Regarding the June 20 article "LDP to review Occupation, tribunal," the Liberal Democratic Party intends to set up a group to examine the postwar Occupation and the International Military Tribunal, or Tokyo War Crimes Trial, because, according to one official, they need to "scrutinize" the fact that the "rulings included faulty views on history."
As if the revisionist policies of the Abe government over sex slaves have not caused enough problems, now the nationalists in the LDP are going to attempt to rewrite the history of the Occupation and the trial for war crimes in the hopes of further exonerating the acts of those civililian and military leaders who were classified as Class-A war criminals who are enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine.
The constant whitewashing of the past and the attempts to impose their own truth on history points out that for this government "The past is never dead. It's not even past," as William Faulkner once wrote.
It almost leads one to suspect that the ultimate goal of Abe and the nationalists is to prove to themselves that they never lost the war or to deny that it was Japanese politicians who led the country down that disastrous road.
There comes a point where revising the truth begins to border on fantasy and a sense of unreality.
The opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect the policies of The Japan Times.