The great article or book on the deep-seated mutual hatred and distrust between post-war China and Japan, may very well exist, but I haven't found it yet. Perhaps I should look harder, because it seems inevitable that the future of east-Asia will be forged on the relationship between these two countries, and it seems important to understand that relationship better. Certainly there is little insight to be gained from the predictable spattering of wretched articles oozing forth from the Chinese propaganda apparatus to accompany the East Asian Summit, in Kuala Lumpur. The ground level propaganda assault accompanies Wen Jiabao's decision to break off an annual series of sideline meetings with Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi and Korean president Roh Moo-hyun as a result of Koizumi's continued visits to the Yasukuni Shrine.
The postponement of talks "is not something that China wants", Wen told reporters, "the main reason for the impasse in China-Japan ties is that the Japanese leader won't treat the history issue in a correct way and made five consecutive visits to the Yasukuni Shrine that honors Class A war criminals in World War II."

The visits seriously hurt the feelings of Chinese, South Koreans, and the people of other Asian countries, Wen said.

China has long believed that good long-term relations are in the interests of the people of both countries, according to Wen, urging the Japanese leaders to take history as a mirror and take concrete measures to remove the barriers to bilateral ties.

The Chinese are only too happy to hold up the "mirror" for the Japanese, in the form of various commemorations of the genuinely awful Nanjing massacre. Among other things, today's China Daily treats us to an article stumping for a multipart documentary on the massacre, which is due to start broadcasting on Chinese television stations tonight. The early reviews are already in:
"I have never known so many truths of the Nanjing Massacre before," said Yang Shou after attending the launch of a new six-part documentary film yesterday.

Yang, 28, who lives in Nanjing, capital of East China's Jiangsu Province, said he was deeply shocked by the film, "1937: The Truth of Nanjing."

One part tells how just before the massacre began on December 13, the Chinese government at the time escorted all of the Japanese people back home.

They even sent soldiers to guard their trains so that the officials, businessmen and their relatives could safely leave Nanjing, capital of the Republic of China (1912-49) for Japan.

"However, Chinese people's humane deeds were changed by the Japanese invaders' cruel massacre," said the narrator in the film.

With tears in his eyes, Yang said: "Every Chinese should watch this film and better understand the history."
Moving. Meanwhile a Xinhua photo shows a Nanjing resident signing his name to a big-character banner reminding people not to forget history, which seems pretty unlikely considering how often it is invoked here. The caption, as always, is illustrative:
A Nanjing resident signs his name Monday on a slogan banner which reads: "Don't forget history!" A photo exhibition based on the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression opened in the capital city of East China's Jiangsu Province Monday. Wu Xianbing, a resident of Nanjing, contributed 280 photos on the Nanjing Massacre for the exhibition, many of which were shown to the public for the first time.
I've noted it before, but I always find it interesting how the war is named here. It's factually accurate, to be sure, but definitely calculated to maintain an emotional charge entirely different from "The Great War" or "World War II" or even Russia's "Great Pariotic War" (their name for WWII). The war's naming (or its Chinese equivalent) is a specific piece of propaganda designed to maintain a direct link between the sins of the past and the Japan of today.

This week, Time magazine published two articles that really should have been combined into one. Each looked at the gulf between China and Japan from the perspective of one of the two countries. From Beijing, Matthew Forney wrote:
You don't have to look far to see why Chinese grow up learning to hate Japan. Take the forthcoming children's movie, "Little Soldier Zhang," which Beijing-based director Sun Lijun says he made having "learned a lot from Disney." The film chronicles the adventures in the 1930s of Little Zhang, a cute 12-year-old boy feeling his way through an unfriendly world. But the resemblance to Pinocchio ends there. After Japanese invaders shoot Little Zhang's grandmother in the back, the boy seeks revenge by joining an underground Red Army detachment. He moves among heroic Chinese patriots, sniveling collaborators and sadistic Japanese. The finale comes with Little Zhang helping blow up a trainload of Japanese soldiers and receiving a cherished reward: a pistol with which to kill more Japanese. "I thought about including one sympathetic Japanese character, but this is an anti-Japan war movie and I don't want to confuse anyone," says Sun, who will premier his film on International Children's Day.

