Does that mean India has officially recognised that Tibet is part of China?
Well, the US does. Is "Tibet" on official maps in England?
And Japan has a *lot* to answer for as far as WWII in China goes... and instead, they're just writing the whole thing out of their history textbooks.
Quoting something I wrote elsewhere, summarizing the deal:
In 1937, Japanese planes started bombing densely populated cities, and the advancing Japanese army became notorious for setting fires and killing civilians. Once they occupied Nanjing, the Japanese soldiers made a sport of forcing Chinese women to, well, do things. Anything. And they took pictures of them doing it. Made for a nice stash of evidence at the war's end, but for two months, looting, rape and impromptu amateur porn in the streets was commonplace.
The public atrocities got so bad, a German businessman (and Nazi Party member) in Nanjing, John Rabe, decided to do something about it. Every time he witnessed an assault in progress, he'd strap on his swastika armband, march out to the Japanese soldiers and demand they stop. And they did. He did it again and again and again, like some kind of Nazi superhero, defending the virtue of the women of Nanjing.
Today, there's a statue of Rabe in the city center.
Anyway, by the end of the two months, between 100,000 and 300,000 of Nanjing's civilians had been killed, often horrifically, and as many as 80,000 women had been raped.
There are people around who still remember that stuff.
If you read that wikipedia article (the second link above), you'll find that censorship on the subject has gone back as far as the massacre itself, and continued on both sides. (Mao thought not mentioning this stuff while "normalizing relations" with Japan would be a good idea, and what Mao thought, went.)
So, like most repressed stuff, this thing has festered and grown in intensity. And is ongoing.
From the last paragraph of wikipedia:
In October 2004, the Japanese manga comic book "Kuni ga Moeru," or "The Country is Burning" by Hiroshi Motomiya was suspended from the manga anthology Weekly Young Jump because it "depicted the Nanjing Atrocities as 'real.'" Certain Japanese politicians and civilians wanted the manga censored or removed because they claimed that the incident never occurred and there was no proof of it.
So, in summary, don't go looking for any Sino-Japanese declarations of unity and brotherhood. Any partnership between the two will be pretty darn fraught. |
