Japan still disowns its dark past

One of the deep issues that still bedevils Japan is that dark, dark decade and a half of fascist rule, from 1930 to 1945, which continues to be kept in the shadows. Can anyone imagine German Chancellor Angela Merkel hamming it up for the media while in the cockpit of a jet fighter marked with the insignia of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele's military medical experiment unit?

Yet that is what Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe did earlier this year when he strapped himself into the cockpit of a jet fighter with the markings of Imperial Japanese Army Medical Unit 731 splashed on the fuselage. Merkel would be obliged to resign instantly if she did something so outrageous. And she would be completely disgraced in German and European politics for eternity.

Despite the outrage, which rolled through Asia and Australia following his thoughtless political stunt, Abe explained it away as a "coincidence" and his government continued to push for stealthy, nationalist constitutional reform.

Indeed, one of the high points of the recent German election campaign was when Merkel accepted the invitation of Gabriele Hammermann, director of the Dachau commemoration site, and Max Mannheimer, one of the remaining survivors of the Dachau concentration camp, to visit the site with them.

Not only did Merkel accept the invitation, she also laid a wreath on behalf of the people of Germany in recognition of the profound wrongdoings of the past of which Dachau was an instrument and today is a symbol. She also delivered a speech warning of the dangers of nationalist extremism.

Doing anything of the kind seems completely unimaginable in today's Japan, even though the country and its leadership have plenty of reasons to do just that, including very personal expressions of remorse.

If Germany can do it, why can't Japan?

That this isn't even in the realm of what is contemplated officially in Japan today shows how far Japan's government is from considering that it has such responsibilities to the past, to the countries it attacked and plundered, indeed to its own people.