In 1939, in response to the German invasion of Poland, Britain and France
declared war on Germany, marking the beginning of the Second World War.
The war was subsequently fought on two fronts: in Europe and in Asia. On 4
December 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The following day the United
States declared on war on Japan. It would take two atomic bombs, the first on
Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, and the second on Nagasaki just three days later,
to bring an end to the war in the Pacific. The Allied Forces insisted on unconditional
surrender from the Japanese, the worst possible result for a nation that
favoured honourable death over defeat. Between 1945 and 1952, the former
colonial power of Japan became itself a colonised power, occupied by the Allied
Forces. The trauma of defeat left scars on Japan’s national psyche which have
never fully gone away, and many horror films from the 1950s onwards would use
the scarred face of the archetypical Japanese wronged woman, ‘Oiwa’, to signal
metonymically the continuing impact of the Second World War on Japan.