Historical Revisionism and NHK

As is pretty obvious, there is a widespread feeling in Japan that the country was a victim in WW2, not an aggressor. Just watch NHK TV and their documentaries on the era. This is especially obvious this month every year, the anniversaries of the atomic bombings and Japan's surrender.

Japan Focus has an excellent article on how scandal-plagued NHK has become more and more a conduit of this type of propaganda. You can read it here.

An exerpt from that article on how the powers in Japan view any hint of Japanese wrong doing in the war:

On August 9, 1993, Hosokawa Morihiro became the first non-LDP prime minister in 38 years and, in his inaugural press conference, stated his belief that Japan had waged "a war of aggression, a war that was wrong." This rather self-evident observation was unprecedented for a Japanese leader, although during the remainder of his brief tenure Hosokawa would refer more discreetly to a war that had included aggressive acts.

(A group of LDP Diet members began meeting a few days later in reaction to Hosokawa'’s statement, which helped galvanize the forces of nationalism and historical revisionism that have since become prominent. An account of the period on the Liberal Democratic Party'’s website refers to "“notable mishaps including Prime Minister Hosokawa's widely-criticized assertion at a press conference that Japan had acted as an aggressor in the Second World War (Nihon no shinryaku senso)."”[9]