The answer is mostly. Dower is a good historian and an excellent teller of tales; his presentation of postwar Japan is probably a bit more one-sided than the reality. Nevertheless as Dower illustrates there was, in the main, a shrugging off of moral responsibility for the war by most "common" people, including the millions of soldiers who were eventually repatriated. The war became something that "those guys" (i.e. the militarists, the ultra-nationalist zealots) planned, initiated, and perpetrated; the common people simply suffered, powerless, under their regime; and those few who had risen in protest – namely the communists and socialists who were imprisoned in the late 1920s/early 1930s – became heroes when eventually freed (while also demonstrating the impossibility of resistance from within).

This history is termed the "dark valley" narrative by scholars, i.e. Japan was a happy democratic place, then sunk into darkness, then got happy and democratic again. What it lacks first and foremost is any moral accountability for the people – the great mass of people who were totally gung-ho for the project of imperial expansion, who adored military spectacle, and who believed that they belonged to the superior race in Asia, perhaps even with a religious mandate to "guide" (read: rule) the rest. Furthermore, in recent decades many scholars have countered the "dark valley" narrative with a "transwar" narrative, suggesting that many of the economic, social, and political structures that generated the conditions of possibility for the totalitarian state persisted more or less unchanged after the war. Sheldon Garon's Molding Japanese Minds is a good example of this sort of text, arguing that there's a persistent (transcending wartime) trend of Japanese citizens deliberately seeking the state's intervention into and regulation of aspects of their private lives.

I'm a film historian, and I can tell you that in the arena of popular culture, there was very little attempt to offer an honest reckoning with Japan's – that is to say, the common people of Japan's – responsibility in both the build up to war and the atrocities committed during it. Kobayashi Masaki's The Human Condition (1959-1961) is one of the few that potentially fits the bill, depicting e.g. mass murders of Chinese citizens carried out by the Japanese army, but even that adopts the humanistic dodge of having the "good man" at its center striving, and failing, to change the structure of the system. Far more common are films like Fires on the Plains (1959) and The Burmese Harp (1956), both directed by Ichikawa Kon, which focus on the suffering of Japanese G.I.s – at the hands, mostly, of their villianous superiors, or else just War itself, as an abstract and ahistorical force of chaos and destruction – in far-off locales with almost zero account of why those soldiers were there in the first place, or what horrors were unleashed on the native populations by people just like them.

There's a wonderful scene in Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon (1962) that sums up the postwar consensus in a nutshell. Two old army buddies have reunited at a karaoke bar. They request one of the old military marching tunes, and the subordinate does a nostalgic little "parade" while his former superior salutes, grinning. After it's over, one sighs to the other, "Imagine if we'd won. Kids over in America would be rock-and-rolling on the shamisen." To which the other replies, "Yeah, but I'm sure glad those guys aren't in charge any more."

Those guys (ano yatsura). That's whose fault the war was: someone else's, the men in charge, the Class-A war criminals. They led Japan to a terrible end, and caused the Japanese people a great deal of suffering (and sure, maybe caused some other people suffering elsewhere, but we all suffered together, amiright?). And because it wasn't us, the common people, the average soldiers and colonists and war boosters, who did all the terrible things, or at least were responsible for the terrible things, we can still wax nostalgic about the fun of war, about the excitement and pageantry and power and machismo, about the exotic thrills of the lands we subjugated for a time, and not feel the slightest contradiction.

Can you a nd me a copy of t,he bokok please?