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Unit 10—Handout 9
The Controversy in Japan: Another Phase of the Controversy
By M. Kajimoto
In August 1993, four years after the demise of Emperor Hirohito, a signifi cant transformation took place
in Japan’s offi cial stance on the nation’s role during World War II.
That month, Hosokawa Morihiro became the fi rst prime minister who did not represent the longdominant
Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in 38 years.
Immediately after he took offi ce, Hosokawa formally announced, “It [the Sino-Japanese War and the
Pacifi c War] was a war of aggression, and it was wrong.”
On August 23, in his maiden policy speech to the Diet, Hosokawa apologized for Japan’s past aggression
and colonial rule for the third time.
“I would thus like to take this opportunity to express anew our profound remorse and apologies for the
fact that past Japanese actions, including aggression and colonial rule, caused unbearable suffering and sorrow
for so many people,” said Hosokawa.
In 1995, the Diet passed a resolution on Japan’s responsibility for World War II that acknowledged the
nation’s guilt for “acts of aggression” and “colonial rule.” However, the compromise statement was criticized
in some Asian countries due to its lack of the word “apology” and of any reference to specifi c brutal acts
committed by Japanese troops during the war.
The same year on August 15, the 50th anniversary of the end of WWII, Prime Minister Murayama
Tomiichi went much further than the resolution by stating:
During a certain period in the not-too-distant past, Japan, through its colonial rule and aggression, caused
tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly those of Asia. In the hope
that no such mistake will be made in the future, I regard, in a spirit of humanity, these irrefutable facts of
history, and express here once again my feelings of deep remorse and state my heartfelt apology.
“Such a conciliatory domestic environment,” writes historian Yoshida Takashi, the co-author of The
Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, “provoked intense challenges” from Japanese conservatives
and nationalists.
Senior LDP politicians such as environmental agency chief Sakurai Shin and education minister
Shimamura Yoshinobu continued to make statements that played down Japan’s wartime aggression between
1994 and 1995.
When interviewed by a national newspaper, Mainichi, in May 1994, newly appointed justice minister
Nagano Shigeto told the paper that the Pacifi c War was a war of liberation and the Nanjing Massacre was a
mere “fabrication.”
His perception of Japan’s involvement in WWII and his remarks on this specifi c historical incident
infuriated the Japanese people as well as people in China and South Korea. Two national newspapers, Asahi
and Yomiuri, criticized Prime Minister Hata Tsutomu for not taking immediate action. Consequently, Nagano
was forced to resign only ten days after taking offi ce. Hata subsequently sent a letter of apology to his Chinese
counterpart, Li Peng, and telephoned South Korean President Kim Young Sam.
At this point in the mid-1990s, the Nanking Atrocities once again came forward in the political arena,
creating a foundation for another phase of ongoing polemic. The vanguard was a professor of education at
Tokyo University, Fujioka Nobukatsu. Frustrated by the “pervasive Tokyo War Crimes Trial view of history”
and “masochistic” descriptions of Japan’s imperial past in school textbooks approved by the Ministry of
Education, Fujioka and his collaborators co-founded Jiyushugi Shikan Kenkyukai, or the Association for the
Advancement of A Liberalist View of History, in January 1995, and Atarashi Kyokasho wo Tsukuru Kai,
or the Society for Creating New History Textbooks, in December 1996, aiming to revise what he dubbed
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