Back to the past

The military establishment's "comfort women" system of the Second World War period returns to haunt a resurgent Japan.

P.S. SURYANARAYANA in Singapore

RISING states and resurgent powers often face challenges from unexpected quarters in global politics. This reality has now hit Japan as it seeks to stay the course of its resurgence as a political power. And the unexpected challenge has come from some political sections in the United States, which not only subdued war-mongering Imperial Japan over 60 years ago and imposed pacifism on it but also wooed the country as a military ally after the War.

From Tokyo's perspective, the latest attitude of some activists in the U.S. reflects strange political morality. What has now hit Tokyo, though, is yet another reality-check about the moral fall of Imperial Japan's military at the height of its sway across East Asia, including China and the Korean peninsula. The end of the Second World War marked Imperial Japan's sunset. The issue that has now come back to haunt Tokyo is the one that is politely described as the "sexual enslavement of comfort women" at the hands of Imperial Japan's military minions. For Tokyo, compounding the present challenge over this old issue is the new impression among its neighbours and some sections in the U.S. that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is adopting a revisionist view of his country's military history.

Abe is the first Japanese Prime Minister to have been born after the Second World War. So, the suspicions about his perceived move to "whitewash" Japan's "past of guilt" have come to acquire a certain cutting edge. The conventional wisdom outside Japan is that Abe, unlike his predecessors, should have no difficulty in rising above history and paying for his country's past misdeeds. Abe is already schooled in self-respecting nationalism, which his mentor and immediate predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, had moulded into a political mantra. Before Koizumi, a maverick leader of Japan's long-governing Liberal Democratic Party, most Japanese politicians had placed Tokyo as the self-effacing surrogate of the U.S.

Abe is eager to capitalise on his political asset of being the first Prime Minister with not even childhood links to the Second World War. As a result, he clearly wants to put Koizumi's legacy of self-respecting nationalism to much greater effect and look at Japan's past from a perspective that would not be solely "coloured" by the outcome of the Second World War - a comprehensive and degrading defeat of Imperial Japan.

Abe's aim is to restore national dignity in full so that Japan can soon be a fully resurgent political player on the global stage instead of remaining just an economic powerhouse. All this is fine, insofar as national politics goes. But Abe has so far failed to recognise that Tokyo cannot breezily walk into the high arena of an increasingly globalised world as if Japan's imperial-era atrocities against its neighbours were just a thing of the past.

The reason has much to do with the insistence of China, a rapidly rising power and a close neighbour, that Japan should "atone" for its past misdeeds and look at the future by "holding history as a mirror". The question here is not whether China is morally superior to other countries or whether Japan has to suffer forever for its past misdeeds. Realpolitik comes into play as well. As an ascendant power, China is able and willing to try and set the terms for a new world order. To this extent, there is a "price" that Japan may have to pay before it can realise its desire to become a fully resurgent political power on the global stage. And the "price" has to do with what China, South Korea and some political sections in the U.S. summarise as "atonement" by Japan for its past crimes against humanity.

"Atonement" surely is a qualitative attribute. It is, therefore, difficult to measure; and Tokyo does face the complicated tasks of convincing external players with their own agendas, perhaps even `selfish' ones, about how far Japan can now be treated as a "normal country". Easy to reckon, though, is whether or not Japan is in a state of denial about its past crimes.

It is in this context that Abe has not, as of writing, come out with flying colours. He is seen by Tokyo's neighbours as having really gone back on its earlier acknowledgment of, and apologies for, the brutal treatment of "comfort women". These women, including girls, were forcibly recruited across East Asia and even in Australia to meet the sexual "needs" of imperial Japan's military personnel.

Quickly noticing this new wave of outrage in China and South Korea, Abe began a damage-control exercise. By mid-March, he was still trying to fine-tune his politics to control the damage that was caused by some of his earlier statements on the subject.

China and the two Koreas have never let go of any opportunity to remind Japan of its past atrocities, including those against their women, and to hold Tokyo to account. Human rights activists around the world, including those in the U.S., have also remained in the forefront of condemning Japan regularly for its past record of aggression against other states and abuse of their women.

