provocative phrasing, victims can, thus, lose the “human right to a human history” as the story is taken out of their hands.3 In the early twenty-first century climate of political apology and redress, therefore, the individual stories that make up the histories of past atrocities stand precariously close to extinction because the state’s narrators have massaged the histories to fit their own purposes of national narration.
The whole issue of apology is rife with contradiction. For some victims, no apology will ever suffice. However, demands for state-level apologies escalated in the late twentieth century, and many people around the world demanded apologies for the historical atrocities they survived—from former U.S. soldiers suffering the effects of Agent Orange to former sex slaves of the Japanese empire.4 Once official statements of sorrow and regret are uttered, however, many victims and their supporters describe them as fake or lacking in real meaning, raising the problem of who should decide when an apology is real. Moreover, because apology is part of international law, the statements often come with cash compensations or reparations, leading others to say that victims are only in it for the money. Of course, only the privileged members of society—not necessarily economically privileged, but those privileged by race or gender or ethnicity as well—can find venues to say such things publicly. The ongoing debate concerning apologies and reparations to African Americans for slavery in the United States makes this abundantly clear—even mentioning the issue encourages some politicians to say things that would get others fired from their jobs.5
Examining apologies from the perpetrators’ and the victims’ perspectives—as well as that of their descendants—reveals a society’s various anxieties over coming to terms with the past and also allows for the victims’ voices to be heard.6 At the same time, it is essential to notice that governments use the script of apology politics for their own purposes because the writing of history itself is disturbed as a result of this phenomenon. Official apologies now move so easily in and out of long-standing practices of apologetic history that not taking a stand on certain issues—the Rape of Nanjing, for example—can wind up aligning the historian with the state in complicating the victim’s right to his or her own history.
This uncomfortable tension came into relief most clearly in East Asia during the late twentieth century, where long-quiet voices seemingly burst out of nowhere in the wake of wartime emperor Hirohito’s 1989 death and demanded public recognition for their long-denied histories.7 Widely known examples include the former sex slaves of the Japanese military, and laborers and soldiers forcibly enslaved or conscripted from throughout the empire Japan maintained during the first half of the twentieth century.
The apparent freshness of these stories in Japan during the 1990s underscores a significant difference from the post-1945 history of victims’ claims and movements for redress in Germany. Although it has been persuasively and intelligently argued that too much has been made of Hitler’s own responsibility in German historiography, in Japan, the leader of the wartime state—Hirohito—remained on the throne for nearly a half-century after the war ended, generating the opposite condition. Japan’s postwar environment was, in effect, framed by the American government’s decision not to try the emperor as a war criminal in the 1940s and, at the other end, by the 1989 death of the emperor. In between, an unusual situation existed that was known as the “chrysanthemum taboo.”8 The chrysanthemum is the symbol of the emperor and the imperial family, and the “taboo” is commonly understood as the inability of Japan’s public sphere to assess the roles of the emperor and the imperial institution in and responsibility for the Japanese empire (1895–1945), Japan’s wars in Asia and the Pacific (1931–1945), and the suffering therein.9 With Hirohito’s death, the silence was officially broken, touching off a public airing of the state’s historical victims’ narratives and placing the—now strangely irreconcilable—issue of Hirohito’s responsibility for the suffering at the center of the debate, where it remains more than two decades later.
Moreover, many of the areas in Asia that Japan colonized only began to foster the conditions necessary for victims’ groups to make public claims in the mid-1980s or later. Thus, the coincidence that Hirohito died just as Japan’s former colonies offered new liberties to their people (North Korea and Myanmar remained wholly undemocratized in this regard)—not to mention that the Cold War was over—sparked the wave of victims’ stories heard and published in the 1990s. Not insignificantly, despite the time lag in most instances, many victims were still alive to make the claims themselves.
