JAPAN
16 October 2025
War responsibility across borders and generations
From Imperial Japan to Israel, how context shapes moral duty in wartime, writes Kumiharu Shigehara
The question of war responsibility has never been, for me, an abstraction. It has lived in the hollow left by my father, a Japanese schoolteacher pressed into service and sent to the battlefields of Okinawa. He was not a soldier by profession, nor a man inclined to war. He taught children, tended to family and then was taken by conscription into a conflict he did not choose. He died there, in a place he had never imagined, and with his death I inherited a lifelong burden: What responsibility do ordinary people bear when they are swept into war’s undertow?
The Asia-Pacific War is most often remembered through the culpability of generals and admirals, of politicians, and inevitably of Emperor Showa himself. But to stop at the summit of power is to overlook the multitudes who filled the ranks below: Farmers and merchants, students and teachers, drawn into and carried along by the currents of militarism.
My father was one of them. His story has never allowed me to forget that ordinary people can be both victims and participants — at once coerced and complicit, silenced yet implicated.
When I look now toward the Middle East and to the lives of ordinary Israeli citizens, I find myself returning to that same troubling question. The historical contexts are profoundly different, yet the parallels unsettle me. Wartime Japan was an authoritarian state, centralized and unyielding, where dissent was all but crushed. Teachers like my father were given no choice; they were drafted, mobilized and silenced. Responsibility in such a world cannot be separated from the weight of coercion.
Israel, by contrast, is a democracy. Its citizens choose their leaders, lend support or opposition, march in protest or in approval. Their responsibility is therefore heavier, for they hold the franchise of decision. And yet, here too, coercion lurks in other forms: the fear of rockets, the grief after Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli men, women and children on Oct. 7, 2023, the inexorable call of compulsory service.
My father’s path to the battlefield was imposed upon him; the path of Israeli citizens is bound by law and by family ties, by the pervasive sense that survival itself demands sacrifice. In both cases, ordinary people find themselves entangled in wars whose origins they did not script yet whose consequences they cannot escape.
To equate Japan in the 1940s with Israel today would be false; as noted earlier, one was an imperial autocracy and the other is a modern democracy. But both reveal the tragedy of citizens carried by the tide of war. Responsibility in such circumstances is never total, never absent — it is uneven, layered and morally fraught. It becomes an inheritance that lingers long after the guns fall silent.
And the circle widens still further. Wars in the Middle East do not stop at Israel’s borders; their echoes reach synagogues in Paris, schools in New York, neighborhoods in Buenos Aires. Jews who are not citizens of Israel do not vote in its elections, nor serve in its institutions, but they carry bonds of memory and identity that make indifference impossible. For them, the question is not whether responsibility exists, but how it ought to be lived.
Political responsibility belongs to citizens. Jews abroad have none. Yet moral responsibility flows along other lines: through history, kinship and the sense that Israel is not merely a state among others, but a homeland, fragile and contested. In times of war, this bond sharpens into pain, demanding some form of response.
At moments of peril, one role is clear: solidarity. To say to families in Tel Aviv or Ashkelon, Israel, that they are not alone, that the Jewish people in its dispersion stands with them, matters deeply. And when antisemitism rises elsewhere in the world, as it so often does when the Middle East burns, such solidarity becomes protective as well as symbolic, helping Jewish communities abroad to endure the backlash.
But solidarity, if it is to be worthy of the name, cannot mean silence in the face of wrong. Precisely because they are not under the immediate shadow of rockets or grief, Jews abroad retain the capacity to speak with conscience. They can remind Israel that Jewish tradition, born of exile and suffering, demands not only survival but also justice, restraint and compassion.
This responsibility grows sharper still when Israeli retaliation takes the lives of Palestinian civilians in disproportionate numbers. The Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israeli citizens was an unspeakable crime. Yet the subsequent bombing campaigns, when they fall upon women, children and the defenseless, present Jews abroad with a painful dilemma: how to affirm kinship with Israel while refusing to close their eyes to Palestinian suffering. To bear witness here is not betrayal; it is fidelity to a deeper command — that innocent life is sacred, whether Jewish or Palestinian.
From their vantage point in free societies, Jews abroad can do more than lament. They can act as citizens of their own countries, pressing their governments to insist on proportionality, to uphold international humanitarian law, to push for ceasefire and diplomacy. They can work to disentangle Jewish identity from automatic endorsement of military policy, thus defending their communities against prejudice while preserving moral credibility. And they can build bridges in their own towns and cities with Palestinians and others, creating spaces of dialogue that resist the polarization war seeks to impose.
I think often of the contrast with my father. He had no freedom. He was taken, silenced and destroyed in a war he did not author. Jews outside Israel, by contrast, live in free societies. They can write, protest, dissent and advocate. Their responsibility is not one of coerced complicity, but of chosen engagement — how they use their freedom to face wars that affect their people without binding their citizenship.
From Okinawa to Gaza, from conscripted citizens in Imperial Japan to voters in modern Israel, and outward still to Jews abroad, the question of war responsibility takes many forms. It is conditioned always by context, by the degree of coercion or freedom, by the ties of identity that bind individuals to states and peoples.
To be a citizen in wartime is to walk the narrow line between complicity and coercion. To be a Jew outside Israel is to live with dual responsibility: to one’s people and to the larger human family. Holding both together is neither simple nor comfortable. Yet perhaps it is in that very discomfort — in the refusal to relinquish either solidarity or conscience — that the truest form of responsibility is found.
