Nakajima Yohachi, a 73-year-old Japanese war orphan who was brought up by a Chinese family, pays his respects at his Chinese foster parents' tomb in Mudanjiang, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, on August 10, 2015. [Photo by Wang Kai/Xinhua News Agency]

The Second World War in Asia is, in some ways, the least understood of the various major theatres of the global conflict that consumed the planet during the 1930s to 1945. The 70th anniversary of the end of this conflagration gives at least some opportunity to appreciate the immense contribution of Chinese, Koreans and others in the struggle against fascism and also rectify this lack of knowledge.

For the European conflict, in recent years, there have been the magisterial studies of the origins of the war through the work of historians like Richard Evans and Ian Kershaw. Anthony Beevor's work has clinically detailed military aspects of the European War. For English language material about the Second Sino-Japanese War, however, there is less diverse material. Its origins and how it unfolded are poorly understood. This is despite the fact that, in terms of fatalities, more died in China than any other single place, or, for that matter, that the Chinese were allies with the British, Americans and the Soviet Union in the attack on Germany and Japan.

The work of people like British historian Rana Mitter is remedying this paucity of understanding and appreciation of what happened within China in the years between 1937 and 1945 during this titanic struggle. The events in September will no doubt help even further. But it is still good to remember what the war was to Chinese, and why so many fought and made the ultimate sacrifice, during this period.

In essence, the Chinese nation which existed then was a predominantly agricultural one. Only 15 million out of the population in 1937 could be described as urban. The rest of the people lived in rural China. While there was some infrastructure, and patchy industrialization, China was a largely undeveloped country. From 1937, it was pitted in conflict against Japan, a nation which had been undergoing rapid modernization since the end of the 19th century, and which had an advanced military, and a strong manufacturing basis. From the start, this was an unequal struggle.

The imperial Japanese government's motives were centered on creating the same kind of `living space' that they could economically exploit and dominate for their own self-centered ends in Asia, and in particular China, that Nazi Germany desired over Eastern Europe and deep into Russia. Contaminated with the same pernicious ideology of racial superiority, they regarded their neighbors as inferior, and after the conquest of their territories treated many as little better than slaves.