This is Why Japan's Neighbors Still Hate Them

I have been to Japan four times, including one year living and working in Kyoto. Love the place. But Japan is mired in its own equivalent to Holocaust denial that keeps them from fully moving on from the WW II era. I experienced this first hand more than 10 years ago during the 50th anniversary of the end of WW II, and I see it today in the news headlines. From Salon.com:

March 01,2007 | TOKYO -- Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Thursday there was no evidence Japan coerced Asian women into working as sex slaves during World War II, backtracking from a landmark 1993 statement in which the government acknowledged that it set up and ran brothels for its troops.

Abe's comments to reporters came as a group of ruling party lawmakers urged the government to revise the so-called Kono Statement, which states that Japan's wartime military sometimes recruited women to work in the brothels with coercion.

"The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion," Abe said. "We have to take it from there."

Historians say that up to 200,000 women, mainly from Korea and China, were forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers in brothels run by the military government as so-called "comfort women" during the war...

Abe's comments were likely to provoke a strong reaction from South Korea and China.

THAT is putting it mildly. Want to unite China, Taiwan, North Korea and South Korea? Get a Japanese politician making statements like this. And, sadly, they often do.

This is why Japan's neighbors still hate them.

During my year stay in Japan, many controversies circulated regarding the 50th anniversary of the end of WW II. Several Japanese politicians made statements to the effect that Japanese occupation during the 1930's and 1940's was a good thing for Koreans and Chinese. Such politicians were forced to resign, but others would then come up with equally dumb statements.

Let's be clear here. These statements are the Asian equivalent of if the German government denied the Holocaust. They deny events like this:

Try walking through Chinatown wearing the Japanese rising sun flag on your clothes and you will see the lasting resentment among Chinese thanks to events like this.

As politician after politician made dumb, "Holocaust" denial statements, resigned, then another politician followed the same pattern, a German diplomat to Japan finally wrote an open letter to the Japanese media saying, in effect: Get over it! Admit what you did, apologize, pay reparations. Germany did it and their neighbors don't hate them anymore. Japan still swings back and forth between denial and apologies, and their neighbors despise them. Chinese and Koreans are horrified when I tell them I lived in Japan. They can't understand why I would do so.

During a trip through Southern Japan (going from Kyoto through to the island if Iriomoto near Taiwan) I visited Hiroshima. I sat beneath the A-bomb dome, reading about the rise of Japanese Imperialism in the 1920's and 1930's. As I read about the beliefs, violence, imperialism and arrogance of that period of Japanese history, a truck representing one of the far right wing, Imperialist parties, was circling, blaring slogans that could have come right from the 1930's.

There is a major part of Japanese ideology that has not moved on from WW II. WW II remains an open wound in Asia and comments like those made by Abe are the main reason it remains open.

Japan: Get over it. Admit what you did. Apologize. Pay reparations. Join the 21st century. I love Japan but there is no excuse for denying the atrocities of the past, particularly when such denial prevents progress today.

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