title: “Who S Sorry Now " ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-10” author: “Jenny Villasenor”
Zen Buddhists may savor the sound of one hand clapping, but for Christians no sound is sweeter than the beating of breasts. This year in particular, church leaders and groups have produced a veritable chorus of apologies for sins past and present. Last month the Southern Baptist Convention formally apologized to African-Americans for defending slavery in the antebellum South and for condoning “racism in our lifetime.” In the Netherlands last April, a group of 800 German Christians apologized to the Dutch for the Nazi invasion of their country during World War II. On a trip to the Czech Republic in May, John Paul begged forgiveness for the church’s part in religious wars that followed the 16th-century Protestant Reformation. And at their General Congregation in Rome last March, the Jesuits not only apologized for abetting centuries of “male domination” but also pledged their personal “solidarity with women.”
Vague and cursory as it is, the pope’s own apology is part of a church commitment, announced last November, to repent of past ecclesiastical sins as prelude to the celebration of Christianity’s third millennium. “It is time,” John Paul says, “to examine the past with courage, to assign responsibility where it is due in a review of the long history. of humanity.” But his 16-page letter is also a strategic move aimed at capturing support for the Vatican’s position at the fourth U.N. Conference on Women in Beijing this September. The Vatican has already criticized the conference’s controversial draft document for supporting abortion rights, defending diversity in “sexual orientation” and for giving scant attention to women’s role as mothers.
‘Real equality’: At times in his letter, the pope sounds almost like a modern feminist. He praises women for historically unacknowledged accomplishments equal to those of men. “Yet how many women have been and continue to be valued more for their physical appearance than for their skill, their professionalism, their intellectual abilities, their deep sensitivity,” he writes, “in a word, the very dignity of their being!” On the issue of equal rights, the pope discerns “an urgent need to achieve real equality in every area: equal pay for equal work, protection for working mothers, fairness in career advancements, equality of spouses with regard to family rights and the recognition of everything that is part of the rights and duties of citizens in a democratic State.” He even expresses admiration for “those women of good will who have devoted their lives to defending the dignity of womanhood by fighting for their basic social, economic and political rights, demonstrating courageous initiative at a time when this was considered extremely inappropriate, the sign of a lack of femininity, a manifestation of exhibitionism, and even a sin.”
But the pope is not about to sign up with the National Organization for Women. He praises “those women who, with heroic love for the child they have conceived, proceed with a pregnancy resulting from the injustice of rape,” not only in time of war. But before blaming women who have abortions under any circumstances, he insists that “guilt needs to be attributed to men and to the complicity of the social environment” which approves freedom of choice. Moreover, he writes, equality does not mean that men and women are the same. What the world needs, the pope believes, is “an effective and intelligent campaign” which recognizes the specific “genius of women” in society and in the church. As he has done in the past, however, John Paul reiterates his belief that the ordination of women as priests is contrary to the example and intention of Jesus.
The pope’s letter drew faint praise from at least one American feminist leader. “His tributes to equality and to the women’s movement are forward steps,” says Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation. “But the letter has an overall tone of separate-but-equal roles for women.” On the other hand, the pope’s forceful stand for women’s rights seems certain to lose the Vatican support from the conservative Muslim countries that had backed the pope’s views at last year’s U.N. conference on world population in Cairo. Even so, the mea culpas will continue. Next Easter, Protestants will join Catholics in a series of ceremonies repenting the Crusades against Muslims and Jews 900 years ago. Being Christian, it appears, is always having to say you’re sorry.
title: “Who S Sorry Now " ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-23” author: “Priscilla Mendez”
Never mind that no government at any level in Japan had ever issued such a bracing statement of contrition for Tokyo’s aggression in World War II. The motion passed without dissent. Indeed, it passed without several of the council’s members even having read it. And that’s when the trouble started. In Japan, a handful of right-wing, emperor-worshiping nationalists cruise about in menacing black “sound trucks,” blaring patriotic anthems at earsplitting levels. Soon there were several of them parked outside Shiogama’s little town hall, inquiring through their loudspeakers why the council had besmirched the memory of Japan’s war dead. The council got the message. It formally withdrew the resolution and issued another: “Facing the historic 50th year since the end of the last war, we sincerely express our mourning and gratitude for the 3 million people who sacrificed their lives for the stability and peace of our country.”
Fifty years later, Japan still flails about, trying to come to terms with its wartime past-and, in contrast to Germany, its Axis ally, never quite succeeding. To the rest of the world- and in particular to its neighbors in East Asia–there is much to atone for: the Nanking massacre; vicious medical experiments on POWs; the infamous Bataan death march. To this day Tokyo’s reluctance to express remorse for the barbarity it inflicted on its neighbors sows mistrust throughout the region. A few weeks ago a senior member of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party called Japan’s brutal occupation of Korea “peaceful”; in Seoul, students rioted and burned him in effigy. Last Thursday Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama tried to undo some of the damage, announcing that he was writing letters of contrition to all surviving “comfort women"those Chinese and Koreans who were forced into prostitution by the Japanese Imperial Axmy during the war. Yet even that gesture drew heat from critics within his own government.
What is it with Japan? In any country, plainly, history can be divisive. Just ask the curators at the Smithsonian, who caved earlier this year to pressure from U.S. veterans and revamped an exhibit featuring the Enola Gay. But Japan is a society that values consensus above all, and that can make history more complicated still. What to say, think and teach about the war remains excruciatingly delicate–a battlefield still strewn with historical, political and cultural land mines. The rest of the world may not see them, but the Japanese know they’re there. And they must step through them ever so gingerly, no matter how awkward they look in the process.
