Japan Focus has a series of articles about Japan’s wartime actions in China. From the translator’s introduction to “The Nanking Atrocity: An Interpretive Overview” by Fujiwara Akira:
In this essay, Fujiwara provides a concise narrative of Japan’s decision to escalate the “China Incident” into a full-scale war by July 1937. This ultimately led to an assault on China’s wartime capital of Nanking by imperial armed forces, who captured it in December. Fujiwara also gives a trenchant, critical account of the Nanking Massacre (a.k.a. “the Rape of Nanking”), plus an admittedly partisan yet nonetheless fair analysis of right-wing views in Japan today that downplay or deny this atrocity. On this last point, Fujiwara argues that Japanese deniers and nationalistic revisionists seek to build a public consensus that will allow their nation to re-emerge as a military power uninhibited from waging future wars based on putatively unwarranted feelings of guilt about the past. [Full text]
See also:
– “Heroic Resistance and Victims of Atrocity: Negotiating the Memory of Japanese Imperialism in Chinese Museums” by Kirk A. Denton
– “Biohazard: Unit 731 in Postwar Japanese Politics of National ‘Forgetfulness‘” by Frederick R. Dickinson
As well as an article about an ongoing dispute between China and Japan over the island of Okinotorishima.
