White doves rise above Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. The peace bell sounds. People lower their heads. Across the river stands the Atomic Bomb Dome, preserved exactly because the world is not supposed to forget what happened there.

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi steps to the microphone. She promises peace. Then, when pressed about Japan’s Three Non-Nuclear Principles, she says Japan is upholding them — but unlike recent prime ministers who pledged to maintain the principles going forward, Takaichi limited her remarks to a description of present policy, leaving future commitments ambiguous.

Hiroshima must be remembered. But Hiroshima is not the whole history of Japan’s war. A state that remembers only how the war ended can avoid confronting how it began — and what it did to others before the bomb fell.

Japan will not possess nuclear weapons. It will not produce them. It will not allow them into Japanese territory. But that last promise is now under attack. Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi wants nuclear policy discussed “without taboos.” Takaichi has called the ban on bringing in American nuclear weapons unrealistic. Her coalition partner, the right-wing Japan Innovation Party, says it is open to revision. The immediate proposal is not a Japanese bomb. It is allowing American nuclear weapons into Japanese ports, bases and waters.

This is not an indictment of Japan. The strongest resistance comes from Japanese atomic-bomb survivors, peace activists and voters. The target is the nationalist governing project that wants to inherit the moral authority of pacifist Japan while dismantling the restraints that made that reputation possible.

The government says Japan faces its most dangerous security environment since 1945: Chinese missiles, North Korean nuclear weapons, Russia and an unpredictable United States. The weapons are real. But a “security environment” is not weather. It is also produced by alliances, deployments and political choices.

Japan has direct disputes with its neighbors. But treating every Chinese military development as an existential Japanese threat depends on a larger choice: defining American primacy as Japan’s national interest, treating a war over Taiwan as potentially Japan’s war, and offering Japanese territory as the forward base for that confrontation. That is not geography. It is strategy.

If Washington is unreliable, hosting Washington’s nuclear weapons would not make Japan independent. It would bind Japan more tightly to American war planning and make Japanese cities more valuable targets. The alliance would generate new dangers, then cite those dangers as the reason for further militarization.

When Chinese or Korean people object, they are often accused of having a “victim complex”—of refusing to release events from eighty years ago. But history is not a suitcase victims have stubbornly refused to put down. Japan’s neighbors have repeatedly moved forward. In 1972, China normalized relations and renounced its demand for war reparations in the interest of friendship. In 1998, South Korean President Kim Dae-jung accepted Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi’s apology for colonial rule and pursued a future-oriented partnership.

Apologizing and compensating victims are not acts of generosity. They are the minimum expected of a perpetrator. Yet Asian governments repeatedly chose reconciliation. What damages it is the Japanese nationalist right treating every acknowledgement as temporary: honoring war criminals at Yasukuni, minimizing forced labor and military sexual slavery, softening the language of invasion, and accepting earlier apologies abroad while undermining them at home. You cannot demand that victims treat an apology as final while treating the apology itself as provisional.

Reconciliation is a bargain. The victims agree that the future will not remain imprisoned by the past. The former aggressor agrees not to rehabilitate that past.

Then comes the second defense: whatever Imperial Japan did, postwar Japan has been democratic and peaceful. Japan did build a durable democracy. Its people created powerful anti-war movements. Hibakusha made nuclear abolition a moral cause. Ordinary Japanese citizens often resisted militarization and carried memories their politicians preferred to blur. They deserve credit. Japan’s governing establishment does not deserve the same uncomplicated praise.

Japanese demilitarization was not simply a voluntary moral awakening. Japan accepted the Potsdam surrender terms. The Allied occupation dismantled its armed forces and removed militarists from office. Article 9 then placed the renunciation of war inside Japan’s Constitution. These restraints followed invasion, colonial rule and atrocities across Asia. They were consequences of what the Japanese state had done — not gifts later politicians bestowed on the world.

Nor was postwar Japan entirely detached from war. Japanese troops did not fight in Korea or Vietnam, but Japan became a principal supply base for the Korean War, and American bases in Japan were crucial to the war in Vietnam. Japan could be a peaceful society and an American military platform at the same time. Politicians who accepted that arrangement should not be credited with independent peacemaking. They kept Japanese troops out of combat while making Japanese territory available to American wars.

Then Washington’s Cold War priorities preserved the political forces that demilitarization was supposed to remove. As fear of communism replaced fear of renewed Japanese militarism, the American occupation reversed course. Wartime elites returned. The United States cultivated and covertly supported conservative politics. Nobusuke Kishi had served in Hideki Tojo’s wartime cabinet and was detained as a suspected Class-A war criminal. He was released without trial, helped build the LDP, became prime minister and entrenched the American security alliance despite enormous Japanese protests.

This is not hereditary guilt. It is political continuity. Kishi’s grandson, Shinzo Abe, accelerated the removal of postwar military restraints. Takaichi is Abe’s political heir. Since 2015, Japan has authorized collective self-defense, acquired long-range “counterstrike” weapons, raised military spending and removed major restrictions on lethal arms exports. Now nuclear weapons are to be discussed without taboos. Each step is called defensive. Together, they form a direction.

Seventy-six percent of Japanese respondents support maintaining all Three Non-Nuclear Principles. Seventy-seven percent oppose nuclear sharing. The real struggle is not Japan against its neighbors. It is between ordinary Japanese people who defended peace and a nationalist establishment using their peaceful record to justify remilitarization.

Japan’s neighbors are not obliged to forget history precisely when that establishment is removing the restraints created by history. And Hiroshima — the place preserved so humanity cannot forget — must not become the backdrop for making nuclear weapons normal again.