Illustration by Claudio Munoz

MANY Japanese were surprised that a hotel chain, under a cloud for shoddy earthquake-proofing standards, should sponsor a competition for the best essay to deny Japan's wartime role as an aggressor and sponsor of atrocities. But then the chain's boss, Toshio Motoya, is a vigorous historical revisionist (and big supporter of Shinzo Abe, prime minister in 2006-07). More astounding, then: the competition winner, Toshio Tamogami, was none other than the head of Japan's air force.

Mr Tamogami's offering is a warmed-through hash of thrice-cooked revisionism. Japan, he writes, fought a war of self-defence, protecting its legal territories of Manchukuo (North-East China) and Korea against communists. Pearl Harbour was an American-laid trap. Japanese occupations were both benevolent and a liberation of Asia from the yoke of Western imperialism—indeed, neighbours (20m of whose deaths were caused by the Japanese) now look fondly on wartime Japan. Japan must “reclaim its glorious history”, Mr Tamogami ended with a barrel-rolling flourish and a want of irony, “for a country that denies its own history is destined to fall.”

The prime minister of six weeks, Taro Aso, from the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), moved swiftly. Within hours of the essay's publication on October 31st, Mr Tamogami, a general, was out of a job. China and South Korea expressed shock at his views, but accepted that they did not reflect the government's. Mr Tamogami did not help his case by complaining that Japan's freedom of expression was on a par with North Korea's. As well as the ¥3m ($30,000) essay prize, he gets a ¥60m retirement bonus from the defence ministry.

End of story? Not quite. For a start, Mr Tamogami, it transpires, took Mr Motoya for a joy-ride in a fighter jet. And since his sacking, it turns out that of the 230-odd aspiring writers of historical fiction, 78 were officers in Japan's air force, most of them close to their general. Of course, it is understandable that some professional warriors might chafe at Japan's American-dictated pacifist constitution; and at a victor's interpretation of history that discredited Japan's proud armed forces. But for so many to write revisionist claptrap in a hotel-sponsored competition is rum indeed. The unfortunate impression is of those radicalised officers' messes of the 1930s, out of which the Japanese army mugged civilian rule: the rest was, well, history.

So the prime minister has some explaining to do, and the opposition Democratic Party of Japan will make all the hay it can. It wants Mr Tamogami to testify before the Diet. It may press the prime minister about his own views. His government, like its predecessors, endorses apologies, first formulated in the mid-1990s, expressing guilt and remorse for wartime suffering. In office (and as foreign minister before that) Mr Aso has also eschewed visiting Yasukuni, where war criminals as well as Japan's 2.5m war dead are enshrined.

Yet in the past Mr Aso, in a shoot-from-the-hip way, has echoed many of Mr Tamogami's right-wing views. He has, for instance, praised Japan's occupation of Korea from 1910-45, even though his family fortune derives from a mining company that used Korean slave labour during the second world war. As prime minister Mr Aso has been on good behaviour. Yet the day after Mr Tamogami's sacking, he casually picked up a volume of views similar to the general's from a Tokyo bookstore.

Mr Aso is certainly doing his bit to improve tricky relations with neighbours, China and South Korea in particular. Unlike many revisionists, he embraces the post-war order, wants an internationalist role for Japan, and does not see bogeymen behind every tree. Yet now he has the challenge of reassuring Japan's neighbours over the Tamogami affair without undermining his own conservative base.

The public reaction to the affair reinforces how beleaguered these days are Japan's history-deniers, says Jeffrey Kingston, a historian of Asia at Temple University in Tokyo. Even Yasukuni has toned down the exhibits in its notorious museum, where until recently militarism was celebrated and all atrocities denied. The most notable denial was of the Nanjing massacre of tens (or possibly hundreds) of thousands of Chinese in December 1937. Now the museum admits that killings took place, but suggests they were of enemy soldiers disguised as civilians. This is the problem with the historical fantasists. Even as they moderate their public message, they leave you waiting for the “but”.