In Europe, an acknowledgment of World War II’s calamities helped bring the Continent’s nations together in the aftermath of the conflict. In east Asia, by contrast, the war and its history have never been settled, politically, diplomatically, or emotionally. There has been little of the introspection and statesmanship that helped Europe to heal its wounds. Even the most basic of disagreements over history still percolate through day-to-day media coverage in Asia more than seventy years later, in baffling, insidious ways. Open a Japanese newspaper in 2017, and you might read of a heated debate about whether Japan invaded China, something that is only an issue because conservative Japanese still insist that their country was fighting a war of self-defense in the 1930s and 1940s. Peruse the state-controlled press in China, and you will see the Communist Party drawing legitimacy from its heroic defeat of Japan, though in truth, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists carried the burden of fighting the invaders, while the Communists mostly preserved their strength in hinterland hideouts. Scant recognition is given to the United States, who fought the Japanese for years before ending the conflict with two atomic bombs.
