Shinzo Abe, the umpteenth Japanese prime minister to have demanded of him the umpteenth apology for the umpteenth time, was asked at the beginning of the month, by a member of Tokyo's opposition party, if he would entertain grievance number umpteen plus one.
Back in January, an American congressman with the last name of Honda submitted a bill to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Language held the Japanese government in contempt of the duty to "formally acknowledge, apologize, and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner for its Imperial Armed Force's coercion of young women into sexual slavery."
This was about "comfort women," thousands of young foreigners who served as prostitutes for imperial soldiers. Mr. Abe made a cogent statement, insofar as Japanese executives have many times expressed regret for gross wrongdoing of their country's former government and its agents three-fifths of a century before. But the prime minister also said something untrue, which was that reports of impressment were apocryphal. "It wasn't like the government and the army took these women away like kidnapping," Abe protested, and oh, there must have been a lot of hands slapping foreheads.
The flesh stockade is so intrinsic to civilization, past and present, that if there weren't sufficient evidence of militarist Japan's manifold slave labors one could make a justified assumption about the compulsory terms of garrison brothels. Tokyo's obscurantist edition of the historical record, which has continued through three generations and reaches deeply in some places, understandably frustrates. Yet the furor it causes also distracts from a matter of selectivity and unction on the part of claimants, critics and the wailing chorus led by Seoul and Beijing.
Manifest are the atrocities committed, being committed this very hour, in China by a line of totalitarian regimes established nearly sixty years ago. What was it Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing admitted to the world ten days ago? "Japan should face up to history, take the responsibility, and seriously view and properly handle the issue." The reprimand must have diverted Li Zhaoxing from his ministerial priority of informing the democratic nation of Taiwan that formal declarations of independence would be ignored, possibly refuted by force.
The free South Koreans could, if they bothered, list a great number of inhumanities suffered at the hands of authoritarian governments before the last dictatorship fell in 1987; and if they looked to the north, they could trace the horrid police state above the 38th Parallel to the second of two Allied powers bifurcating the peninsula, the Soviet Union. When shall the Kremlin apologize for Stalin's having primed and outfitted Kim Il Sung? Well, who's even inquired? It may irk, that the Japanese people can be reluctant to acknowledge their own modern history, but it shouldn't puzzle.
There is more to Japan's trials than acknowledgment — there is a matter of inheritance. Japan has been rather imaginatively personified, which is necessary for all indefinite condemnations, one such from a Korean speaking for a group that seeks redress for the plight of comfort women. How a Liberal Democratic Party boss recently minimized fact — "We need to research the issue further" — was reproachable. But the response from the Korean? "Another attempt by the Japanese government to distort the past and hide their crimes."
There it is, Japan as a living being, forswearing an oath. Did the many islands rise up and subordinate their neighbors? No? What happened to the government responsible for the terrible, Pacific empire? It was annulled and replaced by way of constitution a year later, during the supersession of the culture around it. Japan, as a nation, continued, altered. And the bereaved, or the plain angry, or the opportunistic, have only an increasing number of Japanese to consent to be in one or another way answerable for what they didn't actually do. Heredity, then, is all that incriminates; but politically it is enough. The apology from Shinzo Abe, or from one of the prime ministers following, won't be the last.