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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
In recent years, the G8 Summit has gone beyond being simply a gathering of world political leaders. The Summit is an occasion for a wide variety of NGOs, activists and civic groups from across the globe to congregate and discuss a multitude of issues. When the location of the 2008 G8 Summit was announced, it was clear that the environment would be a key theme under discussion. As the Hokkaido Toyako Summit (7-9 July 2008) drew closer, rising fuel and food prices and their devastating effects, particularly on the world's poorest people, became an important part of the agenda, too.
[1] Hokkaido Forum is a citizens' group that tries to promote improved relations with Japan's neighbours (especially Korea and China) by addressing Japan's history of aggression in Asia at the grassroots level. Its dues-paying members engage in citizen-led initiatives to address war responsibility. The Hokkaido Forum's activities have featured in other Japan Focus articles: William Underwood, “New Era for Japan-Korea History Issues”; Kim Yeong-Hwang, “Promoting Peace and Reconciliation as a Citizen of East Asia” (Kim served as Korean-Japanese translator for the Symposium). The Joint East Asia Work Shop for Peace is described in Tonohira Yoshihiko (2004) Wakamono-tachi no higashi Ajia sengen: Shumarinai ni tsudou Ni-Kan-Zainichi-Ainu (The Young People's Declaration on East Asia: Japanese, Koreans, Zainichi Koreans and Ainu meet in Shumarinai), Tokyo: Kamogawa shuppan.
[2] Interview with Hiroshi Oda (conducted by Lukasz Zablonski, 18 July 2008).
[3] See Nishino Rumiko, “The Women's Active Museum on War and Peace”, Japan Focus.
[4] Kanazawa's testimony is available in Shinbun Akahata Shakaibu (2006) Moto Nihonhei ga kataru “Daitoa Senso” no Shinso (Imperial Army Veterans Tell the Truth About the Greater East Asian War), Tokyo: Nihon Kyosanto Chuo Iinakai Shuppankyoku, pp. 55-58.
[5] Interview with Kobayashi Hisatomo (conducted by Lukasz Zablonski, 18 June 2008).
[6] Symposium Program, p. 6.
[7] The literature on reconciliation fits within many fields and offers a variety of perspectives that reflect the conflict that concerns the researchers. For example, Hamber and van der Merwe, with reference to the Peace and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, refer to five definitions of reconciliation: the dissolving of racial identities; promoting inter-communal understanding; the religious (in this case Christian) process of confession, repentance and forgiveness; a human rights approach based on justice; and reconciliation as community building. McKay adopts a gendered approach to reconciliation and outlines how reconciliation is so often channelled through male-dominated power structures that make gender injustice a part of national/male-centred reconciliation. She draws on case studies such as the “comfort women” and even the offering of women as brides to former enemies as part of a “reconciliation” process. Van Ness, by contrast, focuses on reconciliation as process in the context of Japan and China and offers strategies for reconciliation rather than definitions, such as “Seize the time”, “Insist on reciprocity” and “Link the past to the present and future”. John Paul Lederach introduces the important concept reconciliation as “a social space”. “Reconciliation is a locus, a place where people and things come together.” (p. 29). This construction illustrates why geographical, cultural and political distances greatly affect the dynamics of reconciliation. Reconciliation between aborigines and Australians of European descent, therefore, poses substantially different geopolitical challenges to Sino-Japanese reconciliation, because one process occurs within contemporary national boundaries while the other crosses them. Finally, Alan Smith, writing in the comparative education journal Compare, discusses the role of education in the process of reconciliation. These brief examples illustrate the diverse concepts of “reconciliation”, which will only increase given other linguistic, cultural and religious contexts.
Brandon Hamber and Hugo van der Merwe, “What is this thing called reconciliation”, Reconciliation in Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1998, online (accessed 15 September 2008); Susan McKay, “Gender Justice and Reconciliation”, Women's Studies International Forum, Vol. 23, No. 5, pp.561-570, 2000; Peter Van Ness, “Reconciliation between China and Japan: the key link to security cooperation in East Asia”, Asian Perspective, Vol. 31, No. 1, 2007, pp. 7-13; John Paul Lederach (1997) Building Peace: sustainable reconciliation in divided societies, Washington D.C., United States Institute of Peace Press; Alan Smith, “Education in the twenty-first century: Conflict, reconstruction and reconciliation”, Compare Vol. 35, No. 4, December 2005, pp. 373-391.
[8] See the website of the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan.
[9] Sven Saaler gives a figure of 15-17 percent subscribing to an “affirmative view of the war” (p. 163). Seaton, meanwhile, using different definitions calculates that conservative and nationalist views on the war account for about one third of public opinion, with nationalists a small minority. Sven Saaler (2005) Politics, Memory and Public Opinion: the History Textbook Controversy and Japanese Society, Munich: Iudicium, p. 163; Philip Seaton (2007) Japan's Contested War Memories: the “memory rifts” in historical consciousness of World War II, London: Routledge, Chapter 1.
[10] Jeff Kingston, for example, writes: “Ian Buruma notes that one of the main obstacles to Japan's reconciliation with its neighbors is that the Japanese people are divided over war memory. Competing narratives about the past that divides Japan from Asia sends mixed signals, muddying war memory, vitiating gestures of contrition and thus preventing reconciliation based on a shared view of the past.” Jeff Kingston, “Awkward Talisman: War Memory, Reconciliation and Yasukuni”, East Asia (2007) 24: 295-318, p. 316.
[11] Oda Hiroshi, Symposium Programme, p. 16.
