Japan shrugs off S Korean calls for 'sex slave' apology

[Elldallan]

Japan has already apologized many times and gave enough reparations...

Something as simple as visiting the Japanese equivalent of Arlington cemetery by the head of state for solemnly commemorating Japan's war casualties is enough to cause riots in SK and CN.

Why can't S.Korea and China just move on?

other countries in Asia such as Philippines, Vietnam & Indonesia already "moved" on

While I agree with you Arlington havn't buried any internationally recognized war criminals to my knowledge, the Yasukuni have so it should be understandable why it's controversial.
On the other hand the War Crimes tribunals after WWII have been accused of essentially being a case of Victor's justice so perhaps some of the extremely nasty an horrifying things the Allies(most notably the Soviets) did that wasn't recognized as war crimes at the time because they were the victors should be reclassified as war crimes, all things being equal.
I personally think that the nukes(the US knew about the destructiveness of the bombs and yet chose to use them in a heavily populated area, a clear contravention of the Hague convention) and the fire bombings of German cities(this was most certainly a crime under the Hague convention, there's not a shadow of doubt about it) would have been classified as crimes against humanity if they had been perpetrated by Japanese/German forces, so maybe the ones who gave those orders and those who executed them should be reclassified as war criminals.

I think the problem is not that they commemorating Japan's war casualties. The problem is that also a lot of the people who are to blame for many things are on this cemetery. I guess no one in SK and CN cares if there would be only civilians.

And it seems that there is a difference between how Japan apologized and how e.g. Germany did it. I don't hear anything about problems between Germany and its neighbours (okay, maybe one exception is Greek at the moment, but that is a different story). Maybe it is because Germany, e.g., still holds court cases against the responsible persons from back then. Haven't heard anything like that about Japan (okay, maybe they do it, but I simply not aware of it).

I think it has a lot to do with political realities today, Germany and France are better off collaborating and that has been the fact ever since the cold war started, so bringing up old injustices will do nothing but harm, but as you say look at how quickly the Greeks brought up old wrongs when the political agenda found it useful.

So I think the problems stem mainly from the fact that South Korea & China etc have a geopolitical struggle with Japan over some rich oil deposits is the reason why all of this is being brought up as a huge issue. If their political agendas was better served by cooperating then it would surely not be an issue any more because it'd put an obstacle on cooperation