WASHINGTON -- Why should Goldman Sachs and U.S. President George W. Bush expect Japan to reconcile its financial accounts and nonperforming loans when it is clear that Japan's political architecture inhibits accountability on any front, particularly in matters of Japan's historical memory?
Official Japan cannot bring itself to apologize to the "comfort women" forced to act as sex slaves for Japan's soldiers; it cannot overcome by leadership or regulation the fundamental involvement of the yakuza and corruption-ridden political machines that have devastated the health of Japan's economy; and it cannot apologize to the American prisoners of war that Mitsui and Mitsubishi used as slave labor.
One key reason why Japan does not reconcile its past with the present, either in finance or in historical matters, is that the United States has at various times turned a blind eye to, permitted, encouraged and even designed this system of structural fraud and unaccountability.