Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has finally crossed the diplomatic red line. The nationalistic leader is not just rubbing salt in the barely-healed wounds of Asian neighbors but defying the universally agreed historical views of the international community.
“The definition of ‘aggression’ has yet to be firmly determined by academic experts or the international community,” Abe said at an upper house session Tuesday. “What is described as aggression ‘can be viewed differently’ depending on which side you are on.” One could simply not believe these words coming from anyone with a modicum of common sense, let alone a national leader.
Prime Minister Abe’s remark was not just a brazen denial of Japan’s wartime atrocities that left indelible injuries among countless Asians during the Pacific War, but posed a square challenge against the postwar global order based on the punishment of war criminals by the Allied Forces. It was a denial of the world’s history of civilization.
The audacity of Abe and his conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) seems to know no bounds. The Japanese leader brushed away protests from Korea and China against the LDP lawmakers’ recent pilgrimage to the Yasukuni Shrine, saying, “Our Cabinet ministers won’t yield to any threats from abroad.” True, every nation has the right to pay tributes to its war dead for their sacrifices. Unlike Japan, however, few other countries pay respect to war criminals, and none, officially.
In retrospect, Japan’s unabashed leaning toward right-wing nationalism is the result of the cursory, and clumsy, arrangement of the postwar world order created by the United States and its allies. Had it not been for Washington’s Cold War needs to check the Soviet Union and China, Japan could not, and should not, have gotten away with all the war crimes it committed against numerous Asians just six years after it surrendered.
President Park Geun-hye recently said the historical facts of injurers and injured cannot change even though a thousand years pass away. Likewise, the wounds of victims cannot be healed in a millennium.
The Park administration is right to try to remain cold-headed in responding to a string of egregious words and deeds from Japanese politicians. But maintaining reason and calm should be different from appearing meek or low-keyed. The government’s cancellation of bilateral foreign ministers’ talks was appropriate in this regard, as confirmed by Japan’s brazen expression of regrets for the unilateral move.
Seoul ought to go further and work out step-by-step plans to counter an expected series of regressive moves from Tokyo, such as a ban on entry by unrepentant Japanese politicians and recall of the Korean ambassador, and even putting off summit talks between Park and Abe indefinitely unless and until the Japanese leaders regain their reason.
In the case of the least hoped-for possibility the neighboring country remains mired in collective and willful amnesia, the government should make joint efforts with China and other sympathetic countries to push for a U.N. resolution calling for Japan to behave itself.
Abe should know his country has not been completely freed from past wrongs but it is still on bail of sorts. Western leaders ought to unequivocally tell this to their Japanese counterpart when such needs arise.