‘Coming to Terms’ with Reconciliation - Working Paper Library Website: www.global.wisc.edu/reconciliation/

Reckoning with Past Wrongs in East Asia David A. Crocker Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy School of Public Policy University of Maryland

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I believe that a university is responsible for maintaining a critical mind. A university should be a place where social phenomena are analyzed and criticized from a viewpoint above the fray. Based on true national interests, true should be regarded as true, wrong should be regarded as wrong. . . Even if your flesh withers, do not kill your spirit. --Yanaihara Tadao, “Tears at the Last Lecture,” University of Tokyo, December 3, 19371

least flown over it.” If I took these wise words to heart and applied them to regions as well as countries, I would refrain from offering a paper on the challenges of reconciliation in East Asia; for I have never been further west than California nor further east than India. Such journeys fall far short of geographical subject matter of this workshop: the East Asian region and, especially, Japan, China, and the Koreas. In spite of being geographically challenged, I still hope to offer something useful to a group of historians and journalists who address East Asian efforts to reckon with past wrongs committed before, during, and after World War II. In this paper I hope to embed in a global context the challenge of East Asian reconciliation. I draw on my study of African, European, Latin American, and North American attempts to deal with difficult pasts. More specifically, I consider the relevance for East Asia of widely accepted ethical norms that nations and scholars have employed to assess wrongdoings in relation to their own citizens or those of other countries. In the light of this background, I hope to contribute to dialogue on the ethical dimensions of East Asian efforts to reckon adequately with past evil and wrong doing. Although outsiders have many liabilities, they also may prove helpful in reflecting insider discussion back to its participants and proposing new ideas move beyond in-group impasses.3 The expanded

To describe the concentration camps sine ira is not to be “objective” but to condone them; and such condoning cannot be changed by a condemnation which the author may feel duty bound to add but which remains unrelated to the description itself. --Hannah Arendt2

Introduction This paper violates a maxim I once heard Douglas North give in a lecture at the University of Maryland: “You shouldn’t say anything about a country unless you have at 

dialogue also may contribute to global deliberation and action. My work on the present paper reinforces what I learned in Memory I (2003) and its follow up (2005): the participants in this conference are doing work whose significance goes well beyond the East Asia. Throughout and especially in the final section, I identify lessons I have learned from the East Asian experience that may benefit other nations and regions. My hope, moreover, is that the evolving global norms that I discuss may be improved by coming to grips with East Asian ideas and practices.

wrongs in the context of the nation’s transition from authoritarianism to democracy. Past wrongs, however, may be ones that a country has perpetrated not on its own citizens but on citizens of other countries. Examples are US government rounding up and “internment” of Japanese immigrants during World War II and Japan’s severe abuse of POWs, forcible coercion of Koreans and Chinese workers in Japan’s war-time factories, biological experimentation on Chinese and Koreans, and atrocities that Japanese invaders committed against Chinese and Korean noncombatants. How should Japan, the victimizer, and the other East Asian countries, the victimized, reckon with Japan’s past wrongs? How should East Asian individuals and regional civil society groups address past wrongdoing? How can and should East Asian nations collaborate to respond collectively and ethically to both past wrongdoing and earlier efforts, often inappropriate, to reckon with past evil?

My paper has four sections. First, I situate the challenge of reckoning with past wrongs in relation to the topic of “transitional justice” in new democracies. Second, I briefly discuss the ethical dimension of the challenge of reckoning with past wrongs and the role that cross-cultural ethical reflection might play in responding to that challenge. Third, in the long central section I analyze eight morally urgent goals relevant, I believe, for any country or region that is reckoning with past wrongs and, in the light of these goals, I assess the ways East Asian countries and groups have conceived and attempted to realize these goals. Finally, I conclude by identifying some lessons that scholars and activists elsewhere might learn from the East Asian successes and failures in dealing adequately with past wrongs.

These questions do not fit snugly within the theory and practice of state-centric transitional justice. What we might call “transnational reckoning with past wrongs” or “regional reconciliation” goes beyond transitional justice’s approach in three ways. First, the wrongs in question were committed by one nation (or its citizens) against the citizens of another nation. Second, some of the East Asian nations to be discussed have not yet or have already made a transition to democracy. Third, national efforts in East Asia do not occur in a national vacuum. Rather, national reckonings with past wrongs take into account and react to—for good or ill—other nations’ responses to past and current geo-political strategies. Forth, and most importantly, East Asian nations and nationals can approach the goal of reconciling with a difficult past and with each other when they collaborate with each through regional and other transnational institutions. The present multinational workshop, with participants from East Asian and other countries, is an excellent example. The ends and means of transitional justice, in the narrow, state-centric sense, must be supplemented. East Asians and others must search for ethically compelling ways by which national and transnational actors may collectively address transnational wrongs.

Beyond Transitional Justice Countries often reckon with past wrongs. Among these wrongs are acts of a despotic government against its own citizens and acts that two or more adversaries commit against each other in a civil war. Argentina (1976-83), Chile (197390), South Korea (XXX-XXX), and South Africa (before 1995) are examples of national conflicts that included statesanctioned human rights violations; Nicaragua (1979-90), Rwanda (1998), and Sudan (since 2002) illustrate human rights violations in the context of civil wars, although in case foreign nations also bear responsibility for things done and left undone. Attempts to deal with such a violent past, if they occur at all, usually take place during the country’s postconflict transition to democracy. The term “transitional justice” has come to designate these national (or international) efforts to navigate, explain, and reckon with such national

Transitional justice and the sort of transnational reckoning 

I am advocating can apply to the same country. South Korea is a good case in point. In so far as it has sought, beginning in 1998, to reckon with its own military and authoritarian past, “South Korea has addressed the issue of transitional justice without undermining its democratic development.” As Soon-Won Park and Gi-Wook Shin observe, South Korean civic activism in the late 1980’s and throughout the 1990’s as well as Presidents Kim Dae-Jung (1998-2002) and Roh Moo-Hyun (2002-present) “pro-active reconciliatory role” achieved or are achieving many of the goals of transitional justice:

reforms; historical writing, investigative journalism, and opinion editorials; art forms (painting, theatre, poetry, novels, memoirs, cinema, TV, and comic books); public protests and websites. East Asia is noteworthy for its contributions to this second category of means. One lesson of the East Asia experience is that ethically justified and effective ways of reckoning with past internal or interstate wrongs include a good deal more than the stark options of “forgive and forget,” trials, and truth commissions. Which tools should an individual or collective agent choose in reckoning with past wrongs, how should it decide, and who should decide? These are normative (“should”) questions, but appropriate answers depend on non-normative as well as on ethical considerations. Especially important are a group’s particular history and context, what it is reasonable to believe about its past, present, and likely future. Each group’s past is, to some extent, unique. The same tool may have little impact in one context and a momentous effect— sometimes good, sometimes bad—in another. One size fails to fit all. Means must be tailored, combined, and sequenced in ways appropriate to each context. And what is appropriate and feasible for one time or generation may be ill-advised for another. Hence, non-normative considerations are important in the choice of means.

It [South Korea] firmly established civilian control of the military, and successfully transferred power from the military/authoritarian to civilian/ democratic and then from ruling to opposition parties in 2003. Former dictators were tried and punished. Past wrongdoings were reinvestigated. Many victims were compensated.4 At the same time that South Korea came to grips with its “internal” past wrongs, it also addressed “interstate wrongs,” such as Japanese war crimes and Korean collaboration with Japanese invaders. Park and Shin correctly remark: “this simultaneous redress of not only external but also internal history problems made the Republic of Korea stand out among all the countries in Northeast Asia that are coping with history redress and reconciliation.”5

Equally important for this selection—and for subsequent assessments of past and current practices—are goals and principles. Of course the choice that groups make of means to reckon with a past wrongdoing may be influenced by a variety of morally problematic goals, such as chauvinistic pride, vengeance, white-washing the past, maintaining political control, thumbing one’s nose at an adversary, or gaining some independence from a patron. It would be foolish and unrealistic to believe that groups typically select ways to deal with past wrongs merely by appeal to what is morally urgent or responsible.

