Time to Move On

I see that Curzon is making many of the same arguments I've made earlier (see the comments) about the pointless and unappeasable nature of the anti-Japanese hatemongering currently festering in China and South Korea, and in addition, he makes one key point I haven't brought up: that contrary to all reason, the intensity of anti-Japanese feeling in both of its neighbors is not decreasing, but increasing with the passage of time.

One would think those who had to live through Japanese brutality would be most obsessed with hating the Japanese, but no, it's those Chinese and South Koreans who've known Japan as nothing but a peaceful neighbor, good trading partner and generous donor* who are most aggressively outspoken: what this says to me is that it isn't Japan's actions which are at issue but the internal psychodramas of the Korean and Chinese fanatics who have nothing better to do with their time than pick at old wounds. The citizens of other countries have managed to move on from their sufferings under colonialism, so why can't these two?

*Especially to China: Japanese ODA to that country has run into the tens of billions of dollars over the last three decades, a point which is never mentioned whenever demands for reparations come up.

Comments

[Chuckles]

There will be no moving on, I'm afraid. People have a cathartic need for vengeance. It raises all sorts of interesting questions. With the Chinese these vitriolic, what are Africans to do then? Talk about messed up history books! Boy, Africans have seen their share of that--Or it could be that African rage is merely pent up.
If I were Japan, I would give all concerned their gaddem apologies and cut them off. There's absolutely no way youre gonna be taking my money and "beheading" the Japanese devil at the same time.
The refusal of Japan to do this is provoking a nationalist backlash against China within Japan itself, with outpourings of Hatred that might dwarf anything the Chinese have to offer--and I really dont think anyone wants to let the genie of Japanese Militarism out of the bottle again.
There is extreme myopia on both sides; again, economic considerations are winning out against security issues.
There are many groups to indict for this present state--The Japanese left; the extreme Japanese right wing, the CCP, The U.S China lobby etc.

The bottom line is this: Every time a Chinese kid meets a Japanese kid who isnt aware of the required portions of history and who doesnt show the requisite contriteness and deference--You get an angry Chinese kid. And this is going to go on for centuries, so long as you have someone stoking the flames.

The retreat into the collective identity and an assumption of all its baggage is often a way people deal with individual deficiencies in the presence of an (often perceivedly superior) other. So you get White kids who dont know shit about Isaac Newton touting Newton as evidence that every black person they meet should be humble and unuppity. Its the same thing with China. You cant go 3 sentences with them without some tangential reference to a great and grand history in the spirit of "There, take that...and that...that'll teach you to think you're better than me you lowly Jap, or Korean or Caucasian etc"

[Chuckles]

http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/05/breaking2453472.986111111.html

[...However, numerous Chinese web sites heaped venom on Rice following her recent state visit, focusing on her race, sex and nationality.
"She looks like an orangutan, and talks rubbish; send us a beautiful woman next time," stated one contributor to Sina.com.

"This black woman is not welcome!!!" stated another.

"She looks absolutely like a witch!" said a third.

Racist thinking nurtured by political isolation is believed to be widespread in China.

One Internet site mocked Rice, who is single, for having "no sons, and not grandsons, just several mad dogs."

Other reported comments:

"Black devil"; "black pig"; "black whore"; "black female dog"; "You're not even as good as a black devil, a real waste of a life"; "Her brain is blacker than her skin"; "Really ugly"; "The ugliest woman in the world"...]

This is tangential to the discourse, but when I see things like this, I just sigh. Not because of the Racist comments, but because of reports like this:

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/bw/20050412/bs_bw/nf200504129145

And the incredible dullness of African leaders--or perhaps Marxist deluded African leaders.
It is all very well for Mugabe to denounce the racist, imperialist British; but European Racism we've seen and we've tempered. The Racism of the Arab and Asian worlds towards Africans--given their continuing and expanding influence on the continent, is given nary a mention--much of the time is spent barking at imaginary demons.
The Chinese government will censor calls for democracy, but not comments villifying Black people for no reason whatsoever.

Africa's embrace of China, just like its previous embraces of two other regions, is going to prove to be a deadly and fatal miscalculation.

[Curzon]

Thanks for the shoutout -- and great blog btw, I'll have to stop by here more often.

[Muninn]

The history problem won't disappear soon I regret. However, there is lots of important work to be done to spread a little knowledge around about the issue.

1) The Japanese education system can benefit from better coverage not so much necessarily about specific atrocities but about the specific nature of the hypocrisies involved in colonialism (not just western but a new layer of hypocrisy built into their own "Japan's Orient" narrative of liberation).

2) The war itself needs to be considered not so much as a terrible war led by military thugs who kidnapped the government from a helpless people (the "dark valley" thesis which is popular with the left-leaning Marxist approach in postwar historiography of the war in Japan) but, like so many other modern wars, one which had massive support amongst the populace (see for example Louis Young's Japan's Total War on this).

