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The textbook controversy has a long narrative in Japan's domestic politics. In 1955, conservative politicians called existing history textbooks "deplorable," arguing that they reflected anti-Japanese and pro-Chinese leftist thought. Since then textbooks have (at various points) been the object of heated debates between the conservative parties and progressive forces, composed mainly of left-leaning intellectuals, academics, and schoolteachers supported by the formerly influential Japan Teachers' Union.

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Japanese textbooks were objects of international debate dates from 1982. It was triggered by news reports that the Japanese MOE had ordered history textbook authors to make various revisions, most notoriously changing the term "aggression/invasion" into "advancements" to describe military action in Northern China (specifically the Nanjing Massacre) - one of the greatest war atrocities in History. They downplay their war actions and use evasive terms to glorify their war actions. This is often seen due to the conservative nature of Japan and their domestic politics where they want to showcase Japan as a strong military power.

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Revisionism of Japan in the Asia Pacific war  

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Revisionism of Japan in the Asia Pacific war  

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In 1964, Hayashi Fusao wrote a seminal book, titled Daitôa sensô kôteiron [The Great East Asian War was a Just War].

This book was in commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the 1868 Meiji Ishin [political reforms of the Meiji Emperor] and ever since has served as a model for later revisionists.

His work is noted to have downplayed the actions and the intentions of the Japanese Government during the war - giving an imperialist point of view. Additionally, he also sympathizes with Japanese nationalism, which he thinks liberated not only Japan but also the rest of Asia from Western domination.

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(most important) History books correctly reflect the atrocities that took place (Reparation #1)

Cessation of visits to Yasukuni Shrine (Reparation #2)

Official apology from the Japanese Emperor (Reparation #3)

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Background: Japanese War Crimes during WW2 against Chinese civilians 

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Background: Japanese War Crimes during WW2 against Chinese civilians 

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In World War II (WWII), Japanese war crimes spanned a range of extremely cruel and violent acts. Expecially in the Rape of Nanking (e.g. Hundred man killing contest), over 300,000 chinese civilans were death. Including rapes of 20,000 to 80,000 girls and women.

In Unit 731, the Japanese ran gruesome medical experiments towards the prisoners, also using deadly diseases to develop biological weapons.

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Hayashi considers the Japanese invasion of Korea a result of Japanese nationalism (i.e., national egoism and national interests). He highlights that it was an act of defence against Western nationalism and imperialism. As such, he deduced that as long as it was an act of national defence, invasion was therefore justified.

In short, Hayashi defines war as a means of achieving political hegemony in a region. Although war is not a solution to all political problems, it is a means of protecting national hegemony based on his definition. He asserts that since there was the decline of China, Japan had to maintain its hegemonic power over Asia, because otherwise the West would have filled the power vacuum. His point of view contains a imperialist mindset which can be argued to be similar to the west in terms of their expansionist intentions.

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Backward vs Forward Looking to Historical Reparations

In this case, Forward looking applies: Past wrongs led to current society being marked by inequalities and broken relationships, thus to improve society must address past wrongs, thereby justifying reparations

However, Japanese apologists argue: "Children from other countries can publicly and confidently boast about their history. But Japanese children cannot. That's how severe the brainwashing is."

Rebuttal: German schoolchildren frequently visit holocaust memorial museums and it is part of their education

Post-war Germany's path to reflection was not easy. "In 1952, when West Germany began the process of making amends for the Holocaust, it did so under conditions that should be instructive to us. Resistance was violent. Very few Germans believed that Jews were entitled to anything. Only 5 percent of West Germans surveyed reported feeling guilty about the Holocaust, and only 29 percent believed that Jews were owed restitution from the German people."

Germany is very much an exception; most countries are more like Britain—while there are museums documenting Britain's role in slavery, schools do not teach children about it or they glance over it briefly. However, there is arguably still a difference between not mentioning the history and whitewashing it completely

British musuems' willingness to reckon with the truth can be contrasted with the revisionism that plagues Japaneses museums: See the Yūshūkan museum, the war museum built within the shrine grounds to promote the nationalist ideology that has become known as the Yasukuni doctrine.

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The Yakusuni shrines commemorates those who died in service of Japan by listing their names, origins, birthdates and places of death. This list of people includes numerous war criminals who have been convicted for crimes against humanity during the Second World War, most of all Hideki Toji.