Means, Ends, and Principles When a nation or other group reckons with serious past wrongdoings, whether internal or external, many tools or mechanisms are available. Among these means are those the favorites of (internal) transitional justice efforts in the 1980’s and 1990s: “forget and move on,” apologies, amnesties, truth and reconciliation commissions, trials and punishments, and individual litigation. The current decade, especially but not exclusively in East Asia, has witnessed a profusion of new means or greater emphasis on hitherto little-used tools, such as declassification of evidence; mass claims processes and reparations programs; memorials (and official visits thereto), museums, and exhibitions; school textbooks and curriculum

Yet such non-moral norms are not invariably dispositive, and sometimes it is prudent as well as right to do the right thing. Hence, individuals and groups—in deciding how to reckon with past wrongs—often seek guidance from moral norms and principles. Which ones? Although many answers exist to this question, I would argue that a set of cross-cultural norms has evolved since the end of World War II that 

Global Norms and East Asian Reckonings

provides some reasonable guidance in the selection, packaging, and sequencing of various tools. These morally urgent and global goals are, as Takashi Yoshida remarks about the values that inform his account of approaches to the Nanjing Massacre, an alternative to “those views of the world … imprisoned by concept of nation and ethnicity.”6 These cross-cultural norms, informed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, have been forged and applied in diverse times and places. Like science and technology, they are a work in progress and the work of many hands. These norms include the following:

Truth. To reckon appropriately with past wrongs, people must know—or be reasonably justified in believing—what happened. Like their counterparts elsewhere, many East Asians aspire to historical truth about a difficult past. Citizens of China, Korea, but also Japan often want the truth about Japan’s wrongdoing during and after World War II. What really took place in Japan’s colonization of Korea, its invasion of China, its treatment of Chinese and Korean civilians and prisoners of war, and its medical experimentation as well as testing and use of biological weapons? Chinese and Koreans, as well as Japanese, also want to know to what extent, if any, Chinese and Korean citizens collaborated with the Japanese or themselves committed serious abuses. Gaining truth about the past is arguably both intrinsically valuable and conducive to other good goals, to be treated presently, such as accountability, reparations, institutional reform that averts repetition of past wrongs, and reconciliation.

• Truth • Public Platform for Victims • Accountability and Punishment • Rule of Law • Reparations • Institutional Reform and Long-term Development

It is useful to distinguish different sorts of truth. “Forensic” truths with respect to past atrocities—such as the killings, mutilations, torture, and rape that Japanese soldiers committed in Nanjing in later 1937 and early 1938—concern what is reasonable to believe about the time, place, and nature of the abuses, the identity and numbers of victimizers and victims, and the fate of the those murdered and those who survived.7 Emotional truths, more difficult to ascertain because of their psychological character, concern what is reasonable to believe about the psychological reactions of those that suffered and survived abuse. Explanatory truths are reasonably justified beliefs concerning the context and causes of the abuses. Interpretive truths are justified beliefs about the meaning and impact of the wrongdoing. Evaluative truths are reasonable ethical judgments about morally justified and unjustified action, both individual and collective.

• Reconciliation • Public Deliberation

Can the norms that I offer be reasonably justified and how one might provide this justification? Can and should one appeal to cross-cultural considered judgments about such injustices as rape, mutilation, and genocide? Can and should one derive these norms from some more abstract ethical principles, such as our human responsibility to respect the value and dignity of each and every human being and the rights of people to run their own lives? What role should dialogue and democratic deliberation play in selecting and improving these norms? I largely leave these important justificatory questions to future work. Part of the “proof,” however, is in the “pudding.” To get a taste of the latter, I turn now to a critical examination, through the lens of these eight norms, of the successes and failures of East Asian efforts to reckon with past wrongs.

Each of these five types of truth has its own methods, presumptions, standards of evidence, and degree of reliability. None, however, requires—or even aspires to—absolute certainty, and each is subject to revision and improvement. Moreover, some agents and institutions are better than others in employing the various procedures and justifying the different kinds of claims. Trials, employing the evidentiary 

standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” are better than other methods in establishing forensic truths and in determining that certain whether or not individual suspects are guilty as charged. Truth commissions, with less rigorous standards of “proof,” are best at delineating the context and statistical pattern of many abuses and in enabling people to express or reveal their suffering. The South African TRC was also a roadmap about differing accounts of the past. Investigative reporters often witness particular events or movingly narrate the fates of particular individuals.8 Professional historians are adept at sifting through and evaluating documentary evidence and first-person testimony so as to describe forensic truths, evaluate explanations of causal factors, and offer general and data-informed interpretations.

accurate knowledge of the past. What I find striking in the East Asian case of reckoning with past wrongs is the crucially important role of professional historians in establishing reliable truth about the World War II’s massive human rights abuses. No historian, of course, works in an intellectual, cultural, or valuational vacuum. All are subject to bias in selection and interpretation and subject to others’ criticism and correction. But unlike propagandists or ideologues who intentionally ignore, spin, twist, and distort the truth about the past to further their current political goals, good historians are committed to an objective or intersubjective truth and often give good reasons to believe that they have approached or ascertained it. They show earlier accounts to be incomplete, one-sided, or erroneous due to poor-quality sources, unsupported conjecture, outright fabrication, and so forth.

Different methods and institutions have made especially noteworthy contributions to truth about the past in various contexts of reckoning with past wrongs. The Nuremburg trials stunned both Germans and nonGermans with hitherto unknown evidence about German atrocities against the Jews and others. The Argentinian, Chilean, and Guatemalan truth commissions established much forensic truth, the latter putting to lie the view that government and insurgent forces committed approximately equal numbers of human rights violations. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission remarkable in encouraging victims to express their suffering. In the breakup of Yugoslavia, it was investigative reporters that first disclosed to the world the Omarska concentration camp in Croatia and Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia.

East Asian historians, of course, have frequently disagreed—sometimes passionately, sometimes vitriolically— about the past. “Conservative” or “revisionist” and “progressive” Japanese historians not only have offered contrary accounts of the past, but each side has often provoked the other to more extreme positions on such matters as Japanese colonialism, militarism, and wartime conduct. Chinese and Korean historians take issue with much Japanese historiography, but also differ among themselves. All too common have been ad hominem attacks that ignore issues of historical truth and a careful assessment of arguments and instead charge one’s opponent with racial bias, disloyalty, or dishonesty. Fortunately, however, in each county we find historians and other social scientists working with their national colleagues and increasingly collaborating with other East Asian nationals and a global community of inquirers.

These approaches, of course, may interact in fruitful (or not so fruitful) ways. Historians may draw on as well as assess trial evidence and decisions, act as staff members of truth commissions and help write their reports, and both draw on and provide historical context for investigative journalism. Journalists write book reviews of historical writing about past atrocities.9

Often suffering official criticism and more, these investigators slowly but patiently have been identifying omissions, dispelling myths, exposing falsehoods, overcoming one-sidedness and bias, and reducing disagreements. Sometimes convergence on the truth occurs through conceptual clarification of such matters as the boundaries of the city of Nanjing, the time period of the killings there, or whether combatants are to be counted among the Nanjing casualties. Often historians—ruling out extreme views as unsupported by reasonably good evidence or based on problematic evi-

It is beyond the scope of this paper to examine critically the cognitive worth and limits of these various ways of justifying beliefs about past events. None of the approaches to truth about the past are infallible. Each may fail to ferret out the truth as well as succumb to bias. Each may intentionally distort or fabricate. But well used, each may issue in more 

dence—have narrowed their disagreements to more manageable issues. Referring to Daqing Yang’s observations historical studies on East Asian “history issues,” Charles S. Meier, a Harvard historian noted for his volume The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity, puts the point well: “Historical reflection can help us narrow the contests over the past: We can converge on the numerical claims, clarify the chains of command and the levels of responsibility, agree on the meaning of terms, establish the context of violence.”10 For example, it is no longer possible for a reputable historian to claim, on the one hand, that the Japanese in Nanjing in 1937-38 killed only a handful of civilians or, on the other hand, that they killed 300,000 or more.11 The gap between a reasonable minimum and reasonable maximum now lies somewhere between 40,000 and 200,000 civilian fatalities. Similarly, historians in Japan, China, Korea, and, especially, the US identified many deficiencies in Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking.12 In responding to her US best seller, historians were able to carry East Asian historiography to new heights of historical comprehensiveness and accuracy. As Takashi Yoshida, a leading historian of the Nanjing massacre observes, “The reaction to Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking has been one of those rare instances when the stream has risen above its source.”13

are most likely to arrive at reasonable judgments when they engage in critical give and take with each other. Such critical dialogue most readily occurs in a democratic society with an ethos and institutions that support free inquiry and mutual criticism. Cross-cultural collaboration, even when some of the colleagues normally work in non-democratic societies, also increases the likelihood of arriving at historical and moral truth. Given the perpetual danger of bias and ethnocentrism, historians increase their probability of approximating the truth, when they engage in transnational collaboration. Echoing themes in the work of Americans Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, the German Jürgen Habermas, and the Indian Amartya Sen, Yang argues that historians should strive to transcend national identities and engage in a transnational version community of inquiry: Historians should strive to, and can indeed, transcend a predetermined position of national identity. Indeed being Japanese has not prevented many historians from producing some of the most critically acclaimed works on the Nanjing Massacre in any language. The national and linguistic divide notwithstanding, history-writing remains a collective enterprise, and historians also belong to what is called “the interpretive community” that is ultimately transnational. Given the rules and codes to which members can and must be held rationally accountable, some would argue that truth, if it does exists, is established by growing rational consensus. . . Although these rules and codes may themselves have biases and therefore should not be exempt form critical examination, “a community of critical discourse” offers the best hope that extends beyond any one local

