It is not entirely for want of international pressure. In the spring of 2019, for instance, a new design for a 10,000-yen note featuring a portrait of Japan’s pioneering industrialist Shibusawa Eiichi was announced, provoking a harsh reaction from South Korea — where Shibusawa’s portrait had been briefly used on the currency imposed by Japanese colonial rulers. The nation’s objections were duly reported in Japan, yet little public debate followed. The banknote will be released, as originally planned, in 2024.

This response echoes the better-known controversy over “comfort women”,  a euphemism for the hundreds of thousands of predominantly Chinese and Korean women forced to become sex slaves to Japan’s imperial army during the Second World War. Japan’s apparent resistance to engaging fully and sincerely with these historic crimes  has inspired much international criticism, including demonstrations outside Japanese embassies in Seoul and Manila.

To understand why Japan is so guarded about its empire, it is necessary to understand how exactly that empire came about. After all, the nation had only narrowly escaped being colonised itself in the mid-19th century, when the industrialised Western powers set their sights on Asian territories. In the 20th, as the first and only non-Western country playing the game of great power politics, Japan tried to adopt the role of the anti-colonial colonialist, predestined to liberate other Asians from Western imperialism and to lead them on the road to progress. Japan’s stated aim was to create “an Asia for Asians”, a slogan it used to justify its own aggressive invasions. China had to be freed from the Western-backed regime of Chiang Kai-shek; Malaya and Burma from the British; the East Indies from the Dutch; Indochina from the French; the Philippines from the Americans. According to this view, Japan’s imperialism was not self-interested — and acted in opposition to Western colonialism.

Race was at the heart of Japan’s Pan-Asianism. Writing in late 1918, Prince Fumimaro Konoe, who would later become prime minister, urged Japan to “reject the Anglo-American Peace” to be proposed at Versailles. Shortly after attending the conference, he wrote: “That the white people — and the Anglo-Saxon race in particular — generally abhor coloured people is an apparent fact, so blatantly observable in the US treatment of its black people.” And his suspicions were arguably vindicated when Japanese delegates tried to have a clause in favour of racial equality included in the League’s charter — and failed.

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After the worldwide depression, as the Great Powers became inward-looking — putting up protectionist trade barriers and, in some cases, introducing laws against Asian immigration — Japan’s rhetoric became focused on economic security. The nation insisted that each of its expansionist steps was part of a grand project — to build a “New East Asia Order” or the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”. The official goal of Japan’s war with the West was declared, in late 1941, to be the establishment of Asian “stability”. Just as the Japanese were taught to believe in their emperor’s divinity, they were also taught that their nation had a sacred mission in Asia — especially in colonial South-East Asia, where the dissatisfaction in European colonies justified Japan’s involvement, for some. For others, it had the opposite effect: in 1962, Lee Kuan Yew, who was then Singapore’s Prime Minister, identified Japan’s military occupation from early 1942 as a wake-up call. Japanese occupation made his generation of young people “determined that no one — neither the Japanese nor the British — had the right to push and kick us around”.

To this day, the belief that ousting the predatory West from Japan’s backyard was morally legitimate persists. In the Nineties, one best-selling manga by the cartoonist Yoshinori Kobayashi, claiming to be a “philosophical comic book”, painted Japanese imperialism in a shamelessly self-glorifying light. The Japanese army, it argued, “bravely fought the white imperialists, who arrogantly regarded coloured peoples as lowly primates”. More recently, the hawkish former prime minister Shinzo Abe’s success was partly down to his effective deployment of neo-nationalist rhetoric, which has remained present since his death.

But whatever the present-day Japanese would like to believe, in practice Japanese occupiers used anti-colonial rhetoric while behaving very much like colonial masters themselves. This led the historian Grant Goodman to observe in 1991 that Japan “out-colonialed” Westerners in terms of brutality and exploitation. In reality, it would be misguided to dismiss Japan’s “Asia for Asians” claim as purely disingenuous, a post facto excuse for its aggressive expansionism. The philosophical underpinnings for it preceded Japan’s empire.

