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From pre-war militarism to post-war LDP rule, Japan has long held a "winner's mentality," says Yang Bojiang, chairman of the Chinese Association of Japanese Studies. Why has Germany been able to confront its wartime past more fully than Japan? Germany was divided into occupation zones controlled by several Allied powers, while the occupation of Japan was overwhelmingly led by the United States. From around 1947, as the Cold War officially started, Washington began shifting its priorities in Japan from demilitarization toward economic reconstruction and building Japan into an anti-communist ally. Yang argues that this allowed distorted historical narratives to persist, creating what he describes as a "vicious cycle" in which one falsehood is used to sustain another. Japan has worked hard to polish its national image. But its latest moves, including the new National Intelligence Agency and the latest defense white paper, are tearing that image apart, piece by piece.

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Why can't Japan fully confront its past? A Chinese scholar explains