Seventy years of selective postwar history

In her movingly beautiful novel dealing with Japan from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s, The Gods of Heavenly Punishment, author Jennifer Cody Epstein describes how people tended to divide life between "before" and "after" the war.

When I was living in Japan in the 1950s, I remember the coinage and frequent usage of the term "apure" - which was derived from the French term apr��s guerre and was meant to convey the mood of the "new" Japan after 1945.

But in his outstanding book, Year Zero: A History of 1945, Ian Buruma, writing on both the Atlantic and the Pacific Wars, demonstrated how things were not that simple.