3) The left (and I include myself in this) needs to better counter the increasingly popular nationalist narrative furthered by the revisionist right, popularized in conservative magazines like SAPIO, general journals like Bungei Shunju and the manga Sensoron, and other writings. The biggest obstacle the Japanese anti-revisionists (who luckily are still the vast majority of Japan's academic and intellectual elites) face is the fact that the solution lies in promoting a post-nationalist historiography, which is extremely difficult when the country is just at this moment trying to "return to" a pride in its nation. If they succeed in transcending the nation, they would be the first in Asia to do so...if they fail, then more conflict lies ahead.

4) The kind of joint historical work being done on the Sino-Japanese war with Japanese and Chinese scholars working together is just not making the connection with the mass media and with the average person on the street. I attended one such meeting of the growing network of scholars involved in this project. See my notes on one of the meetings where I was designated "tea lady" for the event thanks to my former advisor (http://muninn.net/blog/2004/02/the-state-of-joint-study-of-the-sino-japanese-war.html)

5) The media coverage REALLY needs to include a paragraph on the textbook approval process in Japan as required material. They need to talk about adoption rates and the kinds of passages in other textbooks about the same events that are used by the majority of students. They REALLY need to emphasize the huge majority of academics who are on the other side in Japan and what it would take for a textbook to be rejected under the current system. The system NEEDS reform but not of the kind which would please the Chinese protesters...on the contrary, I think it needs to open up EVEN more since it currently prevents different narratives from challenging the nationalistic narrative dictated by its "standard list" of events.

[radek]

I didn't comment on this thread before because I had to turn it in my head for awhile. Instinctively I actually sympathize with the Chinese and Koreans. I don't want to get into a comparison of Nazi vs. Japanese
war crimes - since it's a red herring - but I'm sure that if the German government glibly approved a school textbook which said that the Holocaust did not happen (or even something like that it's extent "was exaggerated") there'd be a huge outcry in Israel, Poland, Russia and the rest of the world.

Yes, I know (from Curzon's excellent website (btw, to exemplify my own historical sensitivities, let me just say that that name has some very negative connotations for me) that the textbook was used in less then .03% of schools or whatever, but regardless, the approval given to it by the Japanese government was a symbolic act, and in international politics - both at the level of diplomacy, as well as the feelings of people in the street - symbols matter. Sometimes a lot.

And it's not like this is a new thing. The controversy over Japanese textbook's portrayal of WW2 goes back at least a decade or so and then you got things like Koizumi visiting the war shrine (again, remember what happened - rightly - when Reagan visited the SS cemetary. Imagine what would happen if Kohl had done that.) I think this is what Chinese and Koreans mean when they argue that the Japanese "are not sincere".

At the same time it's also true, as Abiola points out, that the Japanese have been generous to China with their money, and as others have pointed out that they have offered some kind of an apology on numerous occasions. The basic pattern on the part of the Japanese establishment seems to be to do something to provoke anger abroad and then try to pacify it with generous hand outs combined with some form of apology. So what's going on?

Well, I think the Japanese government wants to have its cake and eat it to. On one hand it wants to have decent international relations - hence the money and the post-fact apologies, on the other it knows that stirring up the nationalist ghost plays well with a certain part of its constituency. It knows that the constituency at home will "understand" that the apologies are, um, diplomatic necessities. The Chinese government in turn is happy to accept both the money and the apologies for pretty much the same reason (i.e. the man in the street will think "we showed them").

I agree that the Chinese government is stirring up anti-Japanese hatred for cynical reasons, as argued above. Of course, that's what governments do; exploit the prejudices and passions of the people. And totalitarian governments have less qualms about doing this then others. But the Japanese do repeatedly provide them with excellent opportunities. Both partners play the game willingly.

Also, even though governments play a role, those seeds of hatred have to be sown in a fertile ground (otherwise every former Soviet satellite would be burning with a blind hatred of the US today). This fertile ground in this case is the fact that China, Japan and Korea all have a tradition of nationalism that dates back a millenia at least. Compare that with Europe where nationalism - though extremely fervent at times - emerged recently, during the Napoleonic Wars or so.

I do think there's plenty of blame to go around on this one.

[Ross]

China's indignation is all the more ironic given that the Chinese Communist Party have been more prolific killers of the Chinese people than Japan ever was. The indifference of South Korea towards the appalling treatment of North Koreans by the Kim's is also well documented.

[Abiola Lapite]

"the approval given to it by the Japanese government was a symbolic act, and in international politics - both at the level of diplomacy, as well as the feelings of people in the street - symbols matter. Sometimes a lot."

