An education ministry panel's approval last April of a history textbook, which critics denounced as attempting to glorify Japan's wartime past, drew a quick response from South Korean politicians.

Four South Korean lawmakers flew to Japan and lodged a complaint with the ministry, staged a sit-in before the Diet building in protest, and filed a lawsuit the following month with the Tokyo District Court, demanding that Fuso Publishing Inc., the publisher of the textbook, stop its publication and sale.

"This textbook denies Japan's past aggression and colonial rule, and the damage caused by such acts," Ham Seung Heui, a member of the ruling Millennium Democratic Party, told a news conference in May after filing the suit. "It is clearly an illegal act that defamed the people of South Korea."

While the two governments frequently tout "future-oriented" relations, past issues like Japan's 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula and its wartime aggression in Asia still weigh heavily on the minds of many politicians in South Korea and China 57 years after the end of World War II.

Their perspectives on history are poles apart from those held by some conservative lawmakers in Japan.

Seisuke Okuno, an 88-year-old Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker, has stated that the Pacific War was not an act of aggression but a war in which Japan freed the people of East Asia from European imperialism.

"There may be past conduct that Japan should reflect on," he said. "But we should abandon the perspective that Japan was the sole scoundrel."

Labeling China and South Korea's criticism of Japan over the past as "interference in domestic affairs," Okuno claims the two governments are using the history issue as a diplomatic card against Japan.

"The two countries have launched an anti-Japan campaign to maintain the solidarity of their people," said Okuno, an elite bureaucrat in the wartime Interior Ministry. "The move is also aimed at gaining economic aid and preventing Japan from building up military strength again."

When he made similar remarks as director general of the National Land Agency in May 1988, he was forced to leave the Cabinet.

Loose-lipped liabilities

Okuno is not alone in being ousted from public jobs in recent years for making problematic remarks about Japan's wartime past.

In 1994, when then Environment Agency chief Shin Sakurai said Japan "did not intend to invade" Asia, he had to step down two days later. In 1995, Takami Eto, then Management and Coordination Agency chief, also resigned after he told reporters that Japan did "some good deeds" during its colonial rule of Korea.

Although in 1995, then Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama offered an official apology, repeated gaffes by Cabinet ministers have cast an impression of inconsistency and incurred distrust elsewhere in Asia.

A few senior lawmakers have, on the other hand, tried to smooth out the differences over the past. LDP heavyweight Hiromu Nonaka, a well-known dove, is one of them.

When he was chief Cabinet secretary in 1999, he called for removal of Class-A war criminals from the Japanese honored at Yasukuni Shrine, as well as the reorganization of the shrine into a nonreligious national institution so that government leaders can pay their respects to the war dead without offending other parts of Asia.

"(The proposal was made) so that all people can pay respect to those who sacrificed themselves for the country," he explained.

On an another occasion, Nonaka pushed for a resolution, which was adopted by the Diet in 2000, vowing that Japan would try to resolve international conflicts through peaceful measures instead of violence and never again wage war.

The Yasukuni issue resurfaced last year when Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi expressed his intention to visit the shrine. Although he visited Yasukuni on Aug. 13 instead of Aug. 15 -- the anniversary of Japan's defeat -- the move further blighted relations with China and South Korea, which were already strained over the textbook row and other disputes.

Same page, different book

The textbook dispute dates back to 1982, when media reports, which later turned out to be false, alleged that an education ministry panel instructed a textbook publisher to revise a history textbook to describe wartime acts committed by the Imperial Japanese Army as "advances," instead of "aggression."

Reacting to protests from Seoul and Beijing, the Japanese government said the ministry's screening body should give "necessary consideration" over modern Asian history in giving official approval to textbooks for use at schools.

Lee Nak Yon, a Millennium Democratic Party member, said South Korea's criticism of Japan over the history textbooks is not a case of interfering in domestic affairs but centers on the rights of South Koreans.

"We are not complaining about Japan's overall history but over the part where we suffered (at the hands of Japan)," he said. "We want Japan to revise the part where South Korea's history of damage is incorrectly described."

But observers say the reactions of Chinese and South Korean leaders over history issues not only reflect domestic public sentiment but also -- and more strongly -- their modern-day political and diplomatic stances.