During the past two decades, therefore, the Japanese government’s response to victims of its empire and wars has made the transnational practice of national apology a centerpiece of regional and national politics.10 There are quite literally hundreds of thousands of websites throughout Asia and North America that track and measure Japan’s official statements of redress. By current estimates, the Japanese government has issued at least twenty statements of “regret” and “heartfelt apology” for the past. Such political practices now dovetail with subfields of modern history to the extent that “war responsibility studies” is a commonplace discipline in its own right and “colonial responsibility studies” is the latest development. Mainstream bookstores now devote sections to these categories, journals specialize in these topics, and the questions and controversies have generated a discourse so familiar that catch phrases stand in for entire discussions. Even the most cautious observers acknowledge that Japan’s “textbook problem”—the debate over what empire and wartime events should be included in Japanese government-approved school books and how they are described—is one of the most volatile issues in the region, and the matter of apology for the past remains central to intraregional affairs.
The Rhetoric of Apology
Edwin O. Reischauer (1910–1990) was one of the world’s most influential commentators on Japanese society to emerge in the post-1945 era. Reischauer’s power derived from his status as an American ambassador to Tokyo during critical moments of high economic growth, his long-standing position as professor of Japanese civilization and director of the Yenching Institute at Harvard University, and his youth spent in Tokyo before the war as the child of missionaries. Regardless of why Reischauer was so commanding—or because of it—during his time as ambassador to Japan in the early 1960s, he engraved the formula for official apology into Japanese political rhetoric, the terms of which inexorably remain in play to this day, embedding him and the United States within apology discussions.
In 1964, as negotiations to establish diplomatic relations between Japan and South Korea continued, Reischauer expressed his belief that the Japanese government should do something to acknowledge Korean resentment over the era of Japanese occupation (1905–1945). In November 1964, he sent a telegram to Secretary of State Dean Rusk to report on a meeting with Japan’s Foreign Minister Shiina Etsusaburo during which he urged Japan to make “some sort of apology to Koreans for colonial past.”11 Shiina’s secretary responded by stating that the foreign minister’s physical appearance in Seoul would come “as close to expression of apology as was feasible,” to which Reischauer responded favorably and added that “some sort of forward-facing statement about turning backs on past unhappy history … might assuage Koreans’ feelings without irritating Japanese public.” Within months, Japan’s foreign minister said these same words—in Japanese—on the ground in Seoul.12
In practical terms, Reischauer’s rhetorical formula of sorrow and regret neatly froze the past into an indeterminate time period for which no one was—or is—to blame. Democratic states that rely, however, on such “forward-facing” discursive strategies at the expense of dignifying the specificity of the histories involved nonetheless humiliate survivors of atrocity—whether their own nationals or foreigners—by saying, in effect: “That was then, this is now, and your past must be swallowed for the benefit of the present at your expense.” The state does not necessarily or straightforwardly deny the past, yet its victims are left with no option for protest as they run in circles in courts of the state’s creation that ultimately remain indifferent to their claims.
During the 1990s, Japan’s so-called miracle economy collapsed and began to be restructured, making leaders debate Japan’s national interests anew in light of the country’s stated aspiration to be a “normal” country in the international system, which many in Tokyo defined as a nation with a permanent UN Security Council seat and a proactive, deployable military (still technically illegal under the country’s constitution). Japan’s apologies to its former colonies and wartime adversaries in Asia blended into these other concerns, revealing the apologies importance to Japan’s national-interests conundrum. Put simply, leaders decided it was in Japan’s national interests to apologize in some measure—and so they did—because doing so maintained the status quo in terms of Japan’s ties with its Asian neighbors.
Whether official apology will continue with the saliency it has had since the mid-1990s remains to be seen, but it is arguably unlikely. In August 2005, commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War II, then Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro issued yet another official apology for Japan’s past. Many noticed right away that Koizumi used an international setting to add weight to this apology—an aid forum in Jakarta rather than a setting in Japan. Many also noticed, though, that Koizumi did not say anything beyond what former Prime Minister Murayama Tomoichi inscribed in 1995, marking the fiftieth anniversary, regardless of the literally thousands of publications concerning atrocities and victims’ claims that had appeared during the intervening decade. With many hoping for more, there was a collective sense of a step back, or worse.
