South Korean National Assembly Speaker Moon Hee-sang’s demand that the Emperor or Prime Minister Shinzo Abe apologize over the comfort women issue was both disrespectful and based on factual misunderstanding.
Japan has repeatedly issued apologies, yet South Korea continues to revive the issue.
Moreover, the common claim that Japan should “learn from Germany” is itself built on a false understanding of Germany’s postwar conduct.

2019-03-29
Germany shifted responsibility for the war onto the Nazis and has provided no wartime compensation other than state compensation to the victims of the Holocaust.

The chapter I published today under the title, “A newspaper that continues to demean its own country and side with the Korean Peninsula, where anti-Japan education is carried out against Japan, and with China, a one-party communist dictatorship hostile to Japan,” is now ranked number one in goo search results.
This morning’s Sankei Shimbun was filled with articles proving that Sankei is now the newspaper that represents Japan.
The world should know that a newspaper which continues to demean its own country and side with the Korean Peninsula, where anti-Japan education is conducted against Japan, and with China, a one-party communist dictatorship ruled by the Communist Party, can never be the newspaper that represents that country.
In particular, newspapers in Italy, France, Germany, and elsewhere, which have stationed in Japan correspondents who are trash afflicted with left-wing infantilism and have repeatedly joined the Asahi Shimbun in running reports that demean Japan, and likewise The New York Times and others, which have continued to have anti-Japan articles written by people of Japanese descent who are similarly afflicted with left-wing infantilism and are little better than traitors, must seriously reflect.

Rui Abiru.
The outrageous lack of judgment of the Speaker of the South Korean National Assembly.

It is tiresome even to mention it, but since it keeps happening, I will comment.
This concerns the following absurd remarks by South Korean National Assembly Speaker Moon Hee-sang in the March 27 edition of the South Korean newspaper Hankyoreh regarding the comfort women issue.

“What is most important is a sincere apology.
If Prime Minister Abe, or the king symbolizing Japan who is equivalent to Prime Minister Abe, namely the Emperor, could say just one word, ‘I am sorry,’ to the former comfort women, then the fundamental problem would be resolved.”

In response, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga brushed it aside at a press conference the same day with an expression of disgust.

“Including this latest one, the series of statements by the Speaker of the South Korean National Assembly are extremely inappropriate, and I do not even feel like commenting on them.”

At a joint meeting held that day of the Liberal Democratic Party’s foreign affairs division and other groups, Yoshitaka Shindo, chairman of the party’s special committee on territory, also said in the same vein.

“This does not even merit comment, nor does it merit a response.
It is merely a display of poor judgment and lack of common sense.
The more he says, the more shameful it is for himself, and it goes beyond anger into sheer amazement.
It is not even worth commenting on.”

◎An impossible demand and a discourtesy.

As Mr. Shindo says, to demand an apology from His Majesty the Emperor, whom Article 4 of the Constitution stipulates has “no powers related to government,” is itself an impossible and discourteous demand.
Besides, the Japanese people are already suffering from “apology fatigue” toward a South Korea that reopens the issue no matter how many times Japan apologizes, and no one is likely to believe what Mr. Moon says.

Mr. Moon claims that if the Prime Minister says one word of apology the problem will be resolved, but Japan has already apologized countless times through the statement by Chief Cabinet Secretary Koichi Kato in 1992, the Kono Statement by Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono in 1993, the Murayama Statement by Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama in 1995, and the Kan Statement by Prime Minister Naoto Kan in 2010.
Even to former comfort women individually, four successive prime ministers, Ryutaro Hashimoto, Keizo Obuchi, Yoshiro Mori, and Junichiro Koizumi, delivered the following “Prime Minister’s letter.”

“As Prime Minister of Japan, I once again express from the bottom of my heart my apologies and remorse to all those who, as so-called wartime comfort women, experienced immeasurable pain and suffered incurable wounds both physically and mentally.”

Whatever one may think of the validity of these accumulated apologies, Japan has apologized to an extent that makes one ask, “How far must it go.”
Does Mr. Moon even understand what he is saying and what he is demanding.

◎A misunderstanding of “Germany.”

In the same interview, Mr. Moon also compared Japan with Germany, another defeated country, and emphasized that “the reason Germany became a leader in Europe despite being a defeated nation is that it apologized for all issues and continues to do so even now.”
But this too is a clear factual misunderstanding.
Germany shifted responsibility for the war onto the Nazis and has provided no wartime compensation other than state compensation to the victims of the Holocaust.

Japan committed nothing like the organized persecution or extermination of a specific race as Nazi Germany did, and moreover there was neither reason nor motive for Japan to inflict such atrocities on Koreans, who were legally “Japanese” during the war.
South Korea repeatedly says that “Japan should learn from Germany,” but the famous 1985 speech by West German President Richard von Weizsäcker, “Forty Years After,” while calling on Germans to keep the acts of the past in mind, did not include an apology.
Rather, the speech taught the following.

“No one can confess guilt for acts he himself did not commit.
To expect people, merely because they are German, to dress in coarse cloth and repent is not something one can demand of human beings possessed of feeling.”

As for Mr. Moon, who demands of Japan what is not possible for human beings to do, I hope that from now on we will never again have to comment on him.

(Editorial Board Member and Political Desk Editorial Board Member).