|
During his official address on the anniversary of the March First Movement, President Roh Moo-hyun said that Japan's leaders should not "say things that hurt our people's feelings." The people feel that the president has said it right for the first time in a long time. The problem is what the Japanese response has been, because it's repeating a position that is a very far cry from giving his comments a serious hearing. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said "It's important that each side recognize their difference and respect each other's positions." Praying at Yasukuni, a site that also enshrines Class A war criminals, is a "difference" Japan has with Korea and the position he wants respected is that he'll go there every year? You're just left shocked to hear Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda "grade" Roh's comments as being "better thought out and more restrained than in last year's speech."
Since last year there has been a continuous flow of reckless and bombastic remarks coming from leading Japanese government officials. This latest series is unprecedented in the history of normalized relations between the two countries.
It is Koizumi who needs to think of relations with neighboring countries, put the brakes on this trend, and ask for restraint. Instead he is the vanguard of claims that Dokdo is Japanese territory, saying also that he'll be visiting Yasukuni Shrine every year from now on, so you're stuck with a loss for words.
Do we really have to bring up the massacre of Koreans after the Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1, 1923, the women who were forcibly taken away during the Pacific War, and the tragedy of the young Korean men who were conscripted into the Japanese military only to be executed as Class B and Class C war criminals? The Korean people are not the only ones who live with this pain in their hearts. The same goes for China, the Philippines, Singapore, and Indonesia.
Right now Japan is fostering dreams of using its economic power as runway to make it fly as a leading nation in the global context. How will it be able to fly when it has the tears and pain and rage of Asian nations on its wings? In this sense, the Japanese leaders who keep issuing the kind of harmful remarks that try to overturn history are guilty not of harming Asia, they're guilty of self-injury towards Japan itself.
When all is said and done, it is the Japanese people who hold the key to a solution. They have to open their eyes to the fact the leaders who try to please them with those comments are obstacles preventing Japan from lifting off into the skies, despite the grand size of her wings.
Finally we would like to tell our government to look carefully at itself over the past year, and ask how it is we have allowed ourselves to appear in Japan's eyes that it more supercilious than ever before.
|