[12] “Colonization” remains a debated term in the context of Hokkaido. Richard Siddle notes that despite the use of the word takushoku (“colonialism”) into the early twentieth century, the most common term used today is kaitaku (“development”), which masks the violence that underpinned the Wajin presence in Ainu Mosir. Siddle criticizes the arguments of Mark Peattie that Hokkaido was a “settlement colony” and that the Japanese government was settling “its own lands with its own peoples”. Instead, he describes the incorporation of Ainu Mosir into the modern Japanese state using the heading “The transformation of Ezochi: from foreign land to internal colony”. However, the symposium programme was implicitly critical of this interpretation by citing the position of Inoue Katsuo: “It is said that Hokkaido became a ‘domestic colony’. But, Ainu people were dispossessed of their land. Calling Hokkaido a ‘domestic colony’ takes an explicitly Japanese point of view. Actually, Hokkaido was a ‘colony’ created by Japanese intruders”. This is closer to the terminology of Brett Walker, who uses the word the “conquest” of Ainu lands. An even more forthright argument would be that the assimilationist policies of Meiji Japan, racist Social Darwinism that almost willed the Ainu to be a “dying race”, and refusal (until just before the G8 Summit) to recognize the Ainu as an indigenous people constituted a national policy verging on cultural (if not actual) genocide.
Richard Siddle (1996) Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan, London: Routledge, pp. 51-2; Mark Peattie (1984) “Japanese Attitudes Towards Colonialism, 1895-1945” in Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (eds) The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945, Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 80; Inoue Katsuo (2006) Bakumatsu, Ishin (The End of the Shogunate and the Imperial Restoration), Tokyo: Iwanami, p. 234; Brett L. Walker (2001) The Conquest of Ainu Lands, Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion 1590-1800, Berkeley: University of California Press.
[13] See lewallen, ann-elise, “Bones of Contention: Negotiating Anthropological Ethics within Fields of Ainu Refusal”, Critical Asian Studies 39:4 (2007), 509-540.
[14] The Japan Times, “Diet officially declares Ainu indigenous”, 7 June 2008.
[15] The establishment of the Continuing the Miracle of Fushun Society is described in Kumagai Shinichiro (2005) Naze kagai wo kataru no ka: Chugoku kikansha renrakukai no sengoshi (Why Talk of Aggression? A postwar history of the Chukiren), Tokyo: Iwanami Booklet No. 659, pp. 58-71; see also David McNeill, “A Foot Soldier in the War Against Forgetting Japanese Wartime Atrocities”, Japan Focus.
[16] This stance is understandable coming from a lawyer representing war victims, but its demands for an inherently political role for judges are problematic. The role of judges is not to rule on historical responsibility or historical consciousness. It is to rule on the legal validity of the claims presented before them. It is the role of judges to interpret the letter of the law, not to write the law. If the law is inadequate it is the role of politicians to rewrite it. If there are statutes of limitations, or if the postwar treaties signed between Japan and its former enemies/colonies are interpreted as being the law of the land, then judges have little alternative but to rule on the side of the government and reject the plaintiffs' case. In many instances, judges have commented in summing up that the evidence provided by the plaintiffs clearly proved their version of events, but that the accuracy of the Japanese government's version of history was not the legal matter under question. For a more detailed summary of Kang's arguments, see William Underwood and Kang Jian, “Japan's Top Court Poised to Kill Lawsuits by Chinese War Victims”, Japan Focus.
[17] Seaton, Japan's Contested War Memories, Chapter 3.
[18] See for example, Japan Times, “No new sex slave apology: Abe”, 6 March 2007.
[19] By coincidence, Seaton's interview with Vietnam veteran Allen Nelson for the paper “Vietnam and Iraq in Japan” presents another example (although not mentioned in the original paper). Nelson had helped to place a young German ASRP volunteer in an old people's home for Jewish people in New York. Many still had the tattoos on their arms from their time incarcerated in concentration camps. Their hostility toward the young German volunteer frequently reduced her to tears. But she persisted because she said she understood their pain. When she left at the end of her two years, she was showered with presents by all the residents of the home. The work of reconciliation is often long and painful, but ultimately rewarding. Interview with Allen Nelson (20 February 2008).
[20] Azuma's story is told in Ian Buruma (1995 edn) Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan, London: Vintage, pp. 129-35.
[21] Mari Yamamoto, “Japan's Grassroots Pacifism”, Japan Focus.
[22] Interview with Christian Staffa (conducted by Lukasz Zablonski, 10 July 2008).
[23] William Underwood, “Names, Bones and Unpaid Wages (2): Seeking Redress for Korean Forced Labour,” Japan Focus.
[24] This section follows closely Tonohira's article in the Symposium Programme and is supplemented by an interview with Tonohira Yoshihiko (conducted by Lukasz Zablonski, 24 June 2008).
[25] William Underwood, “Names, Bones and Unpaid Wages (1): Seeking Redress for Korean Forced Labour,” Japan Focus.
[26] William Underwood, “New Era for Japan-Korea History Issues”, Japan Focus.
[27] NHK Newswatch 9, 22 January 2008. This programme featured a 10-minute segment about the return of the Yutenji remains and the activities of the Hokkaido Forum, including an interview with Tonohira Yoshihiko.
[28] William Underwood, “The Aso Mining Company in World War II”, Japan Focus; “Mitsubishi, Historical Revisionism and Japanese Corporate Resistance to Chinese Forced Labor Redress”, Japan Focus; Christopher Reed, “Family Skeletons: Japan's Foreign Minister and Forced Labor by Koreans and Allied POWs”, Japan Focus.
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