This is a full English rendering of key passages from the WiLL January issue dialogue between historian Watanabe Soki and Aoyama Gakuin University professor Fukui Yoshitaka, titled “Japanese War Studies Have Become Foxholed.”
The speakers criticize former Prime Minister Ishiba’s “Eighty Years After the War” statement and Hatano Sumio’s Ending the War as classic examples of a one-sided “apologetic view of history” that defends FDR and the United States, ignores the European theater and Soviet policy, and relies almost exclusively on Japanese-language sources.
Drawing on works such as Herbert Hoover’s Freedom Betrayed, the Venona papers, scholarship on the atomic bomb decision, and analyses of the Morgenthau Plan, they argue that the true drivers of war and atrocity lay in U.S., British, and Soviet strategy, propaganda, and punitive occupation planning, not simply in Japanese wrongdoing.
The article calls for Japanese historians to move beyond a narrow, Japan-only documentary focus and reconstruct a global, multi-archival understanding of World War II that can stand up to international scrutiny.

We Lose Sight of the Overall Picture of the War Because We Read Only Japanese Sources
A Masterpiece of the “Apologetic View of History”

Watanabe
Former Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru’s “Statement on Eighty Years after the War” turned out, in the end, to be nothing more than his personal impressions.
Its content is in no way worthy of positive evaluation.
He sticks throughout to the postwar “orthodox” view of history, according to which Japan alone was in the wrong.
As you and I discussed in this magazine (November 2025 issue), Professor Fukui, the world has never moved according to Japan’s convenience, either then or now, regardless of whether Japan was right or wrong.
Fukui
War only breaks out when there is an opponent.
In the last great war as well, Japan was likely to be drawn in no matter how it behaved.
Whether or not war occurs depends on the great powers.
Watanabe
Japan was thoroughly bullied by the United States.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), in order to cover up the failure of his New Deal policies, planned to revive the economy by shifting to a wartime economy.
However, more than 80 percent of the American people held to neutrality and non-intervention.
So FDR devised “entry through the back door.”
He decided to torment Japan to the utmost, force Japan to attack the United States, and thus bring America into the war, and this plan succeeded.
Because it is now eighty years after the war, a great many books have been published based on a view of history like Ishiba’s.
Hosaka Masayasu’s Why Did the Japanese Go Wrong? (Shincho Shinsho), Kato Yoko’s The Historiography Next Door (Mainichi Shimbun Publishing)…
Particularly notable is Tsukuba University Professor Emeritus Hatano Sumio’s A History of Japan’s Ending of the War, 1944–1945 (Chuko Shinsho, hereafter Ending the War), which is a wonderfully well-written masterpiece of the “apologetic view of history.”
I say that, of course, with heavy irony.
Fukui
What do you mean by “apologetic view of history”?
Watanabe
I mean a historiography written solely from the American side’s perspective.
It faithfully stands in for the viewpoint of orthodox American historians.
In short, it is a view of history made up almost entirely of apologies invented to excuse FDR’s outrageously bad diplomacy toward Japan.
Fukui
The main theater of the last war was Europe.
Yet in Ending the War there is almost no analysis of what the situation on the European front actually was.
Watanabe
That is why, in that sense as well, it is a quintessential Japanese version of the apologetic view of history.
If you look at the “List of References and Sources” at the end, you can see that the number of foreign sources is extremely small.
No matter how much you crawl over the ground at Nazca, you cannot grasp the full picture of the Nazca lines.
You have to look from a high vantage point.
In the same way, when it comes to the last great war, reading only Japanese sources is the same as crawling along the ground.
You have to range widely through the literature of the United States, Britain, Germany, and Russia.
For example, Herbert Hoover’s memoir Freedom Betrayed (Japanese translation published by Soshisha, translated by Watanabe Soki) and The Venona Documents are missing.
Most of the latest scholarly works are hardly mentioned at all.
Fukui
And yet, for some reason, Japan’s Holocaust, which can hardly be called a work of history, appears in the list.
Watanabe
That is incomprehensible.
In Ending the War, there is no discussion of the actual content of that book.
What in the world did he use it for?