Masao Okonogi, a professor of politics at Keio University, believes South Korea's strong protest last year over the textbook and Koizumi's Yasukuni visit was the product of a political tug-of-war between South Korean President Kim Dae Jung and opposition parties.

The opposition parties and the South Korean mass media, not on the friendliest terms with the government since it launched a tax investigation of media firms, wanted to corner Kim when his political power was declining, attacking him for not taking strong action against Japan, he said.

"The history issue was used as a political tool against Kim," remarked Okonogi, an expert on matters involving the Korean Peninsula. "Had the dispute occurred several years ago when Kim had more power, it would not have created such a commotion."

Tatsumi Okabe, a professor of law at Senshu University, said China deliberately refrained from commenting on the history issue until in the late 1970s, when the nation began to seek better relations with the former Soviet Union.

"China no longer needed to consider diplomatic relations with Japan and the United States to maintain a united front against the Soviet Union," he said.

When the 1982 history textbook row erupted, China started an anti-Japan campaign as if it wanted to demonstrate to Tokyo its shift of diplomatic policy, Okabe said.

Pundits claim another reason why China has always stressed past issues is that a majority of Chinese leaders harbor personal grudges against Japan as most fought in the war.

However, those "third-generation" Chinese leaders are expected to retire in the near future as President Jiang Zemin has promised to carry out a large-scale reshuffle in both the party and the government in a convention to be held in October.

Such a shakeup will allow "fourth-generation" figures, who are in their late 50s and early 60s, including Zeng Qinghong, head of the Chinese Communist Party's organization department, to assume leadership.

As the fourth generation has only secondhand experience of the war with Japan through education and historical documents, experts say tomorrow's leaders may not be as critical as their predecessors over past issues.

Zeng and other relatively younger politicians reportedly played a big role in China's policy shift toward Japan in 1999.

During his visit in 1998, Jiang riled many Japanese by strongly pressing Tokyo to include a clear-cut apology over its wartime aggression in a joint declaration. Apparently mindful of the impact, China eased its position the following year, refraining from focusing too much on wartime issues.

Out of time, out of mind

But a generational shift in leadership may not necessarily help Japan settle its past with its East Asian neighbors.

Takao Ueno, an assistant professor of international studies at Keiai University in Chiba Prefecture, noted that younger Japanese lawmakers appear to be polarized on wartime issues, with some favoring actively trying to resolve the history issues and others rebuffing pressure from Asia, calling it interference in domestic affairs.

Tomiko Okazaki, a Democratic Party of Japan lawmaker, criticizes the government for not offering compensation to former "comfort women," or wartime sex slaves, and other war victims in Asia.

"Their reputation and dignity will not be restored until the government offers an (official) apology and compensation to those individuals," said Okazaki, who headed for Indonesia on Monday to meet with local women who were forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers during the war.

Okazaki and several other lawmakers submitted a bill in November that would require the government to offer an apology and redress to the former comfort women. Such efforts from opposition lawmakers, however, have little chance of winning support within the ruling coalition.

On the other hand, some younger lawmakers have openly voiced a unwillingness to apologize for what Japan did before they were born.

"I feel no remorse as I am not of the generation (who waged the war)," LDP lawmaker Sanae Takaichi told the Lower House Foreign Affairs Committee in 1995 during debate on a declaration that the Diet adopted to mark the 50th anniversary of Japan's defeat.

"And I believe it is unreasonable for our generation to be asked to reflect on past conduct," Takaichi, then 34 and a member of the now-defunct opposition party Shinshinto, told the Diet panel.

When China and South Korea urged Tokyo to make further changes to Fuso Publishing's history textbook, 46 lawmakers joined a nonpartisan group set up in June to prevent "interference" from foreign governments.

Group member Hakubun Shimomura, a 47-year-old LDP lawmaker, argued that the interpretation of Japan's wartime history in most textbooks now in use is "masochistic" and quells the nation's independent point of view.

"(The description in textbooks) should not be nationalistic. But its contents should make Japanese people feel proud," reckoned Shimomura, adding that Japan should not be portrayed as the "sole culprit."