Shame in denial of massacre

Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel (L) and Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe attend their joint news conference after their talks at Abe's official residence in Tokyo, March 9, 2015. [Photo/Agencies]

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's remark that the Japanese government should face up to its wartime crimes during her visit to Japan on Monday sent a good warning to the Japanese public that they are being misled by political bias.

Merkel said that her country was lucky to be reintroduced and accepted by the international community after the terrible days of Nazi rule and the Holocaust. "I think it was possible because Germany did face its past squarely."

But unlike Germany, Japan has never fully done this, a Xinhua commentary says.

The Sankei Shimbun, a Japanese national daily, has run a series of reports since February whitewashing the Nanjing Massacre, quoting several war veterans who claim that Nanjing was an "empty city" when Japanese troops entered it in December 1937, and it was "so peaceful" that no bloodshed ever happened.

The reports are meant to raise doubts about one of the three world-recognized massacres that happened during World War II.

For six weeks after Japanese aggressors first occupied Nanjing on Dec 13, 1937, they slaughtered 300,000 Chinese civilians and unarmed soldiers, and committed countless cases of rape, looting and arson. One-third of the city was burned to the ground. The Nanjing Massacre was judged to be a war crime by the postwar International Military Tribunal for the Far East held in Tokyo.

The occupation of Nanjing and the ensuing massacre was the most-discussed atrocity at the Tokyo Tribunal. The tragedy took up two chapters in the 1,218-page written judgment of the trial after evidence and testimony were presented in court giving irrefutable proof that the massacre did happen.

By denying the most prominent crime Japan committed during the war, the right-leaning Japanese government has tried to play down the tyrannical image that the war crimes, particularly the massacre, have pinned on the country.

Merkel has given Japan good advice. The only way for Japan to win international respect is for it to be honest about its past wrongs.