Mac,
I think the present anti-Japanese feelings in China are largely the product of manipulation by the Communist Party.
Ask why these feelings did not come earlier than than anti-American and anti-Russian feelings. Ask when the last two subsided. Ask how China is ruled by the Party. Believe it or not, there were rather strong pro-Japanese sentiments in China after 1972 when the relations were normalized and 1978 when the peace treaty was signed. Though I was too young to understand at that time, these feelings were manipulated, too.

Undoubtedly, as you said, there is a historical basis for anti-Japanese feelings not only in China but also in other East Asian nations including Australia. This is, needless to say, due to the records of the Japanese armed forces.

I posted a comment to Dan Twinig/Chrysanthemum or Samurai?, Foreign Policy(www.foreignpolicy.com).

Mac,
About the whitewashing of the war records in Japanese schools. We are trying to talk to each other, but I feel as if we may be talking in monologues in a thick fog or through a dark window. It is because we are not exchanging concrete details instead of talking in abstract generalizations.

In order to know even a little bit about Japan today, we need to go back in Japanese history. If you go back to and start from 1930s' Japan, you might have the impression Japan is full of rightwingers. If you start from 1920s' Japan, you might feel it is filled with leftists.
There has been a very strong Marxist-leftist thinking in post-war Japan, though this is waning. This is traceable back to the 1920s' inflow into Japan of Marxism-Leninism. This influence was very strong among the intelligentsia and made an intellectual climate in post-war Japan after about ten years's forced hibernation. To add, Japan in the 1930s was an emotional or moody reaction to the 1920s.

People caught in this climate thought as a general tendency that the United States was a dangerous warmonger in subservience to capitalists; the Soviets and Commnisit China were peace-lovers; teachers said clearly or insinuated in classrooms that Chairman Mao was a great leader who lifte up China, through the Great Leap Forward and the Great Cultural Revolution, from poverty to the paradise of people's democracy in which people lived in equality and freedom; that it was a bad thing to pay respect to the Japanese anthem and the flag which were smeared with violence and blood, etc.

This is being rectified. The Japanese people call it whitewashing, brainwashing or cleaning up, depending on their political philosophy if they have anything like that.

I think there is no whitewashing of the war records. How can we do it when the world knows about them already? How can we do it when we know?
There are differences, however, in different school textbooks, for instance about the numbers of Chinese murdered in Nanking or about comfort-women. The Japanese lefts are generally angry.

Michi,

Thanks for the interesting discussion,a different perspective is always informative.