Japan stays silent on Trump likening Iran strikes to WWII A-bombs
TOKYO (Kyodo) -- Japan's top government spokesman Yoshimasa Hayashi on Friday refrained from commenting directly on U.S. President Donald Trump's recent remark likening his nation's airstrikes on Iran nuclear sites to the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Tetsuo Saito, the head of the Komeito party, the junior coalition partner of Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba's Liberal Democratic Party, described Trump's remark as "extremely regrettable" adding that he believes it "was meant to justify the atomic bombings."
Asked again about Trump's comment, Hayashi, who serves as chief Cabinet secretary, described the calamity and suffering wrought by the atomic bombs that the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki toward the end of World War II.
"It's important to build up efforts, from a realistic and practical standpoint, toward creating a world free of nuclear weapons based on the belief that the devastation seen in Hiroshima and Nagasaki should never be repeated," he told a press conference, without directly addressing the president's remark.
During his visit to the Netherlands for a NATO summit, Trump said Wednesday, "I don't want to use an example of Hiroshima, I don't want to use an example of Nagasaki, but that was essentially the same thing. That ended that war."
When Hayashi was asked Thursday about the view that the U.S. atomic bombings precipitated the end of World War II, he said it is up to historians to make such judgments.
This year marks the 80th anniversary of the war's end. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and of Nagasaki three days later killed more than 200,000 people by the end of that year. In the decades since Japan's defeat, the country has become a close ally of the United States.
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The Diplomat
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Japan's WWII Anniversary Strategy and China's Memory Politics
The historical issues in East Asia have long been a blindspot for the United States. Time to start paying attention. As Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru prepares for the 80th anniversary of Japan's surrender in World War II this August, the United States must, for the first time, fully recognize and respond to the geopolitical implications underpinning these commemorative cycles. While Washington tends to dismiss these disputes as political theater secondary to power politics, Beijing continues its decades-long campaign of systematically collecting, digitizing, and analyzing Japanese wartime records and military writings. This historical infrastructure provides insights into Tokyo's postwar defense establishment, reinforces China's broader nationalistic narrative, and expands Beijing's regional interests – yet Washington fails to recognize the full extent to which China weaponizes historical narratives in order to isolate Japan and weaken U.S. alliances and partnerships across Asia. As Tokyo's role in the Indo-Pacific evolves, Washington's assumption that Japan – constitutionally restricted from maintaining military forces and shaped by decades of antimilitarist constraints and pacifist public sentiment – is fundamentally divorced from its pre-1945 strategic tradition creates dangerous vulnerabilities for alliance management and regional strategy. These vulnerabilities demand a new strategy and vigorous diplomatic effort. Misreading History in the China-Japan Rivalry These strategic vulnerabilities have deep roots. During the 1990s, bilateral security trends between Japan and China received relatively little attention. The general absence of major bilateral disputes or direct military confrontation during this period – combined with the fact that the Japan-U.S. alliance itself has often obscured Japan's own security posture, sometimes deliberately, by serving as both a buffer and interpretive lens for regional dynamics – can partially explain this lack of analytical focus. Yet underlying Sino-Japanese pressure persisted in what Japanese analysts would later describe as a state of sustained 'low altitude flight' (teikū hikō) based on confrontation and distrust. While the late 20th century neglect was perhaps understandable, this analytical blind spot's endurance cannot be justified. This period of sustained tensions was punctuated by insufficient U.S. responses to Japan's history problems. During the 2005 textbook controversy, when China erupted in massive anti-Japanese protests over textbook revisions minimizing Japanese wartime atrocities, official U.S. attempts at intervention failed to effectively intermediate. Recurring disputes over Japanese leaders' visits to Yasukuni Shrine – which controversially honors convicted war criminals alongside Japan's war dead – exemplified the United States' diplomatic limitations. Washington, for example, could muster only tepid diplomatic 'disappointment' when Prime Minister Abe Shinzo proceeded with his own controversial visit despite high level appeals from the Obama administration in 2013. In the 'comfort women' dispute, Japan's controversial approach to its own wartime responsibility for sexual slavery in Korea remains largely unresolved. U.S. pressure for a quick diplomatic resolution – the 2015 Japan-South Korea agreement – alienated survivors and triggered diplomatic backlash that undermined the accord's implementation. These and other recurring tensions and missteps, persisting despite U.S. intervention