What is so important about apologies anyway? Until about twenty years ago, the kind of international political apology that draws such attention nowadays was quite rare. One of the first apologies in Japan’s modern history took place in 1872 after an American working for Japan’s Ministry of Colonial Affairs in Hokkaido got drunk and demolished the house he was living in, then injured two Japanese men working for him, and finally shot five hunting dogs that belonged to the local native Ainu chief. The Japanese government feared protests from the Ainu whom they were beginning to assimilate as Japanese, and, through its pressure, American officials ordered Major A. G. Warfield to write an apology for his actions:
To the Japanese Government: Whereas on the morning of the 29th October I was under the influence of whiskey to such a degree that I was unconscious of what I was doing … I hereby apologize both to Numera, Nangi, and the Japanese government for what I have done.1
Warfield apologized as an individual, not as the U.S. government, and yet his words calmed things down as far as local relations were concerned.
Throughout the twentieth century and around the world there were numerous apologies, mainly formal state to state ones for events such as wars and shipping accidents, with most involving some sort of indemnity. All were carefully scripted according to prevailing international laws, and most were well catalogued in government document books. Things began to change, however, with the post–World War II development of war crimes tribunals and the judgment of one nation over another. The big shift, though, came two decade ago when Richard von Weizsäcker, president of what was still then West Germany, publicly said he was sorry for his nation’s history, fundamentally transforming everything about apology and touching off an international apology boom.
On May 8, 1985, during his speech commemorating Germany’s fortieth anniversary of defeat, Weizsäcker apologized for the country’s former Nazi regime, which, for many, trumped even Willy Brandt’s famous 1970 wordless collapse in front of the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Ever since Weizsäcker’s speech, Germany has been regarded as the world’s apologetic model in terms of addressing bad history. Whether or not the standard is perfect, it took hold, and an apology movement took off around the world, making heads of state the mouthpieces of new official histories. In many cases, the statements leaders issued reversed long-standing practices of purposeful forgetting, or, as the social critic Norma Field so eloquently observed, “What had been official blasphemy seemed to become, overnight, commonsense.”2
In large part, civic groups acting with and on behalf of victims of state-sponsored violence rallied together to bring about these apologies, and victims, activists, and their sympathizers came to regard them as a primary goal. When government officials apologized for historical horrors like slavery, for example, many counted it as an achievement, sustaining an ongoing commitment for more. At the same time, however, state leaders increasingly co-opted apology to make national apologizing work to strengthen the state. In other words, although many would continue to frame apology solely in terms of a victory for the state’s victims, the state’s protagonists simultaneously managed to make apologizing a means with which the state could continue with business as usual.
Essentially, throughout the 1990s and into the beginning of this century, leaders learned to address wrongs that the international community perceived as abnormal to its collective sense of self. The extent to which participants engaged in apology politics depended on local aspirations to power in the international system. Simply put, apologizing came to define those issuing them as “normal” or “good-standing” members of the global community.
Japan’s leaders were no different. During the 1990s, officials began debating Japan’s interests as a “normal” state (“noma-ru” in Japanese), which, save for the few remaining Communists, almost all would now define as requiring a proactive military less dependent on the United States and a permanent UN Security Council seat. Most noticeably in the years surrounding the 1995 fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war and the turn of the century, there appeared at times to be a constant stream of apologies for Japan’s attempt to control Asia during the first half of the twentieth century. In other words, therefore, official apologies became deeply entwined with the pursuit of national interests, and the country’s conservative ruling party, in particular, veered toward the practice. Leaders maintained that it was pragmatic for Japan to apologize for something called “the past” because doing so would affirm the nation’s current and future ties with its Asian neighbors.3 Though largely overlooked, since 1992 Japan has issued at least twenty official apologies for the nation’s twentieth-century record.
Despite the official pronouncements of “remorse,” however, Japan remains embroiled in what are known throughout the region as the “history problems,” which are hostage almost entirely now to political policy, meaning that they are no longer about history (if they ever were). In short, Japan’s way of apologizing only perpetuated a disastrous policy failure since so many found Japan’s words so hollow.
Japan’s apology failure—not its failure to apologize—stems from the problem that, although quite a few Japanese officials have made statements of “remorse” and “heartfelt apology,” they and Japanese society in general have far to go in making the substance of the nation’s twentieth century elemental to modern Japanese history in the same way that Native American genocide and African slavery in this country, for example, must continue to be understood in shaping the history of the United States. For starters, Japan’s multimillion-dollar denial industry would have far less traction in Japan today were a majority of Japanese convinced that the subject matter of its politicians’ apologies—the human cost and structural legacies of Japan’s empire and total war—were of crucial importance to contemporary Japanese social and ethical concern.
Put differently, how could a survivor of one of Japan’s slave labor camps believe the Japanese government’s words when a not insignificant number of its democratically elected politicians and highly paid pundits routinely make speeches and publish wildly popular books denigrating the survivors’ claims or look soberly into TV cameras and say they are making it all up? If anything, such voices are only amplifying in Japan these days.
Although often thought differently, the government of Japan did not dramatically lag behind Germany with its initial stabs at apology. In 1965, for example, Japanese diplomats made public statements in Seoul about the need to “reflect” on the countries’ “shared history.”4 In 1972, Japanese officials issued similar pronouncements when establishing relations with Beijing, and, in 1984, Japan’s wartime emperor Hirohito himself followed the nation’s apologetic formula by expressing his “regret” to South Korea’s visiting president Chun Doo-hwan for the “unfortunate period” that the countries had in common.5 Admittedly, these expressions were lukewarm at best, but were they really more inherently ambiguous than the German leader’s silent prayer?6
Without question, however, Japanese society has not gone nearly as far as Germany’s in terms of incorporating the state’s history of violence into school education, among other things. This became wildly clear during the 1990s, when, in the wake of Emperor Hirohito’s 1989 death, within Japan it suddenly seemed that everything about the war and empire was all being said at once, and, for many, for the first time. Unlike Germany where, since the 1960s, public education has at least made most people aware of stories of death camps and pogroms and collapsed expansionist nightmares, in Japan news of wartime atrocities that Japanese committed seemed to appear out of nowhere for most, raising new questions about the meaning of history itself.7 Furthermore, the Asian places of Japan’s former empire were themselves experiencing budding democratization movements at the time. As a result, from Seoul to Jakarta, voices that had long been silenced by their own leaders in the name of post-1945 national interests—from former comfort women to former conscripted soldiers and former slave laborers—suddenly found audiences receptive to their stories at home as well as abroad.
