Japan should learn to respect history and recognize the changes that have taken place in East Asia before trying to fundamentally solve the contradictions and problems with neighboring countries, an American historian suggested on Wednesday.

Asked by Xinhua to analyze the reasons why there are often protests in East Asian countries against Japan, Chalmers Johnson, president of the California-based Japan Policy Research Institute, said: "Japan's failure to educate its citizens about the Rape of Nanjing, or the Japanese army's Unit 731 chemical atrocities during the World War II has been a scandal for a long time".

The same is true of the issue of the so-called "comfort women" among Koreans, the killings of Chinese in Malaya and Singapore during the war, and the rapes of civilians in Hong Kong when the Japanese occupied the territory, he noted.

"The Japanese government has been arrogant and deceitful in dealing with the peoples it victimized between 1931 and 1945," Johnson said.

Japan has been protected by the United States since the "peace treaty" of 1952 and has been turned into "a docile satellite" of the US, he said, adding that Japan therefore has not come to grips with its own past and has been allowed to deceive its own people through distorted and incomplete school textbooks.

He said, Japan continues to behave as it has been doing for so long even though the environment in East Asia had been changed by rapid economic growth in China, South Korea, and Southeast Asia.

"The US and Japan do not want to recognize these changes. Oddly enough, in economic terms, Japan today needs China more than China needs Japan," he said.

Referring to the fact that Germany passed a law outlawing "Holocaust denial" by German citizens, Johnson noted, "Japan has never done anything like that, and denial of its crimes occurs daily in Japan by political leaders and historians."

"Such things are unimaginable in Germany but common in Japan," he said.

Johnson first visited Japan in 1953 as a US Navy officer and lived and worked there every year between 1961 and 1998. He had taught for thirty years, from 1962 to 1992, at the Berkeley and San Diego campuses of the University of California and held endowed chairs in Asian politics at both campuses.