SOURCE: Bix, Herbert P. “How Japan and Germany Remember Their Military Pasts.” Christian Science Monitor (27 July 1994): 13.

In the following review, Bix summarizes Buruma's historical perspective in The Wages of Guilt and objects to Buruma's criticism of the Nuremberg and Tokyo war trials.

In 1990, when George Bush opted for war in the Persian Gulf, the governments of Japan and newly unified Germany were criticized in the United States for hiding behind their peace constitutions and providing money but not troops for the allied effort.

The new economic superpowers (so the argument went) had drawn the wrong lessons from their past failures and had resisted American importuning on the use of military force. How reliable could they be in managing future crises when they were so distrustful of themselves? Was it not time for them to separate history and memory?

Journalist Ian Buruma never poses that question directly, though it...