Quoting the Murayama declaration (as it is known) almost to the comma breath, Koizumi stated:
In the past, Japan, through its colonial rule and aggression, caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly those of Asian nations. Sincerely facing these facts of history, I once again express my feelings of deep remorse and heartfelt apology, and also express the feelings of mourning for all victims, both at home and abroad, in the war. I am determined not to allow the lessons of that horrible war to erode, and to contribute to the peace and prosperity of the world without ever again waging a war.13
These sentiments continue to be the litmus test. When former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio won his historic victory in 2009, bringing the party in opposition for over fifty years into the position of power, he, too, immediately vowed to “uphold the Murayama declaration.” Thus these phrases—deemed safe for Japanese national interests domestically and regarded as tepid but acceptable by regional governments—hold steady at the official level while continuing to rankle those who demanded the apologies in the first place. They find the words woefully inadequate, if not disingenuous. Their frustration, anger, and sadness underscore the divide between the state’s formula and what sufferers and their supporters believe constitutes a real apology for their individually lived histories. The problem continues its complex hold on the region, while the number of surviving victims, who can make claims for the history they believe is their right, quickly decreases.
The current state formula for apology has largely fallen short because its scriptwriters often find themselves so deeply ensconced within prevailing national myths that they cannot tell enough of the truth to make the apology hold. However, what those seeking apology in the first place are seeking is dignity within the narrative eliding or maligning them in the first place. In other words, they want inclusion in—not exclusion from—the history that would write them off.
When Japan’s historical victims, for example the former comfort women, refused Tokyo’s statements and continued their demands for what they called a real apology—or an apology they considered meaningful—critics complained that Japan had already apologized numerous times, and, therefore, the victims were certainly in it only for the money. State narrators now openly discuss the victims’ history—a history that was denied in Japan at the highest levels until the 1990s—yet none of them has to take responsibility for the history involved, let alone the victims’ current dignity, or lack thereof. In this respect, the state is made stronger from without and within because it has displayed an amount of remorse accepted by the international community, yet it has not had to fundamentally redefine itself.
On March 1, 2007, despite years of reporting in the news, Japan’s then prime minister Abe Shinzo denied the comfort women’s history saying, “The fact is there is no evidence to prove there was coercion.”14 By denying “coercion,” Abe denied Japanese governmental responsibility for the forced enslavement of women and girls into the notorious—and by 2007 well documented—system of sexual slavery that involved an estimated 80,000–200,000 victims from throughout Asia, particularly Korea and China. Thus, he challenged the few remaining survivors of a well-documented history to their right to claim the dignity that came as a result of telling their story and since 1993 when the government of Japan first publicly accepted responsibility. Many predicted that Abe would do something along those lines when he assumed office in September 2006—watching for his slip up almost became sport due to his track record regarding the contours of the Kono statement, which has provided the baseline terminology for Japan’s official acceptance of the comfort women’s history since 1993. It is of a piece with the Murayama declaration, yet specifically focused because its author, Kono Yohei, was a cabinet secretary, not prime minister, and thus freer to address particular histories. Abe’s statements provided a swell of condemnation around the world for Japan’s recalcitrance, yet a full-page ad in the Washington Post in June 2007 paid for by right-wing Japanese politicians and their supporters pushed matters over the edge, at least as far as the court of global opinion was concerned.15
Throughout this time, the U.S. House of Representatives was considering adopting a nonbinding resolution urging Japan to apologize for its wartime aggression and to the comfort women in particular. Congress regularly passes these opinion pieces, especially where human rights issues are concerned. Supporters of the comfort women had repeatedly asked for a resolution regarding the matter and had repeatedly failed for numerous reasons, not the least of which were the significance to Washington of the ability to station fifty thousand American troops on Japanese soil, or the routine payments from the Japanese Foreign Ministry to Washington lobby firms to keep issues of Japanese history off the discussion docket. However, during the summer of 2007, continuing to cover up the issue proved impossible for many U.S. congressmen because official Japanese statements were sounding eerily close to “Holocaust denial,” as numerous representatives asserted. On the one hand, statements afforded some measure of dignity to the victims, on the other hand, the statements perpetuated the comfort women’s challenge of trying to have their history in their terms, not forever in reference to another or for reasons of state interests.
