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The Japanese are concerned with honour, rather than "face," a Chinese concept related to image. In Japan, it's possible to be poor yet completely honourable, but in China you can't be poor and have a lot of face. There, you can be the sleaziest, slimiest, crookedest scumbag imaginable and still have face, if you're wealthy and draped in bling.
As for contemporary Japan and WW2, most who were alive at the time want to forget, and those who weren't don't want to know. It's not taught in schools, and that's how the majority want it.
Japanese behaviour in Manchuria was beyond despicable. Genghis Kahn and his hordes would have been horrified by many of the things the Japanese did there. It was so bad it horrified the local German consular -- an avowed Nazi -- and he is considered to be a hero for his attempts to stem the slaughter. It doesn't get much worse than that.
The ultranationalist far right in Japan is an extreme group: Most Japanese are friendly and polite to a fault to foreign visitors, even though the majority would happily wind the clocks back to the time before they were forced at gunpoint to open their country to the predations of the rest of the world. It's not that they hate foreigners: they just don't want them in Japan as anything other than tourists.
On the other hand, I suggest you visit Japan before you condemn an entire race and society for the wartime atrocities of their forebears. Everyone of us has ancestors who did reprehensible things, yet you'd be howling with outrage if anyone suggested you're somehow responsible.
The Japanese are overall lovely people, and it's a wonderful and interesting place and culture. They're certainly very different in some respects, and, yes, they have their fringe of idiotic racists, just as we do. In fact, I'd say racism and bigotry is far more "in your face" in the west than it is in Japan.
Disclaimer: My wife is Japanese, and I've visited Japan many times.
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