Historians have a professional and moral responsibility to pursue value neutrality and objectivity in the sense of not permitting their hopes and fears to influence their descriptions, explanations, and interpretations of the past. However, this commitment to empirical or historical objectivity is compatible with and even requires that a historian make moral judgments, for instance, ascribe levels of moral (and not merely causal) responsibility for past evil. Some Chinese historians, for example, concede that some Chinese military casualties in Nanjing were likely due to Chinese troops being fired on by other Chinese elite soldiers protecting the Chinese general XX, who arguably fled the city and irresponsibly abandoned poorly trained troops. As Yang eloquently remarks, “the challenges facing historians are as much about evidence and knowledge in historical inquiry as about justice and morality in history.”14

group trapped in its subjectivity.15 The likely incompleteness and fallibility of a “local” group’s reckoning with regional past wrongs, calls for multinational and cross-cultural collaboration. Although Sen’s immediate concern in the following passage is to challenge the alleged “completeness” of a “transcendent” normative theory of distributive justice, his remarks help us grasp the importance transnational community of historical inquiry

With respect to both historical and moral judgments, East Asians, like their counterparts in other parts of the world,

and, as we shall see, public deliberation: 

The admissibility of incompleteness . . . makes it easier to bring in distant voices in the assessment of justice, which can be critically important for the reach and strength of public reasoning. A procedural requirement to consider nonlocal perspectives can help to avoid undue dominance of local interest as well as possible parochialism of local reasoning shaped by the influence of established conventions and limited informational frameworks (without these being intellectually challenged). We have to go firmly beyond relying on territorially moored perspectives. . . 16

work of historians to get public traction. Yoshida is realistic when he questions whether the respective governments and peoples will ever “share a single narrative of the Nanjing Massacre and other World War II barbarities. Yet we should take heart from the historians’ joint work and, more generally, scholarly dialogue. One sign of progress, as Japanese Law Professor Onuma Yasuaki observes, is the occurrence of cross-cultural dialogues in which scholars of different nationalities or national origin end up on both sides of contentious issues and hence break out of “identity” scholarship: The more we have a mixture of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean scholars on the same side, and the same degree of mixture on the opposite side, when discussing the issue of Japanese war guilt, rather than a division of arguments according to the nationality of those who make an argument, the better the chance of understandings and reconciliation we will have.21

Reacting to Japan’s 1990’s curriculum and history controversies, East Asian political leaders, academics, and nongovernmental organizations began to institutionalize their growing commitment to cross-cultural search for “a reconciled view of the past.”17 In 2001, Japan’s Prime Minister, Koizumi Junichiro, and Korean President Kim Dae-Jung agreed to establish the Forum for Japan-Korea Historical Committee. The Committee, composed of 12 governmentally-appointed advisors from each country, acknowledged in their meeting the gap in Japanese and Korean interpretations of the past and in subsequent meetings sought to situate the histories of the two countries “in a new regional history framework.”18 In the same year some 50 Chinese, Japanese, and Korean historians, NGO groups, and high-school history teachers formed The Korea-Japan-China Joint History Guidebook Development Committee, subsequently renamed the Asia Peace and History Education Network (APHEN). After 11 sessions of joint inquiry and discussion, in 2005 APHEN published in three languages a collaborative and common East Asian history textbook, appropriately entitled History that Opens the Future: The Modern History of Three East Asian Nations. Editions in both Korean and Chinese have appeared in the respective countries, but “the textbook has not been approved for use in Japan.”19 As Park and Shin observe, “it is hoped that this landmark work will help to achieve one of the most challenging long-term goals of regional reconciliation: to teach the reconciled, shared past to young people in Japan, Korea, and China.”20

One clue to the success of East Asian historians—not just in achieving mutual understanding but also in overcoming disagreements—is their shared commitment to transnational human rights and the importance of supplementing their national identities with identities of regional and global citizenship. Yoshida gets it just right when he says: During the wars among nations that have already scarred the nascent twenty-first century, states still consider nationality and race when deciding who shall live and who shall die. Readers of this volume should question the purposes for which we need to remember Nanjing: whether we shall use it to construct a global society that respects [sic] dignity of all human beings or to privilege certain national or ethnic groups above those we perceive as alien and threatening.22 Finally, Daqing Yang reminds those of us who are not East Asians both that all nations and peoples should reckon with their own past wrongs and that historians have a special moral responsibility to facilitate this reckoning;

Of course, given the existence—especially in Japan and China—of severe and intensifying popular nationalism and ethnocentrism, it will be difficult to for the collaborative

No single country can claim total immunity in its history. Indeed, neither the history of the West 

nor the history of China, with their own share of imperial expansions and barbarity, can serve as a final point of reference to condemn Japanese aggression and atrocity in World War II. The ultimate moral judgment should be anchored in a common ideal of humanity. As genocide and mass brutality have continued to take place long after World War II, often justified by demonizing the ethnic “other,” historians have all the more responsibility to prevent the categories of victim and perpetrator from being misused.23

victimizers are still living. It is true that China there has witnessed some public clamor to establish an international court to retry Japanese war criminals.25 Moreover, as we shall see in our discussion of reparations, in the 1990s surviving Korean comfort women, Nanjing victims, POWs and slave labor victims did achieve some public visibility and were able to tell their stories. For example, in 2000, Asian NGOs sponsored an International Women’s Tribunal.26 However, East Asian victims and those responsible for atrocities, like their Spanish and German counterparts, are rapidly passing. Moreover, elderly perpetrators who committed abuses as teenagers often are judged too far removed from their crimes or too senile to be held accountable.

Victim Voice and Victimizer Accountability. When many countries reckon with past wrongs, most of the perpetrators of human rights crimes as well as some of their victims are still living. In these nations, such as Chile, Rwanda, South Africa, Serbia, and Cambodia, those suspected of the most heinous crimes should be held accountable through fair judicial proceedings, those convicted of wrongdoing should receive appropriate punishment, and those victimized should be afforded a public platform to express their suffering and grievances.24 When (alleged) atrocities occurred in the distant past, however, these objectives are no longer realizable, at least with respect to individual perpetrators and their victims. No longer living are those Turkish government officials and military personnel who committed atrocities against Armenians in 1915. And few, if any, victims still survive. Alive today are neither victimizers nor victims of long-past moral crimes, such as the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from medieval Spain, the European and North/Latin American decimation of indigenous population, and the slave trade and institution of slavery, for example. It is especially in these cases—where the guilty cannot be punished and the victims have no public platform—that the work of historians is especially significant. Historical truth becomes especially paramount when the victimizers cannot be punished and victims cannot give voice to their own sufferings.

Accordingly with respect to the distant past and increasingly with respect to East Asian wrongdoing in the 1930s and 1940s, it is historians in their search for different sorts of truth who must also contribute—albeit in a second-hand or indirect way—to the goals of accountability and victim voice. Historians and legal scholars analyze and evaluate the “victors’ justice” of the Tokyo Trials, in contrast to the relative justice of Nuremburg. Historian and social critic Ian Buruma argues, for example, the Tokyo trials and other tribunals convened throughout Asia were run by people who had scant understanding of the way in which underlings take the blame for their much guiltier superiors: As a result, many people were wrongly accused of the wrong things for the wrong reasons. This is why there was such sympathy in Japan for the men branded by foreigners as war criminals, particularly the so-called Class B and Class C criminals, the men who followed orders, or gave them at a lower level: field commanders, camp guards, and so on.27 Moreover, historical writing, especially narratives and concrete depictions of individual victims and their families, like novels, film, and dance, may convey the pathos and misery of victims.28

Atrocities and abuses committed in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and in German and Japanese conduct before and during World War II are abuses for which it is increasingly difficult to hold living individuals responsible or give public voice to their victims. For few victims and even fewer

It should also be noted that historical writing and the truth that it establishes is the most important basis for positive role that museums, exhibitions, monuments, and commemorative events may play in contributing to the objectives 

as accountability and victim voice as well as truth. Museum film clips of tribunals as well as the recorded testimony of victims can contribute to criminal accountability and give victims a public platform.

with criminal wrong doing, impartial procedures must replace private revenge as well as the notions of collective guilt and racial or national stereotyping. In civil litigation, similar plaintiffs must be treated in similar ways. Some truth commissions are superior to others because of their balanced composition, decorum, and fair rules of procedure (including giving suspected perpetrators the right to have their say or challenge evidence). Rule of law is especially important in a democracy, whether emerging or mature, bent on distinguishing itself from prior authoritarianism, institutionalized bias, or the “rule of the gun.”

