80 Years since End of WWII: Continue Considering Ways to Face Unsolved Challenges

Editorial

15:14 JST, December 26, 2025

The milestone year marking 80 years since the end of World War II is drawing to a close. Yet many unresolved issues remain. It is hoped, going forward, that all members of the public will continue to consider how to address the feelings of those afflicted by the war and the families of the dead.

This year, memorial services for about 3.1 million war dead, including civilians who perished in air raids and atomic bombings, were held in various parts of the country. Participants in these events renewed their pledges for peace, vowing never to repeat the horrors of war.

Concerns are growing over fading war memories as the number of survivors is decreasing and surviving family members are aging. Furthermore, unresolved issues still persist.

A nonpartisan group of Diet members aimed to pass a relief bill as lawmaker-initiated legislation during the extraordinary Diet session in autumn to aid civilian air raid victims and others, but submission of the bill has been postponed.

The bill aims to provide a lump-sum payment of ¥500,000 to living survivors who suffered physical or mental disabilities due to the war. However, it failed to gain consensus, partly due to the view that “postwar compensation is a matter that has been settled.”

About ¥60 trillion has been provided to former military personnel and civilian workers for the military, among others, since the end of the war as pensions and in other forms. But most civilians, with the exception of some including atomic bomb survivors, have not been compensated, leaving those people and surviving families with complex feelings.

In Setagaya Ward, Tokyo, an ordinance was enacted in December to provide relief payments to air raid victims. The Nagoya and Hamamatsu municipal governments also provide their own relief money. However, relief for war victims is fundamentally an issue that should be debated by the central government and at the Diet.

In addition, the government’s projects to mourn those sacrificed in the war are only half done.

Regarding projects to collect remains of the war dead, three sets of remains recovered from a mass burial site on Peleliu Island in Palau, a fierce battleground between Japanese and American forces, were identified as being Japanese for the first time this year. However, there is little prospect for completing the collection of the estimated 590,000 sets of remains from the war overall that could be recovered.

It is also taking considerable time to identify soldiers who died during detention in Siberia by the former Soviet Union and clarify the circumstances of their lives there.

Individual survivors and surviving families are concerned that public interest in the projects is waning. Efforts must be accelerated to respond to their desire to see the remains of the war dead collected while these concerned parties are still alive.

The dispersal of war-related documents must also be prevented. There are not sufficient storage places for materials that have been collected by university researchers and private museums, but which have not been preserved by facilities such as the National Archives of Japan.

This situation could hinder research activities as well as activities for handing down war memories to future generations. In some cases, these materials end up in the possession of research institutes and others in China and South Korea. The possibility has been pointed out that these countries might interpret Japanese materials to suit their own convenience and use them for propaganda on historical issues.

It is hoped that the central government will advance efforts to grasp the actual situation of such materials and consider measures to prevent the outflow of materials that should be kept within Japan.

(From The Yomiuri Shimbun, Dec. 26, 2025)