Abe has tried to claim there is no internationally agreed upon definition of "aggression", raising doubts over whether he will include key phrases from the Murayama statement such as "colonial rule" and "aggression" when he makes his own statement.

Abe argued that what is described as aggression "can be viewed differently" depending on which side one is on.

Responding to Merkel's words on facing the past, Japan's Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida claimed that Japan and Germany have different neighbors, and therefore it "is not appropriate to simply compare" the two countries.

Having different neighbors, however, does not absolve Japan from its war history.

Tokyo's revisionist logic is centered on the premise that Japan was victimized by the Allied powers, most notably in the fire bombings of Tokyo and the devastating atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which resulted in thousands of civilian casualties.

"If Japan is the victim in the Pacific War, as Tokyo would have it, then America must be the aggressor and Harry Truman, not Hideki Tojo, the war criminal," Dennis P. Halpin, a former advisor on Asian issues to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, currently a visiting scholar at the US-Korea Institute at School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University, wrote in National Interest magazine.

Will the politicians and scholars at home and abroad urging Abe to look at the past have his ear?

It is to be hoped they do, for as Spanish philosopher George Santayana cautioned: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

The authoris China Daily's Tokyo bureau chief. caihong@chinadaily.com.cn