Of course, these public spaces and events can also, like all too much ethnocentric history writing, be vehicles for nationalistic propaganda, white-washing of national sins, demonizing of the enemy, and—to got to the other extreme—uncritical condemnation of one’s own country. Buruma wisely distinguishes memorials, which are ritualistic sites for uncritical and nationalistic sentiment, from genuine museums:

The work of various historians, as noted above, has made it clear that the Tokyo Trials significantly violated due process and should be judged to be a case of “victor’s justice.” Buruma points out one reason for this failure: the organizers of the Trials were more interested in providing for Japanese (and others) a “history lesson”—we might better say, “moral” lesson—than in determining whether or not individual persons were guilty as charged.31 Good historical writing, today, however, can reveal past misrule of law. Buruma also explains the paucity of (fair) war crimes trials in Japan in relation to a tradition in which “law was not a means to protect the people from arbitrary rule; it was rather, a way for the state to exercise more control over people.”32 The same point could be made in relation to not infrequent Chinese Communist Party control of judicial processes. Similarly, in relation to a commitment to rule of law, Korean legal scholars have criticized incomplete fact finding and various biases affecting the hasty work of Korea’s initial truth commission in the early 1990s.33 More recent Korean investigatory bodies have improved on fairness by being more balanced in composition, taking more time, employing professional historians, and broadening the categories of wrong doing to include Korean collaboration with the Japanese colonizers and wrongs committed during the Park and Chun military dictatorships.34

A museum, especially a history museum, cannot just show random objects. Objects must be organized according to ideas. Without stories history is unintelligible. Which is not to say there is no truth and all stories are propaganda. But to catch the truth there must be conflict, debate, interpretation, and reinterpretation—in short, a discourse without end. The problem is to show this in a museum.29 Museums might contrast diverse interpretations of war crimes trials and exhibit a variety of perpetrator acknowledgment and victim testimony. Rule of Law. As they reckon with past wrongs, democracies—whether relatively new, like South Korea, or more mature, like Japan—should comply with the rule of law; and non-democratic societies, such as China (or at least their democratic oppositions), if they were prudent, would lay the groundwork now for eventual rule of law. The rule of law is a critical part of Nuremberg’s complex legacy and is important for any society dealing with an evil past. Its relation to East Asia’s reckoning with past wrongs, however, the rule of law has evolved slowly, incompletely, and unevenly. Following legal scholar and philosopher David Luban’s analysis of rule of law, which itself draws on law professor Lon Fuller,30 let us define rule of law as a state’s respect for and compliance with due process, in the sense of procedural fairness, publicity, and impartiality. Like cases must be treated alike, and procedures must be transparent and open to public monitoring and criticism. In trials of those charged

In sum, although US actions in the Tokyo Trials and East Asia’s post-War efforts to reckon with past wrongs failed to realize adequately the liberal notion of rule of law, more recent institutions and processes are making progress. Moreover, East Asian historians describe and try to explain past East Asian deficits in compliance with the rule of law as well 

as contribute to greater respect for the rule of law in recent investigative bodies.

trials and truth commissions.37 Among the Handbook’s reparations cases are—not surprisingly—those that attracted much attention in the 1980s and 1990s: Germany’s compensation of Israel, Holocaust survivors, and slave laborers for Nazi crimes during World War II; US compensation of Japanese-American internment victims from 1942-45; Argentinean and Chilean compensation for state-enacted killings, disappearances, and torture suffered by their citizens during military rule in Argentina (1976-83) and Chile (1973-90); and the reparations program that South African’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended. Moreover, De Greiff has helpfully included in his volume cases of reparations programs—both failed and relatively successful ones—in Brazil, El Salvador, Haiti, the US (victims of September 11, 2001), and the United Nations Compensation Commission. The latter is a “mass claims resolution facility” to provide redress for injuries sustained during Iraq’s 1991 invasion of Kuwait.

Reparations. It is morally imperative that wrongdoers, whether states, corporations, or individuals, right the wrongs they have committed by “repairing” their victims. The goal of truth focuses on the objective (or intersubjective) facts. Legal punishment and public shaming, both ways of holding perpetrators accountable, puts the emphasis on wrongdoers (although arguably victims are entitled to having justice done). Victims take center stage not only when they tell their story and express their grievances but also when they demand and receive redress for the harms they have suffered. Although the terms “reparation,” “reparative justice,” “just compensation,” “redress,” “restitution,” “indemnification,” “rectification,” “making good again” (Wiedergutmachung), and “rehabilitation” may be used in somewhat different ways, each term underscores the importance that victims (or their heirs) in some way be “repaired.”35 Relative to other goals such as truth, (punitive) justice, and reconciliation, the goal of reparation, the term that I will usually use for “righting past wrongs,” has come into greater prominence in the last decade. Likewise, the mechanisms of individual and mass-claims civil suits, on the one hand, and state-sponsored reparations programs, on the other, have claimed relatively more global public attention recently than have war crimes trials and truth commission reports. It should also be observed that victimizer acknowledgement, confession, apology, and acts of repentance may also be understood as means that perpetrator’s adopt to make amends to their victims.

Although the Handbook does include Erik K. Yamamoto and Liann Ebesugawa’s essay “Report on Redress: The Japanese American Internment,”38 noteworthy by its absence from the Handbook is any mention let alone discussion of reparatory justice in East Asia. Of course, it is not unusual for discussion of reckoning with past wrongs, in general, and transitional justice in particular to neglect East Asia.39 Yet one would have thought that at least the compensation case of the Korean and Chinese “comfort women” would have merited some attention. The larger problem, of course, is scant engagement exists between Asian and non-Asians confronting the challenges in reckoning with past wrongs. The current essay is an effort to promote such a dialogue.

Pablo De Greiff, Director of Research in the International Center for Transitional Justice, New York, has edited a massive and ground-breaking volume, The Handbook of Reparations, that consists of a dozen cases studies, historical and evaluative essays, and primary documents concerning reparations programs.36 This valuable study both manifests recent interest in the end and means of reparation and undoubtedly will stimulate even more attention to this topic. It is bound to play a role in the last decade of the 21st century similar to the US Institute of Peace’s three volumes of essays, case studies, and documents that contribute so much to discussion in the late 1990s and early 21st century on the relative merits of

In order to take stock of East Asian attempts to realize the goal of reparative justice, I briefly describe major past and present East Asian efforts to repair past wrongs and pause at several points to identify the issues to be addressed in normative and practical assessment. Traditionally, victorious states, in peace treaties at the conclusion of a war, demanded that defeated nations pay reparations for damages the victors suffered in the conflict. The 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, between the victorious allies and defeated Japan, declared that that Japan should pay reparations to those countries that suffered war-related damages in World War II. Due to US in10

fluence, however, this requirement was made contingent on Japan’s ability to pay, and signatories waived their right to reparations. This “softening” of the reparation requirement occurred, according to historian Mike Mochizuki, because the US wanted to avoid the calamitous impact of Germany’s reparation burden following World War I, and the US was at that time seeking Japan as an ally to help contain Chinese and Soviet communism in the emerging Cold War.40 Japan also signed treaties with countries who were not signatories to the San Francisco Treaty and on the basis of these bilateral treaties (i) paid explicit compensation to Burma, Indonesia, Philippines, and Vietnam and three other countries; (ii) provided—with the express purpose of settling accounts with the past—grants and untied aid to other victimized countries, such as Korea and Thailand; and (iii) supplied grants and concessional loans to former victim countries to aid in their postwar reconstruction.41 Japan has paid some Yen 1.1 trillion in these three forms of state-to-state compensation.

concesssional loans that totaled Yen 180 billion. Not only did each side get something important from the deal, but each was able to favorably “spin” the agreement for national consumption. Japan and the Chinese communist regime reached a similar agreement in 1972 when “China agreed to waive all claims for wartime reparations for the sake of “friendship between the Chinese and Japanese people” and “Japan in turn agreed to provide large amounts of economic assistance to China.”43 Although De Greiff is reluctant to designate such assistance as genuine reparation,44 it certainly functioned as a functional equivalent or compensation substitute.45 Such arrangements amount to one way in which the goals of reparation and long-term development may reinforce each other. I return to this issue in the next subsection. Internationally, state-to-individual reparations have increasingly supplemented if not replaced state-to-state reparations. This change is arguably part of globalization’s progressive erosion of state sovereignty and the closely related increase in the importance of individual moral and legal rights. Just as states are no longer seen as black boxes that permit governments to violate with impunity their citizens’ rights, states and their representatives are morally and legally liable for wrongdoing against citizens of other countries. In this connection the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that victims of human rights violations have a right—against perpetrators—to “remedy.”

