For more than five decades after the end of the World War II, Japan articulated an official identity as a pacifist, anti-nuclear nation both domestically and in the international arena (its formidable Self Defense Force notwithstanding). Since the end of the Cold War and the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, however, the debate over revising Japan's “Peace Constitution” intensified. In particular, Article 9 of the Constitution, by which Japan renounces offensive war, has been under attack by politicians proclaiming the goal of becoming “a normal nation”, and the present Abe administration has prioritized Constitutional revision. Along with politicians and the citizenry, many intellectuals and artists have spoken against the possibility of Japan identifying itself as a “nation that wages war”–thus rejecting its assumed role as advocate of peace and foe of nuclear arms. In June 2004, Nobel Prize winner Oe Kenzaburo, along with artists and intellectuals Inoue Hisashi, Komori Yoichi, and Kato Shuichi and others, formed the Article 9 Association, which advocates “protection” or preservation of the present Constitution.

Ever since German and Japanese leaders were prosecuted, convicted, and punished after World War II at Nuremberg and Tokyo, there has been a wide split at the core of the global effort to impose criminal accountability on those who commit crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and war crimes on behalf of a sovereign state. The law is always expected to push toward consistency of application as a condition of its legitimacy. In the setting of international criminality the greatest danger to widely shared values is posed by those with the greatest power and wealth, and it is precisely these leaders that are least likely to be held responsible or to feel threatened by the prospect of being charged with international crimes. The global pattern of enforcement to date has been one in which the comparatively petty criminals are increasingly held to account while the Mafia bosses escape almost altogether from existing mechanisms of international accountability. Such double standards are too rarely acknowledged in discussions of international criminal law nor are their corrosive effects considered, but once understood, it becomes clear that this pattern seriously compromises the claim that international criminal law is capable of achieving global justice.

In 2008 and 2009, a series of historical issues once again defined the public space of Japanese-South Korean and Japanese-Chinese relations: the revisionist essay of General Tamogami Toshio; Prime Minister Aso Taro's acknowledgement of the use of slave labor in his family's wartime mine; new flare-ups in the longstanding territorial disputes over the Senkaku/Diaoyu and Takeshima/Dokdo islets; ministerial visits to the Yasukuni Shrine; and Japanese government approval of another amnesiac history textbook whitewashing Japan's World War II aggression.

Historical issues haunt Japan. The world is facing a crisis, which may become a once in a century depression in the wake of Wall Street's financial meltdown and the subsequent recession throughout the world. Japan is no exception. At this time of crisis each country must show its resilience to alleviate immediate pain while implementing a long-term policy to strengthen the fundamentals of its economy and society. Japan is asked to come up with a powerful economic policy to overcome its crisis and contribute to global solutions. Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, and expectations are rising not only in the States but throughout the world that the U.S. will confront this challenge effectively. This is a golden opportunity for Japan because the fundamentals of Japan-US relations are solid and much of Obama's agenda coincides precisely with what the Japanese government has asserted for decades: the necessity for a sustainable global economy, emphasis on the environment, need for a long-term energy policy, serious concern about nuclear disarmament, cooperation through the United Nations and so on. Why not come up with creative ideas to attract the attention of Obama's new team and consolidate the alliance?

We are now facing a critical situation. Not just Japan, but the world as a whole is in crisis. With America at the center, globalization is racing ahead, but there are also strong countercurrents with nationalism becoming stronger in various places. In the midst of war and terror, the threat of global warming is becoming clear to all. In this world, I believe that we should advance toward regionalism. In 2003 I hoisted this flag in a book entitled The Common House of Northeast Asia — Declaration of a New Regionalism published by Heibonsha.

Approaching the 60th anniversary of the opening of the Tokyo Tribunal in 2006, public opinion was divided over Prime Minister Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni Shrine. One reason for opposition to the visit was that Tokyo Tribunal Class A war criminals are enshrined there.

