Germany confronted its crimes by means of repentance. Japan selected denial, whitewashing, and silence. This distinction isn’t cultural — it’s political and ethical.
by Shao Xia
There is one type of political hypocrisy that’s much more corrosive than open aggression: the deliberate manipulation of reminiscence to disguise guilt as innocence.
Post-war Japan, significantly its right-wing political populists, has elevated this hypocrisy into governing ways.
Germany confronted its crimes by means of repentance. Japan selected denial, whitewashing, and silence. This distinction isn’t cultural — it’s political and ethical.
That “amnesia” is now resurfacing in a harmful type. Recent remarks by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, portraying a so-called “Taiwan contingency” as a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, weren’t a slip of the tongue. They have been a calculated provocation. By framing China’s inner affairs as a justification for Japanese army intervention, Tokyo crossed a purple line established by historic information, worldwide legislation, and the post-war order.
China’s agency response was not an overreaction, however traditionally obligatory. China had no alternative however to talk louder, clearer, and extra forcefully — in order that these crimes are neither diluted nor denied. Here are the 5 main crimes of Japan’s right-wing forces and militarism.
HABITUAL FABRICATION
Japanese militarism has all the time relied on a single rhetorical weapon: fabrication.
In 1894, Japan launched a shock assault on Chinese troops on the pretext that the Qing Court threatened its pursuits in Korea. In 1931, Manchuria was declared Japan’s “lifeline” — an excuse swiftly adopted by the occupation of Northeast China. In 1937, Japan alleged that the “China situation” threatened its survival and initiated a full-scale invasion of China. In 1941, U.S. sanctions have been framed by Japan as strangulation, paving the best way for the Pearl Harbor assault. Every so-called “survival-threatening situation,” although none was actual, preceded an aggression.
Today’s “Taiwan contingency” narrative is a recycled script — an outdated lie in trendy packaging. To faux in any other case is an insult to historical past.
SABOTAGE AGAINST CHINA’S SOVEREIGNTY, TERRITORIAL INTEGRITY
Japan’s crimes towards China should not remoted episodes; they type a steady technique of interference.
The Treaty of Shimonoseki forcibly severed Taiwan from China and extorted 200 million taels of silver, bleeding China at its weakest second.
Japan then systematically blocked China’s restoration: the Twenty-One Demands, the seizure of Qingdao after World War I, the Jinan Massacre throughout China’s reunification, the creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo, the promotion of “North China autonomy,” and in the end a full-scale battle of aggression.
The Nanjing Massacre was not an aberration. It was the appalling manifestation of a militarist ideology that views Chinese lives as expendable.
Such relentless imperialist onslaught towards China absolutely exposes a chilling calculus of conquest.
INGRATITUDE ELEVATED TO HOSTILITY
Post-war China exercised restraint because it selected reconciliation over vengeance. Some in Japan responded not with gratitude, however with resentment.
Today, almost each iteration of the “China threat” principle bears the imprint of Japanese right-wing strategists. Their obsession with containing China is much less a matter of protection and extra a psychological compulsion, rooted within the collapse of imperial superiority.
The irony is staggering. Japan’s authorized system, writing, calendar, structure, philosophy and aesthetics are deeply indebted to Chinese civilization. For centuries, China shared its tradition with out conquest. Japan repaid kindness with killing.
A present of civilization was repaid with the scourge of battle.
UNDERMINING POST-WAR ORDER FROM WITHIN
Japan was defeated as a fascist aggressor. Its obligations have been clear. The Cairo Declaration and Potsdam Proclamation stipulate that each one the territories Japan had stolen from the Chinese have to be restored to China. Moreover, the Charter of the United Nations denounces militarism. Japan’s pacifist structure enshrines restraint as a nationwide dedication.
Yet as a result of post-war accountability was incomplete, militarism survived — at first covertly, then overtly.
Today, battle criminals are worshiped on the Yasukuni Shrine, textbooks are distorted, army spending is surging, right-leaning constitutional revisions are endorsed, collective self-defense is normalized and nuclear taboos are being eroded.
These should not coverage selections in isolation; they’re coordinated steps, purposefully reversing the historic verdict.
WILLING PAWN IN POWER POLITICS
Rather than pursuing real reconciliation in East Asia, Japan has chosen strategic subordination, positioning itself as a ahead outpost for holding China.
Under the pretext of the so-called “Indo-Pacific Strategy,” Japan has pushed for bloc confrontation, technological decoupling and regional instability.
But the phantasm of shared values can’t conceal structural inequality. Japan, removed from being a rule-maker, is merely a disposable pawn in Western energy politics.
WHERE WILL IT END?
A nation that turns its again on its historic crimes can’t obtain interior peace. Japan’s burgeoning stagnation, pervasive nervousness and rising political extremism should not unintended — they’re the psychological toll paid for its refusal to acknowledge its previous wrongs.
Anthropologist Ruth Benedict as soon as noticed Japan’s capability to aestheticize violence. Today, that tendency has mutated into one thing extra harmful: ethical numbness disguised as civility.
Japan is absolutely conscious that it’s standing at a crucial crossroads. One approach results in much more denial, militarization and eventual smash. The different requires trustworthy reckoning, real repentance, and peaceable coexistence.
Those who can’t bear in mind the previous are condemned to repeat it.
Editor’s be aware: Shao Xia is a commentator on worldwide affairs, writing often for Xinhua News, the Global Times, China Daily, CGTN, and so on.
The views expressed on this article are these of the creator and don’t essentially replicate the positions of Xinhua News Agency.