Japanese PM Abe hoped to work for regional reconciliation

In a memorial ceremony for victims of the Nanjing Massacre on Saturday, Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Saturday, “Denying crime in history means that it could commit a crime again,” adding, “Forgetting history is betrayal.” He made the remarks by effectively targeting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who is denying crimes against humanity Japan committed in Korea and China during the imperialist era. China held as a national event for the first time a memorial ceremony that pays respect to 300,000 Chinese citizens who were massacred by the Japanese military during the China-Japan War.

Cases of massacre by Japanese soldiers, which are on display at the Nanjing Massacre Museum, cause people to shiver due to brutality of human beings. Japanese military officers even engaged in ‘beheading game,’ in which one who beheads 100 people before others wins. This is part of news reports that were filed by Japanese newspapers at the time. Nonetheless, when delivering an election speech in support of a Tokyo governor candidate in February this year, writer Naoki Hyakuta, a member of NHK’s management committee, claimed “Nanjing Massacre did not exist.” Hyakuta is a well-known rightist person in Japan’s culture community, and has close ties with Prime Minister Abe. Countless survivors are still alive today, and bereaved families have vivid memories of their loved ones that were massacred by Japanese soldiers. Denying the massacre is insult against humanity.

An event meant to criticize Prime Minister Abe also took place in Japan on Saturday. Leaders of Japan’s four largest academic organizations in history, including the History Society, agreed to blast Abe’s distortion of history about comfort women or sex slaves, and spread the truth in Japan and overseas. They unanimously said the truth is that the Japanese military were deeply involved in forced recruitment of comfort women, and that comfort women suffered extreme pain as sex slaves. People in the history community have thus started collective response, as the Abe administration spearheaded distortion, saying that “There is no evidence that the military was directly involved in forced recruitment of comfort women.”

Abe should change to give consideration to sentiment of peoples in countries that suffered due to the Pacific War. Japan’s Kyoto News Agency said “U.S. President Barack Obama urged Prime Minister Abe to exert efforts to recover Korea-Japan relations in Brisbane, Australia last month,” adding, “It was a message asking the Japanese leader to make proactive efforts to present solution to the history issue.” The Liberal Democratic Party of Japan had a landslide victory in the House of Representative elections on Saturday. If Abe interprets the election results as the Japanese people’s support of his diplomacy with neighboring countries and his view of past history, then Korea-Japan ties and China-Japan ties will inevitably deteriorate further. Only when Abe, who will lead Japan over the next four years, admits to the wrongs it committed as imperialists in the past, and makes an apology, then will Korea-China-Japan relations that remain stalled will improve.