In the late-19th century, Asian intellectuals — often writing in English — sought to reject the colonial view of Asia as an entity that was racially inferior. The Japanese art historian Tenshin Okakura, an associate of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, emerged as one of the most influential Pan-Asianist voices. Despite its comparative material and military weakness, Okakura asserted, Asia was a civilisation par excellence. In the preamble of The Ideals of the East, he wrote:

“Asia is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilisations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas. But not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal.”

And yet, Japan’s quest to reach the status of the white nations that ruled the world was conducted not in spiritual terms but old-fashioned military ones. With Japan’s victory in the war against Tsarist Russia in 1905, it became the first non-white power to defeat a white one in a modern war. Unsurprisingly, this stoked anti-colonial sentiments beyond the Japanese archipelago. Jawaharlal Nehru, writing in 1939, recalled the excitement he felt as a boy: “Japanese victories stirred up my enthusiasm … Nationalistic ideas filled my mind. I mused of Indian freedom and Asiatic freedom from the thraldom of Europe.”

A string of anti-colonialists started to seek refuge in Japan — including Indo-Chinese nationalists Phan Boi Chau and Prince Cuong De, Indian independence fighter Rash Behari Bose, and, most famously, Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern Chinese nationalism. Many of them were morally and financially supported by Japan’s Pan-Asianists. The movie studio tycoon Umeya Shokichi, for example, drew on his fortune to help finance Sun’s nationalist movement, as did Torazo Miyazaki, a philosopher who actively collaborated with the Chinese nationalists by volunteering to be their publicist and supplier of arms, and even a combatant.

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Meanwhile, one of the most important figures of 20th-century Japanese literature, the novelist Masuji Ibuse, worked in Malaya and Singapore, writing editorials for the local newspaper. He emphasised the importance of propagating the Japanese language. In February 1942, he wrote, ironically in English:

“The substitution of Nipponese (Japanese) for English as the lingua franca in Malaya is but the natural recognition of a nation which has stood up for things Asia [sic] and which is now in the process of saving Asians from continuing to be the victims of the British strategy to squeeze the wealth and culture of Asians.”

Ibuse was convinced that learning Japanese would elevate other Asians. To him, and many others, Asia was not only one, as Okakura had proclaimed; rather, “Asia was Japan”.

Despite Japan’s utter defeat in the Second World War, this narcissistic self-image persisted. That the emperor was never held responsible for Japan’s imperialism did much to hinder the development of an honest debate: his throne was spared by General Douglas MacArthur out of fear of Japanese rebellion, which would have stifled efforts to rebuild post-war Japan as a fortress against communism. A lingering reverence for the imperial institution has also made Japanese colonialism something of a sensitive — if not a taboo — subject in post-war Japan. The emperor, moreover, has become a symbol of peace in a nation that now hasn’t seen war for a lifetime.

All this partly explains why the West’s post-colonial reckoning has so far elicited no discernible reaction in Japan. There is always a slight time lag before Japan absorbs any social and intellectual movements coming from the outside world. Advocacy for LGBTQ rights, for instance, took some years for college students to embrace. Yet there is a bigger reason why Japan has not reckoned with its colonial past. Whereas in Britain the ideologies used to justify colonialism, including Social Darwinism, have been thoroughly debunked, the imperial Japanese claim that Asia had to be liberated from the West is, in theory, morally unobjectionable. None of this excuses the atrocities committed by Japan in practice. And while most Japanese today are indifferent to the topic of the empire, it’s still a subject that gets conservatives riled up. They stick to the classic narrative of Asian solidarity, in which Japan stood up to the imperial bullies, instead of emulating them.

