Nicobar comments

According to Shinzo Abe, he inherited the political DNA of his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi. And Nobusuke Kishi's attitude towards the Chinese can be found in Wikipedia:

"A believer in the Yamato race theory, Kishi had nothing but contempt for the Chinese as a people, whom he disparaging referred to as "lawless bandits" who were "incapable of governing themselves". Precisely for these racist reasons, Kishi believed there was no point to establishing the rule of law in Manchukuo as the Chinese were not capable of following laws, and instead brute force was what was needed to maintain social stability.

In Kishi's analogy, just as dogs were not capable of understanding such abstract concepts such as the law, but could be trained to be utterly obedient to their masters, the same went with the Chinese, whom Kishi claimed were more mentally closer to dogs than humans. In this way, Kishi maintained that once the Japanese proved that they were the ones with the power, the dog-like Chinese would come to be naturally obedient to their Japanese masters, and as such the Japanese had to behave with a great deal of sternness to prove that they were the masters.

Along the same lines, Kishi used very dehumanizing language to describe the Chinese such as a people good for being only "robot slaves" or as a people who should be nothing more than "mechanical instruments of the Imperial Army, non-human automatons, absolutely obedient" to their Japanese masters.

The Japanese conscripted hundreds of thousands of Chinese as slave labor to work in Manchukuo's heavy industrial plants. In 1937, Kishi signed a degree calling for the use of slave labour to be conscripted both in Manchukuo and in northern China, stating that in these "times of emergency" (i.e. war with China), industry needed to grow at all costs, and slavery would have to be used as the money to pay the workers was not there."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi

Young Japanese people often fail to understand why neighboring countries harbor a grudge over events that happened in 1931-45.

Yes, when Shinzo Abe's grandfather Nobusuke Kishi and great uncle Matsuoka Yosuke ran Manchuria in the 1930s together with Tojo who was the chief of military, their main policy was to make China a nation of drug addicts. As described in Wikipedia:

"To this capacity he overlooked the creation and personally directed the State Opium Monopoly Bureau that mass spread the use of the narcotic firstly in Manchuria and then in China as a way to soften public resistance to the Japanese occupation and expansion while generating huge profits.

Under his authority tens of thousands of hectares were taken over by the Japanese underworld and put under poppy production, while dozens of laboratories were built to convert opium tars into various grades of morphine and heroin, thus the economy of Manchuria became inextricably bound to hard drugs. His administrating success there, made Japan by 1935 the biggest narcotics' producer accounted for approximately three tons or 10% of the world's total supply of morphine and 37% of total heroin production.

According to the testimony of General Ryukichi Tanaka before the International Military Tribunal of the Far East during his post in Manchuria the revenue derived from the opium and other narcotics traffic became the chief source of revenue income for the Manchukuo government. Part of the narcotics was exported to Japan where they were used by a subsidiary tobacco industry of Mitsui of Mitsui zaibatsu in the production of special marketed cigarettes for the Chinese market bearing the then popular in the Far East trademark "Golden Bat". Including small doses of opium on their mouthpiece, apart from generating millions of addicted victims increasing the breakdown of Chinese society it also generated colossal profits for the Japanese economy that (according to testimony at the Tokyo War Crimes trials of 1948), was calculated to be 300 millions prewar dollars annually by the Japanese military."

More can be found here:

Opium: A Japanese Technique of Occupation

http://www.paperlessarchives.com/FreeTitles/OpiumAJapaneseTechniqueofOccupation.pdf

But in spite of this today it was the Japanese who are seen as the bad guys

Yes, the fascist western colonial powers that the G7 represents aren't really better than Japan. But at least they don't deny what they had done.

Not only that Japan hasn't admitted to any of its war crimes, but many Japanese actually believe they are the victims of WWII. Isn't it strange?

Time to start paying attention to Japanese media and blogs to see how they'll massage this.

Media control? Japan is already an expert in this.

Wonder why Japanese don't speak freely like all others in the world?

They're not terrorists; hijack and ransom are inappropriate words

If it is open sea, hijack and ransom are appropriate words to use.

Problem is not many foreign workers can speak Japanese.

Another fail for Abe

Abe not only failed, but failed miserably.

I remember Japan has a GDP of similar size to that of China just a few years ago. Now it is only one third.