The author, Kumiharu Shigehara, president of the International Economic Policy Studies Association in Paris, is a former chief economist of the Bank of Japan and deputy secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. He is the author of “The Bank of Japan, the OECD, and Beyond” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).
The Asia-Pacific War is most often remembered through the culpability of generals and admirals, of politicians, and inevitably of Emperor Showa himself. But to stop at the summit of power is to overlook the multitudes who filled the ranks below: Farmers and merchants, students and teachers, drawn into and carried along by the currents of militarism.
My father was one of them. His story has never allowed me to forget that ordinary people can be both victims and participants — at once coerced and complicit, silenced yet implicated.
When I look now toward the Middle East and to the lives of ordinary Israeli citizens, I find myself returning to that same troubling question. The historical contexts are profoundly different, yet the parallels unsettle me. Wartime Japan was an authoritarian state, centralized and unyielding, where dissent was all but crushed. Teachers like my father were given no choice; they were drafted, mobilized and silenced. Responsibility in such a world cannot be separated from the weight of coercion.
Israel, by contrast, is a democracy. Its citizens choose their leaders, lend support or opposition, march in protest or in approval. Their responsibility is therefore heavier, for they hold the franchise of decision. And yet, here too, coercion lurks in other forms: the fear of rockets, the grief after Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli men, women and children on Oct. 7, 2023, the inexorable call of compulsory service.
My father’s path to the battlefield was imposed upon him; the path of Israeli citizens is bound by law and by family ties, by the pervasive sense that survival itself demands sacrifice. In both cases, ordinary people find themselves entangled in wars whose origins they did not script yet whose consequences they cannot escape.
To equate Japan in the 1940s with Israel today would be false; as noted earlier, one was an imperial autocracy and the other is a modern democracy. But both reveal the tragedy of citizens carried by the tide of war. Responsibility in such circumstances is never total, never absent — it is uneven, layered and morally fraught. It becomes an inheritance that lingers long after the guns fall silent.
And the circle widens still further. Wars in the Middle East do not stop at Israel’s borders; their echoes reach synagogues in Paris, schools in New York, neighborhoods in Buenos Aires. Jews who are not citizens of Israel do not vote in its elections, nor serve in its institutions, but they carry bonds of memory and identity that make indifference impossible. For them, the question is not whether responsibility exists, but how it ought to be lived.
Political responsibility belongs to citizens. Jews abroad have none. Yet moral responsibility flows along other lines: through history, kinship and the sense that Israel is not merely a state among others, but a homeland, fragile and contested. In times of war, this bond sharpens into pain, demanding some form of response.
At moments of peril, one role is clear: solidarity. To say to families in Tel Aviv or Ashkelon, Israel, that they are not alone, that the Jewish people in its dispersion stands with them, matters deeply. And when antisemitism rises elsewhere in the world, as it so often does when the Middle East burns, such solidarity becomes protective as well as symbolic, helping Jewish communities abroad to endure the backlash.
But solidarity, if it is to be worthy of the name, cannot mean silence in the face of wrong. Precisely because they are not under the immediate shadow of rockets or grief, Jews abroad retain the capacity to speak with conscience. They can remind Israel that Jewish tradition, born of exile and suffering, demands not only survival but also justice, restraint and compassion.
This responsibility grows sharper still when Israeli retaliation takes the lives of Palestinian civilians in disproportionate numbers. The Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israeli citizens was an unspeakable crime. Yet the subsequent bombing campaigns, when they fall upon women, children and the defenseless, present Jews abroad with a painful dilemma: how to affirm kinship with Israel while refusing to close their eyes to Palestinian suffering. To bear witness here is not betrayal; it is fidelity to a deeper command — that innocent life is sacred, whether Jewish or Palestinian.
From their vantage point in free societies, Jews abroad can do more than lament. They can act as citizens of their own countries, pressing their governments to insist on proportionality, to uphold international humanitarian law, to push for ceasefire and diplomacy. They can work to disentangle Jewish identity from automatic endorsement of military policy, thus defending their communities against prejudice while preserving moral credibility. And they can build bridges in their own towns and cities with Palestinians and others, creating spaces of dialogue that resist the polarization war seeks to impose.
I think often of the contrast with my father. He had no freedom. He was taken, silenced and destroyed in a war he did not author. Jews outside Israel, by contrast, live in free societies. They can write, protest, dissent and advocate. Their responsibility is not one of coerced complicity, but of chosen engagement — how they use their freedom to face wars that affect their people without binding their citizenship.
From Okinawa to Gaza, from conscripted citizens in Imperial Japan to voters in modern Israel, and outward still to Jews abroad, the question of war responsibility takes many forms. It is conditioned always by context, by the degree of coercion or freedom, by the ties of identity that bind individuals to states and peoples.
To be a citizen in wartime is to walk the narrow line between complicity and coercion. To be a Jew outside Israel is to live with dual responsibility: to one’s people and to the larger human family. Holding both together is neither simple nor comfortable. Yet perhaps it is in that very discomfort — in the refusal to relinquish either solidarity or conscience — that the truest form of responsibility is found.
Acknowledgements
This article was first published by the Japan Times on 12 September 2025.The author, Kumiharu Shigehara, president of the International Economic Policy Studies Association in Paris, is a former chief economist of the Bank of Japan and deputy secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. He is the author of “The Bank of Japan, the OECD, and Beyond” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).