Japan’s wartime history causes contemporary problems

ISHIBA SHIGERU’S time as Japan’s prime minister is coming to an end. His party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), is in crisis: following the departure of its long-time coalition partner, it risks losing control of the government. It might seem odd that, in such circumstances, Mr Ishiba recently chose to spend a precious day expounding his views on Japan’s 20th-century wartime history. But memories of the imperial past remain a flashpoint in Japan’s culture wars, influencing both foreign policy and domestic power struggles.

Battles over how to remember the second world war began almost as soon as the shooting stopped. While some in Japan saw imperial expansion in Asia and the decision to wage war with America as grave mistakes, others viewed it as an act of self-defence, or even heroic resistance against Western colonialism. In 1995—the 50th anniversary of the end of the second world war—Murayama Tomiichi, a socialist who led a short-lived coalition government with the LDP, issued the first official statement marking the occasion. He offered a “heartfelt apology” to the victims of Japan’s “colonial rule and aggression” in Asia.

Ahead of the 70th anniversary, Abe Shinzo, who was then prime minister and known for his revisionist views on history, assembled a panel of experts to help draft his statement. In a display of the pragmatism that characterised his second term in office, he defied his own right-wing supporters and again mentioned Japan’s “aggression”. At the same time, he sought to make his apology the last official one on the matter.

But Mr Ishiba, a long-time rival of Abe, wanted to reopen the issue this year, on the 80th anniversary. Facing resistance from within the LDP, he refrained from issuing a formal statement on the actual day, August 15th. But after being pushed out as LDP leader earlier this month in favour of Takaichi Sanae, a hardline conservative, he decided to have his own final say after all.

Presenting his ideas as personal reflections rather than a government directive, Mr Ishiba focused on a question previous statements had sidestepped: why were Japan’s leaders unable to avoid war? He focused on three factors: the lack of clear civilian control over the armed forces; a limp and divided government and parliament; and a media that fuelled nationalism. While Mr Ishiba’s treatise leaves much to be desired as a work of historical analysis, it resonates as a striking rebuke of his party’s choice of successor—and a trenchant warning about the risk of succumbing to illiberal nationalism today.

Ms Takaichi has diametrically opposite views of the past. She was among those who urged Abe not to use terms such as “aggression”. In a recent book of interviews Ms Takaichi argues that contemporary politicians have no right to condemn the wartime leadership. “Would it have been better if Japan had simply become a colony without any resistance at that time?” she says. “I doubt any politician today could definitively state what ‘other correct choices’ Japan could have made back then.” She has been a regular visitor to the Yasukuni Shrine, which commemorates Japan’s war dead, including war criminals. The problem, she suggests, is not what those leaders chose to do, but that they failed: “If Japan had won the war, Japan probably wouldn’t be blamed by anyone now, and those who started the war would be heroes.”

Such revisionism is key to her appeal to conservative voters. The LDP chose Ms Takaichi in part to win back supporters who abandoned it for Sanseito, a hard-right populist upstart. While Sanseito’s xenophobic rhetoric about foreigners has attracted the most attention, that goes hand-in-hand with ultra-conservative views on the wartime past. The party’s leader posts wide-ranging “history lessons” on a popular YouTube channel; one lecture on wartime history promises to explore “the true history not found in history textbooks”. Sanseito issued its own statement on the 80th anniversary—which, in keeping with the nomenclature of the wartime regime, it calls the Greater East Asian War.

Such debates are not academic. When historical revisionism in Japan rises, contemporary relations with South Korea and China, both victims of Japanese imperialism, tend to suffer. Among the main reasons that Komeito, a pacifist party, suddenly abandoned its alliance with the LDP is Ms Takaichi’s stance on such issues. Whoever emerges as Japan’s next prime minister will find that the battles over the past continue to shape the country’s future.■