Weekend
Edition
April 23 / 24, 2005
A Long
History
The
Anti-Japanese Demonstrations in China
By
GARY LEUPP
Boston,
Mass.
“Japanese
pigs get out!”
“Stinking
Japanese!”
“Kill
the Japanese dogs!”
All
over China, rock-throwing, window-smashing crowds have gathered
in recent weeks to attack diplomatic offices, Japanese electronics
shops, Japanese restaurants (mostly owned by Chinese), exchange
students, anything and anyone associated with the Land of the
Rising Sun.
A
History of Reasons to Demonstrate
There’s
nothing new about anti-Japanese demonstrations in China.
They’re
a staple of modern Chinese history, a mostly rational response
to a long record of abuses. Just six years after the establishment
of the modern Japanese state (1868), several thousand Japanese
troops occupied part of Taiwan, which Qing China claimed as its
territory, ostensibly in order to punish islanders for abusing
Ryukyuan fishermen. China, although it had long regarded the Ryukyuan
kingdom as a vassal-state, had accepted Japan’s claim that
Ryukyuans were Japanese nationals. But it had declined to pay
the indemnity Japan demanded, and so suffered this invasion. To
get the troops withdrawn, China forked over an indemnity that
helped pay the costs of the attack. Twenty years later Chinese
and Japanese forces clashed in Korea. Fighting spilled over into
Manchuria, and following their victory the Japanese demanded and
received Taiwan as a war-prize. This became what one Diet member
termed Japan’s “colonial university.”
The
Japanese regime coveted the Liaodong Peninsula in Manchuria as
well, and received concessions there by treaty, but Russia desiring
the same concessions organized France and Germany to block the
deal. Japan had to give it back to China, or rather sell it back.
(Liaodong soon went to Russia.) During the Boxer Rebellion of
1900, Japan sent half of the 45,000 allied troops that quashed
the anti-foreign movement and relieved the besieged foreign legations
in Beijing. In 1905 following the Russo-Japanese War Japan acquired
Russia’s Manchurian concessions (as well as southern Sakhalin).
The first Chinese movement to boycott Japanese goods followed
a few years later.
In
1915 during the First World War, taking advantage of a provision
in its naval treaty with the United Kingdom, Japan opportunistically
seized German possessions on the Shandong peninsula as well as
in the south Pacific. It submitted a list of demands (the “Twenty-One
Demands”) to the Chinese government, which had they been
accepted in toto, would have reduced China to the status of a
Japanese satrapy. Western intervention caused Japan to moderate
its terms, but the humiliation and international acceptance of
Japan’s actions produced the May 4th Movement in 1919. Initiated
by Chinese students who had been studying in Japan, but had returned
home to protest Japanese actions, the movement involved demonstrations
(some violent), strikes and boycotts.
Shandong
remained a sore spot; anti-Japanese demonstrations there drew
a military response in 1927, triggering nationwide anti-Japanese
protests and boycotts that badly affected the Japanese economy.
The Manchurian Incident of 1931 produced another Japanese colony,
Manchukuo, and more righteously indignant anti-Japanese demonstrations.
There is a long history here.
The
Provocative Distortion of History
The
present demonstrations are all about history and historical memory.
There are lots of contentious issues in the current Sino-Japanese
relationship, including some that involve matters of sovereignty
and contested territory. The Diaoyu islands (which Japanese maps
label the Senkaku Islands) are eight uninhabited rocks northeast
of Taiwan claimed by both nations. They hold promise for offshore
oil drilling and are rich fishing grounds. A right-wing Japanese
organization set up a makeshift lighthouse there in 1996, returning
in 2003; Chinese responded with a landing of their own. More recently,
the Japanese Coast Guard has prevented such Chinese visits. Meanwhile
the dispute over the island of Dokto (Japanese Takeshima) in what
Japanese call the Japan Sea, and Koreans the Eastern Sea, excites
such emotions in Korea that men have publicly severed the tips
of their little fingers to protest a symbolic “Takeshima
Day” pronounced by Japan’s Shimane prefecture.
But
no issue with Japan grates more on Chinese or Korean sensitivities
than the perceived refusal of the Japanese state to acknowledge
and reflect upon its history of aggression, culminating with what
the Japanese call the “Sino-Japanese War” (Nitchu
senso) of 1937 to 1945. The proximate cause of the current wave
of anti-Japanese demonstrations is the decision of the archconservative
Japanese Education Ministry to approve for middle school use a
history textbook that whitewashes the record of Japanese aggression
in East Asia. Specifically, it downplays the Nanjing Massacre
of 1937 and other atrocities, ignores Unit 731’s germ warfare
experiments, and omits discussion of the tens of thousands of
(principally Korean) “comfort women” forced into sexual
slavery by the Japanese military from 1932. The textbooks circulate
in only a handful of schools, reaching well under one percent
of the targeted student audience, so the damage may be small.
But the fact that the government endorsed the text naturally infuriates
the Chinese and other victims of Japanese imperialism.
Meanwhile
another issue pertaining to historical memory clouds Sino-Japanese
relations: the visits by government officials to Yasukuni Shrine.
