The fact that the jitters over Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's statement marking the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II have been going on for months highlights just how controversial the way in which Japan comes to terms with its wartime past, particularly its aggression against and colonial rule of its Asian neighbors, remains. Postwar reconciliation with China, which bore the brunt of Japan's aggression, and South Korea, which was under Japanese colonial rule for 35 years until Japan's 1945 defeat, can hardly be deemed achieved even decades after Japan normalized diplomatic relations with them.

Whatever specific words the prime minister intends to use in the text he delivers on the eve of the day marking the war's ending, it would perhaps be naive to assume that a single anniversary statement will settle once for all the seeds of disputes relating to Japan's modern history with its neighbors. What matters more is that Japan's behavior and actions back up the words spoken by its leaders.

When Abe announced that he would issue a statement commemorating the 70th year after the war, an obvious question popped up — whether he would follow what Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama stated 20 years ago to mark half a century after the end of World War II — because Abe had earlier openly cast doubts about the so-called Murayama statement of 1995, in which the Socialist leader of a coalition government with the Liberal Democratic Party expressed "deep remorse and heartfelt apology" over Japan's wartime aggression and colonial rule of other countries in Asia. Abe triggered more political jitters when he indicated he would not repeat the exact words used in the earlier statement, although he said that his administration inherits the statements by past Japanese governments "as a whole."