German and Japanese war crime apologies: A contrastive pragmatic study

Abstract

In this paper we present a diachronic corpus-based contrastive pragmatic study of German and Japanese Second World War crime apologies. War apology is a very emotively loaded and sensitive phenomenon, in particular because the crimes perpetrated can never be undone. We approach war apologies by examining their pragmatic features and explore the diachronic development of these features. Our aim is to offer a different insight into the phenomenon of war apology than would have been obtained using critical discourse analysis-based and sociological research on language and politics, which often departs from and confirms ideologically loaded assumptions. We approach war apologies through the lens of speech act theory, focusing on apology as an ‘extended’ interactionally embedded phenomenon. Our corpus consists of apologies issued by Japanese and German representatives of the state. Our analysis not only shows that there are major differences between the public war apologies under investigation and interpersonal apologies, but also that there are significant differences between the realisations of Japanese and German war apologies across time.

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