and Japanese concessions, reveal a deeper challenge: the inability of U.S. policymakers to fully recognize the drivers of such regional strain. Washington's mismanagement culminated in its response to Abe's August 2015 statement marking Japan's 70th surrender anniversary. While Abe had publicly pledged during his April 2015 U.S. visit to uphold the 1993 Kono Statement officially apologizing to comfort women, his August assertion that future generations shouldn't be 'predestined to apologize' signaled a shift in Japan's approach. U.S. officials responded positively to Abe's statement, despite predictable regional fallout with Japan's neighbors. This diplomatic misstep undermined trilateral security coordination precisely when North Korean threats and Chinese incursions demanded it. As Ishiba prepares to navigate the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, he now inherits this decades-long challenge. Ishiba's Anniversary Strategy As early as January 2025, Ishiba recognized the 80th anniversary as a predominant challenge of his early tenure, despite fumbling and recently recovering approval ratings. He has proposed an expert panel to examine the war's origins. This approach allows him to sidestep a formal Cabinet statement and instead minimize personal association with the issue by issuing a message to the public based on the findings of this panel. Ishiba's April 2025 visit to the Philippines War Memorial revealed the uneasiness in his approach. His observation that 'they haven't forgotten' Japan's wartime actions acknowledges regional wounds that persist eight decades later. Yet his government's proposed war panel appears to analyze primarily procedural questions and policy failures – what Komeito party leader Saito Tetsuo described as examining 'why Japan plunged into a war where many died and why it couldn't be stopped' – not moral responsibility. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian, in contrast, demanded that Japan 'deeply reflect on its historical guilt' while citing Ishiba's November 2024 pledge to 'look to the future, facing history squarely.' Beijing commands this gap between acknowledging history and accepting guilt – and it will maintain this territory regardless of Tokyo's approach. What Japan has traditionally treated as diplomacy, China wields as strategy. Yet Ishiba's strategy seems to further break a pattern set by his predecessors. Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi's 1995 statement at the 50th anniversary established a template of expressing 'deep remorse' and 'heartfelt apology' for Japan's wartime aggression – language that Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro maintained at the 60th anniversary in 2005. Ten years later, Abe's 2015 approach marked a sea change in this cycle, emphasizing instead Japan's evolving international role while attempting to curtail the cycle of apology. Ishiba's focus, in contrast, appears to be on process and examining wartime decision-making rather than addressing moral culpability, which positions him farther from Murayama's acceptance of guilt and closer to the strategic autonomy that has emerged from Japan's expanding security leadership in the Indo-Pacific under Abe's vision. Yet, importantly, behind Ishiba's mask of analytical neutrality lies a drift in Japan's grand strategy: nationalist narratives muted by procedural distance, quietly assuming Japanese leadership as U.S. power recedes – a shift that helps explain Beijing's efforts at controlling international narratives. Beijing's Memory Politics While Japan crafts new narratives of regional leadership, China has spent decades building the historical arsenal to counter them – translating, studying, and cataloging Japanese war materials that serve Beijing's strategic objectives regardless of Tokyo's diplomatic approach. For Beijing, mastering historical narratives stands equal to technological and economic dominance in securing China's rise to great power status – a strategy evidenced by the Chinese Ministry of State Security's 2021 analysis 'National Security and the Rise and Fall of Great Powers.' This document shows that China studies Japan's path from wartime collapse to postwar growth to map its own rise and navigate around avoidable pitfalls while undermining Tokyo's current position. Beijing does this not to settle scores, but to amplify its own advantages – a game Tokyo is only recently learning to play. Beijing's systematic preservation of wartime records is worth understanding because it both exemplifies China's priorities and serves its strategic intelligence needs – monitoring what officials like Senior Colonel Wu Qian, director general of the Information Office of the Ministry of National Defense, describe as the lingering 'specter of militarism' in Japan's modern defense posture. China leverages this strategy to both elevate its own great power status while creating a self-reinforcing internal narrative focused on historical justice and national resurgence. Institutionalizing China's Historical Infrastructure Marshal Xu Xiangqian's 1979 speech at the Central Military Commission symposium established an institutional mandate that defined China's historical intelligence apparatus. One of his core directives required Chinese military cadres to study foreign histories of World War II to prepare for modern warfare, explicitly linking historical analysis with strategic advantage. This high-level mandate stimulated a major research effort by Chinese military education institutions and civilian