A series of articles in the Aug. 1 edition of The Big Issue Japan, a biweekly magazine sold by homeless people, is addressed "to adults who have never known war." Few major powers, past or present, can equal Japan in that regard. Sixty-five years of peace in a bellicose world have turned war in this country into a fading memory, fading all the faster due to the education system's tendency to avoid the issues raised by the last war. No Japanese under 65 has "known war"; none under 80 is likely to have fought in one. Few under 50 can even imagine such a thing.

It is unimaginable enough. The name Norman Angell resonates feebly today, but exactly 100 years ago he wrote a best-seller called "The Great Illusion." The illusion was victory. It was no longer possible, he argued. The cost and destruction of war had risen to such a pitch that even the winner lost. War, he wrote, had become mass suicide — hence, an anachronism.

Four years later World War I broke out, proving him right as to suicide, wrong as to anachronism. World War I was dubbed "the war to end all wars." World War II happened anyway, and the fact that war as an institution survived the disgust and horror of that mass bloodletting might lead a pessimist to conclude that war is immortal.