Despite all of Japan’s protests, nonbinding House Resolution 121 passed. Afterward, Japan’s ambassador to Washington sent several extremely pointed letters to congressional leaders, and Japan’s parliament weighed the possibility (and still does) of passing counter-resolutions—but, for the time being, nothing has really changed. In January 2010, the ever-dwindling number of surviving comfort women held their nine hundredth consecutive weekly sit-in (begun in January 1992) in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul demanding an apology on their terms—both an imperial one and parliamentary one for most—and for their story to be credited as part of Japanese history. Without doing so, they believe, what will be lost with their ultimate deaths is what was lost during the half-century of silence that followed the Pacific War: the women themselves. Never mind how many times they have had to tell their deeply painful stories in public to gain credibility. Never mind how many times they have had to lift their shirts in public to show the scars of breasts lopped off by angry Japanese soldiers during rapes committed over a half-century ago, or to show gashes across their stomachs where army doctors cut out unborn children. Never mind those who went to their graves in silence. Japan’s leaders are clear: these women and their histories are disposable.
Enduring Struggles
Although the comfort women gained the most international recognition, the disregard they face is of a piece with another group fighting for the right to tell their story. Hitting the papers on December 25, 2009, was the story of seven Korean women in their 70s and 80s who discovered 99 yen (a little less than one dollar) deposited in their bank accounts a week earlier from the Japanese government’s Social Insurance Agency.16 In 1998, the women had begun one of the many lawsuits, formed with supportive Japanese lawyers, against Japanese corporations and/or the Japanese government seeking compensation for their wartime labor. Like other plaintiffs, the women lost in court on grounds of insubstantial evidence, yet 99 yen appeared in their bank accounts when their names magically materialized on wartime government pension records. In short, the women would appear to have won their claim to telling the truth. Their compensation was so bizarrely out of touch with today’s value for this money, however, that the victory seemed like a greater defeat, and worse, a further insult. Demonstrations ensued, first in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul, where the elderly women threw their bodies on the winter ground, wailing and throwing coins in bewildered rage at the high wall surrounding the embassy. In front of the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries factory farther south in Gwangju, their support group leader, Lee Kuk-eon, cried: “During the colonial period, 99 yen covered the cost of two calves. Now it buys two packs of ramen!”17
From the late 1930s to 1945, millions of Korean and Chinese were physically forced, or duped, into going to Japan where they became slave labor. The women who made headlines in December 2009 were tricked in October 1944 by teachers at their middle school in Korea into going to Nagoya, where they believed they would attend high school. They found themselves instead working in wretched conditions for no pay at a Mitsubishi airplane factory until August 1945 when Japan’s defeat set them free. Mitsubishi contended it had no record of these women, yet thanks to modernity’s pathological obsession with recording itself, part of the pay the women never received was transferred into a national pension insurance system where their names would ultimately be remembered. The then newly established Social Insurance Agency (1942) received monthly cuts via corporations of workers’ salaries, Japanese and foreign alike (as it does today), which, at the time, were often unknown to the workers (conditions not so dissimilar today), especially to the foreigners, working under what today would easily be called illegal and/or enslaved conditions.
