While Europe commemorated Nazi Germany’s defeat during the World War II in May 1945, few acknowledged that the war raged on for several more months in Asia, claiming millions more lives before Japan officially signed the instrument of surrender on September 2, 1945.
World War II was fundamentally an Asian catastrophe. Of the war’s 80 million deaths, over half occurred in Asia. China alone suffered nearly 20 million fatalities during Japan’s brutal invasion (1931–1945).
A journalist shoots videos during the visit to the Museum of the War of Chinese People's Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in Beijing, capital of China, Aug. 27, 2025.
The 1937 Nanjing Massacre epitomized this horror: In six weeks, Japanese troops slaughtered 300,000 civilians, using methods the International Military Tribunal later called the worst barbarism of the century. Survivors described infants bayoneted, women gang-raped, and mass burials in trenches like the infamous “Ten-Thousand-Corpse Ditch.”
We are often invited to compare atrocities, but what is truly necessary is to reflect on the past and on what we have yet to learn. Eight decades later, history is still being told in fragments.
Just a few months ago, Europe commemorated the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. And, as so often happens, it did so through a Eurocentric lens that doesn’t reveal the whole history of that specific period. While documented evidence of Nazi crimes fill libraries and museums, the Asian Holocaust remains in obscurity. Only less than 20 percent of global WWII memorials address Asian atrocities, and only a small number of textbooks in Europe mention the Nanjing Massacre. This erasure perpetuates a dangerous hierarchy of victimhood.
Although the crimes of Nazism have been justly documented in films, literature, and international tribunals, the crimes of Japanese militarism have been largely relegated to oblivion in the West.
Meanwhile, Japanese schoolbooks minimize the Nanjing Massacre, with some framing it as a “controversial incident” rather than state-sponsored genocide. As of July 2025, only 26 Nanjing Massacre survivors remain alive, their testimonies fading alongside Japan’s official denials.
In the Philippines, survivors, like those from Mapanique village, still demand recognition for sexual enslavement in Japanese military “comfort stations.” Their lawyer, Virginia Lacsa-Suarez, notes: “History repeats [itself] when we forget.”
Why are the millions of Chinese, Korean, and other Asians killed in World War II almost absent from our history books? To recall the truth of those years is an act of justice – towards those who sacrificed their lives and towards future generations who deserve to know the truth.
Meanwhile, Western complicity persists. The U.S. shielded Emperor Hirohito from prosecution and prioritized Cold War alliances over justice for Asian victims – a geopolitical bargain that still muffles their stories.
China confronts this historical amnesia head-on. In 2015, it secured UNESCO recognition for the Nanjing Massacre documents, cementing evidentiary permanence. UNESCO incorporates the Nanjing Massacre documents to its Memory of the World Register, a program to preserve and ensure access to documentary heritage of “world significance and outstanding universal value.” The collection of these documents, sitting alongside Britain’s 13th century Magna Carta and the World War II diary of Jewish Holocaust victim Anne Frank, consists of films, photos and diaries from the period of the massacre, the post-war investigation and trials of war criminals, and files from judiciary authorities of the People’s Republic of China. China submitted these documents in an effort to “prevent the miserable and dark days from coming back again.”
True reconciliation requires more than rituals. It demands globalizing the memory framework: to integrate the Nanjing Massacre, Manila’s “Red House,” and Unit 731’s biological warfare into WWII education alongside Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps.
The war’s greatest lesson lies not in comparing suffering but recognizing its universality.
The law of the jungle, where the strong prey on the weak, is not a guiding principle for human coexistence, and blindly pursuing a ‘my country first’ policy and seeking hegemony is not a, recipe for global peace.
Eighty years later, I raise my voice to call for a memory that is serene, peaceful, and just. A memory that does not exclude the Asian victims, and that does not forget that China paid one of the heaviest prices for the world’s freedom.
We cannot allow forgetfulness to become falsehood, nor permit the peoples who suffered most to remain in the shadows. World history cannot be written from a single continent, nor only through the eyes of the victors.
To remember is also to commit ourselves to peace. And so, in the name of tens of millions of victims, we should affirm that barbarity must never again be accepted, nor disguised as civilization.
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Marcelo Muñoz is president of the Spain-based Cátedra China Foundation (China Chair Foundation), who was granted the title of the Friendship Ambassador to China by the Chinese government in 2024.
