"Subsequently, the Japanese people experienced a variety of vicissitudes and were involved in international disputes, eventually, for the first time in their history, experiencing the horrors of modern warfare on their own soil during World War II"
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The sentence performs the classic politician’s trick: it narrates catastrophe in the passive voice, sanding down culpability until history feels like weather. “Subsequently” and “eventually” turn a chain of choices into an inevitable slide. “Vicissitudes” is the key euphemism - a word that can cover everything from economic hardship to imperial expansion without naming any actor or decision. Even “were involved in international disputes” implies entanglement, not initiative.
Eisaku Sato, speaking as a postwar Japanese leader, is working inside the constraints of memory politics. Japan in the 1960s and early 1970s was rebuilding prosperity under the US security umbrella while managing domestic fights over remilitarization and constitutional pacifism. In that setting, stressing “for the first time in their history” does two things at once: it positions Japanese people as unprecedented victims of “modern warfare on their own soil,” and it quietly shifts the frame away from Japan’s own wartime violence abroad. The emphasis on the homeland experience also anticipates the moral authority Japan often claimed in nuclear diplomacy - Sato himself accepted the Nobel Peace Prize and promoted the Three Non-Nuclear Principles.
The intent isn’t to deny World War II’s brutality; it’s to curate a usable national story. The subtext reads: Japan learned, at unbearable cost, what war really is, and therefore deserves a pacifist identity going forward. What makes it work rhetorically is its careful balancing act: acknowledging horror while keeping the narrative safely generalized, a kind of emotional appeal engineered to unify without reopening the most divisive questions of responsibility.
Eisaku Sato, speaking as a postwar Japanese leader, is working inside the constraints of memory politics. Japan in the 1960s and early 1970s was rebuilding prosperity under the US security umbrella while managing domestic fights over remilitarization and constitutional pacifism. In that setting, stressing “for the first time in their history” does two things at once: it positions Japanese people as unprecedented victims of “modern warfare on their own soil,” and it quietly shifts the frame away from Japan’s own wartime violence abroad. The emphasis on the homeland experience also anticipates the moral authority Japan often claimed in nuclear diplomacy - Sato himself accepted the Nobel Peace Prize and promoted the Three Non-Nuclear Principles.
The intent isn’t to deny World War II’s brutality; it’s to curate a usable national story. The subtext reads: Japan learned, at unbearable cost, what war really is, and therefore deserves a pacifist identity going forward. What makes it work rhetorically is its careful balancing act: acknowledging horror while keeping the narrative safely generalized, a kind of emotional appeal engineered to unify without reopening the most divisive questions of responsibility.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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