Right Moment for an Apology : The war ended 50 years ago; time is running out for Japan to say it’s sorry

As the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II nears, Japan’s shaky year-old coalition government continues to struggle over the tone and wording of a parliamentary resolution that would note the event and what preceded it. Once again Japan is showing its inability to muster a consensus for an unambiguous acknowledgment of its past belligerent behavior.

Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama, a socialist, believes Japan should once and for all apologize for its aggression, shouldering a responsibility shunned by previous governments. Conservative members of the coalition, sticking to the traditional nationalist position, continue to reject any unilateral acceptance of responsibility. Among other things they argue that Japan didn’t wage a war of expansionism but one of “liberation” of subject peoples from their American, British, Dutch and French colonial masters. This is not a view shared by the Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos and others in Asia who suffered so grievously under Japan’s rule.

Murayama hopes to have an acceptable resolution for the Parliament to vote on before its current session ends on June 18. That would be less than two months before the anniversary of Japan’s surrender, which ended the world’s costliest war. Murayama is scheduled to attend the summit meeting of the Group of Seven industrialized countries in Nova Scotia about the time Parliament adjourns. Surely it would be uncomfortable for him to meet there with a number of Japan’s World War II enemies after having failed to win backing for a long overdue expression of official government regret for the war.

For the better part of 50 years Japan’s educational system, by deliberate omission and selective interpretation, has helped obscure the antecedents and many of the facts of the war. As a consequence, most Japanese, while they know what their country suffered in the war, still know little about the suffering Japan inflicted on others. The government has before it the chance to at last make a clean break with the past. It would be a mistake to pass that chance by.