WWII Apology Fails to Find a Voice in Japan : Asia: Lower house approves a statement on war actions that wins praise neither at home nor abroad.

When the decisive moment came Friday, the chamber was half full, and many of those who claimed to be truly conscience-stricken--in one way or another--had absented themselves. Those who were present were there to offer a tepid endorsement of a statement that many called halfhearted at best.

So dragged to a close another chapter in the embarrassing episode of how members of Japan’s lower house of Parliament produced this nation’s much-anticipated, agonizing, antagonizing sort-of-apology for its conduct in World War II.

Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama and his Socialist Party had pledged to the world when they ascended to power as part of a coalition government that Japan--50 years after the war’s end--would make amends for its past as part of its efforts to step up to a new, more global role.

But to the continued aggravation of many of the Asian nations so afflicted by the Japanese during the war, the whole process never worked as the idealists hoped. They had tried to ram through a legislative resolution in which Japan acknowledged its past and said to its victims that it was sorry.

That plan, however, was torn into tedium in the Japanese legislative process, in which the achieving of a consensus plays a paramount role.

After the resolution’s language had been made unacceptably tame, critics said, the opposition New Frontier Party on Friday stayed away from the vote, claiming that it wanted a stronger statement of past Japanese wrongdoing.

But even many New Frontier members--such as the conservatives in Murayama’s coalition--also made it clear that, frankly, they were opposed to the enactment of any expression of contrition for Japan’s war role.

To express his opposition to even the consensus-achieved, mild and indirect apology for the war, Seisuke Okuno, who led a band of 140 Liberal Democratic Party members against the resolution, boycotted the balloting.

Most of his followers, though, went along with the resolution to preserve the Liberal Democrats’ grasp on power--as Murayama had earlier hinted that he might resign and break up the coalition if his Liberal Democrat partners refused to recognize Japan’s past aggression.

On the opposite side of the fence, Communist Chairman Tetsuzo Fuwa blasted the resolution for “rationalizing [Japan’s] war of aggression.”

The Japanese on Friday took note of “many instances of colonial rule and aggression-like acts in modern history” and acknowledged that Japan also had carried out “such acts.”

“We express deep self-reflection . . . [for] inflicting unbearable suffering on the peoples of other countries, particularly in Asia,” they said.

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That was not enough for many of Tokyo’s regional neighbors.

In Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Burma and India--where some segments of the population agree with Japan’s claim, made during the war, that Tokyo fought to free Asia from Western colonialism--reaction was mild or muted.

But in South Korea, the reaction was, “Oh, no--not again!”

“The resolution . . . once again demonstrates the distorted mental status of Japan,” declared the Hankyoreh newspaper.

The Chosun Daily News said, “As long as Japan does not sincerely repent its war crimes, it will remain a mentally retarded nation.”

Particularly biting was a commentary in China, where Japanese killed an estimated 21 million people in the war there that lasted from 1937 to 1945.

“How can its Asian neighbors feel reassured if Japan . . . fails to take a clear-cut stance toward the war that has long been judged to be one of aggression? How can one talk of the future if one cannot face history? [Winning] the trust of its Asian neighbors remains a problem for Japan to solve,” the official New China News Agency said.

Wen Wei Po, a newspaper in Hong Kong, said the resolution was “not convincing and will not win Asian people’s understanding and trust.”

In Singapore, the Business Times said Japanese politicians who balked at a straightforward apology appeared to still believe that “the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere was a rather good idea.”

The Straits Times called the resolution “a mealy-mouthed expression of contrition” and branded Japan’s unrepentant conservative politicians “old men detached from reality . . . who lost the war but [think they] can save the history.”

Unlike laws, which require the approval of both houses of Parliament, Friday’s non-binding resolution took effect immediately as an independent expression of sentiment of the lower house, staff members of Parliament explained. The upper house, however, was also expected to pass the resolution next week.

Times staff writers Rone Tempest in Beijing, Charles P. Wallace in Singapore and John-Thor Dahlburg in New Delhi contributed to this report, as did Times special correspondent Maggie Farley in Hong Kong and Chi Jung Nam of The Times’ Seoul Bureau.