Last week the government approved a set of school textbooks that dilute references to wartime atrocities, including the forcing of "comfort women" into brothels by Japan's imperial army.
Two groups, Right Sector and Svoboda (Freedom), are frequently mentioned and there are regular references to wartime nationalist Stepan Bandera, seen as a hero to some but accused by others of being a Nazi collaborator linked to massacres of Jews and Poles.
Reference: To the wartime (1937-40) priministerter of England whose policy of appeasement toward Adolf Hitler's Germany culminated in the Munich Pact of September 1938...
The book's only trace of the lascivious is a reference to rising wartime hemlines in Britain because of an effort to conserve cloth.
In Virginia, where car owners can invent their own numberplates, he chose 007 IJG in a coy reference to his wartime intelligence role.
These pieces are engaging and funny, but they're also tellingly lightweight when set against the works that inspired them, beautifully carved wooden troop ships which Westermann called Death Ships, in reference to his wartime service in the Pacific, where he witnessed kamikaze attacks on US vessels.
In the statement, he also made an apparent reference to foreign wartime prostitutes for the Japanese army, though he avoided the question of whether the so-called "comfort women" were forced into the work, a hotly disputed issue with South Korea.
Several years ago, when Mr. Vonnegut was commissioned to update the C. F. Ramuz libretto for the Stravinsky, he wrote that he was astonished that a work composed during World War I made no reference to life during wartime.
Such actions fulfil a long-held ambition: Mr Abe belongs to a parliamentary group that has worked for years to limit historical references to Japanese wartime atrocities.Neighbouring countries reacted with predictable outrage.
