In every society, even the most apparently open-minded, there are times when some questions become taboo. In the United States right now, such questions include anything that hints at American culpability in its recent dealings with other countries.
Last year's events also brought to the surface a couple of older taboo questions left over from the Pacific War. The most obvious of these has been asked outright only by Osama bin Laden: If it was a war crime to kill innocent civilians in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, why wasn't it a war crime to kill innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Then there's the question posed by Akira Yoshimura's 1978 novel, here translated into English for the first time: What kind of justice is it -- other than the oxymoronic kind known as "victor's justice" -- that condones the U.S. firebombing of entire Japanese cities in World War II but condemns as a war crime the executions of U.S. prisoners of war carried out by Japanese troops?