A majority of Japanese lawmakers polled in a newspaper survey released yesterday said the country has apologized enough for its World War II-era atrocities, amid a row with Asian neighbors over interpretations of Japan's past aggression in the region.
The Mainichi Shimbun said it sent questionnaires to all of Japan's 720 parliamentarians and received responses from 384, or just over half.
Of those who responded, 51 percent said Japan's apologies following the war were sufficient, compared with 33 percent who said that the nation hadn't fully atoned.
Nine lawmakers, or 2 percent of the respondents, said there was no need for Japan to apologize over its wartime conquest of Asia. The paper didn't give a margin of error.
Though Japanese prime ministers and emperors have expressed regret and remorse over the country's past, Tokyo's Asian neighbors have often questioned the depth of Japan's remorse.
China and South Korea angrily suspended top-level talks after Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visit last October to a Tokyo war shrine that honors the country's war dead, including convicted war criminals.
Beijing and Seoul have also protested Japan's approval of history textbooks that critics say gloss over atrocities committed by invading Japanese army troops in the 1930s and 1940s.
At its wartime height, Japan's empire stretched from the Pacific in the east to Burma in the west. Its conquest was brutal, with civilians bombed, doused with biological agents and subjected to cruel medical experiments. Thousands of women were forced into brothels for Japanese troops.
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