From the Publisher

By Elizabeth P. Valk

Our Tokyo bureau chief, Barry Hillenbrand, has come to think of the Japanese as remarkably focused on the present and the future, in contrast to Americans' fascination with their history. So it struck him as unusual when the mayor of Hiroshima, in a speech last August on the anniversary of the atomic devastation of his city, apologized for Japan's aggression during World War II. The mayor's openness prompted Barry to take a closer look at Japan's attitudes toward the war and the West.

Hillenbrand requested an interview with former Finance Minister Kiichi Miyazawa to discuss his wartime experiences, and they made a date for early October. Meanwhile, politics intervened, and two hours before the meeting Miyazawa suddenly found himself the front runner to be Japan's next Prime Minister. A surprised Hillenbrand and reporter Hiroko Tashiro were whisked past envious battalions of Japanese journalists for their appointment with the future Premier. For 40 minutes Miyazawa sipped a fruit drink and recounted his days as a young bureaucrat visiting newly conquered nations in the early 1940s. "There are Japanese who are eager to talk about the war," says Hillenbrand. "But Japan is like an onion, and just as you peel one layer, there is another to strip away. It's a constant struggle not to stop and settle for the usual view." The result of Barry's reporting is a story, written with senior writer James Walsh, that accompanies this week's account of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

TIME's master historian, senior writer Otto Friedrich, tried in a different way to retrieve truths from the past in this week's account of the attack. He was assisted by history lover Anne Hopkins, who has worked closely with Otto on a number of special projects, including the 40th-anniversary report on D- day that we published in 1984. "All of the elements in the way the world is organized today derive from World War II," says Friedrich. "It's part of our lives, and we need to go back and examine and explain it." Friedrich has come to believe that the different ways in which Americans and Japanese , remember the war affect their views of each other today. Our stories this week, in a unique pairing, explore that linkage between history and current events.