Life after wartime: the recent feuding between Japan and China underscores a little-noted historic dispute--Japan's miserly compensation of imperial victims.

IN ALL THE PUBLIC BICKERING RECENTLY between Japan and China, one fact has received remarkably little attention: Japan's continuing refusal to pay compensation to victims of its militarist-era brutality.

Ever since Japan surrendered in August 1945, one of the Japanese government's key policy objectives has been to slough off all such compensation claims. Japanese officials seem never to have discussed their argument against compensation publicly, but it would appear to amount to no more than the sotto voce invocation of the old saw that all's fair in love and war. Any defense ...