Japan-China friendship has to be built on Japan's correct attitude

The growing clamor in Japan of denying its war time history has its root cause in that many Japanese have failed to truly reflect on why the country was defeated in that war of aggression, former Kamikaze pilot Nobuo Okimatsu said on Monday.

"If many Japanese have no correct attitude toward history and do not reflect on themselves, or even deny the history of Japanese aggression, there would be no genuine friendship between Japan and China," Nobuo Okimatsu told Xinhua at an event to mark the 77th anniversary of the start of the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression.

The 89-year-old Okimatsu was a former Kamikaze pilot, a squad of young men who crashed their aircraft into allied ships in World War II. He was ready to carry out a suicide attack on Aug. 15, 1945, but was saved at the last minute when Japanese emperor declared surrender.

Okimatsu, now representative director of the 815 Japan-China Friendship Association, said Japan's erroneous education on history led to its defeat in the war of aggression, but both the leadership and the general public failed to understand why Japan should launch the war that had caused great devastation to Asian nations and why it lost that war.

He noted that people like Abe, who are ignorant about why Japan was defeated in that war, have tried to revive a "Great Japan." As a man who has gone through the war, Okimatsu expressed great worries about Abe's cabinet's rightist policies and its military ambition. "Abe lacks international common sense. If he continues the current dangerous path, I am really concerned that Japan would suffer another defeat," he said.

The 815 Japan-China Friendship Association, formerly known as Japan-China Friendship Veterans' Association, was founded by a group of Japanese veterans who had taken part in Japan's invasion of China.

Seventy-seven years ago, at Lugou Bridge in the suburb of Beijing, known as Marco Polo Bridge to Westerners, Japanese troops attacked Chinese defenders and later spread the war to entire China.