Through post–Cold War U.S.–Japan relations and comparisons with Germany, this chapter examines the essence of the Tokyo Trial narrative as a victor’s view of history that suppresses Allied war crimes.

They must have forgotten to write “by Harry Truman” at the end of the inscription on the Atomic Bomb Memorial.
2016-12-12
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
Emphasis in the text is mine.
Fukui.
After the Cold War ended, Japan and the United States could no longer unite through defense against the Soviet Union.
With the loss of a common enemy, the reason for Japan to follow the United States became weaker, and within the American establishment there grew a stronger sense that Japan needed to be pressed down even more.
That is why current U.S. government officials speak in such an overbearing manner.
They even interfered openly with Prime Minister Shinzō Abe’s visit to Yasukuni Shrine.
Ito.
The victorious powers always try to use convenient historical cards.
This is likely in order to conceal their own far greater war crimes.
Even Germany, which lost the war like Japan and was an ally, is used to speak arrogantly, saying that Japan’s postwar settlement was sloppier than theirs, that Japan did not apologize properly like Richard von Weizsäcker, and that Japan lacks sufficient remorse, and there are those in Japan who follow this line.
Fukui.
Regarding the atrocities and war crimes committed by the Allied side in Germany, books gradually revealing the reality of these acts are being published both inside and outside Germany.
The organized rape of German women by Soviet soldiers has long been pointed out.
In addition, in recent years, works such as Taken by Force by J. Robert Lilly have revealed that American soldiers also engaged in similar acts.
However, pointing out Allied war crimes in Germany risks being criticized as revisionism that relativizes or sanitizes Nazism.
For politicians in particular, Allied crimes are a taboo.
President Joachim Gauck stated explicitly in his speech at the 70th anniversary memorial ceremony of the Dresden air raids in 2015 that emphasizing German suffering was undesirable.
Germany is so constrained in its historical awareness that even a head of state must speak in this way.
Ito.
It is natural for Germans to say that the mistake of the Jewish genocide will never be repeated, but on the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Memorial it says, “We shall not repeat the error.”
Whose error, exactly, does that refer to.
Ezaki.
They must have forgotten to add “by Harry Truman” at the end of the inscription on the Atomic Bomb Memorial.
Even so, in the Abe Statement marking seventy years after the war, there was not a single mention of the war crimes of the former Soviet Union.
I found this deeply strange.
Ito.
The Tokyo Trial historical view is, in essence, the victorious Allied narrative.
That is likely why it was thought necessary to refrain from raising objections about the war crimes of the Allied nations.
To be continued.