The wages of guilt - Ian Buruma

In this now classic book, internationally famed journalist Ian Buruma
examines how Germany and Japan have attempted to come to terms with
their conduct during World War II-a war that they aggressively began and
humiliatingly lost, and in the course of which they committed monstrous
war crimes. As he travels through both countries, to Berlin and Tokyo,
Hiroshima and Auschwitz, he encounters people who are remarkably honest
in confronting the past and others who astonish by their evasions of
responsibility, some who wish to forget the past and others who wish to
use it as a warning against the resurgence of militarism.

Buruma
explores these contrasting responses to the war and the two countries'
very different ways of memorializing its atrocities, as well as the ways
in which political movements, government policies, literature, and art
have been shaped by its shadow. Today, seventy years after the end of
the war, he finds that while the Germans have for the most part coped
with the darkest period of their history, the Japanese remain haunted by
historical controversies that should have been resolved long ago.
Sensitive yet unsparing, complex and unsettling, this is a profound
study of how people face up to or deny terrible legacies of guilt and
shame.