To forgive is divine, a poet once wrote.

For 70 years, Peggy Loughner Fisher was forced to carry a grudge. And all that time she had more than a right to bear it. Her story appeared on the front page of Tuesday’s Butler Eagle.

Fisher, of Grove City, is the daughter of the late Earl E. Loughner, a World War II prisoner of war who was forced into slave labor by his Japanese captors.

Pvt. Loughner survived the infamous Bataan Death March of 1942, only to be assigned to the Mitsubishi Mining Co. to work at a dock in Kobe, Japan, for the duration of the war.

Fisher was born after her father returned from the war. She was 7 years old when her father died in 1956 at age 40 — the undertaker said he’d never seen a body more brutalized, permanently scarred from torture, back-breaking work and deprivation.

She wrote “Daddy Came Home,” a biography about her father’s imprisonment. Top executives at Mitsubishi Materials, the descendant of Mitsubishi Mining, heard about the biography and invited Fisher to a formal apology ceremony.

Mitsubishi is the first Japanese company to offer such an apology. There’s speculation that it won’t be the last.

Fisher said it wasn’t easy to overcome the years of confusion and anger, but she did so. She accepted the apology during a ceremony July 21 at the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Museum in Wellsburg, W.Va. Another ceremony took place two days earlier in Los Angeles.

It’s an observed truth that unforgiven offenses sap the energy and productivity of individuals, tribes, races, regions and entire nations. The Bible says God “punishes the children and grandchildren for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.”

An example would be infamous Hatfield-McCoy feud, rooted in the Civil War and spanning 140 years until a truce — formal apologies and forgiveness by both sides — in 2003. Another, the Belfast riots persisted for decades until the formal signing of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. And strife in the Middle East has been ongoing for millennia.

For 70 years, Earl Loughner and his descendants have been bound and bothered by his ordeal in Japan.

It took Mitsubishi executives that long to admit the depth of their wrongdoing and to apologize. These offenses needed to be addressed, not only for the benefit of the American POWs and their families, but for Mitsubishi as well.

Mitsubishi adheres to 10 business principles including principles No. 5, 6 and 7:

• “We will endeavor to secure the understanding and trust of society, and to maintain a harmonious coexistence with society.”

• “We will comply with laws and regulations and conduct fair business activities with common sense.”

• “We will carry out our duties with integrity, in line with the rules and standards established by the Company.”

Without that apology, Mitsubishi would have been violating the spirit of its own principles of integrity.

While Fisher’s biography, “Daddy Came Home,” leaves no doubt in anyone’s mind exactly why they needed to apologize, the Mitsubishi executives must have dwelt on the details of that book while contemplating the severity of the offenses their predecessors inflicted. A true apology requires full acknowledgment of the depths of the offense.

On the surface, nothing changes. Those in charge at Mitsubishi weren’t even alive during the war, and neither was Fisher. But the emotional and spiritual scars of their predecessors still affected their lives and livelihoods.

An apology offered, and accepted, helps bury the past — not to be forgotten, but to be freed from its sting.