Can you explain it to someone stuck out in the Far West?

Things like the Nanking Massacre where wholesale execution of the local populace and where women were raped en masse are still a sore point for the Chinese. The Japanese also conducted biological experiments in some parts of China.

The revised textbooks omit these details, and sometimes even put the blame for the Sino-Japanese war at the foot of the Chinese.

And of course, there is still the lingering issue over the comfort women that were enslaved during the Japanese occupation.

Usually, it’s a yearly protest about the failure of Japan to apologise for its war crimes and the fact that the Japanese prime minister visits the shrines where Japanese Class A war criminals are buried and honored. But this time its the textbook that has fueled the apparent riots in China.

Understandable grievances but it doesn’t justify the destruction of property, sacking of stores that have Japanese products, and intimidating Japanese with China. In a modern civilized society, this sort of xenophobic, civil disobedience has no place. If China doesn’t want the world to look at it backward, it needs to a lid on these acts of mob thuggery.