Beginning in 2004, the South Korean government of then President Roh Moo-hyun established a Truth Commission to deal with the still lingering problem of Koreans forced into labor in wartime Japan, simultaneously establishing a domestic fund for Korean citizens in Korea making the claims. The commission made its work and demands known to the Japanese government, including the information that 40,000 of the 160,000 people who had filed claims with the commission mentioned the pension insurance payments. Although the powers that be in Japan maintained they had no records of the seven women who drew attention last year—as well as the thousands upon thousands of others—all of a sudden in mid-December 2009 the 99 yen appeared in the seven Korean women’s bank accounts. Then, with even greater suddenness, back in Japan a week later, the Asahi newspaper reported that the government’s Social Insurance Agency confirmed the names of 4,727 Koreans on its wartime roster, including the seven women who among thousands of others had worked at Mitsubishi.18
The Social Insurance Agency’s revelation was enormous by Japanese standards, but, because the acknowledgement opens up many possibilities of tangible legal accountability, most in Japan avoid its public discussion. On top of it all, the current South Korean government of President Lee Myung-bak remained silent on the women’s plight, thus bringing into stark relief the problem in South Korea of how the direction of Koreans’ individual histories with Japan heavily depend on domestic politics in Seoul and ties with Japanese big business—especially when the stories revolve around those deemed relatively expendable.
In January 2008, when President Lee Myung-bak took office he announced that history—whatever it was—would not impede Korea’s future. The most attention-getting of his initial remarks was that he would not ask Japan to apologize for the so-called past, unlike almost everyone else in South Korean political life since the nation’s founding in 1948. President Lee wanted smooth economic relations above all and, with an eye to assuring friends in Tokyo and in his party, he declared an end to South Korea’s government commissions investigating so-called collaborationist activities during the Japanese colonial era.
What Lee failed to understand at the beginning of his presidency, however, was the powerful way that South Korea’s dictators from 1945 through the early 1990s had implanted Japan as a foil to legitimate themselves within South Korea on top of Koreans’ lived memories of the pre-1945 era. For example, even as the former South Korean president-dictator Park Chung-hee accepted his (now documented) bags full of cash from Tokyo as part of the 1965 normalization of relations package, he and his cronies fostered anti-Japanese movements within the student protests in Seoul—which President Lee had participated in—to distract the South Korean people from the terms of the official agreement that declared the past settled between Japan and South Korea. For generations after Japan’s occupation of Korea ended in 1945, creating and sustaining an “illegal” Japan made “legal” those who ruled South Korea by nefarious means, or at least that was the government’s version of events.
Democratization movements in the 1980s and 1990s changed this in South Korea. Since 2008, although President Lee has derailed some of the truth-seeking commissions concerning the colonial era and has made it difficult for commissions examining more recent pasts to function freely, he and his administration have come to better understand that simply telling Koreans not to ask Japan to apologize or to seek redress from Japanese corporations will fail unless they silence the people’s voices. The unresolved legacies of the first half of the twentieth century with Japan are simply too fraught to wish away in the name of business and diplomacy. Thus, although President Lee has switched course from the policies of his predecessors, Kim Dae-Jun and Roh Moo-hyun, and into the well-worn Cold War contours of containing history with its approved heroes and martyrs like An Jung-gun (who shot Japan’s first colonial ruler in 1909) and Queen Min (whom Japanese soldiers assassinated in 1895), he and his administration will have to advocate on behalf of citizens such as the old women, however begrudgingly. The Mitsubishi women’s story makes for sticky business with Tokyo because they and the other survivors of the Japanese colonial era who rail against Japan today have been abandoned by Seoul and Tokyo’s Washington-orchestrated 1965 normalization agreement that launched business as usual in the first place.
In short, the women’s story might once again have disappeared, as so many have since 1945, had the women not continued to fight to tell it. On January 26, 2010, the long-wronged women held yet another protest, this time in front of South Korea’s Foreign Ministry in downtown Seoul, accusing it and the government of President Lee Myung-bak of doing nothing as far as Korea’s tortured history with Japan is concerned. Because their story of being wronged by Japan remains one of the most central strands of South Korea’s national definition, however, this demonstration succeeded. The next day, the Foreign Ministry summoned the Japanese ambassador for reprimands.19 The pattern continues. The women wait.
A New Level of Hate
During the era of apology politics, several blatantly racist and wildly xenophobic cartoonists became best-selling authors in Japan—the wildly popular Kobayashi Yoshinori led the pack.20 Although Kobayashi is no longer news, he continues to have mass appeal. He has, moreover, raised a generation in his wake who either learned history from him, or, worse, learned to tell history the way he does because it works and it sells.