The 1965 settlement between Japan and Korea was interesting on three counts. First, South Korea sought remedy for what it considered to be illegal Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910. Here we see clearly one way in which the goal of reparatory justice depends on satisfying the demands of truth. Second, what Korea wanted by way of redress was not only financial compensation but, as Mochizuki relates, “an apology for the thirty-six years of hardship under Japanese colonial domination.”42 It is noteworthy that Korea wanted both state-to-state financial redress and apology. Good reasons exist to consider apologies as a sort of symbolic compensation in contrast to material compensation, whether in the form of monetary transfers or what De Greiff calls “service packages,” for example, medical, educational, and housing assistance. Moreover, it is reasonable to link material and symbolic compensation. Apology without material compensation seems empty or too easy; material redress without (heartfelt) apology risks (the perception of) moral blackmail. Third, although Japan would not compromise on its judgment that its annexation of Korea was legal and did not apologize to South Korea until 1998, the two sides reached an agreement in which South Korea relinquished any further claims against Japan, and Japan provided South Korea with an economic assistance package in grants and

It is helpful to distinguish and evaluate three ways in which a state, such as Japan, or a company, such as a Japanese wartime company that employed slave labor, compensates individuals for injury or rights violation caused by the state or company. First, in individual compensation, a state or company redresses a relatively isolated individual plaintiff who has litigated successfully in a civil suit against the state or company in question. Second, in mass claim compensation, a state (or company), compensates individuals who join together (or have been joined by a judge) in mass-claims litigation that, when successful, results in awarding (perhaps with different amounts) each of the individuals in the collective suit. Third, in what De Greiff calls a “reparations program,” a state or international body (such as the United Nations Compensation Commission) designs and administers 11

a nonjudicial program that directly and speedily provides benefits to many victims. Rather than merely award material benefits in proportion to harm with requirement or option of also apologizing, in reparations programs the administrative unit as two aims: (i) the recognition through both material and symbolic benefits (e.g., apologies) of former victims as rights-bearing human beings, and (ii) and the promotion of some sort of reconciliation between state or corporation and those whose rights it violated.46

doned there could reunite with their relatives in Korea.”51 Second, in the face of international pressure concerning comfort women, in 1995 Japanese Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi announced the idea of a “friendship fund” to disburse Yen 100 billion over a ten-year period for educational and cultural projects that would benefit individual Filipino, Taiwanese, and Korean women, but not label government payments as “compensation.”52 The International Commission of Jurists criticized this plan because, argued the commission, it ducked Japan’s obligation under international law to compensate women.53 Responding to this criticism, the Murayama government established the Asian Women’s Fund (AWF). First, it set up a unit to conduct historical research on comfort women. Second, the prime minister gave a letter of apology to each victim.54 Third, recognizing that material redress was as important as symbolic compensation, the AWF dispensed Yen 1,200,000 to each Filipina victim and 3,000,000 to each Taiwanese and Korean victim (but none to Chinese comfort women). However, not wanting to make itself vulnerable to litigation, for example, from Chinese women, nor to rebuke from reactionaries believing that compensation issues had been settled in 1952, the Japanese government unfortunately did not designate these funds are “compensation.”55

Each of these three approaches to redress or reparation may occur in a country in transition from authoritarianism, such as South Korea, in which establishment or recovery of the rule of law is important part of democratization, or in a more or less mature democracy, such as Japan, in which the rule of law is basically operative at present but serious wrongdoing occurred in the past. Although each of these ways of redressing past injustices, each of which is illustrated in East Asia, has advantages and disadvantages, they need not be incompatible and, as we shall see in the East Asia case, can work together. In 1991 East Asian countries began to confront the issues of state-to-individual redress for damages that individuals suffered during World War II. In that year the Japanese Diet declared that the 1965 agreement between Japan and South Korea permitted individuals to bring suit in Japanese courts against the Japanese government.47 In the same year Wang Lusheng, a delegate to China’s National Congress put forward a bill, which failed to gain approval, that would have given official support for Chinese comfort women to bring lawsuits against Japan.48 Finally, inspired by US class-action lawsuits, globalized human rights, and international feminism, three Korean comfort women brought a class-action suit against Japan in Japanese courts.49 In 1998, a Japanese district court ruled in favor of the three women, and the Japanese government paid each of them the equivalent of $2,140—well short, however, of the $785,770 the three Koreans had sought.50

A fourth component of AWF was to indeed make an “atonement” of Yen 2,000,000 to each victim but not with public money.56 Onuma Yasuaki defends these payments from private sources as an expression of the Japanese people’s fulfilling their obligation to compensate victims of Japanese atrocities. Mochizuki, however, points out the government difficulty in raising the needed private funds and its payments to only about 70 women, mostly Filipinas. Moreover, some NGOs made the “righteous” claim that comfort women should decline such payments, tainted as they were by the private origin of the monies. Apparently persuaded by this argument, in 1998 Korean president Kim Dae Jung outflanked AWF and provided Korean compensatory payments to 152 women but only if they refused to accept Japanese payments.57

In 1994, perhaps in grasping its vulnerability to individual and class-action suits, the Japanese government instituted two non-litigious reparations program. First, it provided Yen 530 million so that Koreans whom Japan “forcibly recruited to work in Sakhalin during the war and subsequently aban-

Hence, not realized was the AWF’s great potential as a government non-litigious reparations program, and unfortunately it is scheduled to terminate in 2007 before its flaws 12

can be remedied. Although it dispensed Yen 565 million, it was limited in vision and compromised in execution. AWF did recognize the importance of combining individualized governmental apology with material compensation. However, although some Japanese interpreted the private funding as appropriate people-to-people compensation, other Japanese and Koreans judged it as an abdication of the Japanese government’s obligation to repair. Reparations, even well-intentioned ones, are no panacea for reckoning with past wrongs.

business leaders, perhaps to compete with Japanese companies in China, have set up a legal fund for the forced laborers. The Chinese government has the endorsed suits against Japanese companies but, perhaps reluctant to jeopardize Japanese trade and investment in China, has not yet allowed suits against the Japanese government. The Japanese lower courts have ruled in favor of the Chinese plaintiffs four times and in favor of the defendants eight times. If the Japanese Supreme Court rules against the plaintiffs, they may take their cases to Chinese Courts.

Even less successful have been recent efforts by Chinese and Koreans individuals (and nationals from six other countries), who have sought compensation for past wages or damages through individual or mass-claims litigation. Since the successfully resolved 1998 litigation of the three Korean comfort women, comfort women have brought about sixty lawsuits in Japanese courts and about forty in US courts.58 Typically in US courts, judges have dismissed these lawsuits prior to trial and a consideration of the merits of the case. Among the reasons for dismissals have been doctrines of sovereign immunity (one nation-state should be immune to the legal processes of another nation-state), the “political question doctrine” (a US court cannot interfere with political questions such as US foreign policy), and a statute of limitations (of 1 to 10 years).59 In Japan, judges rejected redress claims on the basis of the 1951 Peace Treaty and a 20-year statute of limitations.

The legal route, whether in Japanese or Chinese courts, may be suboptimal. As Mochizuki shows, legal scholars like Onuma Yasuaki argue that, regardless of legal considerations, both moral and long-term prudential arguments lead to the conclusion that the Japanese government should devise a nonlegal reparations program to compensate victims of past wrongs.62 Arguably neither the individual or mass-claim litigation route nor state-to-state compensation plus apology is, at least by itself and in the present state of legal evolution, the most promising way forward. Perhaps what is called is for Japan return to the idea of the AWF, correct its flaws, and institute a more acceptable massive state-funded reparations program for its many sorts of living victims (or their heirs). What the AWF got wrong was in the private sourcing of the explicitly compensatory payments to individuals. What is got right was the combining material payment with the symbolic reparations of individual apology. In the next subsection, I discuss a recent and promising joint Korean-Japanese government reparations program.

