Japan Won’t Apologize for Pearl Harbor : Diplomacy: Divided and angry lawmakers fail to approve a statement in Parliament. But the government will reflect deeply on the ‘agony and sorrow’ the attack caused.

TOKYO — Japan will not offer a formal apology now for its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor 50 years ago today, deeply divided and angry lawmakers here effectively decided Friday. But the Japanese government said it will engage in “deep self-reflection” over the military mission that triggered a war that caused “unbearable agony and sorrow.”

In a statement that sought to substitute for a formal apology from Parliament that some of Japan’s top political leaders seemingly had promised would come by today, Chief Cabinet Secretary Koichi Kato said: “Our government, together with the people, is determined not to repeat such an unfortunate history and renews this reflection on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor.”

Separately, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa told reporters that Japan must reflect on the reality that it inflicted “unbearable damage and sorrow on the peoples of the United States, the Pacific and Asia” during World War II.

Despite these two statements, Japan’s political leadership faced the unwelcome prospect of continuing global political fallout from what outsiders insist is a Japanese failure to confront their country’s wartime conduct.

There still is a distant possibility that, before President Bush visits here in January, Japanese legislators may issue a formal apology for their nation’s actions in World War II.

But it became abundantly clear Friday that, even within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party--some of whose leaders had pressed for the apology--opposition to Japan’s making a statement of contrition about the war had stiffened considerably, especially since Bush this week said he did not feel America should say it is sorry for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

(Bush, who as a Navy pilot was shot down over the Pacific during World War II by the Japanese, said “American lives were saved” by the use of the atomic weapons, although he added that he mourned the deaths of innocent civilians.)

Indeed, some of the comments made here, especially those by conservative voices, seemed certain to underscore critics’ contention that the Japanese still hold a narrow, disquieting world view--and that they just don’t get it when it comes to the issue of a war apology.

“Why must we fling mud at the history of Japan with our own hands?” asked former Education Minister Masayuki Fujio.

Takashi Hasegawa, a former justice minister and senior member of the Liberal Democrats, asserted that, since America is forgoing an apology over its wartime conduct, so should Japan. “There is no need now for the loser to apologize to the victor,” he said.

Shintaro Ishihara--an outspoken, generally conservative defender of his nation, seen by some as Japan’s political answer to Lee Iacocca, the Chrysler chairman known for articulating an America-first view--said at a meeting of a faction of the Liberal Democrats that the only people the Japanese need to apologize to “are the peoples in the areas Japan colonized, and not the victors,” in other words, Americans.

In a society that so prizes consensus, the inability of Japanese lawmakers to agree on the proposed Pearl Harbor apology was especially awkward because Cabinet-level officials earlier this week apparently had said the measure was a sure thing.

In an interview Tuesday, Foreign Minister Michio Watanabe, for example, told the Washington Post that Japan regretted the war and that lawmakers “definitely” would pass a formal resolution expressing Japanese regret to Americans and to other countries for Pearl Harbor and World War II.

The White House welcomed the statement.

But no sooner had the apology been promised than the Japanese began to backpedal. One newspaper, for example, quibbled over translations of Watanabe’s statement of Japan’s “deep remorse” for the war’s suffering.

Meantime, complaints arose in Japan about Watanabe’s statement that Japan would not press for an American apology for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Akira Yamagishi, chairman of the Japanese Trade Union Confederation, said Thursday that the United States bears guilt for the deaths of 300,000 people from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and that Americans should apologize.

The proposal for Parliament to issue a formal apology was partially an effort by Japan to soothe a widely feared increase in anti-Japanese sentiment abroad as a result of the Pearl Harbor anniversary.

But the proposed apology was also intended to ease fears in Japan that the nation might be moving toward remilitarization. Those fears have come to the fore as a result of Parliament’s ongoing debate over whether to send Japanese troops abroad regularly--for the first time since World War II--as U.N. peacekeepers. The left-wing opposition, which sees itself as a watchdog against renewed militarism, maintains that Japan’s war-renouncing constitution does not permit troops to be dispatched overseas, even for U.N. operations.