BEIJING – The Japanese side must deeply reflect on its historical crimes, take real actions to break with militarism and truly follow a path of peaceful development, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday.

"Distorting history and covering up crimes cannot win tolerance and trust," the ministry's spokesperson Guo Jiakun said at a regular news briefing.

He made the remarks when answering a relevant question. This year marks the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Tokyo Trials and the 80th anniversary of the conclusion of the Nuremberg Trials. Japan and Germany are both defeated WWII belligerents, but they differ greatly in terms of implementing the trial verdict, repenting over war crimes and educating the public. 

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Germany recently launched an online Nazi history search tool which has already been visited several million times, triggering yet another social discussion on soul-searching about Nazi crimes. In Japan, however, voices that negate or even attempt to overturn the outcomes of the Tokyo Trials are running rampant. Some Japanese lament they are probably the last ones who still remember the Tokyo Trials.

Guo said that in the face of justice, there are those who have truly repented, openly apologized, held the fascists fully accountable, launched nationwide anti-Nazi education, formed a legal system that bans Nazi propaganda and severely punishes any denial of history, and thus won the respect of the world.

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The Japanese government, however, has been shying away from the verdict of justice and history, including casting aside the Murayama Statement and the Kono Statement that express remorse and apologies for Japan's colonial aggression, said Guo, adding the Japanese government even abets right-wing forces' whitewashing of the war crimes in a bid to challenge the judgement of the Tokyo Trials and reverse the verdict on Japan's history of aggression.

He added that eighty years on since its defeat, Japan still hasn't fully removed the pernicious influence of militarism that still haunts the Japanese society as well as the government. Instead, Japan's Class-A war criminals who launched the war of aggression are worshipped in the Yasukuni war shrine to which many Japanese prime ministers and officials pay tribute, and send ritual offering or monetary donation. To this day, school textbooks in Japan fail to present its history of aggression as it is, nor do they seek to establish a "no-more-war" mindset. Instead, they portray Japan as a "victim" and instill a wrong view of WWII history.

This is clearly a challenge to the outcomes of WWII and the postwar international order, said the spokesperson.