The Asahi, one of Japan’s three major daily newspapers, has two contrasting Q&A format opinion pieces regarding Japan’s recent problems with China and Korea that some people may find interesting. The first is with a German freelance journalist Gebhard Hielscher, who was formerly Far East correspondent for the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
Q: What was your reaction to the recent outrage against Japan in China and South Korea?
A: My impression is that all along, Japan has been deliberately not trying to face the past, and hoping that these issues would go away. Japan has been more concerned about its relationship with the United States.
Running away from the issue of compensation to the two countries that were the main victims of Japan’s aggression, the Japanese have had it (protest) coming for all these years.
Our (Germany’s) main victims, aside from the Holocaust, were the Soviet Union and Poland, and we have done a lot for them. I always leave out the Israel issue because it is not part of the comparison: Japan did not commit a Holocaust. But what we did in Poland, which is colonize it, can be compared to what Japan did in the Korean Peninsula.
Germany didn’t pay direct reparations to Poland, or the Soviet Union, but the Allied Forces took a lot of industrial property out of Germany as a form of reparation. Also, Germany gave up 24 percent of its traditional territory to these two countries, the two biggest victims. We saw that as one way to pay our moral debt.
The intreview given as a response to Herr Hielscher, which disagrees from what I would consider a rather moderate position, and not the extreme nationalist stance that has been irritating everyone, is by Keio University professor Tomoyuki Kojima an expert on Chinese and East Asian affairs.
Q: Do you think Japan has compensated enough for wartime aggression, compared with Germany?
A: In terms of state-to-state compensation, I would say Japan has done more through the process of normalizing relations with many of its neighbors.
While there are countries that did not demand compensation, for those countries that did, we have paid compensation.
In the case of China, both Taiwan, with whom Japan normalized relations first, and mainland China, declared they would forfeit claims for reparations.
Taking the example of forced labor, a court has ruled that the former employer of forced laborers from China and Korea pay damages. But the same court did not rule on whether the state was liable, as that issue has been settled through bilateral negotiations.
In the case of South Korea, for example, Japan agreed in 1965 to provide grants and loans to the country. There is a problem that it was not clearly referred to as “compensation,” but in reality both sides agree that is what it was.
There are individual issues pertaining to the war that remain unresolved, and that is undeniable. Definitely Japan must do something.
But my view is that it is not worthwhile to simply consider Germany a model and criticize Japan for lack of atonement for the past.