In chapter 15 of his Embracing Defeat, John Dower makes a forceful, although not always clear, indictment of double standards, charging Japanese suspects with retroactive war crimes, exclusion of many areas of crimes from consideration, and deliberately shielding the emperor, against the Tokyo International Military Tribunal dominated by the United States. What he does not make clear is although one would expect the military generals and leaders of any country to do the same when their country declares war as a national policy, whether those Japanese "political criminals" such as General Tojo and other military generals who participated in the war, often playing a leading role, should go unpunished. Dower did mention in passing, however, that some policies, if adopted, could make the trial a more productive one, such as appointing some Japanese justices (Dower, p.475), and indictments of the military police, ultranatioalistic secret societies, or industrialists who were actively involved in supplying the Japanese military (pp.464-465). Dower's arguments do point us to what one can call the "inconclusive" nature of the Tokyo war trial, which has left behind a host of problems unresolved, including first and foremost: who was responsible for the war. Although General Tojo, the prime minister whose cabinet launched the attack on Pearl Harbor on Tokyo time Dec.8 1944, six other Class A criminals, and over 900 Class B and C criminals, were executed, many Japanese were not convinced this was a fair trial because of some of the charges mentioned above. For many Japanese, the war was a mess and a nightmare they wanted to leave behind by forgetting it. Therefore, we see the phenomenon that Carol Gluck mentioned in her "The Idea of Showa" where the Japanese refer to the years after 1945 as "postwar [year] n," as if 1945, like the legendary beginning of the founding of Japan by Emperor Jimmu, was a new beginning for Japan, and the years prior to that could be chopped off from the collective historical memory as if they had not happened.

The historical past, however, could not be so easily obliterated from memory. In the 1970s, the term "Showa [year] n" was revived, in the newspapers, journals, and especially by people of an older generation, because of a variety of reasons. It was partly a negative reaction to the first international oil crisis started by OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) in 1973 that led to a jump of international oil prices by over ten times and a subsequent oil boycott to all pro-American countries including Japan. Since over 70 per cent of the Japanese oil import came from the Middle East, members of the OPEC (after World War II, the U.S. stopped oil export), this hit the Japanese economy hard. At one point, to encourage the conservation of energy used for air conditioning, the Japanese prime minister started to wear short sleeves during the summer, but he failed to inspire the Japanese corporate employees to stop wearing long sleeve shirts. Conservation of energy is one of the components of what Gluck calls "conservatization," the "need to preserve what had been gained," against a background of high economic growth in the 1960s and early 1970s that made the Japanese feel more comfortable about themselves and entitled to assert some traditions that had earlier been associated with national humiliation, such as the association between the Showa era and the war.(Gluck, pp.5-6) The war, by the 1970s, it seemed, was sufficiently dissociated from the emperor Showa so that using the imperial reign to record time would no longer build an association between prewar and postwar Japan. The Japanese were finally comfortable enough to associate themselves with the Showa era, but not in the same way as they did before the war. A strong distinction continued to be made between the pre-war and post-war Showa eras.

However, in their depictions of the war, the war "appeared as a natural catastrophe which 'happened' to Japan," and the people "'were embroiled' in the war by their reckless leaders." (Gluck, 12) In other words, there was no serious self-reflection over who caused the war. In the mass media, the war years were punctuated by a series of events of military aggression by a small group of fanatic leaders, who were blamed for the American participation in the war against Japan and the American bombing of Japanese cities. The Japanese ambivalence over the Tokyo war trial and the American occupation that came concomitant with the trial led many Japanese to develop a historical amnesia and try to forget the war. The failure to seriously examine who were responsible for the war in Japan led to a series of consequences. Some of the consequences were brought about with the unwitting help of the Americans, such as the incompleteness of the Tokyo war trials, and the American renaming of the Greater East Asian War to the Pacific War, which, Gluck argues, entitled Japan to victimhood from the atomic bombing while minimizing its heinous acts of aggression in China and Korea prior to the bombardment of Pearl Harbor, and attempts to change Japanese school textbooks that described invasion of China as "advance" in China.(Gluck, 14)

The ambiguity in the Japanese collective historical memory has enabled a continued right wing assertion of the authority of the emperor and his divine power. On the other hand, into the 1980s, with economic success and frustrations and Japan's new role in the world, from a country accommodating the Western powers to the second largest economic power in the world, the Japanese found it all the more relevant to discuss the nature of the emperor as well as their own cultural traditions, when their previous models of emulation, both Chinese and Western, seem to be no longer relevant. Japan has come to the stage when it finally has to decide its own identity by itself. Historical memory, as well as the active construction of it, becomes very important.