Chinese protesters — about 10,000 in Beijing and 3,000 at the Japanese consulate in Guangzhou, which is located in the south — marched and chanted to protest a new Japanese history textbook that glosses over Japan’s wartime atrocities that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s. Some of the most notable editorial revisions to Japan’s wartime history include referring to the Nanking Massacre, during which anywhere from 100,000 to 300,000 Chinese civilians were killed by Japanese troops between December of 1937 and March of 1938, as an “incident” and neglecting to mention any numbers of civilians murdered during that massacre, as well as the textbook’s failure to thoroughly explain Japan’s use of Chinese and Korean women as sex slaves, or “comfort women.”

Like an open sore that is constantly chafing against history, the Sino-Japanese rift is constantly being agitated. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s and other ministers’ repeated visits to Yasukuni shrine, where Japan’s war dead are enshrined — including class A war criminals — are frustrating Japan’s Asian neighbors. The ministers who visit Yasukuni state that they are paying their respects to the Japanese war dead, while many Chinese insist that they are glorifying war criminals, such as General Hideki Tojo, who is enshrined at Yasukuni.

Japan’s revisions of history and refusal, unlike Germany, to apologize for its atrocities perpetrated during the war years, have very concrete ramifications on Japan’s relations with its Asian neighbors. The Chinese are protesting Japan’s bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and Kim Sam-hoon, South Korean Ambassador to the UN, recently fumed that “a country that does not have the trust of its neighboring countries because of its lack of reflection on the past” cannot fulfill the “role of a world leader.”

Mimi Hanaoka