I agree, it takes at least two people to fight and it also takes at least two people to make peace.
However, I don't know if many Japanese feel that it is right for them to "apologize" for the events of WWII. They've already issued apologies and reparations, and should the current generation/government be considered responsible for those huge events that helped shape the modern political world? Having Japan apologize again is like having it pay tribute again to a victorious party. It just drags us back into the mud of that war.
However, I do think Abe and his friends should apologize for their stupid comments about comfort women, Nanjing Massacre, and the Okinawan surrender issue. They should also retract any of their programs to revise history textbooks. That's just dumb. Every specialist knows about these things, the first thing to do is except they happened, and to try to understand why. How else can a society improve itself? I think if it wasn't for this mentality of denial amongst nationalists, nobody would have any problem with Yasukuni shrine or the core sentiments it attempts to convey. Some of its ideas seem very outdated though, it's like a little museum for ultra-nationalist, propaganda-prone mentality. Today's Japanese are too smart to fall for this sort of thing, I should hope.
On the other side of things, some liberals say stupid things, like that if the nationalists were to rearm the country, Japan would make war on China/Korea. That's just dumb, they don't seem to realize that the only reason Japan as a nation can afford to keep its beautiful, ideal pacifist constitution is because it lives under the USA's missile shield.
Japan in the 1930's wasn't, it had to fend for itself, and in that age of empires and national ideals, and centralized military governments that felt the health of their empires was more important than the human rights of its citizens, did what they felt they should, and playing the role of villains in the silly dramas we like to make out of history, they forged the modern, postwar era in the rubble of Nanjing and the furnaces of Auschwitz (not that I would compare the two genocides too closely).
If Korea/China/Japan can do this sort of thing together, coming clean about everything and working out all their crimes, creating transparent institutions to protect international justice, great progress can be made in foreign relations.