From what I see of the papers, everything has gone to hell. The Japanese Foreign Minister has turned around to attack the Chinese textbooks for perpetuating the mindset among the Chinese only one perspective - that of the sufferings of the Chinese. Whatever Koizumi has said is going to be spit in the wind if the Foreign Minister doesn't retract what he says soon.

Personally, I find that remark to be very wrong. In the first place, China was invaded by Japan. Because of the war, they had little outside communication and all that and had to deal with the brunt of the Japanese forces during the early days of the Pacific War. It's unrealistic to expect the people to think and consider - "oh, the Japanese civilians must be suffering too!" when you see your own daughters being taken away and your sons drafted into a futile battle. Furthermore, Japanese civilian sufferings never reached any significiant proportion to the amount of killings they had done of civilians overseas until the 2 A-bombs were dropped.

To be fair to the Japanese, though, they are the only nation to have experienced the A-bomb first hand, so perhaps in that way it'd not be fair to neglect saying that their civilians had seen hardship. But the whole glossing over of the wartime atrocities? I'm not going to stand for that even though my grandparents were quite safe and most of my PRC relatives I just don't really know them really.

But just... urgh. Why on earth did that stupid guy have to turn around and accuse Chinese textbooks of being biased? It's among the stupidest diplomatic moves since the new century, I swear.