History revision

As we move into a new millennium, World War II will be viewed increasingly as a piece of history that took place midway through the last century.

And yet to many, certain of the war's more horrific aspects will take a great deal longer to become mere historic details.

Such an event is the 1937 Rape of Nanjing, in which 300,000 people, many of them women and children, were killed by invading Japanese forces.

This act of barbarism is unlikely ever to be completely forgiven.

However, wounds, terrible as they may be, can eventually be soothed when a perpetrator country comes to terms with its past.

The conference held in Osaka on Sunday at which several Japanese speakers attempted to play down Japan's wartime atrocities did little to help this process.

Conference organizers called the Nanjing massacre "the biggest myth of the 20th century."

Not surprisingly, a storm of criticism erupted from Beijing as well as from mainstream academics in Japan.

What added to the outcry was the fact that the event took place in Osaka's International Peace Center, intended to promote reconciliation.

The mainland government and media are right to attack such a high-profile seminar.

Such an event does nothing to help foster goodwill between the two countries and simply reinforces the view that there is a strong right-wing revisionist body at work in Japan.

It is not an issue of free speech; the crux of the matter is whether those in authority in Japan condemn such attempts to rewrite history.

President Jiang Zemin has warned previously that any attempt to distort history would be "detrimental to the development of long-term, good neighborly" Sino-Japanese ties.

Japan and China's economic futures are now interdependent; but so long as the suspicion exists that Japan cannot reflect deeply on its militaristic past and entertain the idea of real contrition, there can be no real reconciliation.

-- The South China Morning Post, Hong Kong