On Aug. 15, 1945, Japan unconditionally surrendered to the U.S.-led Allied Powers, ending World War II. An estimated 3 million Japanese military personnel and civilians died in the war.
But according to some estimates, several times that number of people, mostly Chinese, died in Japan's war of aggression against China, which triggered the Pacific War. In recent years, media reports on Aug. 15 have focused on the war dead and efforts to avoid war at all costs.
I was astounded by a report published by a major Japanese daily Tuesday, the 55th anniversary of the end of the war, on a 12-meter-high stone monument erected at a Shinto shrine in Kanazawa to commemorate Japan's "sacred war in Greater East Asia."