.IChotiner speaks to an expert on modern Japan about the former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Second World War revisionism, his complicated feelings about America, and why his push to reform the Japanese constitution ultimately failed.
. Americans may know this as the Rape of Nanking, when, in 1937, Japanese soldiers killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese people and raped tens of thousands. And there have been some efforts in Japan to deny all this. What exactly was Abe arguing about this?
Abe would say things like, “Well, I maintain the positions of the government of Japan,” on wartime anniversaries, et cetera. And yet, at the same time, his own government was not just whittling away but hollowing out what was already on the books—in particular the Kono Statement.
Abe was very clear that much of his effort was to exonerate the name of his grandfather, who had been labelled a class-A war criminal. [ Abe saw it as part of his mission to rewrite Japan’s place in Asia, in the world. As you say, why shouldn’t every country have the right to this? What’s important to bear in mind is the constitution never prohibited the right to self-defense. Japan has an astonishingly strong military, and has had one since it was able to transform, with U.S. backing, in the early fifties, its police force into what was known as a self-defense force.
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