Not giving a speech has not mattered so much in Japan for a long time. The August 15 80th anniversary of defeat and the September 2 80th commemoration of formal surrender came and went with no fresh prime ministerial statement about Japan and World War II. Then, on September 7, Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru resigned.
As many readers will know, a prime ministerial statement (談話) differs from other speeches because it is determined by cabinet decision and is politically binding, to reflect the will of the government. In theory, its words could stand from one administration to the next. In 1995, former Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi installed this path for official reflection on Japan’s war and empire during that year’s 50th anniversary remembrances. His August 15 speech established the Japanese government’s benchmark for its efforts at apologizing, atoning, reconciling, and taking responsibility for the devastation Japan caused in the Asia-Pacific theater of World War II. Two updated statements have appeared since: former Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro’s 2005 modifications that opened consideration of Japan’s militarized peace-keeping efforts abroad as not incompatible with the country’s atonement for the past; and former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s 2015 Alice Through the Looking Glass rewrite that suggested among other things that Koreans took “encouragement” as an outcome of the 1905 Russo-Japanese War (Korea was awarded as a war spoil to Japan as a result of this conflict).
To be fair, on August 15 of this year former Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru did give a speech at the National Memorial for War Dead that resuscitated Murayama’s term “remorse” (last used in 2012 by former Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko) and re-pledged that Japan would “never again wage war.” These two acts of verbal gymnastics laid bare Ishiba’s divergence from former Prime Minister Abe who erased these expressions in his “fun with facts” approach and from Ishiba’s fellow Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) members who continue to support Abe posthumously.
As for Ishiba, moreover, a week earlier on August 6 at the Hiroshima ceremony commemorating America’s 1945 nuclear attack on the city, he offered meaningful personal reflection, and to the surprise of many, intoned Shoda Shione’s short poem engraved on a monument to teachers at the Peace Memorial: “ The heavy bone must be a teacher’s. The small skulls beside it must be students gathered around.” He then went off script and recited the poem a second time.
Following this, many anticipated that the prime minister would deliver his own new statement by September 2, if only because beginning last spring Ishiba reportedly “often told close associates that this anniversary will almost certainly be the last major milestone year before the war generation fades into history.”
Former Prime Minister Ishiba’s resignation draws focus to how not making a statement matters. An English friend explained, “It’s as if the queen failed to give her speech at 3pm on Christmas Day.” I reminded them that England now has a king, but the point is spot on: for Japanese society, since the first such statement in 1995, the content of these words has come to surpass the Japanese emperor’s New Year’s Day messaging in terms of defining the nation and its place in the world. Ishiba’s speeches on August 6 and August 15 indicate thoughtful reflection on his part. That said — and especially in light of his forced resignation — the absence of a cabinet approved statement demonstrates these governmental markers for what they are now and moving forward: expressions that succumb to the “ruse of history,” in Harry Hartoonian’s words. They are empty verbal shells that recount a necessary story for present purposes rather than addressing the inconvenience of violence in the past.
The cards have been stacked against Prime Minister Ishiba since he took office on October 1, 2024, making it questionable from the start whether his cabinet would have the power to issue a statement on behalf of the nation. Not radical by any means, but not part of former Prime Minister Abe’s cabal, the long-standing hereditary parliamentarian, party leader, and former defense minister is paradoxically regarded as “dovish” on matters of war. Fast forward to the ruling LDP’s significant losses in the July 20, 2025 upper house elections compared with solid gains by the upstart xenophobic, racist, misogynistic Sanseito “Japanese First” party, and Team Abe members openly began calling for Ishiba’s resignation. Collectively, they continue to lick their chops at any whiff of a vulnerable Japan — meaning an honest Japan — and have cornered Ishiba to the extent he chose to say nothing new at what might have been the most momentous moment of his career. All this, in the context of what Norma Field eloquently explains as, “August in Japan. The skies are brilliant, the air is heavy with the souls of the dead.”
