Despite this opposition, which among other things blocked a Diet resolution echoing Murayama's statement, his clear view remained as the official view. In 2005, when then Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro issued his sixtieth anniversary statement, he very notably echoed Murayama's language.

When it was Abe's turn in 2015, he issued a statement that carefully stepped around this challenge to rewrite the Murayama precedent. Under clear pressure from the Obama administration and from within Japan, Abe's own statement does echo key words –“aggression” and“colonial rule” – while also trying to rewrite the narrative about the war.

As I wrote at the time, based on my own expertise on the formation of historical memory about the war, in Nippon:

Since that time, the backers of the revisionist right in Japanese politics have been eager to both protect the Abe legacy but also to correct even the concessions he made at the time.

The most ardent advocates of this view of the past include the leader and members of the newly emergent darlings of the right in Japan – Sanseito, a new party that made a significant showing in the recent election, now holding fifteen seats in the Upper House. Sanseito is now well known as a Japanese echo of Trumpian rhetoric – from its slogan of“Japanese People First” to its anti-immigrant rhetoric.

But what is less well understood is its passionate advocacy for an ultra-nationalist view of Japanese history, articulated by its leader Kamiya Sohei and distributed for many years now on his YouTube Channel, CGS or Channel Grand Strategy. The channel features so-called“history lessons” taught by prominent rightwing historians.

“A fundamental reason for Sanseito's rise, I believe, is rooted in the historical perspective shared by its candidates,” wrote historian Fujioka Nobukatsu in the right-wing daily Sankei Shimbun.“Building on the momentum of these study sessions, Sanseito, established in 2020, has uniquely emphasized the importance of taking pride in Japanese history. It's an approach no other political party has adopted.”

Fujioka is a historian and the vice president of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform (Tsukurukai ), the driving force for decades behind revision of Japanese middle and high school textbooks and opposition to what it views as a distorted view of Japan's past. Sanseito members have been active in promoting the use of their alternative textbooks in Japanese schools.

If Ishiba were to deliver his own judgment on Japan's wartime history in an anniversary statement, what would he say? There are some clear clues to this, clear enough to have fueled the fears of the revisionist right wing in Japan.

Ishiba has made numerous remarks that indicate he shares Murayama's view of Japan's aggressive and colonial past and saw the eightieth anniversary as a key moment to declare Japan's intention not to repeat that past, despite his reputation as a defense hawk.

Ishiba was among the most forthright of Japanese politicians in advocating close ties to South Korea based on a recognition of the illegality of Japan's 1910 annexation of Korea.

“There's no need to flatter Korea or to lay out the logic of the past, but we should admit that what was a mistake was a mistake,” he said in a December 2023 interview t outing his bid for leadership.“We must redouble our emphasis on the fact that it is vital for this region that Japan and South Korea understand one another and cooperate.”

In unscripted remarks to the Global Dialogue organized by the Japan Institute for International Affairs, where this author was present, Ishiba spoke frankly about his desire to mark the eightieth anniversary as a moment for self-reflection about the disaster of the decision to go to war.

“It is time for us to revisit and review the war experience,” he said . He called for Japan to understand“how to position itself in the world to create a world with more peace.”

The idea that the mistakes that led to Japan's war and its total defeat should not be repeated is a persistent obsession of Ishiba. As he told the Diet this week:

Perhaps the most intriguing, and least known, clue as to what an unfettered Ishiba would say is his membership, since its beginning in 2023, in a study group dedicated to the life and work of former Prime Minister Ishibashi Tanzan.

Ishibashi, also a former editor of the august Japanese weekly Toyo Keizai, was a long-time opponent going back to the prewar era of Japanese militarism and aggressive nationalism. In his brief tenure as prime minister in the 1950s, he sought to defy the United States and establish diplomatic relations with Communist China.

According to Richard Dyck, a long-time resident of Japan and a businessman with a passion for Ishibashi and his work, Ishiba has been a regular attendee at these study sessions. Among the members are also two prominent members of his cabinet and close friends – Foreign Minister Iwaya Takeshi and Defense Minister Nakatani Gen.

At the most recent meeting of the group, according to Dyck, Foreign Minister Iwaya gave introductory remarks along the lines of“the message we get from Ishibashi is that relations in Asia need to transcend nationalism, ideology and history.”

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From all this we can gain a glimpse into the largely hidden – at least to Western eyes – war over history that still is being fought in Japan and that lies behind, in part, the fate of Ishiba and his government.

Daniel Sneider is a lecturer in East Asian Studies at Stanford University, the former co-director of the Divided Memories and Reconciliation project at the Asia-Pacific Research Center, and the co-author and editor of numerous books on wartime historical memory, including“Divergent Memories: Opinion Leaders and the Asia-Pacific War”, published by Stanford University Press.

This article first appeared on the Observing Japan Substack and is republished with kind permission. Read the original here .

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