It is a story that stars Radhaninod Pal, an Indian judge beloved by the Japanese Right. Sitting on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in 1946, otherwise known as the Tokyo Trial, he became famous for arguing that all the Japanese defendants, including the wartime prime minister Hideki Tojo, should be acquitted. He insisted that Japan’s crimes were hardly unprecedented, that one only had to look at Western imperialism to find equal brutality. He also pointed to America’s nuclear bombings as war crimes, and accused the victorious powers of moral relativism and racial prejudice. Because of such statements, Pal is to this day memorialised in Japan as a brave nationalist who sided with an Asian ally in the face of Western arrogance.

Japan’s pose as the anti-colonial colonialist will persist so long as it continues to think of itself as having fought a selfless, civilisational war for the good of Asia. All the while, an uncomfortable truth will remain ignored: that, in its execution of the Pan-Asianist dream, Japan fell far too short of delivering its grand promises.

It extended to 84 plaintiffs, with ages ranging from late 70s to 90s, the certification of atomic bomb victims. In other words, it recognised them as having been exposed to radioactive “black rain”. These plaintiffs were just outside the area, officially designated after the fact, where radioactive droplets from the nuclear explosion fell. In spite of their long struggles with radiation-linked diseases, they had been denied the same level of medical benefits that were given to “certified” atom bomb survivors.

For those plaintiffs and other survivors, the nuclear summer of 1945 is never a distant memory. For most Japanese today, it is. Nevertheless, all Japanese people grow up with ample knowledge of the horror and cruelty of nuclear weapons — be it from obligatory lessons at schools, or from popular manga and movies. (Barefoot Gen, a semi-autobiographical manga by Keiji Nakazawa that has sold 10 million copies worldwide, is but one example.) As a result, Hiroshima — Hiroshima more than Nagasaki, for being the “first” — has become a quasi-religious abstraction that reigns at the heart of Japan’s pacifist ideology.

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During the Second World War, Japan’s national ideology revolved around the cult of emperor worship. After Japan’s defeat, the cult of peace worship took its place. This worship draws its moral strength from two interconnected sources. One is Article 9 of the US-drafted postwar constitution, which renounces “war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes”. The other is Japan’s broad-based anti-nuclear arms sentiments, of which Hiroshima is the most potent symbol. And so every year, on 6 August, the city makes national headlines as Japan commemorates the anniversary of the bombing.

“Peace” is everywhere on that occasion. The “Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony” is held in the “Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park”, built near the bomb’s detonation point. Top politicians and dignitaries join in silent prayers with ordinary citizens at 8.15 am, followed by the tolling of “peace bells”, the mayor’s “peace declaration”, and a releasing of doves into the sky once shrouded by a mushroom cloud. Around the anniversary, many commemorative events are held, including art exhibitions, flower shows and concerts featuring the world’s top musicians. (The late pianist Peter Serkin, in 2017, played with the Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra at its “Music for Peace Concert”. He also gave a moving private performance on a Baldwin piano that once belonged to Akiko Kawamoto, an American-born teenager. The piano survived the bombing. Akiko didn’t.)

Due to fear that Covid-19 will spread, many of this year’s 75th anniversary events have had to be cancelled, and the main ceremony will be drastically downsized. Even so, Hiroshima’s essential importance as a galvanising point of postwar Japanese identity will remain unchanged.

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Three is nothing inherently wrong with a country valuing and praying for peace. Peace is hard not to like, and it is also unifying. It can act as the lowest common denominator to bring together people of different political persuasions — as well as former enemies. (The Japanese welcomed Barack Obama when he made a peace-making visit to Hiroshima in May 2016, the first US President to do so while in office.) Adopting pacifism as a national ideology also helped Japan regain its international legitimacy in the Cold War era. Going pacifist meant that Japan, an erstwhile rogue state with expansionist designs, could begin identifying itself as a reformed, benign power — and the most dependable US ally in East Asia.

