Seventy-five years after the end of World War II, Japan is a prosperous country at peace, a representative democracy and one of the most advanced states both economically and technologically in the world. Yet unresolved issues dating to the war continue to bedevil relations between Japan and its East Asian neighbors and create worries about the future.

When Emperor Hirohito, posthumously known as Emperor Showa, told the nation in a prerecorded radio broadcast on Aug. 15, 1945, that Japan was accepting unconditional surrender to the U.S.-led Allied coalition, he said it was to “pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come, by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable.”

He also noted a cruel new bomb, the atomic bomb, had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that to continue to fight would lead to the very extinction of human civilization. The emperor urged Japan to be forward-looking and to rebuild. Others, looking back at a conflict that had killed somewhere between 2.6 million and 3.1 million Japanese soldiers and civilians, called for an end to war itself.