My post wasn’t the clearest and I appreciate you trying to understand my point.
Japan did outright evil things during the war, killing millions upon millions of civilians throughout Asia. As a country, the military, individual commanders and individual soldiers committed widespread atrocities.
IMHO, Germany did worse because they set out with the deliberate intention of massacring millions.
In addition, the civilians Japanese civilians were not as culpable in the atrocities as German civilians.
Coming back to the question of how contemporary Japanese view the war, you have to understand that almost everyone just wanted it to be over and done with. The soldiers came back and remained silent; most until their death, with only a few speaking out after they were old men.
A few people were charged with directing the war; a number (wiki says 5,700) lower ranked personnel were charged with conventional war crimes; the military was disbanded; Japan occupied; a new constitution implemented and then the country set about rebuilding itself.
Those who lived through the war simply did not pass along the stories to their children. I never directly talked to anyway who was an adult during the war, but did have many conversations with those who had been children during the war.
On one occasion, I went to see The Day After, released in Japan as a feature film, with a friend in Nagasaki. She has been a young girl when the bomb had been dropped. Both the parents of my ex-wife had been in the firebombings of Tokyo. My former mother-in-law grew up in shitamachi, and survived the Great Tokyo Air Raid. They fled in one direction, their neighbors fled in another and didn’t survive. My former father-in-law grew up in another section of Tokyo and had one of the napalm bomblets drop into their crude bomb shelter on another one of the raids. As the oldest son he picked it up and threw it out into the street, where it exploded.
Often, when having those conversations, the children of these survivors had never heard the stories until they listened while I was talked to their parents. While these people would tell tell accounts of what happened, they never went into how they felt about it.
Japanese are stoic. They endured the unendurable; they quietly picked themselves up and rebuilt their country into what became for a while the second largest economy in the world. If they had been Allies instead of the Enemy, these civilians would have been looked upon has heroes, much in the same way Americans look at the British for surviving the Blitz.
