Someone pointed out to me recently that most Japanese anti-war pop media engages in a kind of convenient nihilism where the author makes a statement that all war is bad, so there's no point trying to figure out if one side is justified or better than the other.

I sometimes wondered if a lot of that was because of the cultural sting of losing WW2, at least from the "all war bad" types that seemed to be suspiciously fond/nostalgic for Imperial Japan.