Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has undermined his country's economic and security interests by refusing to acknowledge the Japanese military's wartime crimes, an American scholar said Tuesday.
  

Abe, who is on a weeklong visit to the United States, has come under growing pressure from Seoul and other members of the international community to offer a sincere apology to victims of Japan's wartime aggressions.
  

On Monday, however, Abe maintained his earlier stance on the issue of Korean and other Asian women who were coerced into sexual slavery for Japan's World War II soldiers, referring to them only as victims of human trafficking.
  

"It's unfortunate that the prime minister did not specifically name who committed the act of trafficking," Alexis Dudden, a history professor at the University of Connecticut, said during a press conference at a security forum hosted by the Asan Institute for Policy Studies.
  

She stressed that the term "human trafficking" on its own carries little meaning as it does not assign moral or legal responsibility to anyone.
  

An apology from Abe should recognize the Japanese government's role in forcing women to serve at military brothels, she said.
  

"Its most important component is not 'we feel the pain' but rather 'we acknowledge state responsibility for this system.'"
  

Abe's stance has also undermined Japan's position in the region, the professor said.
  

"His actions and his words are contrary to Japan's economic and security interests, present and moving forward, because unless there are stable and productive relations with Japan's Asian neighbors, there's no way to move the region forward productively," she said, citing ongoing disputes over territory and slave labor.
  

"We continue to see that this is a very destabilizing game to play."
  

Although the motivating factors for Abe's stance are not clear, he appears to be tied to a narrative that he believes about his own nation, according to Dudden.
  

"The problem with this particular narrative is that there are very significant pieces of it which are demonstrated historically not to be true or sustainable," she said. (Yonhap)