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In the aftermath of World War II, Germany and Japan, the two major Axis Powers, responded to their role in the war in different ways. Germany sought to compensate Holocaust victims, to deliver justice to war criminals and to bear witness to the historical record. Japan sought to rebuild the nations it had attacked through monetary and developmental aid but still faced severe criticism from China and Korea for not sufficiently acknowledging and apologizing for its war crimes. Such criticism often contrasts with the response to Japan's efforts by Southeast Asian countries, and some commentators argue that Japan has faced irrational criticism when compared with Germany.

Furthermore, it is often argued that making strong efforts to rehabilitate its image serves Germany's national interest as a Central European nation with land borders and close economical ties to many neighbouring nations, whereas the island nation Japan is less dependent on trade with its immediate neighbours.

As Germany was leading the way for a united Europe, the issue for Japan became much more heated since the 1990s. Many suggested that in the past, with the pride of having the second largest economy in the world, Japan could better withstand criticisms from other economically weaker Asian countries. However, with the Japanese economy in recession since the early 1990s, the Japanese have developed a case of "apology fatigue" and have taken a harder stance against criticisms of its wartime conduct, especially China, whose economic development is making Japan concerned about Asia's balance of power.

Germany
Germany's response to its war crimes has been largely lauded by the former Allies. The Government of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany until 1990) has offered official apologies for the role of Germany in the Holocaust. Additionally, German leaders have continuously expressed repentance, most notably when former Chancellor Willy Brandt fell on his knees in front of a Holocaust memorial in the Warsaw Ghetto, also known as the Warschauer Kniefall in 1970. Germany has also paid extensive reparations, including nearly $70 billion to the state of Israel. It has given $15 billion to Holocaust survivors and will continue to compensate them until 2015. Additionally, the government of Germany coordinated an effort to reach a settlement with German companies that had used slave labor during the war; the companies will pay $1.7 billion to victims. Germany also established a National Holocaust Memorial Museum in Berlin for looted property.

Germany's treatment of war criminals and war crimes has also met with approval from outsiders. Germany cooperated in tracking down war criminals for the Nuremberg Trials and opened its wartime archives to researchers and investigators. Additionally, Germany verified over 60,000 names of war criminals for the U.S. Department of Justice to prevent them from entering the United States and provided similar information to Canada and the United Kingdom. On the other hand numerous war criminals were never brought to justice and lived their lives as respected citizens and even state officials, despite numerous pleas for their extradition or trial, stated by countries invaded by Germany. For instance, this was the case of Heinz Reinefarth and Erich von dem Bach, each of them responsible for death of dozens of thousands of civilians in Poland and the Soviet Union.

The German education system focuses on teaching about the Holocaust and the Third Reich and denounces the crimes committed during World War II. Additionally, German legislation outlaws Nazi works like Mein Kampf and makes Holocaust denial a criminal offense. Furthermore, even other symbols of Nazism, like the Swastika and so-called "Hitler Salute", are illegal in Germany.

However, Germany is still criticized by some regarding its response. The German government never apologized for the invasions or took responsibility for World War II. However, an integral part of Germany's relations with Poland is "Germany’s unconditional admission of guilt for the suffering of the Polish people in the Second World War..."1 Additionally, the emphasis for blame is placed on individuals like Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party instead of the government itself, so no restitution has been made to any other national government by Germany. Even after German reunification in 1990, Germany rejected claims to reparations made by Britain and France, insisting that all reparations had already been resolved. Additionally, Germany has been criticized for waiting too long to seek out and return looted property, some of which is still missing and possibly hidden within Germany. Germany has also had trouble dealing with stolen property in private hands because of the need to compensate the owners. On the whole, however, Germany's efforts at restitution are considered satisfactory by both her conquerors and her victims.

Japan
Japan has also attempted to make up for its role in World War II. Japan established a private consolation fund for comfort women who claim that they were used as sex slaves during the war. Japan has paid monetary reparations to many of the individual nations it invaded. It allocated $3.9 billion to the Philippines, Vietnam, Burma, and Indonesia. Some governments, including Thailand and China, relinquished their claim to Japanese reparations at the intergovernmental level (i.e.: the Chinese government recently began to claim that it had not relinquished the right of individual citizens to seek reparations).