In his 1999 essay, “Air War and Literature,” the extraordinary writer W. G. Sebald confronted postwar German literature’s avoidance of the Allied (particularly British) obliteration of Germany’s cities (particularly Dresden) and their inhabitants.8 “The destruction, on a scale without historical precedent,” wrote Sebald, “entered the annals of the nation, as it set about rebuilding itself, only in the form of vague generalizations.”9 In marked contrast to Germany’s apologists who use the bombings of Dresden and Hamburg and elsewhere to divert attention away from the nation’s homegrown genocides, however, Sebald explained the interconnection of these histories in terms of the national psyche as follows:
As far as I know, the question of whether and how (the Allied campaign) could be strategically or morally justified was never the subject of open debate in Germany after 1945, no doubt mainly because a nation which had murdered and worked to death millions of people in its camps could hardly call on the victorious powers to explain the military and political logic that dictated the destruction of the German cities.10
For Sebald, the problem of German authors dancing around this destruction was too large to ignore: the empty center they created “served primarily to sanitize or eliminate a kind of knowledge incompatible with normality … and allowed [West German society] to recognize the fact of its own rise from total degradation while disengaging entirely from its stock of emotions, if not actually chalking up as another item to its credit its success in overcoming all tribulations without showing any sign of weakness.”11
In many ways, the opposite conditions were true for Japan, and their impact cannot be underestimated. During most of the decade following the war, Japanese writers and social critics openly debated the meaning for Japan of the Allied (particularly American) destruction of Japanese cities (particularly Hiroshima).12 At the same time, however, a social taboo suppressed discussion and education about atrocities that Japanese soldiers and colonists committed abroad in the emperor’s name. Put differently and in the broadest strokes, after a period of coming to terms with survival that lasted until the early to mid-1950s, from then on through the early 1990s Germans deliberated their nation’s attempted annihilation of the Jews but not the firebombing of Dresden, whereas Japanese ruminated on the wastelands of Hiroshima and Tokyo at the cost of confronting Japan’s devastation of large parts and populations of Asia.
This collective impasse in Japan stems largely from what is known as the “Chrysanthemum Taboo” for its symbolism of the imperial family. In simplest terms, this taboo is a social prohibition against publicly raising the question of the emperor’s involvement in the war, as well as all the histories that hang in that history’s balance. With Hirohito’s 1989 death, the possibility of this spell vanishing found new life and in no small way triggered the avalanche of materials concerning the first half of the twentieth century that appeared in bookstores, newsstands, art museums, city halls, schools, movie theaters, and TV shows throughout the country during the 1990s.
Between 1900 and 1945, when millions of Japanese expanded and defended their nation’s empire in the name of Emperors Meiji, Taisho, and Hirohito, Japanese law defined the emperor as follows:
The Emperor is Heaven-descended, divine and sacred; he is pre-eminent above all his subjects. He must be reverenced and is inviolable. He has indeed to pay due respect to the law, but the law has no power to hold Him accountable to it. Not only shall there be no irreverence for the Emperor’s person, but also shall he neither be made the topic of derogatory comment nor one of discussion.13
The emperor was supposed to be forever clean regardless of what Japanese people were doing in his name, and ultimately it would be up to him to judge his subjects’ actions dirty should he wish.
Only in January 1946 did the terms of the emperor’s existence change. In his customary New Year’s Day greeting, Hirohito announced that he was not a god: “The ties between us and our people have always stood upon mutual trust and affection. They do not depend upon mere legends and myths. They are not predicated on the false conception that the Emperor is divine.”14 He did not have too much farther to fall, however. By the end of the month, the American occupation authorities controlling him and Japan made it clear that the emperor was not a war criminal. Rather, he was a victim of circumstance, which was how the Japanese people in general would eventually be described in the preponderance of national storytelling that took its cue from this decision.
In other words, even though at the time many in Japan and around the world were aware that millions of Japanese had committed all kinds of violence against millions and millions more abroad and at home to honor Hirohito’s rule, he would not be responsible for any of it. In a telegram back to Washington from Tokyo, General MacArthur determined that evidence to the contrary was not “specific … with regard to [Hirohito’s] exact activities” and that “his connection with affairs of state up to the time of the end of the war was largely ministerial and automatically responsive to the advice of his councilors.”15 Thanks to American intervention, therefore, Hirohito, for the most part, lived comfortably for the next four decade in Tokyo’s imperial palace in his new role as a nature loving biologist, forcefully forgetting his empire’s war for himself and his country.16
Of course, many Japanese would not change overnight the beliefs they once held about the emperor or at least about his place in Japanese society.17 Moreover, many of those in Japan who benefited from not delving into Japan’s record of violence fed the “Chrysanthemum Taboo” by publicly humiliating or threatening those who touched on the historical substance of Japan’s empire and war between 1900 and 1945. The chief sustainers of the taboo included pardoned war criminals who had returned to parliament, big businessmen whose coal mines and rubber plantations had thrived on Asian and Allied POW slave labor, as well as countless average soldiers who did not want to confront or be confronted with the atrocities they had committed abroad in their emperor’s name.18 The victims of the hex, on the other hand, included a wide variety of historians, journalists, schoolteachers, writers, artists, and filmmakers, among others, some of whom lost their jobs or had their careers marginalized simply for urging others to take a look at what had happened earlier in the century.
One reason the “Chrysanthemum Taboo” functioned so easily right away was that, although Hirohito disavowed imperial divinity, he did not publicly challenge the earlier law that forbade “irreverence,” “derogatory comment,” or “discussion” about him. This gave enormous flexibility to those intent on sustaining the myth of his greatness to justify the empire built and fought over in his name. In the decade following Japan’s defeat, those defining modern Japan’s national story saw to it that anyone engaging history in any way that suggested disdain for the emperor or the system he upheld would identify that person as questionably “Japanese.” Foreigners were one thing and their work could be ignored or ridiculed. Yet, in a society that continues to pride itself on homogeneity, for decade Japan’s postwar democratic leaders tried to estrange Japanese who tried to unravel the nation’s most immediate past from within.
