By Tom Plate
Professor at University of California, Los Angeles
Director of UCLA Media Center
LOS ANGELES _ Overly-sincere overstatements can actually be more embarrassing than underly-sincere understatements.
In the former category we have perhaps the most nonsensical comment to come from anyone in the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy. And it came not from a non-Korean who believes that Koreans in some sense bear responsibility for the late and demented Cho Seung-hui. In truth, Americans as a whole have thankfully avoided simplistic or racist categorizations for what happened. We should feel good about that, at least.
The award for the dumbest comment actually goes to a South Korean _ and indeed an otherwise distinguished Korean.
He is Lee Tae-shik, who is none other than the ambassador of South Korea to Washington. As if trying to prove what is completely unnecessary to establish _ that Korean-Americans are a very worthwhile ethnic minority in the U.S. _ he proposed that Korean-Americans across-the-board need to “repent” by initiating a 32-day fast. This would be one foodless day for each innocent victim that died at the hands of Cho.
That suggestion doesn’t just go wildly overboard, it was as if the ambassador tried to tie a cement block around the neck of all Korean-Americans and throw it into the deep end of the deep blue sea.
But in the latter category, some Koreans would award that unwanted accolade to Japanese politicians who would appear to grudgingly apologize for past wartime atrocities committed against their neighbors without being truly apologetic.
Last month Shinzo Abe, the current prime minister of Japan, fell into that category with all the grace of a ton of bricks.
It appeared as if the PM (then in office for only half a year) was denying the reality of Korean “comfort women” (as well as other Asian women) having been forced into sexual enslavement by occupying Japanese troops.
Other than the notion of putting two feet in your mouth at the same time, it is hard to imagine an analogy more fitting to describe the sheer stupidity _ and, worse yet even, possibly appalling sincerity _ of that astonishing and unnecessary statement.
However, on three occasions since then, PM Abe has done an about-face. In the Japanese parliament, he apologized in the spirit of an official 1993 Japanese apology; in interviews recently granted to U.S. news media in Tokyo, he expanded on that apology. To Newsweek magazine editors, he said: “I am extremely sorry that they were made to endure such pain. We feel responsible over the situation in which women had to exist as ‘comfort women’ and endure such hardship.”
And earlier this week he reiterated that apology to reporters questioning him at his official residence in Tokyo. This followed the Japanese government’s release of a statement saying it actually had no quarrel with the official verdict of an international tribunal in 1948 that cited Japanese military culpability in the sex slavery of Chinese women during World War Two.
Sure, Abe’s government has been under perfervid pressure to back down from Asian neighbors and indeed from chief ally Washington, where the PM is scheduled to visit this week and spend the weekend at Camp David with President Bush. He needed to get this issue out of his hair before it entangled a whole range of other issues.
And so, naturally, some elements of the South Korean media scoffed at the apology. The Chosun Ilbo, a powerful Korean newspaper in Seoul, headlined an editorial: “Abe Must Stop Paying Lip Service.”
The hothouse (and sometimes hot air) South Korean print news media, or at least the conservative portions of it (which is most of it), will probably never be satisfied with a Japanese Prime Minister’s apology. A more humanitarian and statesman like response from the Korean media would have been to take Abe at his word, and assume that Japan’s actions would mirror these words over the next few years _ until proven otherwise. Don’t hang the guy before you even give him a fair chance!
All nations and cultures have committed terrible misdeeds in the past, for which the current generation is not responsible. While it is most appropriate to accept and recognize the reality of history, it is unhelpful and counter-productive to hold up the sins of the past as an obstacle to progress in the future.
Apologies, as with all human communications that attempt to reflect reality, however roughly, need to be expressions more or less proportionate to the matter at hand. In this regard, the Japanese prime minister’s struck me as far more rational than the Korean ambassador’s _ and arguably more helpfully sincere.