What Silence on the End of the War Says: Layers of Japan's Historical Responsibility and Right-Wing Politics

Yesterday was Japan's "End of the War Day," and Takaichi Sanae's remarks left me disappointed. What started as a casual message to a friend — "the train stopped, I'll be late" — spiraled into a chain of observations about history, politics, and national narrative. What follows is a record of working through those thoughts.

The Origins That Get Left Out

Japan has never clearly conveyed the full history to the next generation. It has consistently relied on the language of "protecting peace as the victim," without properly explaining the complete origins of what happened — the Hiroshima and Nagasaki narrative naturally overshadows the narrative of outward aggression. NHK is an exception, and a handful of prime ministers have offered sincere apologies. But taken as a whole, Japanese society is almost obsessive about everyday honesty — apologizing for a late train, bowing over a product recall — yet the moment it comes to the "big thing" of national historical responsibility, that same standard of honesty suddenly stops working.

These two kinds of "honesty" run on entirely different accountability circuits. Honesty at the individual or corporate level has a clearly traceable object of responsibility, manageable costs, and can be paid off in the moment. Historical responsibility, though, has to reckon with crimes committed generations ago, with costs shared across generations, and it directly challenges the question of "who are we." That asymmetry may be part of why countries known for "keeping their word" are often the ones that stumble hardest on this kind of historical reckoning — not unique to Japan, but Japan's national character of meticulous attention to detail makes the gap especially stark.

Which Countries Did Japan Invade

Between 1931 and 1945, the countries and territories invaded or occupied by Japan were numerous: China (Northeast China/Manchukuo, most of North, East, and South China, including atrocities like the Nanjing Massacre), the Korean Peninsula (formally annexed as a colony in 1910, with 35 years of colonial rule), Mongolia (border conflicts such as the Battle of Khalkhin Gol), the Philippines, Malaya (present-day Malaysia), Singapore, Burma (present-day Myanmar), Thailand (nominally "allied" but effectively garrisoned and controlled), French Indochina (present-day Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia), British Borneo, parts of Papua New Guinea, Guam, Wake Island and other Pacific islands, Hong Kong, and Macau, which was under military pressure. Japan also fought localized military conflicts with the Soviet Union at Khalkhin Gol and Lake Khasan, and launched the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that drew the US into the Pacific War. The deepest and longest suffering fell on China and the Korean Peninsula — China's war of resistance lasted 14 years counting from the Manchurian Incident, and Korea endured 35 years of colonial rule.

Does Japan Still Have the Capacity — or the Will — to Go to War Again

This question needs "capability" and "intent/trajectory" kept separate. On capability, Japan's Self-Defense Forces effectively rank in the world's top ten for defense spending, with very advanced equipment — Aegis destroyers, the Izumo-class quasi-carriers, a growing F-35 fleet. The 2022 Kishida government's plan to double defense spending over five years and raise it to 2% of GDP was unprecedented for postwar Japan. The industrial base — shipbuilding, precision manufacturing, aerospace — has ample latent capacity for rapid remilitarization.

What actually constrains Japan is institutional: Article 9 (though its interpretation keeps being loosened by successive governments), the US-Japan Security Treaty binding Japan's defense and diplomacy tightly to the American framework, decades of pacifist public opinion (weakening but present), and most crucially, the lack of independent nuclear deterrence or offensive power-projection capability — carrier strike groups, long-range strategic bombing, nuclear weapons. Breaking through on any of these would require US acquiescence and technical support. In short, it's currently almost impossible for Japan to launch a war of aggression on its own without a US nod.

The trajectory of intent, though, is more worth watching. The political lineage from Abe Shinzo to Takaichi Sanae has consistently pushed constitutional revision (especially Article 9), strengthened the SDF's legitimacy and real capability, diluted history textbook narratives, and normalized Yasukuni visits. "Becoming a normal country" — openly maintaining a military and exercising collective self-defense — is an explicit political goal for this group. The 2015 security legislation unlocking collective self-defense was a landmark breakthrough. In the near term, the odds of Japan initiating a war of aggression on its own are very low — the geopolitical reality is simply too different now. But the long-term institutional brakes are being dismantled bit by bit. If the US itself someday pulls back, the domestic right consolidates further, and a major East Asian crisis hits — that combination of "military normalization" plus "historical revisionism" is genuinely worth watching. The real question isn't "will there be a war" but "how much is left in this country to stop one."

