JAPAN:Shinzo Abe is unleashing the historical deniers and whitewashers of Japan's wartime past, writes David McNeillin Japan
One of the Japanese TV networks recently pointed out that some of prime minister Shinzo Abe's ministers no longer stand up when he walks into the cabinet meeting room. Even worse, fumed one observer, they keep chatting as he tries to start the meeting.
Such disrespectful behaviour in a political culture where small acts carry enormous symbolic weight could only mean one thing, most concluded: Mr Abe has lost the respect of his troops. The unruly cabinet coincides with a period of plummeting approval ratings for the government, which started last year at 63 per cent and now speed inexorably toward the low 30s as elections loom. After a string of scandals and six months in office, which has been compared unfavourably to the rocket- fuelled years of Mr Abe's predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, that shuffling of ministerial feet may be the harbinger of a prime- ministerial lynch mob. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Mr Abe is taking shelter under a political umbrella he has always found comfortable: nationalism.
The man who coined the election slogan "beautiful Japan" and who will, if nothing else, be remembered for reinjecting patriotism into the nation's schools (in an education law approved yesterday) is also unleashing the historical deniers and whitewashers who have long been kept tied up in the dungeons of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.
The deniers offer a startling historical counter-narrative: Japan was not the aggressor in the Pacific War but the liberator, fighting to defend itself from the US and European powers and free Asia from the yoke of white colonialism. Imperial troops were not guilty, as most historians suggest, of some of the worst war crimes of the 20th century but of the "normal excesses" of armies everywhere.
Mr Abe's cabinet is dominated by such revisionists. Even as the prime minister was trying to put out the diplomatic fires sparked this month by his assertion that the Japanese wartime state did not round up thousands of sex slaves, his number three minister, deputy chief cabinet secretary Hakubun Shimomura was again denying the military was involved. Foreign minister Taro Aso claims a proposed US House of Representatives resolution demanding Japan apologise for the abuse of the women is "not based on the facts". Mr Abe, himself, still says there was no coercion of the women "in the narrow sense of the word".
As one observer asked, what part of "coercion" does Mr Abe not understand?
"I found myself imagining the international reaction to a German government which proposed that it had no historical responsibility for Nazi forced labour, on the grounds that this had not been 'forcible in the narrow sense of the word'," wrote Tessa Morris-Suzuki, a professor of Japanese history at the Australian National University. The ground zero of the revisionist movement is Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine and the attached museum, which offers the same Alice in Wonderland version of history. For decades, Yasukuni has generated controversy because among the 2.5 million ordinary troops enshrined there are the men - officially branded war criminals - who led Japan's disastrous 1931-45 campaign. The government has always said that it had nothing to do with the decision by Yasukuni's Shinto priests to honour the men, but evidence released this week suggests this is a lie. Papers released by Yasukuni and compiled in a new book claim the government was "closely involved" in the campaign to enshrine hundreds of A, B, and C-class war criminals, going back to 1958. The campaign, of course, operated in secret.
"How about enshrining them in a way that would be hard to discover?" wrote one welfare ministry bureaucrat. The conservative Yomiuri newspaper concluded on Thursday that the government and the shrine "shared the view" that war criminals should be honoured. Mr Abe is a well-known supporter of prime ministerial visits to the shrine.
Confronted with evidence that successive governments had shredded Japan's constitutional ban on the separation of state and religion, however, he reverted to type by denying any such thing. "I don't think there is any problem," he told incredulous reporters, those big teddy-bear eyes darting nervously from side to side.
So far the prime minister has swatted away speculation that he will visit Yasukuni this year, but this is clearly a case of damned if he does, damned if he doesn't. If he goes, he will torpedo Japan's slowly healing ties with China and South Korea; if he doesn't, his nationalist supporters will cry foul.
That Chinese premier Wen Jiabao is due to visit Japan early next month makes this political high-wire act that much more fascinating for political watchers. Will the leaders of one of the world's most important bilateral relationships discuss Japan's undigested history? Will Mr Abe continue to insist that politics and economics be kept separate? And will he keep the political forces he has helped unleash from destroying the hard-won respect Japan has earned since 1945?