¹ In this article, we assume that overall apology has a positive value. For another point of view on the value of apology, see Baer, Ulrich, ‘The Hubris of Humility: Günter Grass, Peter Schneider, and German guilt after 1989’, The Germanic Review, 80 (1) (2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² ‘Who's sorry now? Who should apologize to whom, for what and how?’, The Economist (2 October 2008).

³ Part of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's apology to the First Nations of Canada reads as: ‘I stand before you today to offer an apology to former students of Indian residential schools. The treatment of children in Indian residential schools is a sad chapter in our history. In the 1870s, the federal government, partly in order to meet its obligation to educate aboriginal children, began to play a role in the development and administration of these schools. Two primary objectives of the residential schools system were to remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture. These objectives were based on the assumption aboriginal cultures and spiritual beliefs were inferior and unequal. Indeed, some sought, as it was famously said, “to kill the Indian in the child. . .”. “We're sorry”’, Harper says, quoted in TheStar.com, 11 June 2008.

⁴ The US Congress has considered a similar apology for the slavery and the Jim Crow eras, a gesture long sought by African-Americans. But such efforts were always bogged down by concerns that the apology would prompt a greater call for reparations for slavery. As for ‘Jim Crow’ laws, they were state and local laws enacted mostly in the Southern and border states of the United States between the 1870s and 1965, when African-Americans were denied the right to vote and other civil liberties and were legally segregated from whites. The name ‘Jim Crow’ comes from a character played by T. D. ‘Daddy’ Rice who portrayed a slave while in blackface during the mid-1800s.

⁵ In February 2005, the US Senate apologized for standing by during lynching campaigns against African-Americans throughout much of the previous century.

⁶ Before this apology, Italy and Libya had spent years negotiating a wide-ranging treaty to cover compensation for Rome's military occupation and colonization. Formerly part of the Ottoman Empire, Libya was occupied by Italy in 1911 before becoming a colony in the 1930s.

⁷ See the chronological list of political apologies compiled by Graham G. Dodds, updated on 23 January 2003, http://www.upenn.edu/pnc/politicalapologies.html. See also Dodds, Graham G., ‘Political Apology and Racial Reconciliation’, in Sean P. Hier, Dan Lett, and Singh Bolaria, Racism and Justice: Critical Dialogue on the Politics of Identity, Inequality and Change (Halifax: Fernwood Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar. Refer as well to Nobles, Melissa, The Politics of Official Apologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ On this question, refer to Paul Ricoeur, in the Epilogue, ‘Difficult Forgiveness’, Memory, History, Forgetting, translated by Kathleen Blamy and David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004).

⁹ Allot, Philip, Eunomia: New Order for a New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), especially pp. 207–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Apology can take place in a variety of ways: within borders (from the state to the individuals who have been wronged, for example indigenous populations), among Western actors (e.g. Germany for the genocide of the European Jews during World War II), non-Western actors (e.g. Japan for its crimes in Korea and China in the context of World War II), and among Western and non-Western actors (e.g. Western countries for the colonization of non-Western countries or the slave trade).

¹¹ In 1945, the United States and other Allies developed the Agreement for the Prosecution and Punishment of the Major War Criminals of the European Axis and Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT), sitting at Nuremberg, which contained the following definition of crimes against humanity in Article 6 (c): ‘Crimes against humanity: murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against civilian populations, before or during the war; or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country were perpetrated.’ The Nuremberg Charter represents the first time that crimes against humanity were established in positive international law. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, at Tokyo, followed the Nuremberg Charter.

¹² See the history of the Claims Conference on the Official website of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany: http://www.claimscon.org. In 1956, West Germany approved the ‘Federal Law for the Compensation for the Victims of National Socialist Persecution’. Over four million claims have been submitted under this legislation. Also, in 2001, the Bundestag approved the establishment of a fund of 4.5 billion dollars to compensate labor slaves under the Nazi regime.

¹³ In the 1960s, the philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch was questioning the genuine character and even the reality of the German apology. Refer to L'Imprescriptible. Pardonner? Dans l'honneur et la dignité (Paris: Seuil, 1986), pp. 17–63.