The Public's Disconnect and the Politicians' Calculation Are Not the Same Thing

The gap between "small courtesy" and "great righteousness" in Japanese society is often described as a kind of "split personality," but more precisely, it's a structural cognitive separation, not deliberate hypocrisy. Most Japanese people never place "apologizing for a late train" and "historical responsibility" in the same mental framework to compare them. The former belongs to the everyday ethic of "not inconveniencing others"; the latter belongs to a national narrative built up over decades by schooling and media. The two systems run in parallel, and the education system was never designed to train that kind of comparative thinking. It's less "knowingly playing dumb" than most people simply never having been guided to connect the two.

Right-wing politicians' motives are far more explicit and cold, though. People like Takaichi don't fail to grasp the logical contradiction — the contradiction simply costs them nothing politically. Their voter base is conservatives, certain Shinto right-wing organizations (like Nippon Kaigi), and nationalist voters who feel "Japan is being unfairly blamed" — precisely the constituency with zero need for "historical honesty." Conversely, if they publicly and fully acknowledged the history, their political careers within the party and base would end instantly. So this isn't cognitive dissonance — it's rational political calculation. Historical revisionism isn't a bug in their thinking; it's a structural necessity of their power base. What they likely genuinely believe is closer to a narrative of "national honor / ethnic dignity" — equating "admitting guilt" with "national self-abasement," reframing historical responsibility as a "battle to defend national dignity," so that refusing to apologize gets repackaged as "courage." This logic closely resembles right-wing nationalists worldwide.

Where I Stand

On matters of historical fact, I don't feel any need to perform a "both sides have a point" neutrality. The Nanjing Massacre, the colonization of Korea, Unit 731 — these aren't "contested historical interpretations." They're facts backed by extensive primary sources, military records, survivor testimony, and even postwar testimony from some of the perpetrators themselves. Diluting or avoiding those facts in the name of "national dignity" doesn't hold up morally. Understanding why someone lies is a completely different thing from believing the lie is justified. A country can be patriotic and have national pride, and that's entirely compatible with honestly facing the crimes it has committed — Germany is a living counterexample proving the two can coexist. "Acknowledging history" and "national self-negation" are often treated as equivalent, but I think that equation itself is a false premise, carefully constructed to escape accountability — not some objective truth.

The Role the US Has Played

This kind of analysis genuinely exists in international relations scholarship, often called critique of the "San Francisco System." I'd describe it less as a conspiracy-theory-style "deliberate burying of landmines" and more as "structural permissiveness / selective ambiguity." Preserving the emperor system was an openly stated policy decision by MacArthur's occupation authority — judging that abolishing the emperor would trigger severe domestic upheaval, and that keeping him would let the occupation proceed at lower cost. Once the Cold War began, stability took priority over reckoning, and that logic was never overturned.

The Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands are a case of genuinely deliberate US-manufactured ambiguity. Under the 1951 San Francisco Treaty, the Ryukyu Islands, including the Senkakus, went under US trusteeship. In the 1972 Okinawa reversion, the US returned "administrative rights" to Japan but deliberately avoided taking a position on sovereignty — wordplay separating "administration" from "sovereignty." The apparent intent was to avoid taking either China's or Japan's side, while retaining the defense obligation for the islands within the US-Japan Security Treaty framework. Taiwan was similarly left deliberately suspended: the 1951 San Francisco Treaty only stated that Japan "renounced" all rights to Taiwan and the Pescadores, without specifying who they belonged to. This "undetermined status" doctrine, an intentional blank left by the US, later served the "strategic ambiguity" of the "One China" framework, preserving maximum room for the US to maneuver between the two sides of the strait.

