Abe stops short of apology for war
Print Edition
PRIME Minister Shinzo Abe yesterday expressed “utmost grief” for the “immeasurable damage and suffering” Japan inflicted in World War II, but stopped short of offering his own apology and said future generations of Japanese should not have to make them either.
Marking the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, Abe also said he upheld past official apologies including a landmark 1995 statement by then-Premier Tomiichi Murayama, but the conservative leader offered no new apology of his own.
The legacy of the war still haunts relations with China and South Korea, which suffered under Japan’s brutal occupation.
Both countries had made clear they wanted Abe to stick to the 1995 “deep remorse” and “heartfelt apology” for Japanese colonial rule and aggression.
“Upon the innocent people did our country inflict immeasurable damage and suffering,” Abe said in a statement yesterday. “When I squarely contemplate this obvious fact, even now, I find myself speechless and my heart is rent with the utmost grief.”
China said that Japan should apologize sincerely to countries that suffered during its military aggression. Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Yesui expressed China’s position to the Japanese ambassador after Abe’s remarks.
“Japan should make a clear explanation and a sincere apology to the people of the countries who suffered from that era of military aggression,” the Foreign Ministry said, urging Japan to “take concrete actions to gain the trust of its Asian neighbors and the global community.”
A commentary by Xinhua news agency said the “tuned-down apology is not of much help to eliminating Tokyo’s trust deficit.”
It added: “Instead of offering an unambiguous apology, Abe’s statement is rife with rhetorical twists like ‘maintain our position of apology,’ dead giveaways of his deep-rooted historical revisionism, which has haunted Japan’s neighborhood relations.”
Abe said: “In Japan, the post-war generations now exceed 80 percent of its population. We must not let our children, grandchildren, and even further generations to come, who have nothing to do with that war, be predestined to apologize,” he said. “Still, even so, we Japanese, across generations, must squarely face the history of the past.”
Abe, who referred to the wartime sufferings of the Chinese in his statement, said he hoped China would recognise Japan’s “candid feelings” and that he hoped to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping again if the opportunity arose.
But he told a news conference later that attempts to “change the status quo by force” were unacceptable.
Abe said Japan should “never forget that there were women behind the battlefields whose honor and dignity were severely injured.” But he made no direct reference to “comfort women,” as the girls and women, many of them Korean and Chinese, forcibly recruited as sex slaves in Japanese military-run brothels, are euphemistically known.
Tokyo and Seoul have long been at odds over the issue of comfort women, with South Korea saying Japan has not done enough to atone for their suffering despite a 1993 apology that recognized authorities’ involvement in coercing the women.
Abe said that Japan took the “wrong course and advanced along the road to war,” but his statement did not specifically refer to what a report by his own advisers had called Tokyo’s aggression in China after 1931.
Abe told the news conference that the question of whether a specific act was “aggression” should be left to historians.
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