Koizumi’s Apology. . .

OK – so Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi makes an apology in Jakarta before the representatives of many countries’ governments – so what! Firstly, it was purely a personal “apology” and not endorsed by the Japanese Diet, and secondly it was most likely just a ploy to try to smooth relations with China and Korea at a time when Japanese business interests in China are in deep jeopardy. It was also done to try to FOOL the western media and governments into thinking that this is an official apology and that everything should be alright now between Japan and its neighbours.

Read what L. Ling-chi Wang of the University of California, Berkeley has to say about it -

Another Japanese Apology without National Remorse

L. Ling-chi Wang
University of California, Berkeley

It matters very little how many time Japanese prime ministers and foreign ministers have apologized to China, Korea, and other countries for Japanese invasions into their countries and committing unspeakable atrocities and war crimes during their occupation.

To all the afflicted countries, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's latest apology at the Asian-African summit in Jakarta, Indonesia is the same as all previous apologies: it is personal, not representative of the Japanese government nor the will of the people of Japan. He knew perfectly well when he stepped up to the podium to deliver the apology that it was strictly personal gesture because only by an act of the Japanese parliament, the Diet, can he represent the government and the people of Japan to make the apology.

In the absence of such a legislation, his apology is the same phony apologies all previous Japanese prime ministers and foreign ministers have been giving for more than 50 years, all of which, were designed to mollify or worse, fool the Asian public and win support and admiration from the
Western media and politicians.

In order for a democratic country to express its true remorse, an apology must minimally contain the following four points: (1) the apology must be based on a law duly enacted by the Japanese the Diet, authorizing its Prime Minister and Emperor to make a public apology to all the aggrieved nations;
(2) the same law enacted must include an authorization for the government to compensate the victims of Japanese aggression and atrocities and a mechanism for determining the just compensation for the victims; (3) the law must also mandate a faithful collection, documentation, preservation, and
distribution of the truths about Japanese aggression in the Pacific War, 1937-1945; and (4) it must also include a mandate that the textbooks in Japan reflect this history in perpetuity.

These points, by the way, were the foundation of the Civil Liberties Act, enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1988, authorizing President Ronald Reagan to apologize for the internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans during World War II and to compensate each living internee a sum of $20,000. Along
similar line, the government of Germany has been doing the same every year for the Jewish victims of Nazism and the state of Israel.

Any apology without these four minimal points is therefore phony and devoid of any substance. It is simply an empty gesture, even if it is delivered personally by the prime minister with the profoundest sense of remorse and humility.

Accordingly, it should be rejected by all of Japan's Asian neighbors and none of them should rest in peace until the Japanese Diet has enacted such a legislation. To date, the Diet has taken no such an action.

Prime Minister Koizumi made a point of replicating the apology statement issued by Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama in 1995, a statement considered strongest among all the statements made since the end of the WW II. The world should know that Prime Minister Murayama made the personal apology only after he failed to persuade the Diet to enact an apology into law!

With such a long history of denial, arrogance, and absence of remorse, it should not come as a surprise to anyone that Japan's textbook writers routinely feel free to alter or even bury this ugly chapter of Japanese history without any qualm.

This is also why even as the prime minister was making his apology in Jakarta, eighty-eight members of the Diet, most of whom were members of his own ruling party, deliberately and defiantly paid their respects to Japan's war dead at the controversial Yasukuni Shrine where most of the Class A war criminals were buried.

Is this a genuine national remorse? You be the judge.

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