Amid Japan’s frosty relations with Korea and China, a growing number of U.S. scholars are ramping up pressure on Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to take a more forward-looking approach toward wartime history.

The hawkish premier is currently working on a statement to be unveiled on Aug. 15 to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, which will likely determine Tokyo’s relations with its two key neighbors.

With Abe pushing for a constitutional revision, a greater military role and various revisionist moves, academics around the world, including pro-Japan experts, have been saying that for the policies to win support at home and abroad a sincere atonement for the country’s wartime atrocities should be made.

For Seoul, the issue of Tokyo’s sexual enslavement of Korean women during the conflict remains the biggest thorn in their bilateral relationship, with their reconciliation hinging on the resolution of the issue.

“Abe needs to realize that this is a lose-lose issue for Japan,” Jeffrey Hornung, a professor at the Hawaii-based Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, said in a recent article for the journal Foreign Affairs, referring to the so-called comfort women dispute.

While embracing the comfort women statues in Korea and the U.S., the premier should reaffirm his strong commitment to the 1993 Kono Statement by reissuing it as his own apology, Hornung said. The statement made by then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono offered Japan’s “sincere apology and remorse” for the “immeasurable pain and incurable physical and psychological wounds” inflicted during its rule.

“Abe recently reiterated his commitment to it. Now he should reaffirm it as official government policy by putting it out in his capacity as prime minister: an Abe statement,” the professor said.

“He should place a rose on the empty chair at the statue in front of Japan’s embassy in Seoul. Such an act would be powerfully symbolic, demonstrating to the world his country’s embrace of the issue, his remorse, and a reminder to the world of Japan’s commitment to peace for the past 70 years.”

Michael Auslin, director of Japan Studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, stressed that Abe’s past endorsement of previous formal apologies, including one issued in 1995 by then-Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama, had been deemed “inapt and offensive” due to other remarks and moves that suggested otherwise.

The prime minister “must put all this behind him” by offering a genuine apology this year, he said, which would help him execute his pursuit of greater military engagement in Asia and enable his people to better understand and discuss more comprehensively their past and future.

“While expressing ‘remorse’ is inward looking, an apology is outward directed,” Auslin wrote on the Commentator, a website.

“Abe, who has a bold and largely coherent plan for Japan to play a larger and more beneficial role in Asia, should take this anniversary as an opportunity to once and for all signal official Japanese acceptance of the tragedy of the past.”

By Shin Hyon-hee (heeshin@heraldcorp.com)