In 2000 Japan had already backed away from the idea of state-to-individual compensation when, responding to Amercan POW lawsuits against Japanese companies, the government declared that the 1951 Treaty settlement covered state-to-individual as well as state-to-state compensation. This declaration, however, did not end the matter. Many Asians (and not just Chinese and Koreans) pointed out that China and Korea had not been signatories to the 1951 Treaty. Moreover, 200 Chinese forced laborers have brought 14 mass claims in Japanese courts against the Japanese government or successors to wartime Japanese companies.60 New York Times correspondent Norimitsu Onishi quoted one of these plaintiffs as follows: “First, we want an apology, then compensation.”61

In a fascinating essay, Roy L. Brooks discusses the relevance of Japanese and Nazi forced labor litigation for US slavery and Jim Crow litigation. On the one hand, Brooks has not given up on discerning in or inventing for US law a morally credible way to justify redress to the descendents of slaves; for, otherwise, “US law embodies America’s worst atrocity and the corrupt laws that made that atrocity possible.” On the other hand, Brooks continues: But I also believe that litigation (or, more broadly, the tort model) may not be the best strategy for redressing slavery and Jim Crow. Because of inherent limitations, litigation cannot provide the forward-looking strategy that the ‘Black Redress

The Chinese laborers, initially with private-raised Japanese funds, hired Japanese lawyers. More recently Chinese 13

Movement’ needs. Without a genuine apology from the perpetrator government, there can be no racial reconciliation. Compensation alone does nothing to repair a broken relationship between victim and perpetrator, which, in my view, is the true value of slave redress.63

unless it identifies the causes of past abuses and takes steps to reform the law and basic institutions—government, economic life, and civil society—in order to reduce the possibility that such violations will be repeated. This point applies to South Korea today and, one hopes, to China someday in the future. More generally, reckoning with past political wrongs requires that societies be oriented to the future as well as to the past and present. Roy L. Brooks, in his challenge (quoted above) to the US Black Redress Movement hits exactly the right note when he called for a “forward-looking strategy” that goes beyond the backward-facing strategy of litigation. Reconciliation, the future goal that Brooks affirms as urgent for the Black Redress Movement, is also important, as we shall argue in the next subsection, for East Asia. The more general point, however, is that in reckoning with the past wrongdoing, East Asian nations and the region as a whole should strive to reform those institutions that contributed to past wrongdoing and aim for good national and regional development. One lesson that non-Asians can learn from the East Asian experience of dealing with a difficult past is precisely the way that such efforts are related to present regional realities and future regional goals.

In 1988 the US reparations program made substantial grants to 120,000 Japanese-American citizens and Japanese resident aliens who in 1942 had been forcibly removed from their homes and interned in concentration-like camps. Accompanying the government reparations payment to each recipient was this presidential apology on behalf of the US government and people: A monetary sum and words alone cannot restore lost years or erase painful memories; neither can they fully convey our Nation’s resolve to rectify injustice and to uphold the rights of individuals. We can never fully right the wrongs of the past. But we can take a clear stand for justice and recognize that serious injustices were done to Japanese Americans during World War II.

It is true, of course, that East Asian nations have employed “history” policies both as means to advance questionable national objectives as well as tools to prevent the pursuit of good national and regional goals. For example, China has played the “history card” (recalling Japanese war crimes and pressing for Japanese apologies) to stir up anti-Japanese sentiment as a means of stimulating Chinese economic competition with Japan or tightening up central government and Party control. But China also waived (or recalled the waiver of) compensation from Japan to promote China-Japan “friendship” in the form of development assistance, trade, and investment. Japanese “reactionary revisionists” in curriculum reform and the popular media have denied Japan’s World War II guilt or tried to rationalize its wartime conduct as a way of instilling national pride and becoming a “normal” state with it own military, constitution, and foreign policy.

In enacting a law calling for restitution and offering a sincere apology, your fellow Americans have, in a very real sense, renewed their traditional commitment to the ideals of freedom, equality, and justice. You and your family have our best wishes for the future.64 Such reparations program with both a material and apology component call into question Soon-Won Park and GiWook Shin’s suggestion that a fundamental difference exists, with respect to models of conflict resolution, between Asian moral culture and Western legal culture. Better to say that both East and West are moving toward an approach to reckoning with past wrongs in which the ideal of reparative justice is best realized by combining material components with symbolic elements such as apology.65 Money without apology is insulting; apology without money is both cheap and easy.

On the positive side of the ledger, pre-Tiananmen student criticism of the way the government had failed to press Japan on the war crimes issue was part of the student democracy

Institutional Reform and Long-term Development. An emerging democracy fails to make a sustainable transition 14

Reconciliation. In discussions above, I have quoted some who have invoked reconciliation as a valuable objective for East Asian nations as they reckon with their individual and collective pasts. And the term “reconciliation,” as well as “memory” and “security” appears prominently in the title of this workshop. Indeed, nations, regions, and the international community seeking to surmount a conflictual or repressive past should aim to reconcile former enemies.

movement. More recently, Korean president Roh Moo-Hyun has brought up the issue of the redress on comfort women in a way that is likely to promote some sort of reconciliation between Korea and Japan. In 2005 Roh established a reparations program that permitted Korean forced labor victims to apply to the Korean government for compensation for Japanese forced mobilization. Subsequently, Roh also urged Japan to embark with Korea in a joint reparations program in which the two countries would share responsibilities for compensating Korean victims. This promising and comprehensive Korea-Japan approach has four steps: truth finding, apology and reflection, reparation, and reconciliation.66 As Park and Shinn remark, although Japan has not yet responded to Roh’s proposal, the South Korean government “more articulated and proactive new policy” puts reckoning with the Korean-Japanese past in the context of ongoing dialogue and cooperation between the two countries: “It [the South Korean government] seemed to understand that reconciliation is a two-way process which must be a joint inter-state and inter-societal effort.”67

There are, however, at least five meanings of reconciliation, ranging from “thinner” to “thicker” conceptions, and both historical and policy deliberation in East Asia would benefit from some clarification of this term.69 When even Saddam Hussein in his trial in Iraq calls on “all Iraqis—Arabs and Kurds—to forgive, reconcile and make up,” 70 it is advisable to be clear what concept of reconciliation is being used (and whether or not it is a cover for other pleas). In the most minimal account, which almost everyone agrees is at least part of what should be meant by the term, reconciliation is nothing more than “non-lethal coexistence”71 in the sense that former enemies cease tyrannizing and killing each other. Although this modus vivendi is certainly better than violent conflict, transitional and other societies can and arguably should aim higher. A cessation of violence, without something more, easily can slide back into conflict. The question is, “How much (and what sort of) more?”

Furthermore, the Japanese government, encouraged by both Japanese academics and progressive NGOs, is learning that reckoning with its past national wrongs requires regional reforms and new regional structures. Its failure to reckon adequately with its past wrongs has prevented it from exercising regional leadership and achieving regional security, for example in managing North Korea’s military and now nuclear threat. As Mochizuki observes:

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and especially its chair Bishop Demond Tutu, employed a second and very thick meaning of reconciliation—reconciliation as personal forgiveness, mercy (rather than justice), a shared moral vision, mutual healing, and social harmony.72 Given the depth of hostility between past opponents and both moral and practical objections to coercing mutuality, contrition, or the granting of forgiveness, this thick conception of reconciliation is more difficult to defend than that of peaceful co-existence.

Japan’s failure to achieve reconciliation with its East Asian neighbors about its militarist past has burdened its foreign policy. If Japan did acknowledge and repent for its historical wrongs to the satisfaction of its neighbors, the rest of East Asia might be more willing to accept Japanese influence and leadership—even in the military security realm. It might also open the way for Japan to become more autonomous of the United States in pursuing its regional interests.68

In between the thin and thick conceptions of reconciliation are three less extreme and political interpretations of reconciliation, which I call “mutual security,” “deliberative reciprocity,” and “historical reconciliation.” In mutual security, former enemies—be they adversaries within one society

The challenge for each East Asian nation and region as a whole is how to reckon with national past wrongs in such a way as to promote both national and regional development that is sustainable just and secure. 15

or nation-states formally engaged in war—may reconcile in the sense of going beyond non-lethal co-existence to establish workable “rules of the game” that mediate conflict and guide cooperation on such matters as security, economic opportunities, and taxation. This sort of reconciliation depends on the sharing of norms of tolerance (putting up with the other’s way of life), trust (in the other’s compliance with agreements), restraint (in refraining from breaking agreements) and accommodation (to the other’s concerns). Respecting these norms, in turn, is based on both mutual self-interest and basic fairness. We will comply if and because you will comply (and vice-versa).73

in the senses of mutual security and deliberative reciprocity, is to reconcile with their common past. And one of the best ways to achieve this historical reconciliation is, on the basis of mutual security and deliberative reciprocity, to engage in multinational and multidisciplinary historical investigation concerning the causes, nature, and consequences of past wrongdoing. Former enemies can settle accounts with the past and to some extent with each other in and through forging at least the general outline of a common narrative about what happened and why. Although complete consensus will be impossible and sometimes undesirable and although agreement on details may be elusive, we can hope for convergence on the main framework and identify those disagreements that call for either further investigation and dialogue or informed tolerance.

