To be fair, it should be added that the press are hardly solely to blame. The American scholarly community must also carry the can. Here again I can hear some gasps but many American scholars are funded from East Asia with significant practical consequences for what they study and who gains prominence in their fields.

What is beyond question is that even many China specialists at U.S. universities have never heard of the Huang He massacre, for instance. Yet it was truly an enormous atrocity. On Encyclopedia Britannica's numbers, between 500,000 and 900,000 people died after Chinese Nationalist forces under Chiang Kai Shek destroyed the Yellow River's dikes near Kaifeng. The move was undertaken to try to slow the advance of Japanese troops during the Sino-Japanese War.

(It is interesting to note incidentally that the New York Times ran a major article on the Yellow River in 2006 without ever mentioning the 1938 atrocity. We shouldn't be too hard on the journalist concerned, of course, because his general knowledge was limited by the failure of previous generations of Western journalists and historians to put the matter on record. (The article's here.)

As for the comfort women issue, this came to be widely discussed in the English-speaking media only as recently as the early 1990s. Yet the scandal of the Japanese army's brutalization of more than 100,000 women -- most of them either Korean or Chinese -- was never any secret in East Asia. It was common knowledge all along not only in Japan, but in South Korea and China, among many other nations. It was just not talked about.

The Netherlands takes credit as the first nation to press the issue with post-war Japan. As early as 1948, the Dutch colonial authorities in the then Dutch East Indies (the archipelago now known as Indonesia) brought several Japanese citizens to trial on sex slavery charges and executed one of them. The charges arose from the deployment of between 100 and 200 captured Dutch women in war-time military brothels.

The Dutch went on in 1956 successfully to persuade the Japanese government to pay compensation to the women. And in 1985 the story of what happened was published in an official Dutch government history of the war.

By comparison the comfort women issue remained sub rosa in most East Asian nations until well into the late 1980s. In Korea, for instance, it was swept under the rug by the dictator Park Chung-hee when he took power in 1961. Park, who had been an officer in the Japanese army in the Second World War and who is said to have spoken Japanese as his first language, settled Korea's war claims against Tokyo in an agreement in 1965 that effectively sold the comfort women down the river.

Similarly in the early 1980s, the comfort women issue was given short shrift by Chinese leaders anxious to renew ties with Japan. In return for more favorable economic relations with Tokyo, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai signed away all Chinese individuals' claims for compensation arising out of the Sino-Japanese war.