[Nasional-m] Why Tokyo finds reform so difficult

[Ambon]

 Why Tokyo finds reform so difficult

Yoshihiro Sakai IHT Monday, August 19, 2002

TOKYO Japan's failure to reform is rooted in its social fabric, and can be
traced back to the criminals honored at the Yasukuni Shrine after World War
II. The homage paid at the shrine by current political and military leaders
exemplifies the unwillingness of the establishment to accept blame.
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This was underscored again last Thursday when Shintaro Ishihara, the
right-wing Tokyo governor and a potential prime minister, along with five
cabinet members and a group of prominent lawmakers, visited the shrine 57
years after Japan's 1945 surrender.
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Striking a more balanced chord, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi marked the
end of the war at secular ceremonies. His visit to the shrine last year was
the first by a head of government in five years and angered China, South
Korea and other Asian countries. This August he stayed away from the shrine.
He paid his respects to the more than 3 million Japanese who died in the war
and expressed profound remorse to all the people who became victims of
Tokyo's military expansion.
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The shrine has been a memorial for fallen soldiers for more than a century.
It became controversial after World War II when 14 leaders convicted and
executed for war crimes by the United States and its allies were inducted.
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When many Japanese think of the shrine, they become sad at the thought of
the lives lost through war. They still fail to separate the ordinary
soldiers from the war criminals also enshrined at Yasukuni. This warped
perspective has its roots in events after the war. In Japan the situation
was different from Germany. At the Nuremberg trials prosecutors sought to
show that the Nazi defendants broke German laws. Germans themselves roundly
denounced Nazism. But the Tokyo trials were run wholly by the victors. There
was no opportunity for Japanese to take responsibility and renounce their
war leaders. Foreigners made all the decisions for them. So the people were
not able to realize that a lot of what their leaders did during the war,
both to Japanese and to other Asians, was wrong.
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Half a century later, unwillingness to accept blame for the behavior of
wartime leaders has crystallized into a broader failure to accept blame
almost anywhere. But without a self-critical spirit, economic and social
reform cannot progress.
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Consider Japan's huge problem of bad loans in the banking system and the
mountain of public debt. Successive governments have preferred to spend and
bloat the budget deficit instead of pressing ahead with painful structural
reforms. Rather than take responsibility for a problem at the appropriate
time, they defer action indefinitely. The problems grow so large as to be
nearly impossible to fix.
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The government should begin by re-examining what happened during World War
II - what the war criminals did to foreigners but also what they did to
their own soldiers who were sacrificed even when the leaders knew that the
war had been lost. Then war criminals would cease to be honored at the
Yasukuni Shrine.
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This will break the taboo on accepting failure at any level. The writer, a
former senior official at the Bank of Japan, is an adjunct fellow at the
Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington. He
contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.