After Japan’s defeat, the Japanese people were encouraged to judge the past war from the standpoint of the victorious Allied powers, particularly the United States.
Drawing on an essay by Sukehiro Hirakawa, this article examines how the binary narrative of “democracy versus fascism” placed even the Soviet Union and China on the side of justice while portraying Japan as an evil equivalent of Nazi Germany, and questions the historical worldview transmitted through postwar education.

June 22, 2020
After Japan’s defeat, we Japanese were induced to judge the rights and wrongs of the past war from the standpoint of the victorious Allied powers, including the United States.
Postwar Japanese people were generally educated along those lines.
There were still many passages in this month’s issue of Seiron that I had not yet read.
This morning, I was reading the lengthy installment of Sukehiro Hirakawa’s series.
While doing so, I came across a passage that made me think, “This is precisely what China is like today.”
Among the notes Hirakawa compiled and published at the end, there was also a passage proving that my own view had struck the heart of the matter.
In this article, I will introduce excerpts from those passages, together with passages that every Japanese citizen should know.
Hirakawa’s essay is essential reading not only for the Japanese people, but for people throughout the world.
The Framework of Democracy versus Fascism
After Japan’s defeat, we Japanese were induced to judge the rights and wrongs of the past war from the standpoint of the victorious Allied powers, including the United States.
Postwar Japanese people were generally educated along those lines.
Among the Japanese born after the war, many grew up believing from childhood that Japan was an evil country that had waged a war of aggression.
Some people even feel a sense of righteousness in exposing that evil.
Note 7
The Allied powers, including the United States, Britain, and Russia, proclaimed throughout the world that “the Second World War was a war of democracy against fascism.”
This forcibly brought together two forms of democracy that were inherently incompatible: the democracy of liberal nations such as the United States, Britain, and France, and the people’s democracy of communist countries such as the Soviet Union.
Without doing so, however, it would have been impossible to construct a confrontational framework in which the democratic alliance of good—the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China—fought against the totalitarian alliance of evil formed by the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan.
The Second World War was said to have ended in the victory of good democracy over evil fascism, and after the war, a considerable number of people in Japan accepted this kind of historical interpretation.
Shigeto Tsuru emphasized this view in Iwanami Shinsho and elsewhere because he sympathized with the opinions of the American left.
The decisive reason this moralistic interpretation of history was widely accepted abroad was that Nazi Germany’s extermination of the Jews came to be recognized as an act of unprecedented brutality.
As long as the Allied powers that defeated Hitler’s Germany, the embodiment of such evil, were regarded as righteous, Japan, which had been Germany’s ally on the Axis side, also became unrighteous.
Many Americans and Britons treated Germany and Japan alike as evil enemies.
They did not properly understand the differences between Nazi Germany and Japan.
From this arose the notion that Emperor Showa was Japan’s Hitler.
It also gave rise to the assumption that the Japanese Empire must have possessed a master plan for the conquest of Greater East Asia.
Following the logic that the enemy of one’s enemy is one’s friend, the Soviet Union and China were also classified by Americans and Britons as allies of righteous democracy.
This was the view expressed by Jiang Zemin at Pearl Harbor and the view that Xi Jinping, after becoming President of the People’s Republic of China, attempted to proclaim during his visits around the world.
To be continued.