Mariko Oi is a BBC journalist. She grew up in Tokyo but moved to Australia as a teenager. She conducted a survey about the bitterness between China and Japan last year.

    “‘DO you feel guilty about what Japan did to China during the war?’ was a question that I had to translate more than once during a trip to Japan with Haining Liu, a former reporter for China’s state broadcaster, CCTV,” said Mariko Oi. “It was Haining who posed that question to some of our interviewees — the oldest of whom would have been a child in 1945.”

    “‘I feel sorry for what happened,’ said one man. ‘There were many regrettable incidents,’ said another,” Oi recalled.

    “‘But maybe my regret isn’t enough,’ added one interviewee, a Japanese nationalist, who argued that most school textbooks exaggerate the abuses carried out by Japanese soldiers. But Liu responded, ‘No, it’s not enough,’” said Oi.

    There are some undisputed facts. Japan was the aggressor, occupying Manchuria in northern China in 1931. A wider war began in 1937, and by the time Japan surrendered in 1945, millions of Chinese had died.

    A notorious massacre occurred in the city of Nanjing, which was the capital of the Kuomintang Government. Atrocities were also carried out in other Asian countries.

    But Oi said she felt uncomfortable every time she had to translate the word “guilt” into Japanese. And none of her Japanese interviewees would use it.

    Switch on the television in China and it is easy to find television programs dramatizing China’s resistance of the Japanese invasion. It is reasonable to conclude that anyone growing up watching these programs would believe that Japan is a horrible nation.

    Is this message about Japan justified? Hearing the accounts from survivors would make anyone’s heart ache.

    One survivor was Chen Guixiang, who had been a 14-year-old girl in Nanjing in December 1937 when the massacre took place.

    Dead bodies were piled up outside a school, she said. She witnessed a girl her own age being raped by seven Japanese soldiers and then killed with a knife.

    Twice she was almost captured and raped herself — only escaping, on the second occasion, because the soldier carrying her slipped and loosened his grip. She ran until she collapsed with exhaustion and was hidden by a Chinese farmer under a pile of grass.

    The one small crumb of consolation in Chen’s story came years later. When she was much older, she traveled to Japan to recount her experiences. People hugged her and apologized, saying they had no idea their ancestors had done such things.

    In 2012, the mayor of Nagoya, Takashi Kawamura, a prominent nationalist, denied there was a massacre at Nanjing, saying there were only “conventional acts of combat.” Last year, he made clear his views had not changed.

    It also infuriates China and South Korea when Japanese leaders visit the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors the country’s war dead — among them convicted WWII war criminals.

    It’s hard to see this kind of thing coming to an abrupt halt.

    It is easy to feel pessimistic about the future relationship between China and Japan. It is still troubling that generations of Japanese children have learned little about the atrocities their forefathers committed in China.

    “We have a chance to improve relations, at least on the grass-roots level by increasing honest and open conversations,” Liu told Oi. (SD-Agencies)

    (SD-Agencies)