On August 15 1985, then Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, despite strong domestic and international criticism, carried out an official visit to Yasukuni. The government later acknowledged during parliamentary questioning that it had accepted the verdict of the Tokyo Tribunal through the San Francisco Peace Treaty. As a result, Prime Minister Nakasone refrained from further visits to the shrine from the following year. Though aware of these historical developments, Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro has persisted in visiting Yasukuni Shrine since his assumption of office in 2001. In 2005, he again visited the shrine in the face of strong criticism in Japan and abroad. Conservative newspapers like the Sankei Shinbun take the view that “visiting the shrine is not a Treaty violation.” This argument, however, is not in the least compelling. [1]

‘Forgetting, even getting history wrong, is an essential factor in the formation of a nation, which is why the progress of historical studies is often a danger to nationality.’ Ernest Renan

In 2002, the Japanese government built the “Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims” within the Hiroshima Peace Park. It is located less than two hundred meters from the A-Bomb Peace Museum operated by the Hiroshima City Council. This new Memorial Hall, funded and run by the Japanese government, includes the following message on one of the wall panels:

When, in mid-2005, Japan's Yomiuri newspaper began to publish a series of articles on the question of “war responsibility”, the event attracted nationwide and even international interest. Now the newspaper series has become a book, published in a two-volume version in Japanese and in a one-volume abridged English translation entitled Who Was Responsible? From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbour. There can be no doubt that these publications mark an important moment in the long and vexed history of East Asia's “history wars” - the ongoing conflicts between Japan and its neighbors (particularly China and both Koreas) about memory of and responsibility for Japan's 20th century military expansion in Asia.

Despite his recently failed third attempt to become prime minister, Aso Taro remains one of Japan's best-known and most influential politicians. The former foreign minister still aspires to the top post and in two books published earlier this year he has sketched a road map for the nation.

Japan the Tremendous, a bestseller written in a populist tone, highlights the peaceful nature of postwar Japan and calls the country a “fount of moral lessons” for Asia. Arc of Freedom and Prosperity: Japan's Expanding Diplomatic Horizons expatiates on Aso's tenure as foreign minister from October 2005 to August 2007.

As a recently retired sociology professor in the United States, Ivy Lee became actively involved with global efforts to redress Japanese war crimes a few years before Kajima Co.'s controversial settlement in 2000 with Chinese forced laborers from the notorious Hanaoka worksite. Kajima's approach to resolving the Hanaoka injustice raised serious doubts about its corporate sincerity, but the professional honesty and good faith of Japanese lawyers who provided pro bono representation for the Chinese victims were also called into question by some critics in ways that suggested the need for careful investigation.

Japanese lawyers and activists supporting compensation lawsuits for Chinese forced labor in wartime Japan once called Chinese attorney Kang Jian the “window.” The term acknowledged Kang's pivotal role in coordinating between plaintiffs typically located in the Chinese countryside and Japanese legal teams pressing claims on their behalf in a dozen courtrooms across Japan over the past decade.

However, the close cooperation between Kang and the Japanese Lawyers Group for Chinese War Victims’ Compensation Claims broke down in April 2010, at least temporarily, following the out-of-court compensation agreement by Nishimatsu Construction Co. with forced laborers from its Shinanogawa worksite in Niigata. Late in the process of hammering out the settlement fund worth 128 million yen (about $1.28 million), the five plaintiffs’ Japanese lawyers began negotiating with Nishimatsu on behalf of the larger group of Shinanogawa victims who had not participated in litigation. Flanked by Kang, these five plaintiffs rejected the Nishimatsu pact at a press conference in Beijing the day after it was finalized in Tokyo.

The controversies that continue to swirl around the Nanjing Massacre, the military comfort women, Unit 731 and other Japanese military atrocities rooted in colonialism and the Asia Pacific War are critical not only to understanding the dynamics of war, peace, and terror in the long twentieth century. They are also vital for understanding war memory and denial, with implications for peace and regional accommodation in the Asia Pacific region and the US-Japan relationship. [1]

This article offers a comparative framework for understanding war atrocities and the ways in which they are remembered, forgotten and memorialized. It examines a number of high profile atrocities in an effort to understand their character and the reasons why recognizing and accepting responsibility for their actions have been so difficult. Neither committing atrocities nor suppressing their memories is the exclusive property of a single nation. The issues examined here begin with atrocities committed during the Asia Pacific War and continue to the present.