But peace, or more precisely, the kind of pacifism that Japan has cultivated over the past three quarters of a century, has its drawbacks. For one, it has hindered a meaningful political debate. By emphasising Japan’s own wartime sufferings and its current desire for peace, the conservative Japanese regime, in power for most of the postwar period, has tended to downplay Japan’s record as an imperialist aggressor, first in East Asia, and later in the Pacific and Southeast Asia. And until recently, the Right’s narrative generally overlooked the fact that the nuclear casualties included Allied POWs, as well as Chinese and Korean forced labourers.

The vociferous Right — for some time now represented by the hawkish leadership of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — insists that a revision of the postwar pacifist constitution is necessary so that Japan can become a truly sovereign nation-state. Unless it becomes an active military power, this line of argument goes, Japan cannot preserve peace. But that same need to preserve peace is invoked by the political Left too, which regards any intimation of a constitutional revision as a sacrilege.

“Peace”, in this instance, is tautological. It serves as a reason for Japan to have an active military and at the same time, to continue rejecting that option. A lack of dialogue between those two opposite camps is worrying, when changing conditions — primarily in the forms of China’s rise and a nuclear-armed North Korea — are making it necessary for Japan to examine what kind of peace Japan wants and how best to achieve it. Does Japan need to alter its constitution? How active should the Japan Self-Defense Forces be? Can Japanese peace — and by extension, regional peace — be secured without the strong backing of the United States? If pressed on any of these questions, Japanese individuals would likely have different answers. Yet, the Japanese version of pacifism, anchored in the horrific experience of the atom bombings, has long created a misleading sense that the nation is more united than it really is.

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Another disadvantage of Japanese pacifism is the selective historical memory it has helped to forge. In this retelling, nuclear weapons become overly exceptional. In 1945, they were an extension of strategic preferences that had led all the belligerent parties to bomb their enemies’ civilians. The world was initially shocked by the German bombing of Guernica in April 1937. But all the powers would adjust to the dehumanising idea that civilian deaths were a necessary part of total warfare, either because precision-bombing of military targets was deemed too difficult, or because targeting civilians was regarded as an effective demoralising strategy — or, more and more, as the war dragged on, both.

Before the Blitz, Japan was one of the first countries to bomb civilians, most notably in Chiang Kai-shek’s relocated capital Chongqing from late 1938 onwards. Once the Allied forces, too, got started, they went all out — in Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden, and many other cities, followed by a series of B-29 fire-bombings of Japan. Too few Japanese individuals nowadays, even those who whole-heartedly preach “No More Hiroshima”, remember that Tokyo sustained the biggest air-raid on the night of 9/10th March 1945: 80,000 to 100,000 people perished in one night.

This is not to minimise the exceptionally destructive power of the nuclear weapons or the subsequent moral controversy that emerged as radioactivity’s horrifying and long-lasting effects became known. It is only to stress that one cannot assume, from what we have learned since, that explicit calculations of an immoral or an even racist nature propelled the US decision to drop those atomic bombs on Japanese cities. While those calculations could have existed alongside more urgent strategic preferences. The foremost US priority in the summer of 1945 was to win the war with Japan through extensive bombing, be it incendiary or atomic.

By the time Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945, more than 200 Japanese cities of various sizes had been bombed. Okinawa had fallen. And the civilian population had been thoroughly starved by a blockade of US-planted sea mines that prevented the transportation of food supplies. The prospect of a two-fronted invasion by the Soviet Union and the United States terrified the Japanese leadership. (Stalin was poised to declare war on Japan even before Hiroshima.) With the Soviet Union’s entry into the war on 9 August, Japan’s surrender was imminent. The atomic bombs might have influence the timing somewhat, but the fear of the Soviet invasion and a potential revolution were compelling enough reasons for Japan to give up the fight.

With more than 80% of Japan’s population having grown up in peacetime, war is understandably a remote notion. It is also understandable that for most of today’s Japanese, “peace” — or at the very least, the absence of war — feels like a sui generis condition given to them in response to their earnest prayers for it. But without an active political debate, based on a more balanced view of history, that peace might not last.