Shunning Yasukuni is one way for Abe to say sorry

Last month, on the first anniversary of his premiership, Shinzo Abe expressed “severe remorse” over Japan’s wartime actions and pledged that Japan would “never wage a war again”. Naturally no one paid much attention since on the very same day he undermined those words by visiting Yasukuni shrine, a memorial reviled throughout Asia for its association with Japanese aggression.

His visit ignited predictable, if stage-managed, fury in China and South Korea, two countries that suffered horrendously under Japan’s empire-building onslaught. Beijing said his actions “grossly trampled on the sentiment of the Chinese people” and proved that Abe wanted to whitewash history.

It is a common accusation that Japan has never apologised for its wartime behaviour. This is demonstrably untrue. Over the years, a procession of Japanese prime ministers have expressed contrition for colonial rule and wartime aggression. What is questioned is the sincerity — or otherwise — of those apologies. Japan stands accused of covering up its history in school textbooks, most of which — though not all — mention Japanese wartime atrocities but do not go into great detail. Some of its politicians, including Abe, have publicly debated elements of the official apology, including quibbling over the fact of Japan’s “invasion”.

Qin Gang, China’s foreign ministry spokesman, urged Japan to “repent”, not merely to apologise. In other words, what is required of Japanese leaders is to change not only what they say, but what they believe. Beliefs are hard things to regulate. Japan would prefer to be judged by its postwar actions, for example the fact that it has not fired a shot in battle in seven decades. Sadly, for Japan, it is the victims, not the perpetrators, who determine when the perpetrator is sufficiently contrite. Still, it is worth looking at the wording of Japan’s official apology, best articulated by former prime minister Tomiichi Murayama. It includes the following: “Japan . . . through its colonial rule and aggression, caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations. I regard . . . these irrefutable facts of history, and express here once again my feelings of deep remorse and state my heartfelt apology.”

That statement may sound mealy mouthed to some, particularly when compared with the more stirring apologies issued by Germany. Those were backed by symbolic actions such as when, in 1970, then chancellor Willy Brandt fell to his knees before a monument to Jewish victims at the Warsaw ghetto. No serving Japanese prime minister, let alone the emperor, has ever prostrated before the memorial to the Nanjing massacre or the site of Unit 731 in Manchuria, where Japanese “scientists” performed lethal chemical and biological experiments on victims referred to as “logs” rather than as human beings.

Nevertheless, Japan’s apologies compare pretty well with those of many other nations. Take a statement in 2013 by David Cameron, in which the UK prime minister called the 1919 Amritsar massacre “deeply shameful”. Yet Cameron explicitly refused to apologise for an incident in which British troops fired for 10 minutes into an unarmed crowd, killing up to 1,000 Indian men, women and children. It would be inappropriate, he said, to say sorry for something that had happened before he was born — an excuse that presumably would not wash if uttered by a Japanese leader.

Similarly, no US president has ever apologised for the Vietnam war, in which up to 3 million Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians died. Samantha Power, US ambassador to the UN, recently articulated Washington’s attitude to statements of regret. “This country is the greatest country on earth. I would never apologise for America.”

Japan is being held to higher standards. That could either be because its wartime behaviour was intrinsically more heinous than any other nation, or because its neighbours still do not feel properly assuaged. (Some Japanese would say the difference is that Japan lost.)

Can Japan do anything to convince China and South Korea that it is sincere? Seventy years after the war, at a time when many Japanese — to borrow historian Kenneth Pyle’s phrase — regard the Chinese more as rivals than victims, the answer is probably not.

A wholesale national reappraisal of what went on before most Japanese were born seems implausible. But one thing it could do is ditch Yasukuni in favour of a secular memorial, where those who died in war could be properly and less controversially mourned. One such site, the Chidorigafuchi cemetery to the Unknown Soldier, exists in the heart of Tokyo.

Plans have been floated to clean up Yasukuni by removing the “souls” of the 14 Class-A war criminals commemorated there among 2 million other spirits who died for the emperor. (There are no physical remains at the shrine.) Yet Yasukuni is too tainted by its association with the militaristic and racist imperial cult to be redeemable. Having Japanese prime ministers shun Yasukuni in favour of Chidorigafuchi would not be enough to placate China and South Korea. At the very least, though, it would demonstrate a kind of sincerity.

— Financial Times

David Pilling, FT’s Asia editor, is the author of Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival, published last week.