Yes, symbols matter, but not just to international audiences. The fact is that the "revisionists" are a political force to be reckoned with in Japan, just as the creationists are in the United States, and that means sometimes they *will* get a bone or two thrown their way. For the people of China and Korea to get into screaming fits because of this is simply ridiculous.

"The controversy over Japanese textbook's portrayal of WW2 goes back at least a decade or so and then you got things like Koizumi visiting the war shrine (again, remember what happened - rightly - when Reagan visited the SS cemetary. Imagine what would happen if Kohl had done that.)"

But it was in fact Helmut Kohl who suggested the Bitburg visit! Reagan just went along with it because he felt he owed Kohl for standing by him during the Pershing missile crisis. It speaks for the far greater political maturity of most European countries that nobody went a-rioting because of this visit.

"Well, I think the Japanese government wants to have its cake and eat it to. On one hand it wants to have decent international relations - hence the money and the post-fact apologies, on the other it knows that stirring up the nationalist ghost plays well with a certain part of its constituency. It knows that the constituency at home will "understand" that the apologies are, um, diplomatic necessities."

That's hardly the only the interpretation possible: one could with equal justification say that Japanese politicians try to pacify the nutcases amongst their voters by giving them the odd bit of empty symbolism now and then.

In any case, Japan's apologies are still far more than what *any* Western colonial power has ever given to its former subjects: where, for instance, are the British apologies for the Boer War, the brutal repression of the Sepoy Mutiny or the gassing of Iraqis, and where are the American apologies for the brutal colonization of the Phillipines? Let's not even mention Russia - it'll be a cold day in hell before any apologies for imperialist expansionism are forthcoming from that country's leaders.

In closing, I'm not saying that Japanese revisionists aren't a crazy and nasty bunch, nor am I saying that Japanese politicians couldn't show a bit more courage in facing them down, but as Muninn points out, these extremists are far from representative of national opinion, especially amongst educators, and it's time Japan's neighbors came to understand that any pluralistic, open society will have a constituency ready to push questionable views decent people will find offensive. Germany had its "Historikerstreit" in the 1980s, and the past few years have seen "Der Brand" and other "revisionist" literature hit the bestseller lists there, but you didn't see Tony Blair or Jacques Chirac making childish, overheated declarations of "diplomatic war" over this, did you?

[Chuckles]

I do sympathize with the Chinese and Koreans also; again this is instinctive--but Hitler rode in on a wave of sympathy and resentment. It is also true that not much attention in the West is being given to the counter-revisionists. Is there a vested interest in portraying a rise of Nationalism in Japan? Much of the reports are always about so and so being arrested for refusing to sing the anthem, so and so being arrested for refusing to salute the flag, or something etc. Look at the news headlines. Its always "China Demands Japan Faces Up to Atrocities" as if Japan hadnt done that already! The media is actually painting the rioting Chinese as the good guys here! Whatever for? And this the same Western media that is so hostile to any notions of Western apologies for their own crimes--how long did it take the Germans to apologize for the Herero massacre for instance?
There is no controversy. Japan has trashed this issue time without number. The problem is that the CCP is making ridiculous demands about what form and nature the apology should take.
This crap is going to backlash on all concerned, including the Japanese who may be using it to stir up a nationalist, right wing constituency to expand Militarism.

Anyhow, the Nationalist have the upper ground in all 3 countries concerned. When Japanese school kids tell me that Japan went into Manchuria to fight for freedom... The thing has clearly become a popular narrative in Japan and the narrative of the evil Japanese is popular on the other side also. Who gains in the end? India perhaps? (BTW - Nehru did say something to the effect that he was inspired by Japanese acts in IndoChina to rebel against the British).

[Abiola Lapite]

"And this the same Western media that is so hostile to any notions of Western apologies for their own crimes--how long did it take the Germans to apologize for the Herero massacre for instance?"

And even then the apology was laced with historical relativism:

http://www.namibian.com.na/2004/august/national/045D30AB16.html

["Before Saturday's commemorations, the closest Germany had come to an apology had been an expression of "deep regret" for the killings which were inflicted on Namibians by its colonial soldiers.

Germany also avoids using the word genocide when referring to the 1904 events, but on Saturday its Minister came close to acknowledging that what happened to the Hereros was genocide when she said:"The atrocities committed at that time would today be termed genocide, and nowadays a General von Trotha would be prosecuted and convicted."

Berlin has also resisted campaigns for it to pay reparations for the 1904 massacre, arguing that it was living up to its historical responsibility by extending massive development aid to Namibia, apparently now totalling around 500 million euros since its former colony's independence in 1990."]

