Schröder: Japan Can Learn From Germany

German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder waded into an Asian row Wednesday over Japan's approach to its World War II atrocities, saying postwar Berlin had won the respect of its neighbors in how it contended with its Nazi past. Schröder said after talks with South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun that every country must find its own way to deal with the glories and shame in its history. But, without mentioning Japan by name, he said Germany had learned "that one does not lose friends with a sensitive and self-critical approach to one's own history but rather wins them". Roh contrasted the post-World War II reconciliation between Germany and France with his country's lingering tensions with Japan, in a German newspaper interview last week before his arrival in Berlin. He told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that "Germany had succeeded in healing the wounds of the war, had overcome them and then moved on to integrate itself into Europe." Roh blamed Japan, which occupied the Korean peninsula from 1910-1945, for preventing a similar reconciliation between its Asian neighbors.