Is it true, as the American philosopher George Santayana famously remarked just over a century ago, that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"? If it is, is the reverse necessarily false? Imagine he had said — his eye, for example, on the current discord between Japan and China — "Those who cannot forget the past are condemned to repeat it." Would he have been talking nonsense?

The bilateral relationship between Japan and China is one of the oldest in the world, dating back at least 2,000 years. China civilized Japan — not by conquering it but by teaching it, step by painful step; from wet rice agriculture to metal-working to literacy to architecture to Buddhism, Confucianism and the art of government. China's benevolent tutelage and Japan's eager discipleship constitute a rare, if not altogether unprecedented and inimitable, form of international relations.

That's worth remembering, to be sure, and mutual affection might well be the dominant mood today had Japan's Western-style modernization, begun with the Meiji Restoration of 1868, not turned China, then still backward by Western standards of science, technology and industry, into a vast proving ground of Japanese mettle. Japan declared war on China in 1894 over territorial disputes in Korea. Within a year it was victorious; within 40 years it had turned large swaths of China into a debased, ravaged colony; within 50 it had perpetrated atrocities which today are as vivid in China's collective memory as they are faded in Japan's.