Editor's note: Zhang Wan is a current affairs commentator. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily those of CGTN.

Japan's 2026 Defense White Paper identifies China as an "unprecedented and greatest strategic challenge," while the Sanae Takaichi cabinet openly claims that "Taiwan's emergency is Japan's emergency," even hinting at possible military intervention in the Taiwan Strait. This political maneuver – fabricating an external threat, stoking a sense of crisis, and then breaking through military constraints – is structurally identical to the narrative logic Japanese militarism employed during World War II under the banners of "establishing the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" to justify aggression and expansion.

The past is not so distant: Every time Japan declared an "emergency," it has ultimately meant bloodshed for its neighbors. The "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" was, from beginning to end, a project of plunder and massacre carried out under the guise of "co-prosperity."

The bloody reality behind the lie

In Japanese official rhetoric, the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" was packaged as a new order that would "expel Western colonialists and ensure stability in East Asia." In reality, however, it closely resembled Nazi Germany's "Lebensraum" (living space) doctrine – using the language of "civilization and enlightenment" to mask resource extraction and racial oppression.

After the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japan rapidly occupied the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Burma, and Vietnam, imposing brutal colonial rule on local populations and committing countless atrocities. In April 1942, Japanese forces forced approximately 75,000 American and Philipino prisoners of war on a 65-mile (105-kilometer) march known as the notorious "Bataan Death March," one of the worst prisoner-of-war atrocities in World War II. In the 1945 Manila Massacre, approximately 100,000 civilians lost their lives.

Between 1944 and 1945, Japan's forced grain requisitioning in Vietnam triggered a famine that claimed roughly two million lives. In Singapore, Japanese forces carried out systematic massacres of ethnic Chinese residents, with tens of thousands killed.

To secure an overland supply route between Thailand and Burma, the Japanese military conscripted over 60,000 Allied prisoners of war and hundreds of thousands of Asian laborers to build the Thailand-Burma Railway. In the sweltering, disease-ridden jungles, prisoners and laborers endured inhuman treatment. More than 150,000 perished in construction, an average of 360 deaths per kilometer of track laid. This stretch of railway is still known today as the "Death Railway."

On the Chinese mainland, Japanese atrocities are too numerous to fully recount. The Nanking Massacre claimed 300,000 Chinese lives. In the anti-Japanese base areas, the Japanese army implemented the brutal "Three Alls" policy, namely "Kill All, Burn All, Loot All," razing countless villages to ashes. These acts of violence establish Japan as modern Asia's largest single source of catastrophe.

Fifty years of colonial rule in Taiwan: A forgotten history

From 1895 to 1945, Taiwan was colonized by Japan. For five decades, the people of Taiwan endured political oppression, economic exploitation, and cultural assimilation. More than 650,000 people in Taiwan perished in resistance to Japanese colonial rule – roughly one-tenth of Taiwan's population at the time. Japanese colonial monopolies controlled 94% of Taiwan's banking sector and 96% of its electric power industry, reducing the island's economy to a dependency of Japanese industry. The "Japanization" movement forced people in Taiwan to adopt Japanese names, speak Japanese, and worship Shinto deities – a systematic attempt to sever Taiwan's cultural ties with Chinese civilization.

Yet today, Japanese right-wing figures and separatist forces within Taiwan are attempting to whitewash this colonial history as a process of "modernization." Just as no one would call Nazi occupation "European integration," no one should ever call Japanese colonialism "development assistance."

Written commitments and willful betrayal

During the negotiations leading to the 1972 Sino-Japanese Joint Statement, Japan formally submitted a diplomatic document, the Japanese Proposal for Explaining the Joint Statement, which explicitly stated that the return of Taiwan to China is "the unchanged position of the Japanese government"; Japan "does not envisage any future legal status for Taiwan other than as part of the territory of the People's Republic of China"; and the Taiwan issue "should be resolved by the Chinese people themselves, that is, as a domestic issue of China."

Japan's current hype around "Taiwan contingency" and its implicit threats of armed intervention are not only a gross interference in China's internal affairs, but also a flagrant repudiation of its own legally binding international commitments.

The ghost of history has not faded

From the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" to "Taiwan emergency," Japan's narrative formula remains strikingly consistent: manufacture a threat, stoke fear, break constraints, and intervene abroad. Japan's accelerating re-militarization is essentially an effort to legitimize constitutional revision and military expansion.

The international community's vigilance against Nazi Germany shaped the post-war order, and the memory of Japanese militarism should not fade either. History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. When a nation begins to echo the language of "protection" and "emergency," Asian countries, especially those that lost millions of lives under Japan's lie of "co-prosperity," have every reason to remain vigilant.

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