The most famous of Japan’s voices against this powerful postwar storm was the delightful yet far from radical historian Ienaga Saburo. Ienaga was a high school teacher in northern Japan during the war, and he often said later that his greatest personal shame was failing to resist teaching the required wartime propaganda, which included the myth of fighting for a divine Japan. As a result, Ienaga felt responsible for sending some of his students off to war, which informed his determination to write about what happened during the war to educate future Japanese in the nature of actual, not mythical, fighting. His attempt in the early 1950s to publish a Japanese school textbook that mentioned various notorious histories such as the Nanjing Massacre caused Japan’s Ministry of Education to demand more than two hundred cuts and changes. He refused on the grounds of postwar Japan’s constitutionally and democratically enshrined principle of freedom of speech. And, in 1965, Ienaga began a life-defining series of lawsuits against the Japanese government that involved hundreds of lawyers and thousands of supporters from Japan and throughout the world. He even received a 2001 Nobel Peace Prize nomination for his efforts. Like his lawsuits, however, which saw moments of hope during the 1990s but never fully achieved their aims, the nomination failed. Ienaga died in 2002 at the age of eighty-nine.
During the 1990s apology boom, whenever Japanese officials commented on Japan’s modern history, their statements were viewed—as sociologist Jeffrey Olick observed in a related vein—“in reference to” well-known German pronouncements, not simply in terms of their own content.19 As such, they never quite measured up.
One consequence of the overwhelming emphasis on Japan’s shortcomings compared to Germany’s achievements was to garner the resolve of those in Japan who never favored the idea that Japan should apologize in the first place. The unrelenting “Why can’t Japan be more like Germany?” charge furthermore frustrated even those supportive of apology, and, as a result, as of today the anti-apology apologists for Japan’s histories of violence have accrued increasing common sense to their contention that Japan did not do anything worse than anyone else. The core understanding of those seeking atonement may again be lost. The histories that will always need to be thought about are once again out of the schoolbooks or on the verge of erasure.
In November 2004, for example, public officials such as the education minister Nakayama Nariaki had this to say about the diminishing number of references to wartime atrocities in the nation’s texts: “That’s good. We shouldn’t focus so much on the negative.”20 More widely disseminated affirmations of this trend followed Prime Minister Abe’s March 2007 denial that the thousands of women and girls involved in Japan’s infamous comfort women system had been “coerced.” His party’s policy chief, Nakagawa Shoichi, for one, seemed to presume that the public had not watched television or read newspapers during the 1990s, when survivors appeared routinely to recount their lived nightmares and unhesitatingly told reporters, “There’s currently no evidence that permits us to declare the military, the strongest expression of state authority, took women away and forced them to do things against their will.”21
In starkest relief, such sentiment reveals a conviction that the non-Japanese human cost of modern Japan’s wealth and power is both irrelevant and destructive to a collective sense of being Japanese. In December 2006, in the face of a small yet articulate and poignant protest, the Japanese government achieved what was for some the long-desired goal of revising the 1947 education law, one of the pillars of postwar reform. Once again, a primary aim of public education will be to instill a “love of country” in young Japanese, which is admittedly more difficult to do if you study things like massacres and slave camps in too much detail.22
Now, more than sixty years after the end of the war, the remaining survivors of wartime atrocities continue to want their stories heard and measured as significant to modern Japanese history, and yet they are more and more openly derided as only “in it for the money.” Those sympathetic to the victims and to dispelling the “Chrysanthemum Taboo” which discredits them and their histories are again on the defensive, searching for more evidence to prove the already horrible even worse.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF REMORSE
As mentioned before, toward the end of the twentieth century the Japanese government made a number of apologies concerning the first half of the century, the most elaborate of which was Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi’s 1995 statement on the fiftieth anniversary of Japan’s defeat:
Our country, through its colonial rule and aggression, caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations. In the hope that no such mistake be made in the future, I regard, in a spirit of humility, these irrefutable facts of history, and express here once again my feelings of deep remorse and state my heartfelt apology.23
Regardless of some rather brazen attempts to overturn this statement and other similar apologies, groups as central to power as Japan’s foreign ministry as well as Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo state that these words continue to define the nation’s official view of Japan’s twentieth-century history in Asia.
In its wake, Japanese politicians of all parties converged on this so-called Murayama declaration, with holdouts on the Far Right getting vastly more press than their counterparts on the Left.24 Yet, although it became commonplace for Japanese officials to talk about “sorrow” and “remorse” for an unnamed “past,” it became as common for victims of that “past” and their supporters to dismiss these statements as lacking in substantive meaning. This opinion was not necessarily misplaced, but it trapped those who agreed. Well-organized networks supported the resolve of many of those demanding an apology, and in doing so they created the problem of who would decide when an apology was ever “real.” For many victims of Japan’s state-sponsored violence, no apology would ever suffice. Some, for example, asked for a direct, personal apology from the emperor and others wanted Japan’s parliament to enact a law condemning its own past, neither of which would appear to be looming on the horizon.
Important always to bear in mind, unless the victim of any wrongdoing accepts the apology at hand, it will remain hollow, regardless of how often someone repeats it. Imagine an English-speaking tourist in the middle of a place where no one speaks English. No matter how many times the tourist asks the same question and no matter how loudly he or she repeats it, there may be no communication at all, despite how friendly or unfriendly everyone involved is. In terms of Japan’s official apologies during the 1990s, this pattern played out repeatedly between the government of Japan and various victims’ groups, further fueling the belief that Japan’s apologies would never measure up to Germany’s and fanning the fires of those against apologizing for anything anyway.
On this point, Japan’s post-1945 relations with Korea reveal that the government of Japan has long been concerned with not letting some of the nation’s more troublesome histories undermine its present or future. In other words, the apology and history problems did not just spring out of nowhere in the 1990s when the apology movement gained momentum worldwide. To be sure, people started to pay more attention at the time for reasons ranging from the increasing lack of living survivors to the wild ride of ever globalizing national economies in the 1990s. This particular history demonstrates, however, some important features of Japan’s apologetic techniques with Korea that have been hidden in the recent spate of apologies all around.
