This article, drawn from the January issue of the monthly magazine WiLL (“Japan’s War History Research Has Become Siloed”), features a dialogue between modern Japanese history researcher Sōki Watanabe and Professor Yoshitaka Fukui. They sharply criticize the “apologetic” or “excuse-based” historiography exemplified by former Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s “Eighty Years After the War” statement and Sumio Hatano’s Japan’s End-of-War History 1944–1945, which justify U.S. policy while ignoring the broader international context—European fronts, the Soviet Union, the Morgenthau Plan, Churchill’s role, and the decision-making behind the atomic bomb. Drawing on Western, Soviet, and Chinese primary sources, they highlight how Japan long knew of the Soviet invasion, how Moscow helped brand Kōki Hirota an A-class war criminal, how indiscriminate bombing and harsh occupation policies shaped Japan’s choices, and how propaganda around the Bataan Death March and Hiroshima–Nagasaki distorted the moral landscape. The dialogue argues that Japanese war studies must move beyond a Japan-only “siloed” approach and reconstruct World War II within a truly global framework that does not simply end with “Japan was to blame.”

Below is an excerpt from the special dialogue “Japan’s War History Research Has Become Siloed,” published in the January issue of the monthly magazine WiLL, featuring modern Japanese history researcher Sōki Watanabe and Professor Yoshitaka Fukui of Aoyama Gakuin University.
It is an important article that all Japanese people, and indeed readers around the world, must read.

Why reading only Japanese sources makes the overall picture of the war invisible
The masterpiece of “excuse-based historiography”

Watanabe: Former Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s “Statement Eighty Years After the War” turned out, in the end, to be nothing more than a personal reflection.
Its content is in no way worthy of praise.
It simply reiterates the orthodox postwar narrative that Japan alone was to blame.
As Professor Fukui and I discussed in this magazine (November 2025 issue), regardless of whether Japan’s actions were good or bad, the world neither then nor now moves according to Japan’s convenience.

Fukui: A war only arises when there is an opponent.
In the case of the last great war, Japan would likely have been drawn into it no matter how it behaved.
Whether war breaks out or not is determined by the great powers.

Watanabe: Japan was thoroughly bullied by the United States.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) sought to cover up the failure of the New Deal by reviving the economy through a wartime system.
But more than 80 percent of Americans were neutral and opposed to intervention.
So FDR conceived the idea of entering the war “through the back door.”
He decided to bully Japan to the utmost in order to provoke it into attacking the United States, and this scheme succeeded.
With the eightieth year after the war as a backdrop, many books based on a historical view similar to Ishiba’s have been published.
Masayasu Hosaka’s Why Did the Japanese Get It Wrong? (Shinchō Shinsho), Yōko Katō’s The Historiography Next Door (Mainichi Shimbun Publishing), and so on.
Particularly notable is Professor Emeritus Sumio Hatano of the University of Tsukuba’s Japan’s End-of-War History 1944–1945 (Chūkō Shinsho, hereafter End-of-War History), which is a remarkably well-crafted masterpiece of “excuse-based historiography.”
Of course, I say that with heavy irony.

Fukui: What do you mean by “excuse-based historiography”?

Watanabe: I mean a kind of historiography written solely from the American side’s point of view.
It admirably ventriloquizes the outlook of mainstream American historians.
In other words, it is a historical interpretation filled from beginning to end with excuses designed to defend FDR’s exceedingly egregious diplomacy toward Japan.

Fukui: The main front in the last great war was Europe.
Yet in End-of-War History there is almost no analysis of the situation on the European front.

Watanabe: In that sense as well, it is a quintessential example of Japanese “excuse-based historiography.”
As you can see from the “List of References and Sources” at the end of the book, the number of foreign sources used is extremely small.
You can never grasp the full figure of the Nazca Lines by crawling around on the ground as much as you like.
You need to look from a high vantage point.
It is the same with the last war.
Relying solely on Japanese sources is no different from crawling along the surface.
One must range widely through the literature of the United States, Britain, Germany, and Russia.
For example, there is no trace of Herbert Hoover’s memoir Freedom Betrayed (in Japanese from Sōshisha, translated by Sōki Watanabe) or of the Venona Papers.
The latest scholarly works are barely touched upon.

