For Japan, World War II is not resolved history. It is, incredibly, a recurring controversy.
Several times in recent decades, Japan’s leaders have expressed remorse and apologized for the nation’s rampage through Asia in the 1930s and ’40s. But to the governments and the surviving civilian victims in South Korea and elsewhere, the words and actions have always come up short.
Japan has issued mea culpas, yes. But also from Japan: Revisionist textbooks in schools, a Tokyo shrine that memorializes convicted war criminals, an opaque stance by prime ministers on atonement for the war that shifts between “heartfelt apology” and “eternal, sincere condolences.”
The unshakable impression is of a nation struggling to accept full responsibility for the past cruelty of its military.
This week the Japanese government tried again, negotiating an apology with South Korea’s government that the two sides say is intended to provide closure for a heinous Japanese wartime crime: the enslavement of thousands of women to provide sexual service to the Imperial Army.
If their agreement holds, Japan and South Korea may finally put aside the major source of bitterness preventing two advanced Asian democracies from being true friends. Just 46 South Korean victims are still alive. The deal has angered many of them. A civic group representing the victims said it was “humiliating.”
For decades, Japan insisted the government was not directly involved in sex slave operations. When it did apologize in 1993, the government declined to contribute to a compensation fund, relying instead on private donations.
In the new agreement, reached by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean Prime Minister Park Geun-hye, Japan does better:
“The issue of comfort women, with an involvement of the Japanese military authorities at that time, was a grave affront to the honor and dignity of large numbers of women, and the government of Japan is painfully aware of responsibilities from this perspective.”
As Prime Minister of Japan, Prime Minister Abe expresses anew his most sincere apologies and remorse to all the women who underwent immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women.
Ultimately it’s up to South Korea to decide that the past is now the past. But Japan should continue to reflect publicly on the atrocities it committed, including the sex enslavement of women. It is a dark history.