Amidst the flurry of anti-Japanese protests across China over Japan’s new history text books that gloss over the nation’s militarist past in recent days, a friend of mine asked, ‘Would any nation be forthright in telling the world about its darkest past?’

‘Fat chance.’ I said without a second thought.

The latest effort by Tokyo to whitewash the war crimes of the Imperial Army against much of Asia is indeed deplorable and despicable. With many of the victim countries still reeling from one of the most savage wars waged by an Asian nation against its neighbours, the recalcitrance of the Koizumi government - from the controversial visits to the Yasukuni Shrine to the revision of history – will only make Japan’s path to become a normal country strewn with greater distrusts and perils.

Asians, especially Koreans and Chinese, can certainly be pardoned for having gone berserk with grief over Japan. For the surviving and aging comfort women, time is running out. What is most bizarre and unfathomable is that, while the Korean government is doing its best to help the Koreans fight their cases in Japan’s judicial courts, the Chinese Communist Party, eager to be seen as the Mother of Patriotism, is conveniently standing aside.