TOKYO -- Fifty-three years after Pearl Harbor, pressure in Japan is dramatically increasing for a belated acknowledgment of Japan's bloody past, including the action that brought the United States into World War II.
American and British prisoners of war and civil detainees will soon do as the Dutch did in January and file suit demanding damages for their treatment, according to Isomi Suzuki, an attorney at the law firm Koga & Partners.
War-related demands are even beginning to be heard on Japan's version of Capitol Hill, Nagatacho. Protesters have politely taken up residence on a well-situated piece of pavement between the Prime Minister's Residence and the Diet.
"The way the Japanese government thinks hasn't changed since before the war, it still believes the war is justified," said Sung Sinn King, a Japanese of Korean descent, as he stood at the head of a long line of demonstrators recently taking part in a
rotating hunger strike.
Six groups are participating at the moment. These include people brought from abroad to work as slaves in army brothels and Japanese factories and the descendants of other Asians killed by the Japanese during the war.
As a result, the government's official attitude toward Japanese behavior during World War II is becoming increasingly untenable.
Last month, the Japanese Foreign Ministry briefly acknowledged that the failure to let Washington know that Japan was going to war against the United States was more than a clerical mistake at the Japanese Embassy Dec. 6 and Dec. 7, 1941.
Misojo Yabunaka, general affairs manager of the Foreign Ministry, said recently that declassified documents showed the announcement breaking off talks and raising the inevitability of war was bungled by the Foreign Ministry itself.
This did not constitute an apology to the United States. The apology was intended for the Japanese people, he said.
Unlike in Germany, the Japanese parliament, the Diet, has never issued an apology for the country's acts during World War II, and debate on the issue is muted. A determined right wing reacts violently to the mere suggestion that Japan would admit wrongdoing.
In an effort to accommodate the sharply divergent views, the Diet has been having serious discussions on indirectly compensating the survivors of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In the years after the bombing, victims received nothing, said Yoshio Saito, secretary general of Hidankyo, the Confederation of Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb Survivors. His own history includes a decade of wandering from hospital to hospital in search of help for persistent bleeding from his nose and mouth and an incapacitating sense of "dullness," but it wasn't until the implications of radiation sickness emerged following the Bikini atoll tests in 1954 that he began to receive continuing treatment.
Today, survivors of the bombing receive medical assistance and other benefits, and are being offered additional money through government-arranged, but not government-affiliated, organizations, but they want something else: "a statement," said Mr. Saito, "that these injuries were caused by a war the government started."
In the Diet, support is growing dramatically, from almost no members a few years ago to almost half of the members today. Local governments have been even more responsive, though Mr. Saito acknowledges that when the matter comes to a vote, support has withered. Yet he is undaunted. "We have been fighting for 39 years," he says. "Of course we believe we will win."
When government acts
Officially, the national government tends to act clearly only when it is accusing others of wronging Japan. That has been the case in its continuous fight with Russia for return of several islands off its northern border seized during the last days of World War II.
And, in the past week, it has issued a strong protest after the plan by the U.S. postal authorities to issue a stamp with the picture of an atomic mushroom cloud and the words "Atomic Bombs Hasten War's End" commemorating the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Even that objection, however, was muddied by an official government spokesman who initially indicated an understanding of the U.S. position, only to reappear at a news conference to withdraw any prior comments beyond an official objection to the stamp.
Work has stalled on the first national memorial for the war's victims, which was to have been completed next year for the 50th anniversary of the Japanese surrender Aug. 15, 1945. Initial plans pointedly excluded the mention of any non-Japanese fatalities. That has ignited a controversy that has proved irreconcilable.
With a few exceptions, recent comments by important government officials go to extraordinary lengths to exonerate Japan.
One example was a statement in October by Ryutaro Hashimoto, minister of trade and industry and one of the few politicians who holds strong, enduring power in Japan's political system. Though his comments were too complex to translate directly, Mr. Hashimoto in essence said that Japan caused pain in Asia but was not an aggressor because the intent was to liberate other Asian countries from Western colonization.
Many in Japan contend that the United States initiated the war before Pearl Harbor by participating in an oil embargo, along with the British, Chinese and Dutch -- an action commonly referred to as the infamous A-B-C-D line.