Kay,
“Much outrage” is a relative term. Iris Chang’s “The Rape of Nanking drew some ire, but, as the book is in English, it didn’t exactly dominate headlines. It angered a relatively small group of hardcore conservatives in the same way that the publicizing of any American misdeed provokes vigorous denials and attacks from some hardcore American conservatives.
A decade prior to Chang’s book came a series of magazine articles by a Japanese reporter who received death threats from some uyoku (extremist right-wing groups, often tied to organized crime). At this point, while there are still deniers, the debate over WWII atrocities by the JIA usually focuses on scale, relative importance, and what constitutes apology or reparations.
There was no legal prohibition against publication of The Rape of Nanking – it was more a situation of publishers not wanting to get involved in that kind of controversy.
That said, I think Xanthippe was referring to the censorship inherent in the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, and Technology’s (MEXT) textbook selection process. On numerous occasions, the chosen junior high school textbooks have downplayed, glossed over, or omitted Japanese wartime atrocities. Every couple of years there’s a highly public row between textbook publishers and the textbook selection committee.
Surveys that “show” that people in Japan know little about what happened in WWII tend to have to flaws: 1. Random calling or stopping random people on the street is likely to garner whatever response will end the exchange most quickly, and that response is usually, “I don’t know.” 2. Wartime atrocities are, obviously, sensitive, controversial issues. Japan is somewhat old-fashioned in terms of there being “things not to be discussed in polite company.”
Granted, this is often used as a way of avoiding unpleasantness, and, yes, people here are as influenced by what they hear or read as anywhere else, which can warp perceptions. However, there isn’t a vast conspiracy to pretend that WWII never happened.
Most countries are the same.
It’s telling, though, that an article about a present-day individual crime so quickly led to WWII and multiple indictments of an entire nationality based on incidents from WWII. The young men in question now are young enough that even their grandparents are often too young to have fought in WWII. It really is the equivalent of trying to explain Columbine through the prism of WWII. Not the most fruitful strategy if you really want to understand what’s going on two, even three generations after the end of the war.