These unresolved issues have objectively become levers the US can flexibly use in its long-term East Asian maneuvering. Rather than a precisely calculated conspiracy of "deliberately leaving the Senkakus so China and Japan would fight over them," it's closer to the US, at multiple junctures, choosing whatever handling was least trouble and most advantageous for itself — with the byproduct being a region kept in prolonged low-intensity tension. Whether this was "deliberately designed" this way is itself contested among scholars — some see it as far-sighted strategic positioning, others see it as more of a historical leftover from hasty early-Cold-War decisions that the US later simply learned to exploit.

"Small Courtesy, No Great Righteousness" — Who Actually Said This?

Online, this is widely attributed to Sima Guang's *Zizhi Tongjian* — but that attribution can be established as almost certainly false. The full version usually reads: "Knows small courtesies but lacks great righteousness, mindful of minor proprieties but lacking great virtue, values trivial etiquette while disregarding integrity, fears power but harbors no gratitude, when strong will pillage, when weak will grovel." This passage gets repeatedly attributed on the Chinese-language internet to Sima Guang, to Qing statesman Zuo Zongtang, and even to the *Zuo Zhuan* — but people who've actually checked the primary texts have found the line doesn't appear anywhere in *Zizhi Tongjian*, nor in Zuo Zongtang's collected memorials.

The more credible account is that this is a composite from different eras and contexts — commentary written about "certain kinds of people" or "certain nations" stitched together, reworked, and grafted onto "Japan," gradually fixed into a "famous quote" and then attributed to an authoritative-sounding historical figure for credibility. This is a classic case of fabricated-quote attribution — the same pattern as "Einstein once said" or "Lu Xun once said."

As an analytical tool, the phenomenon this phrase captures is real — there is a genuine structural disconnect in Japanese society between individual-level ethics and collective-level historical justice. But as a case-closed label on national character, it runs into at least three problems. First, it quietly swaps a structural, political problem for a national-character, cultural one. Behind historical revisionism lie changeable political conditions — US permissiveness under Cold War conditions, decades of conservative control over textbook approval, the voter-base structure of LDP conservative factions — not a cultural gene etched into "being Japanese." Expanding "Takaichi and the conservative machine behind her are dishonest" into "Japanese people have small courtesy but no great righteousness" erases real dissenting voices that existed within Japan — Ienaga Saburo, who fought decades of lawsuits over textbooks, Honda Katsuichi, who reported on the Nanjing Massacre under right-wing death threats, Oe Kenzaburo and other postwar intellectuals who sustained historical critique. They too are "Japanese." Second, the phrase easily becomes a tool for self-exoneration — once "lacking righteousness" gets nailed down as an essential trait of the nation, it lets people stop asking more specific, actionable questions, like why textbook approval authority went decades without reform. Third, and most crucially, on the Chinese-language internet, this kind of judgment often functions not as historical reckoning but as emotional mobilization, serving present-day nationalist narratives and geopolitical rivalry — drifting away from the original purpose of pursuing historical accountability. The same phrase might simultaneously hold two very different things: genuine anger at historical injustice, and simplified, instrumentalized, easily-inflamed national sentiment. The two often get spoken as one, and it's worth figuring out for yourself which one is closer to what you mean.

Why the Right Wing Exists, and Why It's So Entrenched

The entrenchment of right-wing thought isn't because "Japanese people are inherently like this" — it's because it's simultaneously woven into several threads that reinforce each other. On the social-psychological layer, postwar Japan went through a dramatic swing from "economic miracle" to "the lost thirty years." After the bubble burst, younger generations faced entrenched class stratification, the breakdown of lifetime employment, and an aging population — that pervasive insecurity is excellent fuel for nationalist sentiment. The right's narrative of "we were once, and should be again, great" offers real comfort against that anxiety, structurally similar to how populist right movements have risen in many countries.

