What was significant about yesterday’s apology by Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi for his country’s barbaric behavior in World War II was not the content but the location. Koizumi’s admission was made in front of some fifty heads of state attending the Afro-Asian summit in Jakarta, some of them leaders of Asian countries which were victims of Japanese brutality.
With the exception of an expression of remorse by the then Japanese Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu on a 1991 visit to Singapore, no other Japanese leader has eaten humble pie in a foreign country and none has accepted Japan’s war guilt before such a wide-ranging and high-level audience of non-Japanese. Unfortunately, a number of factors are likely to conspire to weaken the effects of Koizumi’s words. The controversial Japanese history textbook, which seeks to whitewash Japanese atrocities, is still officially approved for the handful of schools that uses it. Koizumi said nothing about its withdrawal. Then just hours before he spoke, Japanese parliamentarians had paid a visit to the controversial shrine to the country’s war dead, honoring also the architects of Japanese militarism and aggression.
However perhaps the most telling factor is that the Japanese are on the diplomatic back foot and are searching desperately for support from other Asian nations in their bid for a Security Council seat in the reorganized United Nations. The plunge in relations between Beijing and Tokyo, not simply over the schoolbook but over ownership of islands in the East China Sea and oil and gas exploration rights, has put the two governments on their worst terms since formal diplomatic ties were in established in 1972.
Chinese officials, while accepting the significance of where Koizumi had made his apology immediately dismissed it as containing nothing new and not going far enough. In his own speech, Chinese president Hu Jintao made no direct reference to Japan. Beijing currently opposes Japanese Security Council membership and its present strong bargaining position might be undermined by a such a top-level encounter.
The standoff between these two Asian economic powers is however regrettable in terms of the summit itself because it is overshadowing the substantive issue of the summit, that of poverty. Yesterday African leaders like South African President Thabo Mbeki bemoaned the prevalence of deprivation since the withdrawal of colonial powers. They appealed for help to build up their economies and infrastructure while roundly condemning the effects of economic globalization.
President Hu has pledged that China will always defend and promote the interests of the rest of the Third World. Koizumi expressed himself no less interested in the troubles of Africa and poor Asian states. Maybe Beijing and Tokyo are about to embark on a contest to see which can do most for the Third World. This might be to the benefit of the target states, regardless of the real reasons for the sudden concern.
