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When Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe addresses the U.S. Congress on Wednesday – the first such honour given to a Japanese leader – his every word will be parsed in the United States and his own country, but also in China and South Korea and, to a lesser extent, other Asian countries.

August 15 will mark the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in the Pacific, the day Japanese Emperor Hirohito announced his country's unconditional surrender.

In Europe, memories of that war will never fade, or at least not for a long time. But there has been much healing and atonement by Germany, anchored in the European Union and a force for economic strength and social justice on the continent and beyond.

Today, despite a terrible past, Germany is at peace with all of Europe, and enjoys strong relations with its two largest neighbours, Poland and France. Germany has not only done what it can to apologize to these and other countries, it has told itself in many ways about its own past, which makes the apologies and atonement believable and sincere.

In Asia, Japanese prime ministers have apologized repeatedly for launching war. And Mr. Abe will presumably offer something like that before Congress since, after all, his country did attack the United States in 1941 at Pearl Harbor. But Japan had attacked and occupied Korea and swaths of China before that "date which will live in infamy," in the famous words of U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt.

China and South Korea remain unhappy with the degree and sincerity of Japanese contrition, and their unhappiness has deepened with Mr. Abe's performance in office. Japan, therefore, is no Germany lodged between two former foes that have become indispensable allies. Instead, relations in North Asia are businesslike in economics, but sometimes testy, and even frosty in geopolitics.

What is called the "history thing" hangs around in the North Pacific like a bad smell, souring relations, partly because it sometimes suits the Chinese and South Koreans to play the anti-Japanese card for domestic political reasons, and partly because the Japanese do or say things that strike others as insensitive.

Mr. Abe's grandfather was a cabinet minister in the wartime government and helped rule Japanese-occupied Manchuria. There are those who believe Mr. Abe's comments and gestures are designed to modify history's judgment about his relative and the entire war.

Mr. Abe is a conservative in economic matters but a nationalist wanting Japan (a country that flies very few national flags on its own territory) to take greater pride in the better days of its past. His government favours school textbooks that put a somewhat benign face on the war. And then there was his visit in December, 2013, to the Yasukuni Shrine, which was a kind of red flag waved at the Chinese and Koreans.

The shrine commemorates all of Japan's war dead, but some found to be war criminals are among the group. Who was or wasn't a criminal, and whether so-and-so deserved to be thus categorized, is irrelevant. Although right-wing Japanese nationalists applaud prime ministerial visits to Yasukuni, the Chinese and Koreans hate them.

It is disturbing, frankly, to visit the museum next to the shrine and be greeted in the entrance by a Japanese fighter plane and, worse, a beautifully restored steam engine, bedecked with Japanese flags, from the Thailand-Burma railway that was built with prisoners who laboured and died under the most appalling circumstances. No German museum that deals with the war would have an equivalent display.

Japanese will insist they have apologized over and over, with the most complete statement having been made by former prime minister Tomiichi Murayama on the 50th anniversary of the war's end. He offered a straightforward apology for "atrocities" and for the takeover of the Korean peninsula. How many more times do we have to apologize, exasperated Japanese ask?

At a recent dinner, one of Japan's most respected international figures of recent years, when asked what Japan should say, replied: "Nothing." Nothing we could say would satisfy the Chinese and Koreans, he asserted.

What about the Americans, Japan's staunchest ally? They don't like the bad feelings between their allies in the North Pacific, a region that already has maritime boundary disputes and military buildups. Americans nonetheless might reasonably expect appropriate words Wednesday from Mr. Abe, but they are unlikely to parse them as carefully as will the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese themselves.

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