China ( PRC/ People's Republic of China ) ( ROC/ (Taiwan))
Under Treaty of Taipei in 1952, ROC(Taiwan) relinquished it's right to request reparation. With continuity from ROC to PRC claimed by the PRC, PRC's right to request reparation was recognized to be relinquished. In 1972, PRC reaffirmed the relinquishment with 'Joint Communique of the Government of Japan and the Government of the People's Republic of China'. Japan responded by relinquishing compensation for factories and railroads in China's Manchuria region worth billions of dollars. Later, PRC government asked for direct compensation. Japan began the Official Development Assistance to China in 1979, 34 years after WW2. Japanese ODA has provided $30 billion to China(PRC), it still continues. Other nations in Asia had also received ODA and other funds to aid building their country after their independence. Additionally, Japanese school textbooks describe the invasion of China and its subsequent negative effects on the Chinese people. Japan also allows freedom of speech and discussion among the differing views that its citizens have regarding issues like its role in World War II and the efficacy of its retributions. Finally, the government of Japan was judged responsible for the war and war criminals were taken to task by Allied forces. Until 1950, Class A, B, and C war criminals working for Japan, both Japanese and foreign (e.g. General Hong of Korea) were on trial and judged.

Japan has faced strong criticism for not doing enough to atone for its war crimes. While prime ministers have offered official and personal apologies, the Diet of Japan has not resolved an official apology. In fact, Prime Minister Murayama failed to obtain support in the Diet for an official apology by a margin of almost 2 to 1. Additionally, during that time, a former Education Minister organized a campaign and gained 4.5 million signatures against Murayama's resolution. Moreover, Japanese textbooks have been criticized for downplaying the extent of Japan's war crimes.

Most former Japanese Prime Ministers failed to apologize directly for the invasion of China, except in the form of the word regret ("hansei"), which Chinese, Korean, and peace activists in Japan consider insufficient. However, former Prime Minister of Japan Murayama Tomiichi offered an official apology ("owabi") in 1995 on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, and current Prime Minister Koizumi laid a wreath in Nanjing expressing his apologies.

Japan's payment of reparations has also been criticized. Japan refused to pay compensation to individual victims pointing out that their governments had been funded to compensate. Court cases had been made against the Japanese government and involved companies by Chinese and Koreans who claim they had been victimized by them, but all cases lost in court, pointing out that their cases had already been resolved between governments. (A case filed by a Chinese woman was thrown out in the Japanese Supreme Court in less than a minute.) Japan has also been accused by Chinese and Koreans of covering up evidence of "wartime slavery" and paying $450 million to "compensate" 135 companies for "managing the contract laborers" after the war.

Korea (See also Korea under Japanese rule)
After Korea-Japan annexation treaty in 1910, Korea was a part of Empire of Japan until 1945, the end of WW2. South Korean Government, exiled in the US during the Japanese occupation ruled South Korea from Aug 13, 1948. After 1948, there was no relationship between the two countries. In 1965, Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea was signed to establish basic relationship between Japan and the Republic of Korea. In the treaty, Japan relinquished compensation for 'Korea' (as Japan officially recognized South Korea as the only country to govern Korea, including North Korea.).

Additionally, Japan agreed $300 million donation and $200 million loan to South Korea as "management of claims" for a former colony. The money was used to help Korean economy especially in Steels sector.

The 1965 treaty between Japan and South Korea has come under fire in South Korea because Korea was in the midst of a major domestic upheaval that discredited the role military dictatorship had on South Korea. This treaty was opposed by many Koreans as majority of Koreans felt that such was not enough to compensate atrocities of Japanese rule. However South Korea with North Korean threat to the north and impoverishment and political unstability at the time had to accept any aid they could get. On the other hand, the Japanese side claim that the treaty had been forced from the U.S. who feared that the impoverished South Korea was a weak link in the battle against communism. In this treaty, Japan paid one-third of its foreign currency reserve as a compensation for control of Korea and recognized the South Korean government as the only legitimate government on the Korean Peninsula. The South Korean government used this money to help build up its economy.

Singapore
Singapore is another place that felt the effects of Japanese Occupational rule. When the British colony fell on February 15, 1942, the Japanese military authorities attempted a systematic extermination on the Chinese population of Malaya and Singapore, on the context of eliminating undesirable "anti-Japanese" elements. Even though the Sook Ching Massacre did not have the scale nor organization of the Holocaust in Europe, postwar testimonies suggested that the Japanese Army exterminated about 25,000 to 50,000 Nanyang Chinese. After the massacre was called off on March 3, the Japanese military authorities ordered the Chinese Chamber of Commerce to raise $50 million of "tribute money". Singapore requested Japan many times for an apology and compensation, especially after Singapore became self-governing. However, the Japanese Foreign Ministry replied using the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951, in which the United Kingdom was a signatory state (and therefore, the colony of Singapore), has settled all compensation claims (even though Japan's compensations to the Singapore colonial government practically only dealt with British property damages). In October 1966, Japan finally agreed to pay "compensation" to Singapore, now an independent, sovereign nation. However, half of the compensation was paid in the form of a loan, and the "compensation package" did not come with an official apology. Until today (2004), Japan still has not officially apologized for the systematic extermination of Chinese in Singapore in the Sook Ching Massacre.