Counterfactual history is great as fantasy, yet less so as analysis. But we don’t have to play “what if” games with Ishiba because of the March 2025 speech he gave on Iwoto when he visited there together with U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (apparently now Secretary of War). There he quoted from Abe’s statement and expanded on it with a pointed reflection that crosses party lines in Japan (not to mention divisions within the LDP). Echoing nations around the world, Ishiba underscored that it is a “national responsibility” to bring back to Japan as many as possible of the tens if not hundreds of thousands abandoned remains of Japanese soldiers still scattered throughout the former areas of the Japanese empire. Into relief is the questioning so many Japanese continue to have about their nation’s rationale for waging such a disastrous and unwinnable war. Additionally, Ishiba has written numerous books about his understanding of the meaning of national defense that include anecdotes that continue to shape his view of Japan’s responsibility for the past and for its place in the world.
On a personal note in closing, I am writing this brief essay while in Singapore. It is revealing to me that, according to Ishiba, Singapore’s powerful founding leader Lee Kuan Yew is the one who drove home to him the history of Japan at war outside the nation’s borders. In his memoirs, Lee recounted that whenever Japanese dignitaries visited him he would first remind them that Japanese soldiers once occupied the room in which they now sat and then would detail the specific horrors of the February 1942 Sook Ching Massacre, a history many had not learned about before, involving Japan’s slaughter of tens of thousands of unarmed Chinese boys and men in the still-then British colony.
Lee Kuan Yew was no more a pacifist than former Prime Minister Ishiba, who makes clear he would not run from an actual enemy attack on Japan (making him among the only 9 percent of Japanese who state they would defend their country if attacked). Also clear is that Ishiba understands the power of words as potentially divisive weapons — something the fear mongering Sanseito members and the fantasy footballers in the LDP’s “Abe wanna be” crowd regard with disdain and derision. Similar populist impulses around the world suggest Ishiba’s strategy is smart: hate speech disguised as history gets no one anywhere. The challenge moving forward is to dignify the suffering of the generation who experienced so much suffering on behalf of the nation before they die.
References (in order of appearance in article):
Statement by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. August 14, 2015. https://japan.kantei.go.jp/97_abe/statement/201508/0814statement.html
Address by Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony. August 6, 2025. https://japan.kantei.go.jp/103/statement/202508/06hiroshima.html
Kohei Morioka. “Ishiba’s deep interest in war, security reflected in Aug. 15 speech”. Asahi Shimbun. August 16, 2025. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15968978
Harry Harootunian. History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life. (Columbia University Press, 2002). https://cup.columbia.edu/book/historys-disquiet/9780231117951/
硫黄島戦没者慰霊追悼顕彰式 石破内閣総理大臣 追悼の辞 （令和７年３月２９日）https://www.mofa.go.jp/files/100822278.pdf
Norma Field. In the Realm of a Dying Emperor. (Penguin Random House, 1993). https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4839325
Bernd Debusmann Jr. “Trump rebrands Department of Defense as Department of War.” BBC. September 5, 2025. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgr9r4qr0ppo
Shigeru Ishiba. National defense (Paperback Bunko, 2011) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12379734-kokub
“Ishiba reinstates ‘remorse,’ word dropped by Abe, at war memorial”. Asahi Shimbun. August 15, 2025. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15967893
Lee Kuan Yew. From Third World to First. (HarperCollins, 2000) https://archive.org/details/fromthirdworldto00leek
Kevin Blackburn. “The Collective Memory of the Sook Ching Massacre and the Creation of the Civilian War Memorial of Singapore”. Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. Vol. 73, No. 2 (279) (2000), pp. 71-90. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41493428
Hiroshi Hiyama. “Pacifist Japan struggles to boost troops as China anxiety grows”. Japan Today. August 31, 2025. https://japantoday.com/category/national/pacifist-japan-struggles-to-boost-troops-as-china-anxiety-grows
