The present approval of revised history textbooks by the Japanese government which intentionally plays down Japanese wartime atrocities has given that country's ultra-nationalists an impetus - never before possible in the open - to continue their dirty work of whitewashing Japan's past.

Over the years, many liberal Japanese had called on their government to apologise and come to term with their past. One such Japanese is Ono Kenji, who in 1988 interviewed more than 200 wartime veterans from the Aizu Wakamatsu Battalion during the infamous Rape of Nanking .

His research was hailed as the first Japanese account of the Nanking massacre but unfortunately his work brought into conflict with the ultra-nationalists. Today, Ono Kenji lives in seclusion and for fear of retaliation from the fanatical ultra-nationalists.

In 1987, Azuma Shiro, the first Japanese veteran to admit openly his crimes in Nanking, was blasted by the ultra-nationalists followed by death threats. Fearing for his life, he retired to a remote village outside Kyoto.

The mayor of Nagasaki, Motoshima Hitoshi, was shot by an ultra-nationalist for merely saying that Emperor Hirohito bore some responsibility for World War II. And the most frightening thing was that a substantial number of Japanese approved of the action and called it 'divine punishment'.

Inasmuch as the above are concerned, the atrocities committed by the Japanese soldiers during WWII have been systematically purged from Japanese school textbooks by the authorities.

In 1977, the Japanese ministry of education reduced the historical content on WWII in the standard history book from several hundred pages to only six pages. These six pages gave the impression that the Japanese were victims of fire-bombs and the two atomic bombs.

As the product of this impeachment of vital historical facts, one Japanese newspaper in early 90s published an article quoting a Japanese high school teacher who claimed that his students were surprised to learn that Japan had been at war with the United States. They wanted to know who had won.

In 1991, the ministry ordered textbook authors to eliminate all reference to the number of Chinese killed during the Rape of Nanking. In 1994, three years later, the ministry forced a textbook author to reduce the number of the said killings by Japanese soldiers from 25,000 to 15,000.

This without even scrutinising the already available fact that the experts at the International Military Tribunal of the Far East (IMTFE) had come up with. The experts put the figure at more than 260,000.

Has Japan repented or apologised for its wartime atrocities? In reality, no. While Nazi war criminals in Germany were hunted down and brought to justice, in the case of Japan, many high-ranking wartime Japanese officials went unpunished and some even prospered and held high positions in power.

The Germans had, on their part, detached themselves from Nazism and have come to terms with their past. They have included the Holocaust in their school curriculum.

Further, the German government has paid RM22 billion in compensation and reparations and will pay another RM50 billion by the year 2005. In contrast, Japan has paid out less than one percent of the amount that Germany has paid.

Nobukatsu Fujioka, a professor of education at the Tokyo University went beyond human dignity when he likened compensation for 'comfort women' (zyugun-ianfu) as 'striking the lottery' and demanded that the Japanese government retract its apologies to them and strike out any reference of them from Japanese history textbooks.

It is estimated that well over 200,000 Koreans, Taiwanese, Chinese and Filipinos were forced to become 'comfort women' to provide sexual services for the Japanese soldiers during the war.

Coming to the final question, has justice been done? Not all Japanese war criminals have been brought to book. The most notorious of them all was General Shiro Ishii. He was best known as the father of germ warfare.

He was a doctor and the 'murderous mastermind' of Unit 731, a biological warfare complex in Pingfan, northern China. He apparently used 3,000 Chinese prisoners to incubate germs like anthrax (which can kill in three days), plague, dysentery, cholera and so forth. When they died, his assistants harvested the germs from the dead bodies and subsequently placed them in the drinking wells of Chinese villages.

As these murderous experiments progressed, more complexes were set up in Manchuria, Burma, Thailand and Singapore. Shiro and his team were never brought to justice. He died of cancer in 1959 in his home and a memorial was erected to honour him and his henchmen in Tokyo.

It is sad that Shiro the hostic humanus generis (enemy of humankind) should die without justice being done. The only consolation to his victims' families is that he died a painful death.

These injustices still linger in our minds and to forget what Japan had done during from the early 1930s to the end of the Second World War is to allow the seed of militarism in Japan to germinate.

One must not be blinded by the unseen danger that is lurking behind the phenomenal economical success of Japan - that is the discreet resurgence of ultra-nationalism in Japan.

Finally, the conduct of the Japanese soldiers during World War II should not be impeached from our memory and of our future generations as history tends to repeat itself when one forgets.