Japan must not forget its history of aggression during World War II.
Japan needs to remember this history forever, learn from it, and cherish the peace that was achieved.
CGTN – August 15th is a significant date because, exactly 80 years ago, Japan accepted the Potsdam Declaration and announced its unconditional surrender, a fact that sealed the final victory of the Chinese people in the war of resistance against Japanese aggression and in the worldwide struggle against fascism.
It is worth noting that during World War II, the wars of aggression and colonial domination promoted by Japanese militarism brought enormous tragedies to several countries. Among them, the Chinese people were the first to resist and sustained the fight for the longest time, paying a very high price, with more than 35 million dead.
Japan needs to remember this history forever, learn from it, and cherish the peace that has been achieved.
However, eight decades later, the country's stance gives the rest of the world an impression of "historical amnesia." Some Japanese politicians and right-wing forces strive to evade responsibility, even going so far as to classify China's legitimate self-defense as "provocation." At the same time, they have promoted changes in textbooks, denied irrefutable evidence of the Nanjing Massacre and the issue of "comfort women," minimized facts of their aggression, and deliberately amplified the image of "atomic bomb victims" in an attempt to distort perceptions.
Today, faced with a more unstable and complex international scenario, right-wing sectors in Japan have taken advantage of the situation to push for a revision of the pacifist Constitution, expand the military arsenal, and rehearse a return to militarism.
This boldness is directly related to the support of the United States, which, in recent years, has promoted the so-called "Indo-Pacific Strategy" and, in practice, tolerated Japan violating its own pacifist Constitution.
With the release of a series of files, including real images of the Nanjing Massacre and records of the horrific human experiments conducted by Unit 731 of the Japanese army, the lies propagated by Japanese right-wingers were exposed one by one.
Eight decades have passed, but the judgment of history remains. As Hideo Shimizu, a former member of Unit 731, stated: "If we don't let children know the true history, Japan will have no future."
Source: CMG