Hirakawa Sukehiro reveals how, under Allied occupation, Japan’s media adopted the victors’ historical narrative as if it were their own. Some journalists even actively embraced the imposed worldview, presenting it as an inner conviction. Using striking psychological metaphors, Hirakawa exposes how postwar Japan internalized guilt and abandoned its own perspective—a crucial insight for understanding modern historical discourse.

Among them were those who actively supported this view and began to speak of that historical understanding as if it had arisen from within themselves.
June 23, 2024.

June 20, 2020.
There were many sections in this month’s issue of Seiron that I had left unread.
This morning, while I was reading the long serialized essay by Hirakawa Sukehiro, I came across a passage that made me think, “This is exactly China today.”
In the notes that Professor Hirakawa placed at the end, I found a section that proved my intuition correct.
In this article, I will extract those passages and other parts that all Japanese people ought to know.
Professor Hirakawa’s essay is a must-read not only for the Japanese people but for the entire world.

The Divine Soldiers of the Sky
Right after the Army paratroopers made their surprise descent on Palembang in Sumatra, and the Navy paratroopers on Menado in Celebes, my elder sister and I went to Kyoritsu Auditorium in Kanda to hear a report.
The officer who spoke was a skilled storyteller and amused the packed audience by saying, “I nearly landed on the back of a water buffalo.”
The purpose of the surprise descent on Palembang was to secure the refining facilities of the oil fields intact.
Note 4:
Captain Horiuchi Toyoaki of the Menado unit was loved by the local people.
After the war, he was sentenced to death by firing squad in a Dutch military court, and he followed his fallen subordinates in Menado on a “journey to the land of the dead, leaving behind the fragrance of the white chrysanthemum.”
The “white chrysanthemum” in his death poem referred to the parachute.
If the military tribunals in various parts of the south had elements of retaliation and intimidation, then it was only natural that a trial motivated by the same intention would be held in Tokyo as a kind of public spectacle.
Although not explicitly stated in the “Potsdam Declaration,” which Japan accepted, the Allied powers centered on the United States naturally believed that the Japanese military and political leaders who had conceived and executed the “Greater East Asian War” had to be punished.
The anti-Japanese sentiment fueled by wartime propaganda would not have been satisfied unless the Japanese leaders who launched the attack on Pearl Harbor were condemned.
The Allied forces, led by the U.S. military, occupied Japan and attempted to make the Japanese people believe that Japan, which had initiated the war, was a morally wicked country.

Judging Japan Through American Eyes
In Europe, the leaders of Nazi Germany were being punished in Nuremberg.
Therefore, the leaders of the Japanese Empire had to be punished at Ichigaya in Tokyo.
This was the occupation policy of the Allied powers—centered on the United States—which analogically regarded the Japanese Empire as the Asian equivalent of Nazi Germany.
In the autumn of 1945, as soon as Japan was forced to disseminate the victors’ interpretation of history, Japan’s mass media complied.
Among them were those who actively supported this view and began to speak of that historical understanding as if it had arisen from within themselves.
Because this faction was loud in voice, there remain people even today who uphold that authority.
To explain the psychology at work, a psychologist offered the following metaphor.
The Japanese press, completely at the mercy of the American forces, behaved like a woman who, after being raped, does not say she was forced, but instead says it was consensual, that it was not rape but mutual desire, convincing herself and preserving her public image without making any complaint.
It is an overly explicit comparison, but I believe it captures a certain psychological truth.
(To be continued.)