Japan’s Mori Stops Short of ‘Divine’ Reversal

How do you apologize without admitting that you were wrong?

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori tried to tiptoe down that tightrope Friday when he held an unusual news conference to apologize for having upset his fellow citizens by calling Japan “a divine nation with the emperor at its center.”

Though the embattled prime minister said he was sorry for causing misunderstanding, he refused to retract his statement. The 62-year-old Mori insisted that, whatever the “inadequacy” of his words, he did not intend to evoke Japan’s militaristic past or to imply that the nation’s emperor is divine.

Japan’s four major opposition parties have demanded that Mori resign over the remarks, made nearly two weeks ago to a political group tied to the Shinto religion. Mori called the news conference because the flap over the latest in a series of his gaffes showed no signs of fading.

Critics say the language Mori used is a verbatim throwback to Japan’s emperor-worshiping, militaristic past and violates the separation of religion and politics enshrined in the country’s postwar constitution.

It is widely expected that Mori will survive as prime minister at least until the July 23 summit in Okinawa of the Group of 8 leading industrial nations but that he could be driven from office by September.

Polls show that, since the “divine nation” remark, Mori’s disapproval ratings have soared and twice as many people oppose him as support him.

The opposition lacks the votes to oust him. But Mori has handed its members a potent weapon to use against his Liberal Democratic Party in parliamentary elections expected to be held June 25. The LDP has a virtually impregnable majority in its traditional rural bastions but could be hurt badly in urban areas. Several analysts said Friday’s news conference would do little to restore Mori’s standing.

“It was second-rate damage control,” said Sophia University professor Kuniko Inoguchi.

Even before the current flap, foes questioned whether Mori is too loose-lipped to lead the world’s No. 2 economy. His various statements have alienated AIDS patients, citizens of Osaka and Okinawa, Korean residents of Japan and some journalists who cover him. Less than a month into the job, Mori expressed exasperation at being followed everywhere by the media and being asked intrusive questions about his eating habits and even his bedtime.

“It’s OK if I lie to them, isn’t it?” he was quoted as saying.

A senior LDP politician, Junichiro Koizumi, broke ranks and confessed to the TV cameras that he is afraid of what Mori will say next.

Meanwhile, the tabloids have spit out a series of scandalous stories about, among other things, Mori’s alleged sexual indiscretions as a youth and his speech at a 1995 wedding where members of a gangster’s family were prominent guests. Though the prime minister has denied any improprieties--and none have been proved--the mudslinging is nonetheless damaging.

Some LDP members reportedly are insisting that Mori’s photograph not appear next to theirs on campaign posters. Others have let it be known that they do not wish for the prime minister to stump in their districts.

On Friday, reporters asked Mori bluntly whether he is fit to be prime minister, and challenged his answers in a tense session shown on television.

The key to an LDP victory in the coming election is the vote-gathering power of its main coalition partner, the New Komeito party, which is backed by the powerful lay Buddhist group, the Soka Gakkai. But the “divine nation” remarks may have undermined grass-roots Soka Gakkai support.

Before and during World War II, the Soka Gakkai and other Buddhists were persecuted by the government as part of a policy to promote state Shintoism, with the emperor at its head. The group had demanded that Mori explain his remarks.

“Whether or not he retracts the statement is irrelevant,” Soka Gakkai International said in a statement Friday. “He has to understand why people are upset. What’s more important is that he recognizes the significance of church-state separation.”

In the 40-minute news conference Friday devoted solely to clarifying his position, Mori said that, because all Japanese in the postwar era are taught that the emperor is a symbol of the sovereign power that rests with the people, not a divine leader, he had felt no need to make that point to the Shinto gathering. He insisted that his remarks about the emperor and “the gods” were made in the context of rethinking traditional Japanese values to address the recent spate of heinous crimes by youths, and were not meant to promote Shintoism.

“My intention was never to say that the emperor is a god. That is utterly contrary to my personal belief,” Mori said.

Ironically, Emperor Akihito and his wife, Michiko, are now receiving high marks for political sensitivity during a tour of the Netherlands. The couple laid a wreath at a monument to Dutch victims of World War II, and the emperor repeatedly voiced his profound grief over the “unhealed scars” that remain more than 50 years later.

During the war, Japanese forces imprisoned an estimated 140,000 Dutch citizens captured in their former colony in Indonesia. About 12,000 of the prisoners died in the camps. Dutch women were among those forced into sexual service to the Japanese military.

Akihito, son of the wartime Emperor Hirohito, met Tuesday with five camp survivors at a state banquet, according to press reports from Amsterdam.

It is still unclear whether Mori’s explanation will be accepted by the public. Mori is known as a conservative, and after becoming prime minister, he dodged a question in parliament about whether imperial Japan’s occupation of Asian neighbors constituted a “war of invasion,” saying that Japanese citizens must judge that question for themselves.

The clip was played repeatedly Friday on Japanese television. Previous Japanese governments have acknowledged and apologized for a “war of invasion,” and after a long battle between the Japanese left and right, the nation’s textbooks were revised to include that term.

“This is not a ‘misunderstanding,’ ” said Minoru Tada, a political commentator. “The public understands him correctly.”

Tada is a World War II veteran who survived the battle of Iwo Jima and membership in a kamikaze group of pilots who crashed their planes into enemy warships.

“They wore headbands that said the ‘divine land is invincible,’ ” Tada wrote. “In peacetime Japan, 50 years later, the gods should not be exploited for political purposes.”

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Makiko Inoue in The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.