Two hours outside Osaka, Japan, a dozen men gather around a campfire cooking rice and pickled fish in vintage Second World War mess tins – the same rations their grandfathers ate while at the front to fight American GIs and occupy Southeast Asia. Amid marching drills and machine gun training, the men proudly show off their 80-year-old original uniforms. Replicas are frowned upon.
To many in neighbouring Asian countries, the legacy these Osaka Imperial Army and Navy re-enactors are trying to preserve is controversial, offensive and even sinister. In Germany, such activities would be illegal. But as Japan marks the 80th anniversary of its defeat in the Second World War and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this history continues to play a significant role in Japan’s modern identity.
A uniformed man gives orders as members of the Osaka Imperial Army and Navy Reenactors Group take part in a rifle-training exercise: Photo: Christopher Bobyn.
Reckoning with defeat
Historical re-enactments take place regularly across Japan, attracting participants from all walks of life who dress up in imperial army, navy and kamikaze uniforms and wield weapons used to invade Manchuria and occupy the Philippines 80 years ago. The Osaka group includes a dentist, property manager and city administrator in its ranks. While the number of re-enactors in Japan is in the hundreds, the advent of social media has seen the post-war subculture grow in popularity.
The widespread acceptance of these groups reflects a broader social perception of Japan’s war record. The desire to keep a connection to this past is strong and is a primary appeal for those who participate in this eccentric pastime.
A group of re-enactors who met on social media reject the idea that their uniforms are offensive. ‘If I dressed like a Nazi today, it doesn’t mean I’m promoting Nazism. It’s cool!’ says one. Photo: Christopher Bobyn.
‘It’s an activity to prevent the past from vanishing in the future. It’s about passing on traditions,’ said Hironori Miyawaki, a 44-year-old member of the Osaka group. ‘No wonder we lost [the Second World War], our soldiers only had this rice to eat!’ says another. ‘We have to joke about it. You wouldn’t understand the mindset of a losing country.’
Japan’s defeat in 1945 still looms large in the national consciousness, in part because, unlike Germany, Japan never went through an equivalent process of ‘denazification’. As a result, the country’s reckoning with its wartime legacy is markedly different and more complicated than Germany’s.
National suffering
In schools, the war is largely taught from a perspective of victimhood, emphasizing the 2.1 million Japanese military deaths, Allied firebombing and atomic devastation, ending in humiliating occupation. While lessons acknowledge Japan’s war crimes and imperial occupations, education about the American bombings of Tokyo and the atomic bombs is often given greater prominence.
National suffering and military heroism are frequently the focus of pop culture as well, as seen in war films and anime and manga adventures. The 2024 Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One glorified Japan’s Second World War soldiers and pilots as they fought off another invading menace in the film. Meanwhile, Oppenheimer failed to find initial distribution in Japan, finally opening last year eight months after its American debut amid heavy criticism that it omitted the suffering of Hiroshima victims.
Schoolgirls sit on the banks of a waterway opposite the Hiroshima Peace Memorial,
the only original structure still standing after the first atomic bomb was dropped by the
Americans on the city. Some 65,000 people were killed instantly with a further 150,000
deaths caused over time due to radiation. Photo: Christopher Bobyn.
‘You can’t speak about the war in Japan without being the victim. It’s always from the perspective of victimhood,’ says Shun Hokazono, an international law student whose grandmother survived the Nagasaki bomb.
Between 2,600,000 and 3,100,000 Japanese were killed in the war, up to a million of whom were civilians. In the West, Japan’s war with the Allies is often the focus, but 480,000 Japanese soldiers were killed in Japan’s 1937-45 war with China, in which a staggering 15 to 20 million Chinese, both military and civilian, lost their lives.
‘Correcting’ the past
While memories of defeat and trauma still weigh heavily in Japanese society, battle reenactments allow some to revise Japan’s wartime record and reject guilt as something imposed by the victors.
‘I think it was a mistake that America and the Allied powers told us that our history was wrong. But that taboo is disappearing. We are learning the correct history now by using the internet,’ says Miyawaki-san, a member of Osaka Imperial Re-enactment group. Thanks to social media, these activities, which often cut a fine line between remembrance and revisionism, have become more mainstream.
Re-enactors take a break to dine out of vintage mess tins. Photo: Christopher Bobyn
Re-arming Japan
Masahide Kitamura, an amateur historian in Osaka who attends imperial-style ‘costume parties’ in an army officer uniform with fellow re-enactors, shares a similarly revisionist view about Japan’s imperial role which he believes emancipated Asia from European dominance.
‘I don’t think the Greater East Asia War was a good thing, but many colonies in Southeast Asia were liberated, and I think Japan did a good job in that regard,’ he says. (‘Greater East Asia War’ was the term used by Japan’s wartime government to describe and legitimize its imperialist actions.)
Attitudes like this are widespread among re-enactors and prompt many in Japanese society to worry that the country has not fully come to terms with its wartime past even as it builds up its military to prepare for an uncertain future.
Uniformed re-enactors pose outside Osaka Castle, a historical landmark that played
a key role in uniting Japan in the 16th century. Photo: Christopher Bobyn.
Japan is the only country in the world with a constitution that ‘forever renounces war’, yet increasing volatility in the region, including the escalation of North Korean missile tests and simmering Chinese aggression towards Taiwan, has encouraged this constitutionally pacifist nation to rearm. In 2022, Tokyo announced plans for its biggest military build-up since the Second World War, pledging to double defence spending to 2 per cent of its GDP.
This led to a new US–Japan military pact unveiled in 2024, the biggest such security deal since the 1960s. In October 2024, Shigeru Ishiba, Japan’s prime minster, called for the creation of an ‘Asian Nato’ to keep China and Russia in check in the region.
