In many senses the Japanese people have been in denial since the end of World War II.

With the Tokyo War Crimes Trials they blamed their leaders for the catastrophes of war, so allowing themselves to believe that the atrocities were committed by their soldiers, politicians, bureaucrats and entrepreneurs in their name. They themselves could be carefully let off the hook.

The postwar thinking of the vast majority of Japanese was: It may have been "us," but it wasn't "me" who did those awful things. "We" were forced to do those things by underhanded politicians and cruel military men. "I" was a kind of victim, too, a victim of sweeping historical circumstances beyond my control; and now all "I" want to do is buckle down and look after my little personalized circle.

Emperor Hirohito, announcing on Aug. 15, 1945 Japan's capitulation to the Allied Forces, asked his people, in his first-ever broadcast to the nation, "taegataki wo tae (to endure the unendurable)." The unendurable was, of course, defeat and surrender, not the awful pangs of conscience that all Japanese should have felt and redressed individually, for their nation's crimes.

This, in one way, is what is behind the controversy today over the prime minister's visits to Yasukuni Shrine. If some of the soldiers whose souls are revered at the shrine are among those held responsible for Japanese atrocities in World War II, then the prime minister may be seen to be paying homage to the perpetrators of crimes. The fact that the question of personal guilt and acknowledged responsibility was left ambiguous and never clarified after the war makes this an issue that affects Japan's position in Asia to this day. Asians may well ask: What have individual Japanese people done to acknowledge their complicity in their nation's as yet unresolved past?

But as long ago as the 1940s there was a single voice, loud and unequivocal, that rang out, as if to warn the Japanese people that there was no all-clear signal now for a smooth sailing on a calm postwar sea. That voice came from Ango Sakaguchi, who wrote, in his essay "Zoku Darakuron (Decadence Revisited)" in December 1946:

Endure the unendurable? Who are they kidding? By giving ourselves over to historical fakery we have lost all semblance of humanity. What is the proper precondition of humanity? In short, it is to frankly express the desire for that which you desire and to declare offensive that which you find offensive. It's that simple.

What was Ango telling his people? He was telling them that their personal wants and predilections are what should motivate them in life, not some dictum from an emperor that turns them into meek and pliable followers.

According to Ango, the Japanese people could move on from their self-imposed tragedy only if they came to terms with the truth of their misdeeds. He labeled the blinkered view of history by the state Lies, lies, lies! He saw as reprehensible the cynical whitewashing of the past. For Ango, the only way to honestly re-create the Japanese nation after the war was for Japanese people to come out and express their real opinions and act upon them, even if it meant risking polemical confrontation.

But he reached even deeper down than that.

In a long essay published in March 1942 and titled "Nihon Bunka Shikan (My Own View of Japanese Culture)," he brought into question those very so-called immutable values so often linked, as if by blood, to Japaneseness. One is the kimono.

What is tradition? he wrote in that essay. What is national character? Do the Japanese possess intrinsic personality traits which made them invent the kimono, requiring them to wear it? He goes on to say that foreign men look a lot better in a kimono than Japanese men.

As for the legacy of the past and its defining role in the Japanese national character, he has this to say:

It's no big deal if the temples of Kyoto and the Buddhist statues of Nara burn to the ground, but if the trains stop, now that's a bother! The necessities of life are the important things to us and so long as our life itself does not perish, our originality is in a healthy state. This is because we will not have lost our needs and the desires and urges born of them.

This is the crux of Ango's mid-20th-century sensibility. Tradition, the hoary customs, the ancient heritage: All of this arose in the first place out of a necessity felt by the individual creators of those long-ago times. The temples, shrines and statues are mere accouterments on the dress of the artist. If they disappear or fall into neglect, nothing of real cultural value is lost, because the Japanese people of the present can, if they want, re-create it all in a form that is meaningful and precious to them.

Ango, an ardent student of French culture and philosophy, was nonetheless highly critical of the behavior of the people of France during the war.

Oh, France is certainly a bizarre country! he wrote in "My Own View of Japanese Culture."

When war breaks out the very first thing the French evacuate is the art in the Louvre and gold bullion, trading the fate of their homeland for the preservation of Paris. With this they did manage to inherit the legacy of tradition, but in the bargain they lost sight of the fact that they are, themselves, the originators of their native traditions.

This Japanese view of culture expressed by Ango as something inherently intangible and totally dependent upon the willingness of people to redefine it on the basis of present-day necessity was never set out so succinctly before. It forms a core element of the modern Japanese sensibility, and it accounts for both the cynical neglect of the old and the occasionally frantic desire to translate a particular aspect of it into something arch-contemporary.

Ango was a brilliant novelist as well as an essayist. His black-humor 1947 novel "Sakura no Mori no Mankai no Shita (In the Woods Beneath the Cherry Blossoms in Full Bloom)" offers the best look into his icon-busting sensibility. Japanese people are often seen by the outside world as being reverential toward the sacred symbols of their culture. But debunking these symbols and defusing them of their powerful popular image is very much a part of the true Japanese sensibility as well. No one does it better than Ango when he depicts the space beneath the hallowed cherry blossom tree as one where sheer terror reigns.

The hero of the story is a crude bandit who one day abducts a beautiful woman from Kyoto, marries her and makes her his own. But possession works both ways, and soon the bandit finds himself at the mercy of her outrageous desires. She makes him bring her people's severed heads for her amusement. The bandit does her bidding. Soon she finds herself with a host of human heads lined up in her room.

Every day the woman played Heads. A head takes a walk with its retainer. A head's family is entertained by the head of another family. A head makes love. There were even cases of a woman's head jilting a man's head or a man's head rejecting the advances of a woman's head and making the woman's head cry.

And when the bandit brought her the head of a monk:

She whirled it round and round on the end of a string, stood it on its head and rolled it about, slipped her nipples between its thick lips and suckled it and just generally laughed herself sick.

At the end of this grisly but hilarious satirical novel, the epitome of both the grotesque and its parody in Japanese literature, the man and his wife find themselves under the cherry blossoms in full bloom. What occurs there is horrendous and terrifying. This combination of the traditional symbol and fear -- the lyrical illustration and the hair-raising event -- forms a characteristic of the modern Japanese sensibility that is seen, for instance, in stunning films of Hayao Miyazaki such as "Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away)" and "Hauru no Ugoku Shiro (Howl's Moving Castle)." It represents both an affirmation and a negation of a staid cultural heritage at the same time. The greatest practitioner in modern times of this wicked literary art was Ango Sakaguchi.

He was born in Niigata in 1906, the 12th of 13 children. His father was a successful politician in the prefecture who went on to serve in the national House of Representatives. As such, Ango could afford to be decadent. He rejected his family outright and moved around the country, living in Tokyo, Kyoto, Odawara in Kanagawa Prefecture and, finally, in Kiryu in Gunma. He took drugs, primarily the stimulant philopon, and all too often drank himself into a stupor.

But marriage and the birth of a son, in 1953, had begun to change him. Would this ultimate iconoclast, a man who rejected blood ties, all but vowed that he would never be the head of a household and backed off from anything that smacked of permanence, settle into family life? His death in 1955 leaves that question, as well as one about how his irreverent anger would have developed, unanswered.

Despite the fact that after the war his compatriots did not take his advice and look deeply into themselves to find their own personal answers to their nation's actions, Ango's best essays and fiction remain popular.

When, some day in the future, Japanese people feel the need to reassess their past in more honest terms, his words, and all that they imply for the future of Japanese culture, are bound to reverberate with the same power that they had when they were first written.