Then the American written constitution (Much of it was drafted by two senior army officers with law degrees: Milo Rowell and Courtney Whitney.) was submitted in 1946, adopted in 1947 and ratified as it was in 1955 without objection by the Diet. It hasn’t been changed or ammended since.

I’d suggest you read their constitution and see how well the lessons of the war have been taught then, and taught currently to the current generation through its continuing notions of peace.
http://www.kantei.go.jp/foreign/constitution_and_government_of_japan/constitution_e.html

The subject of the war isn’t taboo. I’d suggest you see the movie Go! (Japanese and Chinese Collaboration – where they use the Chinese game and two player’s relationships through the period, and the eventual reconcilliation of said players as a recognition and diffusement of tensions.)

Also here is a list of apologies that Japan has made to its former enslaved/overrun neightbors –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_apology_statements_issued_by_Japan
Also 5 days ago:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601081&sid=atgvv_dGoTGg&refer=australia

And it appears that the Allied Powers established the FEC (Far Eastern Commission) regarding the issue of reparations and actually created the “Basic Post-Surrender Policy of Japan” which outlined the payment of reparations by Japan. However, it was never implemented, because most of the rebuilding of the war ravaged countries had been completed before Japan itself had recovered its “basic/fundamental” industries.
So again these are the countries to “blame” for Japan never paying significant reparations according to the plan that these countries played a role in writing:
USA, USSR, China, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, France, India, Netherlands, New Zealand, Burma & Pakistan.
The concern, like in Germany’s rebuilding and eventual partitioning, was a situation that the reparations would cause the repeat of the mistakes of the Treaty of Versaii in allowing these conservative/nationalist causes to gain traction in a disarmed Japan, leading to future incidents.
This site: http://www.jstor.org/pss/3023451
has the first page of this 11 page document and here is the full citation:
Japanese Reparations to the Philippines
J. L. Vellut
Asian Survey, Vol. 3, No. 10 (Oct., 1963), pp. 496-506
(article consists of 11 pages)
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3023451

@ Sachiko, I hope that the current anti-israeli monologue, returns to a dialogue as well. The Obama administration has offered many gestures and overtures to the most repressive regimes in the world to enter into dialogues on these and other issues, as well as other leaders throughout the world. I too hope that the level of propaganda regarding these issues of Racism/Zionism/Immigrants will be clarified. The boycott, was an attempt to highlight the untruthfulness of the continuing commentary by certain leaders, and try to get constructive discourse re-introduced as the bearing for future discussions of the topic. Whether any of these tactics will work to resolving anything or bringing the discussion of rectifying the subjects of hate worldwide, is unfortunately unknown.

This ridiculous statement, suggests that he will not…
“On 19 April, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad commented on the controversy surrounding the summit in a televised speech, implying that it was due to a Zionist plot. “It is clear that the Zionists and their backers will undertake everything possible so that the voices of those people suppressed will be silenced… [the] Zionists control an important part of the politics in the U.S. and Europe and used this influence, especially in the media, to force their demands, which are nothing more than the plundering of nations, onto the world,” he said.[25]”

Here is a review of the 2009 conference, again Wiki, but it is again fairly written and has references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durban_Review_Conference

Originally Posted By Akacra
So it is in fact a conspiracy of modern nations with established laws, not to obscure the world from some secret cabal lurking and controlling actions that these deluded hate mongers “have come across”, but in fact to try and stop the expression of hate speech and plain misinformation that lead to the outcome that affected not only 6 million jews, but also 4 million invalids, cripples, homosexuals, gypsies, deserters, serbs, slavs, poles, and anyone else considered a liability to the Nazi regime.

But it is the suppression of information that gives disinformation the chance to spread. Once again, suppressing anything that might be construed as anti-Semitic is I believe counter-productive. It is “special treatment”, and nothing fuels racism, xenophobia and conspiracy theories more than that.

Why is it handled differently? Because the Jewish people have a rallying hue and cry. They have pledged to kill 100 attacking people for every 1 Jew killed, and they have put all their efforts into exacting this overaggressive response in hoping to deter further harm against themselves.

Well this certainly explains a lot about their treatment of Palestinians! Once again, this is exactly the wrong thing to do. Jews experienced an unprecedented wave of sympathy after the holocaust, which they’ve completely reversed with Zionism and their general over aggression since. They are creating anti-Semitism through their own actions, and that is the greatest threat to their existence.

