Divided States, Divisive Memories

Lingering legacies of Japanese imperialism in East Asia

By Dolf-Alexander Neuhaus and Torsten Weber

May 8, 1945, is a tragic day for the residents of Imabari. On that Tuesday morning, the Japanese city on Shikoku Island, renowned for its high-quality towel manufacturing, becomes the target of an American air raid. Twenty-nine people die in the attack, including eleven students from Imabari Girls’ High School. When the air raid sirens wailed, the girls left their usual route to school to seek shelter on nearby Mount Himesaka. Tragically, it was precisely there that one of the deadly bombs struck the group of 14- and 15-year-olds. Each year on May 8, current students place flowers at a school memorial to commemorate the victims.

In the weeks and months that followed, tens of thousands of civilians perished in similar raids on Tokyo, Yokohama, and many other cities across the country. While guns in Europe had fallen silent months earlier, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9 alone immediately killed at least 150,000 people. Only then did Japan’s leadership finally agree to surrender. Fourteen weeks after Germany’s capitulation, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender on August 15, famously declaring that the nation must now “endure the unendurable.” He was referring to Japan’s defeat and the coming occupation by US forces whom wartime propaganda had portrayed as demons. Given the hopelessness of Japan’s military situation, hundreds of thousands of lives could have been spared, had Japanese leaders accepted the Allies’ demands to surrender in June, July, or even early August. To be sure, defeat had seemed probable since the Battle of Midway in 1942, and became unavoidable no later than the American landing on Okinawa in early April 1945.

American Occupation of Japan, Civil Wars in China and Korea

Japan’s unconditional surrender ushered in a seven-year occupation by the United States. While the devastated country maintained its own government composed mainly of liberal figures from the prewar era, real authority rested with the General Headquarters (GHQ) under Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers General Douglas MacArthur until the San Francisco Peace Treaty took effect in 1952. Unlike Germany and in contrast to Japan’s former colony Korea, Japan was spared from partition into separate occupation zones. During the early stages of occupation, American authorities aimed to dismantle the entrenched authoritarian structures of Japanese society and oversaw sweeping democratic reforms (Dower 1999, 73-86). The drafting and enactment of a new constitution secured universal suffrage, granting women the right to vote, while the education system was overhauled to foster democratic principles. Occupation policies also involved dissolving powerful corporate conglomerates (zaibatsu) and establishing labor unions. One of the most important and lasting policies was an ambitious land reform that transferred property ownership from wealthy landowners to tenant farmers between 1947 and 1948 (Takemae 2002, 339-46). Alongside these new civil liberties, the demilitarization of society was codified in Japan’s 1947 Constitution: Article 9 formally renounces both military forces and the nation’s right to wage war. In practice, however, Japan has fielded a modern military since 1954, euphemistically termed the Self-Defense Forces to comply with constitutional language. To this day, Japan’s political camps continue to debate whether Article 9 should be preserved or abolished. Democratization largely succeeded, though Japan’s bureaucratic establishment—which retained much of its prewar personnel—implemented liberal reforms incompletely and later reversed some entirely.

As with Germany’s collapse in Europe, Japan’s defeat fundamentally transformed the East Asian and Pacific landscapes. The fall of the Japanese Empire, which since the late 19th century had first encompassed Taiwan and Korea, and later incorporated former German Pacific island colonies and the puppet state of Manchukuo, triggered a comprehensive political, territorial, and social reorganization of East Asia. Division and displacement became widespread consequences. Japanese settlers from Korea and Manchuria were repatriated as former colonial occupiers, often struggling to reintegrate into Japanese society (Watt 2009). Conversely, many people of Korean descent remained in Japan, descendants of those who had either migrated during the colonial era or been subjected to wartime forced labor. At war’s end, 2.4 million Koreans resided in Japan; approximately 650,000 chose not to return to their homeland due to Korea’s partition, ongoing war, or economic factors. While Koreans had been imperial subjects, albeit second-class citizens under Japanese rule, they now lost their Japanese nationality entirely and became stateless. This situation was alleviated only in 1965 when Japan and South Korea normalized diplomatic relations, allowing Korean residents in Japan to obtain South Korean citizenship.

However, while the Iron Curtain descended across Central Europe shortly after World War II ended, ideological divisions in Asia consolidated more slowly and often through violent means. Without their external enemy Japan, the Communists and Nationalists in China resumed their civil war, which eventually culminated in the founding of the People’s Republic of China and the Nationalist retreat to Taiwan in 1949. At least two million Chinese fled to the island to escape persecution under Mao’s communist revolution. Decolonization conflicts such as the Indochina War, in which Vietnamese Communists, backed by Chinese support, fought against the restoration of French colonial rule beginning in 1946, represented another consequence of Japan’s military withdrawal from the region.

