Japan still disowns its dark past(2)

Yet the historical record is crystal clear. After all, if Japan's post-Taisho government that instigated the decade and half of war against Asia, the United States and Australia, in alliance with European fascists, was not fascist, what was it?

True, there is one crucial difference. Japan did not have an explicit extermination policy of Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals, and indeed of the Slavic people, as did the Nazis. But Japan had pretty much everything else when it comes to the traits of fascism. Japan of the 1930s and World War II was marked by corporatist economic management, extremist forms of nationalist indoctrination, racism, intense military dictatorship, vast use of internal repression and total mobilization of the society for war.

The country also used the soon-to-be-urbanized rural poor as cannon fodder in massive campaigns of imperial conquest, as well as the tight integration of corporate Japan in the country's imperial designs.

Where the intransigence of Japan's government gets personal - and very much not in the past - is in the role Abe's family played in all of this. His grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, led the "pacification" of "Manchuria" campaign in the 1930s and subsequently became munitions minister in Japan's war cabinet.

After the war, Abe's grandfather was classed as a Grade A war criminal - until he was let off the hook at the last moment by an America which had become spooked by the onset of the nuclear arms race.

Japan's imperial conquest also benefited many of the politically influential Japanese business families and corporations that are still in positions of power today. For example, the family of former prime minister Taro Aso, who is the current deputy prime minister and finance minister, used slave labor in its coal mines during the period of Japanese aggression throughout the Asia Pacific.

At the time, Japanese industry used slave labor from occupied Korea, China and all across the map in military and civilian wartime operations, both within Japan and abroad in conquered regions.

Yet today, the government of Japan essentially refuses to acknowledge responsibility for sex slavery, labor slavery and other atrocities, let alone the violence unleashed on all domestic opposition during Japanese fascist rule, throughout Asia.

Since the Abe and Aso families were so deeply involved in Japan's dark period, there has never been better-positioned prime ministers and deputy prime ministers to assume this responsibility on behalf of Japan.

Were these people to assume clearly and simply the responsibility for the past on behalf of the Japanese state, it would indeed represent a significant step for Japan in moving beyond the dark, dark past and allow it to become the "normal" state about which Prime Minister Abe never ceases to speak.

The author is managing partner of Starfort Investments, a former vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs Asia.