Double standard

observing Japan comments on Sankei's editorial on Aug 15th.
While Yomiuri and Asahi editorials comment on the cruel aspects of the war which inflicted Japanese as well as Asian people, Sankei only mentions the determination of the war-dead to protect Japan's independence and the importance to inherit it by strengthening the U.S.-Japan alliance.
True, Sanke should have given more space to the brutal aspects of the war for which Japan was responsible.
The blogger complains

there is no question that Sankei is far more concerned about North Korea and China when it looks at contemporary Japanese security policy.

But which country is not more concerned about her neighbors whose missiles aimed at her? Is the U.S. equally concerned about the each country of the world?

It is ready for Japan to reenter the East Asian balance of power in a big way.

In a big way or not, Japan IS playing the important role in the East Asian balance of power. How much role she should play is the point of discussions:Some American and Japanese policy makes want her to play more role, and others want her to play less. But nobody including China do not like the idea of power vacuum

Sankei — and, dare I say, at the Kantei — will ride the US train as long as it has locomotive power, but does anyone anticipate that Japan will value the alliance when the US is bruised, battered, and seemingly down for the count? (Such arguments have been cropping up ever more frequently in the pages of Japan's newspapers and journals.) Again, this need not be a problem — no alliance is permanent.

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The allies are allies; they mutually get benefit from being the allies.

This is, I fear, the face of the men who govern Japan today. Free of humility, free of sorrow, free of regret, they see "uncertainty"

Is he talking about the European countries and the U.S and Japan , free of humility, free of sorrow, free of regret on the past, which see "uncertainty?

.....in Asia and are immediately prepared to send Japan into battle again.

Wow, he is talking about Japan: is Kantei prepared to send Japan into battle again? Wow that sounds like the article by Onishi of New York Times.

the persistence of this manner of thinking will in the long run make it harder for Japan to play a constructive role in upholding the global order, if only because every step taken by these nationalists will prompt a backlash at home and among Japan's neighbors (more specifically, the Korean and Chinese peoples).

Which manner of thinking?
Anyway it is true Yasukuni and other statement by Japanese will prompt a backlash.
And it is true that Japanese politicians should be much more careful about their statements and actions, but we can not miss the fact that a backlash in Korea and in China is also brought about by their irrational ultra nationalism.

The reality is that Japan will not be able to act in the world free of the shadow of the past until the leaders making the strategic decisions are sufficiently apologetic and humbled by their country's past.

Japanese leaders should be sufficiently apologetic, but because he miss the point on
the problem on China and Korea's side, he missed the point that no matter apologetic Japanese politicians are, that does not end the backlash.

Repeating the same apology, word for word, over and over again, does not constitute atonement.

Like European countries and the U.S, should not Japan have apologized?

Japan should sufficiently pay attentions to the sufferings and pains Japan brought about among Asian people and Pows, but I don't understand why some western people can conveniently forget sufferings and pains they brought about in Africa, in Asia, in their nations against non-white people.
Which former colonizers mention the victims of colonized nations on the day of their independence?
Why keep applying the double standard to Japan?

Have they " learned nothing from the war" and the colonization, perhaps except for the lesson that Europe and the U.S. should be more tactful in dominating other nations and other ethnicity?-----well the double standard is a tactful way, but it soulds like the same old prejudice the older generation of Japanese people felt against the West.