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Reviewed by:
  • Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics
  • Thomas W. Burkman (bio)
Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics. By Jennifer Lind. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2008. x, 242 pages. $39.95.

The fields of conflict resolution and interstate relations come together in this highly worthwhile first book by Jennifer M. Lind, a political scientist at Dartmouth College whose research and teaching interests lie in international politics and East Asian security. Her background includes visiting scholar appointments in Korea and France. The book is a comparative study of post-World War II Japanese-Korean and German-French relations, with a focus on the role of remembrance in the mending of relations marred by a legacy of brutality and holocaust. It is multistate in content, global in approach and application, and comparative throughout. The central question of the book is whether official contrition promotes reconciliation.

After an introductory section laying out theoretical frameworks, two detailed narrative chapters treat the history and role of remembrance, contrition, and apology in the transition from enemy to neighbor in the cases of Japan and Germany, respectively. The process has been clearly more successful in the German case. The following chapter brings in the experiences of China, Australia, and Britain for additional cases of the process of reconciliation. A lengthy conclusion addresses the theories projected at the beginning and makes a number of assertions, including: reconciliation can occur without contrition, apologies cause backlash, apologies must be repeated, and unapologetic remembrance fuels distrust of intentions.

Lind's strength is the great detail she delivers in narrating the process of Japan's and Germany's grappling since 1945 with their respective imperial wartime pasts. She divides each country's experience into three time frames. The first, from 1945 to 1965, saw both Japan and Germany in amnesia about their misdeeds, with Japanese even trying to exonerate their wartime goals. The prevailing mentality, furthered by the war crimes trials in both countries, asserted that a narrow clique of ruthless militarists had led the nations astray, victimizing the home populations as much as the people of neighboring countries. Lind is correct to question this assumption of the time, for indeed it is hard to find in pre-1945 Japan public or grass-roots sentiment of any sort that questioned the legitimacy of the nation's political and economic expansion on the continent. It is remarkable that in this first postwar period the French grew to regard Germany as their closest friend despite the absence of public contrition on Germany's part. Korea, on the other hand, harbored deep apprehensions that Japan would remilitarize and reassert its colonial claims. For the former colony, the fear of the resurgence [End Page 136] of the Japan of the past was the most powerful impulse defining its early postwar relations with Japan.

In the second period, from 1965 to the 1980s, Korea and Japan normalized relations. Japan expressed some remorse and committed monetary aid, labeled "reparations," in the Korean version of the normalization treaty, but there was no admission of specific misdeeds. Disagreements over the past shifted to Korean dissatisfaction with historical treatments of colonialism and war in Japanese-sanctioned school textbooks and the enshrinement of the souls of 14 Class A war criminals in Yasukuni Shrine in 1978. In the next decade, prime ministers and cabinet members began to pay visits to the shrine in official capacity. In the same middle period, Germany under socialist leadership began to admit and atone for past crimes. It conducted its own trials of Nazi war criminals and instigated new reparations programs for victim populations previously overlooked. The German government stepped up political education to stem the rise of neofascist youth organizations and shifted the focus of war history from German suffering to German guilt.

In the final period, from the 1980s to the present, Japan sends out mixed messages to victim peoples. While there is more official contrition, including a Diet resolution approved by the Lower House in 1995, apologetic statements typically have evoked right-wing backlash and new textbook projects to present an inspiring national legacy—which in turn enrage sensibilities in Korea and China. New museum renditions of history range from the downplay of the...

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