On Dec. 7, 1941, 353 Japanese planes launched from six aircraft carriers destroyed most of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. That morning, 2,402 American servicemen were killed. Until Sept. 11, 2001, this was the highest number of casualties in an attack on the United States.

But 67 years and three generations later, memory fades. And some Japanese are actively trying to rewrite their country's history.

Just over a month ago, the head of Japan's Air Force, Gen. Toshio Tamogami, was fired by Prime Minister Taro Aso after he entered and won the grand prize in a history essay contest in which he advanced some very interesting ideas. Among other things, Gen. Tamogami wrote that President Franklin Roosevelt entrapped Japan into carrying out Pearl Harbor, that Japan never waged a war of aggression, and if Japan had not fought the war it may have very well become "a white nation's colony."

This would be news to the more than 15 million Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos and others who died at the hands of the Japanese.

To be fair, Gen. Tamogami is not alone in his views. Many members of Japan's military have chaffed under the restraints imposed on it by its own constitution, which allows Japan to only maintain a self-defense force. Under the umbrella of U.S. protection since 1945, this has also helped Japan save billions of dollars in defense costs -- money that went into Japanese education, industry and infrastructure.

But the prohibition against having a military like other nations has frustrated officers who are deeply connected to the warrior tradition in their culture. It's no accident that of the 230 essayists who entered the now infamous contest, as many as 94 served under Gen. Tamogami.

Since 1945, Japan has apologized to other Asian nations, but it has also stressed the devastation of the atomic bombs in its own history lessons and paid insufficient attention to what led up to that event.

Japan is hardly alone in rewriting history. Practically every country involved in World War II has developed its own version of the story. In Russia, the telling of what they call "the Great Patriotic War" never deals with the Hitler-Stalin Pact or the debacle that caught the Soviet Union off guard when the Germans broke the deal and marched all the way to Moscow.

The Germans have been honest in their culpability: Students continue to take field trips to concentration camps. But the Austrians still have the audacity to call themselves the "first victims of Nazism" and conveniently forget the two million Austrians that cheered wildly for Hitler on his return to Vienna.

The worst case of historical revisionism I ever witnessed was actually in the museum connected to the Chiang Kai-shek memorial in Taipei, where the lesson of World War II comes down to this: The nationalist Chinese valiantly fought the Japanese and eventually defeated them, while the communists under Mao Zedong did little fighting and simply horded weapons (it was the other way around). And what was the involvement of the United States? The U.S. sold oil to the Japanese. Period.

America has its revisionists of course. Holocaust deniers tell us the Nazi death camps never actually existed. In a recent bestseller by Pat Buchanan, we learn that it was really Winston Churchill who pushed World War II on the world. Another book by Nicholson Baker tells us the true heroes of the war were not the young Americans and Englishmen who died fighting, but the pacifists who refused to allow their humanity to be destroyed. Even director Clint Eastwood showed us in "Letters From Iwo Jima" that there was very little difference between Japanese soldiers (an army of conquest) and U.S. Marines (a force of liberation).

In some cases, this comes from a moral equivalence that has taken hold of our collective mind. In other cases, it's much darker.

News of Gen. Tamogami's essay did not sit well in Beijing, with its own expanding military, or in Seoul. And his quick ouster did much to quiet things down. Prime Minister Aso understands that memories of the Japanese onslaught throughout the region are still fresh in the minds of many Asians. In any given month in the first half of 1945, upwards of 250,000 Asians were dying at the hands of Japanese. That's no longer war: It's genocide.

But in September of 1945, the number dropped to zero when the Japanese were finally forced to surrender. The end of that horrible conflict did not come about because of a change of heart: The war ended only because the Axis powers were soundly and utterly defeated. Probably not a bad place to restart the history lesson.

Mr. Kozak is the author of the forthcoming book, "LeMay: The Life and Wars of Curtis LeMay," to be published next May by Regnery.


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