¹⁴ Zalaquett, José, ‘Balancing Ethical Imperatives and Political Constraints: The Dilemma of New Democracies Confronting Past Human Rights Violations’, Hastings Law Journal, 46 (6) (1992): 1426Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Malamud Goti, Jaime E., ‘Transnational Governments in the Breach: Why Punish State Criminals?’, Human Rights Quaterly, 12 (1) (1990)Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Rousso, Henry, The Haunting Past: History, Memory, and Justice in Contemporary France, translated by Ralph Schoolcraft (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Derrida, Jacques, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, translated by Michael Hughes (New York: Routledge, 2001)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Vladimir Jankélévitch, L'Imprescriptible. Pardonner? p. 22 in particular.

¹⁹ On 16 July 1995, on the occasion of the fifty-third anniversary of the ‘Vélodrome d'hiver’ tragedy – when French authorities rounded up 13,000 Jews in this former bicycle stadium in Paris, subsequently interned them in a concentration camp, and ultimately deported them – Jacques Chirac, elected French President two months before, officially recognized the French state's role in the ‘Final Solution’. Chirac's statement of recognition radically departed from prevailing official attitudes towards the Vichy past. Chirac admitted French guilt and took responsibility for its ‘collective fault’.

²⁰ The Vatican formally apologized in March 1998 for failing to take decisive action in challenging the Nazi regime during World War II to stop the extermination of Jews.

²¹ This echoes the fact that a system of justice is meant to focus first and foremost on the victim.

²² Regarding apartheid, the South African Constitution of 1993 envisioned amnesty without amnesia. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established in July 1995. It operated between January 1996 and July 1998. It issued its report in October 1998.

²³ Quoted in Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Part 2.

²⁴ Krog, Antjie, Country of my Skull. Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000), pp. 30–1Google Scholar. In the same book, Antjie Krog also indicates how the results of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission have been ambiguous. See pp. 384–6.

²⁵ See Nelson Mandela, on leaving office as South African President, on 16 June 1999: ‘South Africans must recall the terrible past so that we can deal with it, forgiving where forgiveness is necessary but never forgetting.’ Text of speech available at www.anc.org.za.

²⁶ Chris McGreal, ‘Britain Blocks EU Apology for Slave Trade’, The Guardian, 3 September 2001.

²⁷ Melissa Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies, pp. 10–13.

²⁸ For example, Pope John Paul II apologized in 1993 for the Catholic involvement in the African slave trade, but neither France, the United Kingdom or other countries did so.

²⁹ For a philosophical assessment of the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Paul Ricoeur, in the Epilogue ‘Difficult Forgiveness’, Memory, History, Forgetting.

³⁰ A system of justice is meant to be an impartial view, a ‘third eye’ perspective while at the same time pursuing the normative agenda of who is or can be the victim.

³¹ Janet Beavin Bavelas, ‘An analysis of Formal Apologies by Canadian Churches to First Nations’, Occasional Paper No. 1 (Centre for Studies in Religion and Society, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, July 2004).

³² Jaspers, Karl, The Question of German Guilt, translated by E. B. Ashton (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

³³ The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has made the responsibility towards others the constitutive element of what it is to be a subject, to be human, putting ethics at and making it the core of ontology, Levinas, Emmanuel, Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 1998), Chapter 6Google Scholar.

³⁴ On the idea of promising for the future, Ost, Francois, Le temps du droit (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1999), pp. 165–73Google Scholar.

³⁵ For example, many societies assign more of a sense of guilt and shame to the victims of rape than to the perpetrators.

³⁶ Conan, Eric and Rousso, Henry, Vichy: An Ever-Present Past, translated by Nathan Bracher (Dartmouth: Dartmouth University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

³⁷ Minow, Martha (ed.), Breaking the Cycles of Hatred: Memory, Law and Repair (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

³⁸ Mamdani, Mahmood, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), Chapter 7, pp. 191 and 217 in particularGoogle Scholar.

