Another history rewrite

Watching Islamic State militants behead two Japanese hostages in quick succession has reinforced Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s conviction that Japan needs to revise its pacifist postwar constitution. If he wants to ensure that his country has the strength to better respond to 21st-Century threats, however, Abe will first have to stop relitigating the past.

The problem is that the prime minister continues to act as though projecting power in the future requires rewriting Japan’s past. Just last week, he waded into the controversy over a description of wartime “comfort women” in a U.S. textbook, telling a Diet committee that he was “shocked” by passages indicating the women were sex slaves and that many were killed as part of a coverup.

The prime minister’s support for the revisionists is misguided, to say the least; while doubts remain about the exact number of comfort women and the precise role the Japanese military played in procuring them for wartime brothels, mainstream historians, Japanese and Western alike, accept the gist of the women’s story.

When the 70th anniversary of Japan’s defeat comes around this summer, Abe will likely draw upon the country’s postwar record to argue that it can be trusted with a full-fledged military. He’s said he will also affirm past apologies for Japan’s wartime record. A perfunctory reference, though, would be as bad as none at all. Unless the prime minister makes it clear that he accepts the same historical reality that most of his countrymen acknowledge, he will be doomed to spend more time arguing over the past than preparing for the future.