Roundup: Western public urges Japan to face up to wartime reality

Upon the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II (WWII), the Western public and experts have called on Japan to recognize its war history and apologize for its war crimes.

"I hope Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will finally recognize, acknowledge and apologize for what the Japanese Imperial Army has done to the Asian people during the war," said Berthe Korvinus, a 77-year-old Dutch woman, in a recent interview with Xinhua.

Korvinus spent more than four years of her early childhood in Japanese concentration camps in the Dutch East Indies, a Dutch colony which has now become Indonesia. Hundreds of such camps were set up there during the Japanese occupation.

Dutch historian Marguerite Hamer estimates that about 250 Dutch women were among the total of 200,000 abused in the inhumane Japanese military brothels during WWII.

To become a "normal power" in the future, Japan must first come to terms with its past, said Nathan Gardels, a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute and editor-in-chief of The WorldPost.

"Though the re-Asianization of Japan will take another generation of maturing and distancing emotional adjustment as well as practical cooperation with former enemies, the place to begin now is for Prime Minister Abe to complement his constitutional revision with an equally bold gesture of remembrance and apology for Japan's colonialism and aggression," said the scholar.

Gardels mentioned German Chancellor Angela Merkel's advice to Abe -- to convincingly demonstrate the kind of remorse Germany has.

"When then-German Chancellor Willy Brandt fell to his knees and wept at a site memorializing the victims of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1970, he was not humiliating but rehabilitating his nation," he said.

Jose Luis Barcelo, a military history expert and general director of a digital newspaper affiliated to the Spanish Ministry of Defense, noted losses suffered by China due to Japanese invasions and China's contribution to the Allied victory.

China lost 3.2 million military personnel in the war with Japan and it is estimated that between 10 and 17.4 million civilians died in the conflict, said Barcelo.

"With the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, the distance of time allows us a certain objectivity in looking at the role that China played in the eventual Allied victory, not solely through force of arms, but by the fact that its size and the determination to not give in kept millions of Japanese troops tied down, who could have fought decisively in other zones of the Asia/Pacific," he said.

Japan should get the message on history right not just for the justice and dignity of victims of Japanese imperial aggression, but also for the sake of bridging the trust deficit in Northeast Asia, said Peter Drysdale, an economist at the Australian National University on Monday.

Both the baggage of history and the way in which the current Japanese leadership has dealt with it bedevils more productive and stable relations across the East Asian region, said Drysdale.

"It sits like a dead weight upon progress on most dimensions of relations among Northeast Asia's three main powers -- China, Japan and South Korea -- but it especially weighs heavily on trust in political security relations as the Abe administration tries to explain its new security bills to its neighbors and at home," he said. Endi