³⁹ For a multidisciplinary and comparative analysis of genocide, see Semelin, Jacques, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Burrin, Philippe, Nazi Anti-Semitism: From Prejudice to the Holocaust, translated by Janet Lloyd (New York: New Press, 2005), especially Chapter 3Google Scholar. See also Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2000)Google Scholar and Bartov, Omer, Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis and War in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Refer to ‘Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to General Assembly Resolution 53/35. The Fall of Srebrenica’, A/54/549, 15 November 1999, United Nations, New York, and to ‘Report of the Independent Inquiry into the Actions of the United Nations during the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda’, S/1999/1257/, 16 December 1999, United Nations, New York.

⁴² ‘Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to General Assembly Resolution 53/35. The Fall of Srebrenica’, paragraph 503.

⁴³ Statement of the Secretary-General on Receiving the ‘Report of the Independent Inquiry into the Actions of the United Nations during the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda’, 16 December 1999, http://www.un.org/News/ossg/sgsm_rwanda.htm

⁴⁴ Nowhere in the documents, reports and statements does the term ‘apology’ and the expression ‘I apologize’ appear.

⁴⁵ Jean-Marc Coicaud, Kokuren no Genkai/Kokuren no Mirai, Chapters 3 and 6.

⁴⁶ In English, ‘Responsible but not guilty’. In November 1991, Georgina Dufoix, when confronted with having failed, at a time when she was Minister for Social Affairs, to stop the distribution and use of tainted blood in France in 1985, with the result that approximately 600 of the 4,000 hemophiliacs who had received HIV-infected blood through transfusion died, acknowledged her responsibility but refused to consider herself guilty. Thus her expression: ‘responsable mais pas coupable’.

⁴⁷ For more on restorative justice and what it entails, see Susan Herman, ‘Is Restorative Justice Possible Without a Parallel System for Victims?’, in Zehr, Howard and Towers, Barb (eds.), Critical Issues in Restorative Justice (New York: Criminal Justice Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ For a radical view on this, see Foucault, Michel, in particular Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, translated by David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003)Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Quoted in Special Report, BBC News, 24 March 1998, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/03/98/Africa/68974.stm

⁵⁰ Page 94 and footnote 4.

⁵¹ For more on the issue of reparations, on the economic, legal, political, philosophical, and psychological questions and difficulties that it raises, as well as on the link between reparations and positive discrimination policies such as affirmative action, Brooks, Roy L., Atonement and Forgiveness: A New Model for Black Reparations (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Ali, Mazuri, Black Reparations in the Era of Globalization (Binghamton, NY: Institute of Global Culture Publications, Binghamton University, 2002)Google Scholar, and Robinson, Randall, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (New York: Dutton, 2000)Google Scholar. See also Manweller, Mathew, ‘Can a Reparations Package be a Bill of Attainder?’, The Independent Review, 6 (4) (2002): 555–71Google Scholar.

⁵² On how American law endorsed and engineered this divide for a long time, Blackmon, Douglas A., Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Double Day, 2008)Google Scholar.

⁵³ For example Foner, Eric, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York: Knopf, 2005)Google Scholar. For another perspective, Anderson, Carol, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Of course, from this we should not infer that the victim status is all there is to African-Americans, or that the qualification of African-Americans as victims, even as partial victims, is straightforward. The sensitivity of the matter within the African-American community discloses its complexity. The last thing that African-Americans want is to be considered as victims through and through, as the passive and powerless actors of their destiny.

⁵⁵ John W. Dower, ‘Japan Addresses its War Responsibility’, http://www.macalester.edu/~tam/HIST194%20War%Crimes/documents/jpnwar.html

⁵⁶ Ibid.

⁵⁷ See Yoshiaki, Yoshimi, Comfort Women, translated by Suzanne O'Brien (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Earlier comfort women were Japanese prostitutes who ‘volunteered’ for such service. However, as the war expanded, the military found itself short of Japanese ‘volunteers’. They therefore began to coerce local women into serving in these stations.

