Narrating Perpetrator Trauma and Moral Injury: Defeated Soldiers of Japan’s Asia-Pacific War

This article asks how the cultural trauma of war is actively constructed – not only through elite carriers and institutional arenas, but through the moral labor of ordinary individuals “from below.” Drawing on a major archive of war testimonies, I examine how Japan’s former soldiers struggled, across seven decades of silence and social pressure, to make moral sense of their participation in imperial Japan’s wars of aggression. This struggle produces a distinctive perpetrator narrative – one that straddles wartime complicity and postwar moral reckoning. Central to this process is moral injury that places these soldiers in an ambiguous zone that resists clean moral binaries. By analyzing the collective voices of such complex perpetrators, this study illuminates the way perpetrator trauma shapes the moral contours of postwar society. Drawing on a non-western case, it also invites cultural sociology to broaden its scope beyond its predominantly Euro-American foundations.