It’s not so much about how many Japanese believe that Japan was the victim of WWII, but the fact that so many of them do not even know the facts.

You have people who believe that Japan was the victim of WWII. These people are the ones writing WWII books in Japan.

You have some people who agree with the history studied by the rest of the world. These people keep their mouth shut or have their lives threatened by nationalistic fanatics.

And finally, you have people who do not know or care about what happened during WWII.
These people are kept sheltered from history from young.

It seems to me (from my limited obeservations) that the general conclusion many Japanese make about WWII is that war is bad, so we can safely assume that Japan isn’t going to start another war anytime soon. But this conclusion seems to come mainly from the fact that Japan itself was devastated during the war and not from an understanding about what the countries under Japanese Occupation underwent.

In an essence, Japan is mixing its own sufferings with everyone else’s and concluding that WWII wasn’t the fault of any particular country and that wars in general cause pain and suffering to everyone.

That is true in a sense, but that is not what the rest of Asia want to hear. Asia did not nuke Hiroshima. Asia was not the one that firebombed Tokyo. Asia was not the one that froze oil export to Japan. Asia was the victim of Japanese aggresssion, that is a clear and undeniable fact that Japan simply refuses to state explicitly in its literature. Japan tries to justify its actions by talking about its own suffering, and that is just bullshit. If someone stole my money, it doesn’t justify me going around robbing banks.

German cities suffered huge devastation during the war, but Germany’s suffering does not mean that the German people can deny or forget the sufferings of the Jews.
Japan’s own suffering does not justify what it did to Asia. It does not give Japan the right to forget.

Japan’s depiction of history is too morally neutral and vague and the Japanese people don’t really feel responsible for WWII. This is what pisses the rest of Asia off.

As a Chinese Canadian, I believe Japan, or at least the Japanese Government should be like Germany, apologizing for the atrocities that they have committed and recognizing history.

I have never been in Yasukuni although I live in tokyo.
(I think I should go there, like you)
And I hate the propaganda.

So I want to ask all asian peaple.
Do you think that japan will cause war again.
I think it can’t.
Allmost all japanese hate all kind of war.

> A huge percentage of Japanese school children do not even know which side won the war
No way!
At least, Japanese schools tell them “Japan lost the war.”
I think the problem is not that schools tell wrong history or
that japanese history texts are wrong.
it is that they do not tell the detail of the war
because the detail account of the war is not fixed among all japanese even now.

(Please forgive me writing japanese because my english is too poor to describe my opinion.)

どれくらいの人が靖国神社の主張なんて信じてると思っているの？
もちろん、これに影響されて「あの戦争は正しかったんだ」なんて言っている人もいるけど
目立つだけで、少数派だってことを知った方がいい。
だって、少なくとも２４年間日本で生きて来て、そんなこと言っている人と
知り合いになったことがないんだから。
韓国や中国が嫌いでも戦争が好きな人はほとんどいないし、
(その主張に微妙な違いはあれど)第二次世界大戦が正しかった戦争だと
いう人はほとんどいないでしょう。
多くの人々を殺した上に、日本人を含め多くの人を飢えさせたんだから。

基本的に多くの日本人は理由はどうあれ戦争が嫌いなんですよ。
その理由というのがアジアの人々に迷惑をかけたからと言う人もいれば、
戦争で餓死しそうだったからとか
アメリカの空襲が恐かったからと言う人もいる。

まあ、南京大虐殺があったかどうかは自分の目で見てないから分からないけど、
あってもおかしくなかったと思うし、他にも似たようなことはあったと思う。
ただ、考えて欲しいのは戦争は人を変えるということ。
彼らだって日本に帰れば良き父であり、良き夫だったわけだ。
そういうことがあったからといって日本人が本質的に残虐な人間だとは
思わないで欲しい。

> a young Japanese girl onscreen says that she had never learnt about WWII in elementary school
確かに、日本の小中学校では戦争について、もちろん教えることは教えるけど、
詳しくは教えていない。
これは高校の入学試験であまり出ないということと、大昔から始めて
江戸時代まで来ると時間が無くなってしまうこともあるけど、
本当の所は戦争についての評価がしっかりとは定まっていないからだと思う。
例えば、A級戦犯についても、東京裁判の通り彼らは犯罪者であると言う人もいれば、
東京裁判は勝者による裁判であり正当性はないが、
彼らは間違った戦争に導いた指導者であることは間違いないと言う人もいる。
つまり、細かな所も含めて公式的で統一した見解がないといってもいい状況なので、
これが一番の問題だと思います。

あと、靖国神社ごときの宣伝で日本人全員が影響されると思っているの？
日本人をバカにするなと言いたい。

How intriguing if Tokyo and Beijing in the future would to forge an axis of power in the Far East. Old enemies becoming firm allies would be more plausible in the past but from the First World War, war now affects everyone irregardless of their social strata and background. Memories are hard to erase and like stains, the older they get, the more stubborn they are. So Japan should try to solve this issue by acknowledging the existence of their atrocities or try to convert their enemies through soft imperialism… lol.

It’s often too easy to simply place our eyes on the Chinese side, atrocities are rarely nationalised, only differentiated by the willing or the unwilling. Why is there so low coverage on atrocities done to the Japanese populace? Could it be that there are none? I am not pro-Japanese, my father was from China and I seen and heard enough of what they did to people back then yet it only made me wonder.