Building on both nonlethal coexistence and mutual security is the ideal of reconciliation as “deliberative reciprocity.” Among other things, this concept implies a willingness of former intrastate or national enemies to enter into dialogue and deliberation. In dialogue former adversaries seek to hear each other out and learn about each other (even though they may not like what they hear or reach agreement). In deliberation the parties try to solve a concrete problem or make a policy choice together in and through the exchange of proposals, reasons, and criticisms. They enter into give‑and‑take about defining a problem, build on areas of common concern, and forge principled compromises with which all can live.74 Reconciliation, so conceived as public dialogue and deliberation, may succeed even better than mutual security alone in preventing a society or region from lapsing back into violence as a way to resolve conflict. Applied to East Asia, this “deliberative reciprocity” rendering of reconciliation is both desirable and practical.

Public Deliberation. Any society or region reckoning with past atrocities should aim, I believe, to include public spaces, debate, and deliberation in its goals, institutions, and strategies. Public deliberation is one goal whose realization enables a group to decide on the priority and specification of its other goals and its available means in reckoning with past wrongs. It is unlikely that in any given society—and certainly any region—there will be full agreement about the aims and means for dealing with past abuses. And, even if there were such agreement, trade‑offs would have to be made. All good things do not always go together; sometimes achieving or even approximating one important end will come at the expense of subordinating, postponing, or neglecting another. Legal sanctions against former human rights violators can imperil a potential democracy, like China, or fledgling democracy, like South Korea, in which the military responsible for the earlier abuses still wields social and political power. In order to guard against intrusion and adverse publicity, a multinational and nonofficial investigative body may have to do its work out of the public spotlight if not behind closed doors. Testimony by victims and confessions by perpetrators may worsen relations among former enemies, at least in the short run.76 What is spent on historical collaboration, high‑profile trials and punishments, or costly reparations will not be available to spend on educational programs that would narrate the past and overcome national biases and

It is desirable because not only because it substitutes dialogue and deliberation for violence but also because it gives each nation a role at the table to decide how and when to collaborate and cooperate with others in the region. It is practical because it builds on mutual self-interest but goes beyond it to deeper engagement in which the parties seek, through dialogue, to understand each other and, through deliberation, to forge solutions to common problems. One desirable cause and effect of reconciliation as public dialogue and deliberation is yet a third ideal of reconciliation, that of “historical reconciliation.”75 An important means by which former adversaries may reconcile with each other, 16

ethnic stereotyping. What can be aspired to, within democracies but also between democracies and nondemocracies, is that disagreements about ends, trade‑offs, and means will be reduced if not eliminated through dialogue and deliberation—national, regional, and international—that permits a fair hearing for all and promotes mutual understanding, morally acceptable compromises, and tolerance of remaining differences.

and between countries and challenge the naiveté of a thick notion of reconciliation. Third, the most promising efforts in East Asian efforts to reckon with past wrong doing occur when historians and other social scientists from a variety of East Asian and other countries enter into dialogue and deliberation to write a common history of the region and common textbooks for the next generation of East Asians. Universities, foundations, and research centers have a special role to play in providing cross-cultural institutional support. Fourth, and more generally, East Asians are establishing venues and institutions in which they grapple together—through both dialogue and deliberation and as both regional and national citizens—to resolve questions of reparations and problems of regional development.

Public deliberation, whether within or between countries, can sometimes discover ways in which trade offs among the goals can be avoided and the various goals may be related in virtual circles. The achievement of one goal can itself be a means (whether one that is helpful, necessary, or the best) to the realization of one or more other important goals. For instance, I have argued that achieving the goal of truth and historical reconciliation in East Asia is not only good in itself but is a likely means to accountability, fair compensation, and reconciliation. Likewise, the right sort of reparations (material plus apology) promise to contribute to reconciliation as mutual security, deliberative reciprocity, and further historical reconciliation.

Fifth, and both a cause and consequence cross cultural collaboration, is the importance that East Asians and all human beings free themselves from what Yang calls the “iron cage of national consciousness.”77 To do so, we must freely nurture and celebrate our multiple identities. Not only are we citizens of particular nations and families but also are members of regional and professional groups and, most importantly, members of the human family. By virtue of our humanity, we are both rights-bearers ourselves and obliged to respect the rights of our fellow world citizens, whatever their nationality and ethnicity. East Asian historians, among others, point the way. It is fitting to conclude with Yoshida’s remarks in the final paragraph of his book on history and memory in East Asia:

Although each of the eight goals specified above has prescriptive content, each allows considerable latitude in devising policies sensitive to specific historical and local matters. Different means may be justified in East Asia than in other regions for achieving cross-cultural ends. Moreover, the deliberative selection of means—constrained by national and regional institutional capacities—in turn will have consequences for the ways in which East Asians rank and sequence their goals in reckoning with past national and regional wrongs.

It has already been possible for many individuals in all three nations to overcome the limitations of ethnocentrism and nationalism in their thinking about Nanjing. Motivated by the ideal of universal human rights, concerned persons may eventually be able to agree on an international history of the Nanjing Massacre whose objective will be to produce a more harmonious future. Such a history would seek neither to exploit, nor to exaggerate, nor to rationalize atrocity. Instead, it would articulate an understanding of events that values human life without regard to ethnicity, nationality, religion or gender.78

Concluding Remarks I conclude by underscoring five lessons that other nations and the global community may learn from East Asian efforts to reckon with past wrongs. First, we must recognize that any attempts to deal appropriately with a difficult past are actions that take place in and are affected for good and ill by national politics and regional challenges. Second, we must be realistic about the depth of historical animosity within 17

Notes

20 Ibid. In note 9, the authors also mention Korea-Japan Solidarity 21, an association of Korean and Japanese scholars committed to mutual criticism and regional solidarity. See also Yoshida, Making, 151-52, and James Reilly and Daqing Yang, “Memory and Reconciliation in East Asia: Chinese Perspectives,” unpublished manuscript, 54.

1 Quoted in Takashi Yoshida, The Making of the “Rae of Nanking”: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 179. 2 Hannah Arendt, “A Reply,” The Review of Politics, 15 (1953), 79. Quoted in Seyla Benhabib, “Complexity, Interdependence, and Community,” in Women, Culture and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities, eds. Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 249. I own this reference to William O’Neill. 3 See David A. Crocker, “Insiders and Outsiders in International Development Ethics,” Ethics and International Affairs, “ 5 (1991), 149-73. 4 Soon-Won Park and Gi-Wook Shin, “Memory, Reconciliation, and Confidence –Building in East Asia: Korean Perspective,” unpublished manuscript, November 2005, 11. 5 Ibid. 6 Yoshida, Making, 8. 7 South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission distinguished forensic from emotional and interpretative truth. See Charles Villa-Vicencio and Wilhelm Verwoerd, eds. Looking Back, Reaching Forward: Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (Captetonw, UCT Press, 2000). 8 Ibid. 9 A recent example is Elizabeth Kolbert, “Dead Reckoning: The Armenian Genocide and the Politics of Silence,” New Yorker, 6 November 2006, 120-24, a review of Taner Akcam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Metropolitan, 2006). 10 Charles S. Maier, Foreword, The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, ed. Joshua A. Fogel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), xv. See Daqing Yang, “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre: Reflections on “Writings on the Rape of Nanjing,” American Historical Review 104 (1999), 842-65. 11 Yang, “Challenges,” 170. 12 Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanjing: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997). 13 Yoshida, Making, 179. 14 Yang, “Challenges,” 172. 15 Ibid., 167. See also Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivity and Relativism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002). 16 Amartya Sen, “What Do We Want from a Theory of Justice? Journal of Philosophy, CIII (2006), 237. 17 Soon-Won Park and Gi-Wook Shin, “Memory,” 5. 18 Soon-Won Park and Gi-Wook Shin, “Memory,” 5. 19 Ibid., 6.

