by William Choong, Senior Writer

EARLY on in my reporting career in the late 1990s, a corporate communications manager from a Korean chaebol called me several times, seeking to take me out for lunch. Too busy, I told him (moreover, what story could emanate from such lunches, I thought).

I relented in the end. I called him and told him my choice of venue: a swanky Japanese restaurant at Great World City, a shopping mall opposite Times House, the building which housed the Straits Times then.

There was a cold silence. To say the least, lunch afterwards went downhill.

The lunch taught me a precious lesson. Many decades after the end of World War Two, the Japanese are still regarded with a tinge of suspicion - if not resentment - by people in Korea, China and other parts of Asia.

This should not be so. Japan has played a stabilising role in Asia, dishing out aid and assistance to many Asian countries. Its political leaders are largely internationalists. The country has a strong pacifist bent. Since the 1960s, Japan has also issued more than 40 apologies, in various forms, for its wartime atrocities.

Such actions, however, belie a nagging fear about Japan: whether the country has reconciled with its problematic past. This was underscored again last month, when air force chief General Toshio Tamogami was sacked for denying that Japan was the aggressor during the war.

In an essay which won a prize in a competition, General Tamogami repeated many of the shibboleths used by conservative revisionists. The Comintern ensnared Washington to attack Japan in the Pacific. Its actions in Korea and Manchuria were legal. Japan was kind to the people in Korea and Taiwan.

The intriguing thing about the general's essay is not the ludicrousness of its arguments, but the metronomic regularity at which such instances of historical amnesia occur.

In 1994, Justice Minister Shigeto Nagano denied Japan's atrocities in China. In 2001, Taiwan declared Japanese cartoonist Yoshinori Kobayashi persona non grata after a non-fiction comic stated that Taiwanese women who served as sex slaves during World War II had volunteered their sexual services.

Three years ago, a high school textbook by right-wing historians conveniently excluded anything it considered historical 'fiction': the atrocities committed by the Japanese military across Asia.

When such instances of revisionism occur, Japanese leaders have been quick to act. The pertinent question, however, is whether such historical amnesia pervades Japan's policymaking elite.

According to a Reuters report, more than 70 Japanese air force officers had written essays in the same competition, arguing that Japan should not have apologised for its wartime actions. Prime Minister Taro Aso has also refused to acknowledge that his family business used prisoners-of-war as forced labour.

More interestingly, days after General Tamogami's sacking, Mr Aso purchased four books at a bookstore. One of them, according to Japanese political observer Tobias Harris, is 'representative of the most belligerent, the most narrow-minded, and the most revisionist segment of Japanese conservatism'.

'How can Mr Aso fire a general for espousing these beliefs - which he continues to espouse now that he's been sacked - and then...purchase a book that makes similar arguments about Japan's history?' asked Mr Harris.

According to Ian Buruma, the author of The Wages Of Guilt: Memories Of War In Germany And Japan, the former follows a Christian culture of 'guilt' while the latter adheres to a Confucian culture of 'shame.' While Germany has taken massive strides to admit its wartime guilt and make restitution, Japan has gone to extraordinary lengths to silence people who remind the country of its misdeeds.

In 1990, for example, a mayor of Nagasaki was shot in the back after he stated that the Emperor 'bore responsibility' for the war. Right-wingers declared that the mayor had received 'divine punishment'.

Writes Buruma: 'The Germans, riddled with guilt, feel the need to confess their sins, to unburden their guilt and be forgiven; the Japanese wish to remain silent and, above all, wish others to remain silent, for the point is not guilt in the eyes of God, but public shame, embarrassment, 'face'.'

His explanation fits into a body of research about images, which are cognitive structures that embody a person's assumptions and beliefs. For many Japanese, their dominant 'image' has been that they were hapless victims of the atomic attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The fact that they were aggressors has been largely ignored.

When Mr Mori Masataka, an editor of Nanjing Atrocities - a documentary about the rape of Nanjing - showed some middle-school students the film, they were gobsmacked. A 13-year old girl named Ritsuko said she could not understand why Japanese soldiers 'were laughing as they watched Chinese people getting killed'. To her, Japan had always been the loser in the war.

Using the logic of images to support Japan's refusal to come clean with its past, however, is largely academic - and foolish. Practically speaking, if Germany has come clean, so can Japan (unless there is something so unique in the Japanese psyche that prohibits contrition).

At this point, it might be difficult for a Japanese leader to show the same contrition as exhibited by West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. In 1970, the German leader fell to his knees at a former Warsaw ghetto and apologised for what the Nazis had done. But Japan should open up a honest debate about the facts about the war and attack the roots of historical amnesia among its policymaking elite.

Mr Harris told The Straits Times that many Japanese did not yearn to return to the country that existed before the war.

'I don't think Mr Aso is particularly nostalgic for the war. That's not to deny his history of controversial statements... but I do think that his views are more sophisticated than conservatives like General Tamogami,' he said.

But if Tokyo fails to reconcile with its wartime past, other Tamogamis will continue to pop up from time to time. Across Asia, Japan will be perceived as a two-faced Janus: on one hand, it is seen as multilateral, pacifist and constructive; on the other, it will be seen as deliberately obscurantist on the issue of history.

This would not help Japan's growing leadership role in Asia, nor its relations with the rest of the region.

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