5
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia,
1991–2010
Toward an Expanded Analytical Model
As Chapter 4 has shown, by the early 1990s Japan was in the process of redefining its official historical narrative in a more penitent direction. International
pressures were pushing Japan toward greater contrition. Japanese public opinion had shifted significantly toward recognizing the suffering the empire had
inflicted on other Asian countries. Powerful interest groups, in particular the
business community, were pushing for a more conciliatory stance, and Japanese
political leaders – even very conservative ones like Nakasone – were progressively adopting a more contrite rhetoric when speaking about the past. Within
a decade, however, Japan was embroiled in a diplomatic crisis over history
that was far more severe and more protracted than anything it had experienced before. Chinese and Korean resentment over aspects of the Japanese
official narrative – in particular Prime Minister Koizumi’s trips to the Yasukuni
and the Ministry of Education’s approval for the adoption of revisionist textbooks – boiled over into sometimes violent street demonstrations and mass
letter-writing campaigns. High-level diplomatic contacts between Japan and
its two main Asian neighbors – China and South Korea – were severely disrupted for nearly five years, and disputes that previously had been manageable –
in particular the territorial disputes with China over the Senkaku/Diaoyutai
islands and with Korea over the Dokdo/Takeshima islands1 – intensified to an
alarming and potentially dangerous degree.
While a complete breakdown in relations was avoided, the 2001–2007 war
over history was an unusually turbulent and politically costly one. The bright
hopes for building stronger regional structures that had characterized regional
1
As is typical in such disputes, each side asserts its ownership by giving its own name to the
territory. The cluster of small, uninhabited islands in the East China Sea that Japan refers to as
the Senkaku, China calls Diaoyutai. The U.S. State Department prefers the name the Liancourt
rocks. The two small islands in the Sea of Japan that Japan calls Takeshima, the Koreans
insist should be named Dokdo. Because Korea is in de facto control of Dokdo/Takeshima,
the Korean name is given preference here. On the same principle, because Japan occupies the
Senkaku/Diaoytai islands, the Japanese name is given priority.
175
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War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
dialogue in the early 1990s were drowned out in a rising tide of nationalist
recrimination.2 Sharply growing threat perceptions between the major Northeast Asian powers helped to fuel a significant military buildup,3 and new flashpoints for conflict between Japan and its neighbors emerged in the shape of
an array of territorial disputes that would continue to fester well after the
2001–2007 diplomatic crisis was over.
In this respect, the evolution of the Japanese official narrative and its impact
on the East Asian region differs sharply from the politics of history in Europe
during the same period. In Europe previously impenitent Austria successfully –
if fitfully – forged a domestic political consensus in favor of a more contrite
official narrative. Other West European countries – most notably France – also
began to wrestle with their past and began to offer apologies and restitution
for past misdeeds. In contrast, Japanese efforts to move in a similar direction in
Asia led to domestic political controversy and international diplomatic conflict.
The examination of the politics of history in Japan during the cold war period in
Chapter 4 has shown that neither Japan’s alleged “historical amnesia” nor the
power of conservatives with revisionist views alone can explain this outcome.
Nor do the particulars of Japanese Imperial history or the peculiarities of
Japanese culture provide an adequate explanation. Clearly, in this sense, the
Asian experience confounds any teleological worldview that holds that there
is a general trend toward increased acknowledgement of historical injustices –
perhaps as a result of the emergence of some nascent international justice
regime as has been suggested by some4 or as a result of a universal crisis of
the nation state as prophesized by others.5 What then does account for Japan’s
inability to successfully pursue reconciliation with its Asian neighbors and for
the extraordinary degree of contention that resulted?
To answer this question, we will need to widen the scope of our analysis
beyond the range of factors we have looked at in the earlier chapters and examine the broader international and regional context within which they occurred.6
2
3
4
5
6
For a detailed analysis of the disruptive impact of nationalism on efforts to build regional
institutions, see especially Gilbert Rozman, Northeast Asia’s Stunted Regionalism: Bilateral
Distrust in the Shadow of Globalism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
2004); and Takehiko Kamo, “Globalism, Regionalism and Nationalism: Asia in Search of its
Role in the Twenty-first Century,” in Yoshinobu Yamamoto, ed., Globalism, Regionalism and
Nationalism: Asia in Search of its Role in the Twenty-first Century (London: Blackwell, 1999).
On the impact of Japanese impenitence on threat perceptions, see Thomas Christensen, “China,
The U.S.-Japan Alliance and the Security Dilemma in East Asia,” op. cit.; and Jennifer Lind,
Sorry States, op. cit. On the buildup in arms in the Asian region, see Desmond Ball, “Arms and
Influence: Military Acquisitions in the Asia-Pacific Region,” International Security 18:3 (Winter
1993/1994), pp. 78–112. For a more sanguine look a decade later, see Ball, “Security Trends
in the Asia-Pacific Region: An Emerging Complex Arms Race,” Australian National University,
Strategic and Defense Studies Centre, 2003, Working Paper No. 380.
See Barkan, The Guilt of Nations, op. cit.
See Jeffrey Olick and Brenda Coughlin, “The Politics of Regret,” op. cit.
Ideally, such an analysis would have been undertaken for all of the cases over time, and a number
of recent excellent studies of the politics of history adopt precisely such an approach. See Yinan
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
177
This analytical expansion is necessary because if one looks at the international
impact of the historical narrative solely within the context of a single country,
there is a natural tendency to attribute the blame for any problem – or conversely, the credit for any success – to that particular country’s action, without
taking into account that the domestic dynamics of other countries may have
an equally important impact on whether countries reconcile or not. One could
refer to this omission as the problem “listening to the sound of one hand
slapping.”
The following three sections examine the evolution of the official narrative in
Japan in the 1990s, the era of what I call “ah so sorry diplomacy” during which
Japan made an abortive attempt to mend relations with its neighbors. The
first of these three sections examines the changing domestic and international
context of the Japanese debate; the second, the changes that they engendered in
the Japanese official historical narrative; and the third, on how the history issue
affected relations with neighboring countries. The next two sections then focus
in some detail on the politics of history in South Korea and the PRC; focusing
on the role of societal memory, calculations of interest, and the influence of
the pattern of cultural discourse on the past will be considered in all three.
The final section then focuses in on the diplomatic crisis that emerged between
2001 and 2007 following Koizumi’s trips to Yasukuni and the approval for
adoption of revisionist textbooks in Japan. The main concern here will be on
how the intersection of historical memory and political interests produced a
“war over history” of unprecedented dimensions.
Japan and the Era of “Ah So Sorry Diplomacy”: The Domestic
and International Political Context
The end of the cold war and the changes in the international and East Asian
regional system described in the previous chapters translated into a growing
perception in Japan that more needed to be done on the history issue. Shifts
in Japan’s domestic political environment – some of which were indirectly
encouraged by changes in the international system – further worked to increase
the political saliency of the history issue. However, although both domestic and
international forces were pushing Japan in the direction of expressing greater
contrition regarding the war, the international system also created powerful
incentives to promote a sense of patriotism to win greater public acceptance of
the military and the use of force in foreign policy in general. In the end, there
was significant movement toward greater contrition, but the Japanese official
He, The Search for Reconciliation op. cit.; Jennifer Lind, Sorry States, op. cit.; and Alexis
Dudden, Troubled Apologies among Japan, Korea and the United States (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2008). However, such an examination using the approach adopted here for the
range of cases under consideration here would go well beyond what could be managed within the
framework of a single volume. Fortunately, it is possible to come to some important conclusions
regarding our central question – what are the determinants of the official narrative of states? –
even using the more truncated approach adopted here.
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War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
narrative did not move as far or as fast as its counterparts did in Europe, and
the gains that were made would soon prove reversible.
The effect of external pressures were most obvious and straight forward
on the economic front, where burgeoning Japanese interests in Asian markets seemed to dictate increased responsiveness to the concerns of neighboring
countries. Already in the early 1990s Japanese business leaders had begun to
urge their government to tackle unresolved issues regarding the past. Over the
next two decades, the business community would consistently be one of the
leading voices for moderation on historical issues.7
Geostrategic considerations as well suggested that Japan needed to make
greater efforts to seek reconciliation over history. The demise of the old Soviet
military threat implied that originally compelling reasons for the U.S. military
commitment to the region was gone, and there was considerable evidence that
the United States was losing its interest in playing the role of guardian of the
free world. President George H. Bush, whose administration had managed
the collapse of Communism and successfully driven Iraq out of Kuwait, was
defeated in a campaign whose most memorable line was “It’s the economy
stupid.” At the same time, new security threats soon emerged in Asia, beginning with renewed tensions on the Korean peninsula over Pyongyang’s atomic
weapons program, followed by evidence of increased Chinese assertiveness in
the shape of a series of incidents involving nuclear tests, disputed territories,
and Taiwan.8
The initial response of Japanese policy makers to the new security environment was to bolster regional and global security institutions, starting in
1991 with the creation of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) – an expanded
regional security dialog centered on the nations of South East Asia, but including participation by China, Russia, the United States, and eventually both
North and South Korea. Soon thereafter, in 1992, Japan for the first time
dispatched Japanese military forces as part of UN sponsored peacekeeping
operations. Institution building alone, however, soon proved inadequate for
dealing with the new security challenges. As evidence mounted that the U.S.Japanese alliance was foundering over burden-sharing issues,9 Japanese leaders – beginning with Prime Minister Hashimoto Ryūtarō – reinvigorated the
security relationship with the United States by turning it from an arrangement
7
8
9
On business concerns, see Gekkan Keidanren (April 1992) cited in Yoshida, Nihonjin no
Sensōkan, p. 175. See also Koike Hirotsugu, Ajia Taiheiyō Shinron: Sekai o Kawaeru Keizai
Dainamizumu (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shimbunsha, 1993), especially pp. 306–307. The book as a
whole reflects the great expectations that Japanese business leaders had at the time for a Japanese
leadership role in the region.
See Michael, J. Greene, Japan’s Reluctant Realism, op. cit., as well as Michael J. Green and
Benjamin L. Self, “Japan’s Changing China Policy: From Commercial Liberalism to Reluctant
Realism,” Survival 38:2 (1996), pp. 35–58.
For an excellent summary of the problems faced by the alliance in the first half of the 1990s, see
Yoichi Funabashi, Alliance Adrift (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1999).
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
179
focused solely on defending Japan into one in which Japan would more actively
support regional and (after 9/11) global U.S. security efforts.
However, Japan knew that its new efforts in the security field would be
viewed with suspicion by the rest of Asia, in no small measure because of the
widespread perception that Japan had not done enough in terms of facing up
to its past. Lee Kwan Yew, the highly regarded prime minister of Singapore,
was perhaps the most visible and eloquent spokesman for such fears, famously
remarking that encouraging Japan to join in peacekeeping operations was like
offering chocolate liqueurs to a reformed alcoholic: One taste and they were
likely to keep on going. Similarly, at a public symposium in 1994, Lee warned
that Japan – unlike Germany – was not entirely trustworthy because elements
of the old militarist order had managed to “creep back into the mainstream.”10
Lee’s concerns were echoed by Australian prime ministers Bob Hawke and his
successor Paul Keating – both key allies of Japan in the creation of the ARF –
who on repeated occasions urged Japan to apologize for the horrors of the
past.11 In short, as Paul Midford put it, Japan suffered from a bad reputation
in the region. If it were to play a larger security role without starting a regional
arms race, it needed to find ways of reassuring its neighbors.12 Japan’s official
stance on history seemed the obvious and necessary place to start doing so.
Within the context of Japan’s politics, where the armed forces were viewed
with considerable distrust and there was a widespread reluctance to rely on
military means for pursuing national interests, conservatives felt compelled to
build public support for the armed forces by promoting a more positive public
perception of the them. The need to reassure Japan’s neighbors thus clashed
with the need to mobilize domestic support for the military – a tension that
Japanese policy makers would find particularly difficult to negotiate. Although
Germany faced similar pressures to do so, especially as NATO became increasingly involved in the former Yugoslavia, it was fortunate that it could do so
in a multilateral context in which military intervention could be justified on
the grounds of defending human rights and living up to the expectations of the
broader international community. Japanese policy makers, on the other hand,
had only the narrower bilateral framework of the Mutual Security Treaty to
work with.
Japan’s domestic political climate as well was shifting in ways that encouraged a rethinking of the official narrative. In this connection, three developments were of particular importance. First, the death of Emperor Hirohito
in 1989 marked the passing of an era and prompted a renewed discussion
10
11
12
Wakamiya Yoshibumi, The Postwar Conservative View of Asia, op. cit., p. 49, 222. The author
would also like to express his thanks to conversations with Kishore Mahubani on this point.
Jennifer Lind, Sorry States, op. cit., p.169.
See Paul Midford, “Making the Best of a bad Reputation: Reassurance Strategies in Japan’s
Security Policy,” Social Science Japan 11 (November 1997); and Christopher W. Hughes and
Akiko Fukushima, “U.S.-Japan Security Relations – Toward Bilateralsim Plus?” in Ells Krauss
and T.J. Pempel, eds., Beyond Bilateralism U.S.-Japan Relations in the New Asia-Pacific (Stanford, CA; Stanford Press, 2004).
180
War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
of Japan’s pre-1945 past, both inside Japan as well as internationally. Many
topics that had been taboo for decades now could be discussed without fear
of embarrassing the emperor personally, including such sensitive issues as the
emperor’s – and Japan’s – responsibility for Imperial expansionism and wartime
atrocities. An explosion of publications on the war, the emperor, and Japan’s
responsibility for the war soon followed.13
Second, the end of the cold war triggered a dramatic reordering of the
Japanese party political system. The LDP had always been fractious and faction
ridden, but during the cold war, it had largely been held together by the fear
that if the Socialists came into power, they would abrogate the Mutual Security
Treaty with the United States. The demise of the Soviet threat thus weakened
the bonds that held the party together and was one of the key background
factors behind the LDP to split in 1993. Although the LDP was able to come
back into power the following year, henceforth, it would be able to do so only in
coalition with other parties – beginning with its old adversaries, the Socialists,
followed by the Buddhist Kōmeitō. Both the Socialists and Kōmeitō had views
on history that differed sharply from those of the majority of the LDP. For the
Socialists in particular, changing the official narrative was an important part of
their political agenda. To enter into coalition with the LDP, the Socialists had
been forced to abandon many of the pacifist principles that had defined their
party, including their opposition to the Self Defense Forces and the alliance
with the United States. Socialist leaders saw changing the official narrative and
improving relations with Asia as vital to maintaining their credibility with their
rank-and-file members on the Left.14
Third and finally, Japanese civil society continued to gain in strength in
the 1990s, and groups concerned with issues of history and historical justice
grew apace – both on the left and right ends of the political spectrum. On the
Left, groups such as Peace Osaka, with support from local government, opened
museums and promoted exhibitions that moved beyond the Left’s traditional
focus on the Japanese people as victims of the war and placed new emphasis
on Japan as the perpetrator of atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre. Other
groups, such as the Violence against Women in War network (VAWW) took up
the cause of Chinese and Korean victims groups – most importantly the former
comfort women and slave laborers – promoted their views through the media,
and helped them to file law suits demanding compensation and apologies from
the Japanese government.15
13
14
15
Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics, op. cit., pp. 272–275, and more generally Laura
Fields, In the Realm of the Dying Emperor (New York: Vintage, 1993).
Asano Atsushi, Renritsu Seiken: Nihon no Seiji (Tokyo: Bungeishunjū, 1999), Part II, chapter
3; Ryuji Mukae, “Japan’s Diet Resolution on World War II: Keeping History at Bay,” Asian
Survey 36:10 (October 1996), pp. 1013–1014, 1017–1019.
On NGO efforts on the behalf of the comfort women, see Hideko Mistsui, “The Resignification
of the ‘Comfort Women’ through NGO Trials,” in Gi-wook Shin, Soon-Won Park and Daqing
Yang, Rethinking Historical Injustice and Reconciliation in Northeast Asia: The Korean Experience (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 36–54; and Carol Gluck, “Operations of Memory:
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
181
At the same time, groups on the Right redoubled their efforts to challenge
what they saw as the shift to a “self-flagellatory” (jigyaku) view of history.
These included both old groups such as the Izokukai (the Association of War
Bereaved Families), which despite its declining membership remained a potent
force in Japanese politics, as well as new groups such as the Society for Textbook Reform (Atarashii Rekishi Kyōkasho o Tsukurukai) – a politically wellconnected and media-savvy group of writers and intellectuals who promoted
the adoption of texts with a starkly unapologetic view of modern Japanese
history.16
Changes in Japan’s Official Historical Narrative
This combination of changes in Japan’s international and domestic political
contest led to a sharp intensification of the debate over history. On the balance,
the outcome of this debate in the 1990s was a shift toward greater contrition
in the official narrative, especially on the rhetorical level. The shift was less
pronounced, however, in other dimensions of the official narrative. Moreover,
the fierce polemical battles that were sparked by efforts to change the official
narrative seriously undercut – but did not entirely negate – efforts to promote
reconciliation with Japan’s neighbors.
The most controversial aspect of the new historical narrative was a sustained diplomatic campaign to apologize to its neighbors for the suffering that
Japan had inflicted on the region in the pre-1945 era. The opening shot in this
“apology offensive” came in Prime Minister Kaifu’s 1991 speech in Singapore
referenced at the end of Chapter 4. Kaifu’s speech was widely criticized for
evading the issue of Japanese responsibility for the war and colonial oppression. Nonetheless, it marked a significant turn in Japanese political rhetoric
in the direction of greater contrition, and subsequently, other Japanese prime
ministers would expand on Kaifu’s remarks. In August 1993, in Diet interpellation Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro – the first non-LDP prime minister
since 1955 – went further, saying that he believed that the “previous war”
(saki no sensō) had been one of aggression and a mistake. Because his comments could be interpreted as applying not just to the war with the United
States but might also apply more broadly to the history of Japanese Imperial
expansion, it became an immediate source of controversy, and Hosokawa was
much criticized not only by the LDP (which was then in the opposition) but
also by voices from within his own coalition.17 Hosokawa’s stance on the issue,
however, enjoyed broad public support. According to one poll taken soon after
16
17
Comfort Women and the World,” in Sheila Miyoshi Jager and Rana Mitter, Ruptured Histories:
War, Memory and the Post-Cold War in Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007),
pp. 47–77.
On the Tsukurukai, see Sven Saaler, Politic, Memory and Public Opinion, op. cit., especially
chapter 1, and Tawara Yoshifumi, Abunai Kyōkasho: ‘Sensō o Dekiru Kuni o Mezasu ‘Tsukurukai’ no Jittai (Tokyo: Gakushū no Tomosha, 2001).
Asahi August 11, 2003.
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War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
Hosokawa’s comments, fully 67 percent of the Japanese public approved of his
comments, whereas only 15 percent did not.18
When the LDP returned to power in June 1994, it did so in coalition with
its former rivals, the Japanese Socialists. The new prime minister Murayama
Tomiichi of the Socialist Party was eager to use the history issue to demonstrate
to his party’s constituents that the Socialists had not simply sold out to the
conservatives for the sake of gaining office.19 He was therefore determined to
go beyond Hosokawa and offer the most complete and forthright apology yet
for both the war and Japan’s history of colonial oppression. On August 15,
the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, Murayama offered the following
apology for Japan’s actions before1945:
During a certain period in the not too distant past, Japan, following a mistaken national
policy, advanced along the road to war, only to ensnare the Japanese people in a fateful
crisis, and, through its colonial rule and aggression, caused tremendous damage and
suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations. In the
hope that no such mistake be made in the future, I regard, in a spirit of humility, these
irrefutable facts of history, and express here once again my feelings of deep remorse and
state my heartfelt apology (kokoro kara owabi o hyōmei itashimasu). Allow me also to
express my feelings of profound mourning for all victims, both at home and abroad, of
that history.20
Murayama’s statement represented a watershed in the Japanese debate that
bears comparison with the speech Friedrich von Weizsäcker, the president of the
German Federal Republic, had given a decade before and the speech made by
Franz Vranitzky in Austria three years earlier. Despite certain ambiguities,21 it
was the most far-reaching official acknowledgement of Japanese responsibility
for the war and colonial domination to date. Moreover, the statement was
approved unanimously by the full cabinet (kakugi kettei), giving the statement
legal status as government policy as well as underlining its bipartisan character
(half of the cabinet was composed of LDP members).
As with Hosokawa’s comments a few years earlier, Japanese public opinion
was generally supportive of the prime minister’s statement. According to a
June 1995 NHK (the Japanese public broadcasting corporation) poll, only 7
percent of those surveyed felt that Japan had apologized enough for the war;
45 percent felt that it had apologized to some extent, and 35 percent felt that
18
19
20
21
Cited in Sven Saaler, Politics, Memory and Public Opinion, op. cit., p. 137.
On the political importance of the campaign to the Japanese Socialist Party, see Asano Atsushi,
Renritsu Seiken: op. cit., Part II, chapter 3.
The full text (in Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean versions) is available at http://www.
mofa.go.jp/announce/press/pm/murayama/9508.html (accessed March 12, 2006).
Critics pointed out that the prime minister used the word “I” (watakushi) in offering his
apology, suggesting that this was a personal view of his own and his cabinet and not one that
reflected the broader Japanese nation. An analysis of subsequent statements would suggest that
these concerns were not unfounded. Beginning in the late 1990s, the phrase “on behalf of the
Japanese people,” was added to “I”, thereafter the phrase “the Japanese side” was substituted
for “I.” It was not until 2005 that Prime Minister Koizumi unambiguously said that Japan was
making the apology.
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
183
it had not apologized enough.22 Another NHK survey from that same year
showed that fully 57 percent of the respondents felt that Japan had committed
acts for which it should apologize.23
This shift toward a more penitent stance, however, was not uncontested,
especially on the elite level. On the same day that Murayama made his apology,
no fewer than eight members of his own cabinet visited the Yasukuni shrine.
Time and again, senior political leaders – including members of the Hosokawa
and Murayama cabinets – expressed revisionist views on history. In May 1994,
Nagano Shigeto, former chief of staff of the Ground Self-Defense Forces and
justice minister in the Hosokawa Cabinet, told newspaper reporters that Japan
had been forced into the war for its own survival and that the Nanjing massacre
had been a fabrication.24 A few months later, in August, the director general of
the Environmental Protection Agency in the Murayama cabinet, Sakurai Shin,
similarly claimed that Japan had had “no aggressive intent” when it invaded
Asia and emphasized that the Empire had an overall positive impact on the
region.25
Both Nagano and Sakurai were forced to resign as a result of their outspoken
revisionist stance on history. Nonetheless, they represented only the tip of an
iceberg of opposition. Whenever a Japanese prime minister sought to adopt a
more penitent stance on history, prominent members of the government gave
voice to a solidly impenitent view of history, undermining and diluting the
impact of the prime minister’s statements.
The most dramatic example of this pattern came in June 1995, just a few
weeks before Maruyama’s landmark apology, when his government attempted
to pass through the Diet a resolution marking the fiftieth anniversary of the
end of World War II. Originally, the resolution was to include both a renunciation of war and a general recognition of the historical injustices perpetrated by
Japan. However, a powerful coalition of LDP lawmakers, the Parliamentarian
League on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the End of World War II, formed to
block the measure. Headed by the ultraconservative Okuno Seisuke, this group
counted altogether 143 of the upper and lower houses representatives among
its members.26 Another group – the Parliamentarians League to Bequeath Correct History – consisting of 28 lawmakers from the Shinshintō party, likewise
attacked the proposal from the ranks of the opposition.27 Behind both groups
stood an alliance of ideologically conservative interest groups – including the
Izokukai and the Shinto Shrines Headquarters (Jinja Honcho).28 In the end,
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
Cited in Mikyoung Kim, “Myths, Milieu, and Facts: History Textbook Controversies,” in
Hasegawa and Togo, eds., East Asia’s Haunted Present, op. cit., p. 102.
Sven Saaler, Politics, Memory and Public Opinion, op. cit., p. 150.
Mainichi May 5, 1994.
Asahi August 13, 1994.
Mukae, “Japan’s Diet Resolution on the End of World War II,” op. cit., p. 115.
Mukae, “Japan’s Diet Resolution on the End of World War II,” ibid., p. 116.
These groups were believed to wield greater political power than ever as a result of the introduction of a new electoral law. Mukae, “Japan’s Diet Resolution on the End of World War II,”
ibid.
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War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
the greatly diluted language of the resolution avoided making a direct apology
and relativized Japanese actions through reference to the history of Western
expansionism and colonialism. As a result, unlike the Weizsäcker statement in
Germany, the No War Resolution had only limited impact on the official historical narrative in Japan and may actually have helped undermine the credibility
of the prime ministers’ apologies overseas.29
Other dimensions of Japan’s official historical narrative reflected a similar
pattern of a general trend toward greater contrition coupled with strong countervailing pressures coming from the Right. In the area of policies pertaining to
commemoration, there was a proliferation of monuments and museums dealing with Japan’s wartime past. Some of these provided extensive coverage of
Japanese war atrocities and colonial oppression.30 For instance, in 1995 museums in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki included exhibits on Japan’s history
of aggression even though they continued to condemn the atomic bombings
and the suffering that had been inflicted on the Japanese people. When asked
about the change in policy, the mayor of Hiroshima said, “We ourselves were
overwhelmed by the terrible damage of the atomic bomb. But we found that
people around the world were not necessarily sympathetic. We realized it was
necessary to see ourselves not only as victims of war but also as perpetrators.”31
The new museums presenting a more penitent view of Japan’s modern history were supported exclusively by local as opposed to the national government.
Moreover, they soon came under fierce attack from conservative groups and
politicians, who questioned the accuracy of the new exhibits and demanded
a more “balanced” view of Japanese history, that is, one that offered a more
positive evaluation of the nation’s past. In 1996, upper house LDP members set
up a special investigatory committee that criticized Peace Osaka for disseminating what it labeled politically motivated propaganda.32 The political pressure
became so intense that in 2000 one progressive museum, Peace Osaka, was
compelled to allow conservative groups to hold a starkly revisionist event on
their premises entitled, “The Biggest Lie in the Twentieth Century: Complete
Verification of the Massacre in Nanjing.”33
Although the battle over history raged on the local level, still there was no
national government sponsored memorial or museum dealing with Japanese
29
30
31
32
33
See editorial in the Asahi satellite edition, June 23, 1995. For detailed analyses, Mukae, “Japan’s
Diet Resolution on the End of World War II,” ibid., and John Dower, “Japan Addresses its
Wartime Responsibility,” Journal of the International Institute: University of Michigan 3:1
(Fall 1995), pp. 8–11.
Yamabe Masahiko, “Chiiki ni nesazu Heiwa no Tame no Sensō Tenji,” Rekishi Hyōron 556
(August 1996), pp. 12–22.
Roger B. Jeans, “Victims or Victimizers?” op. cit., pp. 168–170. Left-wing activists had already
petitioned the Hiroshima government in 1987 to set up an exhibit to be called the “Aggressor’s
corner” that would deal with Japanese wartime atrocities. However, after a right-wing rally, the
petition was rejected. See Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt (New York: Farrar, Strau, Giroux,
1994), op. cit., pp. 106–108.
Hein and Takenaka, “Exhibiting World War II,” op. cit., p. 70.
Roger B. Jeans, Victims or Victimizers? op. cit., pp. 176–177.
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
185
war crimes and oppression. After tremendous controversy and political infighting, the Showa Hall (Showakan) – which is a national (kokuritsu) museum
sponsored by the Ministry of Health and Welfare – was opened in Tokyo
in 1999. Unlike the openly revisionist Yushukan museum attached to the
Yasukuni shrine, the Showakan did not attempt to defend pre-1945 policies.
Instead, the museum’s exhibitions focused on everyday life in wartime Japan –
the types of clothing women wore during the war, posters exhorting the population to save money, or the kinds of boots worn by Japanese soldiers when
they were dispatched to fight and die for the sake of the Empire. Insofar as the
museum brought to light the immense suffering of the Japanese people during
the war, it could be said to fit into the antimilitarist mainstream in Japanese
public discourse. At the same time, the Showakan avoided entirely the larger
political and international context that had brought the war about in the first
place. It thus sparked considerable outrage both abroad and among progressive
circles in Japan, who had hoped for a more serious engagement with the issue
of Japanese responsibility for the war.34 As one U.S. reporter sarcastically put
it, the history of the war “is less about Japanese soldiers’ footwear than about
whom they stepped on.”35
The 1990s also saw a progressive shift in Japanese educational policy as a
growing number of textbooks approved for adoption by the Ministry of Education included references to wartime atrocities such as the Nanjing massacre,
the savagery of the counter insurgency campaign in North China, Unit 731,
and, most controversially, the comfort women.36 Lending further impetus to
the trend was a 1993 Supreme Court ruling in favor of a lawsuit brought by
Ienaga Saburo, a liberal historian at Chuo University who had repeatedly challenged the Ministry’s textbook screening system. While the court ruled that the
system of textbook screening was constitutional insofar as it corrected factual
errors and inaccuracies, it found that Ministry of Education’s efforts to censor
34
35
36
Roger B. Jeans, “Victims or Victimizers?” op. cit., p. 157. The museum had been proposed
already in the late 1970s, but the project had been repeatedly delayed as a result of bitter fighting
between various ideological groups. Conservatives and veterans groups wanted the museum to
pay tribute to those who had lost their lives in the war and avoid criticizing the war and
the motives of those who fought it. Centrists and progressives were opposed to whitewashing
history. The focus on civilian suffering represented the lowest common denominator on which
all the parties could agree. For more on the background to the controversy, see Ellen Hammond,
“Politics of the War and Public History: Japan’s Own Museum Controversy,” Bulletin of
Concerned Asian Scholars 27:2 (1995), pp. 56–60; Hosoya Chirhiro and Ide Magoroku, “Sensō
o kioku suro to iu koto, Rekishi o kioku suru to iu koto,” Sekai 607 (1995), pp. 22–37; Fujiwara
Kiichi, Sensō o kioku suru: Hiroshima, Horokoosto to Gendai (Tokyo: Kōdanhsa, 2001); and
Tanaka Nobumasa, “Sensō no Kioku Sono Impei no Kozō: Kokuritsu Sensō Memoriaru o
Tōshite (Tokyo: Midori Kaze Shuppan, 1997).
Jeans, “Victims or Victimizers,” op. cit., p. 38.
After 1997, the Ministry of Education even approved mention of the comfort women in textbooks for middle school students, a move that provoked considerable outrage not only among
conservatives but also more mainstream Japanese who were concerned that such material might
not be appropriate for adolescents.
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War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
references to sexual assaults by Japanese forces at Nanjing and the activities
of Unit 731 constituted undue government interference in the textbook writing and ruled that 400,000 yen should be paid to Ienaga in compensation.
Although previous rulings by the courts had come to a similar position, this
was the clearest expression yet of judicial support for a more progressive stance
on textbook writing.37
It should be pointed out that this shift in educational policy – unlike the
changes in Austria around the same time – were not the product of explicit
government policies to promote a more contrite historical narrative through
the educational system. Rather, it was the result of trends in public and elite
opinion, which took advantage of openings in the institutional structure of
Japan’s educational system – that is, the fact that textbooks were written by
independent scholars and published by private companies. That the ministry
approved of such textbooks, however, reflected the changed political atmosphere.
This new trend in textbook writing provoked a powerful counterreaction.
Already in the 1980s, following the first textbook controversy of 1982, a network of conservative groups had formed under the aegis of an umbrella organization, the National Conference to Defend Japan (Nihon o Mamoru Kaigi).
With close links to conservative politicians and government officials (especially
in the Ministry of Education), the conference had become best known in the
1980s for its sponsorship of resolutions in various local assemblies that registered support for the Self Defense Forces. The conference was also active in
promoting a conservative view of modern Japanese history, with a particular
emphasis on textbook writing. One offshoot of this movement was the Society for the Creation of New History Textbooks (Shinkyokashō o Tsukurukai,
commonly referred to as the Tsukurukai), which was formed in 1996 by several
prominent conservative scholars.38
As its name suggests, the Tsukurukai’s main objective was to produce textbooks with a more positive historical narrative, but its members soon produced a wave of historical revisionist literature as well. Their output included
not only scholarly treatises and polemics for a well-educated public39 but also
works aimed at a mass audience. Particularly successful in this connection
37
38
39
Nozaki Yoshiko and Inokuchi Hiromitsu, “Japanese Education, Nationalism and Ienaga
Saburō’s Textbook Lawsuits,” in Laura Hein and Mark Selden, Censoring History: Citizenship
and Memory in Japan, Germany and the United States (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000).
Yoshida Takashi, “A Battle over History,” op. cit., pp. 96–99; Saaler, op. cit.; Daiki Shibuichi,
“Japan’s History Textbook Controversy: Social Movements and Governments in East Asia,
1982–2006” Discussion Paper 4, Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies (March
2008), available at http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/discussionpapers/2008/Shibuichi.html
(accessed November 13, 2009). For a more detailed look at the development of the Tsukurukai
and its grassroots organizations, see Oguma Eiji and Ueno Yoko, Iyashi Nashionarizumu: Kusa
no Ne Hoshu Undō no Jishhō (Tokyo: Keiō Gijuku Daigaku Shuppankai, 2003).
See for instance, Etō Jun, Wasureta Koto to wasuresaserareta Koto (Tokyo: Bunshun Bunko,
1996); Fujioka Nobukatsu, Kingendaishi Kyoiku no Kaikaku: Zendama Akudama Shikan o
koete (Tokyo: Meiji Tosho, 1996); and Fujioka Nobukatsu, “Jigyakushikan” no Byōri (Tokyo:
Bungeishunjū, 2001).
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
187
were the works of the popular manga author, Kobayashi Yoshinoro’s, whose
best-selling works Sensōron parts I and II, offered starry-eyed depictions of
Japanese troops valiantly fighting against treacherous Chinese guerillas and
brutal American invaders, images of demure comfort women bravely doing
their best to assist in the war effort, and progressive intellectuals as agents of
foreign powers who were trying to brainwash the Japanese people for their
own nefarious purposes.40
The Tsukurukai evolved out of the traditional right-wing intellectual milieu,
and many of its members – such as Etō Jun – had been prominent polemicists already in the early 1980s. What was new was the organization’s adeptness at repackaging the traditional conservative-nationalist message to suit
the tastes of a new generation. Its activities were soon to have international
reverberations.
The final dimension of the official historical narrative that saw some change
after the cold war was in the area of compensation and restitution. The most
notable came with respect to the comfort women. The issue of the comfort
women had been publicized in Japan beginning in the late 1970s, and the first
suit by a former comfort woman demanding compensation was filed in Japanese
courts in 1990. The Japanese government, however, adamantly denied that
there had been any official involvement in the comfort women system, insisting
that it had been organized entirely by private contractors. In 1992, however, the
discovery of new documentary evidence in the archives of the National Defense
Agency41 compelled Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihirō to acknowledge that
the Imperial government had in fact been involved in the forcible recruiting
of comfort women. A special fund, the Asian Women’s Fund (AWF), intended
to identify surviving comfort women and to offer them financial assistance
was subsequently established in 1995 under joint Japanese government and
Japanese nongovernmental organization auspices. Two formal apologies were
offered to each comfort woman, one on behalf of the Japanese government,
the other on behalf of the Japanese people as represented by NGOs, along
with 2 million yen (slightly under $20,000 at the time) in financial support, the
bulk coming from the government. Unfortunately, the complicated structure
of the AWF caused considerable confusion and gave rise to the impression that
no apology or compensation was being offered by the Japanese government.
Moreover, campaigns developed in Korea and other parts of Asia that rejected
Japanese actions as insufficient and insulting. As a result, only a handful of
comfort women came forward, and in the end, Japanese efforts on this front,
instead of promoting reconciliation, arguably succeeded only in prompting a
fresh round of criticism.42
40
41
42
See Kobayashi Yoshinori, Sensōron Sōsen (Tokyo: Bunkasha 1999). On Kobayashi’s nationalist
views, see Kobayashi Yoshinori, “Rekishi o mamoru Kigai o ima koso torimadose,” Seiron
(September 2007).
The author is especially grateful to the insights of Professor Onuma Yasuaki of Tokyo University, who was intimately involved in helping organize the AWF, on this issue.
The author is indebted to the comments of Professor Onuma Yasuaki on this point. See also
Japan Times August 13, 1998. There is some uncertainty over why only a handful of comfort
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War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
On the issue of individual compensation for other victims of Japanese actions
prior to 1945 – including the large numbers of former forced laborers who
filed suits in Japanese courts demanding apologies and compensation – the
government refused to budge, arguing that the issue had been legally solved at
the signing of the various bilateral treaties normalizing relations between Japan
and other nations. Despite legal challenges, the Japanese courts, in the main,
supported this government’s position.43
In sum, although there was a significant shift toward greater contrition
across the main dimensions of the Japanese historical narrative, compared
with the European cases examined earlier, the shift was smaller, more uneven,
and more deeply contested. The shift was far more pronounced in the area of
official rhetoric and educational policies than was true with respect to commemoration. In the area of victim compensation, there was hardly any shift at
all – in sharp contrast with both Austria and Germany, who saw compensating
the victims of Nazism as central to their efforts to pursue reconciliation with
their neighbors. In addition, unlike in Austria and Germany (and a number of
other European countries at the time, including France44 ), there was no movement to punish the perpetrators of wartime atrocities or to clamp down on
the expression of revisionist views. Although Japanese political leaders were
convinced of the need to improve ties with their neighbors, their ability or
willingness to implement an integrated political program to change the official
narrative was decidedly limited by the weight of the political and social forces
arrayed behind the existing, more impenitent stance on history. Instrumental calculations of interest thus clashed with an entrenched cultural discourse
on history, producing considerable social and political friction, precisely as a
Historical Realist perspective would suggest it would.
The History Issue and Japan’s Foreign Relations in the 1990s
Despite these shortcomings, Japan’s efforts to achieve reconciliation with its
neighbors had some success. In particular, considerable progress was made
in improving the relationship between Japan and South Korea. President Kim
Dae Jung’s pivotal summit meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Ōbuchi Keizo
in 1998 marked a high point in the relations between Seoul and Tokyo with
43
44
women have come forward. Some, such as Professor Onuma, blame it on the ambiguities
of apology. Others point out that the considerable social stigma attached to being a former
comfort woman discourages women from coming forward. Many Japanese conservatives not
surprisingly claim it was because the problem has been much exaggerated if not wholly invented.
William Underwood, “Chinese Forced Labor, the Japanese Government and the Prospects for
Redress,” Japan Focus, available at http://www.japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=326 (accessed
November 18, 2005); and Underwood, “Mitsubishi, Historical Revisionism and Japanese Corporate Resistance to Chinese Forced Labor Redress,” Japan Focus, February 6, 2006, available
at http://japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=513 (accessed March 21, 2005).
During the 1990s, there was a general movement toward adopting anti-Holocaust denial laws
in Europe.
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
189
Ōbuchi offering an apology, and Kim Dae Jung accepting it on behalf of the
Korean people.45 Thereafter, agreements were reached on lifting the ban on the
import of Japanese cultural products to Korea, on fishing in disputed waters
in the Sea of Japan, and on the joint hosting of the World Cup soccer games.
Following the successful conclusion of the soccer games in 2002, there was
considerable evidence of a marked improvement in Japanese and South Korean
public perceptions of each other, as reflected in both public opinion polls and
increased popular interest in each other’s culture.
