[In the following excerpt, Ford compliments Buruma's central argument in The Wages of Guilt.]

After all but half a century of hegemonic rule, Japan is in a state of rapid flux. The old Liberal Democratic Party, Jiminto—in power since the war apart from a Socialist interlude in 1947-48—is no more. A conjuncture of corruption, the end of the cold war and the passage of time has seen an edifice crumble. After two brief opposition administrations of Socialists, LDP dissidents and the rest, we currently have a Tony Benn-style prime minister kept in power by the Jiminto equivalents of Margaret Thatcher and Michael Portillo. No one expects this to last longer than a few months, before it in its turn is replaced.

The past decade has seen the slow emergence of a more outward-looking, self-confident generation of Japanese politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen. They no longer feel constrained by the Great East Asia War or its aftermath. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, America's security umbrella is no longer needed. It has stopped raining.

The front men for the new politics have been Hosokawa Morimoro and Hata Tsutomu. The third man, behind the throne, is a political boss of the old school, Osawa Ishiro. He has found a new faith. He wants Japan to become a “normal” country that can take its rightful place on the world stage: a country that, as the second most powerful economy in the world, can become a member of the UN Security Council and, most controversially, a country with the world's third largest defence budget which can send military forces to serve abroad. Both of these books, in their different ways, address this issue. …

Yet is Japan so unique? The Wages of Guilt details the evasions in both Germany and Japan. Ian Buruma has looked deeply into how the vanquished and their children have tried to come to terms with their history. For some in Germany, there is only room for a cigarette paper between Nazi Germany and Stasi Germany. The Communists, after all, had used Buchenwald for the first five years after the war as a camp for Nazis. Thousands died there and were buried in mass graves.

Germany committed the crime of omission. Too many said nothing and too few resisted. But at least, in Nuremberg, crimes against humanity were punished. Japan, in contrast, endured what was seen as victor's justice. In Japanese eyes, it wasn't Nanking, the Bataan death march or the bridge on the River Kwai that attracted punishment. Rather, it was losing. The Tokyo war crimes tribunal was choreographed to airbrush Hirohito out of the picture. Then Admiral Tojo put a foot wrong, saying “none of us would dare to act against the Emperor's will.” A week later, he recanted, saying the emperor had opposed the war even after hostilities had commenced.

The Japanese crimes, and General MacArthur's mistakes, were overshadowed by the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaka. Yet reading Buruma makes it clear that we cannot expect to keep Japan and Germany feeling guilty forever. After two generations, they must be released from quarantine, to become normal countries.

If we want a Japan or a Germany with few military forces, we should argue from general principles, not their specific cases. To do otherwise is to create a German problem for the future, and a greater likelihood of Harvey's Japan. The cure may be worse than the disease.