ABSTRACT
Hosokawa Morihiro, the first prime minister of the post-LDP era, held a press conference on August 10,1993, following his accession to office, and broke with precedent by referring to Japan's "aggressive war." Despite defeat, postwar reorganization, and the wealth of evidence about its nature and deeds that had emerged over the decades, Nagano's pride in the old imperial army had remained unbroken, and the punishments meted out by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, more commonly known as the Tokyo Trial, had no legitimacy. In Germany, opinion polls suggest that more than three-quarters of those born after 1945 see the end of the war as "liberation." The participation of German troops in a march down the Champs Elysées in 1994 served to demonstrate that the war wounds were slowly healing and to highlight the contrast with East Asia, where a similar event in Seoul or Peking would be unthinkable.