The desire for social harmony has circumscribed the debate about the war in Japan for decades. And it effectively concealed a basic fact: an awful lot of Japanese believe there are two versions of wartime history. The victor’s version, now accepted throughout most of the world, and the loser’s version–ignored, because the winner always get the final say. The versions differ mainly in nuance, in interpretation. But to the Japanese, the differences matter enormously. Thus, the attack on Pearl Harbor–an unforgivable “sneak attack,” as most Americans would have it–was, to many Japanese, the only response possible to an Allied embargo that was cutting off the flow of oil.
In the victor’s version of history, Japan’s alliance with Germany forever lumps Imperial Japan with the Nazis, the 20th-century’s Evil Inc. Germany’s unflinching willingness to confront the past–critical to its acceptance at the center of a united Europe-is widely admired, and again Japan suffers in the comparison. But, the Japanese protest, we were not Nazis. “Nazi Germany was dominated by an organized violence,” Akihiko Fukunaga, a professor of business management at London’s Lancaster University wrote in a letter to a London newspaper last year. “The Nazis tried to liquidate political opponents, several races, cultures and civilizations . . . . The ‘crimes’ Japan committed,” Fukunaga continued, “were colonization, killing of civilians, and ill treatment of POWs. Every country has at some time committed these ‘crimes.’ I have never heard of any country apologizing . . . except Japan.”
That sentiment is shared by many of his countrymen– and is articulated more and more boldly as the painful anniversaries begin to get under Japan’s skin. It is not just the hard fight in Japan that believes the conflict in the Pacific was, as Hisahiko Okazaki, a former high-ranking diplomat puts it, “just a normal war.” The argument goes like this: For a century before World War II, nation-states fought imperial wars and colonized weaker states. Americans did it, the British did it, even the Dutch did it. The Japanese were just going with the flow, and China, Korea and the rest were the unfortunate victims. The far right in Japan goes further. It will not even use the term “victims.” Japan, to the far right, “liberated” countries like China, Burma and Indonesia, all of which had been suffering under the yoke of “white” imperialism and became independent after the war.
That remains a fringe argument. The point, Okazaki says, is not to justify Japan’s wartime behavior but to acknowledge it as a fact-and as not uniquely or especially evil. Just a “normal” war. The idea that Japan must now “apologize” for a campaign that led directly to the country’s destruction strikes him and others as ludicrous. “Did Louis XVIII apologize for what Napoleon did? And does anyone today care? The fact is, it’s probably going to take 200 years for the wounds to fully heal between Japan and Korea,whether we apologize or not. Time is the only answer.”
The West’s demands for remorse from Tokyo also ignore the fact that the war remains a factor in Japanese politics. Tadashi Itagaki, now a conservative member of the Japanese Parliament, was until 1980 the secretary of a group called the Nihon Izoku Kai–the Japan War-Bereaved Families Association–which has more than I million members. It is, in spirit if not quite in clout, Japan’s equivalent to America’s VFW. Itagaki himself is a veteran who was captured in North Korea at the end of the year and spent five grueling years in a Soviet Siberian prison camp. His father was Japan’s army minister-hanged by the Allies as a class-A war criminal after the Tokyo trials. Like many of his fellow veterans and their families, he is infuriated whenever the Japanese government tries to apologize for the war. “Just as your veterans opposed the Enola Gay exhibition, so are we upset when the government easts shame on the memory of those who gave their lives for their country. One must tread very carefully when their memories are involved.”
“Shame.” It’s a cliche, but also a fact, that in Japan (as in other East Asian countries), shame is a powerful coercive force. Thus, to probe historical wounds openly while Emperor Hirohito was alive would not only have angered the often violent right wing; it would have been, to many Japanese, simply bad form. That Tokyo has taken steps since Hirohito’s death in 1989 to illuminate the past is, in this context, a natural step. For the past year a grisly exhibition organized by several citizens’ groups about the infamous Unit 731–which performed barbaric medical experiments on POWs–drew large cords all over Japan. And at Hiroshima it-self–the ultimate shrine to Japan’s sense of its own victimhood–there is a new wing that deals directly with Japan’s militarism and imperialism. But there are limits to how far Japan will go in airing all this, and there will be until the wartime generation–and its children-is gone. “I am not defending militarism,” Professor Fukunaga concluded last year, “but I want to defend our ancestors who died in the war.”
It’s understandable that the world outside Japan finds much of this troubling. The justifications tend to reveal the lingering superiority complex many older Japanese have toward their Asian neighbors. But while the loudest voices may dominate the bitter historical debates, those are not necessarily the most important voices. In the end those like Itagaki, who refuse to yield an inch to history, must justify themselves not only to the Chinese and the Koreans, but to men like Hiroto Kuboura. He is a 69-year-old resident of Hiroshima and a victim of the American bombing. Every morning he gets up and, before putting on his glasses, places a strip of fresh gauze over what was once his left eye- lost to the bomb as he sat in an office three miles away from ground zero.
In a hotel coffee shop not far from that spot, he speaks 50 years later about blame, and guilt, and the bitterness that only slowly dissipates. “If the war was caused by us then the Japanese government should humbly reflect on that and take care of the victims both inside and outside Japan. I don’t think they have done enough,” he says. “The government does not face its own responsibility for the war.” He has no axes to grind, he says; he has simply picked his own way through history’s land mines and come out on the other side. He thinks his country should do so, too: “In order to part from the past we have to admit it and apologize. Let’s face it. We were all victims of this war.”
