Kevin Lau says honor is not obtained by deleting inconvenient clauses, but is earned by facing inconvenient history

One week, two UN podiums. Last week in Geneva, at the 63rd session of the Human Rights Council, I spoke about the “comfort women” — victims of arbitrary detention whose suffering Japan still refuses to statistically acknowledge, investigate or prosecute — and, at a forum marking the 95th anniversary of the September 18 Incident, about why a nation that refuses to face its history should not be trusted with missiles. This week in New York, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi used her first address to the UN General Assembly to demand that the UN Charter delete its “enemy state clauses”, framing the request as a matter of Japan’s pride and honor.

The timing could hardly be more instructive.

The clauses she wants erased — Articles 53, 77 and 107 — were written when the graves of World War II were still fresh. They permit enforcement action, without prior Security Council authorization, against renewed aggression by the Axis powers; they shield the postwar actions of the victorious nations, including the Tokyo Trials; and they place territories detached from enemy states under trusteeship. They are not decorative. As I said in Geneva, this institution was founded on a lesson bought with millions of lives. These articles are that lesson, codified.

Takaichi’s demand achieved the opposite of her intent. Delegates and commentators around the world promptly looked up the clauses — and many discovered, some for the first time, that eight decades after the war, Japan remains on the Charter’s list of “enemy states”. UN resolutions in 1995 and 2005 declared the clauses obsolete in intent, yet the charter was never amended, because amendment requires the ratification of members who evidently remain unpersuaded. A clause that the world has declined to delete for 80 years is itself a verdict — not of hostility, but of unresolved caution.

Consider Germany. Berlin is covered by the same clauses, yet no German chancellor spends precious General Assembly minutes demanding their removal. Germany does not need to. It faced its history — acknowledgment, reparations, education, memorials — and the clause sleeps, harmless, because no one fears a relapse. Japan’s eagerness to delete the label while contesting the record that earned it is precisely why the label endures. Honor is not obtained by deleting inconvenient clauses. It is earned by facing inconvenient history.

And the record remains unfaced. Eighty years after the Tokyo Trials opened, Japan has still not released full statistics on the women arbitrarily detained,  abducted, and forced into institutionalized sexual slavery--“comfort women”--by the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces before and during World War II, nor investigated, prosecuted or convicted the perpetrators; memorial statues are obstructed rather than erected. The Nanjing Massacre is diluted in Japanese school textbooks. Japanese leaders pay homage at Yasukuni Shrine, where convicted Class-A war criminals are enshrined. As I told the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention: Every one of those girls was somebody’s daughter — and denial is the second detention.

Nor is this only about the past. Last November, Takaichi linked China’s Taiwan island to a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, hinting at military intervention in China’s internal affairs, and has refused to retract the remark. Japan’s defense budget has grown for 13 consecutive years; offensive weapons are being deployed on its southwest islands adjacent to Taiwan; arms-export curbs have been loosened; and even the three non-nuclear principles are being “re-examined”. All this while Tokyo campaigns for a permanent Security Council seat — and now, for charter revision. A government that will not face its national history is asking to be trusted with both missiles and greater power. The world is entitled to hesitate.

The week delivered one more significant verdict. In the consensus emerging from the latest China-US summit, the two heads of state recalled that China and the United States fought side by side as allies in World War II — a reminder, at the highest level, that the victors have not forgotten what the war was about, or who stood where.

My own city knows. Hong Kong endured three years and eight months of Japanese occupation; its defenders died in battle and in prisoner of war camps on our soil. For us, as for Asia, this is not archive material. It is family history.

Japan’s people deserve friendship, and Asia deserves peace. But peace is not protected by deleting the fire alarm because the sound embarrasses the building’s management. If Japan wishes the clauses gone, the path is straightforward: release the statistics on “comfort women”, acknowledge the war crimes, teach history honestly, end the shrine politics, and stop remilitarization.  Do that, and the clauses will fade into dead letters on their own — obsolete not by resolution, but by trust. As I said in Geneva: We remember, not for hatred, but for prevention. The charter’s memory is not Japan’s humiliation. It is the world’s insurance policy.

The author, a specialist in radiology, is founding convenor of the Hong Kong Global Youth Professional Advocacy Action, and an adviser to Our Hong Kong Foundation.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.