Regarding Florian Coulmas' wrongheaded article of July 8, "Act of missionary hypocrisy": We can of course agree with Coulmas' weighty pronouncements that Japanese governments and legislators tend not to be as concerned as they might with an honest admission of Japan's wartime atrocities. But what is Coulmas talking about when he bleats, "Why drag Germany into it?" I would have thought that a comparison of how Japan has not dealt with its wartime past with how the other main Axis combatant of World War II, Germany, has dealt with its past would be fair comment, and would indeed be so obvious that anyone who questioned that would seem to have problems seeing hands in front of faces.

Coulmas goes on to say that America owes an apology to Vietnam for waging a war to prevent that government from taking over by force the now defunct South Vietnam, the vast majority of whose citizens had no desire to be incorporated into a Stalinist state run by the avuncular Uncle Ho, ever concerned to guide his countrymen, via labor camps and "re-education" centers, to the Marxist paradise — the same paradise pursued so fervently in Mao Zedong's China and Kim Il Sung's North Korea.

Coulmas then intones the Japan-as-victim mantras of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Well, there is a vast difference between using nuclear weapons to force an end to a war that the Japanese military was too bone-headed to admit they had lost and methodically slaughtering the inhabitants of cities like Nanking, Hong Kong, Singapore and Manila after the Japanese military had those cities in the palms of their hands.

Japan has never, either through its courts or the machinery of government, compensated the victims of Japanese wartime aggression. Germany has paid out billions of dollars since 1945. Japan precisely nothing. It is significant that the debate over this has been focused in this country on "apologies." Civility, after all, costs nothing.

barry ward