ABSTRACT
The Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945 was unparalleled in either country’s history of external conflicts given its enormous scale, brutality and destructiveness. However, for thirty-seven years after the war’s end, the historical interpretation of that war was never a serious political issue between Japan and China. The turning point came in 1982 when a bilateral dispute erupted over Japan’s history textbooks. Since then, acrimonious disputes over perspectives of history have remained unabated. Since the 1990s the rise of Chinese economic power has been accompanied by rapidly increasing bilateral economic cooperation, and yet their political relationship is strained periodically by the problems of history.1