Similar progress could be detected in Japanese relations with South East Asia,
where anti-Japanese sentiment had been quite strong in the past – as reflected
by the anti-Japanese riots that greeted Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei when
he toured the region in 1974 – and where the memory of the brutality of the
Japanese occupation during the Pacific War could at least potentially have made
history a major diplomatic issue. However, despite occasional expressions of
historically based misgivings, South East Asian perceptions became increasingly
positive throughout the decade.46
Despite burgeoning economic ties and substantive cooperation in other policy areas, there were no signs of any substantive movement toward reconciliation on the history issue in Sino-Japanese relations. This lack of progress is
attributable in part to rising tensions between the two countries over a range
of other issues, notably in the area of national security. Chinese nuclear tests in
1995 provoked considerable consternation in Japan, as did Chinese challenges
to Japan’s control over the Senkaku/Diaoyutai islands claimed by both countries. Even more disturbing to Japan were the PRC’s 1986 efforts to intimidate
pro-independence forces on Taiwan by firing barrages of missiles. As a result,
a growing number of Japanese defense and foreign policy analysts began to
openly talk of China as a potential security threat.47
Chinese demands for further apologies tended to be viewed by Japanese conservatives as the blatant efforts of a Communist regime to manipulate public
45
46
47
For the text of the statement and initial press reactions, see Asahi Shimbun and Yomiuri
Shimbun, October 8, 1998, p. 1. A cynic might observe that Kim did not go unrewarded for
his tact. In return for softening his demands for an apology, Korea received an additional $3
billion in aid from Japan, thus continuing a pattern of Japanese money in return for Korean
circumspection that dates back to 1965.
See Bhubinhindar Singh, “ASEAN’s Perceptions of Japan: Change and Continuity,” Asian Survey 42:2 (March/April 2002), pp. 276–296. Diane Wong makes the argument that in Southeast
Asian countries, unlike China and Korea, the focus of national passions is on the former colonial powers of the West. See Diana Wong, “Memory Suppression and Memory Production:
The Japanese Occupation of Singapore,” in Takashi Fujitani and Lisa Yoneyama, eds., Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s) (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001),
pp. 218–228.
On the evolution of Sino-Japanese relations through the 1990s, see Michael Green, Japan’s
Reluctant Realism (New York: Palgrave, 2001), chapter 3; Mike Mochizuki, “Terms of Engagement: The U.S.-Japan Alliance and the Rise of China,” in TJ Pempel, et al., Beyond Bilateralism,
op. cit.; and Thomas Christensen, “China, The U.S.-Japan Alliance and the Security Dilemma
in East Asia,” International Security, op. cit.
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War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
opinion to bolster its own domestic legitimacy and to win diplomatic concessions. What made the PRC’s actions all the more galling in their eyes was the
fact that the Chinese Communists themselves were guilty of appalling human
rights abuses that had occurred far more recently than Japanese misdeeds. As
a result, when Chinese leader Jiang Zemin visited Tokyo in the summer of
1998 – only a few weeks after Korea’s Kim Dae Jung had – there was no comparable breakthrough on the history issue. Instead, Jiang’s efforts to lecture his
Japanese hosts on the need to draw the correct lessons from the past were met
with a decidedly cool response. On the level of political symbolism, the trip
could only be viewed as a failure.48 A year later, differences over history were
paved over when Obuchi visited China, and the two sides came to significant
agreements on economic and other issues; however, whereas Japan could make
some progress with Korea on the history issue, with China the best that could
be done was to maintain an uneasy peace.
At the start of the twenty-first century, Japan appeared to have taken the
first steps toward achieving a new equilibrium on the history issue, one that
was widely hoped to herald a new age of regional amity and cooperation.
Resistance from the conservative end of the political spectrum in Japan was
fierce; however, it should be recalled that there had been considerable rightwing opposition in Europe as well when those countries had made their turn
toward a more contrite historical narrative. In the case of Austria, over 26
percent of the electorate had voted for Haider and the FPŐ in 1999, a party
widely known for its revisionist historical view. At the time of Weizsäcker’s
1985 speech in Germany, Chancellor Kohl himself spearheaded a campaign to
promote a “healthy concept of patriotism,” sparking international controversy
with his visit to the military cemetery at Bitburg. Politically powerful conservative backlashes against a more apologetic stance, however, did not prevent
the consolidation of a new official historical narrative in the German or Austrian cases, even though (as in Japan), their governments were dominated by
conservative parties.49
Japan failed to go further for a variety of reasons. One important factor was
the fractured nature of the Japanese political system and the inability of political elites to stymie initiatives that could not muster a consensus. As a result,
changes to the official historical narrative tended to be made in a haphazard
fashion. Japanese prime ministers such as Murayama and Obuchi might offer
48
49
For a comparison of the Japanese reaction to the two visits, see Wakaiyama Yoshibumi, The
Postwar Conservative View of Asia (Tokyo: LTCB Library Foundation, 1998), pp. 256–261;
and Michael Green, Japan’s Reluctant Realism, op. cit., pp. 96–98. Jiang Zemin’s aggressive
stance on the history issue contributed to the failure of the trip and can be explained in part as
the product of the need to reach out to the military in the context of Chinese succession politics
at the time. See Caroline Rose, “The Yasukuni Shrine Problem in Sino-Japanese Relations,”
in John Breen, ed., Yasukuni, the War Dead and the Struggle for Japan’s Past (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 37.
On this point, the analysis here disagrees fundamentally with the position taken by Jennifer
Lind, “Perils of Apology,” op. cit.
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
191
apologies, only to have their impact undercut almost immediately by contradictory statements offered by senior conservative politicians. Progressive scholars
might produce textbooks that covered Japanese misdeeds, but conservative
scholars could counter mobilize and produce revisionist texts that attracted
far more attention. In some areas, such as compensation and commemoration,
there was no movement at all.
In addition to these domestic political factors, however, international political variables played a role as well. Unlike Germany and Austria, Japan received
relatively little positive reinforcement from its neighbors for its efforts at reconciliation. Even in the case of South Korea, the overall Korean response was
relatively muted, and there were no grand gestures of reconciliation comparable to Kohl and Mitterand’s walk through Verdun (or earlier, de Gaulle
and Adenauer’s meeting at the Cathedral in Rheims). In the case of China,
there was even less response. To understand the reasons why Japanese efforts
evoked such tepid reactions, and why Asia – in contrast to Europe – would
soon become mired in controversy over history, we need to explore how the
Japanese official historical narrative intersected with the politics of history in
its two closest and most important neighbors, South Korea and China.
South Korea: History, Democracy, and the Endurance of Enmity
In many respects, South Korea and Japan should be natural partners and
allies.50 They face common security threats in the form of a belligerent North
Korea and a rapidly growing and unpredictable Communist China. They rely
heavily on a common ally – the United States – for their security, especially
in terms of nuclear deterrence as well as for the defense of their vital sea
lines of communication. The Korean and Japanese economies are intimately
tied together on multiple levels (Japan regularly ranks as Korea’s second most
important trading partner, and Korea is Japan’s third largest). Both nations
have been among the prime beneficiaries of the global free-trade regime,
and both have broadly similar interests in supporting open world markets.
Finally, the two countries share many deep social, cultural, and historical links.
Japanese is – along with English and Chinese- the language that most young
Korean college students choose to study. Korean singers and television stars are
immensely popular in Japan, and Japanese authors such as Haruki Murakami
are best sellers in Korea. The cultural impact of Korea on Japan is widely
acknowledged. Even that most quintessential of Japanese institutions – the
Imperial household – can trace its roots to the Korean peninsula.51 However,
50
51
Numerous authors and commentators have emphasized the anomalous character of KoreanJapanese relations. The author is especially indebted to early conversations that he had on this
point with General (then Colonel) Noboru Yamaguchi of the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF)
and Professor Chung-In Moon of Seoul University.
In December 2001, Emperor Akihito stunned many when, during a public conference marking
his sixty-eighth birthday, he referred to the Korean connections of the Imperial household.
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War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
despite the many factors that tie the two nations together and appear to favor
cooperation between them, the best Korea and Japan have been able to achieve
over most of the post-1945 period is a precarious partnership – one that is
constantly challenged and undermined by an enduring deep-seated, emotional
enmity.
The most obvious source of this enmity is the memory of Japan’s fortyyear52 colonial domination of the Korean peninsula, an era marked by numerous atrocities and brutal suppressions. Of course, it can be argued that Japan
contributed greatly to the economic and social development of Korea53 and
that many Koreans benefited from Imperial rule; however, these facts do little
to mitigate the terrible suffering of millions of other Koreans who were tortured and killed as rebels, conscripted as soldiers or slave laborers, or found
themselves the target of subtle and not so subtle forms of discrimination on an
everyday basis.
Beyond the physical and emotional suffering inflicted on Koreans on an individual basis, there was the psychic anguish inflicted by Japan’s efforts to impose
its culture on the Korean nation – including such measures as the forced adoption of Japanese names and restrictions on the use of the Korean language – to
assimilate Koreans as the “children of the Emperor.” Whereas many Koreans
adjusted themselves to Imperial rule and were successfully assimilated as citizens of the Empire, others clung fiercely to their own Korean identity. In this
sense, modern Korean nationalism was founded in opposition to Japanese rule,
and the first expression of Korean nationalism on a mass basis – the March
1st Movement of 1919, when hundreds of thousands of protestors took to the
streets in Korea demanding better treatment and independence – was colored
by powerful anti-Japanese sentiments.
The anti-Japanese character of Korean nationalism was reinforced in the
postindependence period by a variety of factors. As in Austria after 1945, the
active repudiation of the occupier’s culture and identity became a paramount
task in the newly founded Korean Republic in 1945. The very fact that Japan
had successfully assimilated many Koreans during the colonial period made it
all the more important for Korean nationalists that every last vestige of the old
Imperial identity be extirpated. Synghman Rhee, the first post-1945 president
of the new Korean Republic, was particularly outspoken in his anti-Japanese
views, stating repeatedly that the promotion of Korean ethnic national identity
52
53
Dating from Japan’s final consolidation of control over the peninsula following the RussoJapanese War of 1904–1905. Japan had been ruthlessly expanding its influence in Korea for
decades well before then.
This is an issue that has been much debated in recent decades both inside and outside of
Korea. For an overview of the Korean debate, see Yonson An, “The Colonial Past in PostColonial Korea: Colonialism, Modernity and Gender,” in Steffi Richter, ed., Contested Views
of a Common Past: Revisions of History in Contemporary East Asia (Frankfurt/New York:
Campus Verlag, 2008). For an American perspective, see Atuhl Kohli. For a critique, see
Stepehen Haggard, Chung-In Moon, and David Kang, “Japanese Colonialism and Korean
Development: A Critique,” World Development 25:6 (June 1997), pp. 867–881.
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
193
and the opposition to Japan, together with anti-Communism, were the two
main ideological pillars of his regime.54
These already powerful anti-nationalist sentiments were exacerbated greatly
by what has been described as the “original sin” of South Korean politics, the
uncomfortable fact that most of the postindependence political and economic
elites had enjoyed privileged positions under colonial rule.55 Much as in the
other countries we have examined, there existed considerable popular anger
against collaborators in the immediate postwar period. At the same time, the
new government was in desperate need of skilled and capable people who could
help restore order and restart the economy. Inevitably, the requisite human
resources could be found only among the ranks of those who had supported
the old regime. This tendency of turning to the old elites was reinforced by
the United States Military Government in Korea (USAMIGIK), which was
concerned with containing the influence of pro-Communist forces – fears that
were reinforced as the Communists solidified their control over the Soviet
controlled northern part of the country.
As a result, although many of the leading political figures in Korean politics
after 1945 – including Synghman Rhee – had been in exile during the colonial
period, on a day-to-day level, Korea continued to be run by many of the same
people who had run the country under Japanese rule and who now had to
demonstrate their distance from Japan. In particular, the South Korean military
and police forces, the two most powerful institutions in post-1945 Korea, were
frequently led by officers, judges, and officials who had willingly served the
Japanese colonial authorities and had often worked against and even persecuted
the pro-independence forces whose cause they now espoused.56 While the new
Korean government made some token efforts to cleanse the collaborators from
public life, its efforts were, on the whole, rather feeble. In the end, only a
handful of people were prosecuted or removed from office.57
To make matters worse, the Communist regime in Pyongyang – with its roots
in the anti-Japanese guerilla movement operating in Northern Korea and China
before 1945 – claimed that it represented the true forces of nationalist liberation
in Korea, whereas the government in Seoul was the pawn of Imperialist forces.
In light of the collaborationist past of many leading South Koreans, this claim
54
55
56
57
On Rhee’s use of ethnic nationalism and his appeal to anti-Japanese and anti-Communist
sentiments, see Gi-Wook Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2006), pp. 97–103.
See Koen de Ceuster, “The Nation Exorcised: the Historiography of Collaboration in South
Korea,” Korean Studies 25:2 (June 2001), p. 27. See also Chung Youn-tae, “Refracted Modernity and the Issue of Pro-Japan Collaboration in Korea,” available at http://www.ekoreajournal.
ent/upload/html 20030820.org/html4231 (accessed December 15, 2009).
For a detailed study of the social and political background of the South Korean Regime, Bruce
Cummings, Origins of the Korean War Volume 2 The Raging of the Cataract, 1947–1950
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), especially chapters 6, 7, and 8.
Only thirty-eight former collaborators were ultimately referred to court for trial. Only twelve
were found guilty and sentenced, and of these, five ultimately had their sentences suspended.
See De Ceuster, “The Nation Exorcised,” op. cit., p. 213.
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War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
had a certain degree of plausibility.58 As a result, those South Korean politicians
who vociferously pursued colonial era collaborators ran the risk of appearing
to undermine national unity and supporting the North.59
The international circumstances of the early cold war period served to further dampen any incentives that might have existed for cooperation between
Seoul and Tokyo. For both nations, the United States was by far their most
important economic and political partner at the time. There was, thus, no
compelling reason for either side to pursue reconciliation, unlike in Europe
where France and Germany were both countries compelled to find a modus
vivendi for economic and geostrategic reasons.60 If anything, the reverse was
true in East Asia. Japanese leaders, beginning with Yoshida Shigeru, feared that
moving closer to South Korea could drag Japan into a military confrontation
on the Korean peninsula, an outcome that went very much against Yoshida’s
preferred strategy to focus on Japan’s economic reconstruction while relying
on the United States to take care of external security relations.61 In addition,
conservative Japanese viewed the country’s sizable resident Korean population
as a latent security threat (Yoshida famously referred to the resident Koreans
as “ants within the stomach of the lion,” with the implication that they could
devour Japan from within), and Japanese government policy encouraged their
repatriation to the peninsula.62 For its part, the Korean government saw the
United States as its chief patron and protector. Any benefits that might have
come from deepening ties with Japan were outweighed by the potential loss of
legitimacy that would result if the Korean public perceived its government as
caving in to the hated former colonial oppressor.63
58
59
60
61
62
63
Hahm Chaibong and Kim Seog-gun, “Remembering Japan and North Korea,” in Gerrit W.
Gong, Memory and History in East and South East Asia. Issues of Identity and International
Relations (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2001), pp. 106–108.
De Ceuster, “The Nation Exorcised,” op. cit., pp. 212–213.
As has been argued by Sung-Hwa Cheong, The Politics of Anti-Japanese Resentment in Korea:
Japanese-South Korean Relations under American Occupation, 1945–1952 (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1991). A similar dynamic may have been at work in Turkish-Greek relations.
See Ronald Krebs, “Perverse Institutionalism: NATO and Greco-Turkish Conflict,” International Organization 53:2 (Spring 1999), pp. 343–377.
Ōtake Hideo, Saigumbi to Nashionarizumu, op. cit.
By the end of World War II, nearly 2.5 million Koreans resided in Japan, about half of whom had
been forcibly recruited as laborers during the war. After liberation, many Korean residents gravitated toward radical leftist groups who emerged with the collapse of the internal controls created
by the Imperial Japanese state. Others turned to criminal activities, often taking advantage of
the special protections that initially were afforded them by the American occupation. It is, thus,
unsurprising that many Japanese viewed the Koreans as a security threat in the early postwar
period, a position that the United States was eventually won around to when, after the outbreak
of the Korean War, the American authorities allowed the Yoshida government to strip the Koreans of their Japanese citizenship. For more on the status of Koreans in Japan during this period,
see Michael Weiner, Race and Migration in Imperial japan (New York: Routledge, 1994). On
the impact of Japanese anti-Korean sentiments on Republic of Korea (ROK)-Japan relations, the
author is indebted in particular to the insights of John Swenson-Wright of Oxford University.
The United States sought quietly to overcome the enmity between its chief Asian rivals but
eschewed direct forms of intervention. There were strong anti-American feelings in both countries at the time, and the United States had good reason to fear that if it sought to mediate
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
195
This combination of a domestically driven anti-Japanese nationalism in
Korea and anti-Korean chauvinism in Japan, together with permissive international political circumstances, created a witches brew of mutual recrimination
and acrimony between the two countries in the 1940s and 1950s. Behind the
scenes, however, ties between Korean and Japanese elites were often quite deep
and mutually beneficial. American intelligence reports from the late 1950s, for
instance, indicated that the Korean conservative party received a large proportion of its political funding from fellow anti-Communists in the LDP, and
many Japanese and Korean businessmen continued to work together.64 The
general atmosphere, however, was poisonous, and on an official level the two
governments adopted sharply confrontational stances vis-à-vis one another. As
described in Chapter 4, in the 1950s efforts to normalize diplomatic ties broke
down repeatedly as a result of comments by Japanese negotiators indicating
a blatantly unrepentant view of Japan’s colonial domination of Korea and a
complete unwillingness to offer any form of apology or compensation for its
past actions.
Tensions mounted over other issues as well. Of particular significance in this
regard was the territorial dispute over the Dokdo/Takeshima islands located
in the Sea of Japan (or East Sea, as the Koreans today prefer to call it). The
islands – consisting of a few uninhabited outcroppings of rock – had been
incorporated into Japan in 1905 in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese war.
After Japan’s defeat in 1945, the U.S. occupation authorities had forbidden
Japanese vessels from approaching within 12 kilometers of the islands as a part
of the general limitations it imposed on Japanese fishing and navigation at the
time. In 1949, as the U.S. occupation began to loosen these restrictions, the
Rhee government made a great show of pressing Korea’s claims to the islands
in response to nationalist sentiment expressed in the Korean press.65
In 1953 and 1954 tensions between Tokyo and Seoul escalated to the point
where armed clashes broke out between the Japanese coast guard and Korean
forces that had been stationed on the island. Fishermen from both sides were
arrested and imprisoned, and firefights broke out in which several people were
killed. In 1954, the two sides de-escalated the conflict. An exchange of prisoners
was arranged, and Japan tacitly accepted Seoul’s de facto control over the
islands. The Japanese government, however, did not abandon its claims, and
64
65
between Seoul and Tokyo, opponents of the alliances would accuse it of favoring the other side,
and instead of achieving Japanese-Korean reconciliation, it would wind up fomenting antiAmerican feelings. See Mark Mobius, “The Japan-Korea Normalization Process and Korean
Anti-Americanism,” Asian Survey 6:4 (April 1966), pp, 241–248.
Bruce Cummings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: W.W. Norton,
1998); and John Wlefield, An Empire in Eclipse: Japan in the Postwar American Alliance
(London and New York: The Athlone Press, 1988).
Sung-Hwa Cheong, The Politics of Anti-Japanese Sentiment in Korea: Japanese-South Korean
Relations under American Occupation (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991) p. 138; Victor
Cha, “Hypotheses on History and Hate in Asia: Japan and the Korean Peninsula,” in Yoichi
Funabashi, ed., Reconciliation in the Asia-Pacific (Washington, DC: Institute of Peace Press,
2003), p. 50.
196
War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
the islands remained a focus of nationalist passions that would periodically
flare up to trouble bilateral relations.66 Although economic interests may have
played a role in the conflict, nationalist sentiments appeared to have been the
ultimate driving force (codfish and squid alone are not usually considered an
adequate reason for major powers to engage in a military confrontation).
In the 1960s, the authoritarian Park Chung Hee government overrode
domestic anti-Japanese sentiment to place Japanese-Korean relations on a more
pragmatic footing. It did so in the face of intense domestic opposition – antigovernment riots rocked Korean cities, and Park was forced to deploy four divisions
to Seoul to restore order. When the treaty normalizing diplomatic relations
between the two countries was presented to the Korean National Assembly for
ratification, the entire opposition walked out in protest. In the end, the treaty
had to be rammed through by the ruling party in a secret session.67 Although
the vague apology offered by Japanese Foreign Minister Shiina Etsusaburō was
favorably received at the time, the Korean opposition parties were sharply critical of the treaty’s failure to pay direct reparations to both Korea and to Korean
individuals who had suffered under colonial rule.68
In many respects, the 1965 Normalization Treaty represented a considerable
step forward in Korean-Japanese relations. It opened the door for intensified
Japanese-Korean economic ties and helped to set the stage for Korea’s spectacular leap into steel and ship building in the 1970s and 1980s. On a more
subtle level, however, the treaty also came at a substantial cost, a cost that
would continue to be paid long after the controversy of 1965 had died down
and been forgotten. By compromising on the history issue, the Korean government was widely perceived to have pursued state interests at the expense
of the nation’s honor and the interests of the many hundreds of thousands of
ordinary Koreans who had been victimized under colonial rule. This willingness to disregard the interests of the people created a linkage in the popular
mind between authoritarianism and the neglect of historical justice issues. That
the politically dominant South Korean elites – beginning with Park Chung Hee
himself – had come to the fore under Japanese rule and had now pushed this
treaty through forcibly made this state of affairs all the more appalling.
The Park government’s willingness to compromise with Japan on the history issue, thus, inadvertently helped to promote a critical historiography that
saw the contemporary Korean authoritarianism as the product of a “colonial modernity” that had emerged under Japanese rule and that now warped
the development of Korea as a nation after the Japanese had left. From this
critical perspective, the same elite sectors of society that had benefited under
Japanese rule had been allowed – with American compliance – to perpetuate an
oppressive form of government that achieved prosperity through the ruthless
exploitation of the people (Minjung) and that could maintain its control only
66
67
68
Alexis Dudden, Troubled Apologies, op. cit., pp. 79–83.
Jennifer Lind, Sorry States, op. cit., p. 48.
Wakamiya, The Postwar Conservative Views of Asia, op. cit., p. 193.
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
197
through the ruthless exercise of state power. Many pro-democracy advocates
consequently came to believe that true democracy could only be achieved by
tackling this history of political and social injustice stretching all the way back
to the colonial era.69
The identification of the authoritarian state with pro-Japanese sentiment
was further reinforced by the way in which the two governments tried to
respond to the 1982 outcry over proposed revisionist changes to Japanese
school textbooks justifying Japan’s colonial rule over Korea and the invasion
of China. For Nakasone – as for the government of Ronald Reagan, which also
warmly embraced President Chun Doo Hwan despite his deplorable human
rights record – the Republic of Korea was a critical ally at a time when tensions
with the Soviet Union were on the rise. It was, therefore, of considerable
strategic importance that ties be restored. For South Korea as well, Japan was
a vitally important partner, and the Chun government was looking to Tokyo to
fund its ambitious industrial modernization plans. Thus, both sides had strong
reasons to get the history issue back under control, and they proceeded to
do so.
In 1983, Nakasone visited Seoul bringing $4 billion worth of aid as well
as a raft of new initiatives on economic and political cooperation. In 1984,
Chun visited Tokyo, where he was received with great pomp and met with the
Japanese emperor, who offered an apology based on the 1965 Shiina apology.
The new policy of contrition was further reinforced by Nakasone at a state
banquet, where he said “ . . . Japan caused great suffering to your country
and your people during a certain period during this century. I would like to
announce that the Japanese government and people express deep regret for the
wrongs done to you and are determined to strictly caution themselves against
repeating them in the future.”70
As in 1965, the initial Korean public response to Nakasone’s comments
appeared positive. Opinion polls and newspaper editorials were strongly positive. However, as in 1965, it appeared to many in Korea that a brutal authoritarian Korean regime that only a few years earlier – in 1980 – had massacred
hundreds of protestors in the city of Kwanju and routinely arrested and tortured
students, labor leaders, and human rights activists to maintain its grip on power
had once again allowed Japan to avoid a full accounting for its past misdeeds.
The Japanese government had apologized, but look at who they apologized to!
Moreover, the nature of the wrongs committed were not specified by Japan,
nor did it offer any explicit compensation made for those wrongs, neither to
the Korean nation as the whole (once again, Japan offered only foreign aid) nor
to any of the individual Koreans who had been victimized. And once again,
69
70
Koen de Ceuster, “The Nation Exorcised: Historiography of Collaboration in South Korea,”
Korean Studies 25:2 (2002), pp. 207–242; and Kenneth M. Wells, South Korea’s Minjung
Movement: The Culture and Politics of Dissidence (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1995).
Wakamiya, The Postwar Conservative View of Asia, op. cit., pp. 198–199, 243–246. Quote on
p. 246.
198
War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
the Korean government had cynically tolerated this obvious injustice on the
grounds of international security and political and economic expedience.71
After Korea began to democratize in the late 1980s, widespread popular
discontent with how the question of historical justice had been handled began
to bubble up. Much as the Historical Determinist school of thought would lead
us to expect, once the political opportunity structure had shifted, suppressed
societal level memory reemerged and reshaped the parameters within which the
Korean official historical narrative was made. Various civil society groups that
had helped drive the democratization process took up the issue of historical
justice and pressed actively for confronting the crimes of the past and the
compensation of victims. The most prominent of these were various groups
who represented the long neglected comfort women. By 1990, the Korean
Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan began to
hold regular Wednesday Demonstrations in front of the Japanese Embassy in
Seoul, and the cause of the comfort women began to draw worldwide attention,
including in Japan, where, as pointed out earlier, various Japanese civil society
activists helped the comfort women to file claims in Japanese courts.72 Other
groups, such as the Institute for Research on Collaborationist Activities, began
to collect and disseminate information on the extent of collaboration during
the colonial period as well as the degree to which former collaborationists
continued to wield influence in contemporary Korea.73
This new focus on coming to terms with the colonial past was part of a larger
trend of dealing with a whole gamut of issues, including the many crimes and
atrocities that had occurred during the Korean War and the long period of
rule by authoritarian governments. Although from an outsiders’ point of view,
the atrocities that occurred under Japanese rule and the crimes committed
by post-1945 Korean governments might appear separate from the “colonial
modernity” perspective, they were part and parcel of a single complex of unresolved issues. In this sense, the issue of seeking justice for the crimes of the
colonial era had been reinforced and revalorized by the question of how to
handle the misdeeds of the authoritarian era.
However, the linkage between colonial era atrocities and the crimes of the
authoritarian past also made both issues more difficult to manage. When the
Kim Young Sam government – the first genuinely democratic government to
be elected in South Korea – came to power in 1992, it did so with the cooperation of conservatives led by Kim Jong Pil, former head of the Korean CIA
(KCIA) and one of the chief pillars of the old authoritarian state. At the same
71
72
73
Yangmo Ku, “International Reconciliation in the Postwar Era, 1945–2005: A Comparison of
Japan-ROK and Franco-German Relations,” Asian Perspective 32:3 (2008), p. 24.
See George Hicks, The Comfort Women, op. cit., especially p. 173 ff; and Yangmo Ku, “International Reconciliation in the Postwar Era,” p. 29, available at hptt://www.womenandwar.net/
menu 02.php.
Koen De Ceuster, “When History Matters: Reconstructing South Korea’s National Memory in
the Age of Democracy,” in Steffi Richter, ed., Contested Views of a Common Past: Revisions of
History in Contemporary East Asia (Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 2008), pp. 86–87.
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
199
time, the security climate on the Korean peninsula worsened as well. War was
only narrowly averted during the first North Korean nuclear weapons crisis
of 1992–1993, and throughout the 1990s, Pyongyang continued to build up
its military forces, despite occasional diplomatic lulls when the political temperatures seemed to drop from subzero to merely freezing. Not surprisingly,
the new government showed little enthusiasm for pursuing historical justice
issues. Although Kim Young Sam had been a leading critic of the military
Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo governments and had fought and suffered
for decades to promote democracy, once in office he called for national reconciliation and rejected a comprehensive purging or prosecuting of members of
previous regimes. Investigations were launched of those individuals responsible
for some of the most notorious incidents of the past – most importantly the
Kwanju massacre of 1980. Chun Doo Hwan and his successor, Roh Tae Woo,
were eventually prosecuted and found guilty for their roles in the massacre and
the subversion of democracy. Investigations were suspended, however, for fear
of “undermining the legal foundation of the state,” and Chun and Roh were
issued presidential pardons.74
Other efforts were made to recognize and correct the wrongs that had been
committed during the era of authoritarian rule. So, for example, the police
records of the approximately 40,000 people who had been arrested during the
1980 Kwanju uprising were expunged. Likewise, the Kim Young Sam government rather reluctantly took up the cause of the comfort women. It rejected as
inadequate the Japanese government-sponsored attempts to compensate them
through the Asian Women’s Fund and proceeded to set up an alternative compensation scheme.75
The question of historical justice was thus still very much alive in 1998 when
Kim Young Sam was succeeded by his archrival Kim Dae Jung. Similar to Kim
Young Sam, Kim Dae Jung had been a staunch critic of the authoritarian Park
Chung Hee, Chun Doo Hwan, and Roh Tae Woo governments, and even more
than Kim Young Sam, he had suffered for his opposition. In 1972, Kim Dae
Jung had even been kidnapped and almost executed by KCIA agents while he
had been in exile in Tokyo. He thus was able to speak with considerable moral
authority on issues of historical justice. Moreover, as a native of Jeolla (Cholla
province) where the Kwanju massacre had taken place, Kim Dae Jung was
viewed favorably by some of the most outspoken advocates of pursuing the
crimes of the previous governments. Similar to his predecessor, however, Kim
Dae Jung was a strong advocate of reconciliation and “restorative justice” – that
is, of trying to rehabilitate the victims of past injustices rather than punishing
74
75
For a brief overview, see Koen De Ceuster, “When History Matters: Reconstructing South
Korea’s National Memory in the Age of Democracy,” in Steffi Richter, ed., Contested Views
of a Common Past: Revisions of History in Contemporary East Asia (Frankfurt/New York:
Campus Verlag, 2008), especially pp. 82–84.
For a factual and useful overview of the issue at the time of Abe’s comments, see Larry Niksch,
Japanese Military’s “Comfort Women” System, Congressional Research Service memorandum,
April 3, 2007, especially p. 15.
War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
200
table 5.1. Korean Views of Japan
Year
1973 1978 1984 1988 1990 1995 1997 1999 2000 2001 2005
Dislike 58.6
Like
12.9
69.9
7.6
38.9
22.6
50.6
13.6
66
5.4
68.9
5.5
65
8
42.6
9.6
42.2
17.1
56.6
12.1
63
8
Source: Jung Ang Daily (1973, 1978); Dong-A Daily (1984–2005) cited in Yangmo Ku, “International Reconciliation in the Postwar Era,” op. cit., p. 25.
the perpetrators to help society heal the wounds of the past. He extended this
philosophy to South Korea’s relations with its neighbors, seeking to engage
North Korea economically and politically (the so-called Sunshine policy), as
well as to Japan.76
It was against this background that Kim Dae Jung met with Japanese Prime
Minister Keizō Obuchi in the summer of 1998. The symbolic success of the
visit was made possible not only by the remarkably frank and forthright nature
of Obuchi’s apology for Japan’s colonial oppression of Korea – presented both
orally and in writing – but also by Kim Dae Jung’s acceptance of that apology,
an acceptance made possible by Kim’s stature as a defender of human rights and
as a democratically elected leader of the Korean nation. The visit was followed
by a marked improvement in the character of Korean-Japanese relations after
the visit. The ideologically sensitive issue of Dokdo/Takeshima was put aside to
allow the two sides to renegotiate fishing rights in the disputed area between the
two nations. The decades old South Korean ban on Japanese cultural products
such as Japanese language films and traditional Japanese art forms such as
Kabuki and Bunraku was lifted.77 In addition, in 2002 the two countries were
able to jointly host the World Cup soccer tournament and cheer each other’s
teams. Public opinion data showed a marked improvement in each country’s
perception of the other (see Tables 5.1 and 5.2). A new era in Korean-Japanese
relations seemed to be dawning.
The shadow of history, however, had not been completely dispelled and continued to hover over the relations between the two countries. The question of
compensation for the victims of Japanese past injustices remained unresolved,
and the growing tide of revisionist views in parts of Japan’s political system
and civil society was viewed with alarm in Korea. In addition, both Japan’s
apology and South Korea’s acceptance of that apology were not based purely
on good will and broad philosophical principles. Japan had been prompted to
pursue the issue in part because of growing concerns over the military threat
emanating from North Korea, which had been exacerbated by North Korea’s
76
77
Kim Young Sam, in contrast, harbored a deep personal animosity towars Pyongyang that was
rooted, it is believed, in the fact that his mother had been killed by North Korean commandos.
In many ways, the ban had long been a sham, circumvented by a thriving black market for such
products. Nonetheless, symbolically it had been of some significance given post-1945 Korea’s
historical desire to assert its national identity after Japan’s efforts at cultural assimilation during
the colonial era.
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
201
table 5.2. Japanese Views of Korea
Year
1978 1985 1989 1993 1996 1999 2001 2003 2004 2005
Feel No intimacy 45.2
with Korea
Feel Intimacy
40.1
45.2
52.2
51.8
60.6
46.9
45.5
41.0
39.2
44.3
45.2
40.7
43.4
35.8
48.3
50.3
55.0
56.7
51.1
Source: Japanese Cabinet Office, Gaikō ni Kan suru Yoronchōsa December 26, 2005, http://www8
.cao.go.jp/survey/h17/h17-gaikou/images/z07.gif.
test of a new generation of ballistic missiles – the Taepodong – earlier in 1998.
Both Japan and the Republic of Korea were coming under increased pressure
from the United States to improve trilateral coordination on the North Korean
issue, and the history issue was viewed as a serious impediment in this regard.
Moreover, the Asian Financial crisis of 1997–1998 had plunged South Korea
into the most serious financial and economic crisis in decades. It desperately
needed Japanese assistance in renegotiating its external debts and in channeling billions of dollars to struggling Korean firms and banks.78 In the broader
public, the suspicion lingered on that the Korean government had once again –
as it had in 1965 under Park Chung Hee and again in 1984 under Chun Doo
Hwan – been willing to forsake honor and justice for the sake of immediate
political advantages.
In addition, the broader issue of colonial era collaboration as well as other
historical justice issues not only continued but expanded during the Kim Dae
Jung era. Increased evidence of authoritarian era atrocities was uncovered, and
demands for the recognition of the suffering of victims of military and Synghman Rhee governments continued to escalate. These concerns with historical
justice in general ensured that continued public attention was paid to the issue
of Japanese wartime collaboration and created conditions in which the question
of compensation for colonial atrocities could easily be revived.
To sum up, Korean and Japanese relations have long labored under the burden of history. During the early cold war period, that animosity based on the
bitter memories of ordinary Koreans on a societal level was reinforced by the
need of the newly independent Korean state to foster a strong sense of Korean
national identity. Instrumental calculations of economic and strategic interest
allowed the two sides to work out a practical modus vivendi. However, the
two nations’ alignment was constantly constrained – and often strained – by
antagonism. In time, some of the barriers to cooperation wore off. Nonetheless,
anti-Japanese sentiments became firmly woven into the Korean political culture. Initially encouraged by the Korean state, these sentiments were taken up
by antistate critics in a new way that identified Korean authoritarianism with
78
For more on the background to the 1998 summit written by a close advisor to the Kim Dae
Jung government, see Chung-in Moon and Seung-won Suh, “Security, Economy and Identity
Politics: Japan-South Korean Relations under the Kim-Dae Jung Government,” Korea Observer
36:4 (Winter 2005), pp. 564–573.
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War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
the legacy of Japanese colonialism. As a result, even when the international
and domestic political circumstances of Korea were dramatically altered by the
end of the cold war and even as the proportion of the Korean population that
had direct experiences of Japanese oppression dwindled, anti-Japanese sentiments remained a potent force in Korean politics. These sentiments had become
embedded in a cultural discourse that was driven by more than calculations
of material and political interest and were themselves a constitutive element in
how Korean leaders understood those interests.
Democratic governments in the 1990s, much like their authoritarian predecessors, continued to find it in their interest to work with Japan, and they
worked to overcome the cultural-ideological obstacles to doing so. Under Kim
Dae Jung, significant progress was made in improving the character of relations
between the two countries. Certain parallels can be seen here to the experience
of German-Polish and German-Czech relations. Although already in the Communist period the German, Polish, and Czech governments agreed to put the
past behind them in order to work together on issues of common interest
(economic development and relieving the tensions of the cold war), not until
democratization after the cold war did genuine changes in public opinion begin
to become possible.
The progress that had been made in Japan-Korean relations, however, was
far more fragile than was commonly realized – especially in Tokyo, where it
was the common view that the issues of the past had finally been consigned
to the past.79 The underlying historically and culturally embedded roots of
animosity remained, and in certain respects even intensified. As we saw earlier,
this was true in the German-Polish context as well. However, in the European
case the common political framework of the European Union helped dampen
tensions by providing powerful material incentives for continued cooperation
and creating an avenue in which other parties – France, Holland, Luxembourg,
and so forth – were able to exert political leverage. In effect, the European Union
helped resocialize both Germany and Poland, helping smooth over tensions
over historical issues when they emerged. In the Asian context, there was no
comparable mitigating force. As a result, conflict over history between Tokyo
and Seoul could be easily reignited, and soon would be.
China: Between Pragmatic Forgiveness and Useful Resentment
Like Korea, China’s relationship with Japan is a long and tortured one. Before
the 1890s, Japan occupied a relatively peripheral position in the Chinese view
of the world and tended to be seen as a sometimes hostile, semicivilized kingdom that had to be handled with caution but, on the whole, did not represent a
79
The author had the opportunity to speak to many well-placed Japanese officials and foreign
policy intellectuals in Tokyo between 1998 and 2000, shortly after the successful Kim-Obuchi
summit. At the time, the near unanimous view was that the history issue between South Korea
and Japan had been resolved.
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
203
serious political or cultural rival. Japan’s successful modernization and industrialization in the second half of the nineteenth century, however, allowed it to
upend what the Chinese had come to view as the natural Sino-Centric order in
Asia.80
The Japanese victory over the Qing dynasty in the Sino-Japanese War of
1894–1895 came as a great shock to the Chinese. Japan’s subsequent ruthless
and relentless expansion of its sphere of interest at China’s expense – first on
the Korean peninsula and then in China itself – represented a fundamental
challenge to China’s sense of pride and power. The crushing burden of the
reparations Japan imposed on China after 1895 was a major factor behind
the collapse of the Qing dynasty and ushered in a period of weakness and
internal disunity that lasted for nearly half a century. In addition, when in
the aftermath of the first Sino-Japanese War Japan separated Taiwan from
the Chinese mainland, a problem was created that would endure well into the
twenty-first century.
Although Japan was hardly the first Imperial power to impose its will on
China – that distinction goes to Great Britain, which began China’s “century of
humiliation” with the Opium Wars of 1839–1842 – it was arguably the most
dangerous and rapacious. Whereas other European powers chipped away at
Chinese sovereignty (imposing unequal treaties and creating special zones such
as the International Settlement in Shanghai), Japan sought wholesale control
over the Chinese government, first through its “twenty one demands” in 1915
and subsequently by seizing direct control over huge swathes of Chinese territory – Manchuria in 1931 and much of coastal China following the outbreak
of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. The fact that the Japanese were
fellow Asians – ones who historically had been viewed as China’s inferiors – if
anything, intensified Chinese feelings of humiliation.
Modern Chinese nationalism – like Korean nationalism – thus emerged
against the backdrop of Japanese Imperial expansionism and was profoundly
shaped by anti-Japanese sentiments. The first major expression of Chinese
national sentiment on a mass level – the May Fourth Movement of 1919 –
followed only a few weeks after the Korean March 1st Movement, and as its
Korean counterpart, was triggered by the Paris Peace Conference. Although
Republican China had joined the Western allies, at the conference the Chinese nationalist government was forced to transfer German interests in China,
including control over Shandong, to Japan. Thousands of students took to the
80
As any number of prominent historians have pointed out, this vision of a benign Sino-Centric
order was very much debatable. For long periods of time, China was in fact the dominant
power in the region, but it had also been frequently challenged, divided, and even conquered.
