Japan's selective amnesia threat to peace and historical truth

History is often written by the victors, but in Japan a selective memory downplays the nation's wartime guilt. This delusion is captured in the recent Chinese film Dead to Rights. Set during the Nanjing Massacre, the movie follows some civilians who seek refuge in a photo studio and risk their lives to expose photographic evidence of the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army.

Instead of prompting a thoughtful reflection, Japanese outlets such as TBS Television linked the movie's popularity to growing anti-Japanese sentiment in China, while the Yomiuri Shimbun dismissed it as "overhyped political propaganda". The Sankei Shimbun went further by publishing a column with the headline, "The 'Nanjing Massacre', as claimed by China, is a lie". Even former Japanese national soccer player Keisuke Honda initially dismissed the massacre as a "Chinese-made lie".

Such a reaction is unfortunately natural from a society that has for decades been minimizing its role as a wartime aggressor. In the public discourse, any discussion of Japanese atrocities is met with a defensive counter-narrative focused on the nation's own victimhood. The horrific Nanjing Massacre, where Japanese troops slaughtered over 300,000 Chinese civilians and unarmed soldiers in just six weeks, is met with the bombing of Hiroshima. The forced sexual slavery of comfort women, who were women and girls from Japan's occupied territories — including Korea, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, and others — and the barbaric human experiments conducted by Unit 731 are dismissed or minimized, replaced by a focus on the Japanese suffering at the end of the war. The staggering scale of the Japanese atrocities and the 35 million Chinese military and civilian casualties as well as the more than $600 billion in economic losses for China during the 14-year war against Japanese aggression are conveniently ignored, creating a false moral equivalence that attempts to absolve Japan of its wartime guilt.