It is regrettable that a Diet resolution that might have turned a similar historical corner for Japan has been watered down almost to the point of meaninglessness, certainly as far as Japan's former Asian victims are concerned. With regard to the Japan-US war that started with the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Japanese media and official spokesmen have seemed intent on portraying their country as the victim by focusing exclusively on the nuclear finale to the conflict. It is tedious and saddening to have to recite such matters, but these are historical facts that Americans who lived through the war, as well as the great majority of American scholars of that period, have not forgotten. This places limits on Tokyo's victimhood campaign and its effort to fine-tune America's commemorations of the war's end. That is an argument over which Japanese and Americans, or even Americans themselves, will probably never come to share a full consensus.
Any country losing a war has some grounds on which to feel sorry for itself.
The samurai ethic of bushido is just one example of that interweaving. A third possibility behind Japan's renewed victimization consciousness toward the United States, a half-century after the event, is more practical as well as more disturbing in its implications. In a year tense with the automobile trade dispute, controversy over the role of APEC, and general uncertainty over the future of Asia, there have been signs that Japan's opinion makers may be using their nation's suffering in the final stages of the war to admit their wartime responsibility one-sidedly toward the Asian peoples, depict themselves as fellow victims of the West, and shift the opprobrium to America. Although some of this trend rests on popular sentiment, one suspects that much of it was originally manufactured and then took on a life of its own. Far too many decades have passed, and far too many positive bonds link the two peoples today for anything like that.