On the organizational-base layer, groups like Nippon Kaigi aren't mere talking clubs — they're political networks with decades of organizational experience deeply rooted in local assemblies and the shrine system. Figures like Abe Shinzo and Takaichi Sanae grew directly out of this network, which controls key levers in textbook approval, the shrine system's mobilizing power, and the voter base of conservative factions within the LDP. This organizational structure hasn't been broken in decades, so the thinking passes down generation to generation — not through persuasion, but through institutionalized transmission. On the generational-rupture layer, the generation that lived through the war is passing away, and history shifts from "living memory" into "a passage in a textbook." Since textbooks have long had their approval authority held by conservatives, the historical narrative younger generations encounter naturally gets pulled into the "we were victims too" framework.

On the layer of external pressure producing backlash, sustained criticism from China and Korea often triggers, in many Japanese people (not just the right), a reflexive sense of "being targeted" or "morally cornered" — and that backlash sentiment is exactly what the right's narrative is best at harvesting. Lines like "we already apologized, what more do you want" pull in both the right's core base and ordinary people who aren't especially radical but are simply tired of the topic. Removing any single thread might not be enough to shake this system on its own, but with all four existing simultaneously and reinforcing each other, they form a structure that's hard to dislodge from any single point.

Two Statements Side by Side: The Church's Confession and Nippon Kaigi's Self-Narrative

After writing everything above, I sat with two specific texts side by side for a long while. One is the 1967 "Confession of Responsibility during World War II" issued by the United Church of Christ in Japan (UCCJ). The other is the founding declaration on Nippon Kaigi's own "about" page. Both are talking about the same stretch of history, yet they read like they're describing two entirely different things.

The UCCJ's original Japanese text reads: 「しかるにわたくしどもは、教団の名において、あの戦争を是認し、支持し、その勝利のために祈り努めることを、内外にむかって声明いたしました。まことにわたくしどもの祖国が罪を犯したとき、わたくしどもの教会もまたその罪におちいりました。わたくしどもは『見張り』の使命をないがしろにいたしました。」(Source: https://uccj.org/confession) In substance: "We, in the name of the Church, declared both at home and abroad our approval and support of that war, and prayed and labored for victory. Indeed, when our fatherland committed sin, our Church too fell into that sin. We neglected our mission as 'watchmen.'"

Nippon Kaigi's original Japanese text reads: 「また、有史以来未曾有の敗戦に際会するも、天皇を国民統合の中心と仰ぐ国柄はいささかも揺らぐことなく、焦土と虚脱感の中から立ち上がった国民の営々たる努力によって、経済大国といわれるまでに発展した。」(Source: https://www.nipponkaigi.org/about) In substance: "Even in facing an unprecedented defeat in our history, the national character centered on the Emperor as the unifying core of the people never wavered in the slightest, and through the untiring efforts of a people who rose up from scorched earth and a sense of exhaustion, we developed into what is called an economic great power."

The sharpest line in the UCCJ statement is 「わたくしどもの教会もまたその罪におちいりました」 ("our Church too fell into that sin") — not "the nation erred and we failed to stop it," but a direct placement of the Church itself among the perpetrators, using language with real theological weight ("falling into sin"), not the vague "we deeply regret" of typical political language. Then there is 「わたくしどもは『見張り』の使命をないがしろにいたしました」 ("we neglected our mission as 'watchmen'") — an especially heavy line. "Watchman" in a Christian context typically refers to a prophetic role, the one meant to sound the warning when the community is heading toward wrongdoing, and the Church admits it failed that duty. This is specific, named confession, not a generalized "war is bad."

Nippon Kaigi's sentence has the opposite structure entirely — 「天皇を国民統合の中心と仰ぐ国柄はいささかも揺らぐことなく」 ("the national character centered on the Emperor as the unifying core of the people never wavered in the slightest") — the subject throughout is "national character" and "the people's efforts," and the only trace WWII leaves in this sentence is the phrase "unprecedented defeat." Who started the war doesn't even appear, let alone who suffered from it. This isn't an oversight — it's a deliberate omission, compressing the entire history into "we lost, but our spirit didn't, and then we rebuilt and got rich." Both perpetrator and victim vanish entirely from the narrative.