In June 1965, after thirteen years of protracted negotiations, Japanese and South Korean diplomats established relations that many describe as “normalizing” or as “coming to terms with the past.” This moment thus officially began Japan’s decolonization process with Korea. It is important to understand that the 1965 agreement inaugurated—not recommenced—South Korea and Japan’s relations as independent states. Before Japan’s 1910 colonization of Korea, Tokyo had relations with the entire peninsula, which it then usurped by annexing the country into the Japanese empire. In August 1945, the creation of American and Soviet occupation zones carved Korea in two, meaning that, in essence, there were no official relations between occupied Japan and occupied South or North Korea, only relations between the various occupation authorities involved, and even those were quite confusing at best.25 In 1948, South and North Korea respectively came into existence, a condition made further real after the Korean War by the terms of the 1953 armistice between Pyongyang and Washington, which, as far as North Korea was concerned, gave it greater legitimacy than the South, which had to rely on the Americans’ signature to end the fighting.26 Therefore, in 1965, South Korea’s decision to begin relations with the country’s former overlord without the North’s participation generated additional tensions between Seoul and Pyongyang, not in the least because the UN-sanctioned 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations Between Japan and the Republic of Korea (South Korea) declared South Korea the sole legitimate government of the peninsula in terms of international conventions and protocols at the time.27
Although the 1965 treaty established Tokyo and Seoul’s relations, Washington was far from absent in the process. As American interests in Vietnam grew in the early 1960s, Washington wanted to free up some of the funds it was spending on development and military aid in South Korea to use to defend its latest bulwark against communism, and it wanted to transfer some of the Korea burden to Tokyo.28 America’s famous ambassador to Japan, Edwin O. Reischauer, had watched the years of failed negotiations between Japan and South Korea and strongly emphasized to Tokyo the need to formally address Korean resentment over colonization for progress to be made. Despite Tokyo’s reluctance to get things going, Reischauer held firm to his position that Japan should make some sort of statement about the colonial era, and, in the months leading up to normalization, Japanese officials made statements revealing the critical role the U.S. played in the development of Japan’s apology politics with South Korea.29
Of subtle yet monumental importance, Reischauer, during this time, offered the phrase “unhappy history” to describe the recent past of Japanese-Korean relations. In pragmatic terms, it was pure genius to freeze the past into an indeterminate time period for which no one was to blame. This, however, is precisely what continues to anger those seeking recognition of specific histories, because, ever since then, Japanese and South Korean diplomats and politicians have repeatedly “regretfully” dissolved “the past” into equally vague phrases concerning the nations’ future together. This vocabulary took root and emerged as the most powerful apologetic technique in play, and Japanese leaders finally solidified it in writing during the 1990s when similar terms flourished worldwide.
In September 1964, Reischauer wrote a memo to Secretary of State Dean Rusk acknowledging that “clear Japanese apology for their colonial oppression of Korea in past” was difficult, because “Japanese officials and public simply do not feel they owe any apology to Koreans.”30 In November, he sent a telegram to Rusk to report on his breakfast meeting with Foreign Minister Shiina Etsusaburo during which he urged Japan to make “some sort of apology to Koreans for colonial past.” When Shiina’s secretary suggested that the foreign minister’s upcoming visit to Korea would come “as close to expression of apology as was feasible,” Reischauer urged that “some sort of forward-looking statement about turning backs on past unhappy history … might assuage Koreans’ feelings without irritating Japanese public.”31
Early the following winter, in February 1965, Shiina visited Seoul for several days. Socialists in Japan protested the ruling party’s decision to launch relations with Seoul at the expense of Pyongyang by organizing a no-confidence vote in the Diet, and students in both countries held demonstrations to protest North Korea’s exclusion from the settlement. Japanese Prime Minister Sato Eisaku and South Korean President Park Chung-hee, however, were determined to make Shiina’s visit a success at all costs. When Japan’s foreign minister arrived at Seoul’s Kimpo airport, he immediately declared Japan’s “regret” for “the unfortunate period” the countries shared.32
Shiina told waiting reporters, “I believe we should reflect deeply on the truly regrettable circumstances of the unfortunate period in the midst of our nations’ long history…. It is in these hopes that we establish future-facing permanent and friendly relations on which we can build a new respectful and prosperous history.” The countries had not yet established diplomatic relations, and this moment marked the first Japanese official public statement in Korea—South or North—about the colonial era. Asahi newspaper special correspondent, Imazu Hiroshi, noted Shiina’s statement as highly significant, and he conveyed his own hopes for improvement.33 At the same time, James C. Thomson Jr., of Lyndon B. Johnson’s National Security Council Staff, remarked that “Shiina came as close as a Japanese can to apologizing for Japan’s sins, and everyone—including State—is thoroughly pleased.”34
The rigidity of such a formulation is clear, however. Until recently, not only did it forestall delving into the histories in question, the governments’ reliance on these words disgraced survivors of any number of violent events by saying, in effect, “that was then, this is now, you don’t matter to our future, and therefore your past must be swallowed for the benefit of our present.” Tokyo and Seoul have not necessarily denied the past, but victims were long left with no option for protest. Even during the more open 1990s, survivors found themselves often doing no better than running along a spinning wheel of the state’s creation in courts that ultimately would remain indifferent to their claims.35
Although Reischauer’s involvement reveals American pressure on the process, Japanese and South Korean officials subsequently chose to maneuver within the boundaries of this formula and make it their own. On October 8, 1998, three decade after Shiina’s statements at Kimpo airport, and after three decade of Japanese and South Korean officials using these terms, Japanese Prime Minister Obuchi Keizo issued Japan’s first written declaration about the “unfortunate past” together with South Korean President Kim Dae-jung. The declaration is largely a continuation of the same theme, combining long-standing words of “remorse” and “heartfelt apology” with the 1995 Murayama statement.36 Self-described pragmatists congratulated themselves and heralded it as a groundbreaking statement that would usher in an era of “new partnership.”
The declaration perpetuated other problems, however, immediately suggesting that simply putting the usual phrases into writing might not produce new solutions to the histories at hand. In fact, the written version might even generate more complications. For starters, the “joint declaration” once again referred to the “unfortunate past” that caused the history troubles in the first place and yet inscribed it as “a certain period in the past,” rendering it even more imprecise. Deciding still to avoid determining when this history took place, of course, has only continued to make it possible to defer the problem of who might take responsibility for it.
