'Holier Than Thou Politics of Comfort Women Apology'

ByABC News
April 4, 2007, 11:40 AM

April 4, 2007 — -- Tokyo and Washington are both in the thick of "comfort women" politics. To some Japanese, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is a hero, a leader who is man enough to stand up for Japan by refusing to engage in what some Diet members have called a "masochistic view of history."

Despite his recent (somewhat forced) apology, Abe has publicly challenged the global charge that the Japanese imperial government (and military) had a sure hand in creating and maintaining the comfort women system during World War II.

To other Japanese, he is a political embarrassment and source of moral shame, for how can the leader of Japan brazenly deny the facts and figures that so many historians and other scholars in both Japan and the world -- not to mention, the United Nations, for which the Japanese have a high regard -- have dug up and agonizingly analyzed over two decades? It sounds a little too similar to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's refusal to accept the historical veracity of the Holocaust.

Closer to home for most Americans, including those on Capitol Hill, the House hearings on protecting the human rights of comfort women and Resolution 121 (to urge Japan to apologize and take responsibility for the comfort system) serve at best as an educational tool for politicians and the American public alike, which knows little about the Asian aspects of World War II. At worst, it serves as a welcome distraction to those who are sick of hearing about U.S. human rights violations and wartime mistakes and atrocities in Iraq and elsewhere.

Critics of Abe and other Japanese conservatives blame Tokyo for playing a disingenuous round of "apology diplomacy," which amounts to a decade or so of various Japanese leaders bowing deeply and stating soberly that Japan had indeed made mistakes in the recent past and hurt a lot of people with its imperialistic ambitions around Asia.

But if disingenuousness were a sin, Americans, Koreans, Chinese and others should not turn a blind eye to their own misdeeds. Who here hath no sin that he should cast the first stone? Although Korean and other Asian women suffered the abuses of the comfort system most severely, Japanese government officials weren't the only ones who had a hand in it.

By Katharine H.S. Moon, associate professor in the department of political science at Wellesley College and associate fellow, Asia Society in New York City.