Japan's ugly truths cannot be retracted

Japan's conservative daily Yomiuri Shimbun shocked many in the country in 2005, when it ran an editorial fulminating against then-prime minister Junichiro Koizumi's frequent visits to the Yasukuni Shrine. It said those visits were unnecessarily provocative to China and showed a willful ignorance of Japan's dark wartime history.

Japan's - and possibly the world's - best-selling newspaper published a year-long series of articles reviewing the uncomfortable truth about Japan's wartime record. And those articles formed the basis for a book, Who Was Responsible? From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor, which was published in Japanese, English and Chinese.

In stark words, the book damns Japanese militarists for launching the war of aggression in China and later the Pacific war of World War II, and it has the courage to unmask the unspeakable atrocities the Japanese military committed in Asia.