War Criminal And Yasukuni
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of postwar Japan's attitude toward World War II is the alleged public worship of war criminals and denial of war crimes. Japan has been accused by Chinese and Koreans of refusing to open up records of "military sexual slavery" and biochemical warfare experiments and failing to cooperate in the war crimes investigation or to verify the names of war criminals to the U.S. Department of Justice. Additionally, the Japanese government has been accused by Chinese and Koreans of claiming comfort women were privately employed prostitutes when in fact they had been forced into sexual slavery and often underwent forced abortion, sterilization, beatings, maiming, murder, and even forced cannibalism. Several law suits were filed against Japanese Companies for slave-laborer and are still under debate. . On the other hand, Japanese government today argues that as the military had acted as the government in the occupied areas, they gave out permissions which is claimed by those demanding "secret records" to be the fact that the military was directly involved. Some Japanese sources argue as well that there was no direct military involvement, and that women who had been reported to be taken into sexual slavery against their will to be an act of local brokers who kept these women in confinement for their own profits. However these claims are widely viewed by East Asian countries as Japanese government trying to hide its wartime atrocities.

On the same day that Murayama offered an official "regret" for Japan's aggression, eight members of his cabinet paid homage at the Yasukuni Shrine, which contained the name list of executed Class A* war criminals.Also, cases and demands have been made by both China and Korea to "remove the ashes and bones of class A war criminals from the Yasukuni Shrine".


 * As a side note, many erroneously think that class notation (A, B and C) denotes the degree of crime, as in class A criminals committed the most hideous war crimes. This is not true; the classification is based on the type of "crimes" they supposedly committed and has no indication whatsoever as to how "evil" the act was.

Biological/Chemical weapons
All existing records of biochemical warfare had been collected by the U.S. occupation force and sent to the U.S. as a part of an investigation on Japan's war technology and thus no collective records exist in Japan. In 2003, a number of residents in Ibaraki prefecture were reported to be ill from an unknown substance. The research would later reveal that chemical agents used in the chemical weapons buried under their homes had seeped into underground water they used everyday. Their homes had been built over an airfield used in the wartime. After interviewing men who had served there and checking records, the local city government deduced that there are chemical weapons buried there and had a private research company dig several holes and collect water and they finally figured out the cause of the illness. If a record had existed at the end of war, these cache should have been handed over to the U.S. Army. If there had been a record and if these were left buried, the Allied force had for some reason, not completely disarmed the Japanese Army. Even today, Japanese chemical weapons buried under Chinese soil during WWII still cause illness and even death in quite some places in China.

Textbooks
The Chinese government has repeatedly criticized Japanese textbooks for exaggerating incorrect or controversial accounts that ameliorate Japanese atrocities, including descriptions of comfort women as paid prostitutes or paid workers. For a few years in the 1980s, text books for elementary schools contained descriptions of "comfort women" but this was discontinued as it would have meant that children before any sex education would be exposed to sensitive materials. But this is an irrelevent point for the issue concerning Japanese High School textbooks, which also feature little critical mention of the war.

Law
Some politicians have gone so far as to claim that Japan was not an aggressor in World War II or even that the Nanjing Massacre never occurred and was a lie made up by the Republic of China and later by the People's Republic of China to alienate Americans and Europeans by portraying that Japanese as criminals. Austria, Germany, and Switzerland outlaw Holocaust denial; however, under pressure from the nationalistic far right wing, the Japanese government has allowed such claims to be continually made.

Conclusion
Japanese officials have offered official and personal apologies or "regret" for the aggressive and bloody war it unleashed in Asia and the Pacific. Unlike Germany or Italy, where there is overwhelming national consensus, Japan has not come to a single conclusion actions of its military during and leading up to the war. Instead, the debate still brews, often among members of its ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Conservative, pro-nationalist members have thus far prevailed in this debate and control textbooks though they are denounced by a vocal minority of more liberal thinkers, intellectuals and teachers. In recent years, Prime Minister Koizumi has re-ignited the domestic and international controversy by paying homage to Yasukuni Shrine.

Resources

 * Apologies
 * Rethinking Japan's Postwar Compensation: Voices of Victims - Japanese site
 * Has Japan offered an apology for its war crimes of the 20th century?
 * 50 Years of Denial: Japan and Its Wartime Responsibilities
 * Collective Amnesia: Japan's Crusade to Forget
 * Alliance for Preserving the Truth of Sino-Japanese War Official Webpage