Can you imagine Japan's prime minister as repentant as German Chancellor Angela Merkel in this AP-Yonhap photo? Merkel is captured with her head bowed in a wreath-laying ceremony during her visit to the former Nazi concentration camp, Dachau, in southern Germany, Tuesday. During their 1933-1945 reign of terror, the Nazis murdered over 43,000 inmates among 200,000 people there, including Jews. Abe strikes a stark contrast to Merkel, defending Class-A war criminals enshrined in Yasukuni, ignoring former sex slaves who were forced to serve Japanese imperial soldiers and trying to revise his country's Pacifist Constitution to open the way for military rearmament. He also skipped apologies to the nations victimized by its colonial rule in his Aug. 15 speech this year, marking the unconditional surrender of Japan to the Allied forces at the end of the Second World War. If the Japanese leader may be appealing to nationalistic sentiment in order to strengthen his political footing, he is doing it at the risk of throwing Japan permanently off from the path of reconciliation with its own past and victim countries. This also has heightened anxiety of its neighbors, who naturally feel reluctant to let Japan take a leadership role on the global stage because they can't trust Tokyo. It is also the duty of past victims to keep a constant watch on and prevent Japan from doing what it did again. Merkel visited the concentration camp at the invitation of a former inmate, a 93-year-old Max Mannheimer. If one of the former sex slaves asks Abe to visit, would he visit and repent his grandfather's misdeeds, would he? He wouldn't likely.
/ Captioned by Yoon Sung-won |
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