Japan Knew the Soviet Union Was Going to Invade

Fukui
On the other hand, the Japanese-language sources are abundant, and the descriptions are accurate.
In Ending the War, we read: “The notification of non-extension itself (Editor’s note: the Soviet refusal to extend the Neutrality Pact) was not a major shock, but for the Army General Staff, which in April had received reliable information that the Soviet Union was shifting its forces from Europe to the Far East, Soviet entry into the war had already become a foregone conclusion.”
As this passage shows, Japan knew that the Soviet Union was going to attack.
It is sometimes said that Japan was suddenly attacked and flustered, but that is wrong.
Incidentally, one of the “reliable pieces of information” was the report from the Manchukuo consulate in Chita, along the Trans-Siberian Railway, on the west-to-east military transport by rail.
In fact, the Soviet Union and Manchukuo had established consulates in each other’s territory, and these events were later described in testimony by Major Harada Tokiyoshi, a graduate of Nakano School who had been dispatched under an alias as a diplomat to that consulate.
They are also recorded in The Secret War Diary of the Army General Staff’s War Guidance Section, which Ending the War lists among its references.
Watanabe
I also evaluate positively the fact that he uses the materials of historian Hasegawa Tsuyoshi, who lives in the United States.
Fukui
Still on the Soviet Union, Ending the War also mentions Hirota Koki, who was prime minister at the time of the Nanking Incident.
In fact, it was the Soviet Union that strongly insisted he be classified as an A-class war criminal.
A copy of a memo was submitted to the Tokyo Trial stating that, when Hirota was ambassador to the Soviet Union, he made belligerent remarks toward the Soviets in a conversation with an army major general visiting Moscow.
Hirota’s defense counsel, George Yamaoka, countered that Hirota knew nothing about that memo.
However, Lieutenant General Kasahara Yukio, who had been the military attaché at the time and testified at the trial, admitted, “I cannot say for certain that the memo accurately recorded Hirota’s remarks, but I did write it.”
There was a Soviet spy in the Japanese embassy in Moscow who photographed the memo that had been locked in the safe and took it out.
The Soviets used this memo as proof of Japan’s intention to invade the Soviet Union, in order to justify their own invasion of Japan.
Yet in Japan this story is hardly known.
It is not discussed in Ending the War either.

The Excuse for Dropping the Atomic Bomb

Watanabe
In regard to how the war was ended, Ending the War sticks consistently to “Japan was in the wrong.”
The same is true of how it started, but even when it comes to ending it, whether or not one can end a war depends on the presence of the other side.
That perspective is missing.
Fukui
What I found most problematic in Ending the War is the issue of the atomic bombings.
As for why the atomic bombs were dropped, the book relies on On Active Service in Peace and War (1947), co-authored by Henry Stimson, who served as Secretary of State and Secretary of War, and McGeorge Bundy, who was then his subordinate, later became a Harvard professor, and served as National Security Advisor in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations (Japanese translation: The Memoirs of Henry Stimson, Kokushokankokai).
Stimson was a Republican, but he served as Secretary of War under both FDR and Truman.
Watanabe
He enjoyed bipartisan favor.
Fukui
Using Stimson as a front man, they crafted the excuse that the bombings were done “to save lives” and were a painful decision of last resort.
In short, this is propaganda.
Ending the War is written on the assumption that this story is factual.
Watanabe
That is precisely what I call the “apologetic view of history.”
Fukui
But the reality is otherwise.
When Americans were confronted with the enormous damage caused by the atomic bombings, doubts arose within the United States about whether they had been justified.
In response, a painstaking review was undertaken as a national project to determine “what kind of excuse should be made.”
The result was the series of writings by Stimson and Bundy.
That said, Ending the War does state something correct as well.
It says, “In any case, given the huge sum of two billion dollars invested in developing the atomic bomb, its use once completed was taken for granted from the outset.”
This is the true reason.
Watanabe
We should also pay attention to what was discussed in the Target Committee.
Use of the bomb was not necessarily a foregone conclusion.
There was a minority who opposed it.
As I note in my book Pearl Harbor and the Atomic Bomb: Who Wanted the U.S.–Japan War? (WAC), Ralph Bard, Undersecretary of the Navy, served on the committee.
He strongly insisted that there were ways to avoid using the bomb at all and that, if it had to be used, there should at least be a prior warning.
I think it is likely that debates about not using the bomb were quite vigorous.
Fukui
Within the military, yes.
For example, Dwight Eisenhower, later president and Supreme Allied Commander in the European theater, was opposed to the bombings.
But for President Truman, Secretary of War Stimson, and other leaders of the administration, dropping the bomb was taken for granted.
Watanabe
The method of dropping the bomb was also crucial.
There were discussions such as “Should we not choose a mountainous area instead?”
Fukui
Yes, but at the level of the political leadership, such questions were not seriously debated.
According to Stanford University Professor Emeritus Barton Bernstein, the decision to use the bomb had been made even before Truman, and what was “taken for granted” was the fact of dropping it, so that the main issue became “on which city to drop it.”
It has come to be said that, prior to the atomic bombings, there were fierce debates over their pros and cons, but that is a “propaganda” line that spread after the war.
The atomic bomb was simply an extension of area bombing.
Even within the United States, those who opposed the bombings faced a telling counter-argument: if area bombing is permitted, why is the atomic bomb not?
Area bombing itself was something that Britain initiated in its war against Germany, and it was not the United States that first began it against Japan.
In Britain, with Germany in mind, preparations to justify area bombing legally had begun already in the interwar period, through the work of James Spaight, a civilian scholar of the laws of war who was a senior official in the Air Ministry.

