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Explainer | Explained: the legacy of war in Asia
- The Japanese government has offered several official apologies for its role in the second world war
- But Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has cast doubt on the need to keep apologising for Japan’s wartime actions
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The second world war left deep scars on Asia – they are still visible in the fraught ties between various countries today.
As Japan seeks to strengthen its military, South Korea and China are determined its wartime atrocities not be forgotten.
What happened in the Asian theatre during the second world war?
Although Japan sided with the Axis powers in Europe during the second world war, the Japanese militaristic expansion across Asia started before the war in Europe.
In 1910, Japan annexed the Korean peninsula. In 1931, the country orchestrated a military attack on its own forces as a pretext to invade Manchuria, China’s northeastern region. The war officially started in 1937, when Japan launched an invasion on the rest of China, quickly seizing control of the major Chinese coastal cities.
The conflict killed more than 20 million Chinese. Japan’s invasion of Nanking – now known as Nanjing and the Chinese capital of the day – involved a systematic campaign of rape and executions. More than 300,000 people were killed and it is considered one of the darkest episodes of the second world war.
Between 1941 and 1942, the Japanese control further expanded across Southeast Asia, where Japanese troops swiftly conquered most of the territory from the Philippines to Burma (now Myanmar).
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