Fukui: Yet for some reason, a work that cannot be called a serious history at all, Japan’s Holocaust, is included.

Watanabe: It is baffling.
End-of-War History does not discuss the contents of that book at all.
One is left wondering what, exactly, was referenced.

Japan knew the Soviet invasion was coming

Fukui: On the other hand, the Japanese sources are extensive, and the descriptions are accurate.
End-of-War History states: “The non-renewal notice itself (editor’s note: the Soviet refusal to renew the Neutrality Pact) was not a major shock, but by April the General Staff had received reliable reports that Soviet forces were being shifted from Europe to the Far East, and thus it regarded Soviet entry into the war as a foregone conclusion.”
As this passage shows, Japan did understand that the Soviet Union would attack.
It is sometimes said that Japan was suddenly attacked and flustered, but that is incorrect.
One of those “reliable reports” came from the Manchukuo consulate in Chita along the Trans-Siberian Railway, which reported military transport trains moving from west to east.
In fact, the Soviet Union and Manchukuo had established consulates in each other’s territory, and Captain Tokiyoshi Harada, a graduate of the Nakano School who was sent there as a diplomat under a false name, testified after the war to this series of facts.
These matters are also recorded in The Imperial Headquarters Army War Leadership Section Confidential War Diary, which End-of-War History lists as a reference.

Watanabe: I do acknowledge the way the book cites the work of Hasegawa Tsuyoshi, a historian living in the United States.

Fukui: Concerning the Soviet Union, End-of-War History also mentions Kōki Hirota, who was prime minister at the time of the Nanjing Incident.
In fact, it was the Soviet Union that strongly insisted Hirota be included as an A-class war criminal.
When Hirota was ambassador to the Soviet Union, a memo recorded that in a conversation with a visiting Japanese major general, he made remarks hostile to the Soviets; a copy of this memo was submitted to the Tokyo Trial.
Hirota’s defense lawyer, George Yamaoka, countered that Hirota knew nothing about such a memo.
However, Lieutenant General Yukio Kasahara, who had been military attaché at the time and later appeared as a witness, acknowledged, “I cannot swear the memo recorded Hirota’s words exactly, but I wrote it myself.”
There was a Soviet spy at the Japanese embassy in Moscow who photographed the memo, which had been locked in the safe, and smuggled it out.
The Soviets used this memo as evidence of Japan’s intention to invade the Soviet Union, in order to justify their own invasion of Japan.
Yet in Japan this story is almost unknown.
It does not appear in End-of-War History either.

The “excuse” for the atomic bombings

Watanabe: End-of-War History consistently concludes that “Japan was at fault” when it comes to how the war ended.
The same is true of how the war began, but even in ending it, there is always an opponent; it is only when there is another party that an end becomes possible.
This perspective is missing.

Fukui: The most problematic part of End-of-War History, in my view, is its treatment of the legitimacy of the atomic bombings.
To explain why the bombs were dropped, the book relies on On Active Service in Peace and War (1947) by Henry L. Stimson—who served as Secretary of State and Secretary of War—and his former subordinate, McGeorge Bundy, later a Harvard professor and presidential adviser under Kennedy and Johnson; in Japanese it is known as The Memoirs of Henry L. Stimson (Kokusho Kankōkai).
Stimson was a Republican, but he served as Secretary of War under both the FDR and Truman administrations.

Watanabe: He enjoyed cross-party esteem.

Fukui: It was Stimson who was placed out front, and the “excuse” worked out was the story that the bombings were a “tragic but necessary decision to save lives.”
In essence, it was propaganda.
End-of-War History proceeds on the assumption that this narrative is factual.

Watanabe: That is precisely what I call “excuse-based historiography.”

Fukui: The reality was different.
Once the immense devastation of the atomic bombings became evident and doubts about the bombings arose within the United States, the question of “what sort of justification should we offer” was examined in painstaking detail as a national project.
The result of that process was the series of works by Stimson and Bundy.
That said, End-of-War History does state one crucial truth: “In any case, given the two billion dollars invested in the development of the atomic bomb, its use after completion was assumed from the outset.”
That is the real reason.

