Controversial Remarks

Controversial Remarks*

Marina Magalhães B. L. da Silva

The Japanese foreign relations in Asia have been a very delicate topic since the end of World War II. The events of the big conflict marked negatively the Japanese history and made the memory of war a very important topic for current policy in Japan. From the beginning of the 20th century, Japan became engaged in an aggressive attempt to dominate its region, with the goal of establishing a new status quo in East Asia. Several military atrocities happened during the Japanese advance over its neighbor countries. Many countries were a target of Japanese military actions in Asia, but China and the Korean peninsula were mainly affected and remain actively claiming for atonement. The Korean peninsula was a Japanese colony for 35 years and suffered with a very strict system of domination; China suffered violent Japanese military invasions in its territory and also suffered with years of colonial system. These facts left painful marks of Japan’s presence in these areas. In the immediate postwar period, a rapid ‘building’ of various memories took place, both inside Japan and especially inside its neighbors. Thereafter, the representations of these memories started to directly influence international policy issues. These collective memories started to figure as an ideological conflict between countries and became an impasse for the regional policies during the last seven decades. Every attempt by Japanese politicians to reach a better interaction with its neighbors involved somehow a negotiation related to past events, with claims of atonements, apologies, return of documentation or recognition of guilt on cases considered atrocities by affected invaded countries. The Japanese government had tried to establish strong ties in its region during this time, with constant visits, trade agreements, military exercises. Good results were reached and many commemorative events and friendship associations were created. The *

Original text released initially as a popular publication at the blog “Japanese Foreign Policy Observatory (JFPO)”, in 2012. This blog is no longer available online, but the material is available at the website Academia.edu.

entire region started to see the positive points of building good relations between neighbors, especially with the concerns related to North Korea. However, problematic points for these attempts are the constant attacks suffered by these positive actions within Japan. A big controversy inside contemporary Japan is related to the political instability in the country. Many of Japanese international objectives are impaired by the lack of uniformity in the political speeches recently presented. During the last years, many positive actions related to war events, including atonement positions by politicians, were severely damaged with speeches of some political figures inside the country. At the beginning of 2012, an example of it occurred between the sister-cities, Nagoya and Nanjing. According to the periodic “Japan Times”, an event “scheduled for Friday (Mar. 2nd), was to feature a ceremony marking the second anniversary of the construction of the China-Japan Friendship Judo Stadium in Nanjing”1 and would be followed by an one week event, called “Japan Week in Nanjing”. The celebration had extreme importance, after the events at the World War II. The so-called massacre of Nanjing is a very important issue between Japan and China since the end of the war. Chinese academics affirm that more than 300 thousand2 people were killed by Japanese army at that day (December 13th), including innocent civilians. However, both events were canceled after a very controversial remark made by Nagoya’s mayor, Mr. Takashi Kawamura. The mayor of one of biggest cities in Japan affirmed that he believes only “conventional acts of combat”3 were realized during the also controversial invasion of Nanjing in 1937. The politician also defended his remark, days later, affirming that he also thought that “it is not factual that as many as 300.000 unarmed civilians were massacred.”4 Remarks as the one made by Mr. Kawamura are actually very common between Japanese politicians and the consequent problems, as the exemplified above,

Notes: 1

Japan Times. Nanjing cancels out on judo event. http://www.japantimes.co.jp. 29 February, 2012. Numbers related to the Japanese action in Nanjing change accordingly to groups of academics, but the main issue is related to the way that the Japanese action was conducted and the high number of civilians affected by that. 3 Japan Times. Op. Cit 4 Id. Ibid 2

are more common than we can imagine. Politicians who use to express themselves without thinking in a larger scale, especially about international relations, ending up by causing serious damages for the attempts of their own country to establish very important ties and overcome the tragic parcel of its past. If Japan aims to, at the same time, defend its interests and change its image for the international society, controversial remarks on memory issues must be eradicated from its politics. Politicians need to see the importance of public discourses, balancing possible internal electoral achievements and the external interests of their country.