In a sense, therefore, Japan is quite used to being bashed by the political establishments of its immediate neighbours and by human rights groups across the world. What, however, has shaken Abe and Japan to the core is the manner in which some political sections in the U.S., a long-time ally of Japan, began championing the cause of the surviving "comfort women". As this report is being written, a draft resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives to censure Japan for its imperial-era treatment of the "comfort women" has not yet been passed. But the move by a few Congressmen was seen by Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso as "an extremely regrettable" step. In his view, the draft resolution, with "absolutely no binding force", was "definitely not based on facts".

The theory doing the rounds in Japan is that the prime movers of the draft resolution were, in all probability, guided by political calculations that had something to do with the demographic profiles of their respective congressional districts. The theory is that some U.S. Representatives were merely trying to woo the constituency-level ethnic Koreans and Chinese by espousing a "cause" deemed to be close to their hearts.

Initially, Abe took a politically defensible line that what the U.S. Congress wanted to do was entirely its "business", even if it related to Japan's present attitude towards the old issues concerning the recruitment of "comfort women" and the sexual crimes against them. Abe noted, as well, that it was not necessary for Japan to respond every time these issues were raised abroad.

At the same time, Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki assured the international community that there was no counter-move by Japan to revise its 1993 statement of apology to all the victims of the "comfort women" system. Other Japanese spokespersons even emphasised that Tokyo had, in the context of the 1993 statement, set up a fund to compensate the victims of the "comfort women" system under a due process.

Behind such initial responses from Japan to the moves in the U.S. Congress lay a sense of political dismay. Behind the scenes, therefore, the timing of the arguably anti-Japan political moves in the U.S., not to be mistaken for any signals from the Bush administration, came into focus.

Significantly, the "freelance moves" in the U.S. roughly coincided with the decision by Japan to dissociate itself from a central aspect of the February 13 six-party accord on ways to shut down, disable, and eventually dismantle North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear facilities, its suspected nerve centre for the production of atomic weapons.

The six parties are China, the host of the dialogue process, the U.S., Japan, Russia and the two Koreas. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, as North Korea is known) was promised energy aid to compensate the civil losses accruing from the proposed closure of the Yongbyon nuclear facilities. The DPRK is to receive such aid from the other five. But Japan refused to give any aid at this stage of "initial actions", pending "concrete progress" towards the final resolution of the issues arising out of North Korea's acknowledged abduction of Japanese nationals during the Cold War.

The DPRK, which claims reparations from Japan for its past colonisation of the Korean peninsula, has often argued that the abduction issue pales into insignificance against the excesses of Japanese colonialism, including the crimes against vulnerable women.

For Tokyo, important indeed are the DPRK issue, in this perspective, and the Korean lobby's anti-Japan "influence" in the U.S. However, Tokyo is no less wary of other lobbies, in the U.S. and elsewhere, with agendas that might militate against the current political resurgence of Japan.

Tokyo's priorities are to shed the U.S.-ordained status as a pacifist state and re-emerge on the global stage as a "normal country". Towards this end, Abe has already announced plans to initiate a domestic political process that could culminate in the abrogation of Japan's current pacifist Constitution. His current priorities include a more active role for Japanese troops in the overseas operations of the U.S.-led "coalitions of the willing" and in the United Nations-mandated peacekeeping missions.

As Tokyo sees it, the anti-Japan move in the U.S. Congress might have been partly designed to serve as a warning to the international community against recruiting Japanese soldiers, for whatever mission, in the context of the atrocious behaviour of their imperial-era predecessors.

It is against this background that Abe, initially cautious about the move in the U.S. Congress, later began maintaining that there was no evidence of coercion in the narrow sense in regard to the recruitment of "comfort women" and their sexual enslavement by Japanese military personnel. This comment was seized upon by large sections of the international community as a sure sign of revisionism regarding Japan's military history. The Abe administration was, in some quarters outside Japan, accused of contorting the truth.

Alarmed at this turn of opinion, Abe and his government beat a retreat and pledged that there would be no move to deviate from the 1993 statement on Tokyo's sense of remorse over the "comfort women" chapter. The statement, issued by the then Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono, had contained an apology as well.

By mid-March, with some ruling party members in Japan wanting to "reinvestigate" the "comfort women" issue, the Abe administration found itself caught in a new dilemma. Abe is known to be a proud nationalist, given his political and parental lineage. So, the question is whether new international calls for apologies and reparations from Japan will produce a backlash of Japanese nationalism.