Japanese politicians frequently visit the shrines, which has increaed tensions between China and Japan.

According to Chong-Ming Lim:

... commemorations are a way in which a community takes its past seriously. They acknowledge the importance of a certain person or event (and often the values that undergird them) for the community.

Commemorations usually celebrate the past and lionise the people associated with it, as is evident in this case with the Shrines. Since the Shrines are publicly available, the views represented by them—that the Japanese war criminals were great men whose actions deserve to be emulated—are widely promulgated.

The fact that the shrines are visited by Japanese politicians—including multiple Prime Ministers of Japan, no less—demonstrates official endorsement by elected representatives of the values promulgated by the Shrines. This is exacerbated by the the continuous visits by politicians notwithstanding protests by the Chinese and South Korean governments.

Lim states that for such "tainted" commemorations, their mere existence is a source of controversy. He suggests that even without outrightly removing them from public view, either counter-commemorations or contextualisations would be appropriate in order for history to be properly acknowledged. Counter-commemorations are defined as commemorating those who actively resisted or were victims of the people or events celebrated by the tainted commemorations. Contextualisations, on the other hand, refer to adding information at the commemoration itself to "directly address and repudiate the views expressed by [the] tainted commemoration".

However, as it currently stands, nothing close to either of the two proposed solutions is likely going to occur for the Shrines. The Japanese government have not discussed any form of counter-commemorations to be installed near the Shrines, as they consistently declare the visits by the politicians are for the sake of "[expressing] respect and gratitude to the many people who lost their lives in the war", rather than gloryifying Japan's past militarism. For the possibility of contextualisations, it is likewise severely hampered by the fact that the located near the Shrines is the Yūshūkan, a war museum known for revising Japan's wartime past by claiming that all wars fought by Japan were "wars of self-defense", with no mention of any atrocities commmitted by the Japanese military. In other words, not only is there a lack of proper contextualisation, the only contextualisation that exists serves to further distort the truth and glorify past wrongs.

Accordingly, not only is the demand for Japanese politicians to cease visiting the Shrines warranted, it is at most a baseline requirement that Japan must fulfill, before it can even move on to the vexed question of handling tainted commemorations.

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Other countries have acknowledged their war crimes and atrocities such as Britain who have admitted their role in the Transatlantic slave trade. Another notable example would be Germany who have acknowledged their war history such as Nazism in which they make it a crime to support Nazism. Furthermore, it is important to ensure that History should not be revised as it distorts knowledge.

Additionally, Japan has also collaborated with the western powers in world war 1 and during the boxer rebellion - signifying that they still are allies with the west.

In lieu of virtue ethics (Aristotle declares that one should do what a morally just person does), it is unethical to revise history as it is dishonest of the government to do so and one good virtue is honesty. It also undermines wisdom as rewriting history corrupts knowledge and makes it difficult for society to learn from past mistakes.

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The shrine lists the names, origins, birthdates and places of death of 2 million people who have died in the service of Japan. Among those are 1k+ convicted war criminals of WW2.

After 1975, the Japanese Emperors have never visited the shrines. Only Japanese politicians visit them.

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In WWII, as to protect the image of Japan from rapes, a group of women called "comfort women" were forced to form. They were forced by kidnapped, coerced, tricked, or sold into prostitution to engage in the Japanese military. These victims were constantly raped by their captors or other Japanese soldiers in the "comfort stations.

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PPP (perpetuator pays principle)

Forward-looking approach -> one believes that to society should be improved now and, in the future, hence, there is a need to address what happened in the past and reparations should be given.

Backward-looking approach -> one thinks that since an injustice has been committed in the past and no redress was made, reparations should be done today

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China desires an official apology from the Emperor of Japan. Currently, the furthest the Emperor has gone is stating that "I earnestly hope that the ravages of war will never again be repeated," which does not fully demonstrate the chief role played by the Japanese military in committing the war crimes.

It cannot be denied that China relies on such reparations as diplomatic leverage.

Chinese emphasise on such reparations depends on the level of tension between the governments. When China seeks closer ties with Japan, it will downplay such issues.