Second, and related to South Korea’s own conundrum of how to project itself onto any Korean history that predates the nation’s birth in 1948, the 1998 statement acknowledged that “Japan caused … tremendous suffering and damage to the people of the Republic of Korea through its colonial rule.” The problem is that there was no Republic of Korea during the time of Japan’s colonial rule, which points to how the official way of referring to the past between Japan and Korea has served until very recently to define South Korea as the rightful government on the Korean peninsula.37 In fact, until September 2002, when Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi traveled to Pyongyang for Japan’s first head of state meeting ever with North Korea, all of Japan’s official proclamations about history referred only to South Korea—Nikkan/
—quietly carving South Korea’s privileged position into stone. None of these issues existed during the “certain period in the past” when there were no separate countries, only “Korea.”
Put simply, until recently when Japan and South Korea’s apologetic exchange began to crumble apart over the tiny islands between them, Seoul’s acquiescence to Tokyo’s words further weakened the demands of South Korean citizens that Japan recognize their histories. Since 1965, Japan and South Korea’s officially shared “remorse” for “the past” has constrained history’s parameters, rather than expand them. Both governments have tried to maintain a calm that may make sense regarding diplomacy, business, or military games but has little to do with history in terms of finding out what happened to whom, what, when, and where. Officials, however, have smoothed things over in the name of history—Harry Harootunian’s “ruse” mentioned earlier—confusing for everyone and especially themselves what is really involved.
In the 1990s, the intensity of claims against Japan entrenched the divide between those saying Japan had never apologized for its past in Korea and those saying it had. The victims and their supporters who found Japan’s words lacking in meaning often overlooked their government’s agreement to them or, and maybe more to the point, found it as difficult to challenge their own leaders. Rather than consider how these conditions might relate to how those asking for apology made their demands, however—which would be one way to approach the problem historically—this only made Japan’s anti-apology apologists angrier and more politicized. As of today, the movement against “remorse” on Japan’s part seeks to deny the increasingly rare survivors of Japan’s historical violence the dignity of even listening to their stories.
KOREA IN A BOX
In March 1999, Prime Minister Obuchi and President Kim celebrated the six-month anniversary of their written “joint declaration” with an unusual live TV broadcast. No journalist raised the dreaded issue of “the past,” and neither did Obuchi or Kim. Instead, they spoke of the dawn of a “new history,” nodding to business and military leaders to forge ahead under the rubric of “cultural sharing.” For some, the expression rather startlingly evoked Japan’s official policy in Korea during the 1920s, which was called “cultural rule.”38
Historical echoes notwithstanding, the South Korean government lived up to President Kim’s commitment to “cultural sharing” and began lifting the nation’s fifty-three-year ban on Japanese music and film. Of course, bootlegs, pirated copies, and underground exchange had long kept savvy Koreans aware of what was hot in Tokyo well before the Internet made it all seem so matter-of-fact, but to do this earlier was harder than many might imagine. As a result, in the spring of 2000, for example, it was still quite exciting in Seoul or Busan to see a Japanese movie on the big screen, or at least it was for the first time since 1945. And regardless of protests over the islands, the comfort women, and Japan’s shrine to war dead, Japanese popular culture remains a multimillion dollar industry in South Korea.
For its part, the Japanese government actively began promoting tourism to South Korea, “so near and yet so far,” and planned extravagant arts and academic exchange programs.39 In 2002, Tokyo and Seoul co-hosted soccer’s World Cup. Both countries’ teams performed better than expected, with history’s underdogs, the Koreans, doing just enough better than the Japanese—but not too much—for almost everyone to feel good.
This elaborately manufactured good feeling blended seamlessly into an Asia-wide craze for South Korean TV shows and movies, known by the Chinese-coined term as the “Korean Wave.” In April 2003, one swell of the wave brought Winter Sonata to Japan. This TV series of star-crossed love caused nothing less than widespread hysteria among middle-aged, middle-class Japanese women for its leading man, Bae Yong-joon, who became fondly known in Japanese as “Yon-sama.”40
Thousands caused a stampede at Tokyo’s Haneda airport in April 2004 when Bae arrived for a visit, sending twelve women to the hospital. When he flew home, Japanese women desperate for love jammed flights to Seoul. Scores made Korean matchmaking companies instantly rich, seeking Korean men for marriage and disparaging their Japanese options in “Yon-sama’s” name.41 A Korean friend of mine rented her condo in the Chunchon ski resort area where the series was filmed to a succession of Japanese fans for more money than she ever imagined.42 Bloggers had a field day, and one Online culture critic declared, “It’s not an exaggeration to say that Winter Sonata has done more politically for South Korea and Japan than the FIFA World Cup.”43
With such a high, however, the crash could almost be expected, and by 2005 one of the most popular books in Japan was titled Hating the Korean Wave.44 The Hating book itself is preoccupied with South Korea, yet the broader social backlash that propelled it gathered steam not simply because the “Yon-sama” pandemonium was so over the top; by coincidence, South Korea’s popular culture wave crashed on Japanese shores roughly at the time that a series of stunning provocations by North Korean leader Kim Jong-il were realizing their effects in Japanese society. In simplest terms—and similar to how 9/11 collapsed many Americans’ perceptions of Middle Easterners into all one category—by the end of 2004, as news from Pyongyang became stranger and stranger, the “Yon-sama” phenomenon more and more frenzied, and, on top of it all, the island dispute took off again, some Japanese warped everything and everyone Korean into one group that was, by definition, a threat to being Japanese.
Whereas, for most Americans, North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is the root cause of mistrust with Pyongyang, for Japanese it is what is known as the “abduction issue” (rachi mondai). Beginning in the 1970s, the North Korean government began kidnapping Japanese citizens to North Korea to work as language instructors to train spies to infiltrate Japan, an idea, some believe, originated by the national leader Kim Jong-il. It is said that more than twenty or fifty or maybe even one hundred innocent Japanese were its victims.
What we know for certain is that, in September 2002, Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi traveled to Pyongyang for the first head of state meeting ever to begin “normalizing” relations with North Korea along the lines of its relations with South Korea.
