JapanAs Japan goes to war over how history is taught in schools, the bitter legacy of its past is again threatening its ambitious plans for the future, writes David McNeill in Tokyo
In a week that saw an extraordinary outpouring of public grief in the Vatican, much of South Korea was watching a different kind of emotional display. Cameras clicked and whirred as Gil Won Ok (77) and her elderly comrades bombarded the Japanese embassy in Seoul with pleas, prayers and bitter denunciations of the Tokyo government.
"Who will take away my pain?" cried the frail woman who was barely a teenager when she was forced to provide sex to hundreds of Japanese soldiers during the second World War. "Atone for the past and let me die in peace."
Drowned out by driving rain and dwarfed by riot police, her cries were too weak to be heard inside the embassy compound - but they were picked up loud and clear by the local media in a country where the women are considered living symbols of the wartime suffering of all Koreans, and by extension millions of other Asians.
The pensioners, among the handful still alive from an estimated 200,000 "comfort women" or Asian sex slaves to the Imperial Japanese Army, have been coming here every week since 1992 to demand an apology, but neither time nor mortality has dulled the emotional heat of their campaign, which is regularly stoked by what Koreans young and old consider fresh insults from across the Japan Sea.
This week, Japan poured more fuel on the fire by authorising high-school textbooks that Korean government spokesman Lee Kyu Hyung said "beautify" its brutal occupation of much of Asia until 1945.
One history book written by neo-nationalist academics drops all references to the comfort women and other war crimes and suggests that Korea invited the Japanese occupation. A civics text claims jurisdiction over a clump of rocks called Takeshima (or Tokdo in Korean), much closer to Korea than Japan. "What nonsense is this?" said an editorial in the normally mild Korea Herald.
If Tokyo can afford to ignore the Korean press and the anguished keening of Gil Won Ok and her dwindling fellow survivors, there are far more threatening sounds coming from its biggest trading partner, China, where a boycott campaign against Japanese goods is growing, and attacks on Japanese businesses in the cities of Chengdu and Shenzhen have spooked once-bearish investors.
The attacks come on the back of a massive online campaign in China which has gathered 27 million signatures against Japan's long-cherished hope for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. In a year pregnant with political and business possibilities, Tokyo is again finding the way forward blocked by its undigested history.
Japan's official response to the growing controversy has been a series of bland statements from the government of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who said Korea and China should not let differences in historical interpretation damage ties. "It is important to control emotions," he said.
But behind the diplomatic platitudes lies a hardening of sentiment among the prime minister's fellow Liberal Democrats, well over 100 of whom - including his education minister - back the historical revisionist movement in schools. Under Mr Koizumi's right-wing government, hundreds of teachers have been punished for refusing to stand for the national anthem, a symbol across Asia of Japan's militarist past.
Privately many in the government say Japan has apologised enough for the past and that China is stoking patriotism and anti-Japanese sentiment, but critics say Japan is doing little to help.
"The Japanese government is inflaming opinion across Asia with these textbooks," says Takashi Hasegawa, a teacher and anti-textbook campaigner in Tokyo. "If they really think Chinese communists are to blame why are they playing into their hands?"
Tokyo hopes that red-hot trade with China, which grew by 17 per cent last year, and growing cultural links with Korea will trump the fallout from its unpopular views on history, but a looming clash of old nationalisms in the world's most dynamic economic region may not be good for business, as some of Japan's biggest corporations are discovering.
Chinese businessman Victor Yuan told a local newspaper this week that he had opted for a Buick over a Toyota following what he called peer pressure, an increasingly common anecdote. In Korea, it is already hard to find a Japanese car among the Hyundai, Kia and Daewoos that crowd the streets.
"I don't think the Japanese government understands the pain it caused these women," says Kaori Suda, who was among the protesters outside the embassy in Seoul. "I wonder if they ever will."