⁵⁹ ‘I offer my profound apology to all those who, as wartime comfort women, suffered emotional and physical wounds that can never be closed.’ (Statement by Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama on the occasion of the establishment of the ‘Asia Women's Fund’, from the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, www.mofa.go.jp)

⁶⁰ ‘The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion’, see Kozo Mizoguchi, ‘Japan's Prime Minister Denies World War II Sex Slaves’, in The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (Center for Research and Documentation on Japan's War Responsibility, 1 March 2007), www.japanfocus.org. Also, following Abe's declaration, former Education Minister Nariaki Nakayama indicated that he was proud that the Liberal Democratic Party had succeeded in getting references to ‘wartime sex slaves’ struck from most authorized history texts for Junior High schools, see Reiji Yoshida, ‘Sex slave history erased from texts: “93 apology next?”’, The Japan Times Online,11 March 2007, www.japantimes.co.jp.

⁶¹ See Vogel's, Ezra comments in Ilya Garger, ‘Interview with Ezra Vogel: China–Japan Relations’, Harvard Asia Quarterly, 6 (2) (2002)Google Scholar, for example ‘China used these issues to achieve concrete goals like getting more financial help from Japan or getting support for countries in Asia to unite with China against Japan’, p. 4.

⁶² Tamamoto, Masaru, ‘The Uncertainty of the Self: Japan at Century's End’, World Policy Journal, 16 (2) (1999)Google Scholar.

⁶³ The latest in this saga of denial is the controversy sparked by an essay written by former Air Self-Defense Force Chief of Staff General Toshio Tamogami, justifying Japan's aggression in China and colonial rule in the Korean peninsula in the first half of the twentieth century. See for example Reiji Yoshida and Jun Hongo, ‘Tamogami – History Again Retold: Ousted ASDF chief's contentious spin on war not the first – nor the first to stretch facts’, The Japan Times, 11 November 2008.

⁶⁴ Masaru Tamamoto, ‘Japanese Discovery of Democracy’, Policy Forum Online, 16 May 2006, http://www.nautilus.org/fora/security/0638Tamamoto.html. See also the following remarks in the same text: ‘Status affirmation is key in the way Japanese society functions, found in everyday manners and rituals, and in restrictive rules and endless intrigues. Japan's status affirmation has its origins in Chinese tradition, of course, and China also continues to see the world in hierarchical terms. The Japanese on the whole are comfortable with “knowing one's place”.’

⁶⁵ Western powers tend to suffer from the opposite problem: overconfidence and righteousness. This is an equally large obstacle to seeing the value of apology.

⁶⁶ Dower, John W., Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), p. 29Google Scholar. A foreigner visiting or living in Japan, surprised by but trying to understand the local idiosyncrasies, will frequently hear, ‘You could not understand, you are not Japanese.’ To which, maybe the best response would be, with some irony, ‘You could not understand, you are Japanese.’ For while it is true that an outsider's understanding of a culture is never as developed as that of an insider, there remain some elements that are more clearly seen from a distance. A third person is often able to see things that those who are living the experience cannot. Furthermore, this sort of remark, which we sometimes hear from Japanese diplomats, is not the best way to connect and establish a rapport with others in the international context. After all, to generate empathy, or to be liked, it is necessary to appeal to the idea of commonality, to the idea that although countries and their members are different, they also share fundamental traits. Highlighting these common elements and wanting to share them is essential to a successful diplomacy. In other words, the seductiveness of the foreign has its limits. The claim of radical otherness and giving the feeling that unless one is Japanese there is no possible understanding of Japan is not the best way to succeed internationally.

⁶⁷ On this question, see the remarks by Bellah, Robert N., Imagining Japan: The Japanese Tradition and its Modern Interpretation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 188–91Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ When presenting oneself as unique, we put ourselves out of reach of comparison and protect ourselves from the unpleasant realization that such comparisons can force us to discover about ourselves.

