The recent sometimes violent anti-Japanese protests that have been occurring the past several weeks throughout China have geopolitical implications, of course, but they are rooted at their heart in justifiable popular resentment at Japan's continuing failure to come to terms with its wartime past.
Japan's wartime human rights record was every bit as bad as that of its Axis partner Germany, yet Japan has been permitted by the international community to largely avoid assuming an unambiguous moral responsibility for the consquences of its aggression, which included at least ten million Chinese deaths. For example, in the infamous “Rape of Nanking” that occurred between December 1937 and March 1938, the Japanese Imperial Army slaughtered an estimated 370,000 unarmed Chinese civilians and prisoners of war, with many of the victims being horribly mutilated. An estimated 80,000 women and girls were raped during this period of time. Another egregious example of Japanese human rights abuses occurred at the Unit 731 facility located near Harbin in northern China, where Chinese civilians, including infants in some cases, were exposed to biological agents and sometimes later dissected for analysis.
In Germany, the Nazi past has been firmly disavowed. Germany has constructed a Holocaust memorial in its capital, has enacted an official Holocaust Remembrance Day, requires all German primary school students to visit former concentration camps as part of mandatory Holocaust studies, and has criminalized open glorification or praise of the Nazi past. Nazi war criminals are still being pursued and imprisoned, and simply denying the Holocaust is grounds for imprisonment in Germany. Germany has paid over 100 billion marks in compensation to Jewish Holocaust victims.
In contrast, Japanese politicians pay regular visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, where 1068 war criminals, including 14 class A war criminals and the architects of the Nanking massacre are not only enshrined, but their legacy glorified. Based upon the content of their English-language web site, it is the Yasukuni Shrine's view that Japan was forced by circumstances without into entering the Second World War for the greater good of Asia and its leaders were not legitimately culpable for atrocities committed during the war:
War is truly sorrowful. Yet to maintain the independence and peace of the nation and for the prosperity of all of Asia, Japan was forced into conflict. The precious lives that were lost in these incidents and wars are worshiped as the Kami (Deities) of Yasukuni Jinja.
There were also 1,068 "Martyrs of Showa" who were cruelly and unjustly tried as war criminals by a sham-like tribunal of the Allied forces (United States, England, the Netherlands, China and others). These martyrs are also the Kami of Yasukuni Jinja.
The recent decision by a group of Japanese legislators to visit the Yasukuni shrine in the immediate wake of the Chinese protests speaks volumes about the insensitivity of the Japanese body politic, and by extension the Japanese people, to the issue. The Chinese have every moral justification to be outraged by those visits, and by recent efforts to purge Japan's national responsibility for the war from Japanese school textbooks. Japan will need to confront its past and reassure its neighbors that the past will not be prologue if it is to assume the kind of international leadership role that it so clearly seeks. The United States should join China and Korea in urging Japan to do so.
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