World media, scholars rap Abe's sincerity-lacking statement on Japan's wartime past

Abe's statement lacked sincerity, Morita was quoted as saying by DPA.

Sarah Hyde, senior lecturer in the Politics of Japan at the University of Kent, said in an article published recently on the academic website The Conversation that Japan's way of remembering World War II still infuriates its neighbors.

Despite widespread public rancor over the war across the rest of East Asia, the Abe government is making no effort to improve Japanese war education 70 years on, she said.

"While Germany has managed to build holocaust education into its curriculum and is now at the center of the European project, Abe and his predecessors have never acknowledged that relations with (South) Korea and China would be greatly improved if there were a push for education and discussion about this terrible history," Hyde said.

"As things stand, no matter how the militaristic and nationalistic Abe handles the memory of the war in this anniversary year, Japan's relations with its former adversaries are set to keep festering," she said.

Gu Xuewu, director of the Center for Global Studies of Bonn University, told Xinhua that Abe's statement was neither sincere nor apologetic.

Gu believed that Abe meant "Japan should not apologize now and in the future" as he argued in his statement that Japan had apologized many times in the past, and Japan must not let its future generations, "who have nothing to do with that war, be predestined to apologize."

Abe simply wanted to "cut the history," Gu said.