I’ll go one better: hiding them only allows for the recurrence later on.

During World War II, while it is true that hundreds of thousands were serving the Japanese involuntarily, some of these conscripts and some of the volunteers did commit atrocities, particularly in the POW camps. A couple dozen Koreans, in fact, were executed for war crimes (a tiny percentage of the Japanese imperial total).

But because the issues and circumstances never really came to light for the general public, it was easy for them to be repeated, not just during Yugio, but also during the Vietnam War. And in the future, who knows? Maybe the way a lot of Korean factory heads run things in China and Southeast Asia is due to a lack of reflection on the capabilities of some Confucian-oriented Korean people in authority to do violent harm to their underlings.

And this is another reason why I find the right-wing Japanese rhetoric so disturbing. Painting the atrocities as little more than a huge fabrication or the war itself as a defensive war derails important Japanese attempts in the past to come to grips with the horrors committed by people from their culture, even themselves. By denying it, watering it down, or rationalizing it away, you make it more likely to happen in the future. And that is why at least some people are nervous about the rhetoric coming from Japan’s right and Koizumi’s lack of concern about some of these issues.

I would like to see the evidence that Korean troops committed these atrocities. My guess is that many of them are true, but that that morphed (by design maybe) into a legendary behavior that exceeded actual incidents. That’s NOT an excuse for any of it, but it would easily reconcile the two major sides of the issue.

Korea cannot demand that Japan come clean if it doesn’t come clean itself. That “the other side” has 100 or 1000 times more atrocities to atone for doesn’t let your side off the hook.