The Japanese occupation of China was a particularly galling and humiliating period because Japan was an Asian, not a Western, power. Moreover, like China, Japan was a society steeped in Confucian culture, which many Chinese reformers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries blamed as a critical impediment to their own country’s development and modernization.
日本对中国的占领是一段尤其让中国人觉得痛恨和屈辱的岁月，因为日本不是西方霸权，而是亚洲国家。此外，日本和中国一样，深受儒家文化影响。19世纪、20世纪中国很多改革者都怪罪儒家文化，认为是这种文化严重阻碍了他们自己国家的发展和现代化进程。