BERLIN, Dec. 1 (Xinhua) -- German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, during a recent visit to the Spanish town of Guernica, stood at the site once devastated by a Nazi air raid and called the 1937 attack "a brutal crime, whose sole target was the civilian population," vowing that Germany "will not forget" the suffering it caused.
The visit has revived broader reflection on wartime responsibility and sharpened the contrast with Japan. Although Germany and Japan were both origins of World War II and ultimately defeated powers, their attitudes toward historical accountability have diverged sharply.
German scholars say that as the world commemorates the 80th anniversary of the victory in the anti-fascist war, Japan has yet to confront basic questions about its wartime aggression and responsibility, revealing a lack of deep introspection and a distorted historical narrative.
The absence, they argue, is now reflected in the latest remarks by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on Taiwan -- comments viewed as a direct challenge to the postwar international order and a serious threat to regional peace and stability.
UNFINISHED RECKONING
"During the war, the fascist ideology of racial superiority in Germany and Japan differed very little," German publisher and author Frank Schumann said in a written interview with Xinhua.
He said both countries spread "terror and war across the world in order to conquer territories and plunder natural resources." After the war, he noted, Germany dismantled Nazism through asset confiscations, purges of Nazi influence from education and the judiciary, and systematic anti-fascist education across the media and academia. "At its core, the question was always: Why is there war?"
He argued Japan never underwent the same reckoning.
"War criminals continue to be honored at the Yasukuni Shrine, even by top politicians. Japan still refers to its invasion of China as an 'incident'," Schumann said.
Richard A. Black, a senior research fellow at the Schiller Institute in Germany, said Japan has softened its wartime record by rewriting textbooks, leaving younger generations with little understanding of its militarist past.
Takaichi, he noted, has repeatedly visited the Yasukuni Shrine and claimed that international assessments of Japan's wartime conduct are "not true" and "exaggerated."
"(What she is doing) is extremely, gravely dangerous," Black said.
VICTIM NARRATIVE
German historian Takuma Melber said Japan continues to lean on a victim narrative regarding World War II, with its responsibility for starting the war weakly addressed. "In Japan, public narratives of World War II still begin with the country's defeat rather than its responsibility for starting the war," he said.
Museums in Japan tend to focus on the final months of the war and highlight the devastation inflicted on Japan, particularly the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Melber said. "Japan primarily sees itself as the last victim of World War II."
The newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau reported that some right-wing forces in Japan continue to portray the country's wartime aggression as the "liberation" of East Asia and have pushed to revise the pacifist constitution as a step toward rearmament.
Takaichi's comments, it said, reflect "the core values of Japan's right-wing conservative ideology," and her stance on history aims to strengthen her standing within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.
DIPLOMATIC FALLOUT
Schumann's own interest in Japan's wartime actions began years ago when his son, then studying in Japan, learned of a former poison-gas factory on Okunoshima Island -- once hidden from the public and used to manufacture chemical weapons.
Now preparing a book on Japanese war crimes, Schumann said archival research could not fully prepare him for what he saw while visiting historical sites in China.
He warned that the postwar international order faces "tremendous challenges," making historical reflection more urgent. "Only by learning from history," he said, "can we avoid repeating the same mistakes."
The repercussions could extend beyond domestic politics. The German magazine Der Spiegel quoted Koichi Nakano, a professor of international politics at Sophia University in Tokyo, as warning that Takaichi's revisionist views "could severely strain the country's key relationships with China and South Korea, potentially plunging Japan into a diplomatic disaster."
Suddeutsche Zeitung, another German newspaper, reported that Takaichi visited the Yasukuni Shrine even while serving as a cabinet minister, a move that has repeatedly damaged Japan's diplomatic ties. ■