Churchill’s Shifting of Responsibility

Watanabe
Historian Michael S. Neiberg’s book Potsdam (not yet translated into Japanese) depicts the conversations between Truman and Churchill at Potsdam.
The two men themselves never directly recorded these talks in their memoirs and so forth, but people around them left records.
Truman agonized over the atomic bombings until the very end.
What finally led him to decide was Churchill.
Churchill said, “Didn’t Japan attack Pearl Harbor without any warning?”
That settled Truman’s resolve.
Fukui
So it was Churchill who pushed Truman over the edge toward dropping the bomb.
Watanabe
At the First Quebec Conference in August 1943, a memorandum on the American and British atomic bomb development program was signed, stating that “if it is to be used against a third country, the consent of both nations is required.”
In other words, without Churchill’s consent, the United States could not have dropped atomic bombs on Japan.
Fukui
Truman maintained until his death that “I ordered the bombings on my own responsibility” and offered no excuses.
Churchill, however, who had led the area bombing of Germany, shifted the blame after the war onto the Air Force.
Watanabe
Yet in Ending the War there is no mention whatsoever of Churchill.
Fukui
The book is written as if the United States were at war only with Japan.
It is a typical example of Japanese-language works on the war that neglect the developments in Europe, which was the main theater of combat.

Why “Fight to the Last Man” Tactics Were Adopted

Watanabe
One of the reasons given for using the atomic bomb is the “Bataan Death March.”
It is an excellent example if you want to understand how Westerners dealt with prisoners of war.
On the European battlefields, the basic rule was not to take prisoners at all.
If only a few surrendered, that was one thing, but if one took a large number of prisoners, one would immediately run out of food for one’s own soldiers.
In fact, during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, his army killed all Arabs who surrendered.
That was the norm for them on the battlefield.
In contrast, at Bataan, the Japanese army did not harm the prisoners; there were even soldiers who shared their own rations with them.
For Westerners, this was unimaginable.
So the United States invented the “Bataan Death March.”
They claimed that the march to transfer American POWs captured on the Philippine front to a prison camp had been carried out in a cruel manner.
They then declared that, because Japan had committed such barbaric acts, dropping the atomic bomb was only natural.
Fukui
The Japanese army’s doctrine of fighting to the last and refusing surrender was by no means based solely on a spiritual disregard for human life.
They understood that if they surrendered to the United States, they would not actually be treated as POWs and that, if they stopped fighting, they would simply be slaughtered.
Ending the War describes the special attack operations by saying that “from the standpoint of operational efficiency, they were a poor bargain,” but after the war the U.S. military evaluated them as an efficient tactic.
In his book Dying to Win on suicide attacks, University of Chicago Professor Robert Pape reaches the same conclusion.
The number of those killed in the special attacks is several thousand.
Compared to those who died, including those who starved to death, on other battlefields, the number is not that large.
Watanabe
Under international humanitarian law, all soldiers who surrender are to be accepted as prisoners.
Westerners, however, arbitrarily changed the definition.
For example, with regard to Germany, the United States and Britain decided that “soldiers who unilaterally took off their uniforms and surrendered” would not be covered by the law.
As a result, many German soldiers who surrendered were given little or no food and starved to death.
Fukui
The basic principle is that POWs must be protected, but it was interpreted that, for military reasons, there could be cases in which POW status would not be recognized.
This idea was known as Kriegsraison (“military necessity”).
