Can nations apologize? - Column

Christian Century, August 2, 1995 by Donald W. Shriver, Jr.

THE DEBATE over apologies for the war between the U.S. and Japan has foundered. Officials in both countries are stalled in the ruts of a pragmatism common to both cultures: "Let the past be, let us look to the future." In the midst of this standoff, American Christians would do well to remember a public statement by prominent American theologians in 1946, "Atomic Warfare and the Christian Faith." The drafters, who included Robert L. Calhoun and Reinhold Niebuhr, called for "an act of contrition" by the U.S. for its misuse of the atomic bomb.

Even though the use of the new weapon last August may well have shortened the war, the moral cost was too high. As the power that first used the atomic bomb in these circumstances, we have sinned grievously against the laws of God and against the people of Japan. Without seeking to apportion blame among individuals, we are compelled to judge our chosen course inexcusable.

A Japanese scholar, who as a young Christian in Tokyo in 1946 was unaware of the Calhoun Commission, notes that had the commission's words been widely publicized in Japan, the cause of Christianity there would have prospered dramatically. Contrition after victory was something new to the Japanese. Unfortunately, it was also new to most American Christians. And as the slimmed-down Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian demonstrates, it is still new to most of us.

One might explain Niebuhr's signing of the 1946 statement as an example of his expectation that, as salt of their local earth, Christians should aspire to be contrite for what they judge to be their nation's sins. But nations themselves may not be capable of "contrition." Niebuhr would appreciate the irony that Americans 50 years later would be glad to have an official Japanese apology for Pearl Harbor, just as the Japanese would welcome an official American apology for Hiroshima. Apologies are always easier to demand than to offer.

Obscured in this standoff, however, are memories of the war on both sides that go beyond its beginning and its end. Fixated on Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, we bypass the assorted evils of the war that still fuel resentments of millions in countries around the Pacific basin. Leaders in Japan and the U.S. owe their publics a wider focus on those evils. We may wait in vain for apologies, but they would be worth waiting for. Pragmatism to the contrary, William Faulkner was right: "The past is not dead; it isn't even past." The past is not dead if your marine father perished on Iwo Jima, or your sister died in Nagasaki, or your grandmother was killed in Nanjing, or five of your cousins were lost in the evacuation of Manila. In personal and public life, certain events can be drained of their poison only through conscious, open recall. (Anyone who doubts the practical results of public truth-telling about the past should consult contemporary South Africans and reflect on why they have demanded a Truth Commission that will uncover the crimes of the apartheid era.)

The term collective apology comes from sociologist Nicholas Tavuchis, who, in his book Mea Culpa, observes that the similarity between personal and political apologies is only partial. "A consummate collective apology is a diplomatic accomplishment of no mean order," requiring some official person to walk the delicate line between just celebration of the heroes of a painful past and just admission of some of their sins. Tavuchis concedes that neither time nor political prudence will permit a leader to assess all the sins of the past. But without confessing, sins will continue to clog political commerce between former enemies. The 50-year trek of German politicians toward confession and away from the Nazi legacy is eloquent witness to this political fact.

Tutored by history, I have a few suggestions for what the leaders of Japan and the U.S. should say to each other, sooner or later. Let the Japanese prime minister say:

* That the soliders of Japan demonstrated courage, sacrifice and duty that any nation would be proud to remember.

* That Japan's imperialistic war began long before Pearl Harbor, resulting by war's end in the death of millions, especially in China.

* That in their conduct of the war against both Asians and Americans the Japanese government mobilized the ideological weapon of racism.

* That the treatment of Korean "comfort women," the medical experiments on living subjects in Manchuria, and other atrocities such as the killing of 100,000 Filipinos in the retreat from Manila were unlawful excesses of cruelty, even in war.

* That, as we now know, by January 1944 Japanese military leaders had decided that the war was lost and that long before August 15, 1945, the country should have surrendered.

* That while the Japanese can understand why the American public in 1945 was ready to kill untold Japanese civilians in order to save a few thousand American lives, Japan wants to join America in repenting of military strategies that kill whole cities.

* That the Japanese people acknowledge their postwar occupation by Americans was far more humane than they had been led to expect.