THE YOUNG STUDENT AT Shanghai's Fudan University pulled no punches. "A lot of young people like me hate Japan," she said last month. The Japanese "never say they're sorry" for atrocities the military committed during World War II, including the rapes in Nanking after the invasion of China. The student said her peers' antipathy for the Japanese outstrips even the Beijing government's -- quite a statement considering the government's virulent denunciations of Tokyo in recent years.
Japan has apologized several times for its actions in World War II, but that has not been enough for Beijing. China's government-controlled media pump the party line across the country and onto the campuses, finding attentive listeners even among those whose parents were not born until after the war.
If anti-Japan rhetoric is a handy tool for Chinese officials to divert attention from their own problems -- such as pollution, corruption and the growing divide between rich and poor -- it's also fed by events such as Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo.
Koizumi has not visited the shrine this year, and he shouldn't. He would be better off spending the political capital from his landslide election win last month on pushing through his economic reforms. Another shrine visit would only antagonize not just China but South Korea, plus other Asian nations that Japan invaded more than half a century ago.
