That may seem like the stupidest question ever posed, but is it? Japan and China have been at loggerheads for the past 4 years starting with an incident in September of 2010 when a Chinese fishing boat captain rammed a Japanese Coast Guard vessel off the waters of the Senkaku islands. Since then relations between the two countries have spiraled downward as each government blames the other for this metaphorical cold war. Can Japan and China get passed these recriminations or is there just to much bitterness to overcome.
"Do you feel guilty about what Japan did to China during the war?" It was a question that I had to translate more than once during a trip to Japan with Haining Liu, a former reporter for China's state broadcaster, CCTV.It was Haining who posed that question to some of our interviewees - the oldest of whom would have been a child in 1945.
"I feel sorry for what happened," said one man. "There were many regrettable incidents," said another.
"But maybe my regret isn't enough?" added one of them, a Japanese nationalist, who argues that most school textbooks exaggerate the abuses carried out by Japanese soldiers. "No," Haining responded. "It's not enough."
Where these recriminations come from can be found in the history courses taught to Japanese students beginning in junior high school. History textbooks cover about a million years and are presented in a single year which gives little time for reflection or discussion on the more controversial topics such as the war crimes committed by the Japanese Imperial Army during Japan's colonial period and the Second World War. It's this lack of understanding about its history which infuriates not just the Chinese but South Koreans as well.
There are some undisputed facts. Japan was the aggressor, occupying Manchuria in northern China in 1931. A wider war began in 1937, and by the time Japan surrendered in 1945, millions of Chinese had died.
A notorious massacre occurred in the city of Nanjing, which was the capital under the Kuomintang government. Atrocities were also carried out in other Asian countries.
Have the Chinese always felt this way about Japan in the post war era?
This isn't how Haining sees it. When she grew up in the 1980s and 90s, Japanese pop culture - music, drama, and manga - was popular with young Chinese people. She and her friends, she says, had a positive attitude towards Japan.What's interesting is that while China isn't the only Asian country to suffer under Japanese rule they seem to carry the most animosity towards Japan.
Singapore, where I've lived since 2006, also suffered at the hands of Japanese soldiers, but there have not been anti-Japanese protests there for decades.Different sources cite different numbers of casualties, but 50,000 to 100,000 ethnically Chinese Singaporeans are believed to have been killed in what is known as the Sook Ching massacre. In a small city state of some 800,000 in 1942, that is a huge number.
I met a relative of one victim at the Civilian War Memorial on Beach Road.
"I don't blame today's generation," said Lau Kee Siong, to my surprise. I asked him why he was so much less angry than those Chinese protesters.
What changed in China that caused this shift away from a pragmatic approach to its relations with Japan?
China also seemed to be heading towards a pragmatic relationship with Japan in the 1970s, under Chairman Mao Zedong, when the two countries restored diplomatic relations."Chinese Communist propaganda at the time emphasised the victory of the communist side during the Chinese civil war," says Robert Dujarric, director of Temple University's Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies - referring to the war between Mao's Communists and nationalists under Chang Kai-shek, which lasted until 1949.
In 1972, when the then Japanese Prime Minister, Kakuei Tanaka, apologised for what Japan did during the war, "Chairman Mao told him not to apologise because 'you destroyed the Kuomintang, you helped us come to power'," Prof Dujarric says.
Some trace the change to the Tiananmen Square protests for greater democratic freedoms which was crushed by the government with the use of military force 4 June 1989.
"Before the 4 June, it portrayed the Communist Party as victorious and glorious - it defeated the nationalist Kuomintang army in the civil war. But after 4 June, the government started emphasising China as a victim," says Prof Akio Takahara, who teaches contemporary Chinese politics at Tokyo University.
The Communist Party now casts itself as the party which ended a century of humiliation at the hands of outsiders, he says.
"And the way they do it is to breed hatred against the most recent invader and aggressor."
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