One of the deep issues that still bedevils Japan is that dark, dark decade and a half of fascist rule, from 1930 to 1945, which continues to be kept in the shadows. Can anyone imagine German Chancellor Angela Merkel hamming it up for the media while in the cockpit of a jet fighter marked with the insignia of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele's military medical experiment unit?

Yet that is what Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe did earlier this year when he strapped himself into the cockpit of a jet fighter with the markings of Imperial Japanese Army Medical Unit 731 splashed on the fuselage. Merkel would be obliged to resign instantly if she did something so outrageous. And she would be completely disgraced in German and European politics for eternity.

Despite the outrage, which rolled through Asia and Australia following his thoughtless political stunt, Abe explained it away as a "coincidence" and his government continued to push for stealthy, nationalist constitutional reform.