Japan's war past sparks Chinese rage

However politically skewed China's history teaching, most Chinese have been exposed to far more details and facts about World War II than Japanese - who come from a presumably open society. With standard Japanese history texts only offering two to three pages about the entire war, Japanese schools seem as diligent about not bringing up the facts of the war as Chinese schools are about raising them, experts say.

"The Japanese try to hide the truth, but it is hard for the Chinese to forget," argues Zha Mei, a retired scholar from Shanghai. "The Japanese invasion is passed down to the younger generation inside families. There are so many individual cases; every family lost an uncle, a cousin, a daughter. With so many relatives killed by Japanese it is hard to forget. I will tell my son, and he is telling my grandson."

China, for all its criticism of Japanese unwillingness to face history, has itself yet to face any number of unpleasant facts of recent history - the killing of intellectuals in the late 1950s, mass starvation in the 1960s, the Cultural Revolution, the foray into Vietnam, and the Tiananmen Square massacre, to name a few, China scholars point out. And state media did not cover the Xian protests.

Xian itself is a stronghold of ethnic Han national feeling. It is regarded as a center of ancient Chinese civilization. In June of 2001 several thousand Han students in Xian surrounded a dormitory of a half dozen Uigher Muslims, tossed rocks through the windows, and sang Chinese national songs until 2 a.m. There had been a fight between a Han and a Uigher student.

The present time is an unusually sensitive moment in Chinese-Japanese relations. Chinese influence in the region is challenging Japan. Asian nations are asking whether the current taste of economic integration will develop into a formal regional identity. At the same time, nationalist feelings are rising in both Beijing and Tokyo in ways that would have been forbidden several years ago. The information revolution plays a role: When during the Japanese election the governor of Kanagawa Prefecture stated that all Chinese with student visas are "sneak thieves," Chinese students heard about it, and passed it around in ways that confirm their own prejudices.

Ironically, popular suspicions and trash talking between China and Japan belie a new move in elite circles in the two nations to open channels of dialogue, cooperation, and even ways to deal with the past. Chinese envoy Dai Bingguo was in Tokyo Wednesday to confirm that six-party talks on North Korea will commence Dec. 10 in Beijing - a diplomatic process that is increasing Asian interaction. Sources say that Y. Nakasone, the venerable power broker in Japan, is openly speaking of offering Beijing a written explanation of why Japanese leaders visit the Yasakuni Shrine - something deeply hated in China. The letter would state that Prime Minister Koizumi is not honoring war criminals, but the average soldier who died.

At the same time, there is a significant set of influential voices on the proud right in Japan that are articulating a whole new set of rationales about Japan's military rule in Asia that deflect criticism.

Japanese, for example, are stung by comparison between themselves and Germany. Germans are famous for agonizing after the war about their collective crimes; Japanese did not do the same soul searching. But some Japanese historians now say that Japan's war history doesn't compare with the Nazi project to eradicate a race of people. In this new view, Japan may have been a harsh colonizer in Asia, but was not so different from other European colonizers like Britain and France in its behavior.

Most Western historians and eyewitnesses disagree with this colonial comparison. But the rationale is gaining status in influential Japanese circles.

A less scholarly argument now on offer is that the real project behind Japan's expansion was an attempt to rid Asia of white colonizers. That Japan pushed Europeans out of China, Southeast Asia, and Korea is something that Asian nations should appreciate, in this view.

Scholars say that Japanese feel that should the 1935 to 1945 war-time period be publicly condemned, it would be a stain on the honor of those that died.

"You can't apologize for a war without implying that those killed did something wrong," says Mr. Curtis. "In the US we criticized Vietnam, while honoring the soldiers. Japan isn't there yet."

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