TOKYO: As Japan locks horns with its Asian neighbours in the latest of a series of disputes over World War Two history, critics often urge Tokyo to express sincere regret and compensate its victims: in short, to be more like Germany.
The comparison offends many in Japan.
“The Japanese really get very angry when they are compared with Nazi Germany, because they say, ‘OK, we were allies, but we were certainly not genocidal, we didn’t have a plan to eradicate Jews,’” said Andrew Horvat, visiting scholar at the International Centre for the study of Historical Reconciliation at Tokyo Keizai University.
Although haunted by greater horrors in its past, Germany has succeeded in establishing close ties with its former enemies, where Japan has failed — something experts say is largely due to the Cold War and its lingering impact in Asia.
When the Iron Curtain drew a line across Europe, it forced Germany to work with its neighbours to form a barrier against communism.
In Asia, the emergence of communist governments had the opposite effect.
“In East Asia, the so-called Bamboo Curtain divided the two parties that should have been reconciled — the Japanese and the Chinese,” Horvat said. The result was an almost total breakdown in bilateral communications between 1949 and 1972, when relations were finally normalized.
Eager to halt the spread of communism, US occupation forces in Japan contributed to the problem by rehabilitating wartime officials, who led the country back to prosperity but swept recent history under the carpet.
Historians point out that the way Germany dealt with its own history was far from exemplary.
“Germany’s coming to terms with its past was a highly controversial, contradictory and slow process. So there is nobody in Germany who claims Germany to be a model,” historian Wolfgang Hopken said in “Sharing the Burden of the Past”, a compilation of academic discussions on the aftermath of World War Two.
GESTURES OF REMORSE: Still, Japan can learn from modern Germany, Horvat says.
In 1970, Willy Brandt, the West German chancellor, fell to his knees in the Warsaw ghetto, a simple gesture of repentance that helped change his country’s image around the world. A lower-key “heartfelt apology” in 1995 by Japan’s then prime minister, Tomiichi Murayama, never achieved the same impact.
Germany spent billions of marks to help establish the state of Israel, and it also paid reparations to individual victims of Nazism, such as forced labourers from Eastern Europe.
Japan rejects all claims for compensation from those who suffered as sex slaves and forced labourers during the war, arguing that such matters were settled years ago by treaties.
Tokyo has poured 3.3 trillion yen (more than $30 billion at the current exchange rate) in loans and grants into China since 1979, but the cash was never officially labelled compensation.
While Japan has no Holocaust for which to atone, Japanese academics agree that Imperial Army soldiers committed atrocities, especially in China, leaving anger that needs to be resolved.
“It is natural that China should criticise Japan about the past, and South Korea was also a Japanese colony, so we must of course accept their criticism,” said Hoei Fujisawa, a professor of education at Waseda University in Tokyo.
Anger over the past has erupted into violent demonstrations in China and South Korea in recent months, endangering Japan’s relationships with two key economic partners.—Reuters