Watanabe: We must also pay attention to what was discussed in the Target Committee.
The use of the bomb was not absolutely predetermined.
There was a minority that opposed it.
As I mention in my book Pearl Harbor and the Atomic Bomb: Who Wanted the U.S.–Japan War? (WAC), Ralph Bard, Under Secretary of the Navy and a committee member, argued strongly that there were ways to avoid using the bomb and that, even if it were used, prior warning should be given.
Debate about not using the bomb was by no means lacking.

Fukui: Within the military there was.
For example, Dwight Eisenhower, later president and Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, opposed using the bomb.
But for President Truman, Secretary Stimson, and other top figures in the administration, using it was a foregone conclusion.

Watanabe: The method of using it also mattered.
There were discussions such as whether it should be used in a mountainous area.

Fukui: Yes, but at the level of the political leadership, it was never seriously debated.
According to Professor Emeritus Barton Bernstein of Stanford University, using the bomb had been decided even before Truman took office; the main question for the leadership was not “whether” but “on which city.”
It later came to be said that there had been heated debate over the rights and wrongs of the bombings, but that, too, was postwar propaganda.
The atomic bomb was nothing more than an extension of indiscriminate bombing.
Even in the United States, opponents of the bombings faced the seemingly effective objection that “if indiscriminate bombing is acceptable, why is the atomic bomb not?”
Indiscriminate bombing itself was introduced not by the U.S. against Japan but by Britain against Germany.
From the interwar period, British Air Ministry officials and war-law theorists such as James M. Spaight had been preparing the legal justifications for such bombing with Germany in mind.

Churchill’s shifting of responsibility

Watanabe: In Potsdam (not yet translated into Japanese), historian Michael S. Neiberg describes conversations between Truman and Churchill at Potsdam.
Although neither man himself recorded these conversations in his memoirs, those around them left records.
Truman hesitated until the end over the atomic bombings.
What finally pushed him into a decision was Churchill.
Churchill said, “The Japanese carried out a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor without warning, didn’t they?”
That resolved Truman’s mind.

Fukui: So it was Churchill who pushed him toward using the bomb.

Watanabe: In the first Quebec Conference in August 1943, an agreement on joint U.S.–British atomic bomb development was signed, and it clearly stated that “use against a third country requires the consent of both nations.”
In other words, without Churchill’s agreement the United States could not drop the bomb on Japan.

Fukui: Truman maintained until his death that “I ordered the bombing and take responsibility” and never tried to shift the blame.
By contrast, Churchill, who had led indiscriminate bombing campaigns against Germany, shifted responsibility onto the Air Force after the war.

Watanabe: Yet End-of-War History says nothing at all about Churchill.

Fukui: It is written as though the United States was waging war solely against Japan.
It is a typical example of Japanese literature on the war that neglects the movements in Europe, the main theater of the conflict.

Why “fight to the death” tactics were adopted

Watanabe: One of the reasons cited for the use of the atomic bomb is the so-called Bataan Death March.
It is a useful example for understanding how Westerners treated prisoners.
On the European battlefields, the basic premise was that one did not take prisoners.
If you took too many, your own soldiers’ food supplies would quickly run out.
In fact, during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, his army simply killed all the Arabs who surrendered.
That was the common sense of their battlefield.
By contrast, in Bataan the Japanese army did not harm the prisoners; some soldiers even shared their own rations with them.
For Westerners, this was unthinkable.
So the United States invented the “Bataan Death March.”
It accused the Japanese of brutality in the forced march of American prisoners of war to internment camps in the Philippines.
Then it claimed that, in light of such barbarity, dropping the atomic bomb on Japan was only natural.

