Apologies
are never easy. Negotiating and uttering a national apology about war-time
activities is especially challenging and sensitive, charged with strategic
implications. And thanks to the profusion of digital media, questionable
actions of the past are ever present in public view, crying out for justice and
apology.
As apologies
come they also invite comparison, and two recent high-profile apologies
highlight differences between East and West: On the cusp of the New Year,
Japan’s hawkish Prime Minister Shinzo Abe issued a surprising, yet highly
specific apology for
sex slavery in Korea before and during World War II. Earlier in October,
during a television interview, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair offered
a less official and partial apology, not for the Iraq war, but
for relying on misleading information before the 2003 invasion and
misunderstanding the consequences of regime change.
Political
calculation was seen as a factor in both cases – Abe sensing the benefits of
closer ties with South Korea at a time of strategic peril, timely given
Pyongyang’s nuclear test just days later, and the former British prime minister
hoping that saying sorry might help him avoid legal difficulty ahead of
publication of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War.
But there
was a key difference in how the gestures were received by their target
audiences: Few in Asia bothered to ask whether Abe, the man, really “meant it”
when he apologized over Japan forcing Korean women into wartime brothels, and
Tokyo also pledged $8.3 million in official funds for surviving victims.
Whereas in Britain, the question of how much Blair personally felt regret over
Iraq was central to the apology’s reception. Blair’s perceived insincerity –
many called his words mere “spin” – may have rendered the gesture meaningless.
By contrast, if asked about Abe’s personal feelings in offering owabi,
among Japan’s strongest words for apology, to South Korean President Park
Geun-hye, many Asians might be tempted to respond that, of course, the
hard-line nationalist didn’t mean it.
Yet such a
response doesn’t make his gesture less significant. The formal, and not the
personal, nature of the event is paramount here. Taiwan and the Philippines
offered cautious welcome, and China’s reaction was “wait-and-see,” as opposed
to outright rejection, which could be seen as a sign of progress. Most
importantly, the apology yielded immediate impact – Abe and Park picked up the
phone after the Jan. 6 North Korean nuclear test, pledging to work
together over the threat.
When a Japanese prime minister
apologizes over World War II, the gesture is ritualized and choreographed. It
doesn’t matter whether the leader is a good one or bad, believer or heretic,
but, just that he is officially qualified to carry
out the task. Abe is the symbolic lightning rod for collective contrition and
also, critically, collective shame. This is why apologies are both easier in
Japan, and harder. Wartime apologies, according to blood laws, cast shame upon
the entire “house” – in fact, the word “owabi” contains the ideogram for
“household.” And for Abe’s apology, house or family means country. The crucial
point: Japanese acceptance of shame is cast not so much upon oneself or one’s
generation, but upon ancestors who were active participants in the war. And for
many Japanese, especially older ones, such shame is unacceptable. The Japanese
traditionally revere their ancestors, and a butsudan, a family
Buddhist altar where incense is lit in prayer for departed loved ones, is still
a common feature for Japanese homes.
In both East
and West, apologizing is a means of bringing the offender back into the social
fold. But in his book "Mea Culpa," sociologist Nicholas
Tavuchis helps illuminate a key difference: “It is only by personally acknowledging
ultimate responsibility, expressing genuine sorrow and regret, and pledging
henceforth (implicitly or explicitly) to abide by the rules, that the offender
simultaneously recalls and is re-called to that which binds.” This Western
emphasis on the personal nature of apology has far less hold in Eastern cultures.
A
Jan. 10 interview for Abe with Japanese national broadcaster NHK was
deeply revealing in this respect. When asked about the “significance” of his
apology, the Japanese leader cited neither closer ties with South Korea nor the
obvious matter of seeking to heal the pain of former sex slaves. The
significance, he said, lay in the fact that the two sides agreed the apology to
be “final and irrevocable.” That is, Tokyo would never have to apologize again.
Abe’s apology was a matter of official business, a concession in
a settling of scores, with no particular relevance to his personal vantage
point. And oddly enough, for Korea, the success in wresting these words of
apology from a conservative hawk may carry greater significance than receiving
them from a liberal dove; the apology itself becomes the extraction of
a price. Many Japanese could not help but wonder, as one person asked in
watching the news, did Abe win or lose?
Abe’s own
attitudes toward the war are intimately tied to his own family history. His
grandfather, former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, was charged with Class A war
crimes although not convicted. This paradoxically means that, while Abe may not
“mean it” when he apologized over comfort women, it’s entirely possible that
the words were just as costly, perhaps more so, since there was no catharsis of
the sort accompanying sincere regret.
It’s not
only in the political domain, but also the personal, that one can find
differences between East and West in perceptions of apology. In the West, when
one half of a couple feels aggrieved, an apology is obviously useful to setting
affairs right. It’s usually part of the process of reconciliation, largely
taken care of by time, with resentment continuing to fester until the original
offense is forgotten. The apology, or lack of it, is then part of the equation
of how long ill feelings last. In Japan, by contrast, and while the process may
vary depending on individuals and circumstances, the apology is itself often
the key objective. Ayamare! Apologize! – an aggrieved party
may demand of a perceived offender. The relationship can remain frozen for an
extraordinarily long time over a strikingly trivial matter, until one proffers
the magic word: Gomenasai! I’m sorry!
Suddenly,
the cloud is lifted, and all is well again. One word, and life returns to
normal. It is the act perhaps more than the perceived sincerity that matters.
Japan
famously makes a distinction between tatemae, façade, and honne, true
feeling. Blair’s apology – which when parsed becomes more of an apologia in
the Socratic sense, that is, a justification – reveals that the concept is not
unique to Japan. One goes about life in the West navigating the
same conundrum of needing to disguise the truth for the sake of social
acceptability, or in Blair’s case, political expediency.
In the West,
there is an unresolved tension between knowing that everybody lies and
expecting everybody to tell the truth. In Asia, there is a little more realism
in how people take the dynamics of tatemae and honne for
granted.
And yet honne matters,
too, evident in the magnificent handshake between Japanese Prime Minister
Kakuei Tanaka and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in 1972, sealing diplomatic ties,
as well as the warm handshake between Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida
and South Korea’s President Park after the two sides concluded the agreement on
sex slaves.
Deep down,
the two politicians may well be poles apart in their personal perceptions of
Japan’s responsibility over so-called “comfort women.” But each displayed
genuine human feeling in the hope of building a better future together – the
key goal in political apologies.
Joji Sakurai
is a journalist and essayist based in Piran, Slovenia. His work has appeared in
the Financial Times, New Statesman, npr.org, Oxford
Today, the International New York Times and other publications.
