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Still, Japanese schools have done a highly inadequate job of teaching the facts about the country's aggression. This year, for example, the Education Ministry insisted that a textbook passage that said "over 70,000 people were reportedly killed by the Japanese imperial army" in Nanking be changed to "a large number of Chinese people were killed." Many Japanese scholars are appalled at such censorship. Over the years they have sued to protect their books, while the teachers' union, a bastion of liberalism, has fought to reinstate some text cuts. At times they win, generally after foreign protests, but progress is slight.
Some teachers do attempt to strike a more balanced view. Shinji Mikabe, a faculty member at the Matsubara High School in Tokyo, devotes time in a course on discrimination to telling students what they should have learned in history class. "To understand discrimination," says Mikabe, "they must begin with the historical background, and that includes the war." His students consistently admit that they know little about what the Japanese army did in China and Southeast Asia. They are, by contrast, familiar with the U.S. atom- bombing of Hiroshima and the bloody battle for Okinawa.
Lack of balance is also evident in popular treatments of the war. In movies and TV documentaries, a few scenes from black-and-white newsreels seem to appear over and over again: the damage from Americans' fire-bombing of Tokyo, U.S. Marines using flamethrowers to clear Japanese troops out of Okinawa bunkers and foxholes, the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, imperial army generals on trial in Tokyo. The images convey the sense that the Japanese people were the war's real victims -- of both the Allies and the militarists who led the nation into disaster. Seldom is there a hint that Japan victimized others.
Confronting the past is hard partly because of Japan's headlong rush, since the mid-19th century, toward modernization. Says Junichi Kyogoku, president of Tokyo Women's University: "We always look ahead. So the Japanese people are not particularly self-reflective." Asked about Pearl Harbor's anniversary, one Japanese official replied testily, "It's a historical fact. We can't deny it, but let's move on."
Japanese who were youngsters in 1945 recall how politicians and teachers who had been extolling the Emperor and Japan's war aims one day turned into instant democrats and peace lovers the day after surrender. It smacked of betrayal and helped spawn the cynical, rebellious generation that marched through Tokyo in the '50s and '60s. Defeat and disillusion also weighed heavily upon the older generation. They passed the blame, considering it best simply to avoid the past -- especially after U.S. occupation authorities rehabilitated some key wartime politicians and businessmen with hardly a question asked.
Antipathy to war of any kind took root deeply. The Self-Defense Forces now are well below their authorized strength of 274,000 because of trouble in recruiting young people. So desperate are the forces to fill officers' billets that in September, for the first time ever, women were allowed to take the entrance exam for the National Defense Academy, a striking concession in a nation where most men still prefer women to hold jobs that allow them to do little more than serve tea.