Chinese attitudes toward Japan is complicated to say the least, and IMHO opinion defies stereotyping. There are those that had direct bad experiences (or their great-grandparents did), bad experiences by association, youth with anti-Japanese as an ‘acceptable’ protest, large numbers that study Japanese and want to live in Japan, Japanese companies that are seen as premier employers, Toyota is the best selling passenger car in China after VW, Japanese goods are seen as high quality, others boycott all Japanese goods, etc. It’s very complicated and convoluted.
One of my customers is Mazda, who have a factory in Nanjing. That makes for some pretty interesting dicotomies. Another is Nissan, who has factories in the interior of China and are considered the economic saviors.
Iris Chang, IMHO, did a great disservice to raising attention. She sensationalized an atrocity that needed no sensationalization. It’s undisputable that tens of thousands of Chinese died in the immediate aftermath of Nanking. Records of the KMT, Communists, foreign observers, etc all more or less agree. Iris exaggerated, took hearsay as fact, redefined the Rape of Nanking to span all direct, indirect and potentially indirect vitims and did anything she could to make it hundreds of thousands of dead. This makes it easy for the Rape of Nanking deniers to pick her most outrageous and probably fictional claims, debunk them, and by extension make the case the Rape of Nanking never happend.
Japan and China, by geographic and economic necessity, are probably going to be closely tied forever.
Some critic her book for being exaggerated, but japanese solidiers was known to have committed similar other such atrocities in other places in Asia under ww2
I can also mention Unit 731 and other japanese research lab that undertook lethal human experimentation during the War.
Japanese atrocities are well known (outside of Japan at least) with still at least a generation of survivors in every Asian country occupied.
Iris Chang played right into the hands of the Japanese Nationalists/Rightists/War Deniers by going so over the top that it was easy to debunk some of her most outlandish claims. Debunk one claim as farcical, and use that to discredit *all * of her claims. Thus, in Japan, her book had almost the opposite effect of helping to deny the Rape of Nanking. IMHO this was a great dis-service to an atrocity.
Despite what those Europeans* think, drawing on their thousands of years of documented history, blahblahblah, quite enough has happened in and because of the US to make atrocities in the Philipines something that didn’t make the cut when they laid out the history books, unless those books were supposed to be entirely devoted to American atrocities.
And I find that shameful, but I’ve long felt the Philipines deserved to be offered statehood, if the people there wanted it. I’m an unapologetic democratic imperialist.
Not saying you are one, just saying they get annoying when they start up on how old their countries are compared to the USA.