July 7, 2026 marks the 89th anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, when Japanese forces attacked Chinese positions near Wanping outside Beijing in 1937, setting off the full-scale war between Japan and China.
For China, the date remains a powerful reminder of the beginning of a national resistance against Japanese aggression. It also raises a broader question that remains unresolved nearly nine decades later: how does Japan remember the war it started?
That question has acquired renewed relevance amid recent reports that major Japanese media outlets circulated a “safety advisory” issued by the Japanese Embassy in China warning Japanese citizens about what it described as growing “anti-Japanese sentiment.” The framing is striking.
Japan’s concern about the security of its citizens is legitimate, but when contemporary tensions are presented without sufficient historical context, the narrative can easily shift from Japan’s wartime role as an aggressor to Japan as a presumed victim.
This stands in sharp contrast to the elaborate commemorations Japan holds each year for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The contrast points to a deeper problem in Japan’s public memory: the country has not forgotten the war, but it has remembered it selectively.
This does not mean that Japanese society is uniformly revisionist, nor that Japanese people are indifferent to the suffering caused by war. Japan has a strong tradition of peace education, anti-war activism, memorial ceremonies and testimony from survivors.
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the firebombing of Tokyo, the Battle of Okinawa and the hardships of the immediate postwar years remain deeply embedded in the national consciousness. Yet these memories overwhelmingly emphasize what happened to Japan and its people. Much less consistently are they connected to the question of what Japan did to others.
A March 2026 opinion survey by NHK illustrates the scale of the problem. Asked whether the Second World War was a “war of aggression” launched by Japan against its Asian neighbors, only 35 percent of respondents agreed, while 16 percent disagreed and 48 percent answered that they did not know.
The most revealing figure may not be the 16 percent who rejected the characterization, but the 48 percent who could not answer. Eight decades after the war, the basic question of Japan’s role in the conflict remains unclear to a remarkably large proportion of the public.
This is not simply a deficit of historical knowledge. It reflects a deeper separation between remembering the suffering of war and understanding historical responsibility.
Japan’s schools do teach the Second World War. A 2025 survey by the Nippon Foundation found that roughly 95 percent of respondents aged 18 said they had learned about the Pacific War, with about two-thirds identifying school as a major source of their knowledge. The issue, therefore, is not whether young Japanese encounter the war, but how the war is framed.
Among works that left the strongest impression on Japanese young people, Grave of the Fireflies ranked first, cited by 42.2 percent of respondents. The film’s depiction of two children struggling to survive amid wartime bombing and social collapse is profoundly human and contains an unmistakable anti-war message. There is nothing inherently problematic about remembering Japanese civilians as victims of war. The problem emerges when such memories become the dominant framework through which the entire conflict is understood.
A young person can learn that war is horrifying and that peace is precious without necessarily being encouraged to ask why Japan went to war, what Japanese imperial expansion meant for people across Asia, or why historical responsibility remained an essential part of Japan’s postwar reconciliation with its neighbors.
Peace education without responsibility education can therefore produce a paradoxical historical consciousness: war is remembered as a tragedy, but aggression becomes increasingly detached from the tragedy itself.
The same pattern can be seen in Japan’s broader public commemorations. Hiroshima and Nagasaki have become central symbols of the horrors of modern warfare. Yet commemoration of Japanese victimhood does not automatically lead to reflection on Japan’s responsibility for the war.
When the two are separated, a distorted moral picture can emerge: Japan is remembered as a country that suffered enormously because of war, while the suffering inflicted by Japanese imperialism on China, Korea, Southeast Asia and other parts of Asia becomes comparatively distant.
This imbalance is particularly consequential because direct memories of the war are disappearing. More than 80 years after 1945, the generation that experienced the conflict firsthand is rapidly shrinking. As family testimony and personal recollections fade, schools, museums, films, television, newspapers and political leaders acquire greater influence over how subsequent generations understand the past. Historical memory is therefore not simply inherited; it is continually reconstructed through institutions and public narratives.
Politics matters greatly in that reconstruction. Japan has never had a single, uncontested interpretation of its wartime past. The country has produced important official statements acknowledging aggression and expressing remorse, including the 1993 Kono Statement and the 1995 Murayama Statement. But these commitments have repeatedly been contested and reframed by conservative politicians.
The evolution of official rhetoric is revealing. In his 2015 statement marking the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said that Japan would maintain the positions expressed by previous governments, including expressions of remorse and apology. At the same time, he argued that future generations should not be destined to continue apologizing for the war. The formulation did not amount to a straightforward denial of historical wrongdoing. Its significance lay elsewhere: responsibility was increasingly presented as something that should not indefinitely constrain Japan’s future.
This is one of the more effective forms of historical revisionism. It does not always require denying individual atrocities or explicitly rejecting every established historical fact. It can operate through ambiguity, selective emphasis and changes in political vocabulary. Historical responsibility becomes a burden; apologies become an inheritance that should eventually be discarded; and wartime history is gradually reframed as an issue that belongs to the past rather than as a continuing moral responsibility toward neighboring societies.
The rise of security anxiety has reinforced this tendency. A 2026 Nippon Foundation survey of Japanese teenagers found that the share describing Japan’s international environment as “peaceful” had fallen from roughly 64 percent in 2023 to 48 percent in 2026. At the same time, support for the Self-Defense Forces as a factor maintaining peace rose by 9.2 percentage points to 34 percent, making it the second most frequently cited factor. On increasing defense spending, 35 percent supported an increase, 24 percent opposed it, while 41 percent said they did not know.[3]
These figures suggest that Japan is caught between two competing political memories. One is rooted in the postwar experience: war must never happen again. The other is increasingly shaped by contemporary security concerns: Japan must be capable of defending itself against external threats.
Neither concern is inherently illegitimate. A democratic society has every right to debate its defense policy in response to changes in the regional security environment. The danger arises when contemporary security anxieties are detached from historical memory. If Japan increasingly understands itself only as a vulnerable state surrounded by threats, its own history as an imperial power can become politically inconvenient. The past then ceases to serve as a warning against militarism and begins to appear as an obstacle to “normalizing” Japan’s military role.
That is why the central issue is not whether Japanese society remembers the war. It clearly does. The more important question is whose suffering is remembered, whose suffering is marginalized, and whether remembrance leads to responsibility.
Japan’s postwar identity was built in significant part around the rejection of militarism and the devastation of war. That identity remains important, and millions of Japanese citizens continue to uphold it. But peace cannot be sustained by remembering only that war is terrible. A durable peace also requires remembering how wars begin, how states become aggressors, and how the victims of aggression experience history.
Japan’s challenge, then, is not simply to preserve its memories of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Okinawa or the suffering of ordinary civilians. Those memories deserve to remain central. The challenge is to place them within a fuller historical narrative—one that also includes colonialism, the Nanjing Massacre, the “comfort women” system, forced labor and the violence inflicted throughout Asia.
A country does not weaken its national identity by confronting the darkest parts of its past. It strengthens its democratic foundations. Nearly nine decades after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, the question facing Japan is therefore not whether it will remember the war. It is whether its memory will remain a warning against war, or become a selective narrative in which Japan remembers above all how it suffered, while forgetting why so many of its neighbors suffered at its hands.
The distinction matters. When historical memory ceases to lead to responsibility, it can be transformed into a political resource for remilitarization. And when that happens, the erosion of postwar pacifism does not begin with the disappearance of memories of war. It begins with remembering the war without remembering responsibility.
Source: the conversation, the irish times, bbc, global times, tokyo times
