In a grim year for Sino-Japanese relations, the board of education in Otawara, Japan, has chosen to use a contentious history textbook that will widen the rift between the two nations. Some of the most notable editorial revisions to Japan’s wartime history include referring to the Nanjing 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, and the textbook’s failure to thoroughly explain Japan’s use of Chinese and Korean women as sex slaves, or “comfort women.” All this in the same week that Japan and China have been snarling at each other across the East China Sea over oil drilling rights in a contested maritime region.

Although only 2,300 students will be using the textbooks, and although the publisher, the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, has fallen well short of its goal of installing its books in 10 percent of the nation’s middle schools — at last count only 0.04 percent of middle schools used the first edition of the textbook — the move will escalate the nations’ recently frustrated relations.

Earlier this year 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 the textbook.

Mimi Hanaoka