Former prime minister Tomiichi Murayama, who died on Friday aged 101, was best known for his landmark apology for Japan’s World War II aggression 50 years after its surrender, an expression of contrition that became the standard for subsequent leaders. As head of an unwieldy coalition of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party and his own Socialist Party from 1994 to 1996, the bushy-eyebrowed Murayama oversaw a period of turmoil including a devastating 1995 earthquake in western Japan and a...