To forgive but not to forget
Don't even get me started on this government's idiot deal with the Japanese government on "comfort women"(more accurate term is military sex slaves). Abe said something in line of "now our next generations do not have to apologize anymore." Congrats. Let's have Angela Merkel go, "We paid Israel so that our next generations don't have to feel sorry about the Holocaust." It doesn't work that way. It must not work that way. I do not hold ordinary Japanese citizens responsible for Japan's past war crimes, but I do hold the Japanese government responsible for not educating people about what wrongs the Japanese Empire committed. As mankind, we have an obligation to learn about the most horrifying examples of crimes against humanity and prevent them from happening again.
The crux of comfort women issue was never that Japan did not pay Korea adequately, but the Japanese politicians publicly making hugely problematic remarks such as comfort women were 1) paid prostitutes so soldiers could do whatever they wanted to them 2) liars who wanted money and 3) comfort women never existed and the Japanese government and textbooks constantly positioning themselves as an absolute victim of WWII and conveniently deciding not to educate their children what violence Japan perpetrated throughout their conquered territories.
It's not between two countries - what Japan did to Korea - but the violence being committed against women and girls and condoned by the authorities during the time of war. Comfort women were an egregious example of state-run systematic sexual slavery. Think of what Korean soldiers did to Vietnamese women during the Vietnam War? It's about social justice, not nationalism.
(The paragraph below can be potentially triggering, so cut: )
I once translated for a former comfort woman. She was a mellow and cheerful lady. She was 13 when she thought she was going to work at a factory and go to night classes. She ended up in a Japanese military base brothel in Phillippines and was forced to have sex with twenty to thirty people per day and got beaten when she refused. She had no personal grudge or even anti-Japanese sentiment - but her greatest sorrow and anger were that the Japanese government kept denying existence of comfort women, and reducing their protests to a bunch of crazy old women begging for money. "I want my nightmare-free youth back," she said, "but I will never get it back. I at least want people to know and acknowledge what happened so this doesn't happen anywhere in the world."