Sounds an awful lot like Japan, doesn't it? The difference is that the Germans are allowed to get away with it, all because Willy Brandt once fell on his knees at Auschwitz (as if that one action cleansed all of the nation's sins). Still, even the German track record with the Herero's better than anything to issue from the Netherlands (Indonesia in the 1950s), France (Algeria, Vietnam, etc.), Belgium (The "Heart of Darkness", anyone?) or any of the English-speaking powers (too many places to count).

[Chcukles]

Yes Indeedy, Abiola -

It is always convenient to deploy relativism when there is an assymetry of Power. But this we know, before Aushchwitz, there was the Namib and before Hitler, there was Leopold. I dont see any reason why the the concept cant be extended before the 1940s. It is things like this that inform the present dilly-dallying on Darfur, with some telling us "It is not a classic case of Genocide" Heh? Genocide now comes in classes? Pray Tell - What is classic genocide?
In the global context, the Japanese have done more than enough. They should get rid of the kid's gloves and tell the Chinese that upfront and crack down on the Japanese Nationalists who see this as a way to express frustration, not only at China, but also at the United States.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No one in West Africa even remembers the Aba women's riot, or the Tirralieurs Senegalais or the mass recruitings and village burnings that preceded WW1. Some people take things just too seriously.

[Jim]

There is a parallel in the US to the tendency in Germany to consolidate all thier national guilt into the Holocaust and then ignore everything else. All class inequalities and conflicts in the US get ignored as the payoff for concentrating solely on slavery and continuing racism. Even that narrative is inaccurate; slavery mrrophed into serfdom and really only began to end in the South with the Civil Rights movement. That serfdom included plenty of white sharecroppers too. That gets ignored in the narrative, and there's a payoff for that too.
The payoff is that the labor struggles can be ignored and the myth of equality and opportunity surviveds. Since the myth really has to come first, or there won't be a reality, that may not be a bad thing, but that doesn't make it true.

Where are the payoffs in this three-way hate orgy? Who is benefiting? Really everyone, even the people being manipulated. Victimhood feels so good.

[Chuckles]

There's a neat article on AToL that succintly analyses the present situation:

As I see it, eyewitness account from this 3rd party neatly encapsulate the general sentiments from all angles who are not interested in apologetics for the CCP. The demonstrations were contrived, staged and fueled by a central administration preying on National pride. This was no outburst of National frenzy and popular sentiment (for that, see Tiananmen), it probably was staged to block the UNSC chances of Japan.

"The Japanese are too arrogant," he said. Yeah right. Exposes the motivation quite clearly.

http://atimes.com/atimes/China/GD14Ad06.html

[...At that time, some Japanese (and for good measure, other) department store display windows were smashed, some items looted. This has been going on for the better part of the past two weeks, not just in Shenzhen, but in Beijing, Changsha, Chengdu and other places. Guangzhou seems to have joined in this past Sunday. Shanghai to date has been largely unaffected...]

[...What struck me was the well-organized nature of the demonstration...]

[..."They [the Japanese] are too arrogant; we can't take it any longer," said another. How did they know about the "whitewash"? They were told about it in their work unit. Where did the Japanese flags come from that were ceremoniously burnt? A guy handed them out when they boarded the bus that took them to the demonstration...]

[...But people picking up rocks on cue as TV cameras focused on them and making quite a show of hurling them at the windows of the Japanese Embassy while "riot police" looked the other way strongly suggest it - and suggest the same organizers of the spontaneous anti-Japanese outpouring...]

[...Sunday noon, Asia Times Online's Chinese-language sister publication (along with most or all Chinese media outlets) received an instruction from the Communist Party's central publicity department (via provincial propaganda units) to black out completely any and all reports of the protest rallies...]

[...The obvious question is, why was all this cooked up, for what purpose, and why now?...]

[...But after seeing what I saw in Shenzhen, I know that the Chinese government and/or Communist Party got this thing going and kept it going. Students might do this sort of thing on their own. They certainly did at Tiananmen in 1989. From the looks of it (the TV pictures), students were involved in the Beijing demonstrations. But in Shenzhen there are no students...]

[Jim]

Playing wiht fire. What if people in the US started to boycott Chinese goods? Walmart would collapse and we would have to wear homespun, or maybe buy from sweatshop countries that are making some attempt at treating their workers decently, like Cambodia. To inflict real pain, we could freeze visas from China. Oops; that is already backfiring with Arab students.

[radek]

Like you say, it's time to move on so I'll take your points (Abiola, Jim and Chuckles) and think about them.

But I can't help but to nit pick on this:
"all because Willy Brandt once fell on his knees at Auschwitz (as if that one action cleansed all of the nation's sins). "

I believe he actually fell on his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising memorial.

[Abiola Lapite]

"I believe he actually fell on his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising memorial."

Er, yes, you're right, and I stand corrected.