Hyde Expresses Disappointment Over Yasukuni Visit

The U.S. government has not taken a public position on Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s most recent visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, but the Chairman of the House International Relations Committee has:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 22 (Yonhap) — A senior U.S. congressman formally expressed his regret to Japan over Tokyo officials’ controversial visits to a shrine honoring war criminals. In a letter to Japanese Ambassador to Washington Ryozo Kato, a copy of which was obtained by Yonhap News Agency on Saturday, Rep. Henry Hyde said the United States and Japan face critical issues at hand and that such a controversy “will not serve the national interests of either of our nations.”

Reading Hyde’s words, it is useful to recall that Hyde himself fought against the Japanese in World War II.

“…I feel some regret over the continued visits of Japanese government officials to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo,” Hyde said in his letter. He sympathizes the pain of those who lost loved ones in the war, he said. “The Yasukuni Shrine, however, honors more than these persons,” he argued. The shrine honors the memory of former prime minister Hideki Tojo and other convicted war criminals who ordered the unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor, he said. “This attack then plunged the nations of the Asia-Pacific region into four years of total warfare.”

“The shrine, thus, has become a symbol throughout Asia and the rest of the world of unresolved history from the Second World War and of those militaristic attitudes which spawned the War in the Pacific,” he continued. . . .

“Charges were brought against individuals for ‘crimes against peace, conventional war crimes, and crimes against humanity.’ The defendants were found guilty. This was no more victor’s justice than was the judgment at Nuremberg,” wrote Hyde.

“While the truth of what occurred in the Second World War must and will prevail, I am concerned that a renewed discussion of history at this critical juncture will distract nations in the region from carrying out a constructive dialogue on the issues at hand,” he said.

“Such a result will not serve the national interest of either of our nations.”

It’s certainly a complication that we don’t need now, as well as a propaganda point for the Chinese. That’s completely aside from Japan’s virtually complete state of denial about its own brutality during the war.

Update: A Newsweek commentator thinks Japan’s failure to come to terms with its past is costing it international influence.

The Japanese tend to expect diplomatic bouquets from even the most insignificant of their foreign visitors. So imagine the audience reaction when German ex-chancellor Helmut Schmidt, invited to give a lecture in Tokyo last month, treated his hosts to an exercise in bluntness. He accused the Japanese of soft-pedaling their country’s responsibility for its wartime past—and came to a devastating conclusion: “Sadly, the Japanese nation doesn’t have too many genuine friends in the world outside.” It was a syndrome he blamed on “the ambiguity of the Japanese public when it comes to acknowledging the conquests, the start of the Pacific war and the crimes of the past history.” His listeners didn’t appear to find much consolation in Schmidt’s concession that his own country had committed “even worse crimes within Europe.” Small wonder, perhaps, that no Japanese media picked up on the content of the speech. . . .

Until recently, Japan could to a certain extent ignore the suspicion and resentment it inspired across Asia. The country was an economic powerhouse, bolstered by its alliance with the United States. But now that animosity threatens Japan’s further progress, at a time when the country finds its claim to regional leadership increasingly challenged by the rising might of Beijing. In effect, the country that spent most of the 20th century aspiring to a leadership role in East Asia now finds itself virtually relegated to a corner for bad behavior. And that’s the last thing the region needs at a time when there is already plenty of instability to go around, thanks to a rapidly modernizing Chinese military, a nuclear-armed North Korea and a variety of potentially explosive territorial disputes. “The wounds of war remain and haven’t been healed in neighboring Asian countries,” says Tomiichi Murayama, the former Japanese prime minister whose 1995 apology to the victims of Japanese wartime conquest set the gold standard for all future public expressions of remorse. “They still lack confidence in Japan.”

Ouch. Although I think Japan needs to have that debate, there’s a legitimate “why now” question, given the degree to which China and the Koreas have tried to use history as a lever to achieve political and territorial goals. Clearly, a lot of the new-found outrage has to do with Japan’s more assertive defense posture, which is a direct result of North Korea’s 1998 missile launch over its territory and China’s military buildup. Thus, a legitimate moral and historical issue is obscured by cynical political motives. Read the rest on your own.