To this day in Japan, the historic significance of Dec. 7th is unknown.
Whenver I mention it (usually on that very day) it always takes my Japanese listener by surprise, though very fairly they never relish it. Meanwhile, of course the exact dates of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are famous.
The exact history of Nanking is not dwelled upon, other than the extremely tiny Chinese community in Japan, some honest lefties and the extreme right, which admonishes that it never happened, or barely.
School textbooks in Japan mostly DO conceed that Nanking happened, but they do not go into the actual details.
The war in the Pacific is usually summed up with the word “advance”, i.e., Japanese forces advanced into China and the Pacific.
“School textbooks in Japan mostly DO conceed that Nanking happened, but they do not go into the actual details.”
The Japanese were every bit as bad as the Nazis. Medical experiments on living POWs, unbelievably brutal treatment of Chinese citizens, mass summary executions, biological warfare experiments on civilian populations, mass murders of POWs, the list goes on and on.
We didn’t hang near enough of them after the war.
L
> The exact history of Nanking is not dwelled upon... <
Now that you mentioned it, here’s the story of John Rabe, a Nazi businessman who was in the city at the time. I came across this story by accident. Rabe saved about 200,000 Chinese from being massacred by the Japanese. Remarkable.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe