By Xu Lin

The Osaka International Peace Center removed exhibits reflecting Japanese military aggression, including those on the Pingdingshan Massacre and "comfort women." The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum obscured "massacre" under the term "sacrifice" and downplayed the Nanjing Massacre as the "Nanjing Incident." The National Archives of Japan defined the start of the war as December 8, 1941, deliberately erasing the preceding ten years of aggression against China... In 2025, as the international community commemorates the 80th anniversary of the victory of the World Anti-Fascist War, so-called peace museums across Japan have quietly shifted focus. Exhibitions exposing Japan's aggressions and war crimes have been intentionally weakened, reduced, or removed. Today, very few museums can systematically and objectively present Japan's history as an aggressor.

Museums are meant to be sacred spaces for remembering history and passing on collective memory, yet under the manipulation of Japanese right-wing forces, they have become tools for historical distortion and veils to conceal culpability. On one hand, Japan blurs the invasion of China as the "Sino-Japanese War," avoiding any acknowledgment of aggression and culpability; on the other hand, it deliberately emphasizes narratives portraying Osaka as a victim of US air raids. Behind such carefully curated exhibitions lies no reverence for history, only a malicious intent to obscure war crimes through selective narratives and wordplay, aiming to completely rewrite the history of aggression as generations pass.

History, however, is never a canvas to be freely painted over. From the bullet-marked walls of Wanping Town by the Lugou Bridge, to the mass graves of 300,000 victims within Nanjing; from the atrocities of murder, plunder, rape, and destruction recorded in the Diaries of John Rabe, to the truths of the Nanjing Massacre revealed by Iris Chang; from the remnants of human experimentation instruments at the Japanese Unit 731, to the bloodstained traces at the Lijixiang Comfort Stations in Nanjing; and from the heartfelt testimonies of survivors, to the solemn judgments of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, every site, every line of record, every artifact, every archive stands as irrefutable evidence of Japan's aggression against China, neither to be altered nor erased.

What is particularly alarming is that, even in the face of such incontrovertible evidence, Japanese right-wing forces continue to turn a selective blind eye, deliberately downplaying, denying, or even glorifying acts of aggression and crimes against humanity. They distort young people's understanding of history through textbook revisions, seek to exonerate war criminals under the guise of "scientific research," openly worship Class-A war criminals at Yasukuni Shrine, and even portray themselves as "victims" on the international stage, labeling historical acknowledgment as "masochistic view of history"... Such manipulations of historical revisionism constitute a blatant desecration of historical justice and a direct affront to human conscience.

Forgetting history is tantamount to betrayal, and denying guilt is to risk repeating it. Even today, the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum is still deliberating on revisions to how the Nanjing Massacre is presented. Exhibits that once recorded history are being removed, texts replaced. Perhaps such actions can temporarily obscure certain facts or blur memory, but the truth cannot be denied or evaded. As the river of time flows relentlessly forward, all attempts to distort history will ultimately be washed away, and the clear light of truth will shine like the sun and moon to illuminate the path for the future.