“It Wasn’t China That Invaded Japan. It Was Japan That Started the War — and Tens of Millions Died.”

From the FB page of:

Khai Beng Tan

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“It Wasn’t China That Invaded Japan. It Was Japan That Started the War — and Tens of Millions Died.”

That’s not a quote from Beijing. It’s from Shigeru Ishiba, a former prime minister of Japan, speaking on Japanese television on October 19 — exactly one year after Sanae Takaichi took office.

And it’s the kind of statement that Japanese right-wing politics has spent years trying to avoid.

Ishiba’s broader argument was about something deeper than one historical fact. He was asking whether a country can conduct serious diplomacy while being dishonest about its own past. Every nation, he said, has both a glorious history and a history it must reflect on with regret. Japan is no exception. The Empire of Japan existed. Today’s Japan emerged through constitutional revision and other processes. But the state is continuous. So when asked “where exactly did we go wrong?” and “what should we change?”, it is unacceptable to brush the question aside with “I wasn’t a party to that” or “I don’t know.”

Then he went straight at the evasion that dominates so much Japanese discourse: there was no such thing as “China invading Japan.” It was Japan that started the war, and it caused tens of millions of deaths. Indonesia and the Philippines suffered in the same way. If Japanese leaders don’t even understand these basic facts, can they really build a genuine relationship with China?

This is where his criticism of Takaichi became especially pointed. He asked how a prime minister who is “ignorant” of history can go to Beijing and talk about “friendship,” “equality,” or “working side by side” — and expect to be taken seriously. A country that is dishonest about history, he said, cannot build stable foreign relations. The words may be friendly; the foundation is rotten.

He also pointed to the power reality that Tokyo’s hawkish rhetoric tends to avoid. China’s GDP is now five times Japan’s. Its military strength is likewise far larger. In that context, does simply issuing tough statements improve Japan’s security? Ishiba said he does not believe so. But the moment anyone raises an objection, they get labeled “pro-China,” and the discussion stops. That, he said, is not in the national interest.

And he did not spare the economic mythology either. Takaichi’s slogan of making Japan “strong and prosperous” is, in essence, “rich country, strong military” — almost identical to Shinzo Abe’s formula. But next year, Japan’s GDP is likely to be overtaken by India and the UK, dropping out of the world’s top five for the first time in more than 60 years. Did the policies pursued for so long actually make Japan’s economy stronger? Ishiba suggested that neither Abenomics nor Takaichi’s version has truly made Japan wealthy.

What makes this significant is not that Ishiba is some anti-Japanese figure. He is a former prime minister, a mainstream conservative, and hardly a “pro-China” ideologue. His critique comes from inside the system. And that is why it lands. He is saying that evading history, suppressing debate with loyalty labels, and substituting tough talk for strategy are not signs of strength. They are signs of a country that has stopped asking itself the hard questions.

The line that matters most is the one in the title. It is not a Chinese accusation. It is a Japanese former prime minister stating a fact that Japanese politics has spent decades trying to blur. And until that fact is confronted honestly, Japan’s diplomacy will keep sounding confident on the surface while resting on a foundation that cannot bear weight.

What do you think? Is Ishiba right that Japan’s historical dishonesty undermines its diplomacy — or is this just internal political positioning ahead of future leadership battles?