Drawing on a recent collaborative and interdisciplinary study of East Asian Images of Japan, this article discusses contemporary Chinese portrayals of Japan, their political context, and their significance for Sino-Japanese relations. It questions some widely-held assumptions concerning the extent of ‘thought control’ in an authoritarian state, the nature of popular protest, and the relationship between official propaganda and popular lived experience. While the main focus is on portrayals of Japan in mainland China, for comparative purposes some reference is made to Hong Kong and Taiwan. The latter part of the article also features a brief discussion of images of China in Japan, especially relating to the Second World War. This reflects particularly on the role of museums as vehicles for ‘peace education,’ focusing on two key institutions in Kyushu. China’s ‘bases for patriotic education’ and Japan’s ‘peace museums’ ostensibly embody radically different institutional missions. However, while Japan’s memorials to the war evince greater diversity, in harping on national victimhood and obscuring the reasons for war, key sites of ‘peace education’ arguably deliver a message that is just as nationalistic as that conveyed by their Chinese counterparts. The article concludes by arguing that, notwithstanding its ‘totalitarian’ facade, China’s social and political fragility in fact limits the scope for the authorities there to moderate anti-Japanese public discourse. In democratic Japan, by contrast, a more honest and open engagement with the national past is—or should be—far more achievable. For both moral and political reasons, scholars and educationalists in Japan therefore urgently need to consider their role in improving Sino-Japanese relations, not least through more forceful engagement in public debate over the socialization of the young.