Tomiichi Murayama, Japanese Leader Who Gave War Apology, Dies at 101

Tomiichi Murayama, who as prime minister of Japan in 1995 delivered the country’s most forthright and enduring apology for atrocities inflicted by Japanese troops in World War II, died on Friday. He was 101.

He died at a hospital in Oita, in Kyushu province, the Social Democratic Party of Oita said in a statement on Friday.

Mr. Murayama delivered his historic apology on national television on the morning of Aug. 15, 1995, 50 years to the day when Japan announced it would surrender to the United States. It was brief and cautiously worded, completed in under five minutes.

“I regard, in a spirit of humility, these irrefutable facts of history,” he said, “and express here once again my feelings of deep remorse and state my heartfelt apology.

“Our task,” Mr. Murayama continued, “is to convey to younger generations the horrors of war so that we never repeat the errors in our history.”

The apology was the defining achievement of Mr. Murayama’s 18 months in office. He had gone further than any previous Japanese leader in expressing regrets for the killing, torture and rape of millions of civilians and other atrocities. But he had been sharply constrained by conservatives in his governing coalition and the apology was not strong enough to ease resentment in China and South Korea. It also rankled nationalists.

Japan’s war crimes across Asia during often overshadowed the suffering and destruction endured by Japan’s civilian population during the war. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians had been killed in the firebombing of their cities and in the first — and still only — use of atomic bombs. Two million Japanese soldiers had come home in coffins or not at all.

By the time of Mr. Murayama’s campaign, Japan had replaced ruined cities with glittering metropolises and become a global economic power. Its pride had grown and there was little enthusiasm among its leaders to look back, even less for a public showing of regret.

But Mr. Murayama set a marker. For years, prime ministers repeated the Murayama phrases “deep remorse” and “heartfelt apologies” in their addresses commemorating the end of the war.

Mr. Murayama’s rise to prime minister on June 30, 1994, came as a surprise. He was 70 years old. He had served quietly in the House of Representatives for more than 20 years and was not nationally known. He had never held a cabinet position, nor had he dealt with countries outside Japan. He was tall, thin, easygoing and grandfatherly, with wild, shaggy eyebrows.

“He wasn’t charismatic,” Koichi Nakano, a political science professor at Sophia University in Tokyo, said in an interview. “He wasn’t particularly inspiring. He didn’t have name recognition. He was a down to earth, ordinary sort of guy, not a typical politician.”

Mr. Murayama became prime minister as the solution to a political crisis.

His pacifist Japan Socialist Party had for decades been the weak rival of the dominant nationalistic and conservative Liberal Democratic Party. In June 1994, amid a recession and political turmoil, both parties were struggling for survival. In desperation, the conservatives invited the socialists to join them and a smaller third party to form a governing coalition.

The socialists recoiled. But the conservatives brought them into the coalition with an irresistible offer: The socialists could have the post of prime minister. About a year earlier, in another round of horse trading, Mr. Murayama had agreed to serve as chairman of the socialist party. Now, as chairman, he was catapulted into Japan’s highest political office.

The coalition was an awkward, lopsided deal that left Mr. Murayama at the mercy of the Liberal Democrats. They greatly outnumbered the socialists and took most of the seats in the cabinet, crucial positions that a prime minister would normally fill with allies.

Mr. Murayama backed away from most of the socialists’ goals, but his powerful partners permitted him to move toward his party’s longtime goal of reconciliation.

Mr. Murayama had to negotiate every step. He got a watered-down version of his apology endorsed by the House of Representatives only by threatening to resign. Before he went on television, the coalition cabinet halfheartedly approved his speech. Mr. Murayama had wanted a more extravagant, ceremonial staging, but his coalition partners blocked him.

Shortly after Mr. Murayama’s landmark address, half of the members of the coalition cabinet virtually slapped him in the face with a showy offering of prayers at the Yasukuni Shrine, a bastion of nationalism in Tokyo that venerates Japan’s war criminals and the battlefield sacrifices of its other military war dead.

“It was a symbolic repudiation of the tenor and purpose of the speech,” John W. Dower, who taught Japanese history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1999 book “Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II,” said in an interview.

One of his main points in reconciliation was the issue of so-called comfort women, the as many as 200,000 women, many of them Korean, who had been forced to work in government-run brothels serving Japanese soldiers, often near the front lines.

Survivors of the ordeal told stories of cruelty and abuse. The women were living evidence of Japan’s atrocities and helped Japan and the world understand why an apology was needed.

Mr. Murayama persuaded the government to set up an organization called the Asian Women’s Fund in 1995, a joint governmental and charitable enterprise that for more than a decade offered medical care and some compensation for the women. It helped draw widespread attention to the suffering. But only a few hundred of the surviving 1,000 or so women benefited. Some were too embarrassed to come forward, historians say, and others felt insulted that instead of recognizing a debt, the government had shifted responsibility for compensation to a charity.

Mr. Murayama became president of the fund when he retired from Parliament in 2000 and stayed on until it closed in 2007. In 2006, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and Congress issued statements in support of the women. A decade later, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon brought one of the survivors to the U.N. headquarters in New York to highlight their plight.

Tomiichi Murayama was born on March 3, 1924, in the fishing and mining city of Oita in the far south of Japan, the seventh of 11 children. His father, a fisherman, died when he was in junior high school and his mother worked at menial jobs to keep the family going.

He was accepted into the prestigious Meiji University in Tokyo, but his studies were interrupted by the war. He was sent to work in a shipyard, later drafted into the army and was in officer candidate’s school when the war ended. He returned to Meiji and graduated in 1946, a year after the surrender.

Mr. Murayama joined the Japan Socialist Party and worked for nine years as an organizer in a fishermen’s union in Oita before being elected to the Oita City Council. He moved up to the Oita prefecture government and, in 1972, was elected to the House of Representatives.

Mr. Murayama was survived by two daughters and two grandchildren. His wife Yoshie died last year.

Mr. Murayama lived in Oita after retiring from Parliament, but often went back to Tokyo and traveled to other countries, giving interviews and making speeches encouraging respect for Japan’s neighbors and warning against the savagery of war.

He was one of Japan’s longest-living prime ministers, staying healthy, he told China Daily Asia, by walking and riding a bicycle.

Mr. Murayama was a skilled calligrapher. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Mr. Murayama donated three of his works to the municipal archive in Shanghai, saying that he hoped his art would cheer up the people in China, who had found themselves at the center of the outbreak.

The calligraphy might have been the work of a young sports coach. “Go China,” one said. “Go Wu Han,” said another. “Go Shanghai.”

A few years earlier, Mr. Murayama had created another piece of calligraphy for China. “Japan-Chinese friendship,” it read. “Credibility comes from being true to one’s words.”