Chinese kids can be forgiven for thinking Japan is a nation of "devils," a slur used without embarrassment in polite Chinese society. They were raised to feel that way, and not just through cartoons. Starting in elementary school children learn reading, writing and the "Education in National Humiliation." This last curriculum teaches that Japanese "bandits" brutalized China throughout the 1930s and would do so today given half a chance. Although European colonial powers receive their share of censure, the main goal is keeping memories of Japanese conquest fresh. Thousands of students each day, for instance, take class trips to the Anti-Japanese War Museum in Beijing to view grainy photos of war atrocities — women raped and disemboweled, corpses of children stacked like cordwood. As one 15-year-old girl in a blue and yellow school uniform, Ji Jilan, emerged from a recent visit to the gallery, she told a TIME correspondent: "After seeing this, I hate Japanese more than ever."

From Tokyo, Jim Frederick wrote:

But while Japanese school kids are not taught to hate the Chinese, they are sometimes offered a distinctly exculpatory version of World War II history. At Yasukuni's museum visitors learn that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt restricted energy exports to Japan not in protest at Japan's invasion of China, for example, but because in 1939, he had resolved to join Great Britain in the war, and used "embargoes to force resource-poor Japan into war." Likewise, an exhibit on the "Nanking Incident" of 1937 does not mention the tens of thousands (and perhaps hundreds of thousands) of Chinese citizens the Japanese military slaughtered there in 1937 and 1938. It says only that, "The Chinese were soundly defeated, suffering heavy casualties. Inside the city, residents were once again able to live their lives in peace."

And due to Japan's distinction as the only country to have suffered the effects of atomic bombs, many Japanese even perceive their country as one of the war's great victims. The growing popularity of nationalist pop culture, meanwhile, is only reinforcing the lapses in education. In "Introduction to China," a best-selling comic book, readers learn that Japanese atrocities like the massacre at Nanking or the biological experiments on Chinese prisoners by the Imperial Army's Unit 731 either never happened or have been cynically exaggerated for Chinese political gain. And today, the comic claims, China is a leading exporter to Japan of crime, prostitution and disease.

It could make you cry. One shouts too loudly, the other is deaf. Both are playing to internal audiences, Beijing to maintain one bulwark of ideological legitimacy for the government, Japan in deference to a powerful electoral constituency. But the results, if the two countries continue like this, will cascade beyond their own borders and affect the entire region, and possibly the world. You can only stoke nationalist outrage so far before it goes looking for an outlet.

In another fascinating Time article this week (which I want to write about separately), Singapore's founding statesman, Lee Kuan Yew, remarked at length on China, a country he has come to know well over the past fifty years. In that interview, Lee said:
"A year ago, a Chinese leader in his 70s asked me, "Do you believe our position on peaceful rise?" I answered, "Yes, I do—but with one caveat." Your generation has been through the anti-Japanese war, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Gang of Four, and finally the Open Door policy. You know there are many pitfalls, that for China to go up the escalator without mishap, internally you need stability, externally you need peace. However, you are inculcating enormous pride and patriotism in your young in a restored China. So much so that when they started demonstrating against the Japanese, they became violent. Furthermore, when my son, the [Singapore] Prime Minister, went to Taipei last year, he and Singapore were attacked on China's Internet chat rooms as ingrates, traitors. The day before yesterday, I was an old friend of China; today I'm a new enemy. It's volatile. The Chinese leader said they would ensure that the young understood. Well, I hope they do. Somewhere down this road, a generation may believe they have come of age, before they have."
Volatility. That's the key concept in that statement. Japan and, especially, China are creating volatile societies where it is easy for nationalist sentiment to trump sensibility. Lee remarks on the vitriol directed against Singapore, an ethnic Chinese, Chinese-speaking nation with a long relationship with China and an overtly China-oriented government. Imagine the power of that volatility directed against Japan, and imagine how the perception of that volatility in-turn influences Japan and provides momentum for its new generation of nationalists.

Unfortunately, we don't have to rely on imagination. We've seen it action in limited but alarming ways, in the Asia Cup riots of Summer, 2004 and the anti-Japanese riots earlier this year. Those were relatively minor. But when comes the point, in either country, where something spins out of control?

Of course the Chinese are right to teach their history to their children, including sharing with them the terrible toll of the war. But if the objective is to teach today's children to hate today's Japanese, then China is forgetting the most important lesson of history: to learn from it in order to avoid repeating it. As the Balkans, Rwanda and Sudan have shown us in just the past fifteen years, the age of massacres hasn't passed. Let's see if we can remember the toll of the past without creating an environment that might, someday, add to it.

Peking Duck's post on this is here.
Asiapundit's is here (proxy link)
And Gordon on a related issue here (proxy link)