The year 2015 will not be a quiet one for Japan or its people as the region marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the Fifteen Year War (1931-45), the Pacific War (1941-45) and Japanese colonialism in Korea and Taiwan.

There will be a series of awkward dates marked by ceremonies of commemoration and opportunities for quiet reflection on the horrors of war, man's capacity for inhumanity and crosscurrents of forgiveness and forgetting, anger and closure.

Seven decades on, Asia remains riven by a shared past and unresolved historical grievances. There is no one reason why this is so, but clearly one powerful factor is Japan's incomplete reckoning and its tendency to downplay depredations inflicted in favor of suffering endured.