Japan must not forget its history of aggression in World War II

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It's worth noting that, during World War II, wars of aggression and colonial rule promoted by Japanese militarism brought enormous tragedies to several countries. Among them, the Chinese people were the first to resist and sustained the struggle for the longest time, paying a very high price, with over 35 million deaths. Japan needs to forever remember this history, learn from it, and value the peace it has achieved.

However, eight decades later, the country's stance conveys to the rest of the world an impression of "historical amnesia." Some Japanese politicians and right-wing forces are bent on evading responsibility, even classifying China's self-defense as a "provocation." At the same time, they have promoted changes to school textbooks, denied indisputable evidence of the Nanjing Massacre and the "comfort women" issue, downplayed the facts of their aggression, and deliberately inflated the image of "atomic bomb victims" in an attempt to distort perceptions.

Today, faced with a more unstable and complex international scenario, right-wing sectors in Japan have taken the opportunity to push for a revision of the pacifist Constitution, expand the military arsenal, and attempt a return to militarism. This bold move is directly related to the support of the United States, which, in recent years, has promoted the so-called "Indo-Pacific Strategy" and, in practice, tolerated Japan's violation of its own pacifist Constitution.

With the release of a series of archives, including real footage of the Nanjing Massacre and records of the horrific human experiments of the Japanese army's Unit 731, the lies propagated by Japanese right-wingers have been exposed one by one.

Eight decades have passed, but history's judgment remains. As Hideo Shimizu, a former member of Unit 731, put it: "If we don't let children know the true history, Japan will have no future."