"It is our obligation as Japan's most influential newspaper to tell our readers who was responsible for starting the Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War," writes Tsuneo Watanabe, editor-in-chief of Japan's -- and the world's -- most widely circulated newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, in the introduction to the book From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor: Who Was Responsible?
Watanabe, who is now in his 80s and served in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, was bothered by the way unfinished business concerning the war continued to hinder Japan's progress.
As a remedy, he set up a War Responsibility Re-examination Committee at his newspaper to undertake a 14-month investigation into the causes of Japan's Pacific War.
Watanabe tells us that the committee concluded that, "not only high-ranking government leaders, general and admirals should shoulder the blame."
According to the committee, "field officers were often more influential than even the emperor, war ministers and chiefs-of-staff in making decisions to go to and escalate the wars, and were responsible for many atrocities."
It has never been easy for a nation to face up honestly to the bitter fact of having committed war crimes, genocide, unjustified foreign aggression or having mistreated and killed its own people. Japan is no exception. Although there have been numerous initiatives to investigate its war guilt, especially its occupation of China, there has not yet been an official effort comparable to what the Germans undertook to take collective responsibility for their war crimes.
While Yomiuri's unique public effort is not a government initiative, it comes as close as Japan will probably ever get to conducting an acceptable "official" inquiry and offering an adequate apology. Its style is almost scientific -- factual, staccato-like and unemotional -- and it goes a long way toward meeting China's demand for a convincing investigation and act of contrition that might allow the bitter and still poisonous past to be overcome.
Watanabe laments the fact that after Japanese war criminals were tried by the Tokyo Tribunal of 1951, "No efforts were made in the name of Japan or the Japanese people to look into where responsibility for the war rested."
As a result, "there can be no genuinely honest and friendly dialogue with those countries that suffered considerable damage and casualties in the wars with Japan."
Indeed, Yomiuri's report may well have helped convince Japan's new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, to go to China immediately after being elected in to seek better bilateral relations.
China's leaders seem to have taken note of this moment of Japanese remorse. This implies a ray of hope for a bilateral relationship -- the most important in Asia -- that over the past two decades has been battered by Japan's reluctance to face its past, which has become a lightning rod for overheated nationalist sentiment on both sides.
But does the Yomiuri study go far enough? While it assigns responsibility to Japan for World War II, and even unflinchingly names the political and military leaders who bear responsibility, one can still detect a whiff of reluctance in its failure to fully describe some of Japan's war-time actions.
For example, the horrors of the Nanking Massacre in 1937, when Japanese soldiers killed 45,000 to 250,000 Chinese -- many of whom were civilians -- are given little more than a brief mention.
But it would be a pity if China's leaders did not endorse this acknowledgement of Japanese guilt as a manifestation of Japan's willingness to repent. The damaged bilateral relationship has only made China's desire for a "peaceful rise" more uncertain. At the same time, it has left Japan's long sought transcendence of its war guilt and quasi-pariah status incomplete. Watanabe and Yomiuri Shimbun have provided a rare opportunity that should be seized for the greater good of China and Japan and the world.
Of course, it is always easier to export blame than to shoulder it. And, true, no Japanese prime minister has yet fallen to his knees in Nanjing the way chancellor Willy Brandt did on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto, where he apologized for the crimes of Germany by saying, "No people can escape from their history."
But that was in 1970, when memories of the war's ravages were fresh. Now, over half a century has elapsed.
"If things are left as they are," writes Watanabe, "a skewed perception of history -- without knowledge of the horrors of the war -- will be handed down to future generations."
It would be an immensely encouraging sign of China's growing maturity if its leaders used this moment to look beyond the bitter past toward a new future with Japan.
Orville Schell is dean of the school of journalism at the University of California-Berkeley.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past