Japanese War Crimes in China

We in the West are shockingly ignorant of Chinese history. Granted, there is a lot of history to learn - thousands of years' worth (one of the professors mentioned that in China, history is a difficult subject to major in). However, that does not excuse our appalling general ignorance of relatively recent events in Asia. Just as no discussion of China would be complete without mentioning the Cultural Revolution, no trip to China and Japan is untouched by the nature of the relations between the two countries.

Just before we left for China, actually, relations between China and Japan made the news in the US. China felt that certain Japanese history textbooks should be banned because they made no mention of Japanese war crimes. There were demonstrations and bad feelings in general.

In a Lonely Planet travel book on China, a Chinese university student is quoted as saying, preposterously, "We don't have racism in China because there are no black people." Whether or not this statement is true, ethnicism is a real problem throughout Asia. Part of it is understandable when you consider the scope of the offenses the Japanese committed against other Asian nations in the 1940's, the crimes committed against China in particular, and the unsatisfactory nature of Japan's apologies along with its failure to educate its people about the brutality against these nations for which it was responsible.

To get an idea of how appalling is our own lack of knowledge of these war crimes, 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. However, in what some call the Asian Holocaust, some put the number of deaths at over 20 million. Although this number is contested, what is certain is that the number of civilian deaths in China alone far exceeds the number of casualties in the European Holcaust. Imagine the outcry if Germany had tried to erase all mention in its textbooks of the Holocaust.

Thinking back also to my previous post on Japanese efficiency, imagine what would happen if a country that efficient and organized decided to put its mind to perpetrating acts of rape, theft, torture, and murder on a large scale. Of course, the Germans come to mind as another efficient people who did similar things on a mass scale. Their crimes pale in comparison to what the Japanese did in Asia. Really, words cannot describe the brutality they used, especially at what became known as the Nanking Massacre; for more information and photos, see this site, and this one. You can see why the subject is touchy, and why people get very upset about this.

In our classes at Nankai University in Tianjin, some of the simulations we were doing with the students required some students to play the part of UN representatives from Japan. We had six classes, and in every class, the same thing happened when the roles were assigned. No one wanted to play Japan. In the debates, too, it seemed that often the rest of the "UN" tended to attack the "Japanese" representative more than was possibly justified.

In Japan, I heard only one comment made about recent events and Japanese war crimes. My professor brought up the issue with a Japanese woman, whose only response was to say, dismissively, "They're all brainwashed." This statement, I think, sums up nicely exactly why China is so upset with Japan over a few textbooks.