"This painful chapter": an analysis of Emperor Akihito's apologia in the context of Dutch old sores.

• Author: Suzuki, Takeshi

Emperor Akihito's first official visit to the Netherlands was seen as the highlight of the Japanese Imperial Couple's four-nation European tour in 2000. There are two reasons for this view. First, Japan and the Netherlands were celebrating four centuries of ties that started in 1600 when the Dutch ship Liefde (Love) ran ashore at Usuki, Oita Prefecture. The other reason, however, is not as cheerful as the first: the relationship between Japan and the Netherlands had been damaged badly in the Second World War and among the Dutch anti-Japanese sentiment still lingered because of Japan's wartime aggression. During the war, in the region that is now Indonesia, an estimated 14,000 Dutch soldiers and civilians were held captive by the Imperial Japanese Army. Although various events commemorating the four-hundredth anniversary of bilateral ties were scheduled during the Imperial Couple's visit to the Netherlands, stone Dutch continued to be haunted by Japan's colonization of the Dutch East Indies during World War II. A number of them had filed lawsuits seeking financial compensation over their treatment while in captivity. (1)

Given these conflicting reasons for attaching importance to the Imperial Couple's visit, argumentative analysis of Queen Beatrix's commemorative and Emperor Akihito's apologetic speech at the Royal Reception provides an opportunity to view how this conflict is managed rhetorically in an important intercultural exchange. The analysis reveals culture specific variations from Greco-Roman argumentation practices, particularly in regard to the conceptions and uses of ethos.

In communication where people genuinely strive cooperatively to achieve a resolution of their differences, argumentation provides a process for advancing, supporting, modifying, and criticizing claims so that a critical judge may grant or deny adherence (Rieke & Sillars, 1993). In this sense, apologetic speech can be viewed as argumentative discourse aimed at finding a viable way of resolving the issue to the satisfaction of the parties concerned, so that they can avoid prolongation of the conflict or, worse, escalation into catastrophe.

In the following, we analyze two crucial speeches made on the occasion of the Imperial visit against this historical background. First, we sketch a general theoretical perspective on apologetic discourse. Second, we explain how argumentative discourse, including apologetic argumentative discourse, can be analyzed as a form of strategic maneuvering. Third, we analyze the strategic maneuvering in the Dutch Queen's speech and the Japanese Emperor's speech at a State Banquet in Dam Palace on May 23, 2000. Fourth, we examine the Dutch people's reaction to the Emperor's apologia. Specifically, in an attempt to understand the relationship of rhetoric and persuasion in intercultural communication we concentrate on the role of ethos. We conch, de our contribution with some observations about the difference between apologetic discourse in the sense of the Occidental communicative action type known as apologia and apologetic discourse in a different sense that is culturally accepted in Japan.

A GENERAL THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE ON APOLOGETIC DISCOURSE

When discussing apologetic discourse we must, to begin with, distinguish between the speech act of apologizing and the more encompassing action type of apologia. The illocutionary point of the speech act of apologizing is making excuses to the listener or reader for something negative for which the speaker or writer feels responsible. The speech event called apologia is a conventional action type in the Western cultural discourse tradition that generally entails a verbal defense. Interestingly, it is not part of the Japanese cultural tradition.

Since the 1970s, American rhetorical critics have written a great deal about the generic boundaries of apologetic discourse (Butler, 1972; King, 1985; Kruse, 1981 ; Vartabedian, 1985; Ware & Linkugel, 1973). In their ground breaking essay B.L. Ware and Wil A. Linkugel (1973) argue that an apologia is a speech of self-defense, a response to "an attack upon a person's character, upon his worth as a human being," and that "[t]he questioning of a man's moral nature, motives, or reputation is qualitatively different from the challenging of his policies" (p. 274). Sherry Devereaux Butler (1972) examines apologia in terms of speakers' endeavors to "repair their ethos," which has been part of the Western rhetorical tradition (p. 282). In essence, Ware and Linkugel (1973) assert that apologia is "a custom of Occidental culture firmly established by Socrates, Martin Luther, Robert Emmet, and thousands of lesser men" (p. 273, emphasis added). Thus, rhetoric and argumentation scholars have made clear that apologia is an argumentative practice that is firmly established in western culture.

Specifically, Ware and Linkugel (1973) indicate four modes commonly available in an apologia: (1) denial, the simple disavowal by the speaker of any participation in, or relationship to, positive sentiment toward what ever it is that repels; (2) bolstering, the speaker's attempts to identify him/herself with something viewed favorably by the audience; (3) differentiation, the speaker's particularization of the charges at hand, which moves the audience toward a new and less abstract perspective; and (4) transcendence, the speaker's attempts to move the audience's attention away from the particulars of the charges at hand toward a more abstract and general view of his/her character (pp. 275-282).

According to Ware and Linkugel (1973), denial is an instrument of negation; bolstering is a source of identification. Both strategies are reformative in the sense that they do not alter the audience's meaning tot the cognitive elements involved. In contrast, differentiation and transcendence are transformative in the sense that any such strategy affects the meaning the audience attaches to the manipulated attribute. Ware and Linkugel have asserted that since a speech of self defense must contain both reformative and transformative strategies, there are four "subgenres" of apologia that combine one element from each strategy: (1) absolution, combining primarily denial and differentiation strategies; (2) vindication, using essentially denial and transcendental strategies; (3) explanation, highly dependent upon bolstering and differentiation strategies; and (4) justification, based mostly on bolstering and transcendental strategies (pp. 282-283).

Benoit and Brinson (1994) define five apologetic strategies: (1) denial--an expanded version of Ware and Linkugel's category or repudiating an accusation or shifting blame to another source; (2) evasion of responsibility, or claiming a lack of responsibility because the misdeed resulted from someone else's actions (provocation) or a lack of information (defensibility), was an accident, or was committed with good intentions; (3) reduction of the perceived offensiveness, in six varieties, three of which (bolstering, differentiation, and transcendence) derive from Ware and Linkugel and to which Benoit and Brinson add minimizing the offensiveness of the unpleasant act, attacking the accuser to lessen the impact of the accusation, and offering to compensate the injured party; (4) mortification, or admitting the wrongful act and asking forgiveness; and (5) correction, or vowing to correct the problem and to avoid similar crises in the future (p. 77).

Japanese authors have written very little about apologia, chiefly because they have a unique rhetorical tradition. Generally, westerners tend to regard rhetoric as pertaining to the vehicles for persuading an audience in a public discussion, placing great emphasis on individual results and achievements, whereas the Japanese tend to view rhetoric as pertaining to the means of disseminating information or seeking consensus among community members, placing greater emphasis on innate commonality and faith (Okabe, 1989). Hence, when things go wrong public penitence for transgressions is the more commonly required form in Japan; people expect their leaders to admit responsibility ("Art of Apology," 1991).

As an example of Japanese practices, in 1996 five...