This establishment in the heart of Tokyo is a unique religious
institution, outwardly resembling many other Shinto shrines. These
are for the most part harmless, charming places to visit, to watch
the devout believer or casual tourist clap and perfunctorily worship
the kami (divine beings) imagined to reside therein. These can
be gods with names and personalities like the Sun Goddess Amaterasu
or her brother Susanoo, mountain deities, river deities, or phallic
deities. Those in Yasukuni happen to be the souls of 2.5 million
Japanese killed in the service of the emperor since 1868, including
14 convicted Class A war criminals. These are kami who, shrine
officials declare, have protected and continue to protect the
nation.
Herein
rest the remains of wartime Prime Minister Tojo Hideki, transferred
quietly on April 21, 1976, along with those of the 13 others designated
as “martyrs of the Showa era” and described in a shrine
pamphlet as “wrongly accused as war criminals by the Allied
court.” (This took place when Ohira Masayoshi was prime
minister. By the way, not that it’s related, thirteen years
earlier during his tenure as foreign minister, Ohira had agreed
to allow U.S. warships loaded with nuclear weapons to visit Japanese
ports in violation of Japanese law.)
“War…Necessary
to Protect the Independence of Japan”
Founded
as a state operation in 1869, Yasukuni enshrined those who had
perished in the pro-imperial cause during the Boshin War (1867-9)
that brought the new, expansionist, “modernizing”
Meiji regime to power. Thereafter soldiers and civilians slain
in the emperor’s service in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese
wars, in World War I and the Nomonhan “incident” versus
the Soviets in 1939, and in the Second World War were all laid
to rest here. “War,” the shrine pamphlet explains,
“is a really tragic thing to happen, but it was necessary
in order for us to protect the independence of Japan and to prosper
together with Asian neighbors.” The shrine’s English
website teaches that “Japan’s dream of building a
Great East Asia was necessitated by history and it was sought
after by the countries of Asia.” You get the idea.
In
1945 under U.S. occupation Yasukuni was privatized. The Japanese
costitution of 1947 specifies the separation of religion and and
state (as it rejects the maintenance of armed forces and announces
equality of the sexes). So technically the shrine is not a government
enterprise. State Shinto, centering on the cult of the god-emperor
descended from the Sun Goddess whose parents had created the Japanese
islands from their own bodies, had been imposed on the population
through public religious rituals and indoctrination in the schools.
This had troubled some people (like Christians, communists, the
scientifically-minded) but while the Meiji constitution had guaranteed
freedom of religion and did not jail people for merely questioning
the existence of the kami, it had required outward gestures of
deference, such as bowing before the portrait of the emperor during
the public reading of imperial rescripts. Shinto clergy had been
paid by the state.
State
Shinto was dismantled under the U.S. occupation, the age-old “folk
Shinto” left alone. But even as a private shrine Yasukuni
continues to fulfill official and political purposes. Emperor
Hirohito, who died in 1989, stopped visiting the shrine after
Tojo was entombed there. But Tokyo’s governor Ishihara Shintaro
urges the current emperor to resume visits and several prime ministers
have gone to pay their respects since 1976. Ronald Reagan’s
pal Nakasone Yasuhiro tested the waters in 1985, producing much
protest. (Not that it’s related, but President Reagan also
drew popular anger when he visited Germany’s Bitberg military
cemetery, where SS officers are interred, with Chancellor Helmut
Kohl that same year.) It took 11 years for another prime minister,
Hashimoto Ryutaro, to repeat Nakasone’s stunt. But current
prime minister Koizumi Junichiro has visited annually during his
tenure, five years in a row, most recently this month. He does
so in his official capacity and signs the guest book accordingly.
In
response to Asian outrage (particularly in China, Taiwan, and
North and South Korea) Koizumi asks blandly, “Why keep blaming
the dead for the crimes they committed when they were alive?”
Apologists
for his visits patiently explain that Shinto beliefs about the
soul and worship and good and evil differ from those of outsiders
and that the ritual in no wise constitutes an endorsement of Japanese
aggression (however the shrine’s literature prettifies that
aggression). The act of worship merely recognizes the sacrifice
of those who died for the emperor and the country, which for them
is the same thing, and comforts their spirits still hovering in
the Japanese ether. Such exegis of religious practice does not
necessarily comfort the war victims.
The
Real Issues
Indeed,
it enrages many. More than the territorial issues, or legal issues
involving compensation for victims of Japanese aggression, the
conscious cultivation of historical ignorance appals those observing
the obvious. Japan despite its U.S.-authored “pacifistic
constitution” has one of the world’s six largest militaries
and could in a very short time greatly augment it for offensive
action. Step by step, the Liberal Democratic Party leadership
has sought to undermine popular opposition to the formal legalization
of the unconstitutional “Self-Defense Forces.” During
Nakasone’s tenure he let the military budget slightly exceed
the traditional 1% of the GNP limit. After Japan met with U.S.
criticism for its unwillingness to deploy troops in the Persian
Gulf in 1991, Japan contributed to