I should also stress that I do not intend to give any credibility to conspiracy theoritsts – quite the reverse in fact. They thrive on the suppression of information; open discusion and debate is simply the best way to show them for what they really are.

I think that true Racism takes place when one group of homo-sapiens considers another group of homo-sapiens to be sub-human.

As a matter of historic note the Flat Earthers, and the Hollow Earthers are actually religious backlash movements against the scientific breakthroughs of Heliocentrism, and round earth (re)discoveries, just like the creationists and intelligent design movements are religious backlashes to geomorphism, the origin of species and the current science of evolution.
http://www.alaska.net/~clund/e_djublonskopf/Flatearthsociety.htm
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/flatearth.html
http://www.crystalinks.com/hollowearth.html
http://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/hollow-earth.html

So fundamentalist beliefs are at work in this area as well, and then you add in the weird pseudo christian beliefs the Nazi’s had about things and everything goes out the window.

How many other countries, other than the European/American powers even acknowledge their roles in the subjugation and the reasons why slaves were so easily procured for these powers in the first place. I guess if we blame it all on the Europeans/Americans we can ask for reparations, never mind the actual systems of intertribal warfare, and cultural oppressions of the source countries provided to these outside colonial powers. Nope, that had nothing to do with it. No blame, for the past, and no recognition of the present tribalism and existing conditions that have kept Africa so divided and easily influenced by power brokering external parties. It is of course just the White Man’s Burden, that has caused every problem in the world.
No the suppression of the Uighur, Tartar, Manchus, and the Outer Mongolians, and the Cantonese and the Soong and the Hokkanese, and the almost 1000 other original racial/ethnic/traditions & nationalities that make up the Chinese country outside the “Han” tradition, have of course no internal manifestation. The current Tibetan debacle, the desertion of the Taiwanese, the reincorporation of Hong Kong, the religious persecution of every group, the second largest prison population in the world, etc, etc. is of course all not important to bring up, because its those terrible Americans and the Northern Europeans doing all the bad things in the world.
I could go on and on and on and on with every group and sub group and their history of subjugation and conquest and slaughter and being slaughtered, enslavement and history of promoting slavery, current origins of human trafficking, government extortion, but its all just the Americans and Northern Europeans who have caused all the problems in the world in regards to these poor hapless nations… nevermind that for the past 100 years outside of various relapses, and natural disasters, these same trouble making foriegn powers with the additional inputs of the former USSR, were pouring billions and billions of dollars into their economies, establishing schools, teaching modern governmental policies, educating the populaces.
America and the Northern Europeans/former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics/Japan know their histories well and have apologized at least 4 to 6 times, and spent renewed billions of dollars of economic/technical & infrastructural development in the regions as repayment and hopefully growth in the future. The bad and the good of what they have done/are doing/hope to do have been broadcast far and wide. Now what about everybody else? They seem awfully forgetful, and seem to want to ignore their own situations, their own responsibilities and continue to perpetrate huge atrocities against their own racial/caste/cultural/ethnic and traditional populations without much thought or acknowledgement of being in the wrong. So what is the use of the “dialogue”.
America and the other modern countries are always the oppressors, no matter their current record for the past 35 years, and the other nations are always the victims of “outside oppression” no matter what their records have been since their independence from their outside colonizations have been.
In 2001, the topics were the same, the victimizers were the same, the victims were the same, and yet racism/xenophobia/explotation decreased in the industrialized nations who were open and accepting of new asylum seekers with some of course highly publicized exceptions, while the “victimized” countries had many mass migrations, wars, executions, and further racially/ethnically/culturally/sexually motivated hate incidents.

Maybe these countries can talk amongst themselves this time, come up with someway to acknowledge their own short comings, and overall end their own internal disputes, while the industrialized nations working with the soveriegn governments directly involved with the current crisis in the expanded Eurasian/Middle Eastern theater tries to stop this subcontinental fundamentalist uprising from ending in a devastating nuclear disaster that threatens to destroy a huge amount of the historical and cultural beginnings of the world, as well as billions of people in the region.

