Conservative members of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party are reportedly worried that the party’s resigned leader and country’s outgoing Prime Minister, Shigeru Ishiba, may come close to issuing the most ardent apology for Japan’s actions in World War II.
Members of Ishiba’s Administration told the Japan Times that Ishiba is weighing releasing his personal message commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II during a U.N. General Assembly meeting later this month after opting not to do so on Aug. 15, the anniversary of Japan’s surrender in 1945. The Prime Minister was reportedly concerned that sharing a message on the anniversary date itself would be too close to China’s military parade commemorating its victory in the war. Issuing a formal statement on the war would also require the support of the cabinet.
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Ishiba on Sunday announced that he is stepping down after the LDP suffered major losses in the July 20 Upper House elections.
“The Prime Minister regards his message as if it were his own will,” a source close to Ishiba told the Japan Times.
Ishiba has said that his message would raise Japan’s failure to prevent its involvement in the war—going a step further than apologizing for the consequences of the war—and discuss the necessity of preventing that from happening again. The word “remorse” had not been included in a draft for Ishiba’s speech on Aug. 15 but was reinstated after he asked about it, sources told Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, according to the South China Morning Post.
Ishiba’s predecessors have issued statements on the legacy of World War II. But conservative members of the LDP have aligned themselves with former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s message in 2015, in which he said on the 70th anniversary of the end of the war that Japan’s future generations should not be obligated to apologize for its actions in the war. A senior official told the Japan Times that Ishiba should “act so as not to cause headaches for his successor,” while Yoichi Shimada, a former LDP supporter who is now a Conservative Party of Japan member of the Lower House, told SCMP that he is “deeply concerned about the statement that Ishiba is planning to make.”
“I do not think that Ishiba has a good or full understanding of history, and I also believe that he has given in to China’s efforts to promote a mentality of ‘war guilt’ among Japanese people,” Shimada said.
Ishiba’s message would be coming as several of Japan’s worst war crimes have gained renewed public attention, with the popularity of Dead to Rights (2025), a Chinese blockbuster movie depicting the Nanjing Massacre, as well as the release of World War II military documents this year relating to Japan’s imperial biological warfare program Unit 731.
The debate over Ishiba’s message, which has been discussed not only within the LDP but also by public commentators, reveals the divide in Japan over how to remember World War II. While some of Japan’s previous leaders have expressed remorse for its wartime actions, many of the surviving victims of Japanese colonial aggression and their descendants, including some 200,000 ‘Comfort Women’ from Korea and China, as well as millions across Southeast Asia who died under Japanese occupation, have said these apologies were insufficient. Critics have also pointed to the fact that Japanese educational syllabi have long glossed over wartime atrocities like the Nanjing Massacre.
Public opinion has also been split. A 2025 survey by Asahi Shimbun found that 58% of Japanese respondents believe Japan has sufficiently apologized and provided reparations for its wartime aggression, about the same as a decade ago, while the share of respondents who believe it has not done enough rose slightly from 24% to 29%. Less than half of those surveyed by Kyodo News in 2015 considered Japan an aggressor in World War II, down from 56% in 1994. Meanwhile, a 2025 survey of Japanese youth aged 17 to 19 found that 70% almost never talk about World War II.
Ishiba may also place more importance on the formal message in light of rising right-wing populism and xenophobia in Japan. He warned in a news conference on Sunday when announcing his resignation that if the LDP loses the trust of the people, Japanese politics will easily fall prey to populism.
“I believe he is trying to blunt the more conservative elements of his party just before the members vote on their new leader,” Stephen Nagy, a professor of international relations at the International Christian University in Tokyo, told SCMP. Yet Ishiba must balance that with the interests of his party, Nagy adds: “A lot of what he is saying does not represent the position of the party, and I am sure that he would not want being ejected from the LDP to be his legacy.”
How past Japanese leaders have talked about WWII
For decades, Japan’s leaders gave tepid acknowledgments of the country’s war deeds. Emperor Hirohito said in 1971, “there are certain things which happened for which I feel personally sorry.” In 1975, he said, “It is a fact that many things happened during the war, but there were many people involved in these things or events, so I would like to refrain from talking about these things at the present time.”
In 1972, former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka in a speech in Beijing expressed regret that “for several decades in the past, the relations between Japan and China had unfortunate experiences. During that time our country gave great troubles to the Chinese people, for which I once again make profound self-examination.”
In 1992, Emperor Akihito acknowledged on a visit to China that, “In the long history of relationships between our two countries, there was an unfortunate period in which my country inflicted great suffering on the people of China. About this I feel deep sadness.”
It was not until 1993 that the Japanese government appeared to publicly take responsibility for explicit war crimes as it published a report on its wartime sex slavery. And only years later, with former Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama’s apology during his speech on the 50th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in 1995, did it become tradition for Japanese leaders to explicitly acknowledge and apologize for its colonial rule and aggression.
Other former Prime Ministers, including Junichiro Koizumi and Yoshihiko Noda, have since echoed that sentiment. Yoshihiko at the 67th anniversary in 2012 offered “profound remorse and sincere mourning for the victims of the war and their bereaved family members.”
But Abe appeared to have broken with that tradition—adding to what critics have called a “one step forward, one step backward” approach by the Japanese government. On Aug. 14, 2015, Abe said in his speech that Japan has “repeatedly expressed the feelings of deep remorse and heartfelt apology for its actions during the war.” The former Prime Minister, who was assassinated in 2022, fell short of making his own apology.
Instead, he said that Japan “must not let our children, grandchildren, and even further generations to come, who have nothing to do with that war, be predestined to apologize.”
Abe also drew controversy after denying the existence of sex slaves during the war in 2007, after which the Japanese parliament issued an apology. And although Abe offered remorse for Japan’s war crimes at a summit in Indonesia in 2015, the following day three of his cabinet ministers visited the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, a memorial to Japan’s war dead and widely seen as a symbol of its militarism. Abe himself visited the shrine in 2013, the same year that he opted not to express remorse in his Aug. 15 annual speech. Japanese politicians under other Administrations, including Ishiba’s, have also visited the shrine, as do thousands of Japanese people every year, which has drawn criticism from China.
Fumio Kishida, Ishiba’s direct predecessor, did not visit the shrine, although several of his ministers did, including his Defense Minister Minoru Kihara—the first serving defense chief to visit the shrine on the anniversary of Japan’s surrender. Kishida, who hailed from Hiroshima, one of two Japanese cities atomic-bombed by the U.S., was wary of war, despite overseeing Japan’s biggest military buildup since World War II.
Ishiba, likewise, did not visit the shrine this year. Instead, he sent a ritual offering. The move perhaps showed Ishiba’s attempt to walk “a fine line,” as Nagy said to SCMP, between pushing back against the conservative elements of the Japanese government and not alienating them completely.
Still, the soon-to-be former Prime Minister seems intent on using his message to return Japan to a more reconciliatory position before his departure. It may indeed be his last opportunity to “make a statement about the importance of unity, peace and stability, as well as where Japan should be going in the future,” Nagy said.
If Ishiba’s Aug. 15 speech is anything to go by, that would appear to be the case.
“We will not forget, even for a moment, that the peace and prosperity that Japan enjoys today was built atop the precious lives and the history of suffering of the war dead,” he said. “No matter how much time passes, we will hand down across generations the sorrowful memories of the war and our resolute pledge to renounce war, and we will remain steadfast in our actions to foster lasting peace. In this world in which tragic conflicts rage on, Japan will, by rejecting division and cultivating tolerance, pave the way to a better tomorrow for the sake of both present and future generations.”