The problem with this story is not only that it happens in the U.S. as well--such willful distortions are not confined, as we like to believe, to textbooks in rural Mississippi--but also that it has become apparent only because the Japanese government has been suing textbook writers to keep this "subversive" material out.

Japanese conservatives who don't want to face the past are squaring off with progressives who do. So the only reason that we know that many Japanese have not confronted their history is that They are on the verge of doing it.

It is also simply not the case that Japan "is a democracy in which one party--the Liberal Democrats, who are actually the conservatives [those wacky Japanese, can't even name their party right]--always wins, and the real opposition party is the U.S. government, with its strategic 'advice' and ceaseless economic complaints," as U.S. News claims.

Instead, there is a crucial flux in Japanese politics where the progressive agenda--equal rights and opportunities for women, an open reassessment of World War II, acknowledgement of a generation gap--has a home: the Social Democratic Party, a party headed by a woman and one that continually threatens the LDP's control.

By seeing Japan simply as a monolith, the news weeklies overlook fundamental issues within Japanese society, issues they prefer to cover with images of millions of like-looking, like-thinking Japanese trotting off to the factory and the driving range.

NOT ONE TO BE DAUNTED by the problems of comparative history, Bill Powell, in Newsweek's "Sweeping history under the carpet," executes an incredible sleight of hand. "Are the fears that Japan is still fighting wholly misplaced?" he asks. Sure, they are exaggerated, he says, but "Japan's big, internationally competitive companies are, to be sure, very disciplined, even regimented organizations. And they do, on occasion, go overboard with martial metaphors."

It is more than a sick joke that Japan is decried as "martial" to the core when it was the American armed forces who returned to heroes' welcome last summer, having polished off their second third world country in little more than a year--decried as too "martial" in the same magazine which suggests that Japan will only become a "whole" nation when it increases the size of its armed forces.

These willful misperceptions of Japan's belligerence fit all too well with the relish with which news casters and reporters convey the latest depressing statistics coming out of Japan. They have higher suicide rates; They smoke too much; They can't loosen up and have fun; They can't build houses because land is so expensive.

At times, this reveling in their misfortune turns nasty: They sell us down the river to the Commies; They dump goods on our markets; They won't pay up when we go kick Iraqi ass for them.

In general, the availability of national character as an excuse, the assumption that societies are monolithic and monomaniacal, allows us to make quick and easy connections between Japan in the '30s and '40s and Japan, Inc. today. Whenever They buy another building or another company, the "Japanese" have done it--not a firm like Komatsu or Mitsushita or Sony, and not a particular capitalist. No, the Japanese--as a nation--did it.

The image of Japanese prime minister Kiichi Miyazawa going door-to-door asking everyone to kick in their 10 yen for Rockefeller Center is unshakeable, but has nothing to do with the realities of world-wide state-capitalism.

ADMITTEDLY, Japanese textbooks are censored, but distortion is endemic in American news weeklies, too. The greatest neglect is the shunning of American responsibility for the use of the atomic bomb.

This is also the problem with American efforts to "forget" Pearl Harbor altogether. Frank Deford, sports writer-cum-national conscience, says that since we don't really "remember" Pearl Harbor (we only "remember that we remember" it), then it should be forgotten.

But national forgetting, at times, plays into conservative hands. President Bush shrugged off apologizing for the the atomic attacks, claiming that Americans and Japanese are "saying 'Hey, let's forget that, let's go forward now together.' And if you see some ugliness in our country about the Japanese, I'll be out front saying, 'Hey, knock that off.'" His message, which implies a forgetting of the most decisive event in 20th century history, seems to be catching on.

The word "Hiroshima" does not appear in Time's history of the Pacific war and is only mentioned in the article on the war in Europe, where its 100,000 dead are compared favorably to the 600,000 who starved to death in Leningrad. Time's "master historian" seems to have forgotten that the Pacific war ended the way it started: in fire and blood, the air filled with the debris of lives, blasted apart from above. America "proved invincible," he says: its methods are left to the readers to puzzle out, if we can remember them.

Eventually, everyone does get around to saying that the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki made Japan "perhaps the most pacifist society on earth," but no one wants to know what that might mean. They want to believe that Japan has all but rearmed, is perfectly willing to do so when the time comes, and has just been playing 'possum for the last 45 years.

In fact, it might mean that Japan could become the first international power that does not couple its dominance of the means of production with an equal willingness to deploy the means of destruction. This is what the end of the Cold War could hold for the world.

THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC ended with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And in that flash, the Cold War began: The death and destruction in Japan and the American nuclear monopoly kept the Soviets on their guard. The U.S.-Japanese security agreement established the entire Pacific rim as a sphere of American control that the Soviet military machine could contest at its own peril.

So the Cold War ended and the Japanese won? Fine by us. The ascendance of Japan as a non-military superpower is not unwelcome. Accompanied by a permanent seat on the UN security council and a new self-written constitution, as Karel van Wolferen proposed in The New York Times this week, Japan and its politicians would have arenas for representation outside economic expansion.

The chance for pacifism in the Pacific century is too important to let slip by through ignorance and insensitivity. As for Pearl Harbor, we need only remember that in the economy of violence, our world runs a perpetual trade surplus.