The 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War falls on Monday, a date less clearly etched in European minds than it should be. Between Germany’s defeat in May 1945 and Japan’s surrender on August 15, some of the bloodiest battles of the entire war raged across the far-flung Eastern theatre, against Japanese troops who fought with undiminished ferocity, regardless of the defeat that was now inevitable. It was the US Army that suffered the brunt of the losses which occurred on the Allied side.

Casualties were huge, not only military but also civilian: firebombing raids were reducing Japanese cities to ashes. The excerpts in T2 this week of Brian MacArthur’s book, Surviving the Sword, vividly bring to life the tense wait for liberation in the camps holding the 123,000 Allied prisoners of war who, for up to four years, had endured conditions so brutal that one in four captives was by this point dead. Of that liberation, the survivors could not be certain; many spent those months being forced to dig the pits that the Japanese had given orders should be, at the end, their mass graves. In Washington, Harry Truman weighed the hardest single decision of the war, perhaps of modern times: to risk invading Japan in what would be a punishing campaign, for Japanese civilians in particular, or to shock the nation into surrender by means of the atom bomb.

VJ-Day dawned on a sickened, bone-weary world. It has never acquired the association that VE-Day has with relief and rejoicing. Significantly and disturbingly, VJ-Day is still, 60 years on, the occasion in Asia of bitter memories and still stirring hatreds. VE-Day has become for Europeans a moment when reconciled enemies can stand side by side. Although the issue of PoW compensation still rankles, the West rightly now perceives Japan as a peaceable democracy with a highly developed sense of the obligations of international citizenship. But in Asia, Japan has yet to win such acceptance, let alone trust.

This is not all Japan’s fault. Its generous postwar aid to the region has assisted in economic development, as has private investment. It has generally been a voice of moderation in all Asian councils, eager to promote consultation and co-operation in a part of the world that remains troublingly short of effective channels for defusing disputes. China’s silence about such horrors as the Great Leap Forward means that Japan is not the only country in this area that has trouble in confronting its awkward past.

Yet Japan has still to grasp that stilted though repeated expressions of sorrow and regret have yet to meet the demand for proper atonement. It persists in treating the outrage caused by the Government’s approval of a controversially unapologetic school textbook as a “misunderstanding” of Japan’s education policies. It is true that schools have a choice; and true that only 1 per cent of Japan’s schools use this textbook. But the choice should not be available. Germany does not allow the glossing-over of the Nazi past. Japan, in its own interests, should be at least equally stern.