Japan Official ‘Deeply Moved’ by Bush Speech

Japan’s foreign minister said Sunday that he was “deeply moved” by President Bush’s speech on the 50th anniversary of his nation’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and he expressed remorse for Japan’s wartime actions.

But like other top government officials, Michio Watanabe stopped short of apologizing for Japan’s aggression. On Friday, conservatives in the governing Liberal Democratic Party scrapped plans for a parliamentary statement, saying there was no need to apologize.

The chairman of the largest opposition party, meanwhile, repeated opposition calls for Japan to apologize and bear responsibility for its history.

“I express sincere apology and sorrow for more than 20 million casualties in the Asia-Pacific countries and the Allied powers,” Makoto Tanabe of the Social Democratic Party said in a speech.

Also Sunday, a car and a motorcycle parked at a U.S. naval base in Yokosuka near Tokyo were destroyed by a fire that police believe may have been set by radicals in connection with the Pearl Harbor anniversary. Police arrested a middle-age man who had been seen nearby carrying three plastic containers of gasoline before the incident, he said.

The Japanese government held no official events over the weekend to mark the attack, but there were many small gatherings throughout the nation.

Watanabe, in his statement, said Japan must face the fact that its Pearl Harbor attack started the Pacific war, which “inflicted unbearable suffering and sorrow on many peoples, including Americans. . . .”

“Japan is deeply remorseful over these past actions,” he said in a statement issued early Sunday.

The statement came hours after Bush told U.S. war veterans gathered in Hawaii on Saturday that for the troops defending the base in 1941, “heroism came as naturally as breath.”

At the Yasukuni Shrine to Japan’s war dead in Tokyo, about 50 former soldiers gathered Sunday to mark the anniversary of the attack and pray for those killed in the war.