The UCCJ's confession is about "what did we get wrong"; Nippon Kaigi's self-narrative is about "what did we go through, and how did we endure it." These are two fundamentally different kinds of historical memory — one oriented toward responsibility, the other toward resilience — and right now, the one holding power within the state's institutional structure is the latter. Nippon Kaigi isn't literally identical to the LDP or the government, but given that cabinet members and party leadership are almost entirely made up of Nippon Kaigi or Shinto Political League members, calling them "equivalent" holds up in terms of actual political weight, if not strict legal terms. The path Murayama's statement represents is now backed by nearly negligible seats on Japan's political map, while the narrative that "even facing defeat, our national character never wavered in the slightest" now sits on 352 seats of the governing coalition.

Appendix: Full Text of the Murayama Statement

To keep this document itself on record, here is the full English text of Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama's "Statement on the 50th Anniversary of the War's End," delivered August 15, 1995, as published on the official website of Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Source links are at the end of the text.

Statement by Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama "On the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the War's End" (the "Murayama Statement") August 15, 1995 The world has seen fifty years elapse since the war came to an end. Now, when I remember the many people both at home and abroad who fell victim to war, my heart is overwhelmed by a flood of emotions. In the wake of our defeat, Japan, from the depths of a scorched land, overcame numerous difficulties to arrive at the peace and prosperity we enjoy today. This is a source of pride for us, and I wish to express my heartfelt admiration for the wisdom and untiring efforts of each and every one of our citizens who made this possible. I would also like to express, once again, my feelings of profound gratitude for the support and assistance extended to us by countries around the world, beginning with the United States. And I am happy that we have come to enjoy the friendly relations we now have with the countries of the Asia-Pacific region, the United States, and countries of Europe. Now that Japan has become peaceful and prosperous, we tend to forget the pricelessness and blessings of peace. So that we do not repeat the mistakes of the past, I believe we must pass on the horrors of war to younger generations. And, in particular, in order to firmly establish peace in the Asia-Pacific region and the world beyond, I believe it essential that we, in close cooperation with other countries, build relationships of deep trust and understanding with neighboring nations. Guided by this conviction, the government has been implementing a Peace, Friendship, and Exchange Initiative, comprising two pillars — supporting historical research into relations between Japan and neighboring Asian countries in the modern era, and rapidly expanding exchange between our countries. I will continue to earnestly deal with the ongoing issue of post-war settlement in order to further strengthen the relationships of trust between Japan and these nations. Now, at this milestone of the 50th anniversary of the war's end, what we should bear in mind is that we must look to the past to learn from the lessons of history, and ensure that we do not stray from the path towards the peace and prosperity of human society in the future. During a certain period in the not-too-distant past, Japan, following a mistaken national policy, advanced along the road to war, only to ensnare the Japanese people in a fateful crisis, and, through its colonial rule and aggression, caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations. In the hope that no such mistake will be made in the future, I regard, in a spirit of humility, these irrefutable facts of history, and express here once again my feelings of deep remorse and state my heartfelt apology. Allow me also to express my feelings of profound mourning for all victims, both at home and abroad, of that history. Building from our deep remorse on this occasion of the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, Japan must eliminate self-righteous nationalism, promote international coordination as a responsible member of the international community, and thereby advance the principles of peace and democracy. At the same time, as the only country to have experienced the devastation of atomic bombing, Japan, with the experience of this tragedy, must actively work for the ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons and the strengthening of the international nonproliferation regime. This, I believe, is our way of atoning for the past and of honoring the souls of those who fell. There is an old saying that "one should not depart from righteousness." At this time of remembrance, I declare to our people and the world our intention to make righteousness and trust the foundation of our government, and this is my vow. (Source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, official website. Japanese: https://www.mofa.go.jp/mofaj/press/danwa/07/dmu_0815.html English: https://www.mofa.go.jp/announce/press/pm/murayama/9508.html)

Supplementary video: footage of Murayama Tomiichi himself, in his later years, reflecting on this statement is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6F0JYTuO6A (recorded November 2015 at a lecture at Kobe Gakuin University; title: "Former PM Murayama Tomiichi looks back on the 50th-anniversary Murayama Statement — 'I wanted to issue the statement to bring closure'").