“A Gift from the Gods” and Reverse Course

Korea’s situation was particularly tragic. The Korean people, who had already staged mass demonstrations against Japanese colonial rule after World War I, gained independence with Japan’s defeat, but the country was divided along the 38th parallel into American and Soviet zones. The policies of the occupying powers deepened existing ideological divisions and ultimately led to the establishment of two separate states in 1948, each seeking reunification under its own system.

Following several armed clashes along the demarcation line, the North Korean army invaded the South in 1950 with Stalin’s backing. Kim Il-sung launched a war that would claim nearly three million lives over three years. The deployment of UN forces under American leadership to support the South, combined with Chinese military intervention on behalf of the Kim regime, gave the conflict a global dimension and brought the region dangerously close to a broader war. The Korean war ended with an armistice in 1953, but no peace treaty was ever signed, leaving the two Koreas technically still at war. These unresolved tensions continue to shape the Korean Peninsula and the region today (Cumings 2010).

For Japan, the brutal war in the neighboring country proved to be “a gift from the gods,” as Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida put it, massively boosting demand for Japanese industrial exports. The heavy industry that had powered Japan’s military buildup in the 1930s now drove the country’s economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s, with annual growth rates reaching ten percent.

However, Japan was more than just a passive economic beneficiary. The occupied nation served as the operational headquarters for US forces in Korea, which MacArthur initially commanded as well. The establishment of the People’s Republic of China and the Korean War fueled fears of communist revolution within both the Japanese government and the GHQ. They regarded Japan’s Communist Party and the Korean minority—most of whom sympathized with North Korea—with deep suspicion. Beginning in summer 1950, the GHQ pursued a so-called reverse course away from supporting labor movements and toward intensified anti-communist purges throughout the public sector, media organizations, universities, and major corporations. Simultaneously, it abandoned further prosecution of suspected war criminals, many of whom were rehabilitated into public life. Nobusuke Kishi, who had served as a minister in Hideki Tojo’s wartime cabinet, even became Prime Minister in 1957.

War clouds over Japan’s holiday paradise?

The Korean War also spurred Japan’s rearmament. A US-Japan bilateral defense alliance, concluded in conjunction with the peace treaty, firmly established the country as a crucial pillar of America’s Pacific security framework. Today, the United States operates 15 major military bases in Japan. The heaviest burden falls on Japan’s southernmost prefecture of Okinawa. This island chain embodies the complex interplay of Japanese war responsibility and guilt, of being both perpetrator and victim. Combined with geopolitical pressures, these dynamics continue to strain the trilateral relationship between Okinawa, Japan’s central government in Tokyo, and the United States. The Battle of Okinawa from April to June 1945 cost over 200,000 lives, in part because the Japanese military forced poorly armed civilians to serve as cannon fodder against the superior Allied forces during the war’s final months. Many residents, including women and children, took their own lives rather than surrender to what Japanese propaganda had demonized as American “beasts.” While Japan’s political and military responsibility for the deaths of Okinawans has been thoroughly documented by scholars and activists, only recently has this tragedy entered broader Japanese public awareness through media coverage. Well into the postwar era, many Japanese continued to regard the islanders far down South as culturally backward and inferior to the rest of Japan.

Today, tourism flourishes in Okinawa’s tropical paradise, which only regained its status as a Japanese prefecture in 1972 when American occupation ended. The prefectural government regularly lobbies Tokyo for a fairer distribution of US military bases across Japan. However, the US military presence in Japan is unpopular with the Japanese public, making it impossible to find any governor willing to accept new bases in their prefecture. Consequently, the bases remain concentrated in Okinawa, along with residents’ fears that they will once again have to bear the heaviest burden of all Japanese in a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. This concern is particularly acute given that the disputed Senkaku Islands, which China claims as its own, are officially part of Okinawa Prefecture. Moreover, Okinawa’s capital city of Naha lies geographically closer to Shanghai than to Tokyo.

Historical Memory and the Burden of Japan’s Imperialist Past

While Japan maintains good relations with the United States, albeit reluctantly at times, its relationships with East Asian neighbors remain strained. According to opinion polls, 89 percent of Japanese hold unfavorable views of China, while more than half of South Koreans and more than 87 percent of Chinese view Japan negatively (NPO Genron 2024, 2023). These negative perceptions stem partly from the legacy of Japanese imperialism. For many Koreans and Chinese, unresolved historical disputes represent the primary obstacle to lasting reconciliation; they believe Japan must offer genuine apologies for its wartime conduct. From the Japanese perspective, however, accusations of insufficient remorse and inadequate reparations constitute a major source of negative sentiment toward Korea and China. In 2015, marking the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe reaffirmed his predecessors’ apologies, but significantly added that the young generation no longer needs to apologize. After all, he argued, in Japan “the postwar generations now exceed eighty per cent of its population” and therefore “have nothing to do with that war” (Abe 2015).