For example, Mao Zedong said in 1972, in response to a Japanese diplomat apologising for Japan's war crimes: "We have to thank Japan, without Japan's invasion of China ... we [the Communist Party] would not have been able to develop and eventually gain power ... If there had been no Japanese invasion of China, there would have been no Communist victory."

That being said, bearing in mind the polluter pays principle, given that the Emperor of Japan, Hirohito, wielded actual power during WW2 and was not just a constitutional monarch. As such, an apology by his grandson, the current Emperor, would be warranted. However, there is academic disagreement on the role played by the Emperor in Japan's war crimes. While the Allied forces did not prosecute him on grounds that he wielded no real power, many have pointed out that the need to preserve stability in post-war Japan was the main reason. Instead, the Emperor may have, among others, signed off on uses of chemical weapons during the war in China, and that he also knew about the mistreatment of prisoners of war and about the murder of civilians in Nanking, but did not try to stop these war crimes or punish military leaders despite his ability to do so.

On the other hand, regardless of how much actual power was wielded by the Emperor then, he is the official and symbolic head of the country of Japan. An apology by him would jump-start Japan's path to reflection, while also placing pressure on the Japanese government to seriously consider Reparations #1 and #2.

Hence, following the PPP, an official apology from Emperor of Japan would be a hugely symbolic gesture of repentance.

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The PPP approach is used as we firmly believe that the perpetuator (Japan) should pay for their war crimes and grievances that they caused to the countries they have colonised. in addition, due to the scale of the crimes, it is fairly right that they give reparations to the country (China) that they have wronged.

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Schneider, Claudia. “The Japanese History Textbook Controversy in East Asian Perspective.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 617 (2008): 107–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25098016.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/japanese-war-crimes

Oh, Ingyu, and Douglas Ishizawa-Grbić. “FORGIVING THE CULPRITS: JAPANESE HISTORICAL REVISIONISM IN A POST-COLD WAR CONTEXT.” International Journal of Peace Studies 5, no. 2 (2000): 45–59. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41852877.

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During World War II, Japan fought with such brutality that even today Japanese scholars and diplomats have a hard time admitting these atrocities actually happened.

World War II struck devastating blows everywhere it took place, but the Pacific Theater was where nations fought the longest campaigns of the war and witnessed some of the most gratuitous cruelty in history.

Between 1937 and 1945, the Empire of Japan reached out into a dozen countries with what appeared at first to be an unstoppable military machine. What that machine did after the conquest, when it had unlimited civilian lives to play with, was often so barbarous, even modern Japanese society has yet to come to grips with it.

Japanese War Crimes: The Rape of Nanking

World War II began in China. The Japanese decision to occupy and annex Manchuria in 1931 set the ball rolling for everything that followed, including the U.S.-led oil embargo that was the proximate cause of the Japanese attack on the South Pacific and the war that followed.

The first shots of this war were fired in 1937, when the Empire of Japan launched a full-scale ground invasion of China in an effort to permanently crush Chinese resistance to Japan. Within months, the Nationalist capital of Nanking fell to the Japanese, and what followed has gone down in history as one of the worst wastes of human life on record: The Rape of Nanking.

Starting around December 13, 1937, and continuing for more than six weeks, Nanking suffered as few other cities in history ever have.

The Japanese, looking at the 90,000 captives as an opportunity to train their own soldiers in brutality, transported them out of the city for executions, the more brutal the better. They marched Chinese soldiers into designated killing fields. There Japanese officers and enlisted men shot, stabbed, and beheaded the Chinese in an attempt to condition them out of having human pity for a fallen enemy.

When the supply of POWs ran thin, the Japanese turned on the city's 600,000 civilians, whom the retreating Chinese Nationalists had prevented from fleeing. In the orgy of rape and murder that followed, which saw babies run through with bayonets and pregnant women sliced open with swords, as many as 300,000 people may have died.

Things got so bad that the 22 Westerners remaining in Nanking organized a "safety zone" near the port, under the control of a German Nazi, of all people, named John Rabe.

The Rape of Nanking was such a horrific event that Japan has yet to fully acknowledge or apologize for it. For one, official Japanese estimates place the number of dead closer to 50,000.

Even now, nearly 80 years later, this refusal to take responsibility for the first major war crime of WWII remains a stumbling block in closer diplomatic and trade relations between the two countries.

