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Memories of World War II play a very important role in the world today, especially in East Asia. These memories are not simple but complicated factors that created many of the controversial issues that exist today. Two of the main issues that revolve around East Asia are the Nanjing Massacre and the comfort women issue. People have debated over the truth of the Nanjing Massacre and the comfort women issue, and people on different sides have not come to an agreement on the historical facts. Daqing Yang’s “The Malleable and the Contested, Joshua Fogel’s “Nanjing Atrocity and Chinese Historical Memory ” discusses the issues in detail, and Chungmoo Choi’s “The Politics of War Memories toward Healing”. In Daqing Yang’s “The Malleable and the Contested”, he gives a detailed explanation on when and how the Nanjing Massacre became such a controversial issue both in China and Japan today. He primarily focuses on the publications that brought awareness of the incident. He also signifies how politics can be a factor in these memories. Right after Japan’s defeat, Japanese atrocities were brought up to the Tokyo War Trials. During the early post-war period, the Nanjing Massacre was acknowledged in Japanese textbooks. It was not until the conservative Liberal Democratic Party’s establishment that the focus on the massacre was lightened in textbooks. On the other hand, the People’s Republic of China brought up the massacre by portraying the communist as the winner who fought against the Japanese in the war, and also focused more on how the United States was the key factor that caused the massacre instead of the Japanese. Yang points out in his article “As China continued its internal struggles to weed out domestic enemies, class conflict, rathe... ... middle of paper ... ...ave a sex life. The women’s purity is much more concerned than the women’s subjectivity. The image of how their virginity was taken away from them was far more important. The memory of the Nanjing Massacre remains diverse in Japan and China. The number of the victims could not come to a conclusion between the two. While the debate remains in Japan, the more united view of the Nanjing Massacre is the case in China. The comfort women issue in Korea is a complicated issue that can be viewed in more aspects. In Korea, the image of the comfort women is more of a nationalistic presence rather than the female presence of the individual women. Memories can be shaped and presented in very different ways. Some parts of the memory bring more attention than others. The individuals have memories of their own and it is the fact people need to take more aspect into consideration.

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