In 1970, German chancellor Willy Brandt fell to his knees before a monument to the victims of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The gesture became a symbol of German contrition. In 1984, François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, then leaders of France and Germany, held hands in a moving ceremony in Verdun, site of a battle in which 700,000 or more soldiers were wounded or killed in 1916.
In Asia, 70 years after the second world war, it is almost impossible to imagine similar acts of reconciliation. Rather than being less contentious as memories fade, contemporary views of history have become ever more bitter.
Japan and the US have become close allies. Yet even they cannot agree on how to remember history. One idea for 2015 that would have had Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, visit Pearl Harbor while Barack Obama, US president, visited Hiroshima has come to naught. Such are the disagreements that persist about what those two events mean that neither leader could say anything meaningful without causing offence to victim or perpetrator. In particular, Mr Obama would find it hard to apologise for a nuclear bomb that most Americans argue saved lives by shortening the war.