Abe Shinzo worries the US

At a January 10 conference on Asia at the Carnegie Endowment, Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell confirmed that US government was concerned about the Abe Administration's statements on history. He will be part of a high level American delegation that will travel to Japan and South Korea the following week to ensure that both governments are committed to "rebuilding" their ties.

The Administration is fast concluding what many more liberal observers of Japan's conservative establishment know. Japan has too long been held to a double, if not lesser standard than Germany for its war crimes. The failure to acknowledge accountability has encouraged extreme views heightening security tensions in the region. Ignoring this has not produced productive results.

The article below in the liberal online Asia-Pacific Journal (Vol 11, Issue 1, No. 1, January 14, 2012) succinctly outlines Prime Minister ShinzoAbe's astonishing views on history and how they can potentially up end nearly 65 years of peace.

Abe Shinzo, a Far-Right Denier of History

By Narusawa Muneo

Translated and edited by Satoko Oka Norimatsu and David McNeill

In December 2012, not a few people in Japan remembered the 75^th anniversary of Nanjing Massacre. Those people hoped that the lessons from war crimes committed by the Japanese Army from 1931-1945 would be learned so that Japan would never wage war against another country again, and peace would be achieved in East Asia. These Japanese, however, now face a major challenge.

In Japan’s general election of Dec. 16th the Liberal Democratic Party, which had been in opposition since August 2009, won an overwhelming majority putting it back in power. With Abe Shinzo, a right-wing historical revisionist back as prime minister, the change of government is no longer just a Japanese issue.

The LDP is a nexus for history deniers who regard calls for historical reconciliation from neighboring countries as unjustified, deem their historical accounts as inaccurate, and claim that listening to such appeals for Japan to remember the past would be "masochistic.” As LDP president, Abe most eloquently embodies this character of the party.

With the signing of the Treaty of Peace in San Francisco (September 1951), Japan was allowed to resume its place in the international community. Japan’s neighbors in Asia expected it, in return, to scrap its imperial past and apologize sincerely for perpetrating a string of wartime atrocities. But while the Federal Republic of Germany began its postwar period by breaking from Nazism and apologizing for the Holocaust, the LDP, which ruled Japan for most of the postwar period, has acted as a hub for history revisionists, and so it remains.

It is impossible to imagine that somebody who denies the Holocaust would be elected as Chancellor of Germany. What the world is witnessing right now in Japan, seventy-five years after the Nanjing Massacre, is the reappointment as prime minister of an extreme rightist who sides with the Nanjing-deniers.

The people of Asia, where millions were killed by Japanese wartime aggression, and where many witnesses and survivors are still alive, have the right to ask this prime minister if he really believes that the Nanjing Massacre was a myth, and if he recognizes that Japan invaded neighboring countries.

The people of both Koreas and Koreans around the world are entitled to challenge Abe on whether he recognizes the Japanese Army’s wartime enslavement of thousands of women (so-called “military ‘comfort women’”), one of the most ferocious and dishonorable crimes of Imperial Japan. This prime minister has been adamant about removing any description of these crimes from textbooks and classrooms.

Here is a fundamental question. Sixty-one years after the resumption of sovereignty, does Japan, led by such a prime minister, truly deserve to be a legitimate and credible member of the international community? It is the people of Japan who, first and foremost, are responsible for asking that question, and the people of Asia and beyond are entitled to pursue it, and to demand clear answers.

1. Who is Abe Shinzo?

Abe Shinzo’s father was Abe Shintaro, who held various key government positions including Foreign Minister and was at one point a candidate for an LDP presidential election. Abe Shinzo used his father’s coattails to get elected to the Diet for the first time in 1993. He is a peculiar existence within the LDP, having climbed the party by consistently advocating extreme right-wing policies. Here are some of his career highlights.

• As soon as Abe was elected in 1993, he became a member of the LDP’s “History and Deliberation Committee.” This committee held about twenty meetings with right-wing scholars, and as a result, published a book called “Overview of the Greater East Asia War,” on August 15^th, 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of Japan’s defeat in the Asia-Pacific War. The book argues: 1) “The Greater East Asia War” (the Asia-Pacific War) was not an aggressive war, but a war for self-existence and self-defense, and for liberation of Asia from Western powers; 2) Events such as the Nanjing Massacre and the “comfort women,” are fabrications. Japan did not commit war crimes and was not a perpetrator; 3) Since “biased” school textbooks contain false information about Japan’s wartime activities, a “textbook struggle” (an attack on education) is necessary. Abe still holds these positions.

• In December 1994, a right-wing group called “Diet Members’ League for the 50^th Anniversary of the End of War” was formed to counter a parliamentary move to pass a resolution in August 1995, critically reflecting on Japan’s aggressive war. Abe was selected as deputy executive director. This group organized the “Steering Committee of Japanese People’s Movement for the 50^th Anniversary of the End of War” in conjunction with far-rightist religious groups (mostly Shinto). It led twenty-six prefectural assemblies and ninety municipal assemblies across the nation to pass resolutions opposing the critical resolution and arguing that Japan did not invade its Asian neighbors.

• The same right-wing members of LDP in June 1996 formed a new group to attack history textbooks, called “Bright Japan - League of Diet Members,” and Abe was appointed deputy executive director. In February 1997, he formed a group called “Group of Young Diet Members for Consideration of Japan’s Future and History Education,” and became its executive director (“Young” was dropped from the group’s name in 2004).

• Abe has always been on the frontline of such groups and has worked hard to scour descriptions of Nanjing and the sex slaves, who he argues were “prostitutes,” from textbooks. He pressured not only education ministry officials responsible for textbook screening, but also presidents of textbook publishers and textbook authors, to remove references to such crimes, claiming that they were “distorted.”

• While Abe was Chief Cabinet Secretary, he complained about the content of an NHK (Japan’s national public broadcaster) program on the sex slaves issue before it was broadcast, demanding that the head of the Broadcasting Bureau make the program “fair and objective,” or resign. As a result, significant changes were made to the program before it was screened on January 30, 2001. One of the changes was deletion of the part where the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal, held in Tokyo in December 2000, deemed the rapes and the military sex slavery system by the Japanese military as “crimes against humanity,” and held Japan and Emperor Hirohito responsible for them.