“1945: With the Pacific war ended, Japanese officials begin a program of whitewashing Japan’s military and administrative actions during the war. One of those actions is to permanently erase masterpieces of Army propaganda from public memory. We to this day still don’t know the extent of the propaganda produced by the Great Japan Army Painters’ Association, the war effort’s employment of several hundred artists to glorify the Army and the Emperor before citizens and captives alike. We have no idea how many artworks were destroyed by the Japanese to hide their atrocities. We only know that 153 war paintings that had been confiscated by the US occupying forces remain in storage in Japan’s national museum. To this day, successive prime ministers have kept the paintings from being shown for fear of offending the neighboring nations depicted”

— Political Art Timeline, 1945-1966: Postwar Art of the Left - The Huffington Post