Moreover, when it did enjoy hegemonic status, it had frequently used force ruthlessly and
with great brutality to serve its interests. These historical realities, however, did not prevent
Chinese intellectuals and leaders from believing that their nation was the natural and benevolent
hegemon in the region. For a perspective on China’s position in the world, see Warren I. Cohen,
East Asia at the Center: Four Thousand Years of Engagement with the World (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2000).
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War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
streets in protest to what they viewed as a betrayal of the national interest. They
were soon joined by workers, peasants, and merchants who all had various,
separate grievances. A pattern – almost a cultural trope – was thus established
of criticizing the government for failing to stand up for the nation, defined in
this instance as challenging Japan. Anti-Japanese feelings were further intensified as the Chinese Nationalist government increasingly found itself at odds
with Japan, culminating in the immensely destructive and bloody Second SinoJapanese War of 1937–1945.81
Complicating matters further, the Sino-Japanese War was a three-sided
affair, pitting not only the Japanese and their Chinese puppet allies against
the Nationalists, but also the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek against their
Communist rivals led by Mao Zedong. Neither the Nationalists nor the Communists were very effective in warding off the Japanese Imperial forces. However, both during and the after the war, each side accused the other of cowardice and incompetence while claiming that it was they who had been the true
defenders of the Chinese nation.82
After 1945, Sino-Japanese relations thus faced a tremendous burden of
thickly layered resentment that had built up on the Chinese side over half
a century. Chinese national identity – the core of its political culture – contained a strong anti-Japanese element creating a strong incentive for political
elites to claim that they were opposed to Japan. This anti-Japanese resentment
was further reinforced by the memories of the tremendous human suffering
that had been inflicted on the Chinese people by the Japanese invasion. From
both a Historical Determinist and a Culturalist perspective, there was ample
reason to expect enmity. However, despite this dark legacy, over the next forty
years, issues of historical justice surprisingly did not have the kind of disruptive
impact that they had on the relations between Korea and Japan, although they
certainly did exert a powerful influence behind the scenes and occasionally
bubbled up on a number of occasions. A combination of historical, Chinese
domestic political and international political factors worked together to contain
the history issue for much of the cold war.
81
82
Zhu Jiangrong, “Japan’s Role in the Rise of Chinese Nationalism: History and Prospects,” in
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa and Kazuhiko Togo, East Asia’s Haunted Present, op. cit., pp. 180–189.
For the claim that Communists in fact had been more effective and the resulting legitimacy that
they enjoyed had been a major factor behind the CCP’s victory in the subsequent Chinese Civil
War, see Chalmers Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of
Revolutionary China, 1937–1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962). Whether,
in fact, the Communists really were more active in fighting against the Communists can be
disputed. As Arthur Waldron has pointed out, with only one major exception, most of the
battles pitting the Communists against the Japanese were small-scale affairs. The one exception,
the Hundred Regiments campaign, ended in military defeat and triggered a brutal Japanese
reprisal. To make matters worse, Mao had opposed taking on the Japanese before the Hundred
Regiments campaign, and after the defeat, ensured that no similar operations were undertaken
again. See Arthur Waldron, “China’s New Remembering of World War II: The Case of Zhang
Zizhong,” Modern Asian Studies 30:4 (1996), pp. 945–978.
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
205
First, unlike Korea, China had not been conquered by Japan. Chinese leaders, both Nationalist and Communist, therefore could plausibly claim to have
defeated Japan, at least in the end. Although there were undoubtedly many
who thirsted for further vengeance, the national honor had in some sense been
restored by victory. Moreover, while many hundreds of thousands of Chinese
had actively collaborated with the Japanese occupation, an independent Chinese government had never ceased to exist, and the cultural impact of Japan
on China, on the whole, had been relatively limited. Although there was an
anti-Japanese element woven into modern Chinese national identity, it was not
as central as in Korea. Although the material losses inflicted on China by Japan,
measured in terms of the number of people killed and cities destroyed, was far
greater than the losses imposed on Korea, the psychic wounds were less severe.
Consequently, both the Nationalist and Chinese Communist governments had
greater leeway to adopt a magnanimous stance on the past than was true of
the postcolonial regime in Korea.
Second, both the Communist Chinese and their Nationalist rivals were harsh
authoritarian regimes that could suppress any domestic political pressures for
vigorously pursuing historical justice issues. Korea as well was authoritarian,
but decidedly less so, with greater scope for freedom of speech and association
than was true of either the PRC or Taiwan. Although many Chinese harbored bitter memories of their suffering at the hands of the Japanese Imperial
Forces, they were in no position to express those views without the sanction of their government. This allowed the Chinese leadership to shape their
official historical narrative based on Instrumental factors – that is, calculations of interest. Although potentially there was some possible benefit to be
derived by elites from appealing to those sentiments on the ground level,
there were even stronger domestic and international political reasons not to
do so.
Domestically, because both the Nationalists and the Communists had not
been terribly effective in the fight against Japan, neither government was terribly
eager to dwell on a period that, if closely examined, might underline their
failures. If anything, they wanted to emphasize the positive contribution their
side had made to the victory over Japan while stressing the failure of the other.
Thus, on the mainland, Nanjing was primarily recalled as an example of the
failure of the Nationalists to defend the city, and the issue of the subsequent
civilian suffering was raised primarily to demonstrate the callous indifference
of foreign powers (especially Britain and the United States) to the plight of
the Chinese people.83 To make matters worse in the case of mainland China,
one of the chief military leaders of the resistance against Japan, Marshall Peng
Dehuai, also became one of the first senior Communist leaders purged by Mao
83
Mark Eykholt, “Aggression, Victimization and Chinese Historiography,” in Joshua A. Fogel,
The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2000), pp. 24–26.
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War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
in the late 1950s.84 The Communist government, thus, had a strong, additional
motive to avoid examining the anti-Japanese struggle too closely.
Internationally, both Taiwan and the PRC found themselves competing for
influence in Japan after the war. For both governments, the history issue was an
important instrument for gaining influence. Whereas the United States was the
dominant power in Asia at the time, both Beijing and Taipei were well aware
of Japan’s strategic military and economic potential and sought to court favor
with influential groups inside Japanese politics. Arguably, the Nationalists were
the first to do so. In his initial broadcast after the Japanese surrender on August
15, 1945, Chiang Kai Shek cited both the Bible and the Chinese sages in calling
on the Chinese people to forgo exacting revenge on the defeated Japanese. He
added that it was Japanese militarism and not the Japanese people who had
been the enemy of China and that indeed the people of Japan should even be
pitied for having been deceived by their leaders.85
In keeping with this policy of “repaying violence with virtue,” the Chinese
Nationalist government arranged for the orderly surrender and repatriation of
over 2 million Japanese soldiers and civilians. Moreover, Chiang Kai Shek’s
decision not to join the Allied occupation of Japan helped to legitimate Truman’s decision to turn down Moscow’s request for a Soviet zone of occupation
on the Japanese home islands. There were limits to the Nationalists’ compassion
for their defeated foes. For instance, the Nationalist government did try to punish several hundred Japanese war criminals. Moreover, Chiang pushed hard for
substantial reparations from Japan, only to be foiled by U.S. diplomatic pressure. Nonetheless, on balance, the Nationalist policy toward its former enemy
was quite generous in light of the savagery of the war.
Although any hopes that the Nationalists might have harbored to turn Japan
into a more active ally in the fight against Communism were disappointed, the
Nationalist government’s policy of leniency on the history issue was rewarded
in a number of ways. First, it helped ease the process of taking control of the
substantial portions of China that were still under Japanese control in August
1945.86 Second, it created an influential network of pro-Taiwanese supporters
on the right end of the Japanese political spectrum – especially in the Kishi
faction – who would provide political support to Taiwan.87 Finally, and most
importantly, by helping the Japanese conservatives, the Taiwanese helped to
84
85
86
87
Waldron, “China’s New Remembering,” op. cit.
An English language version of the text of Chiang’s speech can be found at http://www.ibiblio.
org/pha/policy/1945/450815c.html (accessed February 22, 2010).
On Japanese-Nationalist cooperation in the immediate wake of the war, see Ronald H. Spector,
In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia (New York:
Random House, 2007), pp. 38–42.
John Welfield, An Empire in Eclipse, op. cit., pp. 229; Michael Schaller, Altered States: The
United States and Japan since the Occupation (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997), pp. 77–79. In general, see Yoshihide Soeya, Nihon Gaikō to Chūgoku: 1968–
1972 (Tokyo: Keiō Tsūshin, 1995), especially pp. 115–116 on the formation of the Taiwan
lobby.
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
207
significantly bolster the containment of Communism in East Asia during the
early stages of the cold war.
In certain respects, the Chinese Communists were even more generous in
their stance toward Japan. Like the Nationalists, the Communists adopted a
historical narrative that blamed the “militarist clique” for the war and defined
both the Japanese and the Chinese peoples as victims of Imperialism. This
narrative dovetailed neatly with the Japanese peace movement’s efforts to rally
popular support against the alliance with the United States on the basis of
feelings of Japanese victimization.88 The effort to use history as an instrument
to influence Japanese domestic politics also lay behind Beijing’s lenient stance
toward the Japanese prisoners of war who had fallen into its hands, most
of whom it released unpunished in the 1950s.89 Moreover, it informed the
Chinese decision not to press for compensation or a more far-reaching apology
for Japanese actions after relations between the two countries began to be
normalized in 1972. As Zhou En Lai put it, both the Japanese and the Chinese
people had been victimized by the militarists, so how could victims demand
compensation from other victims?90
As was true for Taiwan, this lenient stance on history yielded significant
dividends for Beijing. Although the PRC was unable to lure Japan out of the
alliance with the United States – as it hoped to do in the 1950s and 1960s –
ultimately this proved to be in China’s interest. As the Sino-Soviet rift deepened in the 1960s, Beijing came to view the U.S.-Japanese alliance as a useful
counterbalance to the Soviet Union. In the meantime, its policies on historical
justice issues generated considerable goodwill in Japan, first on the left end of
the political spectrum and, after 1972, within the LDP as well – in particular
within the then dominant Tanaka faction. The Japanese public as well formed
quite favorable views of China, in part because of its supposedly generous
stance toward history. Survey data from the 1970s and 1980s showed remarkably positive views of China, with over 78 percent of respondents expressing
positive views of China in 1980. Although Japan did not directly pay any reparations to China, from 1978 on it provided $1 to $2 billion a year in foreign
aid for over twenty years. At a time when China remained a desperately poor
country with an underdeveloped infrastructure and limited foreign currency
reserves (China’s GDP was just $183 billion in 1980), this represented a highly
useful sum of money.
In short, for much of the cold war, international politics gave Beijing (and
Taipei) a strong motive not to pursue the question of historical justice. At the
same time, historical realities as well as the totalitarian nature of their regime
88
89
90
Orr, The Victim as Hero, op. cit.
Yinan He, The Search for Reconciliation, op. cit.
The Chinese Communists had initially taken a harder stance on both reparations and war criminals. At the time of the Treaty of San Francisco, Beijing had offered an estimate of 10 million
war deaths and property damages valued at $50 billion. See Rose, Sino-Japanese Relations,
op. cit., p. 42.
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War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
gave Chinese leaders – unlike their Korean counterparts – the capacity to be
magnanimous about the past. In the early 1980s, however, international and
domestic circumstances began to change in ways that would allow latent antiJapanese sentiments to come to the fore on the mainland (but not on Taiwan,
where Japan was viewed as a useful balance to China) and to make history a
more problematic issue in Sino-Japanese relations.
On the international level, China was becoming increasingly worried about
Japan’s growing economic and military might. These concerns were amplified
in the 1980s as Japan under Nakasone began to build up the Self Defense
Forces as part of a general strengthening of the alliance with the United States.
In this context, Nakasone’s tendencies toward historical revisionism – most
notably when he undertook his 1985 trip to Yasukuni – alarmed many Chinese observers and encouraged them to sound the alarm about a potential
remilitarization of Japan.
Moreover, the PRC’s victory in displacing Taiwan at the United Nations
and winning U.S. and Japanese recognition as the representative of the Chinese
nation greatly reduced its need to seek influence in Japan. At the same time,
hopes were raised that it might be possible to reunify Taiwan with the mainland in the relatively near future. As a result, in the early 1980s a marked shift
in Chinese historiography of the Sino-Japanese War can be observed. Whereas
previously the Nationalist side was disparaged for its incompetence and cowardice, in the 1980s, textbooks and museums on the mainland began to depict
the Nationalist side in more positive terms, as allies in the fight against the
Japanese invaders. Inadvertently, this more positive evaluation of the Nationalists implied a more negative one of Japan and helped to open the door for
paying greater attention to the long suppressed issue of Chinese civilian suffering at the hands of the Japanese.
These international developments were reinforced by changes in Chinese
domestic politics. The end of the Maoist period allowed a far-reaching reevaluation of Chinese history and a readiness to admit the failings of the past,
and of Maoism. Former enemies of Mao, such as Marshall Peng Dehuai, were
rehabilitated. As the lure of Maoist ideology faded, new emphasis was placed
on nationalism as the legitimating principle of the Chinese state. The struggle
against Japan became soon a central element in the new official narrative. In
1985, a museum was opened in Nanjing that had the figure “300,000” – the
official number of victims who are said to have died in the Japanese massacre –
inscribed on the front wall of the Museum.91 That same year, the Chinese Ministry of Education launched the Five Loves Education (love the motherland, the
people, work, science, and public property), which emphasized the history of
China as resisting successive waves of foreign invasions, the most recent of
which was the Japanese invasion of 1937–1945.92
91
92
Yinan He, Shadows of the Past, op. cit., p. 207.
Yinan He, ibid., chapter 7; Zheng Wang, “National Humiliation, History Education and the
Politics of Historical Memory: Patriotic Education Campaign in China,” International Studies
Quarterly 52 (2008), pp. 783–806; and Zhao Suisheng, “State Led Nationalism: The Patriotic
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
209
At the same time, the loosening of the Maoist era system of domestic political controls allowed for a wider expression of views inside Chinese society.
Although the PRC remained a harshly authoritarian system, and the instruments of totalitarian control remained firmly in place, a new atmosphere of
relatively open discussion across a broad range of issues – including history –
set in. In this more relaxed climate, a new generation emerged of what James
Reilly has termed “history activists,” a group of people intent on recovering
a past that had been suppressed during the Maoist period.93 The forgotten
history of civilian suffering during the war against Japan now became one of
their chief concerns. In many cases, these history activists were primarily concerned with history for its own sake. In other cases, however, they saw history –
and in particular the state’s failure to take up the cause of victims of Japanese
aggression – as a way of indirectly criticizing their own government. One still
could not challenge the rule of the CCP, but it was legitimate to criticize a
government who supported a generous stance on Japan for being insufficiently
patriotic – much in the tradition of the student protestors of the 1919 May
Fourth Movement.
Under these conditions, history, and in particular the history of the SinoJapanese War, became a political issue in a new way in China. During the
1980s Chinese leaders began to appeal to anti-Japanese sentiments as a way of
mobilizing political support or for attacking the legitimacy of their rivals. For
instance, Yinan He speculates that one of the reasons why the Chinese government took up the Japanese textbook issue in 1982 was that Deng Xiaoping
wanted to win the backing of conservative leaders like Chen Yun and General
Ye Jianying for his program of liberal economic reforms.94 At the same time,
failure to appear patriotic by being soft on Japan could become a significant
political liability. Hu Yaobang, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, highly regarded as one of Japan’s friends in senior Chinese political
leadership circles, was significantly weakened by protests that erupted in China
after Nakasone’s visit to the Yasukuni shrine in 1985, despite efforts by the
senior leadership to shield him.95 Whereas in the past instrumental calculations
of elite interest had led to the suppression of societally based anti-Japanese feeling, under the changed structure of discourse, elites found it increasingly in their
interest to take advantage of anti-Japanese sentiments, or at least to make sure
that they did not fall victim to them.
These trends, apparent already in the 1980s, deepened in the 1990s. The
emphasis on nationalism in Chinese education increased after the suppression
of pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen, and textbooks after 1989 expanded
93
94
95
Education Campaign in Post-Tiananmen China,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies
31:3 (1998), pp. 287–302.
2 See James Reilly, “China’s History Activists and Sino-Japanese Relations,” China: An International Journal 4:2 (2006), pp. 189–216.
Yinan He, The Search for Reconciliation, op. cit., pp. 212–214, 230–232.
Susan Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower: How China’s Internal Politics Could Derail its Peaceful
Rise (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 160–166; Yinan He, “The
Emerging Sino-Japanese Conflict,” op. cit., pp. 12–13.
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War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
their coverage of Japanese wartime atrocities, with little corresponding treatment of the positive aspects of Sino-Japanese relations.96 However, although
direct criticism of the Communist government became more difficult after
Tiananmen, Chinese civil society continued to develop and grow, taking on
new forms and dimensions with the advent of the Internet and the rapid growth
of the Chinese blogosphere.97
The new generation of Chinese leaders who came to the fore during this
period was by and large relatively weak and colorless, devoid of the charisma
and authority of Mao, Deng, and the other founders of the Communist state.
Lacking the legitimacy of their predecessors, they became more sensitive to
public opinion. In particular, when there were splits in the leadership, leaders
were now more inclined to take a hard-line stance on ideological issues, especially the history issue with Japan, lest they be outflanked ideologically by their
rivals.98
At the same time, on the international level, the balance of power shifted
increasingly in China’s favor, both strategically and economically. Strategically, with the end of the cold war, China no longer relied on the U.S.-Japanese
alliance to counterbalance the Soviet threat to the West. As the Chinese economy continued to grow at a blistering pace, its dependence on Japan decreased
commensurably. In the early 1990s, Sino-Japanese relations continued to be
excellent – so much so that Japan was roundly criticized when it became the
first nation to lift sanctions on China following the Tiananmen massacre.99
By the middle of the decade, however, China and Japan began to clash over
a growing range of issues, including China’s continued rapid military buildup,
the intensification of U.S.-Japanese military relations – which China feared
was aimed at containing it much as the United States had contained the Soviet
Union during the cold war – and a growing number of trade disputes. Most
ominously, Sino-Japanese tensions grew over two issues that were particularly laden with historical implications: the Senkaku/Diaoyutai islands and
Taiwan.
96
97
98
99
It is important, however, not to exaggerate the extent of the shift. Zhu Jiangrong, “Japan’s
Role in the Rise of Chinese Nationalism: History and Prospects,” in Tsuyoshi Hasegawa and
Kazuhiko Togo, East Asia’s Haunted Present, op. cit., p. 183.
Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower, op. cit., chapter 4.
Susan Shirk, China: the Fragile Superpower, op. cit., p. 176. This is a point that has also been
made to the author by veteran China watchers Joe Fewsmith of Boston University and Ezra
Vogel of Harvard.
Japanese public opinion became sharply negative of China after Tiananmen, and some Japanese
politicians wished to pressure China on human rights issues after the massacre. China was able
to defuse such critics through a number of means, including through the use of the history
issue. One of the leading critics of China was former Foreign Minister Itō Masayoshi. When
Itō rushed to China to pressure China to take a more lenient stance, Chinese Premier Li Peng
arranged to meet him at the site of an infamous massacre in North East China. See Jing Zhao,
“The Betrayal of Democracy: Tiananmen’s Shadow over Japan,” Haol 4 (Spring 2004), pp.
75–82. More generally on the Japanese reaction to Tiananmen, see Tanaka Akihiko, NiChū
Kankei 1945–1990 (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigakushuppankai, 1991) chapter 7.
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
211
The Senkaku/Diaoyutai are an uninhabited group of islands that had been
incorporated into Japan after the first Sino-Japanese War in 1895. Both the
Republic of China and the PRC claimed that they had been part of Chinese territory since the fifteenth century. After 1945, the islands had been administered
by the United States and returned to Japan in 1972 as part of the reversion of
Okinawa to Japan.100 In the early 1990s at the time of Sino-Japanese diplomatic
normalization, Zhou En Lai suggested that settlement of the issue be postponed,
and the two sides agreed to the joint economic development of the islands –
including its potentially rich natural gas resources. The economic and strategic
stakes of the disputes grew dramatically in the 1990s, however, as China went
from being an exporter to an importer of energy and when the UN Law of the
Seas went into effect giving control over vast swathes of ocean to the country that could claim ownership of the islands.101 As with Dokdo/Takeshima,
the Senkaku/Diaoyutai islands were lightning rods for nationalist sentiments
because Japan’s claims to the islands had been established during the colonial
period. Whereas in the past, Beijing and Tokyo had worked to dampen the
ideological dimensions of the dispute, under the new conditions of the 1990s,
they took on a dangerous new symbolic significance.
Even more worrying were developments on Taiwan. By the mid-1990s, it
became clear that Chinese hopes for an early reunification with the mainland
were dashed, and Taiwanese public opinion seemed increasingly to drift in
favor of declaring independence from the mainland. Pro-independence forces
on the island promoted a historical narrative that stressed that over the past century. They pointed out that Taiwan had been governed for only approximately
two years by Beijing. The rest of the time it had been either under Imperial
Japanese control or had been de facto self-administered. During this period,
pro-independence forces argued that Taiwan had evolved into a separate society distinct from that of the mainland.102 The democratization of Taiwan
beginning in the 1980s increased the political influence of these forces so that
by the 1990s even the Kuomintang – which historically had been committed to
reunification with the Mainland – began to emphasize a uniquely Taiwanese
identity. For many Taiwanese, democracy became equated with abandoning
100
101
102
As a result, when tensions over the islands developed in the mid-1990s, the United States found
itself committed to a definition of Japanese territory that included the Senkaku/Diaoyutai
islands.
For a useful overview, see Reinhard Drifte, “Japanese-Chinese Territorial Disputes in the
East China Sea: Between Military Confrontation and Economic Cooperation,” LSE Asia
Research Centre Working Paper No. 24, (April 24, 2008), available at http://www.lse.ac
.uk/asiaResearchCentre/pdf/WorkingPaper/ARCWorkingPaper24Drifte2008.pdf. The author
would like to thank Professor Drifte for passing a copy along. For a very interesting, if also
controversial, discussion of the background behind the Senkaku and other island disputes, see
Hara Kimie, Cold War Frontiers in the Asia-Pacific: Divided Territories in the San Francisco
System (London and New York: Routledge, 2007). See also Downs and Saunders, “Legitimacy
and the Limits of Nationalism,” pp. 129–131.
Alan Wachman, Taiwan: National Identity and Democratization (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe,
1997).
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War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
the idea of reunification with the mainland, while embracing Taiwan’s colonial
heritage was associated with freedom and independence.103 A new generation
of Taiwanese leaders – beginning with President Lee Teng Hui – emerged with
little or no personal connection to the mainland. Lee, whose family was of
Taiwanese origin, had been educated at Kyoto University and reportedly spoke
better Japanese than Mandarin. Lee’s personal connections to Japan and his
efforts to increase Taiwan’s diplomatic profile was viewed by many in China
as part of a plot on the part of Tokyo and Washington to permanently separate
the island from the mainland.104
Against this background, the new Chinese government led by Jiang Zemin
began to adopt an increasingly harsh tone in its dealings with Japan. In 1994,
Japanese proposals for joint historical research were shot down by the Chinese
government, which stated that the only purpose of such research would be
to encourage deeper Japanese “self-reflection.”105 In 1995, Chinese Foreign
Minister Qian Qichen reopened the reparations issue, stating that although the
Chinese government had forgone the right to raise state-to-state claims, it would
still be possible for individuals to demand compensation.106 Qian’s statements
were soon followed by legal claims pressed against Japan by various victim
groups, including former Chinese comfort women, slave laborers, victims of
germ warfare experiments, and people who had been injured by Japanese
chemical weapons. As in Korea, these long-suppressed voices were making
themselves heard now that the political situation had changed.
The Chinese government also began to frame other issues in terms of China’s
history as a victim of Japanese aggression. In 1995, when former Prime Minister
Kaifu asked Jiang Zemin for Chinese support for a Japanese bid for a permanent
seat on the UN Security Council, Jiang responded that Japan’s views on history
made it difficult for China to do so.107 When Japan protested Chinese nuclear
tests that same year, the Chinese foreign ministry dismissed its complaints,
commenting, “In Japan there are still recalcitrant elements who do all they can
to distort history and glorify invasion.”108 In August 1996, shortly after Prime
Minister Hashimoto made his visit to the Yasukuni shrine, tensions heated up
over the Senkaku/Diaoyutai islands as activists from both sides tried to reaffirm
their countries’ claims to the islands. Japanese right wingers landed on one of
103
104
105
106
107
108
For an interesting discussion of how these issues played out the Taiwanese educational
system, see Hsin-Huang Michael, Hsiao, “One Colonialism, Two Memories: Representing
Japanese Colonialism in Taiwan and South Korea,” in Gi-Wook Shin and Daniel C. Sneider,
eds., History Textbooks and Wars in Asia: Divided Memories (London: Routledge, 2010),
pp. 173–190.
See Qingxin Ken Wang, “Taiwan in Japan’s Relations with China and the United States after
the Cold War,” Pacific Affairs 73:3 (2001), pp. 353–373.
Yinan He, “The Emerging Sino-Japanese Conflict,” op. cit., p. 24.
He, ibid., p. 10.
Wakamiya, The Postwar Conservative View of Asia, op. cit., p. 26.
Chinese foreign ministry press secretary quoted in Wakamiya Yoshuibumi, The Postwar Conservative View of Asia, op. cit., p. 26; see also He, Shadows of the Past, op. cit., pp. 271–272.
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
213
the islands and built a crude lighthouse, and Chinese activists tried to swim
to the islands after being denied permission to visit. The Chinese press was
blistering in its criticism of the Japanese stance on the islands, warning that
China would never renounce its sovereign rights to the islands and vowing
there would be no more Li Hongzhangs – the Chinese official who had signed
the Peace Treaty ending the Sino-Japanese War of 1895 under which Japan
had won control over the islands.109
Jiang Zemin’s disastrous trip to Tokyo in 1998 represented the high point of
the 1990s tensions over history. Various factors contributed to making Jiang’s
visit an exceptionally difficult one. Earlier that year, Beijing had managed to
extract an unusually strong statement from President Bill Clinton that seemed
to support the PRC’s position on Taiwan. Jiang may well have hoped to win a
similarly favorable statement from Japan. The Japanese government, however,
was aware that Clinton had been heavily criticized inside the United States for
leaning too far in favor of Beijing and was unwilling to comply with Jiang’s
wishes.110 Lack of adequate preparation for the trip may also have played a
role. Jiang, having seen that Kim Dae Jung had received a written apology,
wanted the same, even though it had not been on the original agenda for the
visit.111 The most important reasons for failure, however, were the domestic
political dynamics at play. Jiang, who only recently had taken charge in Beijing,
was still insecure in his position and felt that he needed to take a strong line
on history to court conservative political forces in the Chinese military.112 As
a result, although Jiang demanded an apology from Japan, unlike Kim Dae
Jung, he did not offer any language that suggested that the apology would be
accepted. The Japanese side, therefore, felt that it was getting nothing in return
for meeting Jiang’s demands and that the Chinese would continue to bludgeon
it with the history issue in the future as well. As a result, the meeting in Tokyo
ended in a diplomatic impasse.113
In the subsequent months, the two sides worked to paper over their differences. When Obuchi visited China the next year, the main focus of his trip was
on economic issues, and the history issue was largely sidelined. Likewise, when
Premier Zhu Rongji visited Japan in 2000, he neatly sidestepped reporters’
questions about the past by noting that both the Chinese and the Japanese
peoples had suffered during the war. During the same period, both sides
seemed to work together to deepen their political ties, especially through the
109
110
111
112
113
Yinan He, Shadows of the Past, op. cit., p. 280.
Jin Linbo, “Japan’s Neonationalism and China’s Response,” in Tsuyoshi Hasegawa and
Kazuhiko Tog, eds., East Asia’s Haunted Present, op. cit., p. 176.
Susan Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower, op. cit., pp. 166–167.
Caroline Rose, “The Yasukuni Shrine Problem in Sino-Japanese relations,” in John Breen, ed.,
Yasukuni, op. cit., p. 37.
See Wakaiyama Yoshibumi, The Postwar Conservative View of Asia, op. cit., pp. 256–261;
Yinan He, Shadows of the Past, pp. 248–249; and Michael Green, Japan’s Reluctant Realism:
Foreign Policy Changes in a Era of Uncertain Power (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001),
pp. 96–98.
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War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
development of regional institutions such as the ASEAN plus Three Initiative.114 Thus the two nations – for instrumental reasons – were able to
contain the very significant tensions over history that had developed between
them. Beneath the surface, however, deeper structural changes in the domestic
and international politics of the region had taken place that made any moratorium on dealing with the history of Japanese atrocities inherently fragile. The
Chinese political system had changed in ways that allowed the long suppressed
voices of the victims of Japanese atrocities to be heard. The international system
had changed in ways that weakened the case for circumspection on history for
the sake of concern with larger Chinese national history. Perhaps most importantly, the Chinese discourse on the nation and its history had fundamentally
changed since the 1980s so that Chinese political elites were encouraged rather
then discouraged from taking up the history issue. To put it more colorfully,
China’s leaders had unleashed the tiger of an aggrieved nationalism. Now they
had the unenviable task of having to try to ride it.
The Storm over History 2001–2007
In 2001, whatever progress had been made in dealing with the history issue
between Japan and its closest neighbors began to unravel. Over the next six
years, Japan’s relations with its two closest neighbors underwent an unusually
severe diplomatic crisis, one that threatened to undermine regional harmony
and raised tensions over other issues – in particular territorial disputes – to
dangerous levels.
Two developments served as a catalyst for the rapid deterioration of relations. First, there was the Japanese Ministry of Education’s approval for adoption of a controversial new series of textbooks drafted by the revisionist Tsukurukai. The first book was adopted by only a handful of schools (less than .01
percent of the total number of schools in 2001 – including, ironically, a vocational school for the blind) and was immediately criticized not only by the left
end of the Japanese political spectrum but by many centrists as well, including eight associations representing professional historians. Nonetheless, the
decision of the ministry to approve for adoption the 2001 textbook and its
successors suggested continuing support within the Japanese government for
revisionist views and sparked waves of protest in China and Korea.115
Even more disruptive was the decision by the newly nominated prime minister Koizumi Junichirō to visit the Yasukuni shrine. In his campaign to win the
LDP nomination for prime minister, Koizumi reached out to the Izokukai and
114
115
Susan Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower, op. cit., pp. 167–168.
On general background to the 2001 textbook dispute, see Mitani Hiroshi, Reksihi Kyōkasho
Mondai Part II. On some of the diplomatic consequences, see Alexander Bukh, “Japan’s History
Textbook Debate.” For a conservative Japanese perspective, see Komori Yōichi, Sakamoto
Yoshikazu, and Yasumaru Yoshio, eds., Rekishi Kyōkasho Nani ga Mondai ka: tettei Kensho
Q&A (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2001).
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
215
the powerful Mori faction – descendant of the Kishi faction and traditionally
associated with the ideological right wing of the LDP – by promising to visit the
Yasukuni shrine every year in his official capacity as prime minister.116 Despite
repeated and sharp warnings from Beijing and Seoul, as well as from several
senior Japanese political figures, Koizumi made good on his promise, paying
his first visit to the Shrine on August 13, 2001.117
Koizumi tried various ways of softening the diplomatic ramifications of his
visits. For instance, in 2001 he went to the shrine two days before the anniversary of the Japanese surrender in 1945, instead of on the day of surrender itself,
and he repeatedly stressed that his visit was only meant to mourn the dead and
by no means was to deny that Japan had been guilty of inflicting great pain
on the peoples of Asia through its policies of aggression and colonization.118
Despite these efforts, however, Koizumi’s visit prompted an avalanche of condemnation. In response, Beijing suspended direct, bilateral meetings between
the two heads of state, relying on lower level meetings and contacts in such
multilateral settings as the meetings of the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). The Korean response was even sharper. Seoul suspended military
talks between Japan and Korea, reimposed the ban on Japanese cultural items,
and temporarily recalled the South Korean ambassador for “consultations” to
Seoul.119
Spurred by the need to coordinate policies in response to 9/11 and the war
on terror – especially with respect to North Korea – China, Japan, and South
Korea tried to find ways after Koizumi’s first visit to Yasukuni to patch their
differences over history. In October 2001, Koizumi visited China and placed a
wreath on the statue of a Chinese soldier at the Marco Polo Bridge, where the
second Sino-Japanese War had broken out in 1937.120 Likewise, joint historical
research commissions were set up both with Korea and China.121 In 2001,
Beijing and Seoul hoped that after Nakasone’s trip in 1985 and Hashimoto’s
in 1996 that the Japanese government would suspend further visits and the
problem would soon blow over. Against the backdrop of “apology fatigue” in
Japan, Tokyo, for its part, seemed to believe that it could put history behind it
again. A more fatal combination of views would be difficult to imagine.
116
117
118
119
120
121
Shino Watanabe, “Foreign Aid and Influence: Paradoxical Power Dynamics in Japan’s Official
Development Assistance to China” (Dissertation in Politics at the University of Virginia, 2007),
p. 176. The author would like to thank Len Schoppa for bringing this source to his attention.
Asahi August 4, 2001, pp. 1 and 4; Daiki Shibuchi, “The Yasukuni Shrine Dispute,” op. cit.,
p. 211.
Tanaka Akihiko, “The Yasukuni Issue in Japan’s Foreign Relations,” in Hasegawa and Togo,
East Asia’s Haunted Present, op. cit., pp. 134–135.
See The Korean Herald, August 15, 2001.
Akihiko, “The Yasukuni Issue in Japan’s Foreign Relations,” in Hasegawa and Togo, East
Asia’s Haunted Present, pp. 135–136; Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower, op. cit., p. 169.
NiChūkan Sangoku Kyōtsu Rekishi Kyōzai Iinkai, ed., Mirai o hiraku Rekishi: Higashi Ajia
Sangoku no Kingendaishi (Tokyo: Kobunken, 2005); Mitani Hiroshi, “The History Textbook
Issue in Japan and East Asia,” in Hasegawa and Tokyo, East Asia’s Haunted Present, op. cit.,
pp. 89–90.
216
War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
Japan’s readiness for compromise over the history issue was severely limited
by its own domestic political dynamics. A commission to consider possible
alternatives to commemorating Japan’s war dead at Yasukuni – established
by Koizumi and directed by his very able Chief Cabinet Secretary Fukuda
Yasuo – ran into heavy opposition from the Izokukai and conservative LDP
parliamentarians. In June 2002, a group of 125 LDP Diet members, led by
former General Secretary Koga Makoto, gathered in Tokyo and warned that
the Fukuda commission should not ignore the sentiments of the war bereaved
or damage Yasukuni’s unique role as the place where the spirits of the dead
could be appeased. The idea that an alternative commemorative site could
be found was strongly rejected. As conservative Japanese pointed out, when
Japan’s soldiers had marched off to war, they had typically vowed to “meet
again at Yasukuni.” From this perspective, choosing another site would be
tantamount to betraying the spirits of the dead.122
Political positions in both China and South Korea hardened as well. In 2003,
the new leadership team of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao took over from the Jiang
Zemin. Hu and Wen essentially were technocrats, and they came into office
stressing that they wished for closer, forward-looking relations with Japan.
Nonetheless, they soon exhibited the same need to consolidate their support
on the right end of the Chinese political spectrum that Jiang Zemin had, and
they were doing so at a time when popular nationalist passions were on the
rise. Commentators such as the liberal journalist Ma Licheng and international
relations expert Shi Yinhong, who called for an end to attacking Japan over
its stance on history, were soon silenced, and the new leadership adopted a
tolerant attitude toward various anti-Japanese nationalist groups.123
Meanwhile, in 2003, Roh Moo-Hyun took over the presidency from the
ailing Kim Dae Jung in South Korea. Roh came into office intent on continuing
his predecessor’s policy to seek reconciliation with Japan. His efforts to do
so, however, were frustrated by the textbook issue and Koizumi’s decision to
visit Yasukuni despite Roh’s repeated entreaties to not do so. As Roh’s political
fortunes declined because of controversies over his handling of the economy and
other issues, Roh increasingly became inclined to appeal to Korean nationalist
sentiments to bolster his own public opinion ratings.
As a result, Japan’s relations with its two most important Asian neighbors
went on a downward spiral over the next few years. Increasingly, popular anger
began to turn into sporadic action at the grassroots level. In 2003, a series of
anti-Japanese incidents began to break out in China. Many of the incidents
appeared quite trivial. For instance, in October 2003 riots broke out in the
western city of Xian after two Japanese exchange students put on a sexually
122
123
The author is indebted to his conversations with a number of Japanese on this point, in particular, former Ambassador Togo Kazuhiko and Tokyo University Professor Tanaka Akihiko.
See Peter Hays Gries, “China’s ‘New Thinking’ on Japan,” The China Quarterly 184 (December 2005); and Susan Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower, op. cit., pp. 172–173, 177.
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
217
inappropriate skit in the local university, which their Chinese compatriots
interpreted as an insult to China’s national honor.124 Others were more serious,
such as the public uproar that was generated after a worker was killed and four
others were injured by abandoned Japanese poison gas munitions that were
unearthed during construction in Qihar.125
These incidents escalated steadily. A high point came in early April 2005
when an Internet campaign to collect signatures opposing Japan’s bid for a
permanent seat on the United Nation’s Security Council (reportedly well over
30 million were collected within a year) sparked countrywide riots. Over a
period of two weeks, Japanese shops and diplomatic outposts were pelted
with stones and garbage, and several Japanese were injured by mobs of Chinese demonstrators.126 The Japanese diplomatic response became increasingly
tough as the violence continued, and even usually pro-Chinese groups and commentators, such as the liberal Asahi newspaper, began to become highly critical
of the Chinese government’s unwillingness to clamp down on the protestors.
At this point, the Chinese leadership became concerned that the tensions
were getting out of hand. They feared that if the protests continued, they
could damage Chinese diplomatic interests and potentially might mutate into a
broader critique of the Chinese Communist government. Although the Chinese
authorities had adopted a lenient stance to the protestors in the beginning –
possibly believing that they were just letting off steam – in late April they took
forceful measure to contain the unrest. At an April 17 meeting of the CCP
Propaganda Department, Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxiang called on the cadres
to contain the violence in the name of “maintaining social order.”127 Chinese
officials fanned across the country to explain why boycotts were ineffective
and good relations should be maintained with Japan. Restrictions were placed
on the use of cell phones and the Internet, which had been used to organize
the protests, and the Chinese media launched a full-court press on the need for
social stability.128 The government’s measures proved effective, and the unrest
soon ended.
The Japanese side as well did what it could to bring the crisis under control. At a conference to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Asian-African
Nonaligned Movement in Bandung, Koizumi delivered a keynote speech in
which he repeated Murayama’s 1995 apology for Japan’s historical role as an
124
125
126
127
128
During a school performance, the two students appeared on stage semi-nude with heart-shaped
signs over their privates with the words “We love China” written on them.
“Relic of War Adds Strain to Beijing ties,” New York Times, August 12, 2003; He, “History,
Chinese Nationalism and the Emerging Sino-Japanese Conflict,” op. cit., p. 2.
Asahi satellite edition, April 9, 10, 11, 17, 18, and 21, 2005, p. 1.
Joseph Kahn, “Chinese Official Orders End to Anti-Japanese Demonstrations,” New York
Times, April 20, 2005, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/20/international/asia/
20china.html?ex=1271649600&en=d539df61c78c523a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&
emc=rss (accessed May 17, 2006).
