Rising China-Japan friction in 2012 has centered on territorial claims over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands. Like many such clashes since the early 1990s, it is bound up with unresolved legacies of the Asia-Pacific War. As much valuable research on the politics of memory in contemporary East Asia has demonstrated, the politicized anger and bitterness that characterize the China-Japan relationship today have a complex archeology in which popular tempers were not always so enflamed. For example, during the 1950s and 1960s the United States, not Japan, was by far the primary geopolitical and ideological enemy of the PRC. In that context, as the CCP aimed to lure Japan from its American geopolitical embrace, China's leaders also sought to persuade the Chinese people to “forgive and forget” matters of the Japanese invasion, and ultimately recast popular Chinese perceptions of Japanese society from those of wartime enemy to regional geopolitical ally.

Growing evidence suggests that the U.S. military tested biochemical agents on its own forces on the island in the 1960s of unwitting American service members around the globe to substances including sarin and VX nerve gases between 1962 and 1974.

According to papers obtained from the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the 267th Chemical Platoon was activated on Okinawa on Dec. 1, 1962, with “the mission of operation of Site 2, DOD (Department of Defense) Project 112.” Before coming to Okinawa, the 36-member platoon had received training at Denver's Rocky Mountain Arsenal, one of the key U.S. chemical and biological weapons (CBW) facilities. Upon its arrival on the island, the platoon was billeted just north of Okinawa City at Chibana — the site of a poison gas leak seven years later. Between December 1962 and August 1965, the 267th platoon received three classified shipments — codenamed YBA, YBB and YBF — believed to include sarin and mustard gas.