⁶⁹ This sense of historical insecurity, in the modern era, goes back to the forced opening of Japan to the world in the middle of the nineteenth century. Ever since this time Japan has always tried to catch up. If it has largely succeeded in this, especially economically, it has never achieved the sense of international recognition that it feels it deserves. Hence, its almost obsessive quest for a permanent position on the United Nations Security Council. Despite successive failed attempts, the last in 2005, this objective remains a priority in Japan's multilateral agenda and the failure to fulfill this continues to be, at least for Japan's diplomatic elite, as much an element of incomprehension as a source of frustration.

⁷⁰ See Dudden, Alexis, Troubled Apologies Among Japan, Korea and the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷¹ John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, chapter 9. See also Benfell, Steven T., ‘Why Can't Japan Apologize? Institutions and War Memory since 1945’, Harvard Asia Quarterly, 6 (2) (2002)Google Scholar.

⁷² John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, Chapter 4. See also the comments by former education minister Nariaki Nakayama indicating that he agreed with an e-mail sent to him saying that the ‘victimized women in Asia should be proud of being comfort women . . . Those women deserve much sympathy, but (being forced to provide sex) is not so much different from what was commonly seen in poor rural Japanese communities in the past, where women were sold to brothels. It could be said that the occupation was something they could have pride in, given that their existence soothed distraught feelings of men in the battlefield and provided a certain respite and order’, in ‘“Comfort women” distortion stirs indignation’, in China Daily, 13 July 2005, www.chinadaily.com)

⁷³ Miyoshi, Masao, Off Center: Power and Culture Relations between Japan and the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 124–5Google Scholar.

⁷⁴ This is quite paradoxical, and all the more unfortunate for Japan and those with whom it could be friends, since in Japan, both in terms of individual and collective relationships, once a bond of trust has been established it is as solid as can be. The chance of default is very low: one partner can count upon the other.

⁷⁵ Japan is relatively isolated at the diplomatic level, with very few allies, and even fewer true friends, regionally or globally. This applies to the US–Japan relationship, which is rather ambiguous. For a country ultimately as sensitive and sentimental as Japan, this has to be a source of intense disappointment. This can partly be explained by the fact that Japanese diplomacy is quite foreign to the international affability that can be so useful in the diplomatic and political arenas. And yet Japan wants to be liked, if not for loved. (A Japanese colleague consulted for this section of the article described Japan as a ‘love supplicant’. See also Masaru Tamamoto, ‘The Japan that Wants to be Liked’, in Danny Unger and Paul Blackburn (eds.), Japan's Emerging Global Role (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1993)).

⁷⁶ The fact that Japan has difficulty clearly defining the nature and objectives of its national interest is also linked with the legacy of Japan's actions during World War II. Due to the incomplete reconciliation in the region, Japan feels uneasy about stating its national interest in a straightforward fashion.

⁷⁷ This assessment is in no way meant to be an indictment of Japan, quite the contrary. As a person who has lived in Japan for a number of years and who feels strongly about and close to this country, the author cares about how Japan could find ways out of the difficult predicament in which it finds itself. The thoughts above are meant to be part of the debates that could help in the move forward.

⁷⁸ On the colonization of the African continent by European powers, refer for instance to Wesseling, Henri, Le partage de l'Afrique. 1880–1914, translated by Patrick Grilli (Paris: Gallimard, 2002)Google Scholar. More specifically, on Congo, see Hochschild, Adam, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York: Mariner Books, 1999)Google Scholar.

⁷⁹ Gibney, Mark and Roxstrom, Erik, ‘The Status of State Apologies’, Human Rights Quarterly, 23 (4) (2001), p. 936CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁰ Jacques Derrida, Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness.

⁸¹ Tatsuo, Inoue, ‘Human Rights and Asian Values’, in Coicaud, Jean-Marc, Doyle, Michael W., and Gardner, Anne-Marie (eds.), The Globalization of Human Rights (Tokyo, New York, and Paris: United Nations University Press, 2003)Google Scholar. See also Bell, Daniel A., East Meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸² On this, consult the remarks on the notion of sharing in pre-white South Africa, in Antjie Krog, Country of my Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of forgiveness in the New South Africa, p. 213.

⁸³ Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., ‘Multiple Modernities’, in Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. (ed.), Multiple Modernities (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002)Google Scholar.