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Official Japan, still mired in undigested history
 Japan
is often called a shame-based society based on status and honor,
while the West is guilt-based with our “thou shalt not”
commandments. This cultural difference is offered as an explanation
why Japan does not accept its war guilt.
Maybe so, maybe not. After a great deal of diplomatic arm-twisting
in recent years, China managed to extract a weak statement from the
Japanese Government that ‘regrettable’ things happened in Nanking in
December, 1937 when Japanese troops raped, tortured and murdered
more than 200,000 Chinese civilians in a three-month rampage.
Today’s Japanese textbooks still refer the horrors between 1937 to
1945, when some 20 million Chinese were killed, as ‘The China
Incident’ and doesn’t mention the war crimes.
And South Korea is still waiting for a full apology and reparations
for the tens of thousands of young Korean maidens who were forced
into Japanese Army brothels to serve as diseased-wracked ‘comfort
women.’
Throughout all of Southeast Asia, the victims of Imperial Japanese
policies are dying off without ever having received compensation for
what was done to them. In a few more years, the victims and
witnesses will be dead. Meanwhile, the Japanese Government promotes
the view that the Japanese were themselves the victims of brutal
American power, despite the fact that they attacked America without
warning.
Not to admit such terrible guilt is to repeat the crime.
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