Japan, China and the memory of the war

Between 1931 and 1945 Japan's army killed somewhere between fourteen and twenty million Chinese, by most estimates: in battle, by bombing and famine, in the killings at Nanjing, in experiments on prisoners, in forced labour. Japan has apologised, most fully in 1995. But ministers still pay respects at a Tokyo shrine where the leaders hanged for the war are honoured among the dead, textbooks soften the record, and courts have refused the victims compensation. China's government, for its part, has made the memory of the war a pillar of its own legitimacy, and revives it whenever relations sour.

The wider rivalry and each side's full account: Japan and China.

Where it stands · September 2026

On 4 September 2026 China marked the 81st anniversary of victory against Japanese aggression. On 16 September families of Chinese wartime forced labourers sued six Japanese companies. On 24 September China pushed back against a call by Takaichi to remove the 'enemy state' wartime label.

What the dispute is about

Whether Japan has apologised. It has, many times. Each apology has been followed by a minister who doubts Nanjing, a textbook that calls the war an "advance", or a shrine visit. China and Korea conclude that the apologies are diplomacy and the rest is conviction.

The shrine. Yasukuni honours two and a half million Japanese war dead. Since 1978 these include fourteen men convicted by the Allied tribunal as chief authors of the war. The museum beside it presents the war as the liberation of Asia.

Compensation. China waived reparations from the Japanese state in 1972. Japan's courts hold that individual claims were waived with them. The victims never agreed to that, and Chinese courts now accept their suits.

How each side explains it

Beijing's account

Japan has never faced its history as Germany did. Its leaders bow to war criminals, its schoolbooks hide the massacre at Nanjing, the sexual slavery, the germ warfare, and its courts turn the victims away. The few who apologised were disowned by those who came after. The present prime minister has spent her career denying these crimes. When such people rearm and speak of fighting over Taiwan, remembering is not nationalism. It is a warning the Chinese people paid for.

In our coverage

Japan is reviving militarism behind a pacifist facade →43 headlines
Covered by:Global Times · CGTN · China Daily · People's Daily

The account of Japan's government and conservatives

Japan has expressed deep remorse and heartfelt apology in statements by its prime ministers and its emperor, has been a peaceful democracy for eighty years, and gave China more aid than any other country to build its railways, ports and hospitals. How a nation mourns its dead is its own affair; the shrine honours soldiers, not a policy. China's government keeps the wounds open because anti-Japanese feeling is useful to it. Later generations of Japanese, who had nothing to do with the war, should not be made to apologise for ever.

What each account leaves out

Beijing's leaves out the apology of 1995 and forty years of Japanese aid, neither of which its schoolbooks mention; that China itself waived reparations; that it was the Nationalist army, not the Communists, that bore most of the fighting against Japan; and that its own history of famine and political killing, which cost at least as many Chinese lives, may not be commemorated at all.

Japan's government leaves out that its apologies have been regularly contradicted from inside the cabinet; that the shrine added the convicted leaders deliberately and in secret, after which Japan's own emperor stopped going; and that the companies which used forced labour have, with few exceptions, paid nothing.

The victims' advocates leave out that in China their cause can be taken up or dropped only with the state's permission, and was set aside for long periods when relations with Japan were good.

The ledger

China's government

Wanted: by its account, an honest reckoning from Japan.
Gained: a cause that unites its public.
Paid: a public whose hostility to Japan it cannot always switch off; a Japanese schoolboy was stabbed to death in Shenzhen in 2024 on the anniversary of the 1931 attack.

Japan's conservatives

Wanted: an end to apology and a history their children can be proud of.
Gained: a generation that knows little of the war.
Paid: every other goal of Japanese diplomacy in Asia is harder because of it.

The victims

Wanted: to be acknowledged.

Words in dispute

Names and terms the sides do not share. This page keeps them out of its own voice.

war of aggression / Greater East Asia war
Nanjing massacre / Nanjing incident
comfort women / sexual slavery
war criminals' shrine / Yasukuni
masochistic history / facing history
remorse

Events per week

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Week of Sep 21, 2026(1)

China pushes back against Takaichi’s call to remove ‘enemy state’ wartime label

1 sourcesSep 24, 2026