Abe should offer apology

By Alexis Dudden

What should Prime Minister Shinzo Abe say during his speech to congress this week?

Easy: what previous Japanese prime ministers have already said.

Prime Minister Abe should unequivocally state former Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama’s1995 “heartfelt apology…for the tremendous damage and suffering” caused by “mistaken (Japanese) national policy” ― which Murayama offered in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. Repeating these words would make clear that Abe honors this apology instead of simply “inheriting” it, which he and his spin-masters unconvincingly reassure skeptics is good enough.

Were Abe to incorporate the Murayama apology into his speech he would, moreover, endorse former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s 2005 decision to repeat these words verbatim on the 60th anniversary of the end of the war to drive home the point within Japan that bipartisan support best reflects the will of the Japanese people to the world.

Additionally, Abe could reinforce Murayama’s apology before the joint session of the U.S. Congress in the same “spirit of humility” that former Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi summoned in 1998 when repeating its terms to launch an era of partnership with South Korea. Abe’s U.S. audience is as equally concerned as Koreans and others about issues of prisoner slave labor that still linger from the war. Such a modest and enlightened approach uttered from the same podium where 74 years ago former U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared a “date that will live in infamy” after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor would confirm Japan’s valued moral position to the international community.

Finally, to calm the maelstrom surrounding debate over Japan’s notorious system of state-sponsored sexual slavery ― known as the “comfort women” ― most of whose victims were Koreans abducted by agents working for the Japanese military when Korea was under Japanese occupation ― Abe could rely on former Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s 2010 sharpening of the Murayama apology and specifically note the “enormous suffering (Japan) caused during colonial rule.”

This would reassure friends of the U.S. and Japan today in the Philippines, Australia, Singapore and elsewhere in areas of Japan’s former empire that Japan “gets it.” Also, it would allay apprehensions among Japan’s American security guarantors that its allies Tokyo and Seoul can work together without competing interpretations of increasingly distant histories undermining them.

This should be pretty easy, yet Abe and his supporters have everyone guessing, unproductively chasing after the words he has not said or says he does not need to say.

Ironically, Abe would do better with his money and time than to spend it on speechwriters who write away Japanese history and instead put them into action on the economic plans that his American congressional hosts expect from him, and that the world hopes for from Japan.

The most difficult parts of his speech this week in Washington are free. And, they are already written.