COLUMN ONE : Facing the Demons of War Guilt : Germany often is seen as atoning for Nazi era while Japan balks at apologizing for wartime acts. But after 50 years, the way the former Axis allies dealt with their pasts has proven to be much more complex.

Shiro Azuma can’t deny Japan’s sordid history of atrocities during World War II. After all, he committed some of them: As an Imperial Army soldier in China in 1937, he joined his comrades in unleashing six weeks of breathtaking brutality during what has come to be known as the Rape of Nanking.

“When we raped the women, we thought of them as humans, but when we killed them we considered them pigs,” he says matter-of-factly in his rural home three hours outside Kyoto. “This was the Japanese army at the time.”

Now Azuma, a spry and pugnacious man of 83, is fighting a new battle. This time, his adversaries are Japanese who deny the atrocities, threaten him with death and condemn him for smearing the honor of those who died in the name of the divine emperor.

Fifty years after World War II, Azuma is one of a growing number of Japanese battling to air the truth about their war deeds, apologize squarely for them and set things right, once and for all, with their Asian neighbors.

It is a battle Germany successfully fought nearly three decades ago--underscoring how the two nations, Axis allies in war and democratic partners in peace, have come to terms with their war legacies in distinctly different ways.

At first glance, it might seem that Germany has repented while Japan has not; Germany has faced its demons while Japan continues to duck them. As a full member of the European Community and North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Germany appears to have regained the trust of its neighbors while Japan continues to invite suspicion from Asia.

But, as Azuma illustrates, the reality is far more complex.

“The cliche is that the Japanese are not contrite and not apologetic and the Germans are,” said Ian Buruma, author of a new book, “Wages of Guilt,” comparing how the Germans and Japanese have dealt with their war legacies. “But it’s simplistic and not true.”

In fact, polls show the majority of Japanese support an apology and compensation, views not reflected by political leaders. And a full airing of the military past did not take place in western Germany until two decades after the war; the process began in eastern Germany only after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Some scholars think the Japanese should not even be compared to the Germans, since the wars in the Atlantic and the Pacific were different, as was the nature of the crimes perpetrated. The criminal Nazi regime cannot be compared to the legitimate, albeit authoritarian, Japanese government, said Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, based in San Diego.

And despite its many atrocities, Japan had no “Mein Kampf,” no Adolf Hitler--and no system for exterminating an entire people.

Even if Japan has less to apologize for, however, it has not done even the minimum--an accurate historical reckoning--Johnson said.

“If the Japanese don’t want to be treated as Nazis, they shouldn’t act like them,” he said. “The fact that they keep covering up is part of what contributes to the view that they’ve got something to hide and are not truly contrite.”

Such impressions are fueled by differences in the way the nations have dealt with everything from education to political responsibility to reparations.

Issue of Responsibility Hazy

In schools, Germany has hammered students with anti-Nazi education and the concept of Zivilcourage , or civil courage, to give them a sense of how moral responsibility can exist even in times of terror, dictatorship or war. While Japan’s newer textbooks show vast improvement in covering the nation’s aggressive acts in Asia, they still leave hazy the issue of who was responsible for the war.

Germans were able to pin the war’s blame squarely on Hitler and to purge most officials of the Nazi regime--in the East more so than in the West. But in Japan, the man in whose name the war was fought and atrocities were committed--the late Emperor Hirohito--was protected by U.S. occupation authorities who needed him after the war to unify the country and rally support for democratic reforms.

German leaders consistently apologize for their past aggression in the clearest possible terms, calling their deeds “the worst crimes against humanity.” Former Chancellor Willy Brandt once fell to his knees at the site of the Warsaw Ghetto in a dramatic tribute to those who died there at Nazi hands.

“Along with grieving for the dead, with sympathy for the victims, come, for me, shame and anger. Shame and anger that it was Germans who committed these crimes--and that what happened could have happened in the land of Lessing, Kant and Goethe,” said President Roman Herzog in April at the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Japanese officials, however, dance around diction. While then-Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa clearly apologized in 1993 for Japan’s “war of aggression,” his phrase set off a political uproar. After that, he and the two prime ministers after him slipped back to the more ambiguous phrase “acts of aggression”--implying that the war itself had justifiable aims--and waffled over whether to “reflect” on the war deeds or apologize for them.

