It would help a lot if Japan would be owning up to its crimes in the way Germany has.
One has to ask when it comes to the Japanese elite and I am sure they have... is it in Japan’s military, political or economic interest to do what you say?
Political and Military interest?: Not really. Abe wants the post war constitutional restrictions such as the banning of war and having an armed force erased. They do have an armed force, but they have had to make quite an effort to extend the scope of the wording of Article 9 (self defense non-military armed force or whatever) and other such stretches.
The Japanese political class also wants rearmament which isn’t aided by the population being reminded about WW2. Much the opposite.
Economic interest?: No. The markets for their goods is heavily outside of countries where politicians use events in the ‘30s and 40s in the Pacific as a bloody shirt to rally political support.
What about Germany?
Military interest?: In the Cold War they wanted an army to defend themselves and free Western Europe from invasion. So did the U.S. and the rest of democratic Western Europe. They were the main force in most of the Cold War facing off against the Soviets to slow them down before global reinforcements arrived.
In the Cold War the German government could blame much of the worst acts that on the Nazi Party and SS and they did. In terms of the German Army for post war Germany a great deal were veterans of WW2 and self-flagellating too much about how bad their regular army was to the Soviets would run contrary to the ability to have an army that could defend free Europe against Soviet invasion. Generally this is what people today call ‘the myth of the clean German Army’ period.
I will only say the myth is indeed a myth in that the free world and historians recognized and wrote at the time the war in Eastern Europe was an ugly war with a racial component as the war in China was for Japan. But, they also believed the bulk of the outright genocidal acts were executed by the SS and Western elite weren’t going to yell that much about past actions against a state that has millions of men they believed completely might rush democratic Europe at any time.
Once the Cold War ended or so Germany thought Chancellor Kohl admitted before he died that they let anti-military elements in German society dictate the terms of history because they didn’t think Germany would need a real military ever again. He said it was a mistake on his part and it reverberates today in Germany’s rather severe difficulty in turning around the collapse of their armed forces. In the popular consciousness the SS and Heer divide evaporated in the post Cold War years.
The problem is the German Army today and how it’s regarded can’t be simply separated from how they are seen and regarded in the last big war they were engaged in which is true of the other armed forces around the globe.
Political/Economic interest?: Berlin decided that a humble Germany that wasn’t perceived as a possible threat to anyone was in the interest of aiding EU expansion and trade for their goods. It didn’t want possible populist uprisings against Germany from its major markets inside free Europe.
We have seen the start of major populist movements in Europe against Germany and the EU, but they didn’t start over the things the German political class seemingly worried a few decades ago it might start over.