Internal recognition of Japanese war atrocities

I was in a Japanese history class for a semester. It was supposed to be post-WWII but ended up being end-Tokugawa/beginning-Meiji onward. Anyway, through all the lectures and projects, and even through a study of Japan's imperialist period, I have never discovered why the Japanese are so intensely unwilling to own up to their war crimes. Glaringly well-documented historical practices and events, such as the Bataan death march, comfort women, the Rape of Nanking, and Unit 731 are, for the most part, glanced off the shoulder or just outright refuted. Of course their wartime media focused on the plight of the ethnically superior Japanese soldiers. I can understand that during a war. But what does it say that present-day Japan refuses to deal with its past? Or, a frightening possibility, are they simply unashamed, unchanged, even quietly proud?

Did you know that during the wartime period, I'll say about late '30s to mid '40s, the Japanese killed more than Nazi Germany? And possibly even more than Stalinist Russia?! (I say "possibly" because the Stalinist figure is subject to disagreement-- the commonly tossed around number is 20 million, but one professor places the estimate at a whopping 62 million.) 30 million Filipinos, Indians, Malays, Vietnamese, Koreans, Cambodians, Indonesians, Burmese, and of course Chinese. Probably more ethnicities. Damn.

But there are quite a few analogous situations in the U.S. (American Indians principally). And regarding stuff like slavery, what do our empty politically correct apologies really accomplish? O SHI--

This is too complex an issue to tease out in a small stupid blog posting. Nihonjinron, ethnic cleansing, jingoism, overcompensatory emulation of the West... HALP.

This posting was prompted by: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/the-politics-of-apology-for-japans-comfort-women/

A - when I think about you I get so empty I feel sick.