Fukui: The Japanese “fight to the death” tactics were by no means based solely on a death-defying, life-disregarding spirit.
They knew that surrendering to the United States would not mean becoming a prisoner of war; if they stopped fighting, they would simply be massacred.
End-of-War History states that “kamikaze operations were inefficient in terms of cost-effectiveness,” but after the war the U.S. military evaluated them as an efficient tactic.
In Dying to Win, a study of suicide attacks, University of Chicago Professor Robert Pape reaches the same conclusion.
The dead from kamikaze operations numbered in the low thousands.
Compared with those who starved to death or were killed in other theaters of war, that number is not large.

Watanabe: Under international humanitarian law, all soldiers who surrender are supposed to be accepted.
Yet Westerners took it upon themselves to change the definitions.
For example, in Germany, the United States and Britain declared that soldiers who voluntarily removed their uniforms and surrendered would not be covered.
As a result, many German soldiers who surrendered were given little or no food and starved to death.

Fukui: In principle prisoners of war must be protected, but there was a legal interpretation that, for military reasons, it could be lawful not to recognize them as POWs.
This was the idea of Kriegsraison, or “necessity of war.”
In Japan, former Kyoto University Professor Ryōichi Taoka discusses it in detail in Fundamental Problems of the Law of War.
In the midst of fierce fighting, if large numbers of enemy soldiers surrender at once, accepting them as prisoners can greatly hinder ongoing operations.
In such cases, taking prisoners runs counter to military rationality.
However, did battles between Japan and the United States ever reach such a level of ferocity?
The U.S. military’s policy in the war against Japan was not to take prisoners—to kill all enemy soldiers—and even within the United States there were those who opposed this.
For example, aviator Charles Lindbergh harshly criticized in his diary the way Japanese soldiers were treated, writing that “the American treatment of Japanese prisoners is far too brutal.”

Watanabe: Lindbergh volunteered to serve on the Pacific front himself, so he saw the reality firsthand.
As for atrocities, what the U.S. and Britain did to Germany far exceeded anything attributed to Japan.

Fukui: Exactly.
For that reason, racial discrimination had little to do with the last war.
Although the Anglo-Saxons are ethnically closest to the Germans, they treated them with extraordinary cruelty.

The terror of the Morgenthau Plan

Watanabe: The reason Germans today have become so servile is that such immense atrocities were committed against them that they had no choice but to become so.
When Woodrow Wilson established the League of Nations, he opposed including racial discrimination in the preamble and insisted that the charter be adopted unanimously.
At that time, blatant racism against Asians was certainly rampant.
But in the last great war, it is better to see racism as having played only a minor role.

Fukui: It was precisely the way the Allied forces treated Germany that made it impossible for Japan to end the war.
Under the Morgenthau Plan, drafted by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, all German heavy industry was to be dismantled or destroyed and Germany was to be reduced to a purely agricultural nation barely capable of subsistence.

Watanabe: It was nothing less than a repetition of Rome’s treatment of Carthage.
After defeating Carthage, Rome demanded confiscation of colonies such as Carthagena, renunciation of the right to wage war, disarmament and burning of warships, and payment of enormous reparations.
Until the treaty was signed, the Roman army was allowed to loot and rape at will.
In the end, Rome seized Carthage’s wealth, slaughtered its rulers and nobles, sold the population into slavery, and scattered salt on the land so that nothing would grow.
So-called “the peace of Carthage.”
The same thing was about to be done to Germany and Japan.
Of course, the detail about salt is an exaggeration added later.

Fukui: You could say Germany was forced to fight to the bitter end because of the Morgenthau Plan.
Even within the United States there was criticism of the plan.
Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State known for the Hull Note, opposed it.

Watanabe: The U.S. Army had drawn up its own plan for the occupation of Germany.
It was not so cruel as to completely destroy German industry.
But Morgenthau and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White visited the U.S. Army headquarters in Britain and overturned it.
They felt it was “too soft.”
The plan was an extreme expression of Morgenthau and White’s hatred.

Fukui: Unlike Eisenhower, who was both a strategist and a politician, General George Patton was a soldier to the core and fiercely opposed a punitive occupation of Germany.
He intended, after his retirement, to denounce the policy loudly as intolerable.
Yet Patton died in a mysterious accident.
In the United States there are those who believe he was assassinated.

Watanabe: This discussion will be continued in the next installment.

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