An apology for the “unfortunate past” and financial incentives were to be part of the deal.45 During the meeting, however, Kim Jong-il acknowledged his government’s involvement in the kidnapping program, and Koizumi returned to Tokyo with the news that North Korea had admitted abducting thirteen people; eight were dead, and five remained there. Profound shock and despair engulfed Japan.
Lost in the moment, Pyongyang’s disclosure about the kidnap-pings came in the form of an official apology. This rare instance of “double apology”—Tokyo to Pyongyang for colonization and Pyongyang to Tokyo for the abductions—is perhaps unique in recent international relations and raised several very important factors about political apologies, all of which disappeared in the maelstrom caused by North Korea’s revelation.
First, regardless of whether Prime Minister Koizumi should be remembered for his repeated visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, for trying to disband state-controlled postal savings accounts, or for grabbing Lisa Marie Presley at Graceland and singing “Love Me Tender,” he broke with decade of constipated official Japanese policy toward North Korea and decided to get on with things with Pyongyang once and for all. To the palpable anger of many in his own conservative party, Koizumi flew to North Korea armed with the formula of “sorrow and remorse for the unfortunate past.” This act did nothing but underscore that the content of that past—meaning history—had very little to do with the apology offered for it.
Second, regardless of whether North Korean leader Kim Jong-il should be thought of as the diabolical playboy that numerous American news magazines have portrayed him as, or, as he sees himself, surrounded by throngs of adoring countrymen, during his 2002 meeting with Koizumi, Kim clearly understood that political apologies were the name of the game. He offered Koizumi a perfectly scripted counter of “regret for the deaths of eight of the victims,” making these quid pro quo apologies highlight their sheer instrumentality. Kim’s apologies also begged the question of whether a “double apology” would work like a double negative, erasing what the other had said.
At the time, however, any critical examination of these apologies or related ones remained at the level of excited talk—and maybe even only between my colleagues and me—because, within the month, Kim Jong-il owned up to his nation’s nuclear weapons program and placed Pyongyang beyond the pale for many Japanese and Americans. Even though some might think that the nuclear weapons issue might have then become the cause of concern in Japan because of its proximity to North Korea, Japanese remained transfixed on the abductions. And even though there has been growing fatigue with the issue, and even after North Korea tested a weapon in October 2006, the abduction matter continues to predominate Japanese discussions about North Korea.46 In January 2007, for example, the Japanese government sponsored special film showings as well as other events about the issue at the United Nations in New York just as its new secretary general, South Korean Ban Ki-moon, took charge.
The reason that the abduction issue remains the story in Japan is fairly straightforward. Its immediate human dimension generates almost total national sympathy. More important, however, Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program is far less useful than the kidnap-pings for summoning the myth of Japanese togetherness. Superficially at least, the kidnappings do not raise certain questions; for example, “Would Japanese cities or the U.S. military bases in Japan be North Korea’s target?” Or, “Why does Pyongyang hate Japan so much?” Even quick answers quickly spiral backward into the open-ended mess of history.
Moreover, the abduction question came with its own baggage in the Japanese political and media worlds that made anyone and everyone earning a living off public opinion feel the need to be heard or seen claiming the victims in the name of Japan when North Korea came clean. In the 1970s, when the mysterious disappearances began, the victims’ families approached the Japanese government for help, but they were told that their children had simply run away. Much information is still needed about who in the Japanese government knew what and when, yet what is known is that ever since the kidnappings started, government spokesmen and most of the media (except the right-wing Sankei Shimbun for its own North Korean bashing purposes) continued to ignore the families’ requests for information or publicity for their plight. They occasionally accused them of lying or of being spies themselves.
As a result, when Kim Jong-il confessed to his government’s official involvement in the plan, and it was clear that the Japanese government and press had not protected its own, every politician and media outlet in Japan leapt on the story, especially liberal-leaning ones like the Asahi to atone for their earlier lack of attention. On some days, there has been no other story. Millions of people openly wept watching the survivors’ homecoming on live TV in October 2002. They wept again the following spring when the victims’ teenage children who were born and raised in North Korea were “returned” to Japan. For some, the issue of the children’s “return” to Japan raised discussions about the power of the verb “to come home” which, in Japanese, uses the word “country” for “home.” How could the victims’ children be “coming home” to a place that they never even knew until recently was vaguely a part of them? It is no surprise, however, given the stakes involved, that the defenders of a homogeneous Japan prevailed, and the Korean-born, Korean-raised, Korean-speaking children’s blood won hands down over any other issue of Japanese identity. This remains an important notion, given that being even “half” Japanese, for example, is never enough for many Japanese-born, Japanese-raised, Japanese-speaking Japanese Koreans who want to be defined as Japanese. Needless to say, skeptics were and are viewed as less than Japanese.
The kidnap victims stayed in Japan for good when they came back in October 2002.
Throughout the fall, Japanese obsessively watched the effects of their so-called North Korean brainwashing vanish. All five got new haircuts and clothes in Tokyo bureaucratic-chic. Some took quite well to the style, eventually getting jobs in local administrative offices and in schools where they started to teach, of all things, the Korean language to Japanese students. The victims resumed their full and, arguably, divinely appointed Japanese-ness over the 2003 New Year’s holiday when they had their first chance in decade to pray at local shrines. Television cameras followed their every move, and the message was clear: the stain of North Korea was gone.
The only person involved in the whole abduction scheme that Japanese cannot wholly incorporate as one of their own is Charles Robert Jenkins, the American-born husband of one of the Japanese victims. In 1965, Jenkins defected to North Korea while serving in the American military along the demilitarized zone in South Korea, and his appearance in the mix caused all kinds of additional problems. The abduction story broke on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and at that moment the American military was not about to pardon any of its soldiers who had run off to the “commie North” to avoid Vietnam, which is what the military would have had to do for Jenkins to enable him to join his Japanese wife in Japan. The extradition laws that exist between Japan and the United States would have required that Jenkins be immediately arrested and sent “home.”47
When Jenkins’ wife returned to Japan with the four others in October 2002, Jenkins and their two children stayed in Pyongyang. Eventually, Tokyo and Washington and Pyongyang worked out a deal. Jenkins and his wife would reunite in Jakarta, where Jenkins would receive medical treatments unavailable to him in Pyongyang. Because Jakarta is, according to international law, what is called a “third country”—meaning that no one really responsible would have to take responsibility for what was going on—from there Charles Jenkins could finally come to Japan together with their two daughters. Unlike the other victims’ children, the Jenkins girls, from birth, were defined as “half” in North Korea, as they also would be in Japan.
