Photo courtesy of Kyodo
Japanese Prime Minster Shinzo Abe said his country cannot follow Germany’s footsteps in mending its relationships with neighboring countries, although he acknowledged Japan’s wartime atrocities.
Abe recently said that the post-war situations between Japan and Germany, the main Axis power during World War II, were completely different. His statement serves as a direct dismissal of the demands from South Korea and China, two countries with longstanding beliefs that Japan owes sincere apologies and proper compensations to reconcile its strained relations with the rest of East Asian countries.
Both South Korea and China have continuously proposed to Japan that it should use Germany, which now plays a central role in the European Union, as a model to mend the relationship that has been fraught with animosity due to its reluctance to acknowledge the wartime atrocities by the imperial Japanese army.
“In Europe, there was a pan-European quest for the great goal of European integration,” Abe told German daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “The situation in Asia has been completely different after the end of World War II.”
Last week, U.S. President Barack Obama said during his visit to the country that Japan’s wartime atrocities, including the deployment of East Asian women as sex slaves known as comfort women, were “a terrible, egregious violation of human rights.”
Abe initially responded to Obama’s comment by admitting without offering a direct apology that it’s “heartbreaking” to even imagine the level of pain and suffering those comfort women had to endure, but his recent interview with the German media will likely irk Japan’s neighboring countries even further.
