After losing the war and its national self-confidence, Japan largely abandoned its own historical judgment and submitted to the interpretation imposed by the Allied occupation authorities.
Drawing on an essay by Sukehiro Hirakawa, this article examines the strange convergence between the Allied condemnation of Imperial Japan and the left-wing denunciation of Japan as an imperialist state, a convergence that established the Greater East Asia War in Japanese textbooks as a purely aggressive war.

June 22, 2020
At that point, a strange alliance emerged.
The Allied position of condemning the Japanese Empire as evil overlapped completely with the left-wing position of denouncing Japan as an imperialist state.
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.
Historical Interpretations of Coercion, Accommodation, and Unprincipled Alliance
Why did the Japanese submit so obediently to their rulers and accommodate themselves to them?
Looking back, the Japanese before and during the war put on a brave front and spoke defiantly.
There were strong public slogans suggesting that Japan was the greatest country in the world.
At military schools, this kind of psychological bravado was expressed in Chinese-derived slogans such as “an unblemished golden vessel” and “without equal among all nations,” and it became an article of faith.
A self-centered worldview lacking in realism may be described as a kind of delusion.
Japan misjudged its actual strength in the world and suffered defeat.
Soho Tokutomi Iichiro also described the errors in Japanese self-perception in his sworn statement submitted to the Tokyo Trial on March 18, 1947, which was rejected in its entirety:
“If the Japanese people are to be blamed today, it is for having misjudged China, misjudged the United States and Britain, misjudged the Soviet Union, misjudged Germany and Italy, and, above all, most seriously misjudged Japan itself; knowing neither the other side nor themselves, as Sun Tzu put it, they arrived at the present state of affairs, and for the Japanese people this was the consequence of their own actions……”
Note 6
After the war, however, Japan had lost its self-confidence.
It was therefore unable to place the war that had ended in defeat within world history according to its own judgment.
Many Japanese abandoned their own judgment and simply obeyed the new authority above them, the General Headquarters of the Allied occupation forces, or GHQ.
Both before and after the war, the Japanese were unable to locate Japan appropriately within the wider world.
At that point, a strange alliance emerged.
The Allied position of condemning the Japanese Empire as evil overlapped completely with the left-wing position of denouncing Japan as an imperialist state.
For that reason, Japan’s war in the Asia-Pacific region, known as the “Greater East Asia War,” came to be recognized as a war of aggression and was described as such in Japanese history textbooks.
Who on the Japanese side devised the English expression “Greater East Asia War”?
I once discussed the impression created by this expression with Ben-Ami Shillony, an Israeli scholar of Japan.
He pointed out, “By using a comparative adjective such as ‘Greater,’ it created the unfavorable impression that the Japanese Empire intended to continue expanding its sphere of power further and further.”
To be continued.