Japan Criticizes China History Textbooks
By JOSEPH COLEMAN
Associated Press Writer
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TOKYO -- Japan opened a new front in its dispute with China on Sunday by sharply criticizing Beijing's history textbooks, signaling continued friction between the Asian powers despite high-profile diplomatic moves to quell tensions.
Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura refuted Chinese claims that Japanese textbooks gloss over Tokyo's World War II-era atrocities, firing back in a TV talk show Sunday that China's schools indoctrinate their students with an unbalanced take on the past.
"There is a tendency toward this in any country, but the Chinese textbooks are extreme in the way they uniformly convey the 'our country is correct' perspective," Machimura said, echoing Sunday's editorial in Japan's largest newspaper accusing China of nationalistic education.
Machimura said Tokyo would officially inform Beijing of its opinion of Chinese textbooks after fully reviewing them. He said China's state councilor and former foreign minister, Tang Jiaxuan, had invited him to do so during a recent discussion.
The firm language reflected Japan's sometimes contradictory approach in handling the conflict with China, which erupted into a string of violent anti-Japanese protests in Chinese cities after Tokyo approved the latest version of a textbook by nationalist historians. China claims the books play down such Japanese wartime atrocities as mass sex slavery and germ warfare.
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi on Friday made the most public apology in a decade for his country's bloody march through Asia in the 1930s and 1940s, and then pressed hard for a meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao on the sidelines of a regional summit in Indonesia.
Despite the diplomatic push, Tokyo also has sent strong signals that it will not be bullied by Beijing. Just hours before Koizumi made his apology, some 80 lawmakers, including a Cabinet member, paid homage at a Tokyo war shrine that China criticizes for honoring war criminals.
Machimura also mixed his attack on Chinese textbooks with praise of the Koizumi-Hu meeting Saturday, saying of China: "They're next door. We can't move. They're important and we're important to each other."
The diplomatic moves have calmed some of the fury on the Chinese side, where the government has been tightening controls on protesters over the past week. Despite the troubles, Japan is a major source of investment in China's rapidly expanding economy.
Chinese state media urged protesters to stay off the streets Sunday, and dozens of paramilitary troops guarded the Japanese Embassy in Beijing, where demonstrators in past weeks have thrown rocks with little interference from police.
Hong Kong's Cable TV reported that more than 300 people in the southern city of Zhuhai marched to a Japanese-owned factory but were blocked by police. The broadcaster said the crowd eventually dispersed.
Officials in Zhuhai denied the report.
"There were no anti-Japan protests," said a city official who gave only his surname, Zhang.
The recent tensions come after several years of troubled relations between Japan and China, whose emergence as an economic power is making it Tokyo's competitor for influence in Asia.
Though Beijing is incensed by Koizumi's annual visits to the Yasukuni war shrine, the differences go far beyond interpretations of World War II history. The two are feuding over the ownership of East China Sea islands, gas exploration rights, the division of exclusive economic zones and Tokyo's bid for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.
Hu made a direct mention of broader problems following the meeting with Koizumi, saying that Tokyo must refuse to support any moves toward independence by Taiwan. The self-ruled island and the mainland split during civil war in 1949, but Beijing still claims it as its territory.
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Associated Press reporter Min Lee in Hong Kong contributed to this report.
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