I had a similar kind of eye-opening experience on my first trip to Japan, back in high school. We went to a museum in Hiroshima about… you know… Hiroshima.

The exhibits about the bomb and the aftermath were quite harrowing, if I’m honest. But there were also a couple rooms dedicated to the “greater east-Asian co-prosperity sphere”.

One panel in particular stuck in my mind: it discussed, in two or three paragraphs, how the Imperial Japanese Army went to Nanking, “uplifted” the population, faced many trials and tribulations, and eventually went home.

Colloquially, most of the rest of the world knows this campaign as the Rape of Nanking. Think Bucha, but instead of a village/small town, it’s the capital of a whole damn province (Jiangsu), with a population of about a million. About a third - yes, that’s right, roughly 300,000 - ended up enduring some combination of rape, torture, and/or murder. But the exhibit more or less portrayed that as “we went to Nanking, got a bit drunk, don’t remember much”.

That exhibit one of the main reasons I find the Japanese cultural tendency to sweep things under the rug in the interest of honoring one’s ancestors to be so incredibly caustic.