On his visit to the United States in April, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe addressed Congress and told them: "History is harsh. What was done cannot be undone."
Apparently Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto did not listen to the speech or get the memo. The Osaka International Peace Center museum has just reopened after renovations that involved removing the exhibits on Japanese wartime aggression. Hashimoto once threatened to close the museum when he was Osaka's governor, but after touring the facility on its reopening he praised the face-lift.
On a visit there several years ago, I was pleasantly surprised by a museum that unflinchingly presented both what Japan endured and what it inflicted during the 1930s and '40s. It seemed an encouraging reproach to the Smithsonian museum, which in 1995 tried to mount an exhibition that complicated the atomic bomb narrative in an effort to give voice to scholars who questioned the wisdom and necessity of former President Harry Truman's decision to drop them. The curator's inspiring vision could not survive the political gauntlet, showing an America that was overly eager, half a century on, to stifle criticism.