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Editorial: Japan's shameful ignorance

Shinzo Abe, shame on you.

Shame on you for attempting to deny the culpability of the Japanese government and military in forcing thousands of women to work as sex slaves during and prior to World War II.

Shame on you for sacrificing the honor of your country to placate a rabid minority of rightist ultra-nationalists. These are the same people who took all of the progress and promise of the Taisho Democracy in the 1920s and tried to turn your country into a savage land of assassins, murderers and suicidal fanatics.

The people you are courting by ignoring undeniable historical facts do not represent the "Beautiful Japan" that you are constantly evoking -- the Japan of Katsushika Hokusai, Matsuo Basho and Izumi Shikibu.

The people you are courting with your revisionism represent a dark, bloody Japan that is a freak of history. They represent the "Peace Preservation Law" of 1925 that all but killed individual freedom. They stand for the dishonorable militarists who broke their oath to serve their country and attempted to overthrow the legal government on Feb. 26, 1936. They stand for the Kokuryukai, the "Black Dragon Society" that caused terror and suffering throughout Asia through its criminal machinations and its bloody plots.

These people you are placating represent Ugly Japan.

So shame on you, Mr. Abe.

The goodwill of your neighbors is not something to be taken lightly. You may be content to forget the past, to believe the fallacy that the pain and suffering seared into the collective consciousness can be mitigated or erased by semantic gymnastics.

But speech does not change fact. Words do not change truth, and the truth is known to all.

Mr. Abe, you were not in Manchuria in 1931. You were not in Nanjing in 1937. You were not even in Tokyo in 1945, to hear the voice of Emperor Hirohito tell your people to surrender.

But those who were there have shared their experiences with us. They have spoken about what they saw; they recorded the events that they saw and wrote about the emotions that they felt during that awful period of struggle.

So who are you to deny this vast collective memory that has been handed down to those of us who did not have to live through the horror and the evil of the world's most terrible war to date?

Again, shame on you. The arrogance, the sheer lack of compassion and of empathy for the people who suffered under the Imperial Japanese Army demonstrates that you have not even attempted to understand the realities of the world in which you live.

Just imagine what it feels like to watch your brother or your father taken away, never to return. Try to imagine the pain of watching your sister or your mother dragged from their house, or their job, or the street in broad daylight, and locked away in a brothel to be raped at will by foreign soldiers.

And then tell us, does it matter who did the dragging, who locked her away?

If it is beyond your ability to imagine this, Mr. Abe, then ask your elders, who lived through the war and its aftermath, if it was worth it.

Ask them one thing: Whether watching Japan reduced to rubble and cinders by fire and steel was alleviated by waving the Hinomaru, or by chanting "Banzai!"

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