Susan Shirk, China: The Fragile Superpower, op. cit., p. 175.
218
War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
aggressor and colonizer. Whereas Murayama had made his speech in Japan,
Koizumi’s speech was at an international event well attended by regional
leaders.129
Japanese public opinion as well showed signs of increased concern about
the political impact of Japan’s official narrative on the country’s relations with
its neighbors. According to a poll taken by Asahi in March, still 54 percent
of those surveyed approved of the visits to the Yasukuni, whereas only 28
percent opposed them. However, according to a follow-up poll taken by Asahi
in April, as the crisis with China developed, only 36 percent approved of
the visits, whereas 46 percent were opposed.130 Although the Japanese public wished to honor their dead, like Nakasone twenty years earlier, they did
not want to do so in a way that would harm Japan’s broader international
interests.
Although the violence had ended, relations between Beijing and Tokyo
remained poisonous for the duration of the Koizumi administration. When
Vice Premier Wu Yi visited Japan in May 2005, she abruptly ended her visit
reportedly because she was offended by conservatives in the LDP who continued to insist that Yasukuni was an internal matter.131 High-level contacts
between Beijing and Tokyo remained impaired,132 and tensions were evident at
high-level multilateral meetings as well. For instance, at the East Asian summit
in 2006, little was accomplished by regional leaders after China joined South
Korea in criticizing Japan over its stand on the history issue.133
In September 2005, after the riots in China had ended, tensions rose to
even more dangerous levels when a group of five Chinese military vessels were
spotted in the disputed waters around the Senkaku/Diaoyutai islands. One
warship even “locked” its radar on a Japanese coast guard plane, a step that
could indicate it is preparing to fire.134 The possibility that the dispute could
escalate to the military level suddenly seemed quite real. Similar maneuvers
in 2001 had led to the downing of a U.S. reconnaissance plane by a Chinese
fighter near Hainan Island and had severely tested Sino-U.S. relations.
129
130
131
132
133
134
For the text of the speech, see http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/meet0504/speech.html
(accessed May 26, 2006).
Asahi Shimbun, April 25, 2005, pp. 1 and 3.
“Wuu Fukushusho no Kikoku – ‘Yasukuni ga Genin’ Chukoku Setsumei,” (China explains
“Yasukuni’s the Cause’ of Vice Prime Wu’s Return to China,” Asahi satellite edition, May 25,
2005, p. 1.
“APEC Meeting Sees Splits over Trade, Japan’s Past,” AFP, November 15, 2005, at http://asia
.news.yahoo.com/051115/afp/051115085837.business.html (accessed November 15, 2005);
“China Kills Summit with Japan, Korea,” Japan Times, December 5, 2005, at http://www
.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/makeprfy.p15?nn20051205a1.htm (accessed December 5, 2005).
“NiChuKan Gikushaku: Yasukuni kennen, takoku ni mo Kakudai,” (The Awkwardness
between China and Japan: Worries over Yasukuni Spreads to other Countries as well”) Asahi
satellite edition, December 15, 2005, p. 4.
“Chinese Warships Make a Show of Force at Protested Gas Rig,” Japan Times, September 10,
2005; “Chinese Warship Pointed Gun at MSDF Plane,” Japan Times, October 2, 2005.
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
219
A similar deterioration was to be observed in Japanese-Korean relations.
Soon after Kim Dae Jung’s successor, Roh Moo Hyun, entered office he
found himself confronted first with an escalating war of words between the
two countries over the Japanese Ministry of Education’s approval of revisionist textbooks and then over the Dokdo/Takeshima islands in the Sea of
Japan. Like Beijing, Seoul had been incensed by Koizumi’s repeated visits to
Yasukuni. However, even more than Yasukuni, the central issue on the Korean
side revolved around territorial disputes. From 2002 to 2003, the two sides
maneuvered to underline their claim to the islands. The Korean government’s
campaign to rename the Sea of Japan the East Sea intensified, and when Korea
issued a postage stamp commemorating the islands, nationalist sentiment on
the Japanese side were inflamed. Tokyo, for its part, continued to insist that
the islands belonged to Japan.
In March 2005 a major diplomatic crisis ensued after the Shimane prefectural government declared February 22 to be Takeshima Day. President Roh
stressed that from the Korean standpoint, Dokdo had been the start of the
annexation of Korea and, therefore, had a symbolic and historical significance
that far outweighed its economic or strategic importance. Japan’s stance, he
claimed, was an effort to legitimate its policies of expansion and colonialism in
Asia. Roh went on to declare the “diplomatic equivalent of war.”135 In a rare
show of unity, the Korean National Assembly backed Roh, voting 241 to 1 that
Dokdo belongs to Korea and that Japan’s claims were part of an unacceptable
political movement that sought to whitewash Japan’s Imperial past.136
As with the Senkaku/Diaoyutai dispute a year earlier, the competing claims
to Dokdo/Takeshima began to escalate to a potentially dangerous level. In
April 2006, after Korea threatened to give oceanographic features around the
island Korean names, Japan announced that it would send survey ships from
the Japanese Maritime Safety Agency to the islands to present its own naming
counter proposals at an upcoming international oceanographic conference in
Berlin. In response, South Korea then dispatched a flotilla of military vessels
to the islands and threatened to use force if Japan sent the survey ships. In
a televised speech, President Roh accused Japan of denying Korean independence and once again declared diplomatic war on Japan.137 In response, conservative politicians in Japan advocated sending an armed coast guard escort
for the survey ships. Thanks to last minute diplomatic efforts – with quiet,
behind the scenes support from the United States – the crisis was eventually
contained. Japan chose not to dispatch the survey vessels, and the Korean
government chose largely symbolic measures to underline Korean sovereignty
135
136
137
“Kankoku Daitoryo: ‘Nihon, Shinryaku o Seitōka’ Takeshima Kyōkashohihan no Danwa”
(Korean President Criticizes Takeshima and Japanese Textbooks as Legitimating Japan’s Invasion), Ashai satellite edition, March 24, 2005, pages 1, 2 and 7.
Michael Weinstein, “South Korea-Japan Dokdo Takeshim Dispute: Towards Confrontation,”
Japan Focus, May 10, 2006, p. 4, available at http://japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=596.
“Takeshima wa ‘Rekshininshikimondai,’” Asahi satellite edition, March 26, 2006, p. 1.
220
War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
over the islands.138 Nationalist sentiment on both sides, however, remained
unappeased, and public opinion data showed a sharp rise in negative attitudes
toward the other country. By 2005, according to a Dong-A survey, 63 percent
of Korean respondents had a negative view of Japan, up from 42.2 percent in
2000.139 Meanwhile in Japan, nationalists embarked on an anti-Korean propaganda campaign, producing a stream of critical press commentary on Korea and
publishing best-selling manga with titles such as “Hating the Korean Wave” – a
repudiation of the era of warm feelings that followed the Kim-Obuchi summit
of 1998.140
The downward trend in Japan’s relations with its Asian neighbors began
to provoke growing concern in a variety of quarters. Naturally, the Japanese
Foreign Ministry was concerned over the Japan’s growing diplomatic isolation
in the region.141 The Japanese business community, worried about the potential damage to Japan’s rapidly growing economic interests in the region (China
had become Japan’s number one trading partner, outstripping the United States,
and by some estimates as much as of half of the increase in Japan’s economic
growth since 2002 can be attributed to exports to Asia), took the unusual
steps of making independent overtures to the Chinese leadership and to publicly admonish the LDP against continuing official prime ministerial visits to
Yasukuni.142 Meanwhile, mainstream Japanese opinion leaders, both right-ofcenter and left-of-center, together to tried to forge a new consensus on history
that could diffuse the tensions that were threatening to overwhelm Japan’s relations with its neighbors. The most visible reflection of this trend was a highly
unusual joint historical research enterprise launched by the liberal Asahi and
conservative Yomiuri newspapers. Their efforts culminated in the publishing of
a two-volume history of modern Japan that was strikingly moderate in tone and
quite critical of the views of the Tsukurukai and other revisionist groups.143
138
139
140
141
142
143
For an overview of the crisis over Dokdo/Takeshima, see Michael Weinstein, “South KoreaJapan Dokdo-Takeshim Dispute: Towards Confrontation,” Japan Focus May 10, 2006,
pp. 2–3, available at http://japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=596.
Dong-A Daily (1984–2005) cited in Yangmo Ku, “International Reconciliation in the Postwar
Era,” op. cit., p. 25.
See Rumi Sakamoto and Matthew Allen, “Hating ‘The Korean Wave’ Comic Books: A Sign
of New Nationalism in Japan,” Japan Focus (October 4, 2007), available at http://www
.japanfocus.org/-Rumi-SAKAMOTO/2535 (accessed July 3, 2011).
Ajia Gaiko Yuzuranu Shusho (“The Prime Minister Refuses to Back Down on Asian Diplomacy”), Asahi satellite edition, November 15, 2005, p. 2.
See the critical comments on Yasukuni made by the Japanese Business Federation,
Keizaidōyūkai, Asahi satellite edition, May 10, 2006, p. 2. On the Japanese Federation of
Business (Keidanren) diplomatic overtures to China, see “Keidanren Made Covert Trip to
China Last Month,” Japan Times, October 23, 2005, available at http://www.japntimes.co.jp/
cgi-bin/makeprfy.pl15?nn20051023a1.htm.
The effort began in 2006, after the editors of the two newspapers Watanabe Tsuneo and
Wakamiya Yoshibumi participated in a public seminar and found themselves surprisingly
in agreement on many of the central issues in the history dispute. See “Yomiuri and Asahi
Editors Call for a National Memorial to Replace Yasukuni,” Japan Focus, February 14, 2006,
at http://www.japanfocus.org/products/topdf/2124. Abridged version of article appearing in
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
221
Even the Izokukai began to strike a more measured tone on history after
it was revealed that the late Emperor Hirohito had chosen to no longer visit
Yasukuni after class A war criminals had been enshrined there in 1978. Because
many Izokukai members longed for Imperial participation in rites to mourn
the dead, and because there was no prospect that the new emperor or his likely
successor would visit the shrine under current circumstances, support grew
within the organization for either de-enshrining the class A war criminals from
the shrine (by removing them from the list of names of the spirits who have been
admitted to the shrine) or perhaps even creating an alternative commemorative
site.144
U.S. political policy makers, traditionally hesitant to interfere in what they
see as an issue that should be left to the Asian nations to settle, became increasingly vocal in their efforts to persuade Japan and the other governments to
adopt a more moderate stance.145 Although the United States continued to
avoid trying to mediate between the different sides for fear of becoming the
target of criticism itself, senior U.S. policy makers grew concerned that the territorial disputes between Japan and Korea as well as with China could escalate
to the level of military clashes in which case the United States would find itself
automatically involved because of its alliances with Japan and South Korea.146
Whereas Koizumi continued to visit Yasukuni right until he left office in
2006, his immediate successor Abe Shinzo, the grandson of Kishi Nobusuke,
took a more measured stance on history. Before running for prime minister,
Abe had been viewed as a leading hawk who had visited Yasukuni many times
in the past and had close ties to the Izokukai and other groups known for their
conservative views on history. Nonetheless, during the race to succeed Koizumi,
Abe along with the other leading candidates, suggested that he would avoid
going to the Shrine, at least publicly, to improve relations with Japan’s Asian
neighbors.147 After taking office, Abe immediately visited Beijing even before
he went to Washington, signaling the increased importance of China to Japan.
During his time as prime minister, Abe sought to avoid the history issue as
much as possible, although it occasionally bubbled up, as it did in late 2006
144
145
146
147
Ronza, February 9, 2006. The author is also very grateful for the insights on the process
provided by a number of Japanese journalists, in particular Miura Toshiaki of the Asahi.
“Kogashi A-Kyū Sempan Bunshi Kentō o Teigen,” Asahi satellite edition, May 19, 2006, p. 4.
For a useful summary, see John Breen, “Introduction: A Yasukuni Geneaology,” pp. 1–5, in
John Breen, ed., Yasukuni, op. cit.
“U.S. Lawmaker Wants Koizumi’s Guarantee that He Won’t Visit Yasukuni,” May 16, 2006,
at http://asia.news.yahoo.com/o60516/Kyodo/d8hkji981.html (accessed May 25, 2006). See
also “Yasukuni’Nichibei ni mo Eikyo,” Asahi satellite edition, April 30, 2006, p. 1. On the U.S.
position on the history issue in general, see David Straub, “The United States and Reconciliation
in East Asia,” in Hasegawa and Togo, East Asia’s Haunted Past, op. cit.
The author is indebted to several high-level U.S. policy makers based both in Washington and
in the U.S. embassy in Tokyo for their insight on this issue.
Asahi “Sampai Shuh wa Kotaisho,” (Favorable Contrast in how to visit the Shrine) Asahi
satellite edition, August 5, 2006, p. 2.
222
War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
when he made remarks that suggested the Imperial government had not been
directly involved in the forcible recruitment of comfort women.148
The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which took power from the LDP
in 2009, went further and tried to actively reach out to China and Korea in
an effort to reconcile over the history issue. As the party prepared to take
office, senior DPJ leaders sent signals that improved relations with Asia would
be at the top of their diplomatic agenda. Soon after taking power, they took
concrete steps to promote reconciliation by releasing records on forced laborers
and preparing to pay them compensation for their suffering.149
Aftermath
In closing, there are three questions that need to be addressed. First, how
serious was the 2001–2006 dispute over history? Second, was it an aberration,
a one time “perfect storm” of historically contingent factors coming together
to create an unusual degree of turbulence, or could it reoccur? And finally, why
were Japan and it neighbors in Asian unable to attain a degree of reconciliation
on historical issues comparable to what Germany and Austria managed to
achieve in Europe?
With regard to the first question, it is important not to exaggerate the
extent of the crisis. The violence that was triggered was relatively constrained,
and no deaths or serious injuries resulted. Diplomatic contacts between Japan
and its two neighbors never ceased, and although high-level contacts were
restricted to regional multilateral meetings, there continued to be dialogue on a
range of pressing issues, such as trade, managing the regional economy, dealing
with North Korea, or responding to the U.S. war on terror. Likewise, despite
fears of an economic embargo and the politically motivated cancellation of
contracts,150 trade between Japan and its Asian neighbors continued to grow
steadily throughout the period. Chinese and Korean consumers and companies
continued to eagerly buy high-quality Japanese goods despite their differences
over history, and Japanese corporations continued to be happy to make profits
by selling to them. It might be tempting, therefore, to conclude that the whole
thing had been a rhetorical tempest in an Asian teapot.
148
149
150
For a review of the controversy over Abe’s comments regarding the comfort women, see Larry
Niksch, The Japanese Military’s “Comfort Women” System, op. cit. For the text of the speech
in which Abe originally made his comments, see http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/zxxx/t311544
.htm#.
Koizumi’s immediate successor, Abe, reached out to China and was rewarded by a highly successful visit by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in April 2007. The incoming DPJ made addressing
history an important issue and saw it as part of a new, more Asia-oriented foreign policy. See
“Ozawa in his own Words,” interview by Dan Sneider, The Oriental Economist, June 2009,
pp. 5–6. See also Sneider, “A Japan That Can Say Maybe,” same issue, pp. 7–8.
Of particular concern was the possibility that Japan would lose its bid to participate in the
construction of a high speed, multibillion dollar rail project linking Beijing and Shanghai.
In 2004, the Chinese vice foreign minister even warned visiting Japanese officials that antiJapanese popular sentiment made it difficult awarding the contract to Japanese firms. He, “The
Emerging Sino-Japanese Conflict,” op. cit., pp. 19–20.
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
223
table 5.3. Japanese Public’s View of China 1978–2009151
90
80
78.6
70
60
72.7 72.5
70.9
74.4 75.4
68.8
68.6 68.3 68.5
62.1
66.6
63.4
61.6
55.5
52.3 51.1
50
43.1 42.2 44.4
40
58.5
42.2
44.2
51.3 50.2
45
49.1 48
48.9 49.6 48.8 48.1
47.9
47.5
47.4 46.2 47.2
45.9
45.6
38.5
37.6
32.4
34.3 34
31.8
28.4
25.6
20
51.3
31.6
30
63.5
58.2
53.8
48.4
39.9
61.6
24.8 25.1
20.3
19.9 19.8 19.2
17.8
14.7
10
0
Favorable
Unfavorable
A more careful look at the events, however, would suggest that a less sanguine view of the crisis is in order. Certainly from the point of view of the
governments involved, the dispute over history had been enormously costly.
Senior political leaders spent huge amounts of time on managing the crisis, and
there were extended periods when the battle over history had gone to the top
of the domestic and international political agenda. Managing relations with
Japan’s Asian neighbors became a central issue in the LDP presidential election
of 2006. It was clearly of similar importance to the Roh Moo Hyun government
and perhaps only slightly less important to the Hu Jintao regime in China.
The crisis also had a distinctly negative impact on public opinion. Japanese
popular perceptions of China, which had turned negative after the Tiananmen
crisis, turned even more negative after the start of the history crisis, peaking
in 2006 with surveys showing that 66.6 percent said that they had little or no
feeling of liking (shitashimi) for China. Although there was some improvement
in popular views after the crisis peaked, with over 58 percent expressing negative views in 2009, popular antipathy toward China remained higher than it
had been at any point before the crisis began (see Table 5.3).
Public opinion data from China is harder to come by and is not as systematic
as the data available from Japan and Korea in that the same question is asked
repeatedly over the space of years. Sporadic public polls began to be conducted
in China only from the late 1980s on. The available data nonetheless suggest
151
Gaikō ni Kan suru Yoronchōsa Cabinet Office, October 2009, Table 10, available at
http://www8.cao.go.jp/survey/h21/h21-gaiko/index.html.
224
War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
an ever-deteriorating Chinese popular image of Japan. Whereas a joint SinoJapanese poll in 1988 showed 53.6 percent of Chinese respondents felt close to
Japan, 38.6 percent felt not close; the two joint polls conducted by the Asahi
and Chinese People’s University in 1997 shows only 10 percent of Chinese
liked Japan, whereas 34 percent disliked it. By 2002, a survey revealed that
only 10 percent liked Japan, whereas those who disliked Japan increased to 53
percent.152
Korean views of Japan showed a similar negative trend. Whereas in 2000,
before the onset of the crisis, 42.2 percent of those surveyed by the Dong-A
Ilbo newspaper had a negative view of Japan, by 2001 that percentage had
climbed to 56.6 percent before rising to 63 percent in 2005.153
Not coincidentally, the Japanese public’s perception of threat also grew
during this time period. When asked, What is the danger that Japan will be
dragged into a war (makikomareru) by 2006?, 46 percent of those surveyed
said that there was considerable danger, and 32 percent said there was some
level of danger, and only 16.5 percent said that there was no danger. This
was a far greater perception of threat than had existed at any point during the
cold war, when thousands of Soviet nuclear missiles were pointed at Japan,
and the Soviet Union was building military bases on the disputed Northern
islands just off the shore of Hokkaido. Much of the public’s perception of
threat was driven by the enormous media attention that was focused on North
Korea, the international crisis over its nuclear weapons program and the revelations that North Korean agents had kidnapped possibly dozens of Japanese
citizens over the space of several decades. Nonetheless, there could be little
doubt that public apprehensions were sharpened greatly by the perception
that Japan was hated by its two closest neighbors. In 2009, after the crisis
over history had ended, the percentage of those who said that there was a
danger of entanglement had dropped to 26.6 percent, even though little concrete progress on the North Korean nuclear weapons program had been made
(see Table 5.4).
Of course, it is impossible to say what the impact on regional relations would
have been if the tensions over history had escalated any further. It is quite possible that if a violent incident of some sort had occurred – say, if Japanese
citizens had been killed by Chinese rioters, if right wingers had assaulted Chinese students, or if a firefight had broken out between Japanese and Chinese
or Korean naval forces maneuvering around the disputed territories – it would
have had a sobering effect on the political leadership in the countries involved
and that some way would have been found to paper over their differences.
However, given the domestic political realities described above – that is, the
unfortunate interplay of the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean official narratives
and public discourses on history and the resultant deepening of negative public
and elite attitudes – it is almost certain that the animosity between the countries
152
153
Yinan He, The Search for Reconciliation, op. cit., p. 261.
Data cited in Yangmo Ku, “International Reconciliation in the Postwar Era,” op. cit., p. 25.
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
225
table 5.4. Japanese Public Perception of the Risk of War, 1969–2009154
50
45
45
43.2
42.6
40
36.8
36.4
35
35.2
34.3
32.2
30
25
28.7
32.1
31.3
33.1
31.3
34
30.2
30.5
32.6
28.7
28
26.9
26.6
25.8
23.2
23.1
20
15
30.9
30
33.8
24.3
20.6
23.8
21.5
23.2
22.3
21.1
19.2
16.5
14.9
14.9
11
10
5
0
1969 1975 1978 1981 1984 1988 1991 1994 1997 2000 2003 2006 2009
There is a danger
There is some danger
No danger
in the region would have deepened further and led to the adoption of policies
that would have made regional cooperation less likely and regional confrontation more probable. As it was, Japanese and Korean diplomatic and security
cooperation broke down almost completely during the crisis. Sino-Japanese
relations deteriorated even further, and increasingly both governments began
to openly plan and equip their forces for the possibility of a military confrontation between them.
In short, although it is highly unlikely (but not impossible) that the dispute
over history would have led directly to war between Japan and its neighbors, it
did poison the relationship between them and set the stage for a possible militarized confrontation between them at a later date. A possible analogy can be
seen in the historical impact of U.S.-Japanese relations over immigration before
World War II. Although growing discrimination against Asian immigrants in
the United States did not directly lead to the attack on Pearl Harbor, it strongly
reinforced the sense in Japan that it would never be accepted as an equal by the
154
Jietai Bōeimondai ni Kan suru Yoron Chōsa Chief Cabinet Secretary’s Office, May 1,
2006, updated with data from 2009 survey. Available at http://www8.cao.go.jp/survey/h17/
h17-bouei/images/z24.gif.
226
War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
racist Western powers. This greatly undermined those in the Japanese political system – internationalists like Foreign Minister Shidehara Kijuro and many
members of the Japanese business community – who wanted to maintain better
relations with the West and strengthened those who believed that Japan would
have to carve out its own, autonomous sphere of influence in Asia.155
Was the 2001–2006 crisis a unique event, an unfortunate confluence of
factors that made for a sort of perfect storm of controversy over history?
Certainly accident and personality played an important role in shaping the
course of events. Koizumi, who began his term in office as a weak prime minister
lacking an effective power base inside the party, had a strong incentive to find
a way to rally ideological support. Visiting Yasukuni was a readily available
and convenient option for him. Having made this a signature issue, one that
helped reinforce his image as a politician who acted on the basis of conviction
rather than convenience, Koizumi continued to visit the shrine despite growing
domestic and international political opposition. Similar points could be made
about Roh Moo Hyun in Korea and – to a lesser extent – about Hu Jintao in
China.
In addition, it is clear that none of the players at the start of the crisis could
envision that the crisis would take on the kind of amplitude it did. Certainly
there was little international political incentive for them to allow it to do so,
either from the Realist or Liberal international relations perspective. If they
had, it is quite possible that they would have taken steps to avoid it. The crisis
was in many ways a new phenomenon, born of miscalculation and inexperience
on the part of the leaders.
However, if the 2001–2006 clash was an accident, it was an accident waiting to happen. Similar, although less virulent, disputes had developed in the
early 1980s, and they had increased in intensity over time. Long-term developments in the domestic discourses of the countries involved as well as shifts
in the broader international parameters within which the history issue played
itself out fed this trend. Growing weariness over history (“apology fatigue”)
and the mobilization of grassroots history activists in Japan clashed directly
with the pluralization of public discourse in South Korea and China and the
efforts of both countries to come to terms with the unfortunate aspects of their
own political history both before and after 1945. In this sense, although one
could attribute these developments to the interests of different political actors
in China, Korea, and Japan, reducing the crisis to a rational calculation of
interest on part of elite actors offers only a partial explanation. The problem
with such a reductionist account is that the definition of elite interests and their
association with particular interpretations of history were themselves the product of a discursive evolution in the political cultures of the three countries that
developed over time and was beyond the control of any individual or group of
individuals, however influential.
155
For a useful, general discussion, U.S.-Japanese Relations throughout History (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1997), pp. 88–89, 104–106, 120, 123–124, and 144–146.
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
227
For instance, as we have seen, the link in South Korea between the Japanese
colonial past and post-1945 authoritarianism emerged out of Korean political
and intellectual debates over the space of several decades. Certainly, the Korean
government would have preferred to avoid such an association; however, the
authoritarian government had only incomplete control over the cultural discourse in Korea, allowing the theory to take root in the Korean academy and
inspired a generation of Korean political activists to view a facing up to the
country’s colonial past as being inextricably intertwined with their project of
establishing democracy in Korea. Likewise, the parallels between the May 4
demonstrators in China and anti-Japanese protestors in the late twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries was a contextual feature of Chinese politics that
had not been manufactured by manipulative elites. Individuals, such as Roh
Moo Hyun or the Chinese critics of Hu Yaobang, may have been acting rationally when they chose to try to utilize anti-Japanese sentiments to pursue their
own, instrumental objectives (in Roh’s case, to bolster his flagging popularity,
in the case of Hu’s critics to strengthen their own political faction’s influence).
The existence of these sentiments, however, was a feature of the Chinese and
Korean political cultures that could not be ignored or wished away. History
alone did not create these dynamics, nor did the concrete material interests of
political actors. As the Historical Realist position would predict, interest and
historical memory combine to create a cultural discourse that is difficult for
any actor to control.
These trends came together in the early years of the twenty-first century
and created a severe crisis over history between 2001 and 2007. They did
not, however, disappear after the crisis was over. In all three countries, very
different views of history continued to persist and were propagated, sometimes
with feverish intensity, by a broad array of societal actors such as the history
activists in China, groups pursuing historical justice in South Korea, or the
Tsukurukai and other similar organizations seeking to promote a “healthy
sense of patriotism” in Japan. Each of these groups understood these projects
as being linked to other key objectives. The history activists in China saw it as a
way of opening public discourse and indirectly criticizing the CCP. The Korean
history activists used it to promote democracy. Taiwanese nationalists saw it
as a way of underlining their independence from the mainland. The Japanese
right wing sought to strengthen Japan and prepare the population for a more
assertive foreign policy and for assuming a greater defense role, and so on.
Although after 2007 political leaders in the region understood these dynamics
better and sought to reign them in, the underlying social and political cultural
trends remained. Under the right circumstances, it is easy to imagine that these
forces could be reignited. Indeed, in certain respects they never really died
out, and instead found a new, and more dangerous, outlet in the simmering
territorial disputes between all three nations.
The answer to the third question, Why has history been so much more
problematic in Asia than in Europe? now becomes answerable. Clearly, no
single feature of the Asian international environment made history especially
228
War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II
contentious there. Conversely, a variety of factors pushed Europe toward
reconciliation. As the Historical Realist position would lead us to expect, a
combination of historical, practical, and cultural factors were at play. The
international environment in Europe forced Germany to be more penitent than
was true of Japan. As a divided, ruined nation on the front lines of the cold
war, Germany desperately needed not only U.S. support but also that of the
other major European powers. For their part, the West European countries
needed Germany for much the same reason, as a bastion against Communism
and as an engine for economic growth and reconstruction. Austria, which
stood outside of the cold war system, was not subject to similar pressures and
inducements. Japan, which was aligned with the anti-Communist block, was
much more loosely integrated and, therefore, as Austria, could afford to ignore
the history issue. History was a contentious issue in Japan but primarily for
domestic political reasons.
Germany’s rapprochement with its Western neighbors over history – however incomplete – helped it create a network of multilateral institutional ties –
the most important of which were NATO and the European Union, which
helped to lock in the benefits of a penitent official historical narrative. At the
same time, however, it also led to the development of a culture of contrition that slowly spread and solidified over the courses of the 1990s. In time,
the attractive power of Germany’s network of institutions, together with the
growing costs of a non-contrite historical narrative in an increasingly interdependent world, led previously impenitent Austria to reconsider its stance on
history. Closely following the German model, Austria embarked on a full-scale
campaign of reconciling itself on history with its neighbors, including not only
making official apologies but offering compensation to the victims of Nazism
and fostering its own culture of contrition through museums, monuments ,and
the state-controlled school system. And like Germany, it was rewarded for its
efforts by membership in the new European Union.
In Asia, in contrast, no similar network of institutions came into existence,
and relatively little effort was made by Japan or its neighbors to foster reconciliation on historical issues. Instead, there was a piecemeal approach of
defusing particular historical issues as they emerged. Although over time Japan
did grow more penitent, both on a societal level and in terms of its official historical narrative, it was a highly incomplete contrition. Japan’s partial penance
was further complicated by the factionalized nature of Japanese politics and the
lack of strong leadership on the history issue, on the one hand, and by domestic
political cultural dynamics in China and South Korea, where national identity,
democratization, and anti-Japanese feelings had come together to form a potent
and highly toxic brew, on the other. A catch-22 situation emerged in which
Japan failed to apologize in part because it felt that its apologies would not be
accepted, and such apologies as it did – grudgingly – offer tended to be viewed
with suspicion because Chinese and Koreans tended to view them as insincere.
Without the mitigating impact of strong international institutions like the EU,
tensions over history would continue to flare up, leaving regional governments
lurching from one crisis to another with no final resolution in sight.
The Geopolitics of Remembering and Forgetting in Asia, 1991–2010
229
Eventually, it can be hoped that domestic and international conditions will
fall into place that will allow for a more stable solution (although, as the
German tensions with Poland in 2003–2007 demonstrated, there always
remains the possibility for new flare-ups even when such structures are in
place). Strong leadership will be required, as well as a better understanding of
the dynamics of the international politics of history. In Chapter 6, we will offer
some thoughts as to what kind of solutions may be possible.
Asia's second-world-war ghosts | The Economist
25/09/16 13:15
ESSAY
English
한국어
The unquiet past
Seven decades on from the defeat of Japan, memories of war still
divide East Asia
T
HERE can be no more pleasing spot in Tokyo on a
July evening than the Yasukuni shrine. The cicadas murmur as
you pass along the avenue of ginkgo trees framing the great
shinmon gate, fashioned out of dark balks of cypress. The
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chrysanthemum drapes of the worship hall flutter alluringly;
lanterns line the way, and the crowds are in a holiday mood
and summer robes. Parties chant with gusto as they parade
past with the palanquins housing their neighbourhood deities.
Yasukuni’s summer celebrations reach their
climax on August 15th, the anniversary of
Japan’s defeat in the second world war. As the
date draws closer the avenue expands into a
Bartholomew Fair of stalls and revelry. Not
everyone is jolly. Sombre groups that include
some of Japan’s few surviving war veterans
and their families remember fallen friends.
There are chin-jutting Yakuza thugs in suits a
size too small, and strutting military fantasists
kitted out with officers’ swords or kamikaze
flight suits. There are protesters—many of
them middle-aged or older—and police to keep
them in their place.
And there are ghosts. Without them Yasukuni
would have no purpose. The shrine honours
the souls of those who have died protecting the
emperor; they are revered as kami, which can
loosely though not wholly satisfactorily be
translated as “divine spirits”. Consecrated in
1869, the year after the Meiji Restoration
which launched Japan’s modernisation, the
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striking combination of solemn ritual and
popular entertainment that can come as a
surprise to people from other cultures was
present from the beginning; the first rites of
apotheosis were attended by fireworks,
cannons and sumo.
The first kami so enshrined were those who
had fought on the imperial side in the civil
wars around the time of the Meiji Restoration.
The number of their fellowship, and the size of
the festivals, grew with the occupation of
Taiwan (1895), Korea (1910), Manchuria
(1931), China’s eastern seaboard (1937) and
South-East Asia (1941). There are now
2,466,532 imperial protectors inscribed in
Yasukuni’s “Book of Souls”. Collectively, they
are viewed as a divine shield for the emperor.
By the tenets of the shrine, all these spirits are
equal. To the world at large, they are not. No
one objects to a nation honouring its war dead,
even if the cause for which they fought was a
bad one. But in 1978 the priests of Yasukuni
surreptitiously enshrined 14 political and
military leaders, including General Hideki
Tojo, the wartime prime minister, who had
been found guilty by the Tokyo War Crimes
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Trial of planning or prosecuting the military
aggression of the 1930s and 1940s. All 14 had
either been executed by Japan’s new American
overlords or died in prison. For many—
including many in Japan—granting divine
honour to such men went beyond the pale.
Emperor Hirohito, in whose name millions
died, stopped visiting Yasukuni; the current
emperor, Akihito, has upheld the boycott. Yet
visits by conservative nationalist politicians,
including the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, have
increased, drawing admonishment in much of
the world and stoking anger in China and
South Korea.
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There are other spirits that stand out, too—less
infamous, but more poignant. One is that of
Lee Sa-hyon, who was a native of the city that
today is Seoul but from 1910 to 1945 was Keijo,
the capital of Japanese-occupied Korea. By the
time Lee Sa-hyon was growing up in the 1930s,
most of his hometown’s city walls and royal
palaces had been razed; there was just enough
left to make tour parties from Japan think that
they were taking in something exotic (Korean
brothels were on the tourist trail, too). The
huge dome of the governor-general’s palace
dominated the city centre. The Imperial
Subject Oath Tower, built for the celebrations
in 1940 of the (wholly fabricated) 2,600th
anniversary of the Japanese imperial family,
housed written vows of loyalty to the emperor
from 1.4m Korean students.
"I'm not an
activist or a
scholar, just
the daughter
of a father
whom I never
met"
Lee Hee-ja, Lee Sa-hyon’s daughter, was born
in 1943, a time when Japan’s prospects were
looking grave. The Americans were fighting
their way up through the country’s Pacificisland possessions. The war against China that
had begun in 1937, and which the Japanese
had expected to be a relatively short affair, had
developed into a long struggle on an epic scale
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thanks to the resistance of the ascetic Christian
generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek, and his
Kuomintang (KMT). The demands of the war
effort stripped Korea and occupied Manchuria
to its north of both resources and people.
Thousands of Korean women were tricked and
abducted into military brothels; tens of
thousands of men were forced into labour in
mines and on industrial sites, mainly in Japan.
And from 1944 many were conscripted into the
army. Lee Sa-hyon became one of those
conscripts. In June 1945, just a few weeks
before the war’s end, he was killed in
Guangdong, in southern China.
His daughter is now 72. Like all East Asian
septuagenarians she has lived through times of
startling disruption. Like China, Ms Lee’s
country was wracked by civil war and divided
into two; like Japan and Taiwan, and later
China itself, it was also transformed by
remarkable economic growth. Its population
has tripled, its GDP risen by a factor of 50. It
has become, for the first time in its history, a
democracy. From the far end of a lifetime of
such profound change the war might be
expected to seem distant—as it does, for the
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most part, in America and Europe. But in ways
both great and small, in the details of
individual lives and in the relations between
states, the war that ended 70 years ago still
shapes East Asian worldviews, animating its
politics—and its ghosts.
In 1959 the spirit of Lee Sa-hyon was quietly
enshrined at Yasukuni; having died fighting for
the emperor, he became one of his divine
protectors. When his daughter found this out,
in 1996, she became determined to have his
name, and kami, removed from the shrine.
“I’m not an activist or a scholar,” she says, “just
the daughter of a father whom I never met. So I
feel I have an obligation to him: to bring him
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back from Yasukuni.” His proper resting place,
she has always maintained, should be at
Cheonan, south of Seoul, where a memorial
honours what is known as the March 1st
movement: millions of Koreans who took to the
streets in 1919 to protest against Japanese rule.
Thousands were mown down; many more
ended up in Keijo’s infamous Seodaemun
prison.
Moving a soul in Japan proves to be not so
easy. Yasukuni’s priests were polite but firm.
Once a spirit has joined the kami there is no
going back, whatever the circumstances. Ms
Lee turned to the government. Officials told
her that Lee Sa-hyon’s enshrinement was just
evidence that all imperial soldiers had been
treated equally. Ms Lee notes, though, that the
government never made any attempt to find
his remains, as it did those of Japanese
soldiers.
Along with others eager to liberate relatives
from Yasukuni—including some Japanese—Ms
Lee has turned to the courts. They have offered
no joy. In the latest set of cases, one of the
names for removal is that of an elderly
plaintiff, the reports of whose death have
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clearly been exaggerated—yet even being alive,
it seems, does not get you struck from the list
of the kami. It is rude even to ask, apparently.
A recent Tokyo High Court ruling said that the
plaintiffs should “show tolerance for others’
freedom of religion”.
Why, Ms Lee asks, does Japan’s establishment
not understand the humiliation of families like
hers, one it would be so easy to redress?
Japanese prime ministers have apologised for
their country’s aggression; its government has
acknowledged its culpability in enslaving
women in brothels. And the Japanese know
what it is to have people taken from them. Mr
Abe made his political reputation when, more
than a decade ago, he stood up to North Korea
over a number of Japanese citizens kidnapped
in the 1970s and 1980s to serve the brutal
regime as translators and spies. Every day Mr
Abe wears a blue ribbon in his lapel as a
reminder of them. Can he not see, Ms Lee says,
that her father was abducted too?
But no name has ever been removed from
Yasukuni.
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Rich country, strong army
T
he Meiji Restoration initiated a bout of
modernisation the like of which the world has never seen
elsewhere. Not even China’s transformation since 1978
compares to it. In less than two generations an insular feudal
shogunate became a modern power—not just an economic
power, but a military one. Japan’s leaders never forgot the
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indignity of American gunships forcing open what Herman
Melville called their “double-bolted land”. Fukoku kyohei, went
the rallying cry: “rich country, strong army”.
In the 70 years since 1945 Japan has fired not a
bullet in anger. In the 70 years before that, war
was central to its progress. Its expansionism
began in 1874, when it launched a first punitive
expedition to Formosa (now Taiwan). In 1879
it annexed the peaceful Ryukyu kingdom—
modern-day Okinawa. A war against the Qing
dynasty in 1894-95, fought largely on the
Korean peninsula, ended in humiliating defeat
for China; its centuries-old dominance of East
Asia was usurped. In 1905, in the greatest
naval victory since Nelson’s at Trafalgar 100
years before, Japan sent nearly the entire
Russian fleet to the bottom in the Tsushima
Strait between Korea and Japan, setting the
scene for its subsequent uncontested
annexation of Korea.
Given the condemnation Japanese militarism
was later to receive, it is worth recalling the
admiration Japan’s military modernisation
inspired in these early decades. It dressed its
imperial adventures abroad in a cloak of
righteousness, legalism and brute force—just
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as Western imperial powers did. Impressed,
those Western powers could hardly deny their
pupil a place at the top table—even if the new
member of the club was quick to detect racist
slights.
Asian nationalists, too, admired this new Japan
—among them Sun Yat-sen, the future founder
of republican China. Radicals and intellectuals
flocked to Tokyo to learn from an Asian power
that could foster pride and prosperity at home
while standing up to the West abroad. The
admiration even extended to Yasukuni,
embodying as it did the virtues of loyalty, selfsacrifice and patriotism. In the early 1890s
Wang Tao, a Chinese intellectual and reformer,
wrote approvingly that it was “easy to
understand the intention behind the Japanese
government’s enshrining of the war dead: the
enthusiasm of the masses will flourish, and
their loyalty will never be found wanting.”
Imperial China’s defeat at Japanese hands
followed shortly thereafter.
