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When Should Countries Stop Apologizing?
Perpetrator’s fatigue, moral disengagement, and the difficulty of reckoning with the past
Every five years, on round-number anniversaries of the end of World War II, Japan goes through the same ritual. There are commemorations of the events that ended the war — the bombings, the treaties, the surrender — and the Prime Minister offers his remembrance of those events. His remarks usually include some expression of “regret” or “remorse” for what happened during the war.
Then the cycle of backlash begins. Countries that suffered at the hands of Japanese aggression during the war invariably find the Prime Minister’s speech insufficient. They note, often correctly, that his statement falls short of a full-throated denunciation of his own country’s actions during World War II and does not specifically acknowledge some of the worst examples of Japanese war crimes. Why hasn’t Japan paid reparations to the so-called “comfort women” who were so terribly abused by Japanese soldiers? Where is the specific accounting of Japan’s biological-warfare program and massacres of Chinese civilians?
After that, we see the backlash to the backlash, in which Japanese conservatives push their narrative of the war. They emphasize the suffering of the Japanese people during World War II…
