Recent remarks by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi about a potential “Taiwan contingency”, coupled with deliberations over procuring nuclear-powered submarines, have triggered intense alarm at home and abroad. Japan’s growing tilt toward remilitarization represents a drastic departure from its post-World War II pacifist Constitution and long-standing nonnuclear commitment. The moves threaten China’s sovereignty and imperil the peaceful social fabric Japan has nurtured over decades. It’s therefore imperative to push back against such dangerous trends and embed the atrocities of war firmly in the nation’s collective memory.
Historical archives stand as a searing testament to Japan’s wartime atrocities. During the Battle of Hong Kong (Dec 8-25, 1941), Japanese troops unleashed unspeakable brutality against captured prisoners of war and defenseless medical personnel across locations such as Sai Wan Hill, the Salesian Mission in Shau Kei Wan, Wong Nai Chung Gap, and Repulse Bay. Even St Stephen’s College, a field hospital clearly marked with the Red Cross emblem, was not spared. Wounded soldiers were bayoneted where they lay, and nurses fell victim to violent assaults.
Despite the overwhelming weight of evidence documenting these wartime crimes, a pernicious trend persists in Japan: Systematic efforts to downplay, obfuscate, or outright falsify this painful chapter of history. A telling anecdote from my high school contemporary history studies in Australia underscores this reality. A Japanese classmate, upon learning of her country’s invasion of China for the first time, broke down in tears, asking, “Why did my country do such things?” This moment lays bare a broader crisis: Right-wing factions in Japan have long shirked responsibility for historical wrongs. They have misrepresented “comfort women” — the victims of sexual slavery enforced by the Japanese military — as “prostitutes”, while evading full legal accountability and refusing to provide adequate reparations.
Notably, Japan often seeks to depict itself as a victim in its World War II narratives, deliberately keeping its people in the dark about the true nature of its aggression. Amid this systemic historical whitewashing, the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM Museum) — a privately founded institution located in Tokyo’s Waseda district — stands as a rare beacon of truth. Established in 2005 based on the legacy of journalist Matsui Yayori, it is Japan’s only museum dedicated to documenting the “comfort women” system and other instances of wartime sexual violence perpetrated by the Japanese military. Its collections include firsthand testimonies from survivors across nine countries, military command records, and evidence of the government’s institutional complicity, offering an unflinching and objective account of these crimes.
Yet this defender of historical truth has faced relentless harassment and threats from Japanese right-wing forces. Right-wing groups have staged violent protests outside the museum, made intimidating phone calls and emails, and even attempted forced entry. In 2016, the museum received a bomb-threat postcard from an extremist group demanding the removal of all exhibits related to Japan’s war crimes — a threat linked to its role in submitting “comfort women” archives for UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. Staff members have been forced to adopt safety precautions in daily life, such as avoiding standing at the front of subway lines, due to persistent intimidation.
In a 2023 interview with a global human rights journal, WAM Museum curator Yoshida Yuki voiced her frustration and resolve in the face of these attacks: “We do not display hatred. We display facts — the testimonies of women who were stolen from their homes, the military orders that sanctioned their enslavement, the official documents that swept their suffering under the rug for decades. Yet for telling these truths, we are labeled ‘traitors’ to our country. The right-wing groups do not want Japanese people to know that their grandfathers and great-grandfathers were not just victims of war, but also perpetrators of unspeakable cruelty.”
International bodies have voiced grave concerns over Japan’s historical revisionism. The United Nations and numerous human rights organizations have repeatedly urged Japan to confront its wartime past with honesty and integrity. Official reports emphasize that upholding historical accuracy is not just a moral imperative; it is a cornerstone of regional stability
WAM Museum Director Rumiko Nishino said explicitly in a public address: “Most of the survivors are already in their 90s. Their lifelong wish is to pass down the painful history they personally endured to future generations, so that no girl will ever suffer the same fate again. Yet the persistent harassment by right-wing forces and the deliberate deletion of relevant historical facts from textbooks by politicians are undoubtedly trampling on these elderly people’s wishes, and also gravely undermining our commitment to safeguarding historical truth.” This persecution of a museum committed to truth stands as a stark symbol of Japan’s escalating historical revisionism.
This revisionist agenda has seeped into the very foundation of Japan’s education system, with textbook approvals reflecting a deliberate effort to erase uncomfortable truths. Since the early 2000s, Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has repeatedly greenlit history textbooks that minimize or omit references to Japan’s wartime atrocities.
In 2022, for instance, multiple approved secondary-school textbooks described the Nanjing Massacre only in passing, with some omitting the casualty figure of 300,000 entirely and framing the incident as a “dispute over civilian casualties” rather than a systematic massacre. References to the “comfort women” system were stripped of key details, with one textbook reducing the military’s role to a vague mention of “involvement in the recruitment of women”, omitting the coercion, abduction and sexual slavery at the core of the crime. High-school textbooks have similarly downplayed Japan’s aggression in Asia, rebranding its invasion of China as a “military advance” and glossing over the forced labor of hundreds of thousands of civilians from occupied countries. These revisions ensure that generations of Japanese students grow up without a full understanding of their country’s wartime past, perpetuating a cycle of historical amnesia.