More worrisome than Kobayashi’s self-aggrandizing way of telling history at the expense of those less fortunate than himself, however, is a young man named Sakurai Makoto (nom de guerre, Doronpa). Sakurai grew up under Kobayashi’s cloud, and he achieved his own fame by capitalizing on Kobayashi’s work and that of others by publishing his own series of racist rants.21 Moreover, Doronpa aspires higher off the page than others of his crowd, demanding action on the streets. On June 9, 2007, he established the Citizens League to Deny Resident Foreigners Special Rights (the Zaitokukai).22 Among other things, the Zaitokukai urges open violence against Koreans in Japan (and to a lesser degree Chinese and others) in an extensive set of You-Tube postings and via regular demonstrations in front of government buildings, newspaper offices, the Korean embassy and consulates, as well as through neighborhoods and in front of schools. The group and its leader’s significance must not be measured in terms of the ten thousand people who count themselves contributing members throughout Japan (as well as several hundred more overseas) but rather in their publicly issued orders for violent insurrection and/or military action (depending on whether the enemy is within or without), which together define the Zaitokukai as Japan’s fiercest and most dangerous hate group today.
In keeping with the age-group targeted, the group gathers force on the Internet, soliciting contributions (as membership) online by direct bank deposits and by credit card (i.e., available everywhere and anytime, yet centered nowhere in particular). As of February 2011, the nearly ten thousand people listed on the group’s website as members come from all over Japan, with the densest concentrations in the most populated centers: Tokyo, Osaka, and Fukuoka. The group’s main web pages—as well as those to which they link—are regularly refreshed and advertise where to gather and demonstrate. The group’s self-posted videos on YouTube, moreover, make clear to anyone with access to the Internet (including, for example, the police) that violent forms of protest are desirable and worthy of admiration, with postings showing Zaitokukai members openly threatening those they view as impediments to their vision of Japan.23 Unsurprisingly, they target individuals and groups who are weak within the Japanese legal system by stalking and harassing them, and they use customary bullying tactics, for example, getting the victim to throw the first punch, knowing there will be little to no punishment for Zaitokukai members’ behavior.
Recently, they most viciously zeroed in on a small group of elderly ethnic Koreans living in an enclave north of Kyoto, called Utoro. The two hundred or so remaining residents of Utoro descend from more than 1,300 Koreans brought there in 1940 by the Japanese government to build a military airstrip that was abandoned in 1945, together with those being forced to build it. The forsaken Koreans turned to the land first to sustain themselves, which the auto giant Nissan technically owned, first as a wartime airplane manufacturer then refashioned for cars, where many of Utoro’s residents also worked. The company sold the land in 1987, and the new owner demanded the residents’ eviction from the five-acre plot, where they had long lived, in a series of lawsuits that wound up in 2000 in Japan’s supreme court. The court declared Utoro’s inhabitants “illegal,” squatters without rights or papers. The aging Koreans stayed on, however, vowing to honor their parents’ hardship and to “die under their houses” if need be.24 For Zaitokukai members, many of whom were not born when the lawsuits began in 1987, Utoro’s residents are obvious prey, and in a December 2009 video clip, they show others what to do: to the tune of “Clap for the Killers,” local Zaitokukai leaders block out the area on a map and deliver threatening leaflets into residents’ mailboxes in ways shockingly evocative of the Hitler Youth brigades or the American Ku Klux Klan. This apparently proud display only builds, however, on a series of videos posted a year earlier in December 2008, in which Doronpa leads his followers, as well as some of their young children, through the residents’ neighborhood armed with their constitutionally guaranteed rights to wave the national flag and speak freely, even if it is hate speech yelled through megaphones.
