"Who's Sorry Now?"

Japan can't seem to confront its wartime past, and the country's reluctance to apologize still skews its relations with its neighbors and with the West.  The obstacles are peculiarly Japanese - and aren't going away.

     More than fifty years afterwards, Japan still flails about, trying to come to terms with its wartime past - and in contrast to Germany, its Axis ally, never quite succeeding.  To the rest of the world - and in particular to its neighbors in East Asia - there is much to atone for: the Nanking massacre; vicious medical experiments on prisoners of war; the infamous Bataan death march.  To this day, Tokyo's reluctance to express remorse for the barbarity it inflicted on its neighbors sows mistrust throughout the region.

     A few weeks ago a senior member of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party called Japan's brutal occupation of Korea "peaceful".  Last Thursday Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama tried to undo some of the damage, announcing that he was writing letters of contrition to all surviving "comfort women" - those thousands of Chinese and Korean women who were forced into prostitution by the Japanese Imperial Army.

     What is it with Japan?  In any country, plainly, history can be devisive.  Just ask the curators at the Smithsonian, who caved earlier this year to pressure from U. S. veterans.  But Japan is a society that values consensus above all, and that can make history more complicated still.  What to say, think and teach about the war remains excruciatingly delicate - a battlefield still strewn with historical, political and cultural land mines.  The rest of the world may not see them, but the Japanese know they're there.

     The desire for social harmony has circumscribed the debate about the war in Japan for decades.  And it effectively concealed a basic fact: an awful lot of Japanese believe there are two versions of World War II history.  The victor's version, now accepted throughout most of the world, and the loser's version - ignored because the winner always gets the final say.  The versions differ mainly in nuance, in interpretation.  But to the Japanese, the differences matter enormously.  Thus the attack on Pearl Harbor - an unforgivable "sneak attack", as most Americans would have it - was, to many Japanese, the only response possible to an Allied embargo that was cutting off the supply of oil.

     In the victor's version of history, Japan's alliance with Germany forever lumps Imperial Japan with the Nazis, the 20th century's Evil, Inc.  Germany's unflinching willingness to confront the past - critical to its acceptance at the center of a unified Europe - is widely admired, and again Japan suffers in the comparison.  But, the Japanese protest, we were not Nazis.  "Nazi Germany was dominated by an organized violence,'' according to one Japanese intellectual.  "The Nazis tried to liquidate political opponents, several races, cultures and civilizations... The 'crimes' Japan committed were colonization, killing of civilians and ill-treatment of POW's."

     This sentiment is shared by many Japanese and is articulated more and more boldly as the painful anniversaries begin to get under Japan's skin.  It is not just the hard right in Japan that believes the conflict in the Pacific was just "a normal war."  The argument goes like this:  For a century before World War II, nation-states fought imperial wars and colonized weaker states.  Americans did it, the British did it, even the Dutch did it.  The Japanese were just going with the flow, and China, Korea and the rest were the unfortunate victims.  The far right in Japan goes even further.  It will not even use the word "victims".  Japan, according to the far right, "liberated" countries like China, Burma, and Indonesia, all of which had been suffering under the yoke of "white" imperialism and became independent after the war.