In Germany, it is a crime to utter what is called “the Auschwitz lie”--denial of the death camps or the deliberate extermination of European Jews. But Japanese politicians and others routinely assert that the massacre in Nanking (now Nanjing) was fabricated, that Japan’s brutal colonization of Korea was beneficial and that Japan’s purpose was not to dominate Asia but to liberate it from white colonizers.

Seisuke Okuno, once a colonialist in Korea and proud of it, says he knows of no brutality during Japan’s 35-year rule and that Korean assertions to the contrary are lies to prop up a policy of hatred toward his country. Okuno is no fringe maniac; he is a politician with the Liberal Democratic Party, which is part of the ruling coalition and wields enough clout to have weakened a parliamentary war-apology resolution into virtual milk toast this year.

“It was America and England that invaded Asia,” he says. “We improved the Korean standard of living and have nothing to apologize for.”

Germany has made generous acts of atonement, including official payments of about $69 billion to Israel and personal pensions to Holocaust survivors that are estimated to total as much as $14.8 billion. Japan has paid a total of $3.9 billion to the Philippines, Vietnam, Myanmar (formerly Burma) and Indonesia but has never officially paid China or Korea one yen in reparations.

Money to China and Korea has been cloaked in such euphemisms as “economic cooperation” aid--which has laid Japan open to burgeoning compensation claims from Chinese laborers and from Asian women who were forced during the war to provide soldiers with sex.

Aid for ‘Comfort Women’

Even though the Japanese government maintains that all reparation issues were settled in normalization treaties, it has moved to stem controversy with new aid measures: a private fund for former “comfort women,” unofficially pegged at about $20,000 per woman, for instance, and $1 billion more for other cooperative programs in Asia.

In other ways as well, Germany has been quicker to come to terms with its past. The nation has numerous monuments and museums, including the sites of the death camps and an exhibition detailing the history of the Holocaust at the Memorial House of the Wannsee Conference, where Hitler’s top bureaucrats met to hammer out details of the Final Solution.

But five decades after the war, Japan still does not have one national war museum, and efforts to build one are mired in controversy not unlike the dispute occasioned recently in the United States by a planned World War II exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution. Japanese veterans groups object to exhibits depicting military aggression, while scholars demand them for accuracy.

Still, four Japanese “peace museums” have cropped up in recent years that include unflinching looks at the nation’s war aggression. The Kyoto Museum for World Peace details Japan’s manufacture and use of illegal poison gas in China and describes the notorious Unit 731 that used humans for biological warfare experiments.

Analysts say there are many reasons why such differences exist--but culture is probably not one of them. Despite American anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s famous formulation that Japan is a “culture of shame” reluctant to reveal embarrassing truths, in contrast to the “culture of guilt” that disposes the West to confess its sins, many Japanese are expressing guilt about the nation’s war past.

“I reject the shame-versus-guilt theory,” says Buruma. “You can explain the differences by looking at the history of the European and Asian wars and the political developments since 1945.”

In fact, Germany was not much more forthcoming than Japan for nearly two decades after the war. Education guidelines on the Nazi era were vague; most West German teachers glossed over the war crimes. Textbooks, largely focused on German suffering, were evasive, mentioning “acts of cruelty” without saying who committed them.

That evasiveness reflected a palpable public unwillingness to deal with the war, and most historians at the time described Germany as a normal, orderly country that was mysteriously hijacked by a gang of criminals in 1933.

But in 1968, West Germany was shaken by the same kind of student unrest that was then sweeping other nations--and a coming clean about the past was among the students’ key demands. “German society was still not prepared to talk about this,” said Werner Nagel of the federal Ministry of Culture. “One of the main points of the social revolution of 1968 was to tear down this code of silence.”

The protests led directly to tough new guidelines that direct schools to “protect juveniles against the danger of euphemistic conceptions” about the Third Reich.

‘Victim Mentality’

In the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the rules explicitly state that teachers must not play down the Holocaust by comparing it to how Germans suffered near the end of the war. By contrast, the U.S. nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped foster an overwhelming “victim mentality” in Japan that blinded the public to the nation’s acts of aggression and is only now beginning to change.

The 1968 youth movement also led to an extensive, painful public discussion in West Germany about the nation’s historical responsibility. “Insofar as it is even possible to overcome the past, this can only be done by recounting what has occurred,” said the emigre philosopher Hannah Arendt.