Alifetimeofchange
TrackingpopulationandwealthinEastAsiaafterthesecondworldwar
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1953
Population
Populationgrowth
%,onyearprevious
4.0
Taiwan
3.5
JAPAN
87.1m
3.0
2.5
2.0
SKOREA
20.5m
SKorea
1.5
1.0
CHINA
60
569.6m
20
TAIWAN
8.3m
Population
m
0.5
Japan
0.0
China
1960
1970
-0.5
1980
1990
2000
-1.0
2010
Source:PennWorldTables
Like the imperialism of the European powers it
sought to emulate, Japan’s colonialism was
rooted in violence and, often, racism. But by
the early 1930s it had also become oddly
chaotic—the result not so much of a strategic
aim to further national greatness as of a lack of
control over adventurism. The last of the
oligarchs who had wielded power after the
Meiji Restoration, and who had a restraining
influence on the armed forces, shuffled off the
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stage. In 1931 a clique of army officers
presented their occupation of Manchuria to the
government as a fait accompli. After the
League of Nations condemned the move, Japan
withdrew from the body and entered a pact
with Nazi Germany in the name of fighting
communism. In 1937 a flare-up between
Chinese and Japanese troops at the Marco Polo
Bridge outside Beijing precipitated a “war of
annihilation”, as Japan’s prime minister,
Fumimaro Konoe, called it, down the length of
China’s eastern seaboard.
John Dower, a historian of Japan at MIT,
underlines that modern societies are not
mobilised for war in the name of committing
aggression, and that Japan was no exception.
Its aggression was painted at home as either a
defence of legitimate interests or a selfless
crusade against communism. Condemnation
by Western colonial powers was dismissed as
so much hypocrisy: Japan was the liberator
and natural leader of Asian nations suffering
under Western colonialism. Pan-Asianism was
the philosophical, and at times spiritual,
underpinning of Japanese expansionism. For
Japan, as Mr Dower puts it, the years in which
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it fought to subjugate what developed into its
“Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” were
a period of “beautiful, modern war”.
Many conservative Japanese nationalists still
see the beauty of that period. Mr Abe believes
that Japan’s pursuit of fukoku kyohei was
essentially right then and still is today, and that
its resumption is the key to making Japan what
some would call a “normal” nation again. It is
what Mr Abe chooses to call “the post-war”
which is the shameful historical exception, with
its reliance on American tutelage and a
constitution that clips Japan’s wings abroad.
To take such a position is not to deny that
Japan did wrong. John Delury, a historian of
East Asia at Yonsei University in Seoul, argues
that, instead, it is to believe that imperial
Japan behaved in war little differently from
other countries. And other countries did
grievous wrong. Witness the smouldering
aftermath of the firebombing of Tokyo, in
which 100,000 died; witness the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On this
view history places no special obligation of
remorse or apology on the Japanese: “indeed,
not feeling obliged to express special remorse…
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is a manifestation of Japan’s belated return to
normalcy”.
Back at Yasukuni, the shrine is bathed in
beautiful lies. A visit to its associated museum,
the Yushukan, finds the militarism that
brought Japan to its knees still glorified. Grim
engines of death have pride of place, including
the Kaiten (“Return to Heaven”) torpedo, a 15metre, matt-black projectile with a tiny seat
inside and a small periscope—in effect, a
submersible suicide vest. The atrocities of
Nanjing (1937) and Manila (1945), in which
Japanese troops massacred tens if not
hundreds of thousands of civilians and
prisoners-of-war in an orgy of murder and
rape, are downplayed or denied. Always, war
aims are painted as noble and pure: Japan
standing as a bulwark against Western
imperialism, communism or the anarchy of
Chinese warlords.
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The horcrux theory of history
W
hen Mr Abe paid his respects at Yasukuni in
late 2013 he fulfilled a campaign promise and generated a
diplomatic storm. Around the world China’s diplomats took to
op-ed pages with the aim of stoking anti-Japan sentiment. In
Britain’s Daily Telegraph the Chinese ambassador to London,
Liu Xiaoming, called Yasukuni a “kind of horcrux, representing
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the darkest parts of [Japan’s] soul”. He expected his readers to
know that, in the world of Harry Potter, a horcrux stores a
fragment of a sundered soul in hope of immortality, and can be
created only by murder. He hoped they would infer that Mr
Abe was the new Lord Voldemort.
It was a smart stroke of rhetoric. It was also
more than a little disingenuous. China’s
Communist Party has a horcrux of its own on
which until not long ago it pinned all hopes of
immortality—the corpse of Mao Zedong. His
violent rule saw the murder in purge and
famine of millions of his countrymen. Yet since
his death in 1976 his remains have lodged
under a huge and ugly mausoleum in
Tiananmen Square, the symbolic centre of
Chinese power, embalmed but very slowly
putrefying.
Mao is a necessary source of legitimacy for
China’s rulers, but no longer a sufficient one.
There is enough awareness of the violence and
misrule that he oversaw that even the
Communist Party has had to avow that his rule
was only “70% good”. And as China’s economic
and diplomatic clout grow, prestige matters to
its rulers in ways that never really interested
Mao, and which his legacy can do nothing to
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promote. So a reinvigorated nationalism has
joined economic growth and military strength
as part of the “Chinese Dream”—a nationalism
defined above all in opposition to wartime
Japanese aggression. President Xi Jinping
clearly sees the memory of that struggle as a
tool for shaping Chinese identity.
China’s leaders think memories of its role in
the war should matter abroad, too. America’s
claim to a Pacific presence rests on its defeat of
Japan. China’s claim to leadership in its region
rests on its role in that same defeat—a role for
which, after all, it was at the time rewarded
with one of the permanent seats on the UN
Security Council reserved for the victors. In Mr
Liu’s horcrux op-ed he referred to Chinese
soldiers standing “shoulder to shoulder” with
Allied troops. Last month he sent this
correspondent an invitation to a 70th
anniversary commemoration of August 15th
that refers to “the Victory of the World AntiFascist War and the Chinese People’s War
against Japanese Aggression”.
China’s contribution to the second world war
certainly deserves a reappraisal, as Rana Mitter
of the University of Oxford argues in a recent
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book on the Sino-Japanese war, “Forgotten
Ally”. From the outbreak of hostilities at the
Marco Polo Bridge in 1937 to December 7th
1941, when Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor
forced America into the war, China fought
Japan alone. Mr Mitter argues that, had China
surrendered in 1938, as seemed all too likely at
the time, East Asia might have been a Japanese
imperium for decades. Instead it fought on, at
enormous cost. Perhaps 15m Chinese soldiers
and civilians died in the war of 1937-45, with
100m made refugees; of the other nations at
war only the Soviet Union suffered losses on a
similar scale. True, China failed in the end to
beat the Japanese. But its dogged resistance
tied down hundreds of thousands of Japanese
troops.
This is the legacy that Mr Xi insists be
recognised. But there is an inconvenient truth.
For decades the official Communist Party
narrative had little space for the KMT and
Chiang Kai-shek; if they were mentioned at all,
it was as anti-communist forces too cowardly,
corrupt or unpatriotic to take on the Japanese.
China’s “liberation” came not in 1945 but in
1949—that is, with the Communists’ defeat of
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the nationalists in the civil war that followed
Japan’s collapse. Communism’s victory over
nationalism was thus framed as the end point
of its victory over fascism.
Yet it was in fact the armies of the antiimperialist, fiercely nationalist KMT that
offered the chief resistance to Japan’s army,
drawing it ever deeper into the mire. It was
they who shared in the suffering, hardship and
endurance on the part of hundreds of millions
of Chinese civilians that marked the eight
wartime years beyond the relatively small and
secure Communist base areas. It is quite
possible that, had the KMT not spent so much
of its force in that struggle, Chiang would have
won the subsequent civil war.
Viciously suppressed in the decades following
the war, this part of the country’s history is
now being cautiously and selectively
rehabilitated as part of the new nationalism
through which China is expressing its regional
and global aspirations. Among other things,
this serves the purpose of uniting the stories of
Taiwan—to which Chiang and the KMT fled in
1949—and mainland China, stressing the
common struggle of the Chinese against
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Japanese aggression rather than their division
by civil war. Beyond reasons of state, though, it
is also bubbling up from below, as regions of
China previously marginalised manifest a new
desire to tell their own war stories.
In a large apartment in a brand-new suburb of
Chongqing, a city in China’s south-west, Wang
Suzhen, a diminutive lady in floral pyjamas,
disappears into a vast faux-leather sofa
surrounded by three generations of her family.
Opposite, a television covering the entire wall
pumps out a reality programme devoted to
parental indulgence: a father takes a girl in a
tutu to a ballet lesson; a little emperor in
sunglasses drives a scale model of a BMW.
Outside, Chongqing is Dickensian in its smog
and nearly hellish in its summer heat, the
Yangzi river winding brown and swollen at the
feet of its steep hillsides.
Chiang Kai-shek retreated to Chongqing with
his government in 1938, the year after Nanjing,
then the capital of the Republic of China, fell to
the Japanese amid great slaughter—an
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infamous victory which put the invaders in
control of nearly all of China’s coast, including
Shanghai. Millions of Chinese followed Chiang
to Chongqing; it was the provisional capital
until the end of the war.
They were seven hard years. Though
geographical remoteness and mountain
topography offered the city a degree of
protection, the war was always present. Many
civilians died in air raids; on June 5th 1941
some 1,500 civilians died from suffocation in a
single shelter. Boatmen were paid half a kilo of
rice per body to take the corpses out of the city.
The Wang family did better than most. Living
outside Chongqing in a town called Shilong,
they escaped the air raids. Just six days before
the defeat of Japan, Ms Wang was born. Soon
after the family moved to Chongqing proper
where they made a living selling the silk
embroidery they made in the city’s wholesale
markets. But the Communist victory in the civil
war changed the city. Chongqing’s sense of
itself as a centre of resistance, and its price in
its wartime experience, were suppressed. Its
Monument to Victory in the Anti-Japanese
War was renamed the Liberation Monument.
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People with a “bad” class background—that is,
evil “landlords” and nationalists who had come
to the region with Chiang Kai-shek—were
stigmatised. Ms Wang’s family was forced out
of the city and into the countryside.
One political campaign after another washed
over the agricultural collective where Ms
Wang’s mother struggled to feed eight
children. Ms Wang remembers a cow being
brought to the production team in winter, but
having no hay with which to feed it. Then
people started eating grass themselves, leading
to bloating and sometimes starving all the
same. Later, during the Cultural Revolution,
Red Guards dragged evil “landlords” outside
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and beat them. “We didn’t ask questions,” Ms
Wang says. “We didn’t dare speak, or we’d get
beaten too.”
In 1987 Ms Wang and her family left the
commune and prospered growing their own
crops for market. The government gave her
daughter, a teacher, a flat, into which they all
moved. In 1989 they got their first television,
and a fridge. In 2005 they bought their first
car. No one in the family imagined that things
could change so fast. A few years ago Ms Wang
found spiritual comfort, too. It happened when
an elderly relative died, leaving behind her
troubled ghost. A Taoist master was called in to
appease the ghost but it did not work. “Then
some Christian friends said that their kind of
prayers could bring peace, and they did.” The
ghost no longer troubles the family; Ms Wang
goes to church each week.
In her spiritual development Ms Wang is
somewhat unusual; in her family’s enrichment
she is quite typical of her city. And as the
south-west has grown richer, so it has started
to tell the story of its wartime experience more
openly. On August 15th Chongqing’s
newspapers used to spout the same national
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narrative one might read in Beijing. Now they
celebrate local wartime heroes. The air-raid
shelter that suffered the disaster of 1941 has
been designated as a memorial site. In Chiang
Kai-shek’s hilltop hideout of Huangshan
visitors are welcomed by a young actor decked
out in the generalissimo’s scholarly gown and
thin moustache.
If Chongqing is reclaiming its past—and China
as a whole coming to acknowledge the role of
nationalism, and not just communism, in
fighting the forces of imperialism—what does
that mean for relations with the Japanese?
There are signs it may improve them; a more
nuanced view of Chinese history permits a
more nuanced view of its adversary.
On the face of it, Ms Wang still sees things the
old way: the Japanese, she says, are cruel and
she dislikes them. Has she ever met one? No,
she admits, but—nodding at the television—she
sees them all the time. Reminded that the
Japanese in the war movies on television are
Chinese actors in costume, she laughs. “It’s just
propaganda, I know,” she says, before
becoming absorbed along with the rest of the
family in the girl in the pink tutu.
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Mr Xi’s use of old antagonisms to buttress a
modern nationalist identity is a worrying one.
But there is a lot else shaping the ideas of a
richer society than any China has known. As if
to underline the point Ms Wang murmurs, as
much to herself as to this correspondent, “Who
would miss the past?”
The displaced
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25/09/16 13:15
he spirits of Yasukuni are not the only ones with
whom Mr Abe communes. After his election victory in 2012 he
went straight to the tomb of his grandfather to make a
promise. Like his grandson, Nobusuke Kishi rose to be prime
minister, serving from 1957 to 1960. A fervent nationalist, he
had nonetheless accepted, in the face of Japan’s surrender to
the United States and its neutered post-war role as little
brother, that the restoration of wealth had to come before the
resumption of power. But—and Kishi was clear on this point—
this was to be only a temporary expedient.
In 1965 Kishi argued that rearmament was
necessary as “a means of eradicating
completely the consequences of Japan’s defeat
and the American occupation. It is necessary to
enable Japan finally to move out of the postwar era and for the Japanese people to regain
their self-confidence and pride as Japanese.”
The words could have come from Mr Abe’s
manifesto. The promise Mr Abe made by his
grandfather’s grave was that he would “recover
the true independence” of Japan.
This is not to say that Mr Abe is anti-American.
Like his grandfather, he needs America to
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ensure his country’s security. He has
strengthened the countries’ military alliance,
agreeing to revised defence guidelines in April
in the face of a rising China. But he feels deeply
America’s role in “the history of Japan’s
destruction”—by which he means not the
physical devastation of the war, but the
subsequent period of American-imposed order.
He hates the war-crimes tribunal that sat in
Tokyo: what hypocrisy to hang the Japanese
leaders who conquered Asia at the same time
as the Western powers were reasserting their
rule in Asian colonies. He sees the constitution
imposed on the country as constraining
Japan’s legitimate ambitions. A left-wing
conspiracy in education inculcates war guilt
and an aversion to patriotism.
"I did what
they said. And
then they
started
hitting me."
The role of that post-war order in the
subsequent seven decades of peace, prosperity
and democracy from which Mr Abe’s Liberal
Democratic Party has been a great beneficiary
is passed over in such analysis. Yet America is
in no position to call Japan’s nationalists out
on the grounds of double standards. It was,
after all, General Douglas MacArthur who
chose not to prosecute Emperor Hirohito for
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the crimes that were committed in his name
and by a political system to which he was
central, on the unprovable but implausible
grounds that a crushed people would be more
biddable with their emperor still in place. That
decision made it harder for Japan to examine
its actions, and make a full accounting of them,
both to its victims and to itself. The cold war,
for which America needed experienced,
conservative allies in Japan, removed any
lingering chance of such a reckoning. Almost
immediately after the Tokyo tribunal handed
down its first batch of sentences, the other
people indicted for Class A crimes were
released from Tokyo’s Sugamo prison and put
in positions of authority.
Notable among them was the mastermind of
Japan’s Manchurian puppet state, known as
Manchukuo, in north-east China. By
harnessing private capital to a heavily statedirected economy, he had turned Manchukuo
into the engine of Japan’s war machine. Mark
Driscoll of the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill has written of the system’s
“necropolitical” vision of dehumanised Chinese
labour. Yet the brutal human cost of this
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experimental, hyper-modern state is now
largely forgotten, while its marriage of private
capital and heavy state direction was a direct
inspiration not just for Japan’s post-war
development, but also, subsequently, for that
of South Korea—and China, too. And the
mastermind behind this? Nobusuke Kishi
himself.
Mr Abe’s uncritical belief that his country’s
essence is inextricably bound into the
institutions of the Meiji Restoration and all
that they went on to spawn is wrongheaded.
But it is equally wrong to decry all aspects of
continuity between Japan’s pre-war and postwar. On all sides ghosts are kept locked away.
Instead they should be allowed to speak and
also to listen—to hear and voice the complex
truths of war, responsibility and victimhood.
Xu Ming remembers the first time she found
herself outside without her mother holding her
hand. She asked a group of children if she
could play. “ ‘No’, said one. ‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Because you’re a xiao riben guizi—a little
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Japanese devil.’ Then the tallest child
intervened. ‘Okay’, he said, ‘You can play. But
you have to be a dog. You must crawl between
our legs and say bow-wow.’ So I did that. And
then they started hitting me.”
Ms Xu was born in Heilongjiang province in
north-east China, part of Manchuria, in 1944—
three years after Kishi had been recalled from
his position there to serve as industry minister
in Tokyo. She was an only child brought up by
loving and protective parents. And she was
badly bullied. When she was seven her class
were taken to see a war film that showed
Communist troops in glorious battle against
the murderous, evil Japanese. The children
around her starting shouting “Down with the
Japanese”. And then they were spitting at her.
After the film the teacher held a roll call, but
Xu Ming was missing. The teacher found her
crouched under her chair, her eyes red with
crying. She scolded the class: Xu Ming, she
said, is only a child; and the film is only a film.
That day, Xu Ming determined to be a teacher.
A year later an officer from the Public Security
Bureau came to her house. Xu Ming was sent
outside but craned to hear the conversation.
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The officer was shouting: “You had better
admit it: the child is Japanese and you adopted
her.” Her mother burst into tears. Xu Ming ran
in to comfort her. Mother and daughter cried
so much that the officer gave up any further
questioning.
It was then that Xu Ming asked: “I’m Japanese,
aren’t I?”
“Yes”, her mother replied, “you are.”
According to John Dower, there were over 6m
Japanese stranded overseas when the war
ended. Their story is strangely little told, even
in Japan. Something over half of the stranded
were servicemen, many wounded,
malnourished or diseased. The rest were
administrators, bank clerks, railwaymen,
farmers, industrialists, prostitutes, spies,
photographers, barbers, children. For them
and for their families and friends back home,
just as for conscripted and exiled Chinese and
Koreans in similar situations, August 15th was
far from a definitive end. A year after its defeat
2m Japanese had still not made it home. Many
never did. A national radio programme,
“Missing Persons”, was launched in 1946. It
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went off-air only in 1962.
The Allies took advantage of surrendered
servicemen. The Americans used 70,000 as
labourers on Pacific bases. The British, in a
supreme irony, made use of over 100,000
Japanese to reassert colonial authority over
parts of South-East Asia that had just been
“liberated”. In China tens of thousands of
Japanese fought on both sides of the civil war.
The worst fate was to be under Russian
“protection”. The Soviet Union, which entered
the war in its last week, accepted the surrender
of Japanese forces in Manchuria and northern
Korea. Perhaps 1.6m Japanese soldiers fell into
its hands. About 625,000 were repatriated at
the end of 1947, many having been sent to
labour camps in Siberia and submitted to
intense ideological indoctrination. Others were
able to make their way south to the Americancontrolled sector of the Korean Peninsula. In
early 1949 the Soviets claimed that only 95,000
Japanese remained to be repatriated—leaving,
by Japanese and American calculations, over
300,000 unaccounted for.
In August 1945 there were also 1m Japanese
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civilians in Manchuria. Some 179,000 are
thought to have died trying to get to Japan in
the confusion and Soviet-perpetrated violence
following surrender, or during the harsh winter
of 1945-46. Children returned to Japan as
orphans, the family’s ashes in a box hung
around their neck. In Manchuria parents
begged Chinese peasant families to take in
their youngest children.
That is what Ms Xu’s natural mother had done.
Her father, serving in the imperial army, had
been dragged off to Siberia. Her mother
thought Ming, the youngest of her daughters,
would not survive the journey to Japan. She
begged a couple to take the baby. When that
couple later had more children of their own
they sold Ming on to the Xu family.
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In due course Ms Xu passed as a teacher. She
qualified with flying colours that might have
hinted at a stellar career. But the following
years were spent teaching the children of
loggers in dismal mobile camps deep in
Heilongjiang’s forests. “There’s nothing you
can do about it,” her professor had said:
“You’re Japanese.” In the timber camps they
ground up sweetcorn husks and tree bark for
bread, but living in such remote places
shielded Ms Xu from the worst madness of the
Cultural Revolution. Back in her home town
the ethnic-Japanese dentist, gentle and
diligent, was dragged to the crossroad with a
sign around her neck denouncing her as a
Japanese spy. Every time she was asked
whether she was a spy and denied it she was
hit. Three days later she was dead.
In 1972 the Japanese prime minister, Kakuei
Tanaka, visited China, initiating a programme
of billions of dollars of bilateral aid for its
former foe. Japanese people started coming to
Heilongjiang to look for family members. A
visiting journalist promised Ms Xu he would
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place advertisements on her behalf in Japanese
publications so that she might find her birth
family. An old soldier in Hokkaido responded
to one, certain she was his daughter. In 1981 a
visa was secured for Ms Xu. She was intensely
excited to go to Japan; her meeting with the
old soldier was emotional. Then a DNA test
showed they were not related. The old soldier
would have no more to do with her.
Japanese bureaucrats threatened to deport Ms
Xu: Chinese court documents affirming her
Japanese blood counted for nothing. While
fighting through the courts to stay, she
volunteered her help at a local NGO dealing
with the “Manchurian orphans”. One morning,
in a nearby café, two Japanese women on the
way to the NGO asked whether they could
share her table. Of course, Xu Ming said, in her
still accented Japanese. The women asked
whether she was Chinese and if so from where?
Heilongjiang, Xu Ming replied. That’s where
our mother left our sister, the women said. The
coincidences grew: the town, the name of the
family, Li, that first adopted Ms Xu, the Li
home being right by the railway track. The
three sisters were together again for the first
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time since 1945. For Sumie Ikeda, as Ms Xu
now knew herself to be, the elation was
tempered only by her learning that their
mother had died just months before. But now
her ghost, at least, could rest.
The lives scarred in the second world war are
nearing their ends. The Asian history they are
part of continues to shape the worlds of those
people’s children and grandchildren, though.
In some places it is distorted, in others denied.
Some victims and some victors are
commemorated. Others are forgotten.
In the 1960s a head priest at Yasukuni more
liberal than today’s put up a tiny shrine in a
corner of the grounds to pacify the spirits of
fallen enemies. It is now surrounded by a high
metal fence, and out of bounds to visitors. On
its annual feast day in July a young priest
unceremoniously places a bowl of fruit outside
the shrine as an offering and shambles off. As
for the Japanese victims of aggression—the
young soldiers, let down by their generals, who
died of hunger and disease in New Guinea
jungles, the hundreds of thousands of civilians
killed as the war came to the Japanese home
islands: they are nowhere to be seen. Yasukuni
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remembers only glorious deaths.
“Who would miss the past,” asks Ms Wang,
from her sofa in Chongqing. Who indeed? But
the past is not just there to be missed.
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Remembering and Forgetting the War
Remembering and Forgetting
the War
Elite Mythmaking, Mass Reaction,
and Sino-Japanese Relations, 1950–2006
Yinan He
Ruling elites often make pernicious national myths for instrumental purposes,
creating divergent historical memories of the same events in different countries.
But they tend to exploit international history disputes only when they feel insecure
domestically. Societal reactions to elite mythmaking, reflected in radicalized public
opinion, can reinforce history disputes. During the 1950s–1970s, China avoided
history disputes with Japan to focus on geostrategic interests. Only from the early
1980s did domestic political incentives motivate Beijing to attack Japanese historical
memory and promote assertive nationalism through patriotic history propaganda,
which radicalized Chinese popular views about Japan. Media highlighting of
Japan’s historical revisionism exacerbated societal demands to settle war accounts
with Japan, while factional politics within the Chinese Communist Party made it
difficult for the top leaders to compromise on the bilateral “history issue.”
Introduction
On 13 August 2001 Japan’s new prime minister, Koizumi Junichiro, paid
homage at the Shintoist Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, dedicated to the spirits of those who died fighting on behalf of the Emperor of Japan, and a
long-time symbol of Japanese imperialist aggression in the eyes of China.
While he claimed that his visit to the shrine was intended to “convey to all
victims of the war my heartfelt repentance and condolences” and “pledge
for peace,” it was immediately denounced by the Chinese government
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Yinan He
as an “erroneous act that has damaged the political foundation of SinoJapanese relations as well as the feelings of the Chinese people and other
Asian victims.”1 Nonetheless, Koizumi continued his annual visits to the
shrine until shortly before stepping down in September 2006. With much
anger, the Chinese leaders refused to hold summit meetings with Koizumi,
and Chinese mass protests against Japan repeatedly erupted, first through
Internet petitions and later culminating in large-scale anti-Japanese demonstrations in 2005. During the Koizumi years, bilateral relations reached
their “lowest point since diplomatic normalization in 1972.”2
The Yasukuni incidents were only a recent indication of the sharp
clash between Chinese and Japanese interpretations of their war history.
Beginning from the first Sino-Japanese textbook controversy in 1982,
bilateral political disputes over history, or the “history issue,” have severely
escalated. The role of historical memory in contemporary Sino-Japanese
relations has long puzzled students of East Asian politics because it defies
two conventional wisdoms: first, that time can heal all wounds; and second, that growing bilateral contacts should mitigate historical grievances.
China and Japan fought a traumatic war during 1937–45, but they did
not start to quarrel about history until more than three decades later, the
early 1980s, when the majority of the population no longer had direct
experience of the war and the two countries had developed close economic
and social ties. Since then, their political disputes over the memory of the
war have continued unabated, becoming a major concern in bilateral relations and overshadowing the prospect of regional stability and prosperity
in East Asia.3
Why do countries today still bicker about events decades or even
centuries old? Why cannot the governments restrain such seemingly
irrational quarrels that may jeopardize more tangible national interests?
I argue that the fundamental cause of international political conflict over
history lies in the intentional manipulation of history by ruling elites, or
national mythmaking, for instrumental purposes. National myths, which
are fanciful stories about the origins, identity and purposes of a nation,
constitute an integral part of the ideological foundation for national
identity and nationalism.4 Though often distorting historical facts, myths
present a picture of the shared past that can evoke the deepest emotional
resonance from the populace. Elites use these highly symbolic myths to
justify national security policy or address domestic political concerns such
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Remembering and Forgetting the War
as regime legitimacy, social mobilization needs, and factional and organizational interests.5 These myths tend to lead different countries to interpret
the same historical events with great discrepancy. Elites may shelve their
historiographical differences with another country for fear of damaging
immediate economic and political interests but tend to exploit the political benefit of these differences when they feel a strong sense of insecurity
in domestic politics.
Not all national myths are elite-driven or falsifiable. Anthony Smith’s
ethno-culturalist theory claims that since national myths are traditional
stories about the ethnic origins of a nation, they should be value-neutral
and not really falsifiable.6 However, nationalism scholars in the school of
“invented traditions” emphasize the falsity in certain mythical representations of national history.7 In order to understand international history
disputes, I focus here on national myths that blatantly distort history,
especially three types of pernicious myths created by ruling elites that serve
to incite international conflict: (a) self-glorifying myths, which explicitly
incorporate inflated or false claims of national virtue and competence; these
include myths of victimization that form a “cult of national martyrdom,”
endowing a nation with moral superiority;8 (b) self-whitewashing myths,
which deny or rationalize a nation’s past wrongdoing against others; and
(c) other-maligning myths, which denigrate other nations as inferior,
evil or culpable.9 In particular, such myths foster disagreement between
former enemy countries over what happened during their past conflict
and generate dramatically different answers to the question of “who bears
what kind of responsibility to whom for having done what.”10 Myths that
glorify their own countries’ beneficence and virtues, deny guilt for crimes
and blame others for tragedies will harden the perpetrator side’s claim of
their own innocence and the victim side’s demand for retribution.
Meanwhile, it is important to understand that national mythmaking
is rarely implemented in a strictly top-down, coherent fashion because
national memory is constructed through a complex process of contestation.
Internal memory contestation can escalate and perpetuate international
history disputes: intra-elite tension may compel the top leaders to maintain a hard-line position externally, and elite mythmaking may radicalize
public opinion about another country. Therefore, even if the governments
would rather de-escalate history disputes when their cost, such as damage to
bilateral economic cooperation, exceeds the benefits, factional and societal
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Yinan He
forces may prevent them from compromising on the “history issue.” In
order to illustrate these arguments, this article examines, as a case study,
the fluctuations in postwar Sino-Japanese political disputes over history,
from the silence in the first three decades after the war to the vociferous
clashes over memory from 1982.
Avoiding the “history issue,” 1950–1981
After Japan’s catastrophic defeat in World War II, the Japanese conservative elites fostered three major national myths whose main purpose was
to cleanse the reputation of the conservative group tarnished by its inextricable ties to the wartime government and legitimate its ruling power.
First, the “myth of the military clique” blamed a small group of military
leaders for launching the war and asserted that the Japanese people were
peace-loving, innocent victims of the war. This myth whitewashed the complicity of a wide range of wartime political actors, including the emperor
and court officials, zaibatsu, or business conglomerates, civilian politicians
and high-ranking bureaucrats, who regrouped in the conservative parties in postwar Japanese politics. It also ignored the enthusiastic support
that numerous ordinary Japanese had given to the war policy. Second,
the Western-centric myth held Japan responsible for opening hostilities
against the Western Allies but evaded its aggression and atrocities in Asia.
The conservatives perpetuated this myth because acknowledging and
thoroughly investigating war crimes would have incriminated many people
outside the military clique. Third, the “heroic sacrifice” myth gave imperial
soldiers special honor for having sacrificed themselves for the nation. By
extolling the military’s image, conservative historiography circumvented
the fundamental mistakes in the war policy and the horrendous atrocities
committed by the military rank and file.11
Elite mythmaking was also prevalent in China, largely motivated
by national security interests. After 1949, the central theme of Chinese
grand strategy was to counterbalance the threat of “American imperialism” because of its containment policy against Communist China and
commitment to support the Kuomintang (KMT)-led regime in Taiwan
after the outbreak of the Korean War. In line with this strategy, Chinese
communist ideologues sought to anchor national identity in the “defining
fundamental fissure” between the Chinese Communists and the Capital46
Remembering and Forgetting the War
ists, including the KMT and its American ally.12 The official history of the
Sino-Japanese War made every effort to magnify the role of the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) in the national resistance campaign and condemn
the KMT and the US.
Related to the struggle against the US was China’s policy toward its
Western allies, including Japan. The CCP leaders saw a world not merely
dominated by two superpowers but also ridden by contradictions between
superpowers and smaller powers; if Beijing could build a revolutionary
United Front with both socialist countries and smaller Western powers,
it would erode international support for the US-led containment against
China.13 From the 1950s, Beijing practiced “people’s diplomacy” toward
Japan, a semi-official diplomatic campaign aimed at changing Tokyo’s
policy of non-recognition of Beijing and undercutting its security alliance
with Washington.14 In the arena of historical memory, the Chinese official
narrative refrained from demonizing the entire Japanese nation but drew
a clear line between “the small handful of Japanese militarists” and ordinary Japanese people, who were treated as the Chinese people’s fellow
victims of the militarists. Clearly overlapping with the Japanese “myth of
the military clique,” such a moderate tone on Japanese war responsibility
was designed to promote a favorable impression of Communist China
in Japanese society and facilitate “people’s diplomacy.” Moreover, the
distinction between the many good Japanese and the few bad Japanese
supported the class-based communist ideology, the primary foundation
of the Beijing regime’s legitimacy.
The interest calculus behind national mythmaking does not suggest
that the process of elite manipulation of history is linear because contestation over memory construction almost always exists between ruling elites
and societal forces, and even between different elite factions. Whether
myths created by certain ruling elites can become the hegemonic national
memory and shape the core ideas of national identity has much to do with
the larger political opportunity structure, including the balance of power
between elite groups, and ultimately their ability to control the institutional
tools of memory construction, including school textbooks, museums and
commemorative rituals, and post-conflict resolution measures, including
war compensation programs. Whichever political group enjoys domination of these institutional tools will succeed in instating its own version
of historiography as the mainstream memory.
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Yinan He
The above Japanese and Chinese national myths became the official
memory mainly due to the dominant state control over memory production
that coerced societal voices into silence or marginal influence. In Japan, the
conservatives’ interest in manipulating history coincided with the American
strategy of supporting a stable conservative government in Tokyo both
to achieve occupation objectives and to make Japan an important anticommunist bulwark in Asia.15 Japan’s progressive elites, often associated
with the Japanese Socialist Party (JSP), Japanese Communist Party (JCP)
and other left-wing organizations, held a more forthright perspective on
war guilt, and they indeed practiced “history as opposition” to compete
with the ruling conservative elites for power and influence.16 But the
influence of the progressive forces on the hegemonic national memory
diminished as the JSP and JCP repeatedly lost in the power struggle against
the American-supported Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). As a result,
the conservatives were able to disseminate national myths through such
institutional tools as the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, textbook authorization
system, postwar compensation policies, and war commemoration rituals
such as those at the Yasukuni Shrine and the peace museums in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.17
Moreover, Japanese conservative elites successfully spread these
national myths because they were in accordance with the broad frame of
public attitudes. Consuelo Cruz suggests that when constructing rhetoric
systems for national identity, political actors must operate within the limit
of “imaginable possibilities.”18 In order to appear truthful or persuasive
to the public, national myths usually build on certain embedded perceptions and genuine emotions that already exist in family memories and
folk culture, rather than “fabricating” something entirely new. Japanese
myths of self-glorification and whitewashing won wide public resonance
precisely because they captured the imagination of the general public in
the aftermath of the war, when the nation was preoccupied with its own
sufferings and in no mood to face up to Japan’s war guilt vis-à-vis other
Asian nations.
With its totalitarian control of state power and thorough penetration
of societal life, the CCP easily institutionalized war myths as the hegemonic
national memory. Chinese school textbooks in the 1950s and 1960s praised
the CCP as the sole leader of the “Great Chinese War of Resistance against
Japanese Aggression.”19 In contrast, they accused the KMT of kowtowing
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to and actively collaborating with the Japanese aggressors, and blamed
the US for conniving with the Japanese and helping the KMT suppress
Chinese communism. They omitted those significant, sometimes valorous
battles fought by the KMT troops, and neglected to mention American
military aid to China and the larger picture of the Pacific War. Compared
to the vivid descriptions of the wartime roles of the CCP and KMT,
textbook treatment of Japanese actions was rather cut-and-dried, rarely
providing details, and never condemning the entire Japanese nation, but
only the ridi (Japanese imperialism), rijun (Japanese military), or rikou
(Japanese bandits) The state-controlled media also claimed that ordinary
Japanese people wanted peace, and urged them to join hands with the
Chinese people to oppose the US–Japan alliance that “would drag Japan
into another disastrous war.”20
Although echoing Japan’s “myth of the military clique,” Chinese
official history conflicted with the other two Japanese myths that glorified the imperial army and denied Japan’s victimization of Asia. However,
Beijing deliberately set aside these differences lest the Chinese people
confuse Japan with their true archenemies, the KMT and America. Domestically, the government suppressed historical investigation of Japanese war
crimes.21 War movies avoided elaborating on this topic because otherwise
they would be disseminating sentimentalism and capitalist humanitarianism
that would “dilute our hatred of imperialism” and “lower our morale.”22
The government also blocked information on Japanese textbook distortion
and other domestic programs that asserted the other two Japanese myths.
Externally, Beijing handled bilateral historical legacies with exceptional
generosity. Shortly before the 1956 war-crimes trials, the CCP Central
Committee defined two principles with regard to Japanese war criminals:
none should be executed or sentenced to life in jail, and verdicts of imprisonment should be limited to a very small number of people. Therefore,
of approximately 1,000 Japanese war criminals detained in China at the
time, only 45 were sentenced to prison, the rest pardoned and quickly
repatriated.23 Moreover, Beijing never made war reparations a precondition or bargaining chip in its diplomacy toward Japan, and in the 1960s
even decided within the party that the government would forgo reparation
claims in the future.24
Toward the end of the 1960s, profound international structural
changes, including the Sino-Soviet confrontation and Sino-American rap49
Yinan He
prochement, compelled Beijing to collaborate with more Western powers,
a category that included Japan, to confront Soviet hegemonism. Shortly
before Sino-Japanese normalization, the CCP Central Committee issued
to its members Mao’s policy instruction that cooperation with Japan would
“contribute to the struggle against American and Soviet hegemonism,
especially Soviet revisionism” and was useful for opposing a Japanese
militarist revival, liberating Taiwan and mitigating tensions in Asia.25
Given the strategic significance of bilateral solidarity in the face of
the common Soviet threat, Beijing reached a compromise with Tokyo
on issues considered secondary, such as war memory. When signing the
joint communiqué of diplomatic normalization in Beijing in September
1972, Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei spoke of the “unfortunate period”
in bilateral history, for which he expressed “deep reflection,” but not
apology.26 Beijing quickly accepted this ambiguous gesture of contrition
in exchange for speedy diplomatic recognition. At the beginning of the
preparatory meetings negotiating the joint communiqué, Premier Zhou
Enlai offered to renounce claims for war reparations.27 Zhou also told
Tanaka that the few militarists must be strictly separated from the vast
majority of the Japanese people, and that both the Chinese and Japanese
nations had been traumatized in the war.28 By reiterating its concurrence
with Japan’s mainstream war history, Beijing avoided political disputes
over history and made way for the two countries’ immediate strategic
cooperation.
Thus, propaganda of national myths prevented rigorous investigation of historical facts, and political gestures were substituted for sincere,
concrete restitution. In China, the state retained tight control of memory
institutions in the 1970s, so private memories of the war, though still
alive, could not enter the public space of discourse. Most young Chinese
had minimal knowledge about Japanese war atrocities. Meanwhile, Mao’s
charismatic leadership and dictatorial grip on central power largely precluded intra-party challenges to the propagation of myths that downplayed
Japanese war crimes.29 Therefore, through the 1970s neither official
interest nor popular pressure existed in China to incite history disputes
with Japan.
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The eruption of the “history issue”:
the japanese textbook controversy of 1982
When are elites willing to expose and highlight memory conflict with other
countries, even to the extent of risking damage to diplomatic relations?
One circumstance is when they feel a strong sense of insecurity because of
concerns about their power status or national cohesion. Liah Greenfeld and
Daniel Chirot describe in their study of the early nation-building stage in
Russia, Germany and certain Arab countries how “proud, patriotic, deeply
shamed and insecure” elites were constantly dissatisfied with their domestic power status and felt humiliated for their countries’ lagging behind
advanced Western countries. These feelings propelled their nationalistic
propaganda and belligerent foreign policy.30 Another possible motivation
is the attempt to use international disputes over history in order to restore
domestic consensus and harmony. Omer Bartov points out that German
myths about Jewish enemies and German victimhood were institutionalized after World War I when German nationalists perceived a series of
threats to national unity and purity from within and without.31
In the case of Sino-Japanese relations, starting from the 1982 Japanese textbook controversy, Beijing engaged in acrimonious strife with
Tokyo over the narration and commemoration of war history. Such a
dramatic departure from earlier policy can be understood in light of the
post–Cultural Revolution socioeconomic difficulties and burgeoning
democracy movement, as well as the political cleavages within the CCP.
Beijing’s move in the textbook incident was evidently based on a rational
calculation that the tasks of enhancing internal cohesion and boosting
regime legitimacy were more pressing than maintaining harmonious relations with the West.
