Japan has apologised. It has also paid compensation to governments per the Treaty of San Fransisco. Just because certain Asian governments like to sometimes whip up/pander to nationalism in complaining that Japan still hasn’t done enough doesn’t mean Japan has been inactive.
It is one thing to say it, it is another to mean it.
Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, apologised for Japan’s use of wartime sex slaves but stopped short of acknowledging that they had been forced into it by the Japanese military.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/mar/27/secondworldwar.japan
And it is not just some Asian governments, but also e.g. former colonials who were interned (Dutch)
Although Japan has practiced apology politics according to an internationally resonant formula of atonement for much of the postwar era, the lived histories of the victims of Japan’s wars of imperialist expansion remain undervalued as an ethical concern in contemporary Japanese society. Victims and their supporters will, therefore, continue to seek more from Japan in terms of an apology that addresses their specific history.
…
In the wake of Hirohito’s death in 1989, the explosive public debate within Japan over the issue of responsibility for the state’s role in directing the colossal suffering of Asians earlier in the 20th century made it clear that many Japanese felt strongly that Japan did, in fact, owe an apology to the nation’s historical victims, and that such redress was at the crux of Japan’s new hoped-for international role. At the beginning of the 21st century, though, in the wake of so many repetitive official sorrowful statements of “heartfelt apology” and “remorse,” a new challenge is confronting those who hope to have their individual histories matter to Japan’s collective modern narrative. During the past decade, extremists in Japan as well as some of a more centrist inclination have found increasing public space to claim that Japan has apologized enough already.
When Japan’s historical victims such as the former comfort women have refused Tokyo’s statements in recent years and have continued their demands for what they call a “real” apology — or, looked at differently, an apology they consider meaningful — their critics have begun complaining that Japan has apologized many times, and, therefore, the victims are certainly just after the money. The state’s narrators now discuss the victims’ history openly, yet no one has to take responsibility for their history, let alone the victims’ current dignity, or lack thereof. In this respect, the state is made stronger from without and within because it has displayed an amount of remorse accepted by the international formula of normality, yet has not fundamentally had to redefine itself. For the time being, the state’s protagonists have apologized in the state’s national interests. Society again casts off the victims, while their detractors re-empower the old national narrative that existed before the victims’ voices were heard. Prideful zealots denounce those who speak out on victims’ behalf — Japanese, Asians and others alike — as espousing what they call a masochistic view of Japanese history, a charge that Japan’s leaders are either failing to challenge or encourage themselves.
http://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/us-japan/research/pdf/06-01.Dudden.pdf
As Obi Wan said, Japan isn’t going to be invading anyone with ships like these (or even larger aircraft carriers). If there is a maritime threat to regional security it’s China.
It didn’t think they were going to, that’s besides the point
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