Another Japanese Official Assailed for WW II Remarks

TOKYO — Yet another Japanese Cabinet minister has suffered foot-in-mouth disease with remarks about World War II.

“In an era in which more than 70% of Japanese have been born since 1940 and know nothing of the war, I wonder why Japan should keep rehashing the past and apologizing all the time,” Yoshinobu Shimamura told reporters shortly after he was named education minister Tuesday night. “Whether Japan committed aggression or not is a matter of how you look at things. Isn’t an exchange of aggressions what war is all about?

“If Japan alone had done [aggression], it would have to cope with this issue intensely. . . . But in war, it’s the winner who decides that the other party was the aggressor,” he was quoted as saying.

His statements came minutes after Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama had cautioned him and other members of his new Cabinet about expressing personal opinions about the war.

The remarks threw yet another wet blanket over Murayama’s attempts to make the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II--which occurs next week--an occasion for Japan to settle its past accounts and win the trust of its neighbors to play a more active role in Asia.

Last year, two Cabinet ministers were forced to resign for making revisionist comments about the war.

This year, the Liberal Democratic Party, the conservative partner in Murayama’s coalition, sabotaged an effort to enact a parliamentary apology for Japan’s wartime conduct. Former Foreign Minister Michio Watanabe, Shimamura’s mentor in the Liberal Democratic Party, also had claimed that Korea had willingly submitted to annexation by Japan in 1910.

On Thursday, after China issued a statement condemning Shimamura and South Korea protested through diplomatic channels, Shimamura was battling to stay in office.

Shimamura said his views had not been reported accurately.