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Two questions for Shinzo Abe and the Japanese Right

By Zhao Jinglun: 0 Comment(s)Print E-mail China.org.cn, March 30, 2013

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[By Jiao Haiyang/China.org.cn]

Question 1: Can Shinzo Abe and the Japanese Right reconcile themselves with Japan's defeat and unconditional surrender after WWII?

Answer: It doesn't look that way. They cannot truly accept the world order established at the end of the anti-fascist war, and they even question the very nature of Japan's war of aggression.

Shinzo Abe, in a meeting of the Lower House Budget Committee in February 2006, said, "There is a problem in how to define aggressive wars; we cannot say it is decided academically. It is not the business of the government to decide how to define the last world war. I think we have to wait for the estimation of historians." And, on a TV program in July 2006, he denied that Manchukuo was a puppet state.

In his 2006 best-selling book, Toward a Beautiful Nation: My Vision for Japan, Abe says that Class A war criminals who were adjudicated in the Tokyo trials after World War II were not war criminals in the eye of domestic law. He again questioned the Tokyo trials after he became Prime Minister a second time last December, claiming that the trials were arranged by the victors.

Abe blatantly denies that Japan's war was a war of aggression.

But as early as August 1995, Japan's then Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama stated that Japan "through its colonial rule and aggression, caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those in Asian nations." Even before that, in 1993, Yohei Kono, the then Chief Cabinet Secretary, apologized to former comfort women.

Shinzo Abe questioned both statements and suggested that they should be amended or replaced by new statements. He particularly asserted that there is no evidence that comfort women were coerced.

These are obviously unpopular views. But they serve Abe's purpose of trying to make Japan a "normal country" with the right to collective self-defense and a full-time military.

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