Who knows...
None of them were in office long enough to really make anything happen. The way it works over here is the PM takes responsibility of anyone's screw ups.
One guy somewhere down on the totem pole screws up and the PM takes the heat and resigns. Or he resigns because he didn't come through on a promise he used in his campaign. Hatoyama was one of those guys.
He promised to fix the issues in Okinawa concerning the public and the Futenma Air Station. He was working on it, but it wasn't going fast enough, so it came down to him just saying, "I didn't deliver as quickly as you would have liked, so I will step down because I don't have a sack between my legs."
Not in those exact words, but you get the point.
Koizumi was probably the best and most popular in the last 15 years.
Even though he stirred issues when he would visit Yasakuni Shrine each year (a shrine where the war dead are housed with war criminals), he always just told the public to piss off. It was quite awesome watching that guy do his thing.
But like TMS said, Japan has a problem with admitting to the screwed up things they have done. They usually refuse to even mention
Unit 731 even existed. Or, as mentioned before, the bombing Pearl Harbor. It's pretty sad that this government is so wrapped up in itself it can't even see its misgivings over the few good things that they have done.
Taken from the wikipedia article:
Shinjuku
A medical school and research facility belonging to Unit 731 operated in Shinjuku, Tokyo during World War II. In 2006, Toyo Ishii—a nurse who worked at the school during the war—revealed that she had helped bury bodies and pieces of bodies on the school's grounds shortly after Japan's surrender in 1945. In response, in February 2011 the Ministry of Health began to excavate the site.[24]
China has requested DNA samples from any human remains discovered at the site. The Japanese government—which has never officially acknowledged the existence of Unit 731—has rejected the request.
