"Who's Sorry Now?"

    That Tokyo has taken steps since Hirohito's death in 1989 to illuminate the past is a natural step.  For the past year a grisly exhibition organized by several citizens' groups all about the infamous Unit 731 - which performed barbaric medical experiments on POW's - drew large cords all over Japan.  And at Hiroshima itself - the ultimate shrine to Japan's sense of victimhood - there is anew wing that deals directly with Japan's militarism and imperialism.  But there are limits to how far Japan will go in airing all this, and there will be until the wartime generation - and its children - is gone.

     It's understandable that the world outside Japan finds much of this troubling.  The justifications tend to reveal the lingering superiority complex many older Japanese have toward their Asian neighbors.  But while the loudest voices may dominate the bitter historical debates, those are not necessarily the most important voices.  In the end those like Itagaki, who refuse to yield an inch to history, must justify themselves not only to the Chinese and the Koreans, but to men like Hiroto Kuboura.  He is a 69 year old resident of Hiroshima and a victim of the American bombing.  Every morning he gets up and, before putting on his glasses, places a strip of fresh gauze over what was once his left eye - lost to the bomb as he sat in an office three miles away from ground zero.

     In a hotel coffee shop not far from that spot, he speaks 50 years later about blame, and guilt, and the bitterness that only slowly dissipates.  "If the war was caused by us then the Japanese government should humbly reflect on that and take care of the victims both inside and outside Japan.  I don't think they have done enough," he says.  "The government does not face its own responsibility for the war."  He has no axes to grind, he says; he has simply picked his own way through history's land mines and come out on the other side.  He thinks his country should do so, too:  "In order to part from the past we have to admit it and apologize.  Let's face it.  We were all victims of this war."

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