21 Onuma Yasuaki, “Japanese War Guilt and Postwar Responsibilities of Japan,” Berkeley Journal of International Law, 20 (2002), 620. 22

Yoshida, Making, 183.

23

Yang, “Challenges,” 159.

24 David A. Crocker, “Punishment, Reconciliation, and Democratic Deliberation,” Buffalo Criminal Law Journal, 5 (2002), 509-49 25 Reilly and Yang, “Memory,” 37, citing Oyang Lieden, “Riben qunhua shi yu jiaokeshu xiuding wenti yantaohui zongshu” [Summary of the Conference ‘The history of Japan’s Invasion of China and the Issues of Textbook Revision], Journal of Studies of China’s War of Resistance Against Japan [Kagnri zhanzhen yanjiu], 39 (2001), 222. 26

Cite?

27 Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994), 169. See also Onuma Yasuaki, “Japanese War Guilt,” 604. 28 Important examples of such studies of particular victims include John Hersey, Hiroshima, a volume that shocked Americans in the 1960s to the horror of the US dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945; Chuck Sudetic, Blood and Vengeance: One Family’s Story of the War in Bosnia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998); and Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (New York: Harper/Collins, 2006). Ariel Dorfman’s play and film Death and the Maiden gives voice—in the character of Paulina—to those torture victims often ignored in Latin American efforts to reckon with past wrongs. 29

Ibid., 234.

30 David Luban, “The Legacies of Nuremberg,” in Legal Modernism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 335–78. Cf. Lon L. Fuller, The Morality of Law, rev. ed. (New Haven, 1977), 33–39. 31

Buruma, Wages, 144.

32

Ibid., 160.

33 Soon-Won Park and Gi-Wook Shin, “Memory,” 14 and 44, n. 26. 34

Ibid., 14.

35 Pablo De Greiff, “Repairing the Past: Compensation for Victims of Human Rights Violations,” in The Handbook of Reparations, ed. Pablo De Greiff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1-3. 36 For analysis of these cases as well as general historical and evaluative essays, see De Greiff, ed. Handbook. See also Geroge Ulrich and Louise Krabbe Boserup, eds. Human Rights in Development Yearbook 2001: Reparations: Redressing Past Wrongs (The Hague: Kluwer Law International; Oslo: Nordic Hu18

man Rights Publications, 2003).

52 For two assessments of the AWF, see Onuma Yasuaki, “Japanese War Guilt,” 607-608; and Mochizuki, “Memory,” 4244. 53 Mochizuki, “Memory,” 43. 54 Onuma Yasuaki, “Japanese War Guilt,” 607. 55 Mochizuki, “Memory,” 43. 56 Onuma Yasuaki, “Japanese War Guilt,” 607. 57 Mochizuki, “Memory,” 43. 58 Soon-Won Park and Gi-Wook Shin, “Memory,” 10. See also, Mochizuki, 42. 59 Roy L. Brooks, “Litigating Mass Claims Involving Slavery and Jim Crow Under United States Law,” in Redressing Injustices, ed. Permanent Court of Arbitration, 185. 60 In this paragraph and the next I draw on Norimitsu Onishi, “Wartime Chinese Laborers Su Japan for Compensation,” New York Times, November 15, 2006, A 11. 61 Ibid. 62 Mochizuki, “Memory,” 43, cites Onuma Yasuaki, “Japanese War Guilt,” 614. 63 Brooks, “Litigating Mass Claims,” in Redressing Injustices, ed. Permanent Court of Arbitration, 181-82. 64 Quoted in Eric K. Yamamoto and Liann Ebesugawa, “Report on Redress: The Japanese American Internment,” in Handbook, ed. De Greiff, 269. 65 See Erik Doxtader, “Reparation,” in Pieces of the Puzzle: Keywords on Reconciliation and Transitional Justice, ed. Charles Villa-Vicencio and Erik Doxtader (Capetown: Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, 2004), 25-32. 66 Soon-Won Park and Gi-Wook Shin, “Memory,” 29-30. 67 Ibid., 30. 68 Mochizuki, “Memory,” 1. See also ibid., 47, 50 and Masaru Tamamoto, “How Japan Imagines China and Sees Itself,” World Policy Journal, (Winter 2005/06), 56. 69 See, for example, “Reconciliation,” in Pieces, 3-9. 70 John Ward Anderson, “Hussein Asks Iraqi Factions to Reconcile,” Washington Post, 8 November 2006, A3, 19. 71 David A. Crocker, “Punishment, Reconciliation, and Democratic Deliberation,” Buffalo Criminal Law Review, 5 (2002), 528; “Reckoning with Past Wrongs: A Normative Framework,” Ethics & International Affairs, 13 (1999): 43-64. 72 Desmond M. Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness (New York: Random House, 1999), 23, 31, 54-55. 73 I adopt this notion of mutual security from Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 1516, 36-37. 74 For this view of dialogue and deliberation, see Peter Levine, Archon Fung, and John Gastil, “Future Directions for Public Deliberation,” in John Gastil and Peter Levine, The Deliberative Democracy Handbook: Strategies for Effective Civic Engagement in the 21st Century (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005). See also David A. Crocker, “Sen and Deliberative Democracy,” in in Alexander Kaufman, ed., Capabilities Equality: Basic Issues and

37 Neil J. Kritz, ed., Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes, 3 vols. (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1995). 38 Erik K. Yamamoto and Liann Ebesugawa “Report on Redress: The Japanese American Internment, in Handbook, 257-83. 39 Ulrich and Boserup, eds. Human Rights in Development addresses European, Latin American, African, and Central Asian issues and cases but altogether neglects East and South Asia. 40 Mike Mochizuki, with Sharon Chamberlain and Jeffrey Hornung, “Memory and Reconciliation in East Asia: Japanese Perspectives,” unpublished manuscript, June 2005, 40. For additional possible US reasons for waiving reparations, see also Onuma Yasuaki, “Japanese War Guilt,” 605, n. 9. 41 Mochizuki, “Memory,” 2, 40, Appendix A: Postwar Settlement Treaties and Agreements, 61-73. 42

Ibid, 41.

43

Ibid.

44 Pablo De Greiff, “Justice and Reparations,” in Handbook, ed. De Greiff, 469-70. 45 Commenting on Chinese leader Li Peng’s 1992 remarks on the link between economic aid and war reparations, historian Mark Eykholt observes “Li’s comments make clear that China expected increased aid from Japan because China did not demand war reparations.” (Mark Eykholt, “Aggression, Victimization, and Chinese Historiography of the Nanjing Massacre, in Nanjing Massacre, ed. Fogel, 51. Li’s comments, quoted by Eykholt, occur in Foreign Broadcast Information Service, “Li Peng Links Japanese Aid with Repayments for Invasion,” Daily Report: China, 19 September, 1995, 18. 46 Here I draw on De Greiff’s conception of a state’s reparations program that he sets forth in “Repairing the Past,” and more fully in “Justice and Reparation,” in Handbook, 1-2, and 451-59, respectively. 47

Mochizuki, 42.

48

Reilly and Yang, 41.

49

Soon-Won Park and Gi-Wook Shin, “Memory,” 10.

50

Mochuzuki, 44.

51 Mochizuki, 42. The Iran-United States Claims Tribunal, established in 1981, anticipated the first full-blown mass reparation program, the United Nations Compensation Commission (“UNCC”). Established in 1991, the aim of the UNCC was “to resolve [the 2.6 million] claims resulting from the Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait” (Hans Das, “The Concept of Mass Claims and the Specificity of Mass Claims Resolution,” in Permanent Court of Arbitration, Redressing Injustices through Mass Claims Processes: Innovative Responses to Unique Challenges [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006], 3, note omitted). See also Hans van Houtte, Hans Das, and Bart Delmartino, “The United Nations Compensation Commission,” in Handbook, ed, De Greiff, 321-89. It would be interesting to investigate whether the UNCC influenced Japan in setting up of the Sakhalin or later Comfort Women programs. 19

Problems, ed. Alexander Kaufman (New York: Routledge, 2006), 155-97. 75 See Susan Dwyer, “Reconciliation for Realists,” Ethics & International Affairs, 13 (1999), 81-98. 76 See Gilbert A. Lewthwaite, “In South Africa, Much Truth Yields Little Reconciliation,” Baltimore Sun, July 30, 1998, 12; and Phylicia Oppelt, “Irreconcilable: The Healing Work of My Country’s Truth Commission Has Opened New Wounds for Me,” Washington Post, September 13, 1998, C1, C4. 77 Yang, “Challenges,” 166. See also Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York and London: Norton, 2006). 78 Yoshida, Making, 183.

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