It is well known that Japan committed atrocities during World War II. In the 1990s, however, these crimes and related prewar and wartime policies began to be viewed in a new light, as forms of genocide. This characterization of Japan's behavior was controversial, and was challenged for specific historical, political, and conceptual reasons.

For decades, Japan had been virtually absent from postwar discourses on genocide, which gave primacy to the Nazi holocaust as a phenomenon of modernity centered in Europe. This changed in the 1990s, with the rise of new global concerns with restitution and the negotiation of historical injustices. Asian citizens and their governments, in particular China, began to demand official apologies and compensation for Japanese war crimes committed against them. At the end of the twentieth century, the creation of historical knowledge about Japanese genocide and crimes against humanity engaged...