In line with the arguments of John Dower and Norma Field, Gavan McCormack believes that decisions made by the American occupational forces have had an indelible impact on Japanese memory of the war, either directly, or through the manipulations of these decisions by the Japanese government or right wing. Correctly or incorrectly, McCormack compares the Japanese with the Germans and even the pope, in that the latter two "apologized" to the people they victimized, either it be the neighbors of Germany or Czechs whose opposition to their Catholic king led to retaliation from a Catholic league within central Europe. But the Japanese under Hirohito never did. Things started to change only in 1993-1994, when Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa, grandson of Prince Konoe who was twice prime minister during the war and who committed suicide while imprisoned as a Class A war criminal, apologized to Korea for Japanese colonization. Both his cabinet and that of his successor Hata Tsutomu, although short lived (1993-1994 together), were formed by alternative parties to the mainstream Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that dominated Japanese politics from 1955 to 1993. Despite the reform nature of the cabinets, their change of their view of the war was very little, and in the Hata cabinet, the change was nil.

McCormack finds infuriating that Nagano, Hata's Minister of Justice (1994) followed the tone of Japanese right wing that the Japanese invasion of China did not happen and the massacres were a fabrication. McCormack believes such words should not come from someone in charge of administering justice. Nagano, like so many in Japan, did not believe in the legitimacy of the Tokyo war trial. Here, arguably, practices during the Tokyo war trial left many loopholes for its opponents to have ample ammunition against it. It did not directly result in, but helped build the argument of the Japanese right wing that the trial was unfair, and therefore could be ignored. The incompleteness of the American reconstruction of Japan therefore did not directly result in, but was easily used to shape up a dogged denial of responsibility for the war among many of the Japanese right wing, inside or outside the government. Together with this denial was a refrain from criticizing the emperor's role in the war, so that when the mayor of Nagasaki accused the (dying) emperor of war responsibility in Dec., 1988, he was at once threatened with death, and was shot in 1990. (Field's chapter 3 deals with Mayor Motoshima of Nagasaki's remarks and the story behind them.)

Despite McCormack's contrast between the Germans and the Japanese reactions to their crimes (the Germans, more repentent, and there was an indigenous opposition to the war), which can be a bit stretched because there have been Germans in denial, some of his comparisons are thought-provoking, although not totally justified, such as that between Hitler and Hirohito, one escaping trial by dying on his own hands, and the other declared immune to trials and died in his own bed 44 years later (McCormack , 231). While one may want to cry out "wait, the story is a little bit more complicated than that," one is provoked into thinking: was condoning Hirohito really seriously bad? There were several such comparisons in the chapter, such as that between Albert Speer (architect and economic minister to Hitler who received 20 years imprisonment, 1946-66), and Nobusuke Kishi, Japan's minister of commerce and industry in General Tojo's cabinet, who was imprisoned from 1945 to 1948 as Class A war criminal suspect and then released, and who went on to become prime minister in 1957 (to 1960). This constant comparison with Germany is not always appropriate: Germany's right wing should by no means be ignored; nor have all war criminals in Germany been properly punished, nor is German repentance completely sincere. But such comparisons do push us to think more directly of the (negative) consequences of certain occupation policies. McCormack also introduces the concepts of the inner self and the outer self: while apologies by Prime Minister Hosokawa may be seen as the Japanese outer self--the self that wills itself to open up to the outside world, industrialize, and establish a modern Western style government, there remains the Japanese inner self that holds on to tradition and the belief that the war was a "sacred cause that, unfortunately, Japan lost." (McCormack, 236) This division of the inner and outer selves, again, is interesting and helpful in bringing out different aspects of Japanese thinking, but not entirely correct. From Dower's work we learn that not all Japanese think alike: after all, many embraced the liberal constitution drafted by the American occupational force and many still do in Japan today, which is why it has never been revised since its inception in 1947. McCormack also comments on the aspects of the Tokyo War Trial that were, to say the least, unsatisfactory: the flaws in the trials of Class B and C war criminals, and the absence of any indictments of Japanese crimes against the Koreans and the Chinese. (McCormack, 237-238) The cover up of the war crimes such as the germ experiments of Unit 731 meant "obfuscation and displacement of responsibility from higher to lower) and led to confusion surrounding the issue of war responsibility and war compensation that has lasted till this day.(McCormack, 239-240)

More than previous readings, McCormack's chapter details the various aspects of "forgotten" memory of the war on the part of the Japanese government. Moreover, he points out that sometimes this historical amnesia was caused by a covert alliance between conservatives in Japan and the United States, such as in the proposed exhibit of Enola Gay, the American airplane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on April 6, 1945, together with graphic remains from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the Smithsonian Institution in 1995, which, due to the protests of the National Air Force Association and the American Legion, was cancelled in 1994.(McCormack, 241-247) Just as Emperor Hirohito accepted the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as no different from conventional warfare, so the U.S. justified the use of A-bombs as part of a conventional war. Such claims ran against protest groups in both the U.S. and Japan that the use of the A-bombs went beyond the conventional.

McCormack also covers other areas of "forgotten memory," such as the "comfort women" drafted to be military prostitutes, forced Chinese and Korean labor during the war, germ warfare, the issue of displaced Japanese children left behind in China, Korea, etc., displaced Asian laborers drafted by the Japanese during the war, and the issue of compensation to the countries Japan invaded. All these issues received minimal or no settlement during the Tokyo War trials, or even met with flat denial (such as germ warfare). The ultimate question is historical memory, which McCormack claims the Japanese government has consistently tried to shape in the postwar years, one of denial of Japanese wrong during the war.b