Japan Offers WWII ‘Self-Reflection’ : Asia: Coalition government proposes watered-down resolution referring to Tokyo’s ‘aggression-like actions.’

To mark the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, Japan’s coalition government patched together a proposed parliamentary resolution Tuesday expressing “deep self-reflection” over this nation’s past.

The “negotiated apology” omitted the word apology on the insistence of the Liberal Democratic Party, whose antecedents led Japan during the war.

But to satisfy Socialist Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama and his party, which from its beginning made condemnation of Japan’s aggression in World War II a pillar of its principles, a watered-down reference to “aggression-like actions” by Japan is included in the proposed resolution.

The coalition leaders’ agreement on the resolution saved Murayama’s government from a possible split.

It is still uncertain whether the compromise will receive approval in Parliament, where members of the New Frontier Party, the main conservative opposition force, reportedly opposed enacting any resolution about World War II. By tradition, parliamentary resolutions have been enacted with unanimous approval.

Murayama wants Parliament to approve the resolution before its session ends on June 18.

Last June, when Murayama agreed to bring his Socialists into an “oil and water” alliance with the party’s chief enemy of four decades, he insisted that Liberal Democrats join in issuing a 50th anniversary anti-war resolution.

The conservative party agreed to do so--but only to regain a grasp on the political power it had held for 38 years until 1993.

Murayama and other war-repentant Japanese leaders argued that a sincere apology for Japan’s past colonialism and aggression was needed to clear the air so Tokyo can build trust with its neighbors as a prerequisite to its assuming a role of leadership in Asia.

The wording of the proposed resolution-- and the bitter negotiations that went into producing it--deprived the measure of emotional force.

The key sentence reads, “Thinking of the many cases of colonial rule and aggression-like actions in the modern history of the world and taking note of such actions by our own country and the pains [we] inflicted upon other peoples, especially the peoples of Asia, we express deep self-reflection.”

The proposed resolution also offered condolences to all of the world’s war victims and pledged that Japan will work for the construction of a peaceful international society.

Earlier, the Liberal Democrats had proposed wording suggesting that Japan was guilty of nothing more than joining 19th- and early 20th-Century aggression and colonial rule by Western nations in Asia--including, by implication, aggression and colonialism by the United States in the Philippines.

Socialists rejected that proposal and threatened to break up the coalition if conservatives refused to recognize Japan’s aggression as a matter for at least regret, if not apology.

Leaders of the three parties even worked out an agreement that the Japanese phrasing, “aggression-like,” would be strengthened in English translation, using the word aggression.

Shortly before the agreement was hammered out, South Korean students early Tuesday set the Japanese cultural center in Seoul on fire in protest of a remark Saturday by former Foreign Minister Michio Watanabe. He asserted that Korea had accepted “peacefully” its “annexation” by Japan in a 1910 treaty.

Tokyo’s rule over Korea ended in 1945 with Japan’s defeat in World War II.

Only after South Korean Prime Minister Lee Hong Koo expressed “shock and dismay” did Watanabe, a prominent Liberal Democratic leader, issue a statement apologizing for his remark and retracting the word “peacefully” in his reference to Korea’s signing of the 1910 treaty.