Consistent with the group’s general belief that all things Korean are to blame for all things wrong in Japan, the Zaitokukai stands ardently opposed to an apology for any aspect of Japan’s twentieth-century record. In short, any sort of apology for any past Japanese action involving Koreans or Chinese equals a “gross travesty and treachery, dishonoring our fallen forebears. Japanese like [former Prime Minister] Murayama are a disgrace to the nation and should be tried as criminals.”25 Needless to say, one could simply frown and regard all this as the ravings of a radical and insignificant fringe in Japan if only there were some hint that anti-hate speech laws were in the offing. Yet, in February 2010, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination singled out Japan for its whole-scale absence among leading nations of such a law: “In international law,” committee member Patrick Thornberry noted critically, “freedom of expression is not unlimited.”26
Akin to human rights itself, apology can be spun in the completely opposite direction from how those seeking its inclusion in public discourse intended. No longer in Japan, for example, does it mean solely an apology to the Asian victims of Japanese imperialism as it did a decade ago. It means now—or it does so again, because it once may have done so in the immediate postwar era—official repentance also to the Japanese who suffered fighting for the state’s cause. Historian Marilyn Young has demonstrated how this double valence operates with regards to human rights:
In one way, the language of human rights can now be used to defend the reputations of those who may have committed atrocities; in the other, attention to one past violation of human rights has led to the uncovering and discussion of tangentially related causes.27
While many have come to expect the latter situation as far as apology in Japan is concerned—for example, the former enslaved laborers’ case initially emboldened the comfort women—the matter of the Japanese government apologizing to those who may have facilitated some of the atrocities is no longer beyond the pale.
One of the most complicated aspects of apology, the state, and Japan is, ultimately, whose apology counts. The 1947 constitution of Japan made clear that the newly redefined emperor’s position would make that post subject to the Japanese parliament. Thus, many Japanese activists and liberals in favor of Japan’s issuing a state apology have long argued the need for such a statement to come through parliamentary channels, thus defining it as democratically decided and the will of the Japanese people. At the same time, however, an overwhelming majority of the remaining survivors of the mid-twentieth-century atrocities committed in the name of Japan—which at the time meant in the name of the emperor—want an apology from the emperor of Japan, despite the wartime emperor now being dead for over two decades.
Precisely because history is a never-ending process during the era of apology politics, the whole issue of how to reconcile current Japan with the wartime emperor has come increasingly to the fore, and not necessarily in the way those advocating for an apology for those victimized in Emperor Hirohito’s name might wish. In July 2003, Japan’s best-selling literary journal, Bungei Shunju, included a copy of a draft of what it and the essay’s author described as a recently discovered document, now referred to as Emperor Hirohito’s “Imperial Edict on Apology.”28 In her essay explaining the document, journalist Kato Kyoko argued that this document holds the potential to “broadly recast a page of Showa history” (1926–1989), making quick reference to the long-standing debate over Japan and apology. Much of this document is interesting in terms of how to use it and similar materials as sources. The former emperor apologized in such a particularized form of Japanese language that the journal needed a Japanese language specialist to render the words accessible to readers. Also, as the article makes clear, Hirohito did not write the document himself; rather, it was remembered by the then head of the Imperial Household Agency, Tajima Michiji, in whose records the document surfaced. Most of all, Hirohito’s “apology” is not to Japan’s overseas victims who pressed to topic of apology. Instead, the document shows that Hirohito expressed “profound shame” to his noncolonial subjects—meaning Japanese—“who lost their property abroad.”
The contemporary social understanding by some in Japan, however, that this document would equal Hirohito’s “apology” found receptive audiences not simply with extremists of Doronpa’s ilk—who oppose any statements of remorse concerning Japan’s attempt to conquer Asia—but also with more mainstream Japanese who, while still committed to the Murayama declaration and the Kono statement, are tired of the rest of the world demanding that Japan do more apologizing for its past wars, especially, as its leaders routinely remind others, since Japan is the only country in the region (and including the United States) that has not waged a war since 1945.29
NOTES
1. Ilan Pappe, “Historophobia or the Enslavement of History: The Role of the 1948 Ethnic Cleansing in the Contemporary Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process,” in Partisan Histories: The Past in Contemporary Global Politics, ed. Max Paul Friedman and Padraic Kenney (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 127–43.
