Japan-China relations are in trouble, again. The latest recriminations began with the fierce booing of a Japanese soccer team in Chongqing in July of this year. Few of Japan's many indignant commentators seemed to know that this large central China city had been the defenseless target of relentless Japanese bombing raids for most of the war years. Its people were reduced to living in caves.
The commentators also like to zoom in on former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin as incurably anti-Japan. Few realize his formative years were spent in Japan-occupied Shanghai, which also suffered badly.
Anyone who knows China knows the depth of genuine Chinese dislike and even hatred for Japan. Japanese conservatives and rightwingers have lately begun to blame this on what they see as exaggerated emphasis on Japan's 1937-45 wartime atrocities in communist China's school textbooks. (They do not tell us how this alleged anti-Japan bias in the schools meshes with Beijing's strong efforts to curb anti-Japan comments on the Internet and in the Chinese media. Nor do they explain why anti-Japan feeling is just as strong in noncommunist Hong Kong, which has different textbooks.)