'Face history squarely for postwar reconciliation'

German Chancellor Angela Merkel waded into the fraught area of wartime forgiveness during a visit to Japan yesterday, saying that "facing history squarely" and "generous gestures" are necessary to mend ties.

Merkel was speaking in Tokyo ahead of the 70th anniversary of Japan's defeat in World War II, in which Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's conservative views on Tokyo's war crimes are under scrutiny, and as China and South Korea continue to call for ever more contrition.

"Germany was lucky to be accepted in the community of nations after the horrible experience that the world had to meet with Germany during the period of National Socialism (Nazism) and the Holocaust," she said in a public lecture hosted by the left-leaning Asahi newspaper.

"This was possible first because Germany did face its past squarely, but also because the Allied Powers who controlled Germany after the Second World War would attach great importance to Germany coming to grips with its past."

"One of the great achievements of the time certainly was reconciliation between Germany and France... The French have given just as valuable a contribution as the Germans have," she said.

Relations between Japan and its wartime victims, China and South Korea, are at a low point, with Beijing and Seoul both demanding Tokyo does more to atone for its past. Both countries suffered from Japan's militarism in the first half of the 20th century.