2. See Brian A. Weiner, Sins of the Parents: The Politics of National Apologies in the United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005).
3. Richard A. Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 57.
4. See Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York: Norton, 2000).
5. See Roy L. Brooks, Atonement and Forgiveness: A New Model for Black Reparations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
6. Norma Field is the most eloquent writer on the subject of apology from the victims’ perspective. Begin with her, “War and Apology: Japan, Asia, the Fiftieth and After,” in “The Comfort Women: Colonialism, War, and Sex,” special issue Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 5, no. 1 (1997): 5.
7. A useful volume is T. Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama, eds., Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
8. To begin see Herbert Bix’s magisterial book, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: Harper Collins, 2000).
9. Norma Field, In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century’s End (New York: Vintage, 1992). Such “taboos” are certainly not unique to Japan. Turkish novelist, Orham Pamuk, faced trial in Istanbul for the Turkish “taboo” of speaking out about the Armenian genocide. See Pamuk, “On Trial,” in The New Yorker, December 19, 2005, 33–34. In it, interestingly, Pamuk mentions discussing such taboos with Japanese Nobel Prize winning novelist Oe Kenzaburo: “I heard that [Oe], too, had been attacked by nationalist extremists after stating that the ugly crimes committed by his countries’ armies during the invasions of Korea and China should be openly discussed in Tokyo.” P. 34.
10. See Jennifer Lind, Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).
11. Karen L. Gatz, ed., Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968: Volume XXIX, Part 1, Korea (Washington, DC: U.S. GPO, 2000). “U.S. Efforts to Encourage Normalization of Relations Between the Republic of Korea and Japan”: 745–802; See No. 349, Reischauer to Rusk, September 8, 1964, 770; and No. 353, Reischauer to Rusk, November 21, 1964, 778.
12. Asahi Shimbun, February 17, 1965, evening edition, 1.
13. Official translation as posted on the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, www.mofa.go.jp (accessed February 25, 2011).
14. The comment caused a domestic and international media firestorm. Beginning with the Japanese evening papers on March 1, 2007, throughout the month each paper in Japan and Korea ran daily stories on the controversy, and the New York Times and the Washington Post had extensive coverage and editorials as well.
15. Washington Post, June 14, 2007.
16. Asahi Shimbun, December 25, 2009, evening edition.
17. Hankyoreh, January 5, 2010.
18. Asahi Shimbun, December 30, 2009.
19. Hankyoreh, January 27, 2010.
20. Wikipedia describes Kobayashi, author or editor of more than 200 books, as “one of the most prominent conservative authors and commentators of Japan’s younger generations.” See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshinori_Kobayashi (accessed February 27, 2011).
21. Doronpa does publish in book form, although his Internet portals are the main “action”: http://ameblo.jp/doronpa01/ (accessed February 27, 2011).
22. Membership stands now at roughly ten thousand people from throughout Japan openly describing themselves as part of the group and sending money, http://www.zaitokukai.info/ (accessed February 27, 2011).
23. For example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrcBLW14P8M&feature=related.
24. For the Utoro story, see Japan Times, July 12, 2005.
25. By pressing a link on Doronpa’s main page, one is directed to http://www.maruyamadanwa.com/.
26. Quoted in Japan Times, February 26, 2010. Japanese original translated by author.
27. Marilyn Young, “The State and Its Victims Remembering to Forget,” in Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights, ed. Mark Bradley and Patrice Petro (New York: Routledge, 2002), 11.
28. Kato Kyoko, “Fuin Sareta Shosho Soko o Yomitoku,” Bungei Shunju, July 2003, 94–113. Author’s translation.
29. Japanese poet Okunishi Ei recently published a collection of his works entitled Nihon wa senso o shite iru (Japan Wages War) (Tokyo: Doyobijutsusha, 2009). The title’s eponymous poem makes the case that Japan’s financing of the war on terror and assisting coalition forces is synonymous with waging war.