Japanese paper recants over war atrocities

One of Japan's leading conservative newspapers has taken a surprising stance in revisiting the nation's dark wartime record. Yomiuri Shimbun, which is the world's largest daily with a 10m circulation, has exposed the way in which its wartime leaders treated human life with contempt, and its articles on the topic have also been collated in book form, From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbour: Who Was Responsible?. What moved Tsuneo Watanabe, the paper's 80-year-old chairman and editor in chief, to make such a dramatic about-face? He says he felt compelled to step into a void left by the politicians. (Via Los Angeles Times)