After the death of Mao and the end of the Cultural Revolution, the
CCP’s policy focus shifted from class struggle to economic modernization. The immediate political goals of the new leader, Deng Xiaoping,
were to restore the people’s trust in the party after the disastrous Cultural
Revolution, and to weed out Mao’s legacy and consolidate his own power
base within the party, both crucial to implementing his overall strategy of
economic reform and “open-door” policy. But these goals met challenges
from elements within both Chinese society and the CCP. From late 1978
a “Democracy Wall” campaign was launched in Beijing, in which, through
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street posters and sometimes underground journals, the public shared their
experiences of suffering during the Cultural Revolution and criticized the
communist leaders. The campaign soon escalated to bold demands for
democracy and political freedom. The movement had the potential for
gaining enormous public resonance, given the widespread social discontent
exemplified in the complaints about unemployment on the part of “sent
down” youths (those who had been sent to the countryside in the 1960s
but were now returning to the cities without jobs and urban residency),
the petitions by hundreds of thousands for redress of their grievances, and
the increasing urban violence triggered by the petitions.32
Deng initially tolerated the democracy movement, but when it began
to question the legitimacy of the reformers like Deng himself, he took a
hard line to the “Rightist agitation.”33 But the crackdown on democratic
activists did not silence the expression of public resentment about many
socioeconomic problems that had emerged since the reform, including
inflation, official corruption, increasing crime, and industrial pollution.
The dismal situation was captured in the remarks of Hu Yaobang, general
secretary of the Central Party Secretariat, who admitted in February 1980
that the party confronted a threefold crisis of faith, belief and trust in its
relations with the Chinese people. Indeed, when the Polish Solidarity
movement erupted that year, Beijing was so worried about similar labor
unrest in China that Deng called for effective measures to forestall possible
mass protests and “ensure stability and unity.”34
Coinciding with the growing social instability and declining public
faith in the CCP, the intra-party split between the reformists like Deng and
conservative party elders deepened in the early 1980s. The former sought
further economic reform and openness to the West to obtain advanced
technical and managerial know-how as well as financial investment. Deng
himself was keen to reform the military to shed those senior commanders with “ossified thinking.” He also desired to uproot the leftist residual
from the Mao era represented by Hua Guofeng, Mao’s anointed successor,
and consolidate his own authority. But a cohort of veteran cadres, senior
military leaders, and conservative ideologues loathed the reform policies.
Economic conservatives like Chen Yun advocated caution in introducing
a free market, private sector and direct foreign investment.35 Politically,
the party’s old guard blamed the reformists’ laxity in ideological indoctrination for permitting the infiltration of dangerous Western liberal ideas.
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Remembering and Forgetting the War
The aforementioned democracy movement, social disorder and worsening
economic situation all gave the conservatives ammunition for attacking
the reform program. In February 1982 a conservative ideologue, Wang
Renzhong, even proposed to declare war on bourgeois influences spread
by the open-door policy.36
In order to build a broad reform coalition, Deng had to gingerly
walk a fine line between the two rival factions.37 After all, he needed support from the conservatives, including from Chen Yun for the economic
program, General Ye Jianying for removing Hua and retiring old military
commanders, as well as the old guard’s tolerance of the open-door policy.
Therefore, while adhering to economic reform, Deng conceded considerable ground to the conservatives on political and ideological fronts, such as
propagating a moderate evaluation of the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s
legacy, and sanctioning several ideological campaigns combating bourgeois
liberalism from the early to mid-1980s. Deng’s ambiguity was manifest at
the 12th Party Congress held in September 1982, when he called for the
further opening-up of China to the outside world but warned of “corrosion
by decadent ideas from abroad,” and placed equal emphasis on economic
construction, and political and ideological education.38
Such was China’s domestic political background when the Japanese
textbook controversy erupted. The incident was the result of the intensifying struggle between the progressive and conservative views of history
in Japan. One of the most important areas of memory contestation is
mass education. In the so-called “Biased Textbooks Campaign” (Henkō
Kyōkasho Kyanpein) that started around 1980, Japanese conservative
elites intensely attacked the moderate increase in textbook coverage of
the Asian peoples’ war suffering, which had been brought about since the
1970s by leftist influence, and sought to tighten control over the textbook
authorization process. In January 1982 the LDP issued a statement that
school education should “cultivate the Japanese spirit and foster national
pride.” Education Minister Tanaka Tatsuo even explicitly told textbook
writers and publishers who were preparing textbooks for the 1983–86
triennium to “soften their approach to Japan’s excesses during World War
II” and place more stress on patriotism.39 Wary of government attempts
to distort history, Japanese liberal intellectuals closely monitored the textbook screening process in 1982. At the end of June the Japanese media
reported that Mombusho (the Japanese Ministry of Education) had issued
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instructions for historical whitewashing in textbooks, such as replacing
the term shinryaku (invasion) by shinshutsu (advance) in relation to the
Sino-Japanese war.40 The news sparked a political storm in Japan, which
was quickly picked up by the international media. In response, the Chinese
and South Korean governments lodged formal protests with Tokyo in late
July and early August.
Beijing’s reaction to the incident was not impulsive; the Chinese
media waited nearly one month after the initial outbreak of the controversy
to start attacking Japan. As noted above, in 1982 Deng was under great
pressure as a result of the mounting social crisis and domestic political
disunity. Moreover, this occurred shortly before the 12th Party Congress,
when Deng would make a compromise with the conservatives in exchange
for their endorsement of reform and the open-door policy. To show “softness” in relation to Japan, a country in the category of Western countries,
in the textbook controversy would lay him open to even more vigorous
attacks from the conservatives and endanger his reform agenda.
Despite the dearth of information on Beijing’s policy deliberations in
July, one can logically infer from the domestic situation and the reaction
in the Chinese media that Deng very likely saw the textbook incident as
a good opportunity to shore up his own and the party’s prestige and also
prepare for the upcoming Party Congress. A tough stance on Japan could
show his determination to fend off inimical foreign influence, as well as
to check the pro-West wing of the reformist faction, represented by Hu
Yaobang, who was also sympathetic to the liberal intellectuals’ quest for
political freedom.41 This could greatly appease party hard-liners who were
alarmed by the strengthening of the democratic movement as a result of
economic reform. Beijing’s diplomacy toward Japan over the history issue
can therefore be seen as a product of the power struggle between different party factions, since Deng did not enjoy Mao’s dictatorial charisma
and relied more on the support of veteran political and military leaders.
Besides, by lashing out at Japan’s amnesia about its past aggression toward
China, Beijing could depict Japan as an immoral “other” and thus restore
the internal cohesion of the “self,” the Chinese nation, and assuage public
resentment toward the government.
The international context that enabled Beijing to reap political profit
from the “history issue” was the decline, from the 1980s, of the pressure
on China to maintain an intimate relationship with the West as a result of
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Remembering and Forgetting the War
the Cold War. At the 12th Party Congress, Beijing formally adopted an
“independent foreign policy” between the two superpowers. Although the
continuing Soviet threat prevented China from becoming truly independent of American strategic support, at least rhetorically Beijing began to
pull back from the West.42 In the 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed,
the geostrategic incentives for Beijing to restrain nationalist diplomacy
faded even more rapidly.
After the textbook incident, China’s internal tension only worsened. Not only did the intra-party factional politics continue, but also
the reform policy drew complaints from a large part of the population
that was adversely affected. The CCP’s prestige further tumbled after the
violent crackdown of the 1989 democratic movement and the exacerbation of social inequality and cadre corruption from the 1990s. Popular
resentment against what they saw as the unfair, corrupt and incompetent
state was so intense that it sparked numerous mass demonstrations and
even violent riots.43
With the inexorable decline of communism, the government resorted
to a new ideological framework, nationalism, to facilitate intra-party consolidation and strengthen the regime’s legitimacy. As discussed earlier, elite
mythmaking gains wider public acceptance if it invokes beliefs and values
shared by the public. One commonly used tactic is to wrap national myths
in the fabric of patriotic rhetoric, claiming that pride in one’s own nation
and hostility to others are in the national interest. As John Bodnar argues,
patriotic ideas appeal to the public because they are perceived as “fundamentally true” rather than as instruments of elite exploitation.44 Thus,
from the mid-1980s, Beijing began to foster a mixture of what Michel
Oksenberg calls “confident nationalism” and “assertive nationalism.” It
was moderate in the economic sphere, acknowledging the importance
of Western technology and investment, but rigid and muscular in the
ideological and cultural spheres, often using the “othering” of the Western out-group to glorify the Chinese in-group.45 The dual nature of the
official nationalism was aimed at raising the national spirit while retaining
the benefits of the economic open-door policy.
A country that had invaded and humiliated China in the past, and
whose historical amnesia was notorious, Japan became an easy target
of China’s assertive nationalism. By adopting a harsh position on the
Japanese “history issue,” Beijing conveyed to the public that it would
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not compromise with Western countries to hurt national interests. Thus,
in a second textbook controversy in 1986, Beijing pressured Nakasone
Yasuhiro’s government to revise a nationalistic history textbook and fire
Minister of Education Fujio Masayuki who had opposed the revision.46
Incidents of Japanese leaders’ worship at the Yasukuni Shrine, including
those involving Prime Ministers Nakasone in 1985, Hashimoto Ryūtarō
in 1996, and Koizumi since 2001, also invariably provoked Beijing’s
harsh criticism.
Promoting official nationalism: china’s patriotic
education campaign
To be sure, China’s official nationalism was not intended to provoke
anti-West xenophobia that would have damaged its economy, which
was so interdependent with the West. Excessive public animosity against
foreigners also carries the risk of undermining political stability, which
had been the case in both the May Fourth Movement of 1919 and the
Xi’an Incident of 1936, when anti-Japanese mass demonstrations rapidly
turned into anti-government movements. To signal the domestic orientation of the nationalist propaganda, the official discourse preferred the
term aiguo zhuyi (patriotism) to minzu zhuyi (nationalism), since the
latter had anti-foreign, parochial connotations. Using patriotic language
could also mediate divergent interests and concerns in society for no one
would dispute love for the motherland, not even the liberal dissidents.
The government exhorted the people to identify with and rally around
the communist state that was allegedly the “paramount patriotic force and
guardian of national pride” and, in the name of patriotism, persuaded the
public to support the reform policies.47
Therefore, in addition to politicizing history disputes with Japan,
another main instrument that the Chinese government employed to
promote official nationalism was patriotic school education. In 1985, the
government resumed “Five-Love Education” (wu’ai jiaoyu), a patriotic
education program dating back to the 1950s. The State Education Commission (SEC) instructed schools in 1990 to “integrate the teaching of
patriotism and national condition (guoqin) with the education of love for
socialism and the CCP.” In 1994, formal guidelines under the heading
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Remembering and Forgetting the War
“Outline for the Implementation of Patriotic Education” were published.48 In order to stimulate national pride and cohesion, this campaign
placed particular emphasis on teaching China’s history of resisting foreign
aggression as a collective experience of suffering, struggle and glory. In
1989 the SEC instructed schools to use history classes to make students
“remember historical lessons, and not to forget the imperialist invasion
and the Chinese people’s heroic resistance.”49
This program of patriotic history education highlighted the 1937–45
Sino-Japanese war, which had previously been treated as merely one of
many episodes in China’s nearly one hundred years of “national struggle
for liberation.” Now the war was singled out as the most important military and political conflict in Chinese history because in this war “China
could claim its first complete victory against foreign invaders.”50 In 1995,
taking advantage of the fiftieth anniversary of China’s war victory, Beijing
launched a vigorous commemorative campaign designed to bring patriotic
education to a climax. The official media published numerous historical
documents, interviews and editorials regarding the war, and secondary
schools nationwide carried out the “Six Hundred Project” to popularize
a long list of patriotic books, movies and television dramas, and songs
and poems.51
While highlighting the theme of national resistance, the new historiography redefined the KMT’s role in the war. Since the patriotic
propaganda prepared the nation for the grand cause of overcoming
foreign humiliation and restoring national glory, the unification with
Taiwan, a province ceded to Japan by an unequal treaty in 1895, became
a significant issue of national pride. Beijing jettisoned the old narrative
on the CCP–KMT class struggle, as the KMT, which now represented
the anti-independence constituency in Taiwan, was Beijing’s potential
ally. It instead claimed that the two parties had shared the common goal
of defeating Japanese aggression. Textbooks published in the late 1980s
for the first time included the KMT-led military campaigns against Japan.
New war movies also portrayed the KMT in a more positive light, such as
Xuezhan Taierzhuang (The bloody battle of Taierzhuang) made in 1986,
which portrayed a major victory of the Nationalist army in 1938.52
Those who now replaced the KMT as the worst villain in the history
of the war were the “vicious Japanese imperialist aggressors.” Textbooks provided comprehensive coverage of Japanese war crimes, with
57
Yinan He
Fig. 1. The Nanjing Massacre Memorial, front wall. Photo by author.
figures of fatalities, gruesome pictures, and even names of villages and
individuals that had fallen victim to the aggression.53 War movies made
since the 1980s graphically depicted Japanese acts of brutality, such as
the Nanjing Massacre and the germ warfare conducted by Japanese Unit
731. Meanwhile, war commemoration brought Japanese atrocities to
the center of national memory. The memorial to the Nanjing Massacre,
the icon of Chinese war victimhood, which was completed in August
1985, included a display of numerous photographs, written documents,
eyewitness testimonies, and even human skeletons. The inscription on its
front wall declared “VICTIMS 300,000” (Beijing’s official estimate of
the massacre’s fatalities), while the inscription on the inner wall instructed
visitors “Never forget national humiliation” (wuwang guochi) (see figures
1 and 2). Similar museums were built at other sites of Japanese atrocities
throughout the country and designated as centers for patriotic education.
Chinese scholars were also encouraged to conduct deeper investigation
of Japanese atrocities and publish their research.54
Mythmaking was evident in the patriotic education campaign. While
reversing the previous cover-up of Japanese atrocities, the new narrative
went to the other extreme of arousing a sense of Chinese victimhood and
demonizing Japan. It failed to strike a balance between the relatively peaceful Sino-Japanese interactions in their earlier history, their later conflicts,
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Remembering and Forgetting the War
Fig. 2. Detail from the Nanjing Massacre Memorial showing the inscription
“Never forget national humiliation.” Photo by author.
and post-normalization cooperation. Besides, wartime history was far more
complicated than black-and-white struggles between Japanese invaders and
Chinese patriots; secret diplomacy, puppet governments and numerous
petty Chinese collaborators had existed under the Japanese occupation.
By placing the lion’s share of the blame for China’s past suffering, longstanding backwardness and current socioeconomic difficulties on Japan,
the new narrative evaded many sensitive issues that might hurt national
self-respect or the party’s prestige.
Public opinion radicalization and beijing’s predicament
These self-glorifying and other-maligning myths promoted by the patriotic
education campaign elicited vociferous public response in China. These
myths were highly imaginable and credible to a “captive audience” whose
private memories of the war aggression and genuine resentment toward
Japan had previously been masked by class hatred. Compared to other
imperialist powers, Japanese aggression was the most recent, the bloodiest and the most painful.55 In the eyes of many Chinese, Japan was the
ultimate enemy, and to combat anything related to Japan was quintessential patriotism.
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Yinan He
Elite mythmaking, of course, involves the selective use of historical
memories according to their political convenience. This explains why
some memories fade with the passage of time, while others are played up
under particular circumstances. While tapping into the deeply embedded
Chinese cultural images of Japan, the Chinese ruling elites sought to banish to oblivion the history of other external conflicts that did not fit their
needs. For example, from the 1990s the Chinese government systematically
deleted the 1980s war against Vietnam from public memory. Textbooks
omitted the war, war heroes disappeared from public view, artists stopped
depicting the war, and even relevant library materials were removed.56
The patriotic campaign centered on Japan initially scored great
success in stimulating public resonance. The Chinese were receptive to
information on Japanese war atrocities, of which they had some knowledge
but which had never been officially documented. For example, a book
produced by a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) publisher in 1987, The
Great Nanjing Massacre, sold 150,000 copies in the first month and was
reprinted time and again to meet the market demand.57 Since then, numerous such books have appeared, often on the initiative of local governments
or individual publishers. Not only the state but also the non-official mass
media enthusiastically took up the subject of patriotism. As Geremie Barmé
observed: “Patriotic sentiment is no longer the sole province of the Party
and its propagandists … nationalism is functioning as a form of consensus
beyond the bounds of official culture.”58
While the appeal to patriotism can make it easier to promote national
myths, placing too great an emphasis on patriotic emotions may engender a
mass ideology of extreme self-glorification and anti-foreignism. According
to the self-categorization theory, group interaction causes extreme opinions
to prevail because members of the group compete among themselves to
act out socially desirable values and ideas.59 In the case of China, when
patriotism became the buzzword in public discourse, everyone wanted
to be an ardent patriot in order to win social status and respect, so that
more people began to advocate extreme views on both past events and
current policies, proclaiming uncritical love for China and their desire to
defend it from aggressive foreigners. The idealization of patriotic warriors generated visceral anti-Western sentiments, of which Japan was the
main target. The official history still maintained that Japanese militarists
should be differentiated from the ordinary Japanese, but the public was
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Remembering and Forgetting the War
too preoccupied with Chinese suffering to recognize such fine distinctions. Best-selling books, Internet chat rooms and other private discussion
forums on Japan and war history commonly condemn the entire Japanese
nation as evil.
The extreme anti-Japanese popular nationalism in China was reflected
in the recent phenomenon on the Internet of “fenqing (indignant young
people) culture.” Fenqing use cyberspace to make unbridled insults against
the Japanese people, culture and government, accusing those Chinese who
have connections with Japan of being hanjian (Chinese traitors).60 Fenqing
culture has many fanatical followers among young urbanites. For instance,
in 2001 a famous Chinese actress was attacked on the Internet for wearing
a dress resembling the Japanese military flag in a fashion magazine photo.
Soon after she apologized on national TV, an angry member of the audience splashed human waste on her during a stage performance. Although
he was immediately arrested by the police, he was hailed as a warm-hearted
patriot on the Internet and in the tabloid magazines.61 Fenqing do not, of
course, represent the whole Chinese population, but the fact that they are
far more vocal than moderate citizens and set the tone for policy debate
on the Internet, the most open and dynamic public space of discourse
in China, makes them a particularly powerful constituency in support of
anti-Japanese policies even in an authoritarian China.
Chinese public sentiment against Japan would not have escalated so
rapidly without the considerable liberalization of the mass media. From the
1990s the Chinese publishing industry flourished, launching thousands of
new papers, magazines and journals, many of which depended on income
from advertisements or foreign money rather than state funds.62 The nonofficial media were therefore often driven by commercial profit to pursue
sensationalism. While diversifying information sources and expanding the
public space of discourse, the media liberalization also brought about a
worrisome trend, the rapid spread of malicious rumors about Japan, which
incited the Chinese public against that country.
Public opinion may become especially radicalized if society gains more
influence over the institutional carriers of national memory at a time when
the state is still capable of repressing undesirable public debate. Because
patriotic discourse almost always falls within the limits of tolerable free
speech, those seeking to advance their social prestige, commercial interests or political agenda are tempted to jump on the patriotic bandwagon.
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Chinese intellectuals, therefore, also endorsed patriotism as the consensual
national ideology, not only because it was the social fashion, but also due
to the harsh state repression of liberal discourse after 1989. Casting their
ideas in patriotic terms was a safe, effective way of advancing their own
political agendas. For example, the “popular-civic nationalists” invoked
nationalism to encourage greater mass participation and foster Chinese
civil society and democracy. Another group, consisting of self-proclaimed
nativist academics and tabloid nationalist writers, even adopted a xenophobic and isolationist perspective in order to incite a mass movement to
combat Western imperialist domination.63 These nationalist intellectuals
spoke in particularly harsh and passionate terms against Japan, disregarding facts and logic.64 Depicted as representing Chinese public opinion
and defending China’s best interests, these nationalist views became so
powerful that they pushed more moderate views out of the mainstream
of popular discourse.65 A telling example is the “New Thinking” debate
on Japan around 2002–2003, where moderates who spoke out against
the growing anti-Japanese nationalism in China were strongly criticized
in intellectual circles and shouted down on the Internet by radical fenqing, who called them “traitors.”66 Consequently, members of the Chinese
elites are reluctant to express moderate views on Japan.67
Becoming increasingly incited against Japan, Chinese public opinion
demanded settling historical accounts with that country. The first outburst
of popular repugnance occurred in the mid-1980s when Chinese university
students openly protested against Nakasone’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine
and distortions in Japanese history textbooks. Since then anti-Japanese
mass demonstrations have become a routine concern in bilateral relations. Unlike before when people were largely insulated from the outside
world, from the 1990s many followed international news closely and
engaged in policy debates, especially on Internet Bulletin Boards. These
attentive, vocal, mostly urban Chinese also tended to be the same radical
nationalists who eagerly sought any piece of negative information about
Japan. Whenever something controversial happened in Japan, they could
immediately learn about it and voice protests.
Against this backdrop of surging Chinese popular nationalism, media
reports of Japanese domestic struggles over the memory of the war greatly
galvanized history activism in Chinese society. Under mounting domestic
and international pressure since the 1980s, the Japanese government had
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to concede some ground on war history, such as to increase coverage of
Asian victimization in history textbooks and respond to the international
citizens’ movement for redress of war victims by compensating certain
groups such as the “comfort women.”68 But the new trend provoked a
neo-nationalist backlash in Japan against what was seen as the government’s
capitulation to foreign pressure, and against progressive historians, accused
of spreading masochistic views among young people. The right-wingers
advanced a self-glorifying view of history by organizing symposiums, publishing cartoons and popular readings, and even compiling textbooks of
their own, including the controversial New History Textbook that a rightist
organization produced and pushed through the textbook authorization
process in 2001.69 The rightist attacks compelled the Japanese government to retreat from earlier concessions to the “progressive offensive.” As
a result, textbooks approved in 2000 markedly deleted or watered down
descriptions of military atrocities.70 Many of these changes seemed to have
arisen from the so-called “voluntary restraint” of textbook publishers, but
they were actually the result of political coercion by Mombusho and the
Office of the Prime Minister.71
The intense contestation over war memory between various political
forces in Japan, especially the voices of the more vocal and well-funded
right-wingers, immediately caught the attention of the Chinese public
who now enjoyed more open access to external information. Incidents
like the Japanese government’s approval of revisionist history textbooks
and right-wing politicians’ “slips of the tongue” to gloss over aggression
brought the gap between the two nations’ memory of the war into sharp
relief and easily incited the already inflamed Chinese public opinion. Chinese nationalists were also provoked by Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni
Shrine in 2001–2006, which were primarily aimed at fostering Japanese
national pride and “normal state” mentality, as well as ensuring a power
base for his governance.72 Not only has Yasukuni enshrined Class-A
Japanese war criminals since 1978, but also the newly redesigned and
expanded military history museum associated with the shrine, Yushukan,
termed Japan’s aggression in the 1930s–1940s “the Greater East Asian
War” and glorified “the elevated thoughts of the noble souls” who had
fought in that war on behalf of Japan.73 As Japan’s top leader, Koizumi’s
worship at the shrine signaled official accommodation and even promotion
of its clearly revisionist interpretation of history. The Chinese saw it as a
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direct insult, for they believed themselves to have suffered the most from
Japanese aggression during the war. Hence, genuine indignation, a victim
mentality and biases against Japan all interacted to produce an intense and
frequently destructive anti-Japanese mass campaign in April 2005.
The public agitation placed the government in a difficult dilemma.
On the one hand, the objective of official nationalism was primarily
domestic.74 Beijing sought to restrain anti-Japanese sentiments when they
jeopardized important national interests such as economic cooperation
with Japan. Especially after the harsh criticism expressed by President
Jiang Zemin during his 1998 state visit to Japan backfired, Beijing began
to soften its rhetoric on Japan’s treatment of its war history.75 On the
other hand, a crude clamping down on popular nationalism would incur
criticism against “soft-kneed” government diplomacy and weaken its
patriotic credentials.
Such a predicament was behind Beijing’s decision to suspend
exchanges of leaders’ visits with Prime Minister Koizumi from 2002. Since
the 1998 diplomatic debacle, Beijing had evidently felt the imperative to
modify its policy toward Japan. Compared to Koizumi, Jiang preferred
to maintain the status quo on the history issue, hoping to restrain further
polemics and repair the damaged relations. Nonetheless, fearing attacks
from the nationalist public and leftist party elites should he make any
compromise, he demanded that Koizumi stop visiting Yasukuni. When
the fourth-generation leader Hu Jintao took power in 2002, he and the
moderate Foreign Ministry were eager to seek a breakthrough in SinoJapanese relations. However, rejection of the conciliatory “New Thinking”
on Japan by both the Chinese public and the elites forced Hu to put the
plan on the backburner.76 Because he was still consolidating his power
within the party, for which support from Jiang’s remaining power base was
essential, Hu had to uphold the explicit linkage that Jiang had established
between a halt to Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni Shrine and resumption
of state visits between the two countries. Politically it was too costly for
him to back down from his predecessor’s harsh stance on Yasukuni.77
Today, it is widely believed in China that Japan owes the Chinese
people an apology for its war crimes. Although Beijing indeed wished to
tone down history-related disputes in the hope of repairing Sino-Japanese
relations after Jiang’s counter-productive visit, when high-profile events
that rekindled the controversies over the memory of the war occurred, such
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Remembering and Forgetting the War
as the Japanese prime minister’s worship at the Yasukuni Shrine, Beijing
had to adopt a firm position in order to assuage public rage. Thus, the
growing bottom-up impetus for addressing the bilateral historical legacy,
combined with intra-party challenges to leadership stability and nationalist
provocation from Japan, all forced the Chinese leaders to confront Japan
on the history issue even when they would have probably preferred to
compromise.
Conclusion
Remembering the past is not a simple act of recording historical events,
but a process of constant reconstruction of these events in light of present
social and political changes. Although elite mythmaking has been a central
factor in causing Sino-Japanese political disputes over their war history in
the 1930s–1940s, this practice also appears to be present in China’s official
interpretation of the national resistance against other foreign imperialist
oppression in its history. Paul Cohen has pointed out that mythologizers
tend to portray history as a one-dimensional picture, imposing a subjectively predetermined, often simplistic theme on the otherwise complex and
multifaceted historical process.78 Chinese textbooks glorify dramatic clashes
between Chinese nationals and foreigners such as the Boxer uprising as
spontaneous, anti-imperialist mass movements, while failing to critically
examine the backwardness and xenophobia in Chinese society at the time
that were reflected in these movements. In January 2006, a preeminent
Chinese academic Yuan Weishi attacked the textbook account of the Boxers
in an article published in Bingdian, a weekly magazine associated with the
official China Youth Daily.79 The government responded to Yuan’s article
by shutting down the magazine and replacing the editor-in-chief and his
deputy. When the magazine was allowed to reappear two months later,
it immediately published a lengthy rebuttal of Yuan that defended the
Boxers as patriotic heroes who had “prevented China from being carved
up by foreign imperialism.” While acknowledging some of the Boxers’
atrocities against foreigners, the author attributed them to the limitations
of the peasant class (but exculpated the latter since they were the victims of
foreign oppression), noting that ultimately the Chinese people had found
power in Marxism and the communist movement which had won them
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national independence, prosperity and dignity.80 Evidently, this debate
over the one-hundred-year history of the Boxer uprising went far beyond
an academic discussion to involve political contestation over power and
legitimacy in today’s China.
The Chinese ruling elites not only mythologize the nation’s interaction with foreign countries but also tightly control the interpretation
of internal history. One example in point is the heavily politicized treatment of CCP history. For the Chinese government, party history is one
of the most critical ideological tools for legitimating the party’s rule and,
as a required university course, plays a major role in the political training
of future members of the bureaucracy, of both the government and the
party.81 Instead of basing itself on rigorous academic research of historical
facts, Chinese party historiography is strictly limited by political theories
established by party functionaries holding leading positions within the
CCP. One such theoretical guideline is the Resolution on Some Questions of
History, a document passed at a CCP Central Committee plenary in 1945
and the party’s first attempt to give an overall interpretation of its history.
The second major document is the Resolution on Some Questions Concerning the History of the Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of
China, adopted by the party in 1981. While some party historians since
the reform years have tried to reconstruct the past in a more scholarly
way, less oriented to propagandistic goals, overall the study of party history is highly institutionalized, and the content remains “stereotyped and
monotonous” to the present day.82
The case of the Sino-Japanese conflict over the memory of the war
indicates that elite manipulation of history can pit the memories of former
enemy countries against one another. This does not always give rise to
a salient “history issue” in international relations because of the ruling
elites’ reluctance to undermine their immediate strategic or economic
goals by inciting political conflicts over history. But when elites feel that
their power may be threatened by domestic opposition forces, they may
be tempted to resort to polemics over sensitive historical issues in the
international arena.
This case also demonstrates that the politically motivated national
mythmaking process is not the sole province of a monolithic ruling
elite capable of designing a coherent strategy on historical memory and
implementing it at will. Memory contestation is the rule rather than the
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exception, precisely because the political motivations behind historical
interpretation differ across social groups and over time. The ruling elites
are often divided over how to deal with history, and they can be challenged
and swayed by dissenting memories held by other social elites and even
the general public. Some of these challenges to official historiography are
the state’s own making. Elites cannot twist history arbitrarily but have to
design a credible narrative that is easy for the public to accept, such as to
array it in the popular garment of patriotism. But once embraced by the
public, patriotism can assume a much more fanatical and even xenophobic
tone, generating strong momentum for uncompromising struggles with
other countries.
The twin driving forces of the “history issue,” top-down elite mythmaking and bottom-up mass reactions, suggest that international clashes
of memory are not easily depoliticized. “Let bygones be bygones” is easier
said than done. Elites have high stakes in manipulating national history
and exploiting international history disputes. Moreover, even when elites
find it no longer cost-efficient to continue pursuing the “history issue,”
the population is unlikely to put such disputes aside merely because it has
been instructed to. While no country is immune to egocentric nationalism, the incentive for elite mythmaking tends to be strong in a political
system combining weak regime legitimacy, internal disunity, and social
unrest. Hence, any remedies to international history conflicts need to
address both the misunderstandings between countries and the domestic
political and social ailments that generate them.
Notes
I would like to thank Ariel David Adesnik, Thomas U. Berger, William A. Callahan, Daniel Chirot, M. Taylor Fravel, Edward Friedman, Peter Gries, Ron Hassner,
Jacques Hymans, Alastair Iain Johnston, Edward Miller, Melissa Nobles, Roger
D. Petersen, Shogo Suzuki, Allen Whiting, Dingxin Zhao, and two anonymous
reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions.
1. “Anger over Japan PM’s Shrine Visit,” BBC News (Online), 13 Aug.
2001.
2. Quoted from the remarks of Chinese State Councilor and former Foreign
Minister Tang Jiaxuan, The Japan Times, 13 Dec. 2005.
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Yinan He
3. Numerous works have discussed the negative influence of historical legacy
on contemporary Sino-Japanese relations. See Allen Whiting, China Eyes Japan
(Berkeley, 1989); Thomas J. Christensen, “Chinese Realpolitik,” Foreign Affairs
75, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1996): 37–52; Nicholas Kristof, “The Problem of Memory,”
Foreign Affairs 77, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 1998): 37–49; Thomas U. Berger, “Tangled
Visions: Culture, Historical Memory and Japan’s External Relations in Asia,” paper
presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association
(Boston, MA, 1998).
4. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge and New York,
1989), 22; and John Gillis, Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity
(Princeton, 1994), 3.
5. Stephen Van Evera, “Hypotheses on Nationalism and War,” International
Security 18, no. 4 (spring 1994): 5–39. For example, Thomas Christensen, Useful
Adversaries (Princeton, 1996), argues that Mao Zedong’s anti-American propaganda in 1958 was intended to mobilize mass support for his grand strategic goal
of accelerating China’s industrial modernization.
6. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1986).
7. Jonathan Friedman, “The Past in the Future: History and the Politics of
Identity,” American Anthropologist 94, no. 4 (1992), 849.
8. Omer Bartov, “Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews, and the
Holocaust,” American Historical Review 103, no. 3 (1998): 771–816; and Ruth
Linn and Ilan Gur-Ze’v, “Holocaust as Metaphor: Arab and Israeli Use of the Same
Symbol,” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 11, no. 3 (1996): 195–206.
9. C. G. Jacobsen, “Myths, Politics and the Not-So-New World Order,” Journal
of Peace Research 30, no. 3 (1993): 241–50. See Liah Greenfeld and Daniel Chirot,
“Nationalism and Aggression,” Theory and Society 23, no.1 (1994): 79–130.
10. This is a formula advocated by progressive Japanese intellectuals to define
war responsibility. See Ishida Takeshi, Kioku to bōkyaku no seijigaku (The politics
of remembering and forgetting) (Tokyo, 2000), 165; and Ienaga Saburō, Sensō
sekinin (War responsibility) (Tokyo, 2000), 29–35.
11. On war myths in postwar Japanese conservative historiography, see Yinan
He, “Overcoming Shadows of the Past: Post-Conflict Interstate Reconciliation
in East Asia and Europe” (Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
2004), 74–82.
12. Rana Mitter, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum: Nationalism, History
and Memory in the Beijing War of Resistance Museum, 1987–1997,” The China
Quarterly 161, no. 1 (2000), 283.
13. For analyses of China’s United Front strategy, see Okabe Tatsumi, Chūgoku
no Tainichi seisaku (China’s Japan policy) (Tokyo, 1976), 22–39; and Wang Jisi,
“International Relations Theory and the Study of Chinese Foreign Policy: A
68
Remembering and Forgetting the War
Chinese Perspective,” in Thomas Robinson and David Shambaugh, eds., Chinese
Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (Oxford, 1994), 482–505.
14. For Chinese official accounts and diplomats’ personal recollections of
“people’s diplomacy” toward Japan, see Xue Mouhong, Dangdai zhongguo waijiao
(Contemporary Chinese diplomacy) (Beijing, 1990), chap. 16; Sun Pinghua,
Nihon to no 30 nen: Chūnichi yukō zuisōroku (30 years with Japan: Miscellaneous
thoughts on Sino-Japanese friendship) (Tokyo, 1987); and Xiangqian Xiao, Eien
no rinkoku to shite (Being eternal neighbors) (Tokyo, 1997).
15. Herbert Bix, “Inventing the ‘Symbol Monarchy’ in Japan, 1945–1952,”
Journal of Japanese Studies 21, no. 2 (1995): 319–64.
16. Carol Gluck, “The Past in the Present,” in Andrew Gordon, ed., Postwar
Japan as History (Berkeley, 1993), 70. Even the Japanese leftist approach to war
responsibility had limitations. It mostly shunned the question of the responsibility
of “the people,” or collective responsibility, and converged with conservative narratives of Japanese victimhood. For a sharp critique of the left-wing intellectuals’
view of Japanese war responsibility since the mid-1950s, see Ōnuma Yasuaki, Tōkyō
saiban kara sengo sekirin no shisō e (From the Tokyo Trial to postwar thoughts on
war responsibility) (Tokyo, 1993), 169–74.
17. For more on the Japanese domestic struggle over war memory after World
War II and the eventual institutionalization of the conservative national myths,
see He, “Overcoming Shadows of the Past,” 74–77, 82–90.
18. Consuelo Cruz, “Identity and Persuasion: How Nations Remember
Their Pasts and Make Their Futures,” World Politics 52, no. 3 (April 2000):
275–312.
19. The following discussion is based on a number of substitute teaching materials used around 1950 when formal textbooks had yet to be produced, and four
editions of official textbooks produced in the 1950s–1960s.
20. People’s Daily editorials frequently made such arguments before the 1970s.
See Tian Huan, ed., Zhanhou zhongri guanxi wenxianji (Documents on postwar
Sino-Japanese relations) (Beijing, 1997), 1:469–72, 590–93, 780–82.
21. Daqing Yang, “Convergence or Divergence? Recent Historical Writings
on the Rape of Nanjing,” American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (June 1999):
858.
22. Chen Bo, “Genggao di juqi Mao Zedong sixiang hongqi, wei chuangzuo
gengduo genghao de geming junshi ticai yinpian er nuli” (Lifting higher the red
flag of Mao Zedong’s thoughts, striving to produce more and better revolutionary
military movies), Dianyin Yishu (Film art) (Beijing) (Aug. 1960): 5–6.
23. Jin Yuan, Qiyuan: Yige zhanfan guanli suozhang de huiyi (Unusual destiny:
Reminiscences of a director of a prison for war criminals) (Beijing, 1999), chaps.
25–27.
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24. See Zhang Xiangshan, Zhongri guanxi: Guankui yu jianzheng (Sino-Japanese
relations: My humble opinions and testimony) (Beijing, 1998), 66–70. Zhang
was a member of Premier Zhou Enlai’s inner group responsible for designing and
implementing diplomacy toward Japan.
25. Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao (The manuscripts of Mao Zedong since
the founding of the nation) (Beijing, 1987–1990), 13:316.
26. Prime Minister Tanaka’s speech at the welcome dinner hosted by Premier
Zhou, 25 Sept. 1972, in Tian, ed., Zhanhou zhongri guanxi wenxianji, 2:105.
27. Ibid., 89–95.
28. Ibid., 103–4.
29. Factional politics was a constant phenomenon in Mao’s era, but overall
his power prevailed in intra-party debate over grand strategic designs and major
foreign policy decisions such as the Korean War, the two Taiwan Strait crises, the
Sino-Soviet split and the rapprochement with the US and Japan.
30. Greenfeld and Chirot, “Nationalism and Aggression,” 95.
31. Bartov, “Defining Enemies, Making Victims.”
32. More than 100,000 out-of-towners came to Beijing and Shanghai to petition
for their cases in 1979 alone, and many demonstrations and protest marches were
staged in Beijing and other cities. Richard Baum, Burying Mao: Chinese Politics
in the Age of Deng Xiaoping (Princeton, 1994), 76–78.
33. Ibid., 69–84.
34. Ibid., 91, 112.
35. On the intra-party split over economic reform strategies in the 1980s, see
Harry Harding, China’s Second Revolution: Reform after Mao (Washington, DC,
1987), 77–90.
36. Baum, Burying Mao, 142.
37. Harding, China’s Second Revolution, 90–93.
38. Baum, Burying Mao; and Merle Goldman, Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in
China: Political Reform in the Deng Xiaoping Era (Cambridge, MA, 1994).
39. Caroline Rose, Interpreting History in Sino-Japanese Relations: A Case Study
in Political Decision-Making (London and New York, 1998), 68–71.
40. However, subsequent investigations discovered the report was inaccurate
because the change from shinryaku to shinshutsu did not occur that year and
some original textbook drafts before the screening already contained the term
shinshutsu.
41. On Hu Yaobang’s connection with the liberal intellectual movements in
the 1980s, see Goldman, Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China.
42. David Shambaugh, “Patterns of Interaction in Sino-American Relations,”
in Robinson and Shambaugh, eds., Chinese Foreign Policy, 204; and Harry Hard-
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Remembering and Forgetting the War
ing, A Fragile Relationship: The United States and China since 1972 (Washington,
DC, 1992), 121–23.
43. Elizabeth Perry, “Crime, Corruption, and Contention,” in Merle Goldman
and Roderick MacFarquhar, eds., The Paradox of China’s Post-Mao Reforms (Cambridge, MA, 1999); and Lu Xiaobo, Cadres and Corruption: The Organizational
Involution of the Chinese Communist Party (Palo Alto, 2000).
44. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and
Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 1992).
45. Michel Oksenberg, “China’s Confident Nationalism,” Foreign Affairs 65,
no. 3 (1987): 501–23.
46. Akihiko Tanaka, Nitchū kankei 1945–1990 (Sino-Japanese Relations,
1945–1990) (Tokyo, 1991), 137–39, 150–52.
47. Suizheng Zhao, “‘We Are Patriots First and Democrats Second’: The Rise
of Chinese Nationalism in the 1990s,” in Edward Friedman and Barrett McCormick, eds., What If China Doesn’t Democratize? Implications for War and Peace
(Armonk, NY, 2000), 26–27.
48. Pu Weizhong, ed., Aiguo zhuyi yu minzu jingshen (Patriotism and national
spirit) (Beijing, 2000). Also see Alisa Jones, “Politics and History Curriculum
Reform in Post-Mao China,” International Journal of Education Research 37,
no. 6–7 (2003): 545–66.
