hankyoreh

Japan is losing out significantly, as it fails to honestly cope with its past wrongdoings, souring relations with neighbors in Northeast Asia and hurting America’s security interests. One who denies history always repeats it.

In a public hearing held September 14, Washington time, Tom Lantos, a senior member of the U.S. House Representatives International Relations Committee, offered this strong criticism of Japan. He continued by saying that he supports Japan’s permanent membership in the U.N. Security Council, but that it is a friend’s duty to speak frankly.

Lantos criticized Japanese prime minister Koizumi Junichiro for visiting the controversial Yasukuni shrine, likening it to the honoring of the graves of Herman Goering and other war criminals in Germany. To Abe Shinzo, who is poised to become Japan’s new prime minister, Lantos said that paying respect to war criminals is morally bankrupt and unworthy in a great nation such as Japan.

The hearing is seen as a rare moment for the U.S. Senate International Relations Committee, where criticism of Japan had all but disappeared since a brief period in the 1980s when it seemed that "Japan-bashing" had swept the nation. Japan is one of the U.S.’s strongest allies, along with Britain, Israel, and Australia.

The hearing was led by Lantos and Henry Hyde, the committee’s chairman, who visited South Korea and Japan last month before his planned retirement. Hyde said that in Europe, the past is questioned, and the European Union and a single currency have been forged. However, he said, East Asia is lagging behind in making a regional security framework or a joint economic system. He pointed out that history has remained in the way of America’s major allies in the region - South Korea and Japan - joining forces.

Some participants at the hearing expected Japan to see a ’rebirth’ of sorts in the wake of Koizumi’s departure as prime minister.

Michael Green, a former White House senior security advisor for Asia, weighed in and said that South Korea-Japan relations have worsened because of the dispute over the Dokdo/Takeshima islets, which has mired domestic politics in both countries. South Korea and Japan still have a lot of room for cooperation based on their joint agendas, he said.