Germ Warfare

We've already brought you the story about Unit 731, the Japanese germ warfare division that worked for more than ten years to weaponize some of the worst diseases that have ever afflicted mankind, but you may not have the sheer scope of the project in view.

Founded in 1931 as a normal army medical unit, by 1935 the team was stockpiling supplies of bubonic plague, anthrax, and cholera in forms that were distressingly easy to deploy against civilians.

In just a single attack in Manchuria, the Japanese dropped aerial bombs filled with sawdust and plague-infected fleas over population centers. This was partly a terror bombing against territory that the Japanese already controlled, and partly a test of the weapon's effectiveness.

When the bomb casings split open in the air, the fleas fell unharmed to the ground and began biting people, infecting their blood with a strain of Yersinia pestis that had been bred for greater virulence by being passed through multiple generations of Chinese and Korean prisoners.

Poring over population figures before and after the war, the Chinese government now estimates that this one attack may have killed nearly 600,000 people in the weeks following the drop. Unit 731's other activities may have killed another half a million or so innocent people before the end of the war.

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WWII Japanese War Crimes So Appalling That The Perpetrators Still Won't Acknowledge Them

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World War II struck devastating blows everywhere it took place, but the Pacific Theater was where nations fought the longest campaigns of the war and witnessed some of the most gratuitous cruelty in history. Between 1937 and 1945, the Empire of Japan reached out into a dozen countries with what appeared at first to be an unstoppable military machine.

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Japanese Imperialism refers to the period from the 19th century until the end of World War II. The reasons for Japanese Imperialism were due to various factors, such as economic pressure, industrialisation, political ambitions etc., The Meiji government aims to strengthen the Japanese army and navy in order to counter the Western dominations. Additionally, there were the Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the Korean Annexation. These were the opportunities that triggered Japan to transit from a semi-colonized state to an imperialist power.

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Ching, F. (2020, May 20). Opinion: Did Japan invasion do Communist Party any favours? Mao, for one, thought so. South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3085206/mao-zedong-thought-japan-did-communist-party-great-favour-invading?module=perpetual_scroll_0&pgtype=article

Emperor Hirohito. Nuclear Museum. (n.d.). https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/profile/emperor-hirohito/

Fraga, K. (2023, April 12). Inside the most horrific Japanese war crimes of World War II. All That's Interesting. https://allthatsinteresting.com/japanese-war-crimes

Hilldrup, V. V. (2006, December 9). The reasons for Japanese imperialism (1895–1910). SSRN. https://ssrn.com/abstract=2352281

Ito, M., & Fukada, T. (2008, April 23). Lawmakers visit Yasukuni Festival. The Japan Times. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2008/04/23/national/lawmakers-visit-yasukuni-festival/

Li, David Daokui (2024). China's World View: Demystifying China to Prevent Global Conflict. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0393292398 at pg 226.

Sieg , L., & Saito, M. (n.d.). Japan emperor Naruhito expresses “deep remorse” over country’s wartime past | reuters. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ww2-anniversary-japan-emperor/japan-emperor-naruhito-expresses-deep-remorse-over-countrys-wartime-past-idUSKCN25B07C/

Vox. (2017, May 26). Japan’s Rising Right-Wing Nationalism. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHJsoCAREsg&t=200s

https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2321.html

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2014/1/9/china-takes-japan-shrine-dispute-to-un

https://web.archive.org/web/20131227012900/http://mainichi.jp/english/english/newsselect/news/20131226p2g00m0dm032000c.html

https://www.mofa.go.jp/a_o/rp/page25e_000356.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/26/japan-shinzo-abe-tension-neighbours-shrine

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2014/07/28/issues/trip-around-yushukan-japans-font-discord/#.VDUpAo0cR9A

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We used the backward-looking approach as we wanted to emphasise that since an injustice (Japan's massacre and other war crimes in China) is committed in the past with the Japanese government not wanting to redress it, we firmly beleive that this is hence why reparations should be done today. This is especially so when the first step of making amends is admitting that it happened - something the Japanese government has not done so far up till today.

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the forward-thinking approach is where one believes that to improve society there is a need to address what happened in the past and give reparations. This is applicable to the context of Japan and China. in order for such injustices such as massacres and sexual slavery from happening again, it should be addressed so that future generations will understand that such actions are irreversible and despicable, so that the past would not repeat itself.