The question of war responsibility has never been, for me, an abstraction. It has lived in the hollow left by my father, a Japanese schoolteacher pressed into service and sent to the battlefields of Okinawa. He was not a soldier by profession, nor a man inclined to war. He taught children, tended to family and then was taken by conscription into a conflict he did not choose. He died there, in a place he had never imagined, and with his death I inherited a lifelong burden: What responsibility do ordinary people bear when they are swept into war’s undertow?

The Asia-Pacific War is most often remembered through the culpability of generals and admirals, of politicians, and inevitably of Emperor Showa himself. But to stop at the summit of power is to overlook the multitudes who filled the ranks below: Farmers and merchants, students and teachers, drawn into and carried along by the currents of militarism.

My father was one of them. His story has never allowed me to forget that ordinary people can be both victims and participants — at once coerced and complicit, silenced yet implicated.