Japan Legislator Opposes ‘No-War’ Pledge

The leader of a league of Liberal Democratic Party politicians opposed to Japan apologizing for World War II said Monday that he also would resist Parliament’s enacting any resolution to renounce war in the future.

A no-war declaration by legislators “could be taken to mean that Japan will not fight to protect its freedom and independence, even against aggression,” said Seisuke Okuno, 81, chairman of the League of Members of Parliament for the 50th Anniversary of the End of the War.

His statements to the Foreign Correspondents Club here appeared certain to wipe out any chance of Parliament enacting a resolution on the war before Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama visits China next month. It even casts doubt on whether a promised resolution can be enacted at all.

Almost 70% of the Liberal Democratic members of the upper and lower house belong to Okuno’s league and, by tradition, Parliament requires unanimity to pass resolutions.

In June, when Murayama’s Socialists, the Liberal Democrats and the splinter New Party Harbinger formed a coalition government, the three parties agreed to enact a 50th anniversary resolution to “self-reflect” on Japan’s wartime actions.

But Okuno insisted that any such resolution be limited to a pledge to work for peace in the future.

This failure to display contrition--after Tokyo had pledged to offer a measure of some kind about the war--threatened to inflict a severe blow to Japan’s continuing efforts to win the trust of other nations, particularly those in Asia, as a country irrevocably committed to peace.

Murayama himself has said he wants Parliament to adopt a resolution “reflecting upon Japan’s acts of aggression and colonial rule.” But even he has stopped short of describing all of Japan’s wartime activities as “aggression.”

Okuno insisted that the war Japan declared against the United States and Great Britain in 1941 was “self defense” staged to end “white man’s colonialism and exploitation” in Asia. He said he formed his league of 206 Liberal Democrats after 4.6 million Japanese signed petitions of protest against the prospect of Parliament “staining the history of Japan and portraying it as a criminal state.”

Descriptions of Japan’s actions--from what he called “the Manchurian incident” in 1931 through 1945--as “15 years of aggression” were the product of American propaganda foisted upon Japan, he said.

“No Japanese had any notion of 15 years of war. Aggression, to Japanese, means to steal land and assets, and Japanese had no such intention,” he said.

To the contrary, Okuno condemned what he called “inhuman” U.S. atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and American firebombings of other cities that “ignored international law” and killed “hundreds of thousands” of Japanese civilians.

U.S. experts, however, say the dropping of atom bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima hastened the war’s end and averted up to 1 million casualties, had the Allies been forced to wage land operations in Japan.