Shinzo Abe, the first Japanese prime minister born after World
War II, has put changing the way Japan views its wartime history
front-and-center ahead of a major parliamentary election this
weekend.
Heading into Sunday's upper house elections, Abe is stressing a
"Beautiful Japan" platform of promoting patriotism, overhauling the
constitution so that the military can play a bigger role abroad and
revising school textbooks - critics would say whitewashing history
- to bolster national pride.
"I have renewed my resolve to make further progress toward
realizing a new Japan, a country admired and respected by people in
the world, a country our children's generation can have
self-confidence and pride in," he said in a speech marking
Constitution Day in May.
But his avowedly nationalist stance doesn't seem to be swaying
voters, who seem more focused on scandals in his Cabinet and a
perceived lack of leadership.
His support rating, which once stood at 70 percent, has
plummeted to around 30 percent. Abe himself is not up for
re-election on Sunday, but polls suggest his party could suffer a
major setback.
"He talks about patriotism all the time, but I don't think
people understand what he means," said Eiken Itagaki, a well-known
commentator and political analyst. "I don't think it will help him
much at the polls. In fact, I think it is scaring voters away."
Many Japanese voters, particularly older ones, remain highly
suspicious of efforts they perceive as harkening back to the days
before their country's disastrous defeat in 1945, when Japan's
government stressed nationalism and sacrifice to bolster its
military conquest of Asia.
A minority of conservatives, however, believe that the war was
justified and that war crimes have been exaggerated.
In a political gamble, Abe has been playing to that crowd.
Rewriting history
With Abe's blessing, a group of roughly 100 lawmakers that he
helped create before taking office is undertaking a high-profile
review of several controversial World War II-era issues.
The issues include the 1937 Rape of Nanking, in which Japanese
soldiers slaughtered civilians and pillaged the city; the forced
suicides of Okinawan civilians by Japanese soldiers in 1945; and
"comfort women", the euphemism for forced prostitution during World
War II.
The group of conservative lawmakers claims that excessively
negative portrayals of history serve only to hurt Japan's image and
run counter to Abe's "Beautiful Japan" policy. They want to keep
such depictions out of junior high school textbooks.
Abe, meanwhile, is still reeling over anger from comments he
made regarding "comfort women", most of whom were Chinese or
Korean.
He found himself in a firestorm - at home and abroad - after
saying there was no proof Japan's government had coerced any of the
women into prostitution. The vast majority of historians, who put
their numbers at between 50,000 and 200,000, disagree.
A resolution in the US Congress called on Japan to apologize for
its use of prostitutes on the front lines during World War II. Abe
retorted that the resolution was "not based on fact."
Keeping his own Cabinet in line on the interpretation of history
has been another headache.
A Cabinet minister who strayed from the conservative line was
forced to resign earlier this month after suggesting that the US
atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unavoidable.
Conservatives call the bombings acts of unjustifiable
brutality.
"I just meant that there was nothing we could do about it,"
Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma said after tendering his resignation.
"I don't think people understood what I meant."
Abe's one major accomplishment has been largely ideological -
education reform.
Amid widespread concern over the deterioration of the quality of
Japan's once-vaunted public school system, Abe spearheaded an
effort to rewrite the Fundamental Law on Education, which had
replaced a prewar structure that was highly nationalist in its
goals.
Abe took on two specific, practical reforms - mandating a review
of teacher's licences every 10 years and granting the education
minister more power to reign in local education boards. But he also
restored a stress on "moral education", which critics have panned
as an attempt to force political obedience onto children.
"His reforms will radically change the fabric of the education
system that was created after serious soul-searching about the
mistakes Japan made in the years before and during World War II,"
The Asahi, a major, left-leaning newspaper, said in an
editorial on Tuesday.
"How will the voters judge it?" The Asahi asked.
So far, Abe's message does not seem to be outweighing anger over
problems with the national pension system, questionable use of
public funds for private offices by Cabinet members and a widening
gap between the rich and poor.
(China Daily via agencies July 27, 2007)
