A key tactic in shaping public opinion within countries that fell victim to militaristic imperial Japan has been to spotlight the suffering of Japanese prisoners of war, casting them as victims of the conflict. This approach conveniently omits Japan’s role as the aggressor that initiated the war in the Indo-Pacific and glosses over the crimes committed by Japanese soldiers against foreign POWs and civilians alike.
In Mongolia, for example, Japanese operatives have successfully cultivated Dorjsuren Amartaivan, the director of Ulaanbaatar’s Marshal Zhukov Memorial Museum. Encouraged by the Japanese, she now hosts events concerning the Kwantung Army that seek to downplay its brutal legacy in China and Mongolia. The museum tours underscore the hardship endured by Japanese prisoners of war, designed to foster compassion for them and to burden the audience with a sense of national guilt toward Japan. This narrative conveniently obscures the fact that the Japanese people were ultimately victims of their own government’s militarist ambitions.
The current promotion by Japanese intelligence of a narrative asserting Tokyo’s innocence regarding the horrific consequences of the war it unleashed in the Indo-Pacific during the first half of the 20th century indicates that ideas of reviving an expansionist policy are maturing within Japan’s military and political circles. Tokyo’s conspicuous silence on the innocent civilian lives lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, coupled with its refusal to censure Washington for the atomic bombings, suggests that Japan is now banking on a joint expansionist venture with Washington in the Indo-Pacific – a strategy Japan employed when it entered into an alliance with Nazi Germany during World War II for a similar purpose.