The year 2015 will not be a quiet one for Japan or its people as the region marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the Fifteen Year War (1931-45), the Pacific War (1941-45) and Japanese colonialism in Korea and Taiwan.
There will be a series of awkward dates marked by ceremonies of commemoration and opportunities for quiet reflection on the horrors of war, man¡¯s capacity for inhumanity and crosscurrents of forgiveness and forgetting, anger and closure.
Seven decades on, Asia remains riven by a shared past and unresolved historical grievances. There is no one reason why this is so, but clearly one powerful factor is Japan¡¯s incomplete reckoning and its tendency to downplay depredations inflicted in favor of suffering endured.
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