Here is some comedy of Russell Peters (A Canadian of Indian descent who actually acknowledges racial/ethnic concerns, but is able to make people laugh about it.)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2579833089500205658

The President of Iran, has been repeatedly asked to go to Germany, and go to the preserved memorials, and camps from the Holocaust, by the German government, by the CBS 60 Minutes reporters, by the international community, and yet, he has never responded, and he has never went, and he continues his preposterous claims that it never happened, and it is a Jewish conspiracy blah, blah, blah.

Unfortunately his belief and his political agenda get in the way with of the truth and compassion that he and the other leaders of repressive regimes need to express before they will truly move towards the ideals of what the “WORLD CONFERENCE AGAINST RACISM RACIAL DISCRIMINATION, XENOPHOBIA AND RELATED INTOLERANCE” actually stands for.
When your country’s regime is a xenophobic, intolerant, sexist, homophobic, & religiously driven theocracy (on the surface at least, as actual Iranian people have many times expressed their desire to meet and do international relations with the west.) and you must remain in power by the will of those who drive the followers of the masses of that religion (whatever that religion is, including authoritarianism, dictatorship, etc.). Unlike Obama’s recent showings of respect to other leaders, the leader(s) of these countries cannot be expected to show such consolatory guestures or that they are wrong, or else they won’t be leading much longer.
If you were in their position, and your choices were – show weakness, and gain world respect, but possibly lose your position and ultimately your life as you know it in that country, or spout the regime’s dogma, keep your position and suffer international condemnation which most of the time doesn’t mean anything outside your country, which would you choose?
It is obvious which one these leaders keep choosing. It would be great if we could offer a third option, but what is that third option? China found a third option in Detente’ with Nixon and “ping pong diplomacy”. Gorbachev chose to forsake his position and end the cold war, as he thought it was best for his country and the world. So far these are the only two situations that weren’t resolved by a coup, or an external invasion. (Of course even this is arguable as The Gang of Four was removed from power by a military tribunal in 1974 in China, and Gorbachev was removed from power by a military coup – arrested while on vacation at his Dacha in 1993 – and replaced by Boris Yeltsin.)

The world doesn’t want to invade Iran. China doesn’t want to do what it has done in the past with the Korean Pennisula for a number of reasons. Most Americans didn’t and don’t want to be in Iraq or Afghanistan, but unfortunately these failed states could not be ignored as easily as Rwanda, Darfur, and Somalia have been due to the energy stores that the world depends on to keep running. Afghanistan has platinum and other minerals inherently tied to many aspects of current energy usage as well as issues with nearby Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan and India that also have huge raw Uranium or established nuclear capacities. (That is why the McCain campaign kept talking about 100 year military installations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as the goal was to have a safe way to transport nuclear fuels for world wide nuclear reactors usage for the next 60 years when the world would have run out of nuclear fuels, at current consumption levels, as well as removing those resources from the region so that further threats could be kept in check.) It was an impossible mission and no one could sell it, and no one could do it, so it was just as well America inadvertantly (most people had no idea what the McCain Campaign was talking about, and he never explained it.) chose the candidate that was willing to not attempt it, and try a different way.

Right now the entire region is in limbo. The Afghani’s are unstable, the Pakistani’s are unstable, Iraq is in flux, the Taliban are on the march, nuclear weapons are at risk, the Iranians are trying to centrifuge enriched uranium, to produce a nuclear reactor and possibly some small amount of warhead materials and you are worried about us not taking part in a forum designed to allow these people to distract us from this larger threat because they babble about how horrible those Zionists are?

I think I’ll let the conspiracy theorists dance around their bonfires of their vanity, and hopefully the real work of truth and compassion that has to be deployed to extiguish the fires of hatred in the form of religious indoctrination/racism/sexism & ethnocentrism in the region can actually be done without threatening the safety of the current world energy supplies.

It would be nice if this current crisis could have been dispelled with the UN conference, but as the last one ended with 9-11 just three days later, that it is unlikely that our participation in this one would make a lot of difference, given the current situation raging in the same region as in 2000-2001.

I hope that the actual diplomacy and verbal engagement with the surrounding powers will have the effect of success that the US going alone would never achieve, and that Obama’s able to convince the rest of the world to get involved in the actual arenas that will make a difference to right the past 8 year’s wrongs in terms of dealing with these issues in a decisive manner. I think that these head on approaches may have the ability to resolve the other issues more than any UN conference would as well.