Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expressed no remorse for Japan's past military aggression in Asia and failed to pledge to never again wage war Thursday when the nation marked the 68th anniversary of its surrender in World War II, underscoring his revisionist views on history and push to amend the pacifist Constitution.
Every prime minister since the Socialist Tomiichi Murayama in 1994, including Abe himself during his first stint as leader in 2007, had expressed "profound remorse" and "sincere mourning" for the suffering inflicted by the Imperial Japanese military at the annual Aug. 15 ceremony to commemorate the war dead. In 2007, Abe had also renewed his predecessors' pledge never to go to war again.
But this year Abe stopped short of including those words in his memorial speech for the 3.1 million war dead, including the 2.3 million fighting for Japan who died in the war and 800,000 civilians who were killed by air raids, including the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.