When Jenkins, his daughters, and his wife were reunited as a family in July 2004, the Japanese media and its pundits had yet another chance to monopolize the airwaves for several days discussing what it meant to be Japanese or, in this case, what it meant to be not Japanese. Japanese news cameras at Jakarta’s international airport beamed home the first blip of Jenkins’s plane coming into view. Reporters built up as much suspense as possible until the plane door opened, and the slight, white-haired, sixty-four-year-old man limped down the stairs with a cane, whereupon he immediately embraced his wife. They then fell into a loving and eager kiss on the lips for all in Japan to see. “They’re kissing! “They’re kissing!” each major station’s reporter shouted as if the gesture would be lost without translation. “Jenkins has given his wife a kiss! They’re kissing! It’s an American kiss!”
When I heard this, I quickly flipped through the TV channels to make sure that other reporters were similarly fixated, and I remember thinking, “What? What are they talking about?” I was struck not because I thought the comment was anti-this or anti-that but because my own stereotypes were at odds with those of the Japanese reporters. Before the reporters said anything, I was thinking to myself, “Wow, the Jenkinses have become pretty Korean.” I thought this blatantly stereotypical thought, because husband and wife repeatedly stroked each other’s faces while kissing in the way that I have grown accustomed to seeing people kiss in Seoul when they are desperate to see each other or as Korean family members are featured when South Korean TV shows them reuniting after decade of living on opposite sides of the demilitarized zone.
The more I thought about everyone’s preconceptions and preoccupations (my own included) and about affection and national identity, the more I realized that the significant point in all this was that coverage of this moment ran absolutely counter to Japan’s whole Winter Sonata craze. If nothing else, the “Yon-sama” phenomenon revolved around a soap opera about love, separation, assumed identity, and plenty of kissing on the lips. What had everyone been watching?
An interesting note is that when the kidnapping story first broke, South Koreans paid almost no attention. On one level, the very subject of kidnapping remains too sensitive in domestic Korean affairs, because both South and North Korea have kidnapped hundreds of each other’s nationals since the Korean War ended in 1953, not to mention the problem of POWs who were not allowed to go home on either side. On a deeper level, however, it is difficult for any Korean to comprehend how the tragic stories of five individuals could so eclipse everything else in Japan when the Japanese government has yet to deal with the tragic stories of the millions of Asian lives ruined by the forced separations and abductions perpetrated by its colonial and wartime government.
Misguided or not, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s bewildering behavior should be understood as an attempt to generate legitimacy for himself abroad and at home—international legitimacy by coming clean with Japan about the abduction scheme, and domestic legitimacy by standing up to the United States and pursuing nuclear weapons. Without a doubt, though, his contributions to the growing anti-Korean feeling in Japan since 2002 have shifted Japanese popular consciousness about North Korea from suspicion to outrage. Most alarming, his actions have enabled ideologues on Japan’s Right, such as the popular governor of Tokyo Ishihara Shintaro, to make their racist commentary make increasing common sense to many. During the past few years, people like Ishihara have even generated mainstream support for some of the more extreme acts that their hate mongering has produced, such as beating up kids of Korean descent on their way to school or once again defaming as “anti-Japanese” those who demonstrate interest in the historical reasons behind these issues.48 Most notorious, of course, was the September 2003 firebombing of the house of a prominent Japanese foreign ministry official for his efforts to talk to North Koreans.49
These recent moments of extreme fondness and hate underscore the profound disconnect between Japan and Korea that remains at the heart of what lingers from history that no popular wave can wash away. Many Japanese will continue to hate Korea openly and without hesitation because the inner histories of being Japanese and being Korean remain so absent from Japan’s social landscape. It will still be easy and fun to fly to Seoul for a weekend shopping spree as long as you don’t have to bring any history “home,” just as it will be preferable to keep Koreans safely inside your TV set because there they do not disturb being Japanese.
“IN THANKS TO YOU ALL!!”
Beyond the loving and hating Korea waves, Kobayashi Yoshinori can claim more responsibility than anyone for popularizing the trend to discredit those who would apologize for any of modern Japan’s history. He is a cartoonist and a pundit, and the astronomical sales of his two most famous books, SensŌron (On War) in 1998 and its successor SensŌron 2 in 2001, attest to his central place in this endeavor.50
In these books, Kobayashi repeatedly explains that failure to praise those who fought for Japan’s empire created a “masochistic” understanding of history in which Japan and Japanese remain judged for what foreigners determined to be crimes. To his mind, the nation’s sell-outs perpetuate this “masochistic” view by demanding apologies for three events: Japan’s “so-called war of aggression,” colonization of Korea, and apparent “troubles” (meiwaku) Japan caused in Asia. According to Kobayashi, since 1945 Japanese “leftists,” “intellectuals,” “individualists,” “cultists,” and, above all, “the media” are responsible for this treachery, and “the Americans” have played no small part.51
Presenting history like using a remote control, Kobayashi invites readers into his narrative by drawing himself as the main character, wearing either an Imperial Army uniform (as on the covers of his books) or an “I could be you” plain, black sweater. Just to make sure readers know where he stands, randomly in the text he includes drawings of himself at his desk or in bed being embraced by a pretty, young, and completely naked Japanese woman. In an unusual spin on the erotic displays that typify Japanese comics, the naked woman (or women) clinging to Kobayshi will have to wait, however, because Japanese history must first be satisfied.52
Taking Kobayashi Yoshinori seriously only gives him more attention, yet thoughtful critics have argued that to ignore his work is more than intellectual snobbery; it is cowardice.53 Put differently, to step around the Kobayashi phenomenon is akin to pretending that Bill O’Reilly of Fox News is irrelevant to today’s America.54 It is no surprise that both Kobayashi and O’Reilly manipulate similar views of history, reducing everything in their paths to the least common denominator, playing on the assumption that a fact is a fact if you, the reader, are vaguely familiar with some of the particulars. Both also rely on similarly charged masculine contours of right and wrong—“feminists” are an especially loathsome threat to the “truth” and “values”—and both find no logical inconsistency with defaming their opponents as “idiots” or “fanatics” while relying on imaginary evidence to support their own claims.55
Throughout his books, Kobayashi reworks the long-standing tactics of Japanese extremists into matter-of-fact storytelling by reworking demands for an “apology” (shazai/
) for Japan’s record during World War II into demands for “gratitude” (kansha/
) for those who endured it. In the first volume he clarifies the objects of his hatred, and describes his plan for rescuing Japan’s honor in a five-panel drawing, the text of which reads:
For our grandfathers who endured the brutal war with all their might and perished, for our grandfathers who achieved victory on the battlefield of honor, for our grandfathers who endured the even more unendurable after the war when Japan’s military was reviled, for our grandfathers who hold grudges against the mindless beatings they endured in the military, for our grandmothers who narrowly held down the home front during the war, and for the comfort women who gave comfort to Japanese troops, I’LL TELL THE STORY OF THE WAR IN THANKS TO YOU ALL!!56
Given the levels to which Kobayashi’s work aspires, it is predictable that he takes his cue from various extremist groups who also urge “giving thanks,” such as the poster from one such organization pictured here that has renamed Japan’s surrender date as a “Day of Gratitude.”