Japan’s neighbors criticized this attempt to draw a line under the past as premature. New revelations about Japanese wartime crimes, such as sexual exploitation and forced labor, which had not been addressed in the normalization treaties with South Korea (1965) and China (1972), combined with the growing influence of revisionist forces within Japan, have intensified historical disputes since the 1990s. In a pluralistic society like Japan, divergent interpretations of the nation’s imperial past may not be surprising, yet the stark divide between scholarly research and segments of public discourse certainly is. Did Japan wage a just war of liberation against Western imperialism, or did it colonize and exploit its neighbors? Was the Nanjing Massacre of winter 1937-1938, with its assumed death toll of up to 300,000, merely Chinese propaganda? Were the “comfort women,” since 2020 commemorated by a monument in Berlin, sex slaves or “well-paid” prostitutes? Japanese historical scholarship has largely settled these questions, exposing the historical distortions promoted by right-wing populist politicians and public commentators (Hatano 2022). Former Prime Minister Abe exemplified this revisionist tendency: a grandson of alleged war criminal Kishi, he supported notorious deniers of the Nanjing Massacre and engaged in the discrediting of the “comfort women.”

What accounts for the whitewashing perspective many Japanese hold regarding their past? Comparisons with Germany are widespread but often misleading: While Germany committed systematic genocide, no atomic bombs were dropped on its cities. Moreover, unlike Japan in postwar East Asia, West Germany encountered favorable conditions for reconciliation with former adversaries in postwar Europe. Instead of such comparisons, examining Japan’s early postwar period provides clearer insight. During the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, seven military and civilian leaders received death sentences, including wartime Prime Minister Tojo and General Iwane Matsui, who bore responsibility for the Nanjing Massacre. However, when politically expedient, the United States blocked prosecution of numerous other crimes and exempted figures such as Emperor Hirohito and his family from legal proceedings. Even today, Japan’s political right continues to venerate the Emperor as divine, despite the constitution designating him merely as the nation’s “symbol.” The United States also shielded leaders of Unit 731, which had conducted biochemical experiments on men, women, and children in Manchuria, in exchange for their research data. As in Germany, this combination of selective prosecution and deliberate protection impeded comprehensively coming to terms with wartime atrocities on legal and societal levels.

With some exceptions, the Japanese today primarily commemorate their own wartime suffering. As wartime personnel, including the Emperor, kept or regained influential positions in postwar Japan, wartime ideologies regained social acceptance, including the propaganda narrative of a pan-Asian liberation war aimed at creating a “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.” A key witness to the popular postwar myth of Japan’s legitimate war is Indian judge Radhabinod Pal, who alone among the Tokyo Trial judges voted to acquit all defendants. He is honored with a monument at the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in central Tokyo, where convicted war criminals are venerated and where what is commonly known as the Asia-Pacific War continues to be called the “Greater East Asian War”—the same terminology used 80 years ago.

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Dolf-Alexander Neuhaus and Torsten Weber are historians and research fellows at the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) in Tokyo. Dolf-Alexander Neuhaus’ research concentrates on Japan’s postwar engagement with Asia, examining how its imperial past shapes Japanese development aid programs through technical assistance and educational initiatives. Torsten Weber’s current research focuses on different aspects of historical commemoration and memory politics in East Asia, including a project that studies John Rabe’s Nanjing Diaries as contested testimony of war atrocities.

This blog post is a revised and expanded translation of “Beschönigung der Kriegsverbrechen”, originally published in German in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 4 May 2025.

References

Abe, Shinzo. 2015. “Statement by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, August 14, 2015”, Prime Minister of Japan and His Cabinet. https://japan.kantei.go.jp/97_abe/statement/201508/0814statement.html.

Cumings, Bruce. 2010. The Korean War: A History. New York: Modern Library.

Dower, John W. 2000. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Hatano, Sumio. 2022. Nihon no Rekishi Mondai [Japan’s History Problems]. Tokyo: Chuo Koron Shinsha.

NPO Genron. 2023. “Dai 11-kai Nikkan Kyōdō Seron Chōsa Kekka” [Results of the 11th Joint Japanese-Korean Opinion Poll]. https://www.genron-npo.net/world/archives/16656.html.

NPO Genron. 2024. “Dai 20-kai Nitchū Kyōdō Seron Chōsa Bunseki” [Analysis of the 20th Joint Japanese-Chinese Opinion Poll]. https://www.genron-npo.net/world/archives/20131.html.

Takemae, Eiji. 2002. Inside GHQ: The Allied Occupation of Japan and Its Legacy. Translated by Robert Ricketts and Sebastian Swann. New York: Continuum.

Watt, Lori. 2009. When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center.

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