To be more precise, in a Girardian sense Germany and France where able to reconcile thanks to using the Nazis/Pétain as scapegoats. Hence the factually dubious but politically crucial discourse of both De Gaulle and Adenauer after the war (“Nazis where a minority, Germans where only following out of fear, they didn’t know about the Holocaust” and “from the beginning everybody in France was supporting De Gaulle”). This allowed both countries to cast their culpability away while still accepting that their governments did evil things, and for German to consider the defeat as a liberation. In Japan, the only condition of the capitulation was that the Emperor would stay on the throne. This made it impossible to operate the same scapegoating and this is why Japan has such an ambiguous attitude toward the war (plus the atomic bombs gave them a very good reason to present themselves as victims, even if the destructions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki where not really different from classical bombings such as Tokyo or Dresden).
To be more precise, in a Girardian sense Germany and France where able to reconcile thanks to using the Nazis/Pétain as scapegoats. Hence the factually dubious but politically crucial discourse of both De Gaulle and Adenauer after the war (“Nazis where a minority, Germans where only following out of fear, they didn’t know about the Holocaust” and “from the beginning everybody in France was supporting De Gaulle”). This allowed both countries to cast their culpability away while still accepting that their governments did evil things, and for German to consider the defeat as a liberation. In Japan, the only condition of the capitulation was that the Emperor would stay on the throne. This made it impossible to operate the same scapegoating and this is why Japan has such an ambiguous attitude toward the war (plus the atomic bombs gave them a very good reason to present themselves as victims, even if the destructions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki where not really different from classical bombings such as Tokyo or Dresden).