Kobayashi rehashes much of the same story in the second volume, yet he makes much more of the significance—in positive terms—of Japan’s having fought a “holy war” in the name of “Greater Asia.” To this end, he even delayed the book’s publication to include the 9/11 attacks on the United States into his explanation that Japanese should be proud of their nation’s historical and “spiritually based” attempts to “liberate” Asia from white rule.57 As a result, the second volume is nothing less than a mass-marketed manifesto for Japan’s anti-apology apologists. In it, Kobayashi argues that the government’s conservative establishment sold out the country during the 1990s by even responding to calls for apology. And unlike the pre-1990s apologists of Japan’s wartime record who would simply ignore the existence of survivors of Japan’s wartime atrocities such as the comfort women, Kobayashi unabashedly includes them in his logic to keep his own narrative as current as possible.
After a lengthy discussion targeting Japan’s 1991–93 prime minister, Miyazawa Kiichi, for his weakness on this score (as Kobayashi sees it)—in one drawing Kobayashi lops off Miyazawa’s skull cap as well as that of a foreign ministry spokesman to demonstrate their “empty-headedness” as they “apologize six times and express remorse twice!”—Kobayashi draws the root cause of this apparently idiotic behavior: a self-satisfied, healthy-looking young woman surrounded by cash flowing from heaven. This figure is meant to portray a former comfort woman at the end of the war, and the text explains, “Because it was a war-zone and dangerous, the money was great. There were lots of them who earned more than 10 times what a college graduate did in those days and 100 times more than a soldier. In 2–3 years they built houses back in their hometowns.”58 Just in case this explanation is too vague, on the right-hand side of the drawing, silhouettes of soldiers (presumably Japanese) race head-on into explosions while female figures on the other side (presumably like the young woman or as she will be in the future) walk away unscathed with bundles and bags of what must be the money tumbling down.
Volumes of documentary evidence that appeared during the 1990s prove Kobayashi’s explanation of the Japanese wartime comfort women system wrong. Nonetheless, Kobayashi deploys a striking, young, and foreign face to counter the numerous pictures of the system’s actual young women that surfaced then—one of the better-known ones is reprinted here—and to cast doubt on the testimonies that elderly survivors were giving in Japan at the time.
Kobayashi frames his outrageous ideas in the middle of a diatribe against the centrist and, by their own definition, pragmatic politicians who had apologized to Korea in some measure, culminating in a demand to “Make Insulting the Nation a Crime! Put (the Politicians) Who Insulted Japan and the Japanese People in Jail!”59
With similar drawings and text throughout the book’s hundreds of pages, Kobayashi willfully tries to court today’s young Japanese who, at the time these texts were published, were living through the nation’s worst economic moments since the early 1950s. The logic is simple: they are here to take our money again.
YET ANOTHER APOLOGY
The July 2003 issue of Japan’s best-selling literary journal, Bungei Shunjū, printed “Imperial Apology to the People” across its cover, and inside it reprinted a copy of a newly found 1948 document purporting to be Hirohito’s thoughts on apology.60 Nonfiction author Kato Kyoko found the document among Tajima Michiji’s personal effects, and Tajima had been head of the Imperial House hold Agency and Hirohito’s confidant. Kato defines the written note as the wartime emperor’s apology, and suggests that it could “broadly recast a page of Showa history (1926–1989),” referring to the long-standing discussion of Japan’s war responsibility, the emperor, and apology for Japan’s rampage and defeat in Asia and the Pacific during the first half of the twentieth century.61
Never mind the obvious problems, however. Never mind, for example, that the former emperor apologized in language that required a Japanese translator, who himself was Japanese, to render it comprehensible in popularly used Japanese. Never mind that Hirohito did not write the document himself; likely, he expressed his thoughts to Tajima, in whose private records Kato made her discovery. And, most important, never mind that Hirohito did not apologize to the people who have been seeking redress all these years since 1945. Instead, he expressed “deep shame” to his non-colonial subjects, paying particular attention to those “who lost their property abroad.”62
For many Japanese, these words of Japan’s dead emperor would describe Hirohito as always and already apologetic. The people who claim that they still deserve an apology remain ostracized, and this discovery in the end simply shades the history of Japan’s empire and war in the same halftones that has long obscured its victims’ stories.63 In the logic of those determined never to allow the record of Japan’s state-run terror from staining Japanese history writ large, however, the tragic wartime leader did, in fact, apologize. End of story.
Hirohito’s words will surely continue to emerge from the grave. If they do so along their current path, they may only reintroduce for younger or forgetful Japanese the apologetic sentiment the emperor expressed in 1946 when he renounced his divinity: “The devastation of the war inflicted upon our cities, the miseries of the destitute, the stagnation of trade, shortage of food, and the great and growing number of the unemployed are indeed heart-rending.” It would seem, then, that the “Chrysanthemum Taboo” continues to define Japanese identity at the cost of its history.
