Again: I so don’t have a dog in this fight, but I find this stuff very interesting. Another reader — with a Japanese first name — chimes in:

Dear Jonah,
I read with interest the e-mail you posted decrying Japan. One
sentence in particular was the dead giveaway: “I’d take that anyday
over the last 700 years Japan has been looting, pillaging, and raping
Korea.” This is the kind of gross distortion of history the far left
creates and then condemns Japan for not facing squarely. During its
Edo period Japan was looting, pillaging, and raping Korea? NRO readers
are too smart and they have seen it all before to buy into this kind of
myth-making. The same kind of forces that turn Jenin into a holocaust
have been busy at work the last sixty years creating a Japan that makes
communist China and North Korea seem the world’s saviors of personal
liberty and justice. It is no coincidence that after Tianneman the
authorities in China saw fit to ratchet up the numbers, by hundreds of
thousands, those massacred by the Japanese in Nanking. And that a few
years later a “scholar” toeing the new party line would publish a
widely read, and highly deceitful, tract on the same topic. None of
this is to dismiss the actions of Japan during a very brief and
unwelcome period in its history, but it is difficult for well
intentioned Japanese conservatives to address that history when the far
left and state sponsored propaganda machines continue to rewrite it in
order to mask ongoing terror and crimes and solidify the base. In any
case, it is important for America to understand who its real allies
are. Look back over the period in which Reagan was bringing down the
Soviet Empire, it was not only Thatcher, but as importantly Nakasone at
his side. Look back over the last four years and see what Japan has
done and said. And when you have a lot of time look back over the
period from the coming of Perry and the opening up of Japan in the
second half of the nineteenth century until the beginning of WWII and
try to discover when and why things went wrong. Hint: neither America
nor Japan, if not allies, had the ability to hate (and fight) both
Stalin and Hitler at the same time. This being the greatest tragedy of
that tragic war.