Picture: ENRIQUE SHORE/Reuters

WHATEVER it does, whatever it says, Japan seems unable to shift the world's focus from its Second World War record. The promised demonstration by former prisoners of war against Emperor Akihito next week typifies the recurrent rows that have disfigured Japan's image for over half a century. A calculated insult to a well-intentioned guest is always ugly and should not be allowed to overshadow the state visit. Akihito was a boy at the time of the Pacific War, and has done nothing to deserve the old soldiers' contempt. More important, this kind of scene, furiously stirred by the media, undermines years of painstaking reconciliation work by both sides.

That a conflict that finished in 1946 should continue to haunt the world's second largest economy is one of the tragedies of the age. This is not because it provides awkward moments for monarchs, but because it makes the Japanese seem stranger than they are.

More than ever now that their mighty economy has faltered, many here are frustrated about what the world thinks of Japan in terms of guilt, apology, and recrimination. They resent the cringing attitude that their country often adopts abroad, and are repelled by its opposite; the bombastic

ultra-nationalism that portrays Japan as divinely-appointed, misunderstood, or merely unlucky.

This month's furore among Japan's neighbours about a film rehabilitating General Tojo, Pride: the Fateful Moment shows how the war continues to suppurate. Can it be admitted that the Japanese Army was guilty of bestial cruelty? Or were these alleged excesses - as the Tojo film implies - small change in a defensive war against Western imperialism? The Japanese ''miracle'' has been constructed over these unsettled questions, and with the economic momentum slowed, they are becoming easier to see. The revisionists have a point: the Japanese are indeed victims - of Cold War calculations. Failure to draw a line under the Army's barbarities does not lie with the present Japanese government.

If ex-POWs wish to protest about Japan's indifference to their case they should make their point at the gates of the US Embassy.

Many older Japanese agree passionately that Emperor Hirohito should have apologised after the war - to them. It is not only leftists who recall, in private, how after the war they were as angry with their leadership as the ex-POWs are now. Brainwashed by a cooked-up ideology of imperial divinity, they had endured untold sufferings and sacrifices in the Emperor's name, culminating in the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Recent research has exploded the myth - carefully nurtured by the US - that Hirohito was merely a powerless figurehead. Weak and uncharismatic he may have been, but the Showa Emperor (as he is known posthumously) was deeply involved in war-making decisions, including clear-cut war crimes like human experimentation in occupied China.

But the Americans determined that he should not apologise or explain his role, and in that decision lies much of Japan's current problem.

End-of-the-century hindsight makes clear Hirohito should certainly have taken responsibility and abdicated. The imperial institution should have been abolished, or unambiguously established as a constitutional monarchy. Japan could have set out on its post-war reconstruction with a clean national psyche, and its head of state's visits abroad would now be no more controversial than those of Chancellor Kohl.

It now seems extraordinary that this did not happen and that Emperor Akihito should be forced to lug around the sins of the father. Instead it was US policy, instigated by General MacArthur before the defeat, that Hirohito should be absolved of all blame and cynically reinvented as a peace-loving amateur scientist.

This manipulation of the truth - founded on a belief that the Emperor might be useful in the next war with Russia - may well be the most damaging of American's Asian blunders. Its ill effects have lasted longer than the fall-out from the Vietnam War.

It is a bad idea to know better than generals making decisions in the heat of a brutal world war. But as papers relating to the American occupation of Japan in the late 1940s and early 1950s have recently revealed, anyone looking for the roots of Japan's current crisis of leadership can find them in the American anti-democratic manipulations. Failure to rectify the damage of the war before it was too late was part of a more general failure to allow Japanese people power to blossom after years of militarist rule.

In short, in its paranoia about communism, America allowed the Japanese pre-war and wartime elite to stay in power along with the Emperor, whether or not they were implicated in war crimes.

Prime Minister Yoshida's generation of bureaucrats and business leaders ensured that grass roots were squashed, and that Japan's future would be as an authoritarian, materialistic, and politically corrupt one-party government, dependent on the US. Only token reparations would be paid to the war's victims, and - unsurprisingly in the circumstances - no heartfelt apology would be issued.

Japan's conduct in the war would become a taboo, to be glossed over or actively falsified in school text books.

Since the 1980s, under increasing pressure from Asian rape victims, camp prostitutes and slave labourers, as well as Allied prison camp survivors, this festering legacy has been aerated and sincere regrets expressed.

But the damage was done, and for the ex-POWs and others these later amends are too little, too late.

Japan's economic woes have led to calls for a radical restructuring of her elitist economic and political apparatus.

If that cosy but outdated system can be picked apart and reinvented, many are hoping that the half-truths and embarrassments left over from the war can finally be discussed openly and purged from the national mindset.

Then and only then can Japan look the world in the eye.