This article traces the root cause of Japan’s postwar ideological illness to the term “Self-Defense Forces” itself, which embodies a distorted sense of guilt imposed by the GHQ occupation policy. It argues that the WGIP program implanted a false historical narrative that still undermines Japan’s national consciousness and security debate today.

February 24, 2017
What follows is a continuation of the previous chapter.
Embedded in the very term “Self-Defense Forces” is an imposed and historically false “remorse and resolution” that suggests, “Japan once possessed a military and invaded Asian nations, but since the Self-Defense Forces are not a military, they will not invade.”
In other words, the very name “Self-Defense Forces” itself is an expression of a self-degrading historical view and a national delusion.
Indeed, the root cause of the chronic illness that postwar Japan has continued to suffer from lies precisely here.
Immediately after the war, under the American-led GHQ occupation policy, the malignant brainwashing of the WGIP (War Guilt Information Program), which placed all responsibility for the war upon Japan and implanted a sense of atonement into the Japanese people, continues to corrode Japan even today.
In order to facilitate its occupation policy, the United States carried out thorough propaganda portraying the Japanese military and its leadership as the source of all evil, and even conducted purges of professional military officers from public office.
Thus, the Japanese people came to harbor an unconditional aversion toward war and the military.
But the facts are entirely different.
At that time, the United States, which had entered the European front and simultaneously sought to expand its interests in the Asia–Pacific region, tightened economic sanctions against Japan in a provocative manner, driving Japan, out of sheer necessity for national survival and self-defense, into war—Japan by no means sought to invade Asian nations.
On the contrary, as an objective historical fact, the outcome of the Greater East Asia War led many nations that had suffered under Western colonial rule to achieve independence, and therefore the Japanese army was in truth an “army of Asian liberation.”
However, in contemporary times, through the GHQ’s brainwashing policy and the extremely biased education system that inherited it, such objective historical perspectives have been completely erased.
Moreover, the long period of peace enjoyed during the Cold War further instilled in many citizens the outrageous illusion that “peace has continued thanks to Article 9 of the Constitution.”
[To be continued.]