Japan can’t keep apologizing for WWII, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe says
TOKYO – Prime Minister Shinzo Abe acknowledged that Japan inflicted “immeasurable damage and suffering” on innocent people in World War II, but stopped short of offering his own apology, drawing criticism from China.
In a widely anticipated statement 70 years after his country’s surrender, he said Friday that Japan’s repeated past “heartfelt apologies” would remain unshakeable, but that future Japanese generations should not have to keep apologizing.
“On the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, I bow my head deeply before the souls of all those who perished both at home and abroad,” Abe said in a 25-minute address delivered live on national television. “I express my feelings of profound grief and my eternal, sincere condolences.”
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying, in a statement posted on the ministry website today, said Abe had been evasive.
“Japan should have made an explicit statement on the nature of the war of militarism and aggression and its responsibility on the wars, made (a) sincere apology to the people of victim countries, and made a clean break with the past of militarist aggression, rather than being evasive on this major issue of principle,” she was quoted as saying.
Earlier, China’s official Xinhua News Agency called Japan’s statement “a crippled start to build trust among its neighbors.”
The statement was closely watched in both China and South Korea. Resentment over invasion, occupation and atrocities by the Japanese Imperial Army before and during the war still bedevils relations between Japan and the East Asian countries seven decades after Tokyo’s surrender on Aug. 15, 1945.
The statement also got a cool reaction from U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is South Korean.
“The secretary-general has taken note of the message … and is studying it,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said. “As the secretary-general has said previously, he hopes that based on reflection and understanding of history the countries concerned can achieve a genuine reconciliation and build peace and prosperity collectively in the region.”
Abe noted that more than 80 percent of the country’s population was born after the war, and echoed growing though not universal sentiment in Japan that the country has apologized enough.
“We must not let our children, grandchildren and even further generations to come, who have nothing to do with that war, be predestined to apologize,” he said.
But he said Japan took the wrong course in going to war and that, across generations, Japanese must squarely face their country’s past.
“We have engraved in our hearts the histories of suffering of the people in Asia as our neighbors: those in Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines, and Taiwan, the Republic of Korea and China, among others,” he said.