Japanese PM’s speech on World War II riddled with duplicity
Last Friday’s speech by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to mark 70 years since Japan’s surrender in World War II was a carefully contrived exercise. It sought to maintain a veneer of pacifism and contrition for the past crimes of Japanese militarism even as his government expands the country’s armed forces and ends constitutional constraints on Japanese participation in new US-led wars of aggression.
Every word and phrase in the speech was sifted and weighed for months by a government-appointed committee of academics, officials and political advisers. Abe’s cabinet formally approved the statement before it was delivered and released in Japanese and English, followed several hours later by a Chinese translation.
Governments and the media around the world carefully scrutinised the speech for any hint that Abe retreated from the words pronounced in 1995 by then Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama on the 50th anniversary of the war’s end, and repeated a decade later by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in 2005. Murayama expressed “feelings of deep remorse” and a “heartfelt apology” for Japan’s “colonial rule and aggression.”
Since taking office in 2012, Abe has boosted the military budget, taken an aggressive stance toward China over disputed islets in the East China Sea, and sought to revise the historical record of Japanese aggression. As prime minister, he has visited the notorious Yasukuni shrine, a potent symbol of Japanese militarism, where class ‘A’ war criminals are interred. Abe has also denied the role of the Japanese military in forcing hundreds of thousands of women—so-called comfort women—into sexual slavery for its troops.
Read more: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/08/17/japa-a17.html
