Dear Prime Minister Shinzo Abe,
I have to hand it to you. For years we've been hearing about how Japan hasn't apologized sincerely for its imperial past. So what do you do? Threaten to retract those "nonexistent" apologies in the form of the Kono and Murayama statements of 1993 and 1995, thereby drawing such attention towards them that the focus of your statement on the 70-year anniversary of the end of the Asia-Pacific War has turned from whether you are going to apologize to whether you will uphold the apologies that exist. Talk about a triumph of diminished expectations!
It would now seem that your upcoming statement is to focus on the future in preference to what you would dearly like to do: clarify the past. A future-oriented statement is surely a discerning road to take, but I would like to suggest an alternative approach.