Just 67 years ago, Imperial Japanese Navy aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor in Oahu and sank four battleships and other vessels of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, killing some 2,400 Americans. This attack and the landing — one hour earlier — of Imperial Japanese Army units on Malay Peninsula expanded Japan's war front to Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The war brought suffering to millions of Asians and eventually reduced Japan to nearly total destruction. Despite the historical significance of those events nearly 70 years ago, Dec. 8 usually passes rather quietly as another business-as-usual day.

This year, however, most Japanese were reminded of the Pearl Harbor attack by the former Air Self-Defense Force chief of staff, Toshio Tamogami. In a controversial essay that led to his retirement from the ASDF, he wrote that "Japan was entangled in the mesh of a plot hatched by (U.S. President Franklin D.) Roosevelt and carried out the Pearl Harbor attack." He also wrote that "Japan was a victim dragged into the Sino-Japanese War by Chiang Kai-shek," who he said "was driven by Comintern."

Conspiracy theories like these crop up time and again but are refuted by serious scholars. They blur the true nature of Japan's war. It should be remembered that Japan's military aggression in China, from the early 1930s on, formed the background for Japan's war with the United States, Britain and other countries.