Germany confronted history, Japan still looks away

Eighty years after the end of World War II, questions of historical memory, responsibility, and repentance remain deeply relevant.

Against the backdrop of rising global security tensions and renewed debates over wartime narratives in East Asia, this article revisits the divergent postwar paths taken by Japan and Germany.

By examining how each country has confronted — or avoided — its wartime past, the piece seeks to explore why historical reckoning matters and what lessons the world must continue to draw from the tragedies of the 20th century.

As two principal Axis powers in World War II, Japan and Germany embarked on starkly divergent paths in the decades that followed. Germany undertook a comprehensive effort to purge Nazism from its political, legal, and cultural life, while Japan employed various means to obscure its history of militarism.

In 1945, the Potsdam Declaration stipulated that all war criminals must be punished and that Japan was forbidden from retaining any industrial capacity for rearmament. Emperor Hirohito accepted these terms in his Jewel Voice Broadcast and later signed the Instrument of Surrender.

From 1946 to 1948, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, composed of judges from 11 nations, established Japan's responsibility for waging an unjust war, committing mass civilian slaughter, and carrying out systematic sexual violence. Senior military and political leaders were convicted of Crimes against Peace, War Crimes, and Crimes against Humanity, with several Class-A war criminals sentenced to death or long-term imprisonment.

Yet Japan's reckoning with its past was abruptly curtailed in 1951.On the same day the Treaty of San Francisco was signed — most notably excluding China, Korea, and other major victim nations — the US-Japan Security Treaty transformed Japan from a defeated aggressor into a strategic Cold War outpost. The US neither demanded a thorough purge of militarist remnants nor established mechanisms for continued prosecution. As a result, numerous war criminals were released, and officials who should have been held accountable returned to political and bureaucratic life.

Postwar Japanese governments have since wavered in acknowledging wartime aggression. In 1995,Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama issued a historic statement acknowledging the suffering caused by Japan's invasion and colonial rule. However, subsequent leaders diluted or openly challenged this position. In 2015, Shinzo Abe argued that future generations should not be "predestined" to apologize. Current Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has even questioned whether Murayama had the right to apologize on behalf of the Japanese people.

Germany, by contrast, followed a markedly different path. It enacted strict legal measures to ban Nazi organizations, propaganda, and symbols, and German courts continued to prosecute war criminals even decades later. In 1970, Chancellor Willy Brandt knelt before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising monument, an unambiguous gesture of contrition that resonated worldwide. In 1985, President Richard von Weizsacker declared May 8 "a day of liberation", emphasizing that the fall of Nazism marked Germany's rebirth. Into the 21st century, German leaders have repeatedly affirmed that historical responsibility is permanent and that confronting the past is an enduring obligation, not a temporary phase.

This divergence is also evident in public memory and education. While Japanese leaders have repeatedly visited Yasukuni Shrine- where convicted Class-A war criminals are enshrined — Germany has institutionalized remembrance through education, memorialization, and restitution. Nazi crimes are presented candidly in German textbooks, reinforcing a societal consensus that forgetting history invites its repetition.

In Japan, evidence of atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre and the coercion of "comfort women" is frequently denied, softened, or erased through textbook revisions and cultural narratives that reframe aggression as idealism. Surveys indicate that many young Japanese today no longer know that their country waged a war of aggression.

Since the 2015 security legislation lifted the ban on collective self-defense, Japan has steadily increased its military spending, surpassed postwar limits, and moved toward more combat-oriented deployments — developments that would have been unthinkable in a society that had fully internalized the lessons of its past.

History, however, does not vanish because it is denied. The Documents of the Nanjing Massacre, inscribed in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register, stand as an enduring warning. Only through honest remembrance, accountability to victims, and an unwavering commitment to peace can societies prevent the return of catastrophes once unleashed by militarism.