In Soviet-occupied East Germany, nothing comparable occurred. The nation was thoroughly purged of all Nazi collaborators, and citizens were told they were “new Germans.” But denied the chance to sort out right from wrong themselves--East German Wehrmacht veterans, for instance, were not even allowed to meet socially--many people could not quite believe it.

“We always had a sick feeling in our stomachs,” says East German manufacturer Udo Braun. His father worked in a factory that made ovens for the death camps--yet Braun was told he was one of the heirs to the great Communist legacy of anti-fascist resistance.

Eastern Germans finally began talking about questions of guilt after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, but confusion has been great, analysts say.

‘Where Is the Emperor?’

In Japan, a full airing of questions over war responsibility has been blocked by one towering figure: the late Emperor Hirohito. Preserved as a symbol of the state in the U.S.-imposed “no war” constitution, he never took responsibility for the war before his 1989 death. “Where is the emperor?” wartime Prime Minister Gen. Hideki Tojo asked from Death Row shortly before being hanged as a war criminal.

Saburo Sakai, 79, asks pretty much the same thing. The famous ace pilot, who survived more than 200 battles in his Zero fighter, says he went to war for the emperor and was ready to die for him.

“We were following his orders,” Sakai said. After the war, the emperor “should have quit, shaved his head and retired to a temple to take responsibility,” he said.

U.S. authorities also muddied the question of war responsibility by supporting former militarists, openly and covertly, to counteract the rising leftist movements in postwar Japan and elsewhere in Asia. “The refusal of Japan to apologize reflects the fact that the Japanese government--largely because of our creation--is totally irresponsible,” said Chalmers Johnson.

Today, conservatives still dominate the Parliament and do not appear to reflect popular opinion on the war.

Frustration over the lack of political leadership in resolving the issue is apparent even at Yasukuni Shrine, the controversial Shinto shrine in Tokyo popularly associated with right-wing nationalism. On a recent afternoon, one man clapped his hands and bowed before the great wooden shrine emblazoned with the chrysanthemum seal of the imperial throne, praying for the soul of his cousin who died under U.S. fire off Okinawa.

He was no war apologist, however. “The government should clearly admit the wrongs we did--that is real courage,” said the former trading firm executive, 73, who was drafted into the navy toward the end of the war and who declined to give his name. “If we do, Japan will be trusted by other countries. If we don’t, this issue will never be resolved no matter how many years pass.”

Just as eastern Germans are coming to terms with their past, so are Japanese. In one sense, they have to: As their neighbors became more liberal, more individual war victims began appealing for an accurate historical reckoning, apology and compensation--demands that were difficult to make under previous authoritarian regimes that cut cozy deals with the Japanese, said Buruma. West Germany, however, was always surrounded by liberal democracies.

The death of Hirohito cracked open the door to the examination of issues of war guilt, including the establishment of the peace museums and more robust debate in the nation’s intellectual journals. Some journalists say unwritten taboos still exist against debating the emperor’s war responsibility; the former mayor of Nagasaki was shot and nearly killed a few years ago for doing so.

Japan’s growing desire to play a larger political role in the world--reflected, for instance, in its attempts to secure a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council--is also fueling efforts to come to terms with its past and win global trust. Germany, after a wrenching national debate and parliamentary vote, recently decided to send troops and missile-equipped planes to the Balkans, but Japan is still barred from such dispatches by its peace constitution. (It has begun to send troops to help monitor cease-fires and assist with road repair and other tasks, however.)

Planting Seeds of Change

The seeds of change were planted by Yasuhiro Nakasone in the mid-1980s when he became the first prime minister to acknowledge the “aggressive” elements in Japan’s war with China. His policy has been followed, more or less, by every leader since, said Hiroshi Yoshida in the book “The Japanese View of War.”

“The flow of this policy change cannot be stopped,” Yoshida wrote. He warned, however, that constant demands made on Japan could invite a backlash of “aggressive nationalism”--as reflected in brisk sales of such recent books as “Shut Up, Korea.”

For Azuma, the former soldier, the need for Japan to come to terms with its past has nothing to do with complex political strategies.

“It’s a matter of human conscience,” he says simply. “People should tell the truth.”

Watanabe reported from Japan and Walsh from Germany. Megumi Shimizu of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.