The complications of the perpetrator-victim relationship for Japanese children during World War Two: what can psychoanalysis contribute toward conciliation between China and Japan?

This chapter focuses on one interviewed case as material for analysis and discusses the report of the complete results for another occasion. China and Japan have suffered from a complicated perpetrator-victim relationship originating in acts perpetrated by the Japanese military during the Fifteen Year War. The traumatic outcomes both for diplomatic issues and for individual citizens have not been worked through and still cast a shadow over both countries. Perhaps Japan owes the friendship and the economical cooperation brought into reality recently to Chinese kindness and the realistic judgment that traumatic memories are better avoided in order to establish economical cooperation. Economic development during the post-war era could also be the result of a projection of the persecutory object onto foreign countries including the United States of America. One is on the possibility of generalising the concept of "the identification with the aggressor" to broader ranges of identifications at traumatic moments.