universities to translate and analyze works of Japanese strategic and military thought. From approximately 1980 to 2010, Chinese academies published over 700 translations of foreign military texts on World War II, while institutions including the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the Academy of Military Science, and the National Defense University began offering graduate degrees in military history. This translation infrastructure grants Chinese military decisionmakers what Ma Jun of the Chinese National Defense University called a 'rich knowledge of historical studies, and a strong ability to draw insights.' Meanwhile, such foundational Japanese military thought and historical documents are largely unknown and inaccessible to Japan's English-speaking allies. Further, China operationalizes its memory politics through memorial institutions, legal documentation, and strategic research, then deploys this historical knowledge through not just military training but confrontational diplomacy and coordinated public narratives. The Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall exemplifies Beijing's public approach, gradually transforming since its establishment in 1985 from memorialization into a celebration of 'national rejuvenation' under Xi Jinping. Beijing has long weaponized the facility's presence, including recently introducing new documentary evidence of Japanese atrocities, and maintains its international visibility and access to transform historical preservation into political leverage. Beijing applies the same strategic historiography to the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Treatment of these proceedings remained largely neglected until China began entrenching its own historical interpretation of the trials. In 2011, Shanghai Jiao Tong University established a Center for the Tokyo Trial Studies, readily surpassing any similar institution in Japan or elsewhere internationally. The center collects, translates, and publishes Tribunal documents from the 1940s, making them widely available online. Most notably, during heightened tensions over Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands territorial disputes in 2016, the center launched one of the world's most comprehensive, multilingual online depositories of trial records and evidence to date. 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Third, it leaves Washington both ill-equipped to counter Chinese political offensives that strategically weaponize historical Sino-Japanese grievances and inclined to prioritize short-term alliance goals over addressing deeper historical tensions, U.S. retrenchment, or broader strategic evolutions in the region. Beijing's historical memory politics will test these vulnerabilities as Ishiba navigates the upcoming 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. While China's decades of strategic preparation provide significant advantages, Washington can still address these asymmetries through targeted policy adjustments. Most fundamentally, the United States must demonstrate sustained commitment to alliance management with Japan through both concrete actions and public statements that reassure Tokyo of Washington's staying power. Only then must the United States and Japan develop integrated intelligence capabilities to counter Beijing, creating bilateral initiatives that challenge China's monopoly on interpreting Japanese strategic thought for regional audiences while building U.S. expertise. Washington, alongside Tokyo, must anticipate and prepare for Beijing's historical offensives, developing proactive anniversary strategies and multilateral coordination mechanisms that prevent China from exploiting commemorative cycles to drive wedges between the United States and Japan. U.S. retreat increasingly drives Japan toward autonomy, if not outright isolation. Without reform, Beijing will exploit this upcoming anniversary to accelerate that drift while Washington will remain blind to what drives apart one of its most important Asian alliances.
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U.S. tariff rate hits historic level of 25.9%: Japan trade report
TOKYO (Kyodo) -- The effective U.S. tariff rate on all imports rose to as high as 25.9 percent under President Donald Trump, surpassing levels not seen since the protectionist policies of the Great Depression, the Japanese government's annual trade report showed Friday. The U.S. tariff measures as of early April, including an increase in the levies on China to 145 percent, reached a "historic scale," the Japanese trade ministry said, adding that frequent changes in Trump's trade policy are creating "heightened uncertainty." According to the ministry, the effective tariff rate -- the actual rate applied to imports -- was 19.8 percent in 1933, after the United States enacted the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930 to protect American businesses and farmers from foreign competition by significantly raising tariffs on imported goods. The report by the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry cited data from the International Monetary Fund as a reference. The April rate also reflected new tariffs on the auto sector. The U.S. effective tariff rate has since declined after Washington and Beijing agreed in May to roll back a significant portion of each other's steep tariffs, marking a de-escalation of their tit-for-tat trade war. Japan's simple average tariff rate stood at 3.7 percent in 2023, according to data from the World Trade Organization.
