August 16, 2020. Citing Sankei Shimbun editorial writer Masato Inui’s essay “Prepare for the End of the Interwar Period,” this article examines the realities of security, military power, freedom, democracy, peace, U.S.–China confrontation, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, the South China Sea, and the Senkaku Islands.

August 16, 2020
The following is from an essay by Sankei Shimbun’s chief editorial writer, Masato Inui, published yesterday under the title “Prepare for the End of the Interwar Period.”
To Defend Freedom and Peace
We have arrived at an August 15 unlike any other.
The ravages of the novel coronavirus originating in Wuhan, China, have not subsided, and the National Memorial Ceremony for the War Dead at Nippon Budokan is being held with attendance limited to approximately 530 people, less than one-tenth of last year’s number.
The National High School Baseball Championship, where sirens have traditionally sounded at noon and players and spectators have paused for a moment of silent prayer, has also been canceled for the first time since the last war.
When I visited Yasukuni Shrine one day before August 15, when large numbers of worshippers traditionally gather there on the anniversary of the end of the war, signs were lined up asking visitors to “keep their distance to prevent infection.”
The purification basin, normally filled with water, had been drained and the ladles removed, with measures introduced allowing visitors to cleanse their hands with water flowing from bamboo tubes.
The Yushukan Museum, which displays the belongings of the war dead as well as weapons and other artifacts, was open as usual.
It had been a long time since my last visit, but when I entered the first-floor exhibition room, where photographs of more than 10,000 war dead are displayed, I naturally bowed my head.
Why Does the Prime Minister Not Visit Yasukuni?
Regrettably, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is once again not scheduled to visit Yasukuni Shrine this year.
Is that really right?
At a time when people are gripped by anxiety amid a coronavirus crisis that has even been described as resembling “wartime,” surely this is precisely when the leader of a nation should console the spirits of the war dead and pray for the peace and well-being of the people.
At the same time, international tensions are increasing.
As a state resembling global “national seclusion” continues… [passage omitted].
Above all, the U.S.–China confrontation, accelerated further by the coronavirus crisis, has made the international situation even more severe.
Chinese President Xi Jinping will surely dislike the comparison, but today’s China is behaving in ways that resemble the very image of the “evil Empire of Japan” that Chinese textbooks detest and condemn in the strongest terms.
The first is the suppression of freedom of speech.
The repression of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong has gone beyond all bounds.
It resembles a Hong Kong version of the Tiananmen Square Incident, for which even the number of casualties remains unclear; by comparison, the repression of leftists and liberals by Japan’s Special Higher Police under the Peace Preservation Law can appear almost childlike.
The second is intolerance toward other ethnic groups.
The conduct of Han Chinese in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia far exceeds that of the Japanese in Manchukuo (at the very least, Manchukuo formally advocated the principle of “Five Races Under One Union,” meaning ethnic harmony among Japanese, Chinese, Mongols, and others).
Most striking of all is the expansion of military power.
China’s construction of military bases one after another in the South China Sea and its building of new aircraft carriers, thereby provoking the United States, also follow a trajectory similar to that of the Empire of Japan.
The Possibility of a U.S.–China Military Clash Becomes Real
If we take history as our mirror, a comprehensive confrontation between the United States and China, including a military confrontation, is beginning to take on considerable reality.
E. H. Carr, whose The Twenty Years’ Crisis was published in 1939, the year Germany invaded Poland, and subsequently exerted a major influence on the study of international politics, classified the period from the end of World War I to the outbreak of World War II as an “interwar period.”
Following that reasoning, the 67-year “interwar period” since the 1953 armistice in the Korean War, in which the United States and China fought directly, may finally be approaching its end.
Japan, of course, cannot regard this as someone else’s problem.
Around the Senkaku Islands, Chinese government vessels have appeared in the contiguous zone almost every day, watching for an opportunity to establish effective control.
Japan, which depends on the Japan–U.S. Security Treaty for the foundation of its national security, has little room for choice.
But that does not mean Japan can simply stand by and do nothing.
In The Twenty Years’ Crisis, Carr wrote the following about why Germany’s Weimar Republic, which sought to become an ideal democratic state, collapsed so easily before Hitler:
“Most of the policies pursued by the Weimar Republic were not backed by effective military power and indeed stood in sharp conflict with it. Utopians who believe that democracy is not based upon power refuse to face these disagreeable facts.” (Iwanami Bunko edition)
Even 75 years after the war, it remains a “fact” that neither freedom nor democracy can be preserved without the backing of military power.
What must we do now to console the spirits of those who died in war and to defend freedom and peace?
Today, I would like to reflect quietly upon that question.