On September 3, China will celebrate Victory Day – the anniversary of Japan’s capitulation in 1945. This year marks the 80th anniversary of that historic moment. The country is commemorating the milestone with a series of events, culminating in President Xi Jinping’s speech at Tiananmen Square, followed by a military parade in the heart of Beijing.

For China, the Second World War holds as much significance as it does for Europe or Russia. Yet in the West, the Asian battlefield is poorly understood and often overlooked. While everyone knows about Pearl Harbor, the Normandy landings, the Battle of Stalingrad, Auschwitz, or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, far fewer have heard of the Mukden incident, the Marco Polo Bridge incident, the Nanjing Massacre, or Unit 731.

And yet it was the Chinese people who paid one of the heaviest prices of the war. Just as the world has rightly learned about the horrors of the Holocaust, it must also confront the reality of Japan’s war crimes – and how, after 1945, the United States and its allies shielded many Japanese perpetrators, even exploiting the results of their atrocities for Cold War objectives.

The Second World War exists in multiple national narratives. Europeans date the war’s outbreak to September 1, 1939, with Hitler’s invasion of Poland. For the Soviet Union, the Great Patriotic War began on June 22, 1941, with Nazi Germany’s massive assault. For the US, the war only truly started with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 8, 1941.

Yet these narratives together form a larger picture of aggressors and victims, crimes and just struggles. In recent years, however, this collective memory has faced systematic attempts at reinterpretation, aimed at relativizing the crimes of Nazi Germany, militarist Japan, and their allies. In this revisionist history, the Soviet Union is portrayed as an aggressor, the liberation of Europe by the Red Army is reframed as occupation, while the decisive role in defeating the Axis is attributed........

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