“Ironclad evidence proves that Japans development started with and depended on its invasion of China,” booms the voice of a narrator in a video that chronicles the island nation’s wartime rise.

Min follows the video by reeling off a list of Japan’s piecemeal invasions of Chinese territory before inviting her students to comment.

“They lost World War II, but they are not convinced,” says one student. “Some inflamed Japanese youth still want to fight a decisive battle with our Chinese nation and we should prevent them,”  he continues before Min interrupts.

“Learning this episode of history is not for the sake of getting revenge, what’s important is to restore historical truth,” explains Min.

The flames of nationalisation

Yet historical truth is often conspicuously absent in Chinese schools too, as it is in Japan and other East Asian nations such as North and South Korea.

While learning materials in Chinese high schools take special pains to outline Japanese aggression beginning with the 1874 invasion of Taiwan, China’s involvement in the 1950-53 Korea war is dismissed in one sentence.

At the same time such are the holes in modern Chinese history that the average mainland college graduate still believes China is a ”peaceful country” which has fought wars only in self-defense.

Completely absent from textbooks is China’s 1951 invasion and subsequent colonisation of an independent Tibet. Erased too is the 1962 attack on India and the ill-fated 1979 incursion into Vietnam.

Even Min admitted to having heard only in passing about these events.

Despite this, it is Japan alone which has found itself at the centre of renewed international controversy over its teaching of history.

This was starkly highlighted last weekend in China when 30,000 students hit the streets to protest Japan’s approval of a new school textbook that glosses over the Imperial army’s wartime atrocities.

The new right-wing book, which also infuriated South Korea, avoids the word “invasion” when it refers to Japan’s military occupation of other Asian countries in the first half of the 20th century.

It also refers to the 1937 Nanjing Massacre -- in which some historians say at least 300,000 civilians were slaughtered by Japanese troops -- as an “incident” in which “many” Chinese were killed.

Japan is regionally appraised as one of Asia’s most flagrant manipulators of history, while South Korea also routinely makes changes that swing between loose factual interpretations and outright omission.

These historical distortions exacerbate regional diplomatic tensions and fan the flames of nationalism.

Tit – for- Tat…

In turn, Chinese books reserve extra ire for Japan’s wartime bellicosity, the language rife with references to the widely documented atrocities carried out by Imperial troops.

“Everywhere the cruel Japanese invaders went they committed the most horrific evils,” says a first-year high school history text used at Gezhi.

The book then gleefully recounts the number of Japanese killed, before implying that without Chinese resistance Japan would have never been defeated.

“In all 1.5 million Japanese soldiers were annihilated (by Chinese soldiers) accounting for about 70 percent of their total deaths in World War II, making China a decisive player in the destruction of Japan,” it says.

“It’s tit-for-tat,” says Min Hong, the teacher at Gezhi. “Why does Japan distort its textbooks? They always want to cover-up the historical truth, they always want to change (their textbooks). We can’t allow that,” she says.

Haruki Wada, an emeritus professor at Tokyo University, insists that Japan does tackle the bloodier facts of its history, even if teachers can choose to use more “right-leaning” texts that whitewash Japan’s history.

Such recalcitrant attitudes reinforce Chinese perceptions that Japan has not properly atoned for its wartime atrocities, routinely souring diplomatic relations and striking a resonant chord among China’s nationalist youth.

But even when it comes to China’s domestic history students know shockingly little about the deaths of tens of millions that resulted from Mao Zedong’s ill-conceived Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.

Despite changes that apportion Mao with greater blame for the tragedies, texts still gloss them over because in China “textbooks represent the will of the authorities”, says Shanghai Normal University history professor Su Zhiliang.

Focus on unification

In part, the lack of accuracy can be blamed on the closed, secretive heritage of China’s repressive communist party, which catapulted to power in 1949 following its victory over nationalist forces then fleeing to Taiwan.

“There are some archives that historians can’t get at, that’s why contemporary Chinese history is weak,” explains Su.

At the root of that problem lies a more salient interpretation that helps explain Beijing’s adamant refusal to apologise to its people for its own most recent atrocity -- the massacre of hundreds, maybe thousands, of protesting students in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

“If you expose the mistakes the Communist Party of China has made all at once, people will probably doubt whether the communist party is needed any more and whether the state could fracture like the former Soviet Union,” Min says.

Meanwhile, in South Korea educators have only recently moved to a more tempered version of history, abolishing some negative references toward its Stalinist northern neighbour in favour of a positive approach that in part reflects the recent diplomatic thawing following decades of frigid relations.

“My teachings focus on unification and I tell my students that North Koreans are our brothers,” Kan Yang-Sook, a history teacher at Dangan middle school in Seoul, tells AFP.

Although South Korean educators say their versions of international history are as fair and balanced as in Europe, they admit that North Korea, the United States and especially Japan receive more attention.

“Our textbooks do not distort or falsify historical facts such as the Cold War, but we sometimes tell students about their meaning and background,” says Kan.

“When I compare Germany with Japan, I clearly point out to the students Japan’s lackluster action in terms of compensation for war victims and reflection on its past in comparison to Germany’s acknowledgement of its past guilt.”

Photo courtesy: Reuters