“What is the purpose of making such a statement at this point in time?”
They’ve never actually directly admitted to being wrong and they teach their children that they were simply the victims of circumstance in the early 20th century. The best they can bring themselves to do is state that they regret the poor relations they had with certain countries in the past and the related suffering. By most accounts there’s actually more self pity in Japan over Hiroshima/Nagasaki than regret over the tens of millions dead in Asia. They’ve still not even apologized for Pearl Harbor despite our six decade long alliance. I think Americans tend to downplay how evil the Japanese regime actually was because of more visible horrors of the Holocaust. Nobody would fault Jewish people for holding a grudge against Nazi sympathizers, why do people fault Koreans, Filipinos, Burmese, Chinese, etc for holding a grudge against a Japanese government that has had a laughably hard time admitting that they did anything wrong when they were invading, murdering, raping and enslaving their way across Asia. Just getting them to apologize for so called “comfort” women was a half century long exercise in tooth pulling.
We’re allies with Germany and Japan, we’ve moved on as a country, but I’m not going to begrudge Jewish/Polish or Korean/Japanese folks from holding onto their grudges for another generation or two.
Good point.
But at some point, people have to let it go and get on with their lives. Otherwise, just like the Muslims in the ME, people will be fighting over some offense that happened a thousand years ago.
And don’t forget the Russians/Soviet Union and China. They were brutal to their own people as well as the people that they conquered. There is certainly a lot of anger to go around.