Emperor Akihito of Japan should follow the example of Germany in making a genuine gesture of contrition for his country’s wartime aggression in Asia, Lee Myung Bak, the South Korean President, has said.

In an interview with The Times and two Asian newspapers, Mr Lee made a comparison with the late German Chancellor, Willy Brandt, whose genuflection before a monument to murdered Polish Jews became a symbol of postwar German contrition for the horrors of the Holocaust and the Second World War.

No Japanese leader has made a similar gesture and Tokyo’s repeated verbal statements of regret and apology have failed to erase lingering resentment of Japan, more than 60 years after the country’s wartime surrender.

“Willy Brandt touched a firm emotional chord with the whole of the Polish people, Europeans and indeed the world,” Mr Lee said, speaking to The Times along with Chosun Ilbo and the Mainichi Shimbun newspapers in the presidential Blue House in Seoul.

“That was a turning point in the partnership between the countries of Europe. And the visit of the Emperor of Japan could be a similar occasion when relations between Korea and Japan can really look forward.”

Mr Lee’s remarks go to the heart of one of the conundrums left by the Second World War: how Germany, which embarked on full-scale genocide, has managed to regain its standing within Europe, while Japan, which took fewer innocent lives, remains emotionally estranged from much of the rest of Asia.

Tokyo has never taken on a leadership role in Asia commensurate with its status as the world’s second economic superpower and is closer politically to the United States and Western Europe than to its own near neighbours. It remains an outsider in its own continent.

Japanese leaders point to the development aid that they have put into Asia over decades; to their postwar record of pacifism, and to the unambiguous statement of “deep remorse and heartfelt apology” for Japan’s “colonisation and aggression”, endorsed annually by successive Japanese Cabinets since 1995.

From time to time these efforts have been undermined by the remarks of conservatives in Japan, who have attempted to justify Japan’s wartime conduct, although this remains a minority view among the population.

When the head of the Air Force, Toshio Tamogami, published an essay justifying Japan’s occupation of parts of Asia as a war of liberation, he was dismissed swiftly. And since the retirement of Junichiro Koizumi in 2006, no Japanese prime minister has paid a visit to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, the Shinto holy site where the war dead, including war criminals, are enshrined.

Japanese comics, animations and pop music are avidly consumed in Beijing, Shanghai and Taipei but there are still periodic bouts of sometimes violent antiJapanese feeling.

Privately, Japanese diplomats say that they are a convenient scapegoat that governments in China and South Korea can use to divert anger that might otherwise be directed against themselves. But Mr Lee’s remarks underline that no Japanese leader has gone beyond words in expressing Japanese atonement for the brutality of the wartime regime.

A decisive moment for Germany was what is referred to as Brandt’s “Warschauer Kniefall” when, apparently spontaneously, he fell to his knees at the monument to victims of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1970.

As the son of Hirohito, in whose name the Japanese Imperial Army fought, Emperor Akihito is in a powerful position to make such a gesture. Personally, he has shown a deep commitment to assuaging the bitterness caused by his father’s generation. In 2001 he said that he felt an affinity with Koreans because of his family’s ancestral roots there.

“It is difficult to imagine the emperor taking the same posture of atonement [as Brandt], given the strictly choreographed nature of his public persona,” said Koichi Nakano, a political scientist at Sophia University in Tokyo. “However, he appears rather more liberal than many of the ruling party politicians. He won’t be on his knees, but he might be able to say a few things that would reach out to the Koreans.”

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