I heard a professor once, speaking about his experience working with college students in Japan, that many of the students there had never even heard about the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor. I have no idea how to interpret this anecdote so I thought I would come get some hard evidence.
What is the Japanese perspective on the events of the Pacific Theater? My understanding was that the Japanese occupation of China and Korea was exceptionally brutal, and that they frequently trained civilians to attack armed soldiers with improvised weapons. Is this true? And if so, is any of this talked about in Japanese history classes? What is the Japanese attitude towards the American occupation of Japan in the period following WWII?
EDIT: I know this is a lot of information I'm looking for here, but if anyone simply knows of a good English-language source for the Japanese perspective I would find that incredibly helpful. And any answers that you can give would be very valuable for me.
You are asking like five different questions here, each of which is easily a book to answer. But let's try it anyways.
Firstly, I cannot comment on the former as I do not speak with a lot of college students in Japan. However, I have interacted with war buffs, and they do not hide the attack on Pearl Harbor like they may shy away from the Rape of Nanking. Despite what you hear in the media, for the most part Japanese high school history teaches that the militarist Japanese government was the aggressor in the war and did some very bad things. You have to understand though that Japanese history covers a period that can be conservatively estimated at around 2000 years, whereas US high schools teach US history over a period of around 500 years. And in my US history course, we barely had a week to cover World War II. It's kind of unreasonable to expect every student to remember all the battles of WWII. For the US, there is a sort of "trauma" as it is the one foreign attack on US soil, but in the case of Japan it was just one of several port strikes that were made during the war.
I have never heard anything about Japanese civilians being trained to attack soldiers with improvised weapons. In fact I doubt that to be the case as one of the immediate precursors to the Sino-Japanese War was the Tungchow Mutiny, where a group of soldiers hired by the Japanese mutinied and massacred the Japanese civilians in the city.
The Japanese definitely left a harsh impact on China and Korea. The Rape of Nanking is mentioned, although it is covered only briefly. For more details, see here
For the occupation, this thread has an interesting discussion.