[A] conference of historians, psychoanalysts, and artists, gathered to reflect on the relation of education to the Holocaust, watched the videotaped testimony of the woman in an attempt to better understand the era. A lively debate ensued. The testimony was not accurate, historians claimed. The number of chimneys was misrepresented. Historically, only one chimney was blown up, not all four. Since the memory of the testifying woman turned out to be, in this way, fallible, one could not accept–nor give credence to–her account of the events. It was utterly important to remain accurate, [lest] the revisionists in history discredit everything. A psychoanalyst … profoundly disagreed. “The woman was testifying,” he insisted, “not to the number of the chimneys blown up, but to something else, more radical, more crucial: the reality of an unimaginable occurrence.”—Dori Laub

[Japan Focus introduction: Prime Minister Abe Shinzo recently added another entry to the long, sorry chapter of official Japanese war-crime denials when he said that there was no coercion of the so-called comfort-women by the imperial military “in the narrow sense of the word.” On March 1, an historic day in the history of Korean resistance to Japanese colonial rule, he said: “The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion.”

Liberal Democratic Party power broker Nakayama Nariaki further insulted the dwindling group of surviving women when he compared government involvement in the brothels that enslaved them to college canteens. “Some say it is useful to compare the brothels to college cafeterias run by private companies,” he said.

In the furor that followed and in the lead-up to a potentially booby-trapped visit to Washington, Abe backpedaled and issued a series of unsatisfying but politically expedient mea culpas, saying he stood by the famous1993 statement by Kono Yohei, acknowledging state involvement in the brothels and culminating in an expression of sympathy during his stateside trip that sought to lay the matter to rest.

In a one-hour meeting with US politicians arranged by Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and hosted by Sen. Nancy Pelosi, Abe was reported to have expressed sympathy for the victims: “As an individual, and the prime minister, I sympathize from the bottom of my heart with the former comfort women who experienced this extreme hardship. I'm deeply sorry about the situation in which they were placed.”

Calling such remarks an apology—to the US President not the comfort women—George Bush sought to lay the issue to rest in order to get on to the important issues of redefining the US-Japan military relationship. But the problem is unlikely to end there. On close analysis, the Abe statement is a model of the equivocation that has long characterized many official pronouncements on Japanese war crimes. It managed, for example, to douse the fires in Washington caused by his original denial while still conceding nothing on the key issue of coercion.

Fueled by perennial controversies over official Japanese regulation of textbooks, Western media and academics thrive on claims of a peculiar Japanese “forgetfulness” of wartime atrocities. But the postwar record of Japanese discussions of wartime biological warfare experiments reveals an impressive level of public exposure that, in some ways, surpasses American discussions of its own wartime past. To stress Japanese “forgetfulness” tells only half the story and obscures the tale of postwar political polarization that has greatly facilitated exposure of war crimes in Japan.

Japan Focus introduction: In late 1937, a Tokyo newspaper reported on a “hundred head contest” in which two Japanese imperial army officers competed to see who could lop off one hundred Chinese heads first during the campaign to take the Chinese capital city of Nanjing. The contest is symbolic of the perversion and loss of military discipline during the Japanese capture and occupation of the city that has come to be known variously as the Nanjing Massacre, the Rape of Nanjing, or simply the Nanjing Incident. The event belongs to a long list of 20th century atrocities, and is emblematic of Chinese suffering at the hands of a barbarous Japanese military as well as of Japanese predations across wartime Asia and the Pacific.

As part of what one might call a “canon” of horror, various groups have interests in how the event is remembered not only in China and Japan, but also internationally. Estimates of the numbers killed at Nanjiing vary from several thousand to over 300,000, depending on national and political persuasion and the parameters one puts in terms of time, place, and ethnicity of victim. (See David Askew, “New Research on the Nanjing Incident,” available at http://www.japanfocus.org/109.html).