Shared Perceptions of History

INTERVIEWER Can we take that to mean that the way in which the panel was structured had great bearing on the prime minister’s seventieth anniversary statement?

SHIRAISHI The report was compiled by the panel, but the drafting of the statement itself was the job of the Prime Minister’s Office. The two are not the same. And this was the understanding with which panel members, including myself, agreed to take on this responsibility. At the same time, we were also aware that the prime minister was unlikely to issue a statement that clearly contradicted what we had recommended. So while we weren’t assigned to dictate what the prime minister would say, I think we nonetheless did have considerable sway over his remarks.

INTERVIEWER Mr. Hosoya, you were a speaker at the fourth session. What was your impression of the mood of the panel and the discussions that followed your presentation?

HOSOYA There were really no strong requests regarding what I should cover, and I was relatively free to discuss whatever I wanted on the topic I addressed. Many of the panel members were professional historians, and they already had shared perceptions regarding such issues as Japan’s aggressions and policy mistakes in the first half of the twentieth century.

That said, there was no telling how the Prime Minister Abe would ultimately choose to phrase the ideas contained the report. So I think that, especially in the initial stages, there was a lot of tension and uncertainty regarding how the recommendations would be incorporated into his remarks.

What surprised me about the statement was the amount of attention he gave to retracing the past. The emphasis of the panel’s report was on the process of postwar reconciliation, and so I had expected the prime minister to dwell at length on this topic. Another thing that he made clear was his intention to uphold the Murayama statement. He made specific references to the sufferings of the Chinese people and the unbearable sufferings of former POWs. My impression is that as he sat through the panel’s discussions, he came face to face with many new issues, made a point of personally investigating them, and came away with a broader and slightly revised understanding of this era in Japanese history.

Product of the Current Political Climate

SHIRAISHI The media paid inordinate attention to certain phrases and kept a nervous eye on Chinese and South Korean reaction, but I think much of this was misplaced. I’d say that the main target of the prime minister’s address wasn’t our East Asian neighbors but the Japanese public. It was also addressed more broadly, to our US allies and other strategic partners.

In that sense, the statement should be viewed as rounding out a series of connected addresses, starting with his speech before the Australian parliament in 2014, the brief remarks he delivered at Bandung, Indonesia, on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the Asian African Conference, and his speech to the US Congress in May earlier this year.

KAWASHIMA I couldn’t agree more. One unexpected development, though, was that the security bills took a great deal of time to pass, with the result that the anniversary statement had to be issued while the Diet was still in session. The prime minister’s approval rating declined in July, moreover, due to the popular backlash to the security bills. The statement was initially scheduled to be issued after the session closed, but it ended up being closely linked to activities in the Diet and trends in public opinion. As a result, the prime minister needed to be more accommodating, not the least to coalition partner Kōmeitō. I’m sure someone will one day put together a detailed account of the process by which the draft was finalized, why it turned out to be so long, and the kind of tug of war that must have taken place during the final week of July and the first two weeks of August.

HOSOYA I think the fact that the Diet session was extended had great influence on the drafting of the statement. Another significant factor was that it was to be issued as a cabinet decision, meaning that coalition partner Kōmeitō had to agree to how it was worded. Without Kōmeitō’s endorsement, it could not be positioned as the collective opinion of all cabinet ministers. Perhaps also encouraging a softer tone were signs of a rapprochement in Japan-China relations since last year’s APEC economic leaders’ meeting. Neither Japan nor China wanted to kill the momentum that has slowly been building by reopening old, historical wounds. The September 3 war anniversary speech by Xi Jinping was not as harshly anti-Japanese as one might have expected. In that sense, I feel that historical perception and anniversary statements are the products of the current political climate. With the two countries looking for ways to improve their ties, efforts were made by both sides not to antagonize the other.