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When is an apology not an apology? Contrition chic and Japan's (un)apologetic politics

More than ten years ago, Walter Shapiro (1997) declared that the age of ‘contrition chic’ was upon us, as public figures from celebrities and beauty pageant winners to adulterous presidents increasingly came to embrace public apologies as the means of limiting damage caused by their transgressions. As reflected in the proliferation of newspaper articles bearing the sceptical title of ‘Whose sorry now?’ (Nobles 2008: 4), even the decidedly unfashionable world of international politics joined the trend, with expressions of contrition tendered for a wide range of injustices including atrocities associated with World War II; the colonial activities of Britain, Belgium, Germany and Japan; the Holocaust; American interference in the affairs of Central American states; and the failure of the international community to intervene in the Rwandan genocide. In the past decade, this trend has proven to be more than a passing fad. In recent years, demand for apologies has not abated but rather expanded to include those rendered by private corporations alongside states, organisations and institutions, such as the Catholic Church, in international affairs. Accompanying what Teitel describes as an accelerating demand for political apologies (2006: 101) has been a renewed focus on Japan and the perennial issue of its perceived failure to apologise, or apologise adequately, for its actions