The Liberal Democratic Party has launched a panel to scrutinize Japan's modern history since the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, including the Allied occupation of the nation after World War II. It plans to invite a speaker once or twice a month to study particular themes. Members of the panel reportedly agree that the speakers should be ideologically neutral. The panel will not publish any report. But given the past remarks of LDP leaders including Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who places the panel under his direct control, there are suspicions that the panel is aimed at pushing a revisionist view of Japan's modern history and laying the groundwork for revising the Constitution, which looms as a major issue in next summer's Upper House election.
The appointment of LDP Secretary-General Sadakazu Tanigaki — who is viewed as one of the shrinking ranks of doves within the party — as the panel's head may be an attempt to dispel such suspicions. Tanigaki said it is wrong to study history to achieve a specific purpose — a remark apparently meant to deny that the panel would try to push for revisionist history. Before the launch of the panel, Tanigaki reportedly told Tomomi Inada, the LDP's policy chief who became acting head of the panel, to refrain from any moves that the United States might regard as promoting a revisionist view of Japan's modern history.
It was Inada, who is said to share Abe's conservative views, that pushed for the creation of the panel. She had earlier expressed a desire to launch a panel to reexamine the postwar occupation of Japan by the Allied powers and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which tried Japan's wartime leaders. Inada holds the view that the Allied occupation and the trial — which she thinks was an unjust trial carried out by the WWII victors on the strength of an ex-post facto law — deprived the nation of "Japaneseness" and that it is necessary to overcome the historical viewpoints based on the trial, which determined that Japan's modern war was a military aggression, in order to correct what she calls "distortions" inherent in Japan's postwar regime.