This year marks the 80th anniversary of the victory in the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War, as well as the 88th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre, one of the most barbaric episodes of World War II.

The massacre following the Japanese troops' capture of Nanjing, the then Chinese capital, on Dec. 13, 1937, left more than 300,000 Chinese civilians and unarmed soldiers dead. However, the Japanese public today seems ignorant of or unconcerned with the heinous crimes, revealing a troubling historical amnesia.

As Dead To Rights, a Chinese historical film about the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, is seeing a wide international release, Xinhua reporters visited Memorial Museum for Soldiers, Detainees in Siberia, and Postwar Repatriates in Tokyo, Japan, and asked visitors who had just left the exhibition hall the question, "Do you know about the Nanjing Massacre?" The following was their responses:

"I seem to have heard of this term, but I have no idea about what it means," said a woman in her 40s.

"We've heard of it, but we're not quite sure about the details," several female middle school students told Xinhua. "It seems like bombs were planted on the railway?" "It seems to be something like abusing the workers or forcing them to work, right?"

Only one elderly person, about 60 years old, said: "The specific details are not clear, but I did see some very cruel scenes. I remember seeing visual images where Japanese soldiers were slaughtering Chinese people."

What has led to Japan's selective amnesia about the Nanjing Massacre? Zhang Sheng, professor at the School of History, Nanjing University, hit the nail on the head when he said, "In Japan, forgetting the Nanjing Massacre is an intentional and systematic act."

"Since the 1950s and 1960s, people like Nobusuke Kishi, who rose from being a war criminal to become the prime minister of Japan, carried out systematic efforts to revise the history. By the 1970s and 1980s, the Japanese society and even many ministers within the government began to deliberately use the tactic of 'making a mistake in speech' to confuse the public. For instance, they would 'accidentally' say 'entering China' instead of 'invading China,'" Zhang said.

"After the 1990s, and especially after Shinzo Abe returned to power for the second time in 2012, Japanese elementary and middle school textbooks underwent extensive revisions. At the same time, various forms such as picture books, comics, and films began to be used to instill the idea that 'the Nanjing Massacre did not occur' or was questionable among the Japanese public. As a result, after over 80 years, fewer and fewer Japanese people maintain a correct historical understanding of the Nanjing Massacre," Zhang added.

Current Japanese textbooks describe the Nanjing Massacre and its historical background as follows: After the end of World War II, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East concluded that the Japanese army had massacred over 200,000 civilians during its occupation of Nanjing (the Nanjing Incident). However, there is no consensus among Japanese academics on the number of people killed, with some suggesting between 100,000 and 200,000, others 40,000 to 50,000, and others around 10,000. There are also claims that 20,000 prisoners and others were killed, or that several thousand civilians were killed. The government of the People's Republic of China maintains that over 300,000 people were massacred.

In some textbooks published by right-leaning publishing houses, there is no mention of the outrageous atrocities committed by the invading Japanese army in China, such as mass killings, looting and rapes. Instead, they blindly question the rulings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, and even completely erase any references to the Nanjing Massacre.

Friday marks the 80th anniversary of Japan's unconditional surrender in World War II, and it has been over 70 years since the rulings were made by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Yet, Japanese textbooks continue to question the rulings and repeatedly use the number of victims as an issue. Why is this so?

"This is because Japan realized that under the circumstances at the time, it was impossible for the Chinese authorities to count the bodies one by one in Nanjing. In this way, the Japanese invaders actually set an impossible task for China and then used this as a basis to deny the Nanjing Massacre, deny the rulings, and deny Japan's history of aggression against China," said Zhang.

History can not be tampered with, and facts can not be denied. Photographs of Chinese civilians killed by the Japanese invaders, battlefield logs recorded by the Japanese troops themselves, reports by foreign journalists, records by international friends who were in Nanjing at the time tell of the immense brutality of the Japanese invaders in Nanjing.

Japanese monk Satoshi Daito, a temple abbot in Japan, has been collecting evidence of wartime brutalities committed by Japanese troops in China during World War II for 20 years. As of August, Daito collected and donated about 4,000 pieces of historical materials to Nanjing.

"This year, I will donate to Nanjing six photo albums of Lieutenant-General Heisuke Yanagawa, a Japanese army general who attacked Nanjing. Many of the photos in these albums have never been made public and are worth studying carefully one by one," Daito said.

Since 2004, Nanjing-born Chinese-American Lu Zhaoning has donated over 2,100 pieces of historical materials to the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders. In the memorial hall, Lu pointed to a photo of a head placed on an iron fence and told Xinhua that he first saw this photo in the American magazine "Life." Later, he found the same photo with a caption that was collected by a United Nations office, and then donated it to the memorial hall.

This photo appeared in the film Dead To Rights.

"Today, anyone who wants to learn the truth about the Nanjing Massacre can find relevant historical materials in many countries and languages. Chinese scholars are also doing their utmost to collect relevant archives, historical reports and documents about the massacre from all over the world and are working hard to tell China's own research findings to the world in multiple languages," Zhang said.

"Attacks by Japanese right-wing forces are not scary. At least it shows that I am still engaged in a debate with them regarding the history of aggression," Daito said, adding, "However, for the Japanese who are indifferent to history, there is no communication at all between us. In this sense, 'indifference' is actually a more terrifying thing."