Japan aims at China”s books

TOKYO – Japan opened another front in its dispute with China on Sunday by criticizing Beijing’s history textbooks, signaling continued friction between the Asian powers despite diplomatic moves to quell tensions.

Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura disputed Chinese claims that Japanese textbooks gloss over Tokyo’s World War II-era atrocities, firing back on Sunday that China’s schools indoctrinate students with an unbalanced take on the past.

“There is a tendency toward this in any country, but the Chinese textbooks are extreme in the way they uniformly convey the ‘our country is correct’ perspective,” Machimura said, echoing Sunday’s editorial in Japan’s largest newspaper accusing China of nationalistic education.

China claims Japanese books downplay Japanese wartime atrocities such as mass sex slavery and germ warfare.

On Friday, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi made the most public apology in a decade for his country’s bloody march through Asia in the 1930s and 1940s.