Watanabe is my family name.

TOKYO Ms. Watanabe, age 40, is hesitant. Her mother, Mrs. Watanabe, is known for moving the world s markets with the financial trading that occupies her breaks from housework.

Mrs. Watanabe is the generic name for Japan s housewife speculators, who have wielded significant influence on foreign exchange and other markets through their trading. After graduating from university, Mrs. Watanabe quit her job when she married Mr. Watanabe (who worked in the same office), became a housewife, and raised one daughter.

Mrs. Watanabe has a talent for seeing how the tide turns. Her advice is to grab the opportunity at work, and also find happiness in marriage and children.

Encouraged by her mother, Ms. Watanabe set her sights on new shores. It was a completely new working environment, but her English skills and MBA proved to be invaluable.

My exposure to the Japanese right came in the early 1990 s, when I was on a couple of panels in Japan with Watanabe Soichi, who was selected by my Japanese publisher (unbeknownst to me) to translate my book The End of History and the Last Man into Japanese. Watanabe, a professor at Sophia University, was a collaborator of Shintaro Ishihara, the nationalist politician who wrote The Japan That Can Say No and is now the governor of Tokyo.

Without other options, Ms. Watanabe took a long term unpaid leave of absence (which her company typically does not grant to women) to study for an MBA in America. Although she returned with excellent grades, her position within the company worsened, because she did not have a boss who could use her skills.

Watanabe, who is now in his eighties and served in the Imperial Japanese Army during WWII, was bothered by the way unfinished business concerning the war continued to hinder Japan s progress. As a remedy, he set up a War Responsibility Re Examination Committee at his newspaper to undertake a 14 month investigation into the causes of Japan s Pacific War.

Watanabe tells us that the Committee concluded that, not only high ranking government leaders, general, and admirals should shoulder the blame. According to the Committee, field officers were often more influential than even the Emperor, war ministers, and chiefs of staffs in making decisions to go to and escalate the wars, and were responsible for many atrocities.

If things are left as they are, writes Watanabe, a skewed perception of history without knowledge of the horrors of the war will be handed down to future generations. It would be an immensely encouraging sign of China s growing maturity if its leaders used this moment to look beyond the bitter past toward a new future with Japan.

Ms. Watanabe had heard that companies in Norway or France face delisting if their ratio of female officers falls below 40 , and she joked with her friends that Keidanren (the Japan Business Federation) would vanish under such a law. Nonetheless, with each public company in Japan to appoint at least one female officer, it might be her turn someday.

It is our obligation as Japan s most influential newspaper to tell our readers who was responsible for starting the Sino Japanese War and the Pacific War. So writes Tsuneo Watanabe, Editor in Chief of Japan s (and the world s) most widely circulated newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun , in the introduction to the book From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Ha rbor Who Was Responsible .

Watanabe laments the fact that after Japanese war criminals were tried by the Tokyo Tribunal of 1951, No efforts were made in the name of Japan or the Japanese people to look into where responsibility for the war rested. As a result, there can be no genuinely honest and friendly dialogue with those countries that suffered considerable damage and casualties in the wars with Japan.