Japanese emperor tries to make amends for his father’s war
TOKYO (AP) — For his last time, Japan’s Emperor Akihito addressed a memorial service Wednesday marking the end of World War II. Once again, he expressed “deep remorse” for the war.
It was in keeping with what by all appearances has become a mission for Akihito over his 30year reign: to make amends for a war fought in the name of his father, Hirohito. The 84-yearold monarch is set to abdicate next spring.
“Reflecting on our past and bearing in mind the feelings of deep remorse, I earnestly hope that the ravages of war will never be repeated,” Akihito said in a two-minute speech on the 73rd anniversary of Japan’s surrender.
As emperor, he has made unprecedented visits to the Philippines and other Pacific islands conquered by Japan early in World War II and devastated in fierce fighting as the U.S.-led allies took them back. Though Akihito has avoided a direct apology, he has subtly stepped up his expressions of regret in recent years in carefully scripted statements on the war.
His words have taken on greater importance as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has sought to move Japan beyond its troubled past since coming to power in December 2012. Opponents of Abe’s policies have grabbed onto the emperor’s statements as a counterbalance to the prime minister’s push to revise Japan’s war-renouncing constitution and build up its military.
Akihito’s World War II-related trips and pronouncements form part of a broader effort to bring the royal family closer to the public. In so doing, he has won over pacifists, leftists and other critics of the emperor system in a way his father was never able to do.
Hirohito, who was worshipped as a living god until the end of the war, remains a controversial figure even today, with historians still debating his responsibility for the war.
During his father’s reign, Akihito himself was almost hit by a Molotov cocktail on a 1975 visit to Japan’s southern Okinawa island, where tens of thousands of civilians died in intense fighting near the end of World War II.
He has since visited the island 10 times. Okinawans warmly welcomed him and his wife Michiko earlier this year in what was likely his last as emperor.
Akihito was 11 years old when he heard his father’s voice announcing Japan’s surrender on the radio on Aug. 15, 1945. During the subsequent U.S. occupation of Japan, he was tutored in English by Elizabeth Vining, a Quaker, an experience that experts say gave Akihito his pacifist and democratic outlook.
Though Hirohito hardly changed the wording of his Aug. 15 message for a quarter century, Akihito’s has evolved since he became emperor after his father’s death in 1989.
On the 50th anniversary of the war’s end in 1995, he expressed for the first time the hope that the same tragedy would never be repeated.
The same year, then-Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama acknowledged Japan’s wartime aggression and made a landmark apology to victims in the rest of Asia.
His successors expressed remorse to other Asian countries until Abe dropped them and any reference to aggression in his Aug. 15 remarks beginning in 2013.