By Gary Earl Ross
Buffalo, NY – The recent resolution of the U.S. House of Representatives urging Japan to issue a formal apology to Asian women coerced into sexual slavery during World War II was termed "regrettable" by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. In 1993 the Japanese government sent lukewarm letters of apology to some surviving comfort women and established the Asian Women's Fund to pay compensation in a few cases. But Abe stoked the controversy last March by saying there was no evidence the women were forced to be military sex slaves.
The resolution was sponsored by California Congressman Mike Honda, a third generation Japanese-American who spent time in an interment camp during the war. While some in Japan have asked publicly how Honda could support such a measure in light of his lineage, he may have been inspired by Ronald Reagan's 1988 apology for the 1942 relocation that placed 120,000 Japanese Americans in American concentration camps. While reactions have been mixed in Japan, Honda's resolution has found support elsewhere in Asia and also in Europe.
Ironically, the United States government has never issued an official apology for the enslavement of Africans. Bill Clinton expressed regret over slavery, and George W. Bush called it a crime. Though our history as a slave nation is the root cause of both inequality and our national wealth, neither Congress nor any president has ever said, formally and finally, that the country is sorry. Such an apology is centuries overdue, but the government can't find the right words in the labyrinthine chambers of its bureaucratic heart, so someone else ought to try. It might as well be me. I am sorry for slavery. Proud as I am of my ancestors for their strength and determination to stay alive, I am deeply sorry some of them didn't run fast enough to escape the traders who kidnapped them from West Africa. I am sorry that those chained in the belly of the creaking wooden beast lacked the power to punch holes in the hull and send the ship to its grave, that those who survived to make it to these shores expended so much effort they built the American economy while reaping none of its benefits, that they did not burn every single plantation to the ground. I am sorry for those who were beaten or raped or killed. I am sorry, for all their sakes, that they were unable to stop this dreadful evil dead in its tracks.
Had they been able to do so, today's America would be much different, perhaps brighter and freer and truly in touch with the principles of its founding. Perhaps we would be less willing to tolerate injustice and cruelty in places that lacked oil. Perhaps we would be less likely to trample our own rights and freedoms with wiretaps and renditions and indefinite imprisonments. At least our insistence other cultures apologize?rightly so?for their crimes against humanity would not be diminished by our collective reluctance to foster truth and reconciliation in our own back yard.
This may seem a strange sort of apology, almost a wish I had never been born. On the contrary. My late mother always taught me to be the better man, to admit mistakes and say, I'm sorry. In the absence of better men in Washington, this American will offer an apology for his nation's greatest unrepented sin.
Listener-Commentator Gary Earl Ross is a professor at the UB Educational Opportunity Center.
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