In Japan, it is discussed in detail in former Kyoto University Professor Taoka Ryoichi’s Basic Problems of the Laws of War.
The point is that, in the midst of fierce fighting, if large numbers of enemy soldiers suddenly surrender, they become a huge hindrance to the conduct of operations.
In such a situation, taking prisoners runs strongly counter to military rationality.
However, were there really battles of such ferocity between Japan and the United States?
The U.S. military adopted a policy in the war against Japan of not taking prisoners—in other words, of exterminating them—but even within the United States there were those who objected.
For example, aviator Charles Lindbergh harshly criticized this in his diary, writing that “the U.S. military’s treatment of Japanese soldiers is far too cruel.”
Watanabe
Lindbergh volunteered for service and actually took part in the Pacific theater, so he must have seen the reality with his own eyes.
As for inhuman acts against Japan, the inhumanity committed by the United States and Britain against Germany far surpassed anything done to Japan.
Fukui
Exactly; that is why racial discrimination had little to do with the last great war.
Although the Anglo-Saxons were the people most closely related to the Germans, they treated them with extraordinary brutality.

The Terror of the Morgenthau Plan

Watanabe
The reason the Germans have become so servile today is that that is the only way to understand the sheer magnitude of the atrocities inflicted on Germany.
When Woodrow Wilson established the League of Nations, he opposed enshrining racial discrimination in its preamble and insisted that all decisions had to be unanimous.
It is true that at that time there was also severe racial discrimination against Asians.
But when it comes to the last great war, it is better to see racial discrimination as largely irrelevant.
Fukui
The way the Allied forces treated Germany was itself the reason Japan could not bring itself to end the war.
Under the “Morgenthau Plan,” a plan for occupying Germany devised by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, all of Germany’s heavy industry was to be dismantled or destroyed, and the country was to be turned into an agricultural nation capable only of maintaining the bare minimum conditions for survival.
Watanabe
It was exactly the same as Rome’s rule over Carthage.
After defeating Carthage, Rome demanded the confiscation of colonies such as Cartagena, the renunciation of the right to wage war, the disarmament of the military and burning of warships, and the payment of enormous reparations.
Furthermore, until these terms were signed, Rome allowed its troops free rein to loot and rape.
In the end, Rome seized Carthage’s wealth, killed all of its aristocrats, sold its citizens into slavery, and even spread salt over the land so that nothing would grow.
This is what is called the “Peace of Carthage.”
The same thing was about to be done to Germany and Japan.
Of course, the story about actually sowing salt is probably a later exaggeration.
Fukui
You could say that the Morgenthau Plan forced Germany to fight on to the bitter end.
Within the United States there were criticisms of the plan.
Secretary of State Cordell Hull, known for the Hull Note, opposed it.
Watanabe
The U.S. Army had drawn up a separate plan for occupying Germany.
It was not nearly as cruel as completely destroying German industry.
But Morgenthau and his assistant secretary Harry White visited the U.S. Army headquarters in Britain and overturned it.
Their motive was simply that the army’s plan was “too soft.”
The Morgenthau Plan was an expression of their pent-up resentment taken to the extreme.
Fukui
Unlike Eisenhower, who was a political strategist, General George Patton was a soldier to the core, and strongly opposed the punitive occupation policy toward Germany.
He felt the policy was so outrageous that, after retirement, he intended to campaign vigorously against it.
But Patton died in a mysterious accident.
In the United States there are those who believe he was assassinated.

To be continued.