Also why do the Japanese still actively deny these claims? And why did the US befriend them as soon as they did after all that happened in ww2?
Sorry if this is a lot of questions, I’m just pretty curious rn
I can do a pocket answer to two of these questions, and I have a link for the third one.
Why did the US befriend Japan? After WW2, Japan had completely exhausted its supply chains for food and other basic necessities. People were starving to death (as portrayed in Grave of the Fireflies) and the government had been delegitimized by its surrender. Europe faced a similarly dangerous climate and there is even a popular history book about how close we came to global catastrophe, Year Zero: A History of 1945 by Ian Buruma. America moved to start supplying and rebuilding Japan immediately. As this process got underway, Korea was split in two and the situation there became tense, with a large anti-colonial movement rapidly becoming communist. America realized that Japan, which had just demonstrated its economic and military abilities during the war, could be a valuable ally against communism. During the Korean War Japan provided much of the supplies to the United Nations army, and in the end, Japan turned out to be America's closest friend in Asia throughout the Cold War.
Why does Japan deny war crimes? This story also begins during the Occupation. I don't think this can be answered briefly, but check out Why is it still generally culturaly acceptable for Japanese government officials to deny thier countries World War Two war crimes with an answer by /u/AsiaExpert.
Have Japanese war crimes not been portrayed in the media? I don't think this is true. The epic, award-winning 1957 film The Bridge over the River Kwai portrayed treatment of POWs; Unit 731 was portrayed on The X-Files and in the 2011 series Warehouse 13; the 2022 Apple TV+ series Pachinko portrays massacres and fascism. Japanese war crimes have also been mentioned in bestselling (Western-market) novels by Haruki Murakami and Richard Flanagan. I can't think of any Italian war crimes which have gotten such publicity.
I don’t think we do in the case of Italy. We emphasis German ones over all due to the shock of what they were doing reverberating through our culture, however I don’t think I’ve seen any media displaying Italian war crimes where we have some very well known movies and books like unbreakable showing Japanese internment camps. However, what they did to the Chinese and other Asian populations isn’t really shown all that much as it’s impact in the West was minimized by the horrors of Germany and not really effecting any of the majors world powers.