Only true repentance from Japan can resolve East Asia’s ‘memory wars’

During a trip home, I took my daughters to the Nanking massacre memorial hall. It is not an easy place to visit. In shadowy rooms, photographs of victims line the walls. The names of the dead stretch across black stone. In glass cases lie bones unearthed from mass graves.

I wanted my children to learn history honestly, to understand what war does to people. I shared stories my grandma had told me: as she fled town, a bomb fell on a nearby street. One neighbour vanished. Only bits of her remained stuck to a wall. Yet, the older my children grow, the more I realise that in Asia, history is not a settled fact but contested territory. The past is also a weapon.

East Asia remains trapped in what scholars call “memory wars”. China, Japan and South Korea, three neighbours with deep cultural links and enormous economic interdependence, still cannot agree on the legacy of military aggression or the moral meaning of wartime atrocities.

One reason is that post-war Asia never had a Nuremberg moment. While the Tokyo Trials prosecuted top leaders, the American occupation focused on rebuilding Japan as a Cold War ally. Bureaucrats, media figures and military officers who served the wartime state were quietly folded back into public life. Japan rebuilt quickly, but its moral reckoning stalled.

China and South Korea, by contrast, constructed national identities from the rubble of trauma. In China, the narrative is clear: Japan invaded, the Chinese resisted and the Communist Party saved the nation. The Nanking massacre museum is even designated as a national patriotic education base.

Across the country, museums, textbooks and commemorations frame past atrocities as proof of China’s moral righteousness while casting critics as threats to national dignity.

South China Morning Post