Denying history has also been fueling the tensions over the Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. The Japanese government has continued to deny that there is a dispute over the sovereignty of the maritime territory. It has certainly changed the status quo there by nationalizing the islands in late 2012, something that the US failed to condemn.

Obama should know that Abe's right-wing historical views are not just reflected in his tribute to the Yasukuni Shrine, he has also questioned whether Japan's military invasions should be defined as aggression and whether the "comfort women" - women used as sex slaves by the Imperial Japanese Army - were coerced.

Abe also infuriated many of Japan's neighboring countries last year when he posed for a photo, giving a thumbs up, in the cockpit of a military training jet with the number "731", the name of a notorious covert biological and chemical weapons research team of Imperial Japanese Army that experimented on Chinese, Korean and Soviet prisoners during WWII in Northeast China.

Obama will be sending a wrong message to the world and to Japan's neighbors, in particular China and the two Koreas, if he fails to warn his Japanese host against such acts. And that will be costly for the US in terms of holding the moral high ground or if the US seeks to be an honest and credible broker and even a leader in the region.

Obama should not appease such dangerous historical views in order to make gains on other fronts.

The author is deputy editor of China Daily USA. chenweihua@chinadailyusa.com

(China Daily 04/25/2014 page8)