More than 60 years ago, Japan experienced the horrors of nuclear bombardment, and every year ceremonies are held to recall those terrible events that the whole world would wish never to recur. Shortly after the two bombs were dropped, Japan concluded a long war that it had conducted ‘in self-defence and to preserve its Empire’. As well as the soldiers killed in action, 14 of the men responsible for the war are honoured in the Yasukuni shrine. Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Yasukuni are today far more than memorial sites, painful for all Japanese: they mark a borderline in their twentieth-century history, and are still determinant in their major political decisions.

In the nineteenth century no other Asian country had managed to abandon a feudal political system so rapidly, and in a few decades to catch up on the West and become a modern state. Japan was then, like Korea and China, a sort of hermit kingdom, sealed within its frontiers, until the Western powers forced them to open their ports to foreign vessels. This coercive opening-up stirred Japanese patriotism, a mixture of the Samurai code and Emperor-worship, and this unbending patriotism allowed Japan to maintain its independence, by accelerating the modernisation process. In 1945 Japanese patriotism, associated with militarism, was condemned by the American occupying power, and the vanquished, deprived of their national myths, took refuge in the past. Whereas in the nineteenth century Japan succeeded in liberating itself effortlessly from several centuries of history in order to move more rapidly into the modern era, nowadays it is paralysed by passionate attachment to its past, as though it has become a prisoner of its own history.

The Japanese are not alone in being prisoners of their history, blaming endless squabbles with their neighbours on Fate. Greeks and Turks, Israelis and Palestinians, Indians and Pakistanis, etc. Some hereditary enemies, like the Poles and the Russians, or the Germans and the French, have managed to break out of the vicious cycle of massacre. After three wars, two of them World Wars, Germans and French at last understood that to build Europe they had to become reconciled and form an entity of two countries united once and for all. An important step in the reconciliation process came with the tranquilising of a turbulent past, thanks to the work of historians who showed that errors were made on both banks of the Rhine.