The Japanese are more practiced at ritual ­apologies than we are. Perhaps Toyota President Akio Toyoda will do better before Congress this week than golfer Tiger Woods did before TV watchers Friday.

Delivering such a public mea culpa must have been hard, but watching this one was no picnic either. It came across as painfully reluctant, forced, and often patently insincere. As David Hinckley of The New York Daily News aptly wrote, “Woods was a man ­saying the right things out loud while everything about his demeanor was silently screaming, ‘I don’t want to be here!’ … He looked like a man who had caught his foot in a bear trap.”

Nowhere was the broadcast watched with more rapt attention, we imagine, than in Pinehurst, whose prospects are so intimately intertwined with the ups and downs of golf. And golf’s fortunes, in turn, have become much too dependent on the continued star power exerted by one man: Tiger Woods. And when he turns out to have feet of clay, it leaves muddy footprints all over the carpets of an entire industry.

Woods deserves a measure of credit, we suppose, for agreeing to undergo such a humiliating exercise in the first place. It takes guts to go before TV cameras and plead guilty to cheating repeatedly on your wife and letting down millions of fans.

Still, the whole thing was so staged and scripted — a handpicked audience, no questions from reporters, a carefully vetted statement read verbatim — that it could have been phoned in. The Golf Writers Association of America boycotted it.

The event had the earmarks of an exercise crafted by Woods’ advisers and promoters with an eye toward accomplishing as much damage control as possible and maximizing the chances of getting him back out on the circuit and earning money again as quickly as possible.

In that regard, it looks more like a failure than a success. Clearly, there are still miles to go before those who play and watch golf will feel halfway ­comfortable having Tiger Woods back among them. For many if not most of them, regaining respect requires more than a rather robotic “sorry about that.”