Japan has long been at odds with its neighbors over its imperial expansion prior to and during World War II.
And while recent steps have been made to resolve some issues, notably Japan’s agreement with South Korea over the long-standing controversy over “comfort women,” a term that describes sex slaves used by the Japanese military during the war.
But the country’s respected figurehead, Emperor Akihito, has been a strong supporter of regional reconciliation and has visited many Asian nations devastated by Japan’s wartime aggression. He has also visited Pacific battle sites in Saipan and Palau in recent years to pay respect to the war dead, including Japanese and American soldiers along with local nationals.
First SE Asia trip
However, his current trip to the Philippines is his first trip to a Southeast Asian country since becoming Japan’s reigning monarch.
Before heading off to Manila he recalled the 1945 battle that destroyed the city and took the lives of more than 100,000 residents.
His visit aims to heal the lingering wounds of Japan’s brutal invasion and occupation that caused the deaths of more than one million Filipinos.
More Japanese soldiers died in the Philippines, an estimated 518,000, than anywhere else during the Pacific War that began in 1931 and ended after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 — when Akihito was eleven years old.
His “reign name,” Heisei, means “achieving peace” and the emperor has focused on what he views as the unfinished business of his father, the Showa Emperor Hirohito, Japan’s wartime leader.
Expressing remorse
At odds with much Japanese behavior of recent years, ranging from Prime Ministerial visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrines war criminals among others, to whitewashing Japanese atrocities in school textbooks, Akihito has been expressing remorse and making gestures of repentance that convey Japan’s contrition regarding the nation’s regional rampage.
Akihito’s political role is circumscribed by Japan’s postwar constitution, where he is defined as a symbol of the nation, but he has made clear on a number of occasions his support for pacifism and reconciliation.
In the context of Japan’s highly politicized and divisive battles over the wartime past, the emperor’s words and actions are carefully scrutinized and parsed because he has not-so-subtly repudiated rightwingers who want to revise the Constitution, and aimed to rehabilitate Japan’s shabby wartime past.
Conservative politicians including Prime Minister Shinzo Abe are openly critical of what they condemn as unwarranted “apology” diplomacy and a “masochistic” view of history, while liberals advocate repentance and reproach conservatives for downplaying Japanese wartime aggression and atrocities.
Specter of wartime sex slavery
One unresolved controversy involves the so-called comfort women, young women recruited at the behest of the Japanese military, involving coercion, intimidation and deception, who were forced to service troops in wartime brothels.
This week Prime Minister Abe’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party passed a resolution urging the government to pressure South Korea to move a statue of a Korean comfort woman from across the street from the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, a move that comes not long after senior LDP lawmaker Yoshitaka Sakurada said that the comfort women were actually “professional prostitutes.”
He retracted his remark and apologized under pressure — the major flaw in this agreement is declaring closure over an unresolved painful issue by diplomatic fiat without consulting stakeholders or promoting engagement. It is an agreement waiting to unravel and is more likely to end up stoking mutual recriminations than irreversibly resolving the shared past.
Protests continue
Two former wartime sex slaves from South Korea are currently visiting Tokyo to condemn the agreement because Japan continues to avoid legal responsibility for the comfort women system and the women are collectively outraged that an agreement was reached without their consent.
They are demanding a direct apology from Abe, who has angered South Koreans in past remarks construed as downplaying and denying Japanese responsibility and looking the other way while his allies try to rewrite this history.
Surviving comfort women in the Philippines also seek an apology and compensation, and about 10 survivors are taking part in demonstrations aimed at pressuring President Aquino to raise the issue, but he is unlikely to do so.
The Filipino historian, Ricardo Jose, who once participated in an international tribunal in 2000 that found Hirohito guilty for his army’s wartime policy of forcing foreign women to work as sex slaves, says “the issue of comfort women is a historical wrong that has not been righted.”
However, he conceded that it would be up to the Department of Foreign Affairs to pursue an “appropriate approach” to a painful chapter in the country’s history.
Recompense unlikely
For Manila, in light of China’s assertive territorial claims, boosting security ties with Japan trumps righting the wrongs of the past.
Moreover, Japan is the leading trading partner and donor of development assistance and, unlike in South Korea, public opinion is generally positive towards Japan.
The League of Filipino Grandmothers, a civic group of former comfort women, wants just compensation, recognition that they were subject to sex slavery, and a public apology from Japan.
But, despite the presence of Emperor Akihito, Japan’s pilgrim of peace, they are likely to be stonewalled — just like other comfort women and victims of Japanese wartime sexual violence around the region.