ABSTRACT
Scattered media reports of Nanking denial or textbook censorship give a simplistically hostile picture of Japanese officials and government. In fact, the full story is complicated, and a fair share of the blame lies beyond Japan’s shores. Churchill’s insistence at the onset of the Cold War that ‘our policy should be to draw the sponge across the crimes and horrors of the past ... and look towards the future’ was a powerful invitation to amnesia while the personal backing of U.S. presidents of such reactionaries as Kishi and Nakasone served only to abet distortion and revisionism.