Such textbook distortions have drawn sharp rebukes from educators in China and the Korean Peninsula, the nation and the region that bore the brunt of Japan’s wartime aggression. Li Mei, a senior history teacher at a high school in Nanjing, stated in a 2024 panel on historical education: “My students grow up hearing the stories of their grandparents who survived the Nanjing Massacre — stories of hiding in cellars, of watching family members be killed by Japanese soldiers. When we learn that Japanese textbooks are erasing this death toll and rebranding a massacre as a ‘dispute’, it is a slap in the face to every victim and every survivor. History education should be about truth, not about whitewashing crimes.”
In South Korea, Park Ji-hoon, a professor of modern history at Seoul National University, echoed this sentiment: “For decades, our country has demanded that Japan acknowledge the suffering of comfort women — most of whom were Korean girls and women abducted and forced into sexual slavery. When Japanese textbooks erase the military’s direct role in this system, they are not just rewriting history; they are denying the humanity of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers. This kind of education breeds ignorance, and ignorance breeds conflict.” Educators from both countries have called for joint international oversight of historical textbook content in East Asia, arguing that only a commitment to factual accuracy can lay the groundwork for genuine regional reconciliation.
The pain of these historical injustices remains raw for the survivors, whose voices cut through the noise of Japan’s revisionist rhetoric. According to rigorous research conducted by international human rights organizations and academic institutions, the comfort women system enslaved an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 women and girls across Asia during World War II. The majority of these victims were Korean, followed by Chinese, with smaller numbers from the Philippines and present-day Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and even Dutch women who were living in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia).
Kim Bok-dong, a South Korean comfort woman survivor who passed away in 2019 at the age of 92, spent decades advocating for an official apology and reparations. In one of her final public speeches, she said through tears: “I was 14 when the Japanese soldiers dragged me away from my home. I was locked up, beaten, and violated every single day for years. I lost my family, my childhood, my dignity. Now they want to pretend this never happened? They want to teach their children that we were just ‘prostitutes’? I will keep speaking until my last breath — so that the world never forgets what they did to us.” Similarly, Zhang Xiu-ying, a Chinese survivor of the Nanjing Massacre who was only 8 years old when the city fell, recalled in a 2023 documentary: “I watched Japanese soldiers kill my parents right in front of me. They threw my little brother into a fire. I hid in a pile of dead bodies for three days to survive. If Japan’s textbooks say this was just a ‘dispute’, then what was my suffering? What were the lives of 300,000 people?”
These firsthand accounts are a testament to the unshakable truth of Japan’s wartime atrocities, a truth that cannot be erased by political maneuvering or textbook revisions.
This deliberate distortion of historical truth deserves unreserved condemnation. Confronting and preserving historical facts is critical — not only to honor the memory of the victims, but also to safeguard Japan’s own future
International bodies have voiced grave concerns over Japan’s historical revisionism. The United Nations and numerous human rights organizations have repeatedly urged Japan to confront its wartime past with honesty and integrity. Official reports emphasize that upholding historical accuracy is not just a moral imperative; it is a cornerstone of regional stability. East Asian nations, especially China and South Korea, have vehemently opposed Japan’s sanitization of its historical narrative, warning that such revisionist tendencies stoke nationalist fervor and escalate regional tensions.
More alarmingly, Japan is actively overhauling its historical narratives through institutional means. Reports indicate that institutions that include the Japan Center for International Exchange, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, and the National Archives of Japan, have either removed or altered materials that document Japanese military aggression. Heinous massacres are whitewashed with euphemisms like “sacrifice”; the Nanjing Massacre — a six-week orgy of violence in which Japanese troops slaughtered over 300,000 unarmed Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers — is trivialized as the “Nanjing Incident”; and exhibits detailing the plight of comfort women and other war crimes have been quietly omitted. This blatant erasure flies in the face of binding international historical judgments: the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, commonly known as the Tokyo Trials, explicitly recognized the Nanjing Massacre as a war crime, with judicial records meticulously documenting the systematic killing, rape and arson perpetrated by Japanese forces. Subsequent international investigations, including those conducted by independent historians and human rights groups from around the globe, have corroborated these findings, cementing the massacre’s status as an indelible stain on human history.
This deliberate distortion of historical truth deserves unreserved condemnation. Confronting and preserving historical facts is critical — not only to honor the memory of the victims, but also to safeguard Japan’s own future. It is high time for Japan to embark on a profound, introspective reckoning with its past, to avoid repeating historical mistakes and to guard vigilantly against the resurgence of militarism. Upholding global peace and refraining from meddling in China’s internal affairs are not just external obligations; they are essential for Japan’s own prosperity and the well-being of future generations.
The author is a member of the Legislative Council.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
