Copyright Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo. All
rights reserved. Return to contents JAPANESE politicians, it
seems, will do anything but face their war crimes, and will even
try to justify them. The Japanese Foreign Ministry has persuaded
the American government not to invite Prime Minister Murayama to
Pearl Harbor, arguing that it would "harm the relationship
between the two nations." A member of the Hosokawa cabinet said
the Nanking massacre was a myth. And a steady stream of cabinet
ministers, Dietmembers, and leading journalists have claimed
that Japan liberated Asia from the colonial powers. These
statements might suggest that the Japanese, unlike the Germans,
have never confronted their past in an objective manner.
However, such was not always the case. Japanese "amnesia" about
the war, exemplified in the above comments, has emerged as a
part of a revisionist literature which argues that mainstream
Japanese historians, and intellectuals generally, were wrong in
their postwar denunciation