49. Zhongguo Jiaoyu Nianjian (Yearbook of Chinese education) (1990):
103.
50. See “Jiang Zemin’s Speech at the Veterans’ Symposium, August 25, 1995,”
in Tian, ed., Zhanhou zhongri guanxi wenxianji, 2:939.
51. Zhongguo Jiaoyu Nianjian (1996): 422, 957–64.
52. The film’s directors testified that their production had received strong support from top party leaders and propaganda departments for it could not only
stimulate Chinese patriotism but also contribute to CCP–KMT cooperation in
the cause of national unification. See Zhongguo Dianying Nianjian (Yearbook of
Chinese films) (1987): 3/12–3/16.
53. See, for example, People’s Education Press, Junior High School Textbook,
vol. 4, and High School Textbook, vol. 2 (1992) (in Chinese).
54. Yang, “Convergence or Divergence?”
55. Shogo Suzuki, “The Importance of ‘Othering’ in China’s National identity:
Sino-Japanese Relations as a Stage of Identity Conflicts,” The Pacific Review 20,
no. 1 (March 2007): 23–47.
56. See “Was the War Pointless? China Shows How to Bury It,” New York
Times, 1 March 2005.
57. Xu Zhigen, Nanjing datusha (Beijing, 1987).
71
Yinan He
58. Geremie Barmé, “To Screw Foreigners Is Patriotic: China’s Avant-Garde
Nationalism,” The China Journal, no. 34 (July 1995): 211–12. 59. Margaret Wetherell, “Social Identity and Group Polarization,” in John
Turner, ed., Rediscovering the Social Group: Self-categorization Theory (Oxford
and New York, 1987), 142–70.
60. Fenqing culture targets not only Japan but Western bourgeois culture in
general, but its anti-Japan tone receives the most responses from the audience.
61. See http://www.netandtv.com/newspage/htm2002-4/200243160054219
637.htm (accessed 25 May 2007).
62. Barmé, “To Screw Foreigners Is Patriotic.”
63. See Bin Xu, “Chinese Populist Nationalism: Its Intellectual Politics and
Moral Dilemma,” Representations, no. 76 (fall 2000): 120–40.
64. For some examples, see Song Qiang et al., Zhongguo haishi nengshuo bu
(China can still say no) (Beijing, 1996); and Xiao Jiwen, Riben: Yige buken fuzui
de guojia (Japan: A country that refuses to admit guilt) (Nanjing, 1998).
65. China’s emerging middle class tends to be more moderate about world
affairs. But they are only a small fraction of the Chinese population and their views
are not yet articulated given the current political environment in China. See Alastair
Iain Johnston, “Chinese Middle Class Attitudes towards International Affairs:
Nascent Liberalization?” The China Quarterly 179 (Sept. 2004): 603–28.
66. Peter Hays Gries, “China’s ‘New Thinking on Japan’,” The China Quarterly
184 (Dec. 2005): 831–50.
67. Author’s interviews with about twenty Chinese international affairs experts
in Beijing and Shanghai in May 2006 show that Chinese elites are commonly cautious about what they can say about Japan in the public arena lest they become
targets of radical nationalists.
68. Robert Fish, “From The Manchurian Incident to Nagasaki in 20 Pages:
The Pacific War as Seen in Postwar Japanese High School History Textbooks,”
in Edward Beauchamp ed., Education in Modern Japan: Old Voices, New Voices
(Armonk, NY, 2004). In 1995 the Murayama Tomiichi government established
the Asian Women’s Fund to compensate surviving sex slaves in the name of the
Japanese people rather than the government. So far Tokyo has refused to offer
them an official apology or state compensation. On the comfort women controversy
and politics of memory in Japan, see Ueno Chizuko, “The Politics of Memory:
Nation, Individual and Self,” History & Memory 11, no. 2 (1999): 129–52; and
Jordan Sand, “Historians and Public Memory in Japan: The ‘Comfort Women’
Controversy,” ibid., 117–26.
69. Gavan McCormack, “The Japanese Movement to ‘Correct’ History,” in
Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds., Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory
in Japan, Germany, and the United States (Armonk, NY, 2000); John K. Nelson,
72
Remembering and Forgetting the War
“Tempest in a Textbook: A Report on the New Middle-School History Textbook
in Japan,” Critical Asian Studies 34, no. 1 (March 2002): 129–48.
70. Asahi Shimbun, 10 Sept. 2000 and 5 April 2001.
71. Tawara Yoshifumi, “Junior High School History Textbooks: Whither
‘Comfort Women’ and the ‘Nanking Massacre’?” Japan in the World, Nov. 2000,
available at http://www.iwanami.co.jp/jpworld/text/textbook01.html (accessed
25 May 2007).
72. It was reported that Koizumi won the LDP presidency against his opponent
Hashimoto in 2001 because he promised to Nihon Izokukai (Japanese Bereaved
Families Association) on the eve of the race that he would visit Yasukuni after
entering office. Japanese conservative elites, though mostly supporting a nationalist
agenda for Japanese foreign policy, were divided over these visits. While a number
of LDP politicians argued that actions taken to promote national pride through
war history reinterpretation did not need to be provocative, history hawks like
Koizumi, Abe Shinzo and Aso Taro were determined to confront any foreign
pressure, including Asian protests against worship at Yasukuni, which they saw as
unfair interference in Japan’s internal affairs.
73. Quoted from the English website of Yasukuni, http://www.yasukuni.
or.jp/english/ (accessed 4 May 2007).
74. Yongnian Zheng, Discovering Chinese Nationalism in China (Cambridge,
1999).
75. During the visit, frustrated with Japanese Prime Minister Obuchi Keizō’s
unwillingness to provide the same written apology about the war that he had just
given South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, Jiang attacked Japan’s wartime history and demanded Japanese contrition. But Jiang’s tough attitude enraged many
Japanese who found him lacking basic diplomatic etiquette for openly expressing
disproval of Japan when he was there as a state guest. See Gilbert Rozman, “China’s
Changing Images of Japan, 1989–2001: The Struggle to Balance Partnership and
Rivalry,” International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 2, no. 1 (2002): 95–129.
76. Author’s interview with a well-informed Chinese international affairs analyst
in Beijing, 14 May 2006.
77. Author’s interviews with a Chinese diplomat and an international analyst
from the PLA, 11 and 17 May 2006. This also explains Hu’s agreement to hold
a summit meeting with the new Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo in fall 2006.
Hu now felt less constrained by Jiang’s policy on Yasukuni because Abe avoided
provoking Beijing by shunning the Shrine after taking power. Moreover, Hu
gained ground in domestic politics: he not only fired the mayor of Shanghai who
belonged to the Jiang faction but also succeeded in turning his own proposal to
“build a harmonious socialist society” into official policy at a plenary of the CCP
Central Committee in October 2006.
73
Yinan He
78. Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and
Myth (New York, 1997), 214.
79. Yuan Weishi, “Xiandaihua yu lishi jiaokeshu (Modernization and history
textbooks),” Bingdian, 11 Jan. 2006 (available at http://zqb.cyol.com/gb/
zqb/2006-01/11/content_118530.htm) (acccessed 4 May 2007).
80. Zhang Haipeng, “Fandi fanfengjian shi jindai zhongguo lishi de zhuti:
Ping Yuan Weishi jiaoshou ‘xiandaihua yu lishi jiaokeshu’” (Anti-imperialism,
anti-feudalism are the central theme of Chinese modern history: Comments on
Professor Yuan Weishi’s “Modernization and History Textbooks”), Bingdian,
1 March 2006 (available at http://jds.cass.cn/Article/20060301104216.asp).
Yuan soon responded with a new article in April 2006 (available at http://www.
tecn.cn/data/detail.php?id=9363) (both accessed 25 May 2007).
81. Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, “Party Historiography,” in Jonathan Unger,
ed., Using the Past to Serve the Present: Historiography and Politics in Contemporary
China (Armonk, NY, 1993), 172.
82. Ibid., 151–73.
74
3
The shift to the modern world
in East Asia
War, memory and regional identity
Peter Preston
East Asia entered the modern world of reason, science and industrial-capitalism via a tangled exchange
with extra-regional powers in Europe and North America during which indigenous forms of life were
more or less thoroughly remade. Incoming groups sought trade but were not averse to the use of
violence or the establishment of settlements, and so indigenous polities were slowly overborne as
empire holdings were established. East Asia became a peripheral area within a globe-spanning
industrial-capitalist system centred on Europe and North America. But these sprawling multiethnic empires were never going to last. Simple demographics ensured their demise, but the
manner of their eclipse, the contribution of local agents, and the nature of their political successors
were not guaranteed. It was a contingent process; one part of a general crisis of empire systems.
The crisis can be variously dated: in Europe, from 1914 to 1945/89 (war, ruin, occupation and
recovery); in East Asia, from 1911 to 1975 (rebellion, war, ruin and development); and in America,
from 1941–08/10 (war, dominance and overstretch). The crisis manifested itself in various ways:
there were national reform movements in both core and periphery; there were restricted conflicts in
peripheral territories; and finally there was a period of general warfare. From the early twentieth
century through to the early years of this century there were multiple wars: these wars had various
participants, they occurred in various places, they were sustained for various lengths of time, and
they inevitably they gave rise to different memories. In the case of East Asia, the slow process of the
disintegration of foreign empires was accompanied by general warfare, followed by cold war
conflicts plus at the same time multiple local clashes as new states settled issues of borders.
At the present time, East Asia is home to a number of stable, orderly and rich countries. Their
histories can be read as comprising a series of layers of experience: pre-contact civilizations, the era of
foreign empires, the period of crisis, the independence period, cold war, followed by broad success
within the East Asia region. Each layer of experience carries its own stock of memories, which shape
the present and point to the future – one crucial aspect of this past is the business of war. The legacies
of warfare shape collective memory and the national past, and provide areas of interstate tension,
which makes the present seem – at least in this regard – somewhat precarious. The problems in East
Asia are subtle, however, as the region is successful and this entails greater integration – so revisiting
available truths and confronting the legacies of the past is becoming a common problem.
There are two readily available ways of conceptualizing the importance of memory: first, the
idea of collective memory, which looks at the multiplicity of ways in which socially constructed
33
Peter Preston
memories are transmitted down through time within the social world (Halbwachs 1992); and
second the idea of the national past, which points more directly to the exchange between the elite
and the masses in the production of the collective self-understandings of a political community
(Wright 1985). Both lines coincide in stressing the importance of the remembered past in the
understandings and actions of agents in the present – and this is true of the routines of everyday life,
the work of community and formal organizations and in the machinations of the state (and here, of
course, action can be turned either towards domestic or international audiences). This chapter will
begin with the widest historical frame through which to consider the enduring role of the past in
the present – and move towards a narrower focus on contemporary East Asia.
The shift to the modern world: Europe, East Asia and the United
States
All political elites confront the task of managing change. They must read and react to enfolding
structural change, plot a route to the future and organize their population accordingly.
International relations (IR) theorists have addressed these issues in three main ways: realism
(rational state actors must respond to shifting power relations); liberalism (rational actors can
respond to mutually beneficial opportunities in the marketplace); and social constructivism
(socially embedded actors reflexively grasp their circumstances to inform action in respect of
diverse goals). This last noted approach brings IR theorists into contact with scholars from
many disciplines within the social sciences: for example, historians, sociologists and cultural critics.
This dialogue opens up the issue of identity – and here, in brief, there are two key ideas: collective
memory (the multifarious ways in which a community sustains identity); and the national past
(the quasi-formal way in which a polity sustains its identity). The latter is of particular relevance: a
national past is a provisional contested compromise between the ideas of the official elite and the
diverse opinions of the masses; it offers a summary view of the nation – recording its past, detailing
its present and sketching out a route to the future.
East Asia has been shaped in complex interchanges with Europe and the United States; the
three regions inherit long intermingled histories in common and these feed through into
individual national pasts. First, in Europe, the twentieth century saw a series of interlinked wars
involving the metropolitan empire powers. The result of these wars was the ruin of the metropolitan heartlands and their loss of the territories of empire. The continent that had ushered in the
modern world was politically and culturally eclipsed. The project of the European Union was
inaugurated in response to these disasters and in parallel with national welfare state systems has
proved to be surprisingly successful. One unexpected consequence of this success is that deepening
integration is raising questions of identity, not just various national identities but also a common
European identity. Second, in East Asia the twentieth century saw a related sequence of ruinous
wars. The overarching effect was the decline of empires, but the local contributions involved
aspirations to late-empire, civil war and the manoeuvrings associated with state-making. Despite
these wars, East Asia has emerged as one of the world’s most powerful regions: first, in Japan, later
in the four ‘tiger economies’ and more recently with China, whose reform programme, following
a similar period of conflicts, and looking to the East Asian model, has generated very rapid
development. Once again, success creates its own novel demands and the East Asian region’s
general place within the modern world and the relationships of its component parts are in
question. And third, the record of the United States offers a variant upon this theme. The country
was formed in a revolutionary war of independence against its metropolitan core. Thereafter there
were numerous further wars: civil war, then wars of dispossession against the native peoples of the
continent, thereafter late empire wars in Latin America and Southeast Asia, which culminated in
34
East Asia: war, memory and regional identity
claims to great power status in the declaration of the open door regarding accessing China; later
there were wars against Japan, cold wars down the East Asian littoral and from 1989–91 a brief
episode of hubristic celebration that culminated in 2008 accompanied by a nascent recognition of
relative decline within the tri-polar global system and thus the familiar problems of managing
expectations in an era of diminished status.
Seen in this perspective, the relations between Europe, East Asia and the United States are not
simply pragmatic – shaped by the immediate demands of political events or economic contracts –
but are shaped by a great depth of shared experience. And these experiences have in part shaped
the present East Asia – further affected by the tensions of indigenous state-making and cold war.
All this prompts several questions: what is the nature of this shared history, what are its legacies for
today and how does it shape contemporary thinking?
Shared history: the record of the twentieth century
The process of general crisis spawned a multiplicity of wars: ethnic, class, interstate and between
empires. The European and East Asian continents were the sites of extensive military campaigns:
the destruction was extensive and the casualties were measured in millions. The USA participated
in the later wars but suffered relatively few casualties (Judt 2008b).
Crisis, memory and recovery in Europe
In recent years the European Union has sometimes been presented as a model of social life to
which the rest of the world might aspire (Rifkin 2004). However, in contrast to such selfadvertisements the early part of the twentieth century involved a long sequence of interlinked
wars (Mazower 1998); the conflicts were many, the costs horrendous.
The principal conflicts:
1914–18
1917–22
1936–9
1938
1939–45
1941–5
1941–5
1945–51
1956
1968
1989
Great War
Russian Revolution & Civil War
Spanish Civil War
Austrian Anschluss and Munich Agreement
Second World War
Invasion of Soviet Union
Participation of USA
Occupation of Germany
Hungarian Uprising
Prague Spring
Opening of Berlin Wall
Scale indicated: the resultant death toll1
Great War
Second World War
Total
8,000,000
41,000,000
49,000,000
The events of the Second World War shaped subsequent European history and shape
European memory. National pasts were more or less extensively reworked: the British elite
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Peter Preston
claimed a moral victory, affirmed a spurious continuity with pre-war arrangements and began
the task of making a welfare state (Addison 1995); the French elite accommodated the shocks of
military occupation by celebrating resistance whilst reaching back before Vichy collaboration to
an earlier ideal of republican democracy (Kedward 2005; Judt 2008a); and the West German
elite began processing the material, political and moral catastrophe of the National Socialist
years whilst recovering the much broader civilized history of the people of Germany (Evans
1997). The division of Europe saw imported overarching official ideologies deployed, with local
elites adjusting as best they could, thus creating the idea of the free West and its Eastern
European counterpart in state socialism. In Western Europe the institutional apparatus of the
European Union slowly took shape and the end of the Cold War saw its rapid movement to the
centre of European politics. At the present time, histories of the continent are available,
addressed to national audiences. They are selective, but what is now in prospect is a
European national past.
Crisis, memory and recovery in East Asia
In East Asia, the twentieth century saw the collapse of foreign empires, civil wars and a major
region-wide war. In China, the historical core of the region, there were numerous conflicts: the
1911 revolution; warlord violence; class-based civil war between the Kuomintang and the
Communist party; the Sino-Japanese war; and finally the wider Pacific War itself assimilated to
the Second World War (Elleman 2001; Dreyer 1995). After 1945 there were further civil wars,
numerous wars of colonial retreat, plus the proxy wars associated with the cold war concerns of the
United States. The contemporary pattern of states and nations emerged only recently and at great
human cost.
The sequence involved multiple conflicts:
1911–26
1918–41
1927–37
1931–45
1941–5
1945–50
1946–9
1946–54
1948–60
1950–3
1954–75
1978–91
Chinese Revolution followed by Warlord era
First-phase anti-colonial movements
First Chinese Civil War
Sino-Japanese wars
Pacific War
Indonesian Revolution
Second Chinese Civil War
First Indo-China War
Malayan Emergency
Korean War
Second Indo-China War
Third Indo-China War
These wars involved multiple participants; not merely the soldiers of one country fighting those of
another, but armies made up of multiple ethnic groups, perhaps fighting in remote places far from
their home areas, in armies commanded by leaders from outside the area, and for nominal causes of
which they might well be ignorant or indifferent. These wars were typically fought using modern
weapons, some of which were recycled from the stocks of colonial powers, others introduced
during the Pacific War and later provided by supporters of the various forces. These wars were
pursued at great cost to those civilians unlucky enough to be caught up in the fighting, as the
modern weaponry was highly destructive and the armies using them generally indifferent to
civilian losses.
36
East Asia: war, memory and regional identity
Scale indicated: the resultant death toll
Warlords and Civil War 1916–37
Chinese Civil War 1946–9
Sino-Japanese wars and Pacific War
Southeast Asia occupations
Korean War 1950–3
First Indo China War 1946–54
Second Indo China War 1954–75
Indonesian regime change 1965
Third Indo-China War
Total
4,000,000
2,500,000
12,600,000
5,000,000
2,800,000
600,000
2,700,000
500,000
1,500,000
32,200,000
The general crisis, which has shaped contemporary East Asia, has been read into official and
popular consciousness in a number of ways. However, these matters are not settled either
domestically, where competing memories are readily available, or internationally, as it is possible
to point to a number of competing national pasts that have been the occasion for international
tensions and popular protests.
As the violence subsided, the newly empowered elites pursued various projects. These had
common themes: there was a clear desire to establish clarity in respect of new territorial arrangements, thus where Europeans sought a measure of unity, elites in East Asia sought clarity of
difference; thereafter, most elites sought development in the guise of growth and welfare. This
took multiple forms: in Japan, an understated economic nationalism; in South Korea, an authoritarian national development; in Taiwan, national development clouded by unresolved civil war;
in Hong Kong, a curious re-colonization coupled to accidental outward-directed economic
development; in Southeast Asia, there were numerous military dictatorships in Thailand, elite
rule in the Philippines, guided democracy and development in Indonesia, corporatism in Malaysia
and an energetic state-led development in Singapore. In Indo-China, war continued into the
1990s, thereafter, further variants of the pursuit of national development took shape; and in China
the success of the Communist party in liberating the country was tarnished by the utopian excesses
of Mao, before the reforms of the later years of the century saw sweeping change and the creation
of one more variant form of state-led national development.
Crisis, memory and the present day for the United States
By the turn of the twentieth century American politicians were ready to assert their status as a great
power through colonial wars in Latin America and Southeast Asia. In East Asia, America was
active from the late nineteenth century and asserted itself against European powers by promulgating the doctrine of the Open Door, claiming a special affinity for China, a matter of missionaries
and gunboats (Gong 1996; Cummings 1999). In time, these interests clashed with those of Japan
(Iriye 1987, 1997). The Pacific War produced a new political pattern in the region: external
foreign empires were dissolved; indigenous elites secured power; and the USA assumed a key role
and maintained large armed forces in the region.
America’s wars in East Asia2
1898–1902 Philippines-American War
1941–5
Pacific War
1950–3
Korean War
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Peter Preston
1946–54
1965
1954–75
Huk Rebellion
Indonesian Coup
Second Indo-China War
Scale indicated: the resultant death toll
Philippines-American War
Pacific War
Korean War
Huk Rebellion
Indonesian Coup
Second Indo-China War
Total
220,000
17,600,000
2,800,000
35,000
500,000
2,700,000
23,855,000
Postwar American policy focused on Northeast Asia: the elite sought a remodelled Japan; they
were ill disposed to their erstwhile Soviet allies; and their population was war-weary. The mix had
consequences: the nuclear bombing of Japanese cities (Hasegawa 2005); the reform programmes
of SCAP (Supreme Command for Allied Powers); claims for a role in Korea; and support for the
Kuomintang. In 1949–50 matters come to a head: the founding of the People’s Republic was read
as the ‘loss of China’; tensions in the Korean peninsula boiled over as the North’s invasion
precipitated the 1950–3 Korean War; and a region-wide response organized by the USA
inaugurated the cold war in Asia. Economic and military aid flowed to allies: the SCAP reversed
course; there was support for Taiwan, the British in the Malayan Emergency, the French in
Vietnam (and later prosecution of war in Vietnam (plus Laos and Cambodia)), the elite in the
Philippines, Sukarno’s 1965 coup, and for the Thai military the cold war divided East Asia but
support given to its allies helped the region recover (Stubbs 2005). The 2008 Olympics signalled a
turning point – East Asian recovery was clear, as was the eclipse of American power in the region.
Shared history reconsidered
The intermingled histories of Europe, East Asia and the United States run back over several
centuries and these exchanges have left their marks on polities in all three regions. The general
crisis that engulfed Europe and East Asia in the twentieth century wrought dramatic change.
The end of empires was followed by the emergence of new states and the rise to global power of
the USA.
Legacies: comparing and contrasting these experiences
The interlinked histories of these three regions, together with their contemporary legacies, could
be unpacked through their sustaining relationships: the economic relations (colonial trade links,
neo-colonial continuities and lately more equitable participation within an increasingly internationalized global system); social relations (flows of people moving around the territories of
former empires and more recently the emergence of novel patterns as skilled professionals move
around the internationalized system); cultural relations (mutual influences involving languages,
religions, arts and letters, plus buildings, foods, sports, popular cultures and the like); and the
political relations (the legacies of the period of interlinked unfolding modernity, that is, the laws,
the institutions, the party systems, the public spheres and the presently available collection of
national pasts). Such comprehensive enquiries would cover a vast range, but three aspects can be
38
East Asia: war, memory and regional identity
underscored. First, the extraordinary violence experienced by the peoples of Europe and East Asia
during the twentieth century. Second, the different ways in which the elites and the masses in
Europe and East Asia have dealt with these issues. Third, the nature of the recoveries in Europe,
where the elites and the masses have addressed problematic records in the course of pursuing
unification; in East Asia, where such issues, until recently, have been set aside as elites pursued
differentiation through state-making, nation-building and development; and in the United States,
which saw its location within the global system radically upgraded – and whose elites drew the
conclusion that war is an available policy option.
Thus, once unpacked, the exchanges between these three regions admit of shifting comparisons
across a range of time periods, involving numerous issues and producing a bewildering spread of
commonalities and differences, which might be summarily grasped as follows:
the experiences/memories of the shift to the modern world
the experiences/memories of the crisis that remade the system
the concerns respectively for unification, differentiation and hegemony
the situated logics of contemporary national pasts
the nature of regional identities
One: complex intertwined histories
The shift to the modern world of science-based industrial capitalism, which was begun by accident
in Europe, took political-institutional form in the guise of state-empires. These state-empires
embraced large geographical territories and thus were inhabited by multiple ethnic groups. They
were ordered in multiple hierarchies: economic (a broad functional division of labour throughout
the state/empire sphere); social (a detailed social status hierarchy, perhaps also functional (ethnicity/economic role could be linked); cultural (an overarching great tradition was affirmed
surrounded by local traditions); and political (a hierarchy of control running from metropolitan
centres down to the local level peripheries). State-empire ideologies served to discipline populations. Such constructions work in a distinctive fashion. Unlike nationalisms, which can run
reductive arguments (rhetorically, nations are removed from the social world and placed in the
natural world (race or ethnicity) or the realm of history (in the asocial very long run) or the realms
of culture (carried, for example, in discrete languages)), which turn contingent social identities
into the nominally given, state-empire ideologies must confront subject populations that are
diverse and where claims to common ethnicity or history or culture are manifestly false, and so the
empire is distanced from the perhaps messy contemporary social world and its realization is lodged
in the future as its elites claim that progress flows from empire membership – material, social,
cultural and political – and will be secured in the future.
In East Asia the process of the expansion of the modern world entailed the radical reconstruction of extant patterns of life and political institutions: thus existing economies were reworked in
line with the demands of global science-based industrial capitalism. The extent of the reach of
modern economic practices varied from place to place. There was no simple process whereby
forms of economic life were extinguished in favour of market-based activities, rather the interchange was long drawn out and the interactions formed endless permutations; thus existing social
relations were reworked – new forms of economic life entailed revised forms of social life. As a
result, cultural practices changed and existing polities were absorbed and recast within states/
empires. In all these territories, state-empire ideologies were promulgated and whilst their reach
within local populations varied – some groups affirmed the ideas, others ignored them and some
bided their time, learned the lessons and in time lodged their own counterclaims (variants on the
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Peter Preston
ideas on offer) – they shaped the local exchange with the irresistible demands of the modern world
and their legacies can be seen in the present.
Overall, the shift to the modern world is an ongoing open-ended process – it was inaugurated
in Europe – it expanded – other extant civilizations were variously dissolved, absorbed or remade – it
took the institutional form of state-empires. This long period provides the base-line materials of
contemporary national pasts.
Two: general crisis – the system reordered – contrasting views
In the early twentieth century competition amongst European powers for advantage precipitated a
sequence of interlinked wars. These were paralleled by further conflicts variously located in the
peripheral areas of these state-empires as denizens of empire sought ends to foreign rule, projects cast
in terms of independent statehood, nation- building and development. In general, these movements
failed. However, the decision of the Japanese elite to extend their empire holdings deep into China
ensured conflict with the USA and precipitated a general war in East Asia. Ongoing major conflicts
in both the core and periphery of the state-empire system ensured its collapse.
The European-centred system of state-empires disappeared: in Europe, nation states appeared,
built around the metropolitan cores of the earlier state-empires; in East Asia, nation states
appeared, built around the aspirations of replacement elites (more particularly, those who could
successfully lay claim to part of disintegrating empires); and the USA attained an unexpected albeit
contested international pre-eminence at the heart of a project turned to the creation of a global
liberal-market system.
The wars of the crisis era involved diverse locations, they involved multiple participants and
they produced multiple memories. There is no simple history to be recorded: that is, there are no
direct carry-overs into contemporary national pasts. There are legacies, but these are the result of
elaborate and ongoing processes of active forgetting and remembering.
Overall, the period of general crisis resulted in the disintegration of European-centred
state-empires. The global system was radically reordered. It was through this process of violent
change that the contemporary pattern of nation states emerged. These events were read into
national pasts: in Europe, often in terms of shame and regret; in East Asia, often in terms of
progressive projects turned to the future; and in the USA, in terms of a putatively universal
liberal-market project.
Three: elite concerns for unification, differentiation and hegemony
The Pacific War came to an end in August 1945. State-empires were either gone or un-recoverable,
notwithstanding some further wars of colonial withdrawal. Where there had been a number of
empires embracing territory in the geographical areas of Europe and East Asia, what now appeared
were sets of nation states within areas that became regions within the overall global system. Thus
reforms took place across a series of scales: global, regional and national. These process were further
inflected by cold war conflicts: in Europe, the continent was divided with the eastern areas looking
to the leadership of the Soviet Union whilst the western areas looked to the USA; and in East Asia,
the territories were divided into a state socialist core around China and a state capitalist littoral
oriented towards the leadership of the USA.
In Europe, elites were disposed to unification or at the very least cooperation; in the USA,
elites sought to create an integrated global liberal-trade regime (Kolko 1968; Aron 1973); but in
East Asia, elites were disposed to differentiation, for as empire-states dissolved, replacement elites
emerged concerned with state-making, nation-building and development. Replacement elites
40
East Asia: war, memory and regional identity
were concerned to establish their control and their collective identities; thereafter, varieties of
international cooperation were not resisted, as with, for example, ASEAN, or the defence linkages
of Taiwan, South Korea and Japan to the USA.
In the years following the wars, East Asia and the United States saw dramatic institutional
changes in politics as novel states and nations were created and lodged variously within wider
regional patterns. The period of intense rapid change fed into contemporary national pasts.
Replacement elites were marked by war; the populations of new nations were similarly
marked. The episode provides a further set of resources to be invoked and read into contemporary
national pasts.
Four: situated logics of contemporary national pasts
In Europe, national pasts embrace the resources of baseline ideas about modernity and thereafter
are suffused with reflections upon the period of crisis, collapse and occupation. The necessity of
reconstruction is also embraced. The line of travel is towards unification. In significant measure,
European national pasts come to revolve around war as something to be acknowledged, an
occasion for remembering and mourning the dead, and an episode to be recalled in shame –
thus, nationalism flows out of the routine experience of Europeans. However, in contrast, in East
Asia, national pasts embrace the resources of baseline ideas dominated by the period of crisis, but it
is read differently. The crisis gave aspirant replacement elites their chance and they took it; they
seized control of particular parts of the territories of disintegrating state-empires and turned them
into states pursuing nation-building. The line of travel is towards differentiation. Notwithstanding
the violence and loss, the experience could be read positively – as the achievement of independence and, thereafter, regional cooperation was available in the form of varieties of networks. So
nationalism flows into the routine experience of peoples in East Asia. In contrast, in the USA,
events are read in terms of ethics (the war was morally virtuous), military campaigns (the war was a
technical triumph), diplomacy (the war was a mixture of success, in regard to Europe/Japan, and
failure, in respect of the USSR and PRC) and a distinctive route to the future, one in which the
country offers a universal and optimistic line for all nations.
National pasts in Europe, East Asia and the United States involve significant elements of
remembered war – occasions when action made a difference (Wright 1985). In the case of Europe,
the difference made was loss of state-empires and the achievement of nation states disposed to pursue
formal unification; in the case of East Asia, the difference made was of the loss of overarching stateempires and the opportunity for independence and network-carried co-operations; in the United
States, events were read in terms of a morally laudable victorious war and the embrace of a
responsibility to order wider events to the benefit of all.
Five: the idea of regions in East and Southeast Asia
A region is not a natural given, it is a construct; it is the outturn of the interacting projects of
diverse national agents. One aspect of all this will be the ways in which these agents tell the story
of the region. Turning to regional rhetoric, it is possible to identify a multiplicity of agents
offering diverse arguments addressed to a multiplicity of audiences – a shifting mix of agents,
arguments, actions, institutional vehicles and explanatory/justificatory commentary (including
scholarship). There could be several ways in which the story of a region might be told; different
agents make different arguments for different audiences. The elites are, however, the key – and so
the ensemble of ideas and activities will revolve around the substantive projects pursued by elite
agents.
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Peter Preston
There are a number of ways in which the discourse might run. The central arena of these
discursive constructs is memory, understood as an active social process of the creation of meaning.
First, political talk (projects/rhetoric) will involve identifying the players who are involved
(co-operators/competitors); it will require constructing the idea of a region; it will need institutional
vehicles (the organizations that both carry and embody the project/rhetoric); and it will require
popular dissemination (thus, the ASEAN summit photo-opportunities and perhaps, for example, the
ASEAN gift shop at Changi airport). Second, state-planning talk (projects/policy rhetoric) will
involve interpreting the demands of political masters, in other words turning politics into policy. It
requires drawing up plans for what can be done, which will involve drawing lines on maps; preparing
schedules/contracts of actions; and statements asserting the value of the planned actions in order to
exhort popular support. Third, corporate-planning talk (projects/instrumental rhetoric) will involve
selecting a market (for example, the European or American market); thus an audience is identified
and advertising and product can thereafter be tailored and delivered. Fourth, popular talk will be both
passive – that is, accommodating the demands of political, state or corporate worlds – or active, that
is, deploying available popular ideas to identify and characterize a region. In either case, external
demands are read in terms of the resources of the local tradition – quite how they will be read is
dependent on the particular tradition and the ways in which external demands unpack in practice.
In respect to East Asia, a region can be identified in economic, social and cultural interlinkages.
However, political tensions left over from the long episode of the shift to the modern world
inhibit moves towards regional organizations or a common regional identity: there are valuable
organizations (thus bilateral FTAs or currency-swap agreements) and there is a wealth of talk about
East Asia, which in some measure over-rides current political tensions within the region and asserts
a macro-cultural identity. In Southeast Asia there are clearer signs of regional integration/identity.
Acharya (2000) argues that region-ness can be a part of identity. First, beginning with pre-contact
Southeast Asia, region-ness looks somewhat implausible, but then came commerce and colonialism, where the former did act to integrate the region and the latter cut through these patterns,
linking discrete parts of the area to their respective metropolitan cores. Second, the period of
decolonization saw an intermingling of continuing links to colonial cores, with region-ness
understood in terms of pan-Asianism or Third Worldism and the ambiguous impact of cold
war. Third, it is with ASEAN that a local project to build a region begins and it turns out to be
successful, with its most recent expansion presented as completing the project.
In the case of East and Southeast Asia, the material taken into memory looks to the long
experience of colonialism, general crisis and collapse/recovery. It is these patterns of events that
provide the materials to be read into a series of national pasts. The national past is a subtle
construction that serves to link individuals to the ordered political realm. As such, it is a matter
of intense concern to elites, and any revisions to a given national past are likely to have not merely
domestic but also regional and global ramifications.
Contemporary East Asia: the past in the present
East Asia’s shift to the modern world has been a long, drawn-out process. It evidences all the
familiar mix of progress and upheaval, and much of its recent history has been suffused with
violence – events that provide a rich stock of experiences that find expression in both collective
memory and various national pasts. More recently, the countries of the region have experienced
great economic, social and political success. This creates a paradoxical situation: as these communities draw together within a deepening regional context, they must adapt by reconsidering
inherited ideas, adjusting mutual self-perceptions and taking the earliest steps towards conceptualizing
a regional identity.
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East Asia: war, memory and regional identity
Memories of colonial empires and war
In Southeast Asia, memories of French, Dutch and British colonial rule belong to the distant
past; these colonial powers are long gone and memories have faded, neither negative nor
positive but merely irrelevant. Other issues have supervened: in Indo-China, the American
interventions; in Indonesia, the long period of Suharto’s rule; in Singapore and Malaysia, longestablished mutual unease. Of course, the region has ordered itself via ASEAN, committed
amongst other things to consultation and consensus-building (Acharya 2000). Yet in Northeast
Asia, memories are stronger and generally negative. In China, the national past invokes ‘one
hundred years of humiliation’, a nationalist perspective that embraces not merely distant
foreigners – Europeans and Americans – but also near neighbours, in particular Japan, with
its imperial-era aggressions (Zhao 2004; Hughes 2006). In South Korea, the episode of colonial
rule from Tokyo is recalled in hostile terms (Cummings 1997; Shin et al. 2007). Yet in Taiwan,
the recollections of Japanese rule are softer. In China and South Korea, at the present time,
these memories are ritually re-affirmed and they inhibit the search for regional cooperation and
block the emergence of a collective East Asia identity. However, in general, colonial days are
long gone.
In contrast, the period of general crisis continues to shape memories. Certain events, remembered by many, exist as either official ideology or as national past: the Nanjing Massacre; Baton
Death March; comfort women; the bombing of Hiroshima. Sometimes the official memorialization is contentious, for instance, the Yasakuni Shrine or (in a different register) the Smithsonian
Museum exhibit of the Enola Gay. Some events are remembered but are not part of official
memory or national past: the 1941–2 fall of Singapore; the forgotten armies in Burma; the No
Gun Ri Massacre; the My Lai Massacre. Other events fade from view: the often violent end to the
foreign colonial regimes; the race aspects of the Pacific War; the fates of the combatants who chose
the wrong sides (Karens, Ambionese or Thai fascists); the fates of those who chose wrongly in
the struggles for statehood; the experiences of the civilians defeated, such as Japanese settlers in
Manchuria; and so on.
East Asia comprises a number of independent locally ruled polities. There are no colonies;
there are no dependencies. Local elites are more often than not oriented to the pursuit of national
development; and whilst the shift to the modern world has been accomplished there are some
continuing stresses and strains.
At the present time the region is home to unsettled anxieties about the past:
Border disputes – matters left over from the general crisis. For example, Japan/Russia
over the Northern Territories, four islands to the north of Hokkaido; Japan/China over
the Senkoku/Daiyou islands adjacent to the northern coast of Taiwan; Japan/South
Korea over islands in the Straits of Tsushima; China/ASEAN members over the
resources of the South China Sea.
Events during the years of warfare – matters left over from the regions’ wars. For example,
Japan/South Korea over the issue of forced prostitution during the war years, with the former
reluctant to officially acknowledge responsibility; Japan/China over the issue of the behaviour of Imperial Japanese forces during the seizure of Nanking, where debate revolves
around the extent of a massacre of civilians; Japan/USA over the issue of the systematic areabombing of Japanese cities in late 1944 and early 1945, where the latter are disinclined to
accept any moral responsibility; Japan and its neighbours over the issue of textbooks, where
national governments, civil society groups, journalists and scholars all contend over the
‘correct’ recording of history – a squabble that has attained a ritualized form as victims of
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Peter Preston
Japanese wartime aggression repeatedly demand expressions of regret in the form of
‘apologies’.
Domestic problems – unresolved domestic matters. For example, the issue of the mass killings
that accompanied the 1965 coup in Indonesia; in summer 2008, in the run-up to the Beijing
Olympics, the riots amongst ethnic Tibetans and related demonstrations in favour of Tibet,
alongside the symbolic journey of the Olympic torch in Europe – all of which provoked
much unhappy debate as these episodes marked unresolved conflicts left over from the years
immediately following the formation of the People’s Republic.
Contested rituals of mourning the millions of dead – unresolved issues from the regions’
wars. For example, the annual Yasakuni Shrine ceremony in remembrance of Japan’s war
dead has become a contentious issue, where within Japan opinion divides between fervent
nationalists and various networks of the loose peace movement. Internationally, opinion is
hostile to this annual event as it is read as a refusal to acknowledge the damage caused to
the region by the Japanese variant of late-imperialism. Recently, the event has become
mixed up with the shifting dynamics of international politics (will the Japanese prime
minister attend and if so will it be in a ‘private’ or ‘official’ capacity?) and the curious
business of apology diplomacy (where the ceremonies are the occasion for demands for
further, fuller, more sincere apologies from the Japanese state to the victims of earlier
years).
Intermixing remembrance and contemporary political issues – these are contemporary issues.
For example, 4 June 2009 marked the twentieth anniversary of the incidents in Tiananmen
Square and in Hong Kong, as usual, there was a large gathering/march and a number of
figures from overseas travelled to Hong Kong to participate. The anniversary also saw the
publication of memoirs prepared by Zhao Ziyang, which offered an insiders’ view of events.
However, in mainland China the anniversary was not marked, thus the events remain an
unsettled contested memory.
Some issues point towards the future – in Europe, the ‘allied scheme of history’ (Davies 1997:
39) offers an explanation of the Second World War that reduces events to the moral victory of
the western allies, the heroism of the Soviet armies and the responsibility of the National
Socialists, which systematically misrepresents events (eliding the actual confusions of war and
postwar) and provides a starting point for Europe-wide reflection, whereas in East Asia there
is no simple analogous tale available to shape reflection.
National pasts and the consequences of success
A national past offers a story: it tells a political community where they come from, who they are
and where they might expect to be in the future. National pasts are elaborate constructions
compounded of elements taken from the historical experiences of the communities in question.
