By Henry M. Seggerman

My country sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives to Japanese aggression in WWII, so I was offended to see Junichiro Koizumi making his annual parades to the Yasukuni Shrine, which celebrates Japan’s war criminals. However, I made excuses for this politician, assuming he was just making symbolic concessions to conservatives, in order to preserve a reformist agenda.

But when I heard Shinzo Abe’s recent revisionist history, denying the abduction of Japan’s WWII sex slaves, I knew I had been mistaken about Koizumi. There is obviously something deeply wrong with Japan’s leadership and its people, regarding its responsibility for WWII atrocities. Abe has become the atrocity-denying Ahmadinejad of the Far East.

Why is it that the Japanese are incapable of expressing the same remorse as the Germans about the atrocities they committed? Japan was defeated just like Germany in WWII. One reason is that WWII’s victors imposed a rigorous “denazification” program on the Germans, through aggressive social and political reform, as well as outright propaganda.

No such “deimperialization” program was imposed on the Japanese. The Japanese did not in fact ever “endure the unendurable.” In the light of Koizumi and Abe’s offenses, perhaps the Allied Forces should consider implementing the deimperialization program, belatedly, today.

We all look on Europe as a bastion of Free Speech. But there is one exception: if you deny the Holocaust in Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, Switzerland or the Netherlands, you may very well spend a few years in prison. Our deimperialization program will of course make denying any of Japan’s WWII atrocities a serious felony, punishable by a prison term. Nobody will have immunity from prosecution, not even the Prime Minister.

Germany never built a Yasukuni Shrine. Instead, it built a museum in Berlin dedicated to the Jewish people whom they murdered in the millions.

So, Japanese taxpayers will immediately fund a museum in Tokyo dedicated to Chinese and all other Asians they murdered in WWII. They will bring every schoolchild in Japan at least once to Tokyo to visit this museum and study its exhibits.

After WWII, the Allies simply took control of all German media: 37 newspapers, 6 radio stations, 314 theatres, 101 magazines, 237 book publishers, 7,384 book dealers and printers.

Unfortunately, Shinzo Abe is not going to be able to fulfill his campaign promise to delete Japan’s WWII atrocities from history textbooks. Instead, new ones will be written, with the first chapter entitled: How Japan Raped, Tortured, and Murdered Thirty Million People in World War II. Children who do not pass exams on this chapter will not advance to the next grade.

As for reparations to war crime victims, every individual compensation claim brought to Japanese courts failed, without exception. Japan ended up paying less than $10 million in total reparations to individual war crime victims, mostly to Europeans and Americans. In Asia, Japan was able to cleverly take advantage to negotiate miniscule direct payments to corruption-ridden dictatorships, ignoring actual victims like the sex slaves.

In order to rectify this, Japan will have to pay any unpaid reparations to the descendants of the millions of victims of its WWII atrocities, especially in Asia. These atrocities included: torture and murder of POWs, chemical warfare, biological warfare, mass killings, gruesome medical experiments on live humans, induced famines, rape, torture, sexual slavery, and cannibalism. Japan can easily afford these revised reparations; after all, it is the second-largest economy in the world, the home of Toyota, Sony and Nikon.

After WWII, former Prime Ministers Tojo, Hirota, and thousands of other Japanese military and political officials were prosecuted for war crimes. Historians are clear that Emperor Hirohito was the ultimate authority behind Japan’s WWII atrocities; for example, Japan’s POWs had a 30 percent chance of being executed or starving to death, as a result of the specific POW policy approved by Hirohito.

Why was Hirohito not even indicted for his crimes? Why did the Allies permit Japanese officials to tamper with witnesses and obstruct justice to shield Hirohito and other war criminals in the royal family? According to historian Herbert Bix, “measures to save Hirohito from trial as a war criminal had a lasting and profoundly distorting impact on Japanese understanding of the lost war.”

In the decades prior to WWII, the Japanese people watched as their Emperor and military began a campaign of mass killing and conquest across Asia. The Japanese people could have overthrown their government and halted this barbarism, but they chose not to. The Japanese people made a choice to support a government, which raped, tortured, and murdered thirty million other human beings.

The Japanese people today are not unlike the Japanese people in the decades prior to WWII. Due to the absence of any postwar deimperialization program, they grew up in an amoral environment free of guilt or remorse.

Their view of Japan’s WWII war criminals is not shame and revulsion; instead, they think they should be honored. Their view of Japan’s WWII sex slaves is that they deserve no apology, because they were just a bunch of whores. If they did not hold these views, they would certainly not have voted for atrocity-denying Ahmadinejads like Koizumi and Abe.

The writer is president of International Investment Advisers.