Editor’s notice: Xu Weijun is an affiliate analysis professor on the Institute of Public Policy, South China University of Technology. His analysis pursuits embrace East Asian worldwide relations and China-US relations. The article displays the writer’s opinions and never essentially these of CGTN.
In March 2026, an opinion ballot carried out by the Japan Broadcasting Corporation revealed a thought-provoking end result. When requested whether or not World War II was “a war of aggression launched by Japan against its Asian neighbors,” solely 35% of respondents agreed, 16% disagreed, and as many as 48% answered “I don’t know.” These figures replicate not merely a niche in historic data, but additionally a deep rupture between battle reminiscence and the notion of historic duty in up to date Japanese society.
Contemporary Japanese society doesn’t lack reminiscences of the battle. In post-war Japanese public life, there have at all times been quite a few war-related commemorative ceremonies, peace schooling and narratives of the atomic bombings. At the identical time, nonetheless, Japanese politicians have repeatedly visited Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrines Class-A battle criminals and is broadly considered a logo of Japanese militarism and historic revisionism.
This contradictory image reveals the underlying construction of Japan’s battle reminiscence: Japanese society remembers the battle, and even harbors a real concern of it, but it has not recalled to the identical extent how Japan launched the battle, the way it invaded Asian nations, and the way it inflicted monumental struggling on the peoples of these nations. In different phrases, the present state of affairs in Japanese society is just not merely “forgetting the war,” however relatively “selectively remembering the war.”
Many Japanese individuals can understand the struggling of battle via the atomic bombings, the Battle of Okinawa and the trauma of defeat, but they could not essentially perceive Japan’s duty as a perpetrator via the lens of colonial rule, the Nanjing Massacre and the atrocities dedicated on battlefields in Southeast Asia. For Japanese society, the core concern relating to historic understanding lies not in whether or not the battle is remembered, however in whose struggling is remembered and whose is forgotten.
People supply prayers for the victims of the Battle of Okinawa on the Cornerstone of Peace in Itoman, Okinawa, Japan, June 23, 2026. /VCG
Structural flaws
This divergence in reminiscence is first associated to structural flaws in Japan’s historical past schooling.Â
Japanese faculty schooling system doesn’t solely keep away from the historical past of WWII. A 2025 survey of 18-year-olds carried out by the Nippon Foundation discovered that about 95% of respondents said they’d realized concerning the “Pacific War,” and two-thirds stated their reminiscences of the battle primarily got here from courses in class.Â
The extra vital query, nonetheless, is the narrative framework via which this historical past is introduced. The identical survey discovered that amongst war-themed works that left a deep impression on Japanese youth, Grave of the Fireflies ranked first with 42.2%. This work primarily focuses on the struggling of abnormal Japanese civilians, significantly kids, amid air raids and hunger throughout the closing months of WWII.
Such reminiscences of victimhood will not be inaccurate; they carry real anti-war worth. But the issue is that if schooling about battle historical past primarily revolves round Japanese experiences of victimhood, it may well simply lead college students to type an intuitive impression that “the war brought suffering to Japan,” whereas making it troublesome for them to develop a way of duty that “Japan inflicted profound suffering on Asia.”
Japanese youth is perhaps instilled with worth judgments resembling “war is terrible” and “peace is precious,” however they don’t seem to be sufficiently guided to ask three extra basic questions: Why did Japan launch the battle? How did the peoples of Asian nations bear the results of Japanese aggression? Why does post-war Japan have to proceed partaking in historic reflection?Â
‘Victim-centered’ narrative
Second, public reminiscences of the battle in Japanese society have lengthy been characterised by a “victim-centered” narrative. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Great Tokyo Air Raid, the Battle of Okinawa, and post-war reconstruction represent the first narrative entry factors via which the Japanese public perceives the battle. The deeper problem lies beneath these historic reminiscences. When the reminiscence of victimhood is indifferent from the dimension of perpetrator duty, it creates an ethical cognitive dislocation: the Japanese public can genuinely understand the cruelty of battle, but discover it obscure why neighboring Asian nations repeatedly demand that Japan replicate on its previous. The Japanese society is unwilling to confront Japan’s historic id as an aggressor and perpetrator.
These victim-centered reminiscences have turn out to be additional entrenched amid generational change. More than 80 years after the battle, the variety of individuals with first-hand wartime expertise has sharply declined, and direct battle reminiscence based mostly on particular person expertise is regularly fading from Japanese society. Meanwhile, colleges, the media, museums, and political discourse have turn out to be the first channels for shaping battle reminiscence. Whoever controls these channels is best positioned to find out what Japanese society remembers, what it forgets, and the way it understands historical past.
Japanese lawmakers go to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, Japan, April 22, 2026. /VCG
A conservative political panorama
Third, the long-term pattern towards political conservatism in Japan has been an vital driving drive behind the divergence in perceptions of historic duty. The political panorama characterised by the Liberal Democratic Party’s long-standing dominance has granted right-wing historic views institutional affect far higher than that of left-wing and civic forces engaged in reflection.
Japanese conservative politics doesn’t at all times immediately deny historic info. Rather, it’s more proficient at defusing historic duty by obscuring narratives and shifting the main focus. For instance, imprecise phrasing resembling “upholding the positions of previous cabinets” is used to keep away from reaffirming an apology, and the argument that “future generations should not be destined to apologize” is employed to chop off the intergenerational continuity of historic duty. Through these shifts in discourse, historic duty is now not an ethical baseline constraining Japan from repeating previous errors. Instead, it has been framed as a historic burden hindering Japan’s path to changing into a “normal country.”
Historical understanding is rarely merely a debate concerning the previous. It profoundly shapes how a rustic understands itself, views its neighbors, and chooses its future path. The divergence inside Japanese society relating to the character of the battle and historic duty seems on the floor as a break up in historic narratives. But in essence, it issues whether or not post-war Japan can keep its id as a peaceable nation via a real consciousness of reflection.
Source: CGTN