Akihito's Brandt moment

This is the eight in a series of contributed articles by international and Korean experts shedding light on Japan’s claim on Korea’s easternmost islets of Dokdo and other affairs that prove Japan’s lack of remorse about historic misdeeds it has committed. ― E.D.

By Andrew Salmon

Dear Emperor Akihito:

Relations with your closest neighbor have reached a nadir. The ongoing dispute over Takeshima (Dokdo to the Koreans)-- which customarily never moved outside public outcry and diplomatic spaces - has impacted real economics: A Seoul-Tokyo currency swap deal has been scrapped. These endless bilateral spats are becoming damaging.

Many consider the Dokdo-Takeshima dispute territorial. I’d argue otherwise. The islets were seized by Japan in 1905. Five years subsequently, Korea was annexed. Rightly or wrongly, millennial Koreans consider Japan’s 1905 Takeshima land-grab the vanguard of annexation.

This makes the dispute collateral to a much greater issue: Contrasting national interpretations of history and historical responsibility.

So what to do? Assuming you wish South Korea to be a friend and ally, the time has come for a dramatic statement; an in-front-of-the-cameras gesture that cannot be overlooked.

There is a model. In 1970, German Chancellor Willy Brandt touched a wreath in Germany’s national colors, then ￢ unscripted - fell to his knees before the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto. He did not speak; his silence spoke volumes. Brandt later won the Nobel Peace Prize, his Warsaw moment seen as pivotal in laying to rest Germany’s war guilt.

But you protest: “We Japanese never committed genocide like the Germans! Yes, we colonized Korea, and yes, we launched a brutal war across the Pacific. But other nations colonized! Other nations started wars! Why pick on us?”

Fair question, and I am not sure of the best location for your “Willy Brandt moment,” because there is nowhere like the Warsaw Ghetto - or Warsaw - in Korea.

In colonial Korea, partisans never rose against racial extermination as Warsaw’s Jews did in 1943. In colonial Korea, the capital was never liquidated as Warsaw was in 1944, to erase the existence of the Polish nation-state.

There is certainly no death camp in Korea. You Japanese were harsh colonists but never committed genocide. You suppressed the 1919 movement with brutality and forced some 450,000 Koreans into labor but nowhere in Korea was there a Sobibor, Treblinka or Auschwicz-Birkenau - camps designed exclusively for mass murder.

And yes, there were some pluses to your otherwise exploitative colonial rule: You built infrastructure, instituted systems, educated Koreans and employed many in government service. You never planned to eradicate urban civilization and use the population as serf-slaves ￢ Germany’s blueprint for its eastern empire.

But so what? Germany’s atrocities are the greatest crimes in history. By any other standard, Japan’s behavior in the 1940s was barbaric.

Take the “comfort women.” Yes, records are scant and yes, some comfort women were indeed Japanese. But the surviving Korean comfort women were coerced into atrocious servitude. Sex slavery is an appropriate term.

So I suggest surviving comfort women are those you should kneel before.

“But!” you counter. “Japanese prime ministers, ministers and diplomats ￢ even I and my father - have made over 50 apologies for the past. And we paid official restitution in 1965, funding which kick-started ‘The Korean Miracle!’ What more can we do?”

On financial restitution, I agree: You paid.

On apologies, their number and frequency are irrelevant: While some Korean opinion leaders simply ignore those apologies, more thoughtful ones say, “Japan is not contrite.”

The former were disingenuous. The latter have a point.

As evidence, they cite various high-profile Japanese figures who undermine apologies by denying Japanese brutality ￢ in Germany, by the way, holocaust denial is illegal ￢ by officially visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, and so on. Given this, can you blame Koreans for questioning Japanese sincerity?

And there is something worth mentioning about Koreans. Many claim that the heart of the national character is “han”: long-term, repressed bitterness. Han makes it difficult for Koreans, particularly as a group, to let the past go.

Han hovers not only over Japanese controversies. Six decades after the Korean War, neither Korea accepts responsibility. In the South, many cannot forget wartime brutalities committed by U.N. forces. And four decades after his assassination, Park Chung-hee’s daughter is still pressed to apologize for his anti-democratic actions.

So there are difficulties with apologies in Korea - yet none of the above issues carry the enormous emotional ballast of Japan’s colonial rule.

Then there is Takeshima. Let’s face it: Short of war, you will never get it. Given the islets’ general insignificance and the international community’s disinterest, I’d suggest your national government cease pushing an un-winnable issue. You might even be able to reach a behind-closed-doors quid pro quo with the Koreans: If Tokyo renounces its claim to the islets, they may pipe down on the Sea of Japan/East Sea dispute.

But the big issue is history. Only when an unequivocal, un-ignorable apology by Japan’s highest-level figure is issued can Koreans stop claiming ignorance of Japanese apologies or blame Japanese for insincerity.

Such an apology would hurl the gauntlet before Koreans saying: “We have made this gesture. Can the sons be forgiven for the sins of the fathers? Can our two nations move forward?”

These are loaded questions. Koreans may snarl, “No!” But at least it offers hope of reconciliation.

But there is a bigger, prior question, “Would Tokyo’s politicians permit Your Highness to make this gesture on Japan’s behalf?”

I suspect that answer, regrettably, is “No.” And that, in a nutshell, is the problem.

Journalist Andrew Salmon is also a historian and author of “American Business and the Korean Miracle,” “To the Last Round” and “Scorched Earth, Black Snow.”