You'll express deep sorrow and repentance, sincere and vocal contrition.

Still, to be able to die with no special contrition, not having been slaughtered, or enslaved.

Should one apologize for the Crusades, for the destruction of German cities by the armies of King Louis the XIV in the seventeenth century, not to mention the armies of Napoleon? Wouldn t the result simply be to turn history into a perpetual cycle of contrition?

At hearings before a US Senate subcommittee, BP CEO Tony Hayward s evasive maneuvering and failure to answer point blank questions infuriated Congressmen and the American public alike. His expression of contrition may provide some relief that the key culprit has been fingered, but it brought the sealing of the well no closer.

In 2008, Australia s then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized to his country s Aborigines, while Queen Elizabeth II offered a moving gesture of contrition in Ireland a few months ago. And now, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, on a recent visit to the Caucasus, reiterated his advice to the Turks to repent for the massacres of Armenians committed by the decaying Ottoman regime in 1915.

The cathartic actions that post war Germany took, not the least of which was the acknowledgement with contrition of those events and the etching on the collective German memory of the wrongs that Nazi Germany had done to Jews and others, leave little doubt that German society as a whole has sincerely learned the lesson of history and has come to terms with it.

Japan could go a long way toward helping its neighbors overcome the poisoned past that it shares with so many of them as a result of its old imperial ambitions. Just as US President Richard Nixon s unyielding anti communism uniquely suited him to establish diplomatic relations with China, Abe, an affirmed nationalist, may be the Japanese politician best able to blend contrition for the past with forthrightness about the present.

While Yomiuri s unique public effort is not a government initiative, it comes as close as Japan will probably ever get to conducting an acceptable official inquiry and offering an adequate apology. Its style is almost scientific factual, staccato like, and unemotional and it goes a long way toward meeting China s demand for a convincing investigation and act of contrition that might allow the bitter and still poisonous past to be overcome.