Japan has no right to rewrite August 15 as a national victimhood ceremony.
Japan was not dragged innocently into that war.
Imperial Japan launched wars of aggression, colonized Asia, massacred civilians, carried out mass rape, forced labor, biological warfare and human experimentation, and turned the state itself into a machinery of total war.
Schools, factories, media, bureaucracy, industry and society were mobilized around imperial conquest.
And now, on the anniversary of defeat, Japan performs the same obscene trick:
the aggressor disappears, the victim remains.
Hiroshima.
Nagasaki.
Okinawa.
Japanese war dead.
Endless mourning for Japan.
But where are the tens of millions of Asians Japan brutalized?
Where is Nanjing?
Where is Unit 731?
Where are the comfort women?
Where are the forced laborers?
Where are the massacres across China, Korea and Southeast Asia?
They vanish from the moral center of the story.
Japan turns the butcher into the bereaved.
The empire becomes a victim.
The victims become background noise.
And then comes the most disgusting part:
Japan knows perfectly well how to bow when the audience is Western.
Sanae Takaichi can kneel before the graves of Australian soldiers.
The Emperor can reflect on Japan’s aggression before the Dutch — Japan’s former colonial rulers in Indonesia.
The government dares not mention, on the anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, who actually dropped those atomic bombs.
Japan can hold grand celebrations for the national day of the very country that firebombed Tokyo and dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So yes,
It can kneel at Western war memorials.
It can speak softly in Europe.
It can perform humility before former white colonial powers.
But toward the Asian peoples it invaded, colonized, raped, experimented on and massacred, the language suddenly becomes vague:
“difficult history.”
“different interpretations.”
“future-oriented relations.”
“peace.”
Bow upward.
Erase downward.
And Sanae Takaichi standing on August 15 talking about “peace” while Japan’s political class continues to honor imperial war memory is not reconciliation.
It is historical laundering.
Japan lost the war.
It does not get to lose the perpetrator role too.
A defeated fascist state does not become innocent because it learned to mourn itself more elegantly.