National pasts are usually cast in reductive terms: if the nation is grounded in ethnicity or deep
history or language, if the nation is a given, if it endures, then acquiescence can be represented as
rational. But such claims are false. The strategy is misleading. Nations are constructs and so is the
national past. It is one aspect of the elite’s continuing task of reading and reacting to the demands
of enfolding structural change. As the world changes around a polity, then the elite must respond,
and one aspect of that response will be a reordering of the national past the better to order
collective action oriented towards the future. The interlinkages between Europe, East Asia and
the USA are many and these will be subject to reflection as these regions confront change with its
uneven mix of success and relative decline.
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East Asia: war, memory and regional identity
Notes
1 Data in this paper is given only as a rough guide to the scale of the deaths – it is mostly from World History at
KMLA, accessed August 2009–10; other material is from Norman Davies (1997) Europe: A History,
London, Pimlico; and Norman Davies (2006) Europe at War 1939–1945: No Simple Victory, London,
Macmillan; some data is from Max Hastings 2008 Retribution: The Battle for Japan 1944–45, New York,
Alfred Knopf. It might be noted that in all these wars direct American losses were only a small part of
numbers given, thus in the Pacific War direct losses were around 150,000, but the scale of the wars are
indicated by the overall totals. Hastings comments that the Pacific War prompted the American elite to the
view that it could fight wars at relatively low cost to itself (see chapter 22 and on this theme see Tony Judt
2008 ‘What Have We Learned If Anything’ in New York Review of Books 55.7 May 01 2008).
2 This is a very rough list – plus for the USA there were three major domestic wars (War of Independence
1775–1882; the Civil War 1861–5; plus the Indian Wars of the nineteenth century – the list also mixes
overt war with some selected cold war interventions, Philippines and Indonesia – but there are many more.
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25
DIVIDED MEMORIES AND
HISTORICAL RECONCILIATION
IN EAST ASIA
Gi-Wook Shin
Over the past two decades East Asia has witnessed a growing level of regional exchange and
interaction, especially in the spheres of culture and economy. There has even been considerable
discussion about establishing a formal East Asian community. Still, the region cannot escape
the burden of its history, giving rise to what experts call the “Asian Paradox.” Wounds inflicted
during times of colonialism and war have not fully healed and have become highly contentious
diplomatic matters. Historical and territorial issues continue to provoke anti-Japanese sentiment
in China and Korea, while the Japanese suffer from “apology fatigue,” questioning why they
must continue to repent for events that took place more than six decades ago. Increased regional
interaction has not diminished the importance of disputes over the past.
As in many other cases around the world, reconciliation in East Asia first occurred between
governments. With the only exception of North Korea, Japan normalized diplomatic relations
with all of the countries it had once invaded or colonized: the Republic of China (Taiwan) in
1952, the Republic of Korea (ROK) in 1965, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1972.
Nevertheless, these societies have failed to come to terms with their shared past. Japan has paid
no “reparations” to its former colonies – though it gave “grants and aid” to South Korea for normalizing relations and provided major economic assistance to the PRC – and China and Korea
were not included in the San Francisco Peace Treaty that settled the Pacific War (for details, see
chapter 22 in this volume). Historical issues such as war responsibility, disputed territories, and
Japan’s colonial rule and atrocities were largely overlooked as the Cold War began and intensified.
The question of history remains central to the development of regional relations. Japan-China
relations have been conflict-ridden, due in no small measure to both countries’ failure to reconcile their differing views of the past. Similarly, friction between Japan and South Korea about
Japan’s role as colonizer remains unresolved. South Korea and China are sparring over the status
of the ancient kingdom of Koguryŏ (Gaogouli in Chinese), and Taiwan as well is immersed in a
reexamination of the historical past (for details, see chapter 14 in this volume). Even the United
States and Russia have been subject to controversy with respect to their involvement in events in
East Asian history. Recent disputes over Senkaku/Diaoyu and Dokto/Takeshima are not simply
territorial issues: they are closely related to the region’s unfortunate past of war and colonialism
(see chapters 11, 17, and 23 in this volume).
Questions about and legacies of what happened in the past are difficult to deal with, as they
touch upon the most sensitive issues of national identity, the formation of historical memories,
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and national myths that play a powerful role to this day. Whether it is Japanese atrocities in
China or the U.S. decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, no nation is immune to the charge
that it has formed a less than complete view of the past. All share a reluctance to fully confront
the complexity of their own actions of the past and blame others for their historical experiences.
There is widespread recognition in East Asia of the need for reconciliation and a final resolution of historical issues, both for the sake of justice and to remove a major obstacle to regional
cooperation. In fact, many Asians have sought to achieve these goals through diverse means,
including apology politics, litigation, joint history writing, and regional communication (Shin
2014). But there is a fundamental obstacle to reconciliation: the existence of divided, contentious historical memories. Involved nations are simultaneously bound together and separated by
distinct – often contradictory – historical accounts and perceptions. These are deeply embedded
in the public consciousness and are transmitted to succeeding generations formally by education
and informally through the arts, popular culture, and mass media.
Ultimately, East Asian societies need to come to a shared memory and reconciled view of
history to achieve “thick” reconciliation (Crocker 1999).1 However, as Peter Duus aptly points
out, writing a “common history” may be feasible intellectually but not politically, because “the
teaching of history in many East Asian countries is clearly tied to building and strengthening
national identity” (Duus 2011, p. 101). Previous experiences (e.g., the Franco-German case) have
taught us that successful reconciliation via shared history requires a particular political environment, one that is absent in East Asia today (Höpken 2003).2 It would thus be more fruitful to
recognize and understand how each society has developed its own distinctive memory of the past
and how this memory has affected its national identity and relations with others. To illustrate
the merits of this approach, I first examine earlier attempts to create a shared memory through
common history and their pitfalls.
Writing common history?
East Asian nations have engaged in numerous efforts to address contentious historical memories
and even to write a common history. Frequent clashes over history textbooks in East Asia (1982,
2002, and 2005) demonstrate that history is not simply about the past but also implicates the
present and the future (Kim and Schwartz 2010). Moreover, the situation attests to the central
importance of a common view of history that will foster overall reconciliation. One approach
to solving this problem has been to form both official and unofficial joint committees that study
history and produce commonly written textbooks and supplementary materials. As recently
as November 2013, South Korean President Park suggested writing a common history among
South Korea, Japan, and China. Such efforts make for a long and complex process and it is too
early to make a final judgment about their efficacy. Even in Europe, it took many years to produce common history textbooks. It is already evident, however, that this approach is fraught with
difficulty and far from achieving reconciliation (Kitaoka 2007; Kimijima 2000).
Japan and South Korea undertook the first official attempt to deal jointly with history in
October 2001 by establishing the Japan-ROK Joint History Research Committee. This was the
first state-sponsored effort toward placing a reconciled view of the past in a new regional history framework. While not a complete failure, the committee has yet to see its envisioned goals,
achievement of consensual interpretation and eventual reconciliation, materialize. Even though
it adopted the UNESCO model of writing a “parallel history,” when it finished the first phase
in May 2005, both sides disagreed on what exactly should be incorporated into the textbooks.
Apparently, there was significant divergence over how to interpret Japan’s colonial rule, including
the question of Japan’s role (or lack thereof) in Korea’s modernization. While a consensus was
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Gi-Wook Shin
reached in some areas, contended areas were relegated to footnotes (International Crisis Group
2005).
Following Koizumi’s controversial visits to Yasukuni Shrine, the work of the joint committee
was put on hold until October 2006, when Prime Minister Abe and President Roh Moo Hyun
agreed to relaunch efforts. The committee finally met on April 27, 2007, in Seoul. In addition
to the three existing groups studying ancient, medieval, and contemporary history, members
agreed to form a new subgroup that would examine history textbooks. The idea reportedly
was to narrow differences between both nations’ textbooks. The second report was published in
March 2010. Despite some tangible results of the joint study (e.g., rejection of the existence of
Japanese base known as imna ilbonbu between the fourth to sixth century, a claim often used to
justify Japan’s colonization of Korea in the 20th century), the report still failed to resolve many
points of contention.
Japan and China launched a similar effort, also as part of the thaw in relations that followed
the leadership transition in Japan from Koizumi to Abe. The two countries announced an agreement to form a similar joint research committee. Compiled of 20 leading historians from both
countries, the Japan-China committee commenced in late 2006. Led by Chinese Professor Bu
Ping and Japanese Professor Shin’ichi Kitaoka, the committee launched a joint study to produce
an account of 2,000 years of Sino-Japanese interaction by 2008. This would be in time to mark
the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Japan-China Peace and Friendship Treaty in 1978.
From the first meeting, it became clear that their goals were daunting, despite their having
reached an agreement for further discussion on three broad themes: the 2,000 years of SinoJapanese exchange; the “unfortunate” history of the modern era; and the 60 years of “progress”
in relations since the end of the war. Not surprisingly, the Japanese wanted to focus on the postwar era, while the Chinese were more interested in taking inventory of the colonial and wartime
periods (Mainichi Shimbun 2006; The Financial Times 2007). At its second meeting in 2007, the
committee agreed on a list of major historical events to discuss, including the Nanjing Massacre
and Japan’s 21 Demands on China, but the issue of “comfort women” was excluded.
The committee released the first report in early 2010. It covers ancient, medieval, and modern
history, describing themes from Japanese and Chinese academics’ submitted papers. Similar to
the Japan-Korea joint study, there was some progress in mutual understanding of modern history:
both sides used the word “aggression” to refer to the invasion by the Japanese army, asserting
that it “left a deep scar on China” and that the causes of war “were created by the Japanese
side.” However, scholars disagreed on the Nanjing Massacre’s total number of casualties – the
Japanese side mentioned various estimates ranging from 20,000 to 200,000, while the Chinese
side claimed more than 300,000 (Kyodo News 2010).
These official efforts, though useful, are unlikely to produce a common rendition of history,
particularly regarding the most controversial periods. As Shin’ichi Kitaoka notes, perceptions of
history among East Asian nations will never be identical and efforts should be aimed at “ascertaining precisely where the two sides’ perceptions differ and where they are in agreement” (Kitaoka
2007, p. 4). Moreover, it is a serious challenge to insulate the involved historians from political
pressures generated by their respective governments and publics so that they can devote themselves
to a careful investigation of historical facts.3 As the Korean historian Chung Jae-Jeong, a member
of the Joint Japan-ROK Committee and a former president of South Korea’s East Asia History
Foundation, remarks, “It requires a lot of courage, effort, patience and sincerity to publish a history
textbook for common use via a joint project spanning countries which had once been antagonistic
toward each other” (Chung 2006, p. 14).
In contrast to official textbook writing efforts, Japanese and Korean scholars have worked
together privately to move toward a mutual understanding of regional history. The first of such
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efforts was the Japan-South Korea Joint Study Group on History Textbooks. Organized in the
late 1980s, without the direct involvement of either the Korean or the Japanese government, the
group met four times in 18 months. Similarly, the Korea-Japan Solidarity 21 (Hanil yŏndae 21)
was formed with the aim to build regional solidarity between the two nations through
self-reflection. Also, after several years of collaborative work, a regional NGO consisting of historians from China, Japan, and South Korea produced the first-ever East Asian common history
guidebook, A History That Opens to the Future: The Contemporary and Modern History of Three East
Asian Countries (Mirai o hiraku rekishi or Miraerŭl yŏnŭn yŏksa) in early 2005 (Park 2011; Iwasaki
and Narita 2008).4 In spring 2007, after ten years of work, another group of 40 historians and
experts from Japan and Korea published a comprehensive history of Korea-Japan relations, titled
A History of Korea-Japan Relations (Han’il kyoryu ŭi yŏksa). Additionally, a number of teaching
materials for history education have resulted from such efforts (Chung 2006).5 It remains to be
seen how these “unofficial” history books will be incorporated into schools’ curricula.
Divided memories and identity politics
Despite these official and unofficial efforts to reconcile differences over history, we have yet to see
the emergence of a shared view of the past, let alone a regional identity among East Asian nations.
The official projects to produce joint history texts generated “a certain bond of mutual trust”
between scholars and promoted a certain “common intellectual community (Kitaoka 2007,
p. 11),”6 but participants came to the painful if not unexpected conclusion that writing a shared
official history textbook is all but impossible. At best, historians discussed issues on the basis of
open inquiry into historical facts and narrowing perception gaps. Meanwhile, as noted above,
the private efforts did result in publishing common history books, but how they will affect the
formation of a shared historical memory among East Asians is yet to be seen.
If anything, the experience of the past two decades underlines how profoundly historical
writing – and especially writing history texts – is affected by nationalist politics (see chapter 4 in
this volume). Particularly, an obsession with national history, based on a single historical memory,
embodied in history textbooks, has exacerbated Asia’s history problem. Why?
As the first modernizing Asian country but still a late developer from the Western point of
view, Japan felt an urgent need to catch up through “defensive modernization.” In this process,
nationalism, particularly the notion of a racially distinctive and ethnically homogeneous Japanese
nation (minzoku), emerged and was promoted as a force for reform and social change. The myth
of a racially homogeneous ethno (tan’itsu minzoku) constituted the core of Japanese national
history (kokushi) and identity, and remains so even today in the form of theorem on Japanese
(nihonjinron) (Yoshino 1992).
Korea’s history writing also evolved from dynastic to ethno-national history in the process of
modern nation-building. Koreans stressed the uniqueness and purity of the Korean people and
developed a nationalist historiography to counter Japanese colonialist historiography. Developed
during the colonial period and continuing into the postcolonial era, Korean nationalist historiography reflected the competition between the North and South to claim the sole legitimacy of
the Korean ethnic nation (Shin and Robinson 1999; Shin 2006).
China’s experience was similar. Early “modern” China (the Republic of China) claimed itself
to be “nationalist,” and the PRC prided itself on its victory over colonialism and imperialism; not
surprisingly, central to its historical narrative were themes of national resistance and liberation, a
focus which remains today. As historian Qi Chen asserts, “The ultimate goal of history education
in the People’s Republic of China is to stimulate patriotic feeling and consolidate the national
identity of the students” (Chen 2008).
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Gi-Wook Shin
History education plays a powerful role in shaping historical memory and national identity. History textbooks’ aim is to teach youth a specific “master narrative” as part of defining a nation’s collective identity. As Duus argues, since their invention in the 19th century,
history textbooks have been “organized around the narrative or story of a nation or people
rather than around a transnational theme,” which remains the case today (Duus 2011; also see
chapter 24 in this volume). Because textbooks affect national identity, the politics of nationalism invariably affect their writing. This is especially so in East Asia. According to a public
opinion survey of Koreans conducted in 2013, 42.8% of respondents in their 20s – who have
no firsthand experience of Japan’s past wrongdoings and perhaps are more familiar with
Japanese cultural influence – identified the question of history as the most critical issue to be
resolved, while only 34.6% of those who experienced and lived through the period of history
in question viewed it as the most pressing problem in Japanese-Korean relations (Ha 2013).
Clearly, school education has a great influence in shaping the younger generation’s historical
perspectives.
In both Japan and South Korea, the Ministry of Education requires all textbooks to undergo a
strict screening process (Chung 2006). In China, the Ministry of Education has a more direct role
in textbook writing, as history textbooks must “accord with fundamental policies of the government” (Chen 2008, p. 20). This is also the case in Taiwan, where the Democratic Progressive
Party government has revised history textbooks in order to emphasize Taiwanese identity. With
such heavy state involvement, the resulting history textbooks can easily become international
diplomatic issues. Government oversight, as Daniel Sneider argues, makes textbooks a natural
and legitimate subject for debate among competing forces within a nation and among nations
(Sneider 2011). It is no coincidence that textbooks have become a nexus for significant international tension in East Asia.
At the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) at Stanford University, Daniel Sneider and I have led a collaborative project – “Divided Memories
and Reconciliation” – that attempts to comparatively address the history issue in East Asia. The
analytical framework we employ is that the greatest obstacle to reconciliation in East Asia lies
in the existence of divided, and often conflicting, historical memories. Rather than try to forge
a common historical account or to reach a consensus among scholars about specific events, we
argue that a more fruitful approach lies in understanding how historical memory has evolved
in each country and has been incorporated into respective master narratives. Through uncovering the existence of different historical memories, it is hoped that citizens will develop a more
self-critical, self-reflective approach to their own history. Such an introspective effort has the
potential to lay the foundation for greater self- and mutual understanding and eventual historical
reconciliation in the region.
We see reconciliation as a process, not an endpoint. Lily Gardner Feldman suggests that the
concept of reconciliation “does not infuse peace with a vision of harmony and tension-free
coexistence but integrates differences. Productive contention in a shared and cooperative framework for identifying and softening (but not eliminating) divergence is a more realistic goal than
perfect peace” (Feldman 1999, p. 337). In this context, our comparative project can be seen as
an effort to create such a cooperative framework to understand divided historical memories in
East Asia.
To be clear, we are not disputing the importance of historical facts. Historians must strive
to establish “accurate” historical facts and write history based on rigorous academic research.
History is not solely cognitive memory or a matter of interpretation, even in the age of postmodernism. Nor are we suggesting that we treat aggressors and victims equally. Japan was unquestionably a major aggressor in the region and must acknowledge unequivocally its responsibility.
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Still, historical facts are inevitably subject to varying and even conflicting interpretations, forming the basis of historical memories. Our focus thus lies on examining how historical facts are
recorded and remembered in a given nation and how that, in turn, affects national identity as
well as international relations.
More specifically, our project examines the formation of historical memory in four East Asian
societies (China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) and the United States by analyzing the events
from 1931 to 1951. The scope of the period under examination could have been stretched back
to the 19th century or included more societies.7 However, for the sake of constructing a manageable comparative study, we have limited the period to the wartime events that began with the
opening of the Sino-Japanese conflict in 1931, continued with the widening of that conflict into
the Sino-Japanese War and later the Pacific War between the Japanese Empire and the Allies,
and concluded with the peace process culminating in the signing of the San Francisco Treaty in
1951. This period encompasses Japanese colonial rule in Korea, Taiwan, and northern China, as
well as the decisions at the close of the Pacific War, including the division of Korea. Subjects of
focus include general historical issues, China-Japan issues, Taiwan-Korea-Japan issues, U.S.-Japan
issues, and postwar settlement issues.
The first part of the project is a comparative study of high school history textbooks in these
five places, focusing on the period from the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War in 1931 to the
formal conclusion of the Pacific War with the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951. We specifically
compared how these societies remember and teach through formal education eight contentious
issues: the Nanjing Massacre, the atomic bombings, the Korean War, the attack on Pearl Harbor,
forced labor (including “comfort women”), the Manchurian Incident, economic development
under Japanese rule, and the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal.8 There are similar projects but as far
as I know, there exists no such comprehensive study comparing five societies on those topics,
especially one that includes the United States.
The second comparative study covers popular cinema dealing with historical subjects during
roughly the same period. Film, along with television and literature, plays a crucial role in shaping historical memory and provides another means of comparing the formation of historical
memory in each of the five societies. This analysis of films has particular importance when one
considers that in recent years there has been a significant increase in the exchange of films and
other manifestations of popular culture among East Asian nations, in part intended specifically
to promote regional reconciliation.9
The third portion of this project comparatively examines views of elite opinion-makers on
contentious historical issues. Like film and textbooks, how elites in politics, the media, academia,
and business view the past is clearly crucial to the formation of public opinion in East Asia and
the United States. However, very little scholarly research has been conducted at the elite level
and many unanswered questions remain. Daniel Sneider and I have conducted over 50 interviews
with opinion leaders on historical issues in China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States and
are currently writing a book based on the interview data.
The final phase of the project compares Asian with European experiences in addressing
historical disputes and reconciliation. There has been much valuable scholarship on how both
Europe and East Asia have approached these issues, but relatively little that directly compares the
two areas. A workshop of a group of analysts of the contentious 20th century in both Europe
and East Asia was convened at Stanford to deepen the comparative scholarship of how they have
shaped their historical memory of the wartime past and how that legacy continues to shape
current history in both regions. Each conference panel focused on a key question and paired
specialists from Asian and European studies to address that same question (Chirot, Shin, and
Sneider 2014).
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The United States in East Asian reconciliation
The history issue is not entirely an Asian issue; indeed, it is highly relevant to the United States.
The United States has been deeply involved in East Asian affairs since 1941, and even before.
Although the occupation of Japan and the Tokyo Tribunal were conducted under the auspices
of the Allied Powers, the United States was the undisputed leader of both. As such, many Asians
feel that the United States bears responsibility for what they regard as the tribunal’s failure to
fully address Japanese war crimes and for the occupation’s inadequate measures to “reeducate”
the Japanese about the history of their country’s colonial and wartime actions. There are several
specific reasons for including the United States in this comparative study.10
First, the United States did play a crucial role, albeit not always intentionally, in dealing with
historical issues in the immediate aftermath of the Pacific War. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal) focused on the Japanese actions that had most
directly affected the Western allies – the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the mistreatment
of Allied prisoners of war. The proceedings paid only cursory attention to aggression against
Asians, such as Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the Nanjing Massacre, and the use of
forced Korean labor in Japanese mines and factories (Dower 2000).11 Further, issues such as the
conscription of sex slaves (or “comfort women”) were completely overlooked for the issue was
not known to the tribunal at that time. Only three of the 11 judges at the trial represented Asian
countries, and there was no representative from Korea. The U.S.-led tribunal failed to appreciate
or acknowledge the massive suffering of Chinese and Koreans at the hands of Japanese invaders
and colonizers and the need to dry up the deep well of anger left behind. This neglect of crimes
against Asians is “one of the most serious defects of the Tokyo trial . . . [since] many of the
victims of these crimes were left helpless by the injuries they suffered, and they have been left
without redress to this day” (Hosoya et al. 1986, p. 54; cf. chapters 3, 7, and 10 in this volume).12
Second, and perhaps most significant, was the U.S. decision to preserve the Showa Emperor
in the belief that doing so would facilitate the occupation and reconstruction of postwar Japan.
There is still no consensus over the extent of the emperor’s responsibility for Japanese militarism
and war crimes (Asahi Shimbun survey 2006; Bix 2001, 2008),13 although the Japanese people fought and died in his name. Even in the tribunal, there were disputes over the emperor’s
responsibility. The Australian judge and chair of the tribunal, Sir William Webb, opposed the
idea of keeping the imperial institution intact, calling the emperor “the leader in the crime”
(The Sydney Morning Herald 1948). However, his was a minority opinion in the U.S.-dominated
court, and the opportunity to address the personal and institutional role of the emperor in the
historical injustices was lost. As Arnold Brackman, a correspondent for United Press who covered
the Tokyo war crimes trials, notes, “Keenan [the Allied powers chief prosecutor] and his staff
argued that in both theory and practice the evidence showed that ‘the Emperor’s role [was] that
of a figurehead . . . following the line laid down by MacArthur and the Truman administration”
(Brackman 1987, p. 86).14 In fact, the Japanese Tokyo Shoseki Japanese History B acknowledges
this view by stating that the decision to exclude the emperor from the trials was “determined by
the global policy of the United States.”
The failure to address the issue of Hirohito’s war responsibility greatly shaped the ways in
which the Japanese would remember the war years and later address reconciliation issues with
their Asian neighbors. Encouraged by the American decision, the Japanese elite sought to “protect the throne, its occupant, and their own rule” by linking Hirohito to “the idea of peace”
(Bix 2008, p. 12). However, the campaign to promote the myth of the emperor’s innocence only
strengthened Japanese victim consciousness and impeded the search for historical truth. As Herbert
Bix (2008, p. 17) acutely notes, “As long as Hirohito remained on the throne, unaccountable
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to anyone for his official actions, most Japanese had little reason to question their support of
him or feel responsibility for the war, let alone look beyond the narrow boundaries of victim
consciousness.” A recent report by the International Crisis Group reached a similar conclusion
that “the absolution of the Emperor left the country without anyone to blame” (International
Crisis Group 2005).
The failure to resolve Japan’s war responsibility has then “provided fertile soil for the growth
of a postwar neo-nationalism” there (Dower 2000, p. 444). An exemplary case in point is an
award-winning essay by then Chief of Staff of the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force, General
Tamogami Toshio, in the fall of 2008. In what the Economist labeled a “barely warm hash of
thrice-cooked revisionism,” he claims that the war was Japan’s attempt to defend its legally held
territories of China and Korea against communist conspirators, Pearl Harbor was nothing but an
American trap, and Japanese colonial rule was a benevolent undertaking viewed with gratitude
by its East Asian neighbors (The Economist 5 November 2008). Any accusation of wartime atrocity is nothing more than a misconceived “rumor,” and Japan must fight to “reclaim its glorious
history . . . for a country that denies its own history is destined to fall” (ibid.). Tamogami has
advanced a rather extremist view, but his case illustrates that victim identity continues to foster
this kind of rightist view in Japan.
Third, as Japan’s importance as a bulwark against communism in the region increased with
the intensification of the Cold War, the United States sought to quickly put aside issues of historical responsibility. The United States did not press Japan to reconcile with its neighbors as
it had with Germany. The San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951 formally ended the war, settling
Japan’s obligations to pay reparations for its wartime acts. But neither China nor Korea was a
signatory, and Japan’s responsibility toward those nations was left unresolved. By then, China
had become an enemy of the United States, and Korea was weak and divided. Nevertheless, the
1951 Treaty became a major basis of later court rulings on wartime atrocities and crimes. For
instance, in April 2007, Japan’s Supreme Court foreclosed all pending and future lawsuits arising
from actions taken by Japan in the course of colonialism and war, referring to article 14(b) of
the San Francisco Treaty. Some victims took their cases to the U.S. courts but met the same fate
as in Japanese courts. The courts, both Japanese and American, regarded the treaty, drafted at the
height of the Cold War largely by the United States and without the participation of China and
Korea, as having stripped China and Korea and other countries of legal means to obtain redress.
The obstacles to achieve resolution were not cleared either in Japan or in the U.S., both holding
the key to historical reconciliation.
In 1965, under heavy pressure from the United States anxious to solidify its Cold War security
alliance system and to bolster the South Korean economy, the ROK agreed to normalize relations
with Japan despite strong domestic protests. For many years thereafter, Korea benefited from
substantial Japanese economic assistance, but Japan refused to term this as “reparations.” Issues
such as disputed territories and Japan’s colonial rule were again overlooked. Unlike in Western
Europe, where the United States established a multilateral security arrangement (NATO) and
pushed for Franco-German reconciliation, in East Asia the United States established a bilateral
“hub and spoke” alliance system with Japan and the ROK and did not press for historical reconciliation between the two U.S. allies (Palmer 2008).15 As a result, “normalization” occurred
at the governmental level but without addressing popular demands for the redress of historical
injustices. As one former U.S. senior diplomat points out, “For American policymakers, strategic
considerations have consistently trumped issues of equity in historic disputes involving Japan
since World War II” (Straub 2008, p. 215).
Against this backdrop, there has been some debate in U.S. academic and policymaking circles
about the role the United States might play in helping to resolve these historical disputes. A
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Gi-Wook Shin
predominant view has been that this is primarily a matter for Asians. By taking a specific position, its proponents fear, the United States would be pulled into the Sino-Japanese rivalry and
forced to take sides in matters involving its Japanese ally. The other view is that the United States
can hardly afford to stand outside these disputes, particularly when it was a participant in their
creation. In G. John Ikenberry’s view, Japan’s history problem is an American problem as well,
and “Washington should encourage Japan to pursue [a] German path, tying ‘normalization’ to
redoubled commitments to regional security cooperation” (Ikenberry 2006; see also Shin 2007).
Gilbert Rozman also urges the U.S. to “explicitly challenge revived nationalist interpretations
in Japan while also trying to calm historical grievances in South Korea and China” (Rozman
2002, p. 26).
As many have noted, any reexamination of the U.S. “national myth” with respect to wartime
atrocities is most likely to provoke controversy and spirited rebuttals within the United States.
Understandably, there are objections to any efforts that could open this Pandora’s box, as it could
become easily and overly politicized. Still, Washington cannot afford overlooking the issues at
hand and should reconsider its “hands-off ” posture and take a more proactive role. The United
States not only has a responsibility for helping to resolve the disputes but also has a clear interest
in ensuring that the peace and prosperity of a region so vital to its future is not undermined
by controversies rooted in the past. In other words, resolving the history issue is not simply a
matter of helping Asians to achieve overdue reconciliation; it is important if not imperative for
U.S. alliance relations and strategic equities in the region as well (Shin and Sneider 2014). As the
highly contentious dispute between South Korea and Japan over the Dokdo/Takeshima territorial
claims illustrates, the history question can easily spill over into the American policy arena. Thus,
it is only fitting to include the Unites States in addressing issues of East Asian historical injustice.
Challenges for East Asia
The renewal of the history problem among all the players in the region clearly illustrates that
collective memories and reconciliation are rooted not only in colonial and Pacific War injustices,
but also in much deeper, more complex, historical, cultural, and political relations. Increased
regional interaction offers hope for enhanced regional cooperation, but until they come to terms
with the past, there will be clear limits to progress.
Fostering a reconciled view of the past will not be easy, however. Past efforts have exhibited
slow and protracted progress (Shin 2014). This is not surprising, given that the region is bound
by divided, even conflicting, historical memories and identities. Therefore, understanding how
each nation has created its own memory and identity is an important first step. Koreans and
Chinese, for instance, need to understand the duality of the victim/aggressor identity of conservative Japanese elites (unlike their German counterparts) and how this has been the chief
obstacle to Japan’s reconciliation with its Asian neighbors (see chapters 13 and 16 in this volume). Likewise, Japan must understand how central the historical legacy of their aggression
has been in shaping the collective identities of Chinese and Koreans. For instance, in Japanese
history textbooks, only 4% of the coverage of Japan’s modern history (1868–1945) is devoted
to Korea. In contrast, in Korean history textbooks, Japan occupies almost 25 % of its coverage
of modern history (late 1800s–1945). In other words, Japan figures far more prominently in the
historical memory and identity of Koreans than vice versa. The joint efforts such as Stanford
initiative and common history textbook writings by Japan and Korea as well as by Japan and
China to (re)examine historical issues have increased the mutual understanding among the relevant parties. Such efforts should continue to be encouraged, despite limitations in producing
a common history of East Asia.
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Ultimately, East Asia needs to foster a shared vision for the region that transcends victim/
victimizer dichotomy and exclusive notions of national identity. However politically convenient
and psychologically satisfying it may be to blame others, such an approach will neither heal past
wounds nor provide a foundation for a peaceful future. Cultivating a redefined, shared view of
the region’s future rests on the shoulders of visionary political leaders and members of civil society, including the mass media. This type of “thick” reconciliation must be based on democratic
values and respect for human rights, and both state and society need to be actively involved. In the
case of Japan-ROK normalization, when an authoritarian state in Korea suppressed civil society’s
attempts to raise historical issues, the resulting reconciliation was so superficial and “thin” that
collective memory became skewed. Consequently, even after nearly six decades of normalization
with an enormous amount of economic and cultural ties, history issues have become more salient
than ever before in shaping bilateral relations.
Achieving thick reconciliation also requires educating younger generations to consider the
past differently and to reach beyond national borders. Otherwise, there is no guarantee that the
younger generation will be more receptive to reconciled views of the past. As aforementioned,
history education plays a crucial role in shaping historical memories and perspectives. That
explains why the young people of East Asia remain highly nationalistic and why their emotions
in regard to history issues are often more intense and bitter than those of their elders. Therefore,
educating young East Asians to hold more balanced historical views is an extremely important task for the future. To achieve this, East Asian history educators must encourage diverse
views and discussions about their own history rather than just convey a particular – usually
nationalistic – master narrative to their students. The current systems of textbook censorship and
college entrance exams that mandate one and only one “correct” answer to complex historical
issues must be changed. Teachers should be allowed, indeed encouraged, to address contested
issues without fear of retribution. Changes in pedagogical methodology, as well as contents, are
also needed (Iwasaki and Narita 2008).16
In this regard, recent developments in educational reform in East Asia are encouraging. In
South Korea, for instance, starting in 2009, “national history,” a mandatory subject for junior
and senior high school students, became “history” and was treated as an independent, not compulsory, subject. In the new curricula, national and world history, which appeared in separate
textbooks, were integrated to teach South Korean history “within the context of world history.”
“East Asian history,” for the first time, was added as an elective subject in senior high school so
that students could learn that “the people of East Asia have created a common cultural heritage
through close exchanges.” In Taiwan, “national history” has recently been divided into “Taiwanese history” and “Chinese history” to offer more diversity in historical views.17 Also, like Japan
and South Korea, China plans to adopt a textbook screening system that allows schools to choose
among multiple texts rather than authorizing only one set of government-designated textbooks.
It is a critical time for a new East Asia. Increased regional interaction in recent decades has not
diminished the importance of the past; rather, it has become even more contentious as nations vie
for regional leadership in East Asia. In fact, as Daniel Sneider (2011) points out, the emergence
of history textbooks as an international issue in the early 1980s was a response to Japan’s bid for
regional leadership, propelled by its economic success. Now, as China rises as an economic power
and a competitor with Japan for regional leadership, the past is becoming even more important
and increases potential for conflict in the region.
It is hoped that our project, initiated by an American university and supported by multiple
Asian institutions, can contribute in this regard and that there will be more of such collaborative
trans-Pacific efforts. We must also be patient with the rather slow progress in collective East Asian
efforts for reconciliation – even in Europe it took a long time to make significant headways.
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Historical reconciliation, no matter how and where it occurs, is inherently a multilayered, protracted, complex, long-term process. It is predicated on a multitude of actors and demands intertwined participation from the state, civil society, and international organizations.
International society must understand the complex layers of East Asian history and reconciliation. It is misleading to mechanically compare, as many casual observers do, the ways that East
Asia and Western Europe have dealt with the past. While there are issues surely common to both
regions, it cannot and should not be expected that East Asia will simply repeat or emulate the
experiences of Western Europe. The regions have distinctive histories, experiences, and memories, and perhaps even different cultural modes of reconciliation (Cole 2007). In fact, as Daniel
Chirot, who compares the experiences of historical reconciliation in Asia and Europe, notes,
the German model was historically unique (Chirot 2011; Torpey 2006). Accordingly, we must
continue to search for an East Asian model, while using the European experiences as a reference.
This would include reassessing the U.S. role in facilitating the reconciliation process.
Ultimately, overcoming the historical grievances that divide the nations of East Asia is not just
a necessary condition to avoid conflict and enhance cooperation; it is a prerequisite for building
a new regional community that has important policy implications for the United States. As William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. In fact, it’s not even past,” and nowhere
is this truer today than in East Asia. We must not allow the future in this important region to be
determined by a failure to deal wisely and courageously with the past.
Notes
This is a revised version of my chapter “History Textbooks, Divided Memories, and Reconciliation,”
pp. 3–19, in Gi-Wook Shin and Daniel Sneider (eds.) History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia (London:
Routledge, 2011). I am grateful to Joyce Lee for her assistance in preparing this chapter.
1 To use David Croker’s term, reconciliation in East Asia has been “thin.” He distinguishes reconciliation
into varieties of “thin” – formerly hostile parties continue to co-exist without taking active revenge –
and “thick,” which entails “forgiveness, mercy, a shared comprehensive vision, mutual healing, or harmony” (p. 60).
2 Wolfgang Höpken notes three conditions for such a political environment: “a general favorable political
environment of détente . . . after basic disputes had been settled or lost their significance,” “a broad
consensus within the society about the need and the benefit of reconciliation,” and “political elites [to
view it] as a matter for increasing their legitimacy and thus find their support or at least acceptance.” In
East Asia, these conditions are yet to exist.
3 Still, these joint efforts are useful as a kind of public history education. Through media coverage and
public discussion of history textbook issues, many first learned about the Nanjing Massacre, the “comfort women” system, wartime forced labor, and the mistreatment of POWs, as part of the regional wartime experience, and reexamined them with new sensitivity, in light of universal human rights. Both
elites and the public in Korea, Japan, and China have widened their scope of understanding of the Asian
regional history problems that cross their own national borders. In addition, by acknowledging mutual
ignorance, both societies have learned more about each other’s problems.
4 Even in this book, complete agreement is not reached. According to a key participant in this project,
all three nations are producing a slightly different version of this common history book. For instance,
when referring to “comfort women,” the Korean version uses “sex slaves” while the Japanese one uses
“ianfu” (Japanese for “comfort women,” a euphemistic expression).
5 They include Korea-Japan Common History Teaching Materials; History of Korea-Japan Relations from Prehistory to Present (March 2007); Korea-Japan Common History Teaching Materials: From Hideyoshi Toyotomi’s
Choson Invasion to the Royal Envoy from the Choson Dynasty (April 2005); Korea-Japan History: Regarding
One Another Face to Face (2006); and Modern and Contemporary History of Three East Asian Countries Looking to the Future (May 2005).
6 Chung Jae Jeong also mentions a number of achievements from the joint efforts. They include enhanced
understanding of the historical views and textbook censorship systems of each other, development of
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7
8
9
10
11
12
human networks among historians and history educators of both nations, and improved descriptions of
modern Korean history in Japanese history textbooks.
We could have included Russia and North Korea but could not do so primarily for logistical reasons.
The research was published as a book, History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia (2011, New York: Routledge).
We held a workshop about history films on June 6, 2008 and convened a larger conference on December 5, 2008. The conference papers that were assembled as an edited book (Divided Lenses: Screen Memories of War in East Asia, edited by Michael Berry and Chiho Sawada, forthcoming).
For more detailed discussion of why the United States should be included in the study of East Asian
historical disputes, see Shin (2010) and Shin and Sneider (2014).
In Dower’s view, the Tokyo trials focused on “crimes against peace” but ignored “crimes against humanity,” including “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed
before or during the war, or persecutions on political or racial grounds in execution of or in connection
with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic
law of the country where perpetrated” (p. 456). Many war crimes against Asians such as forced labor,
“comfort women,” and mass killings of civilians belong to the second category.
Paik Choong-Hyun also contends that
historical evidence demonstrates that there was a larger number of cases of crimes against
humanity: murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed by the then existing Japanese government, or with the acquiescence of that government, against minority populations in Japan, Korea, Manchuria, China, the Philippines, and
the other Asian regions under Japanese control. But the victorious Allied powers paid very
little attention to crimes committed against these colonized peoples, perhaps because the
victims of these crimes were not nationals of the victorious nations.
(Hosoya, p. 54)
13 An Asahi Shimbun April 2006 survey showed 16% of the respondents believing that the emperor bears
“extremely heavy responsibility” for the war, while 15% said that he has “no responsibility.” Another
22% thought that the emperor bears “heavy responsibility,” and 42% say that he has “some degree of
responsibility.”
14 He also noted that “to his credit, Keenan admitted after the trial that ‘we gave a good deal of thought’ to
indicting him and that ‘strictly legally Emperor Hirohito could have been tried and convicted because
under the Constitution of Japan he did have the power to make war and stop it.’ That, of course, was
the Australian argument” (p. 86).
15 Another example is the contrasting role of the United States in dealing with foreign forced labor. As
David Palmer points out, “the U.S. pressed hard to force the reluctant German government and corporations to admit their role, make a public apology to the aggrieved, and provide compensation. Toward the
Japanese government, by contrast, the U.S. position was precisely opposite, protecting it against claims
at every step, even before the San Francisco Treaty.”
16 Based on the results of our research project, the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural
Education (SPICE) has developed a supplementary curriculum unit for U.S. high school students, titled
“Divided Memories: Examining High School History Textbooks in China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan
and the United States.” It is designed to encourage students to explore and analyze diverse perspectives
on key events in the history between China, Japan, North and South Korea, and the United States, and
will be made available to Asians. Similarly, in their piece exploring possible methodologies for textbook
writing, Iwasaki and Narita assert the need to avoid singular national history altogether and recognize
several different perspectives.
17 This new development may slow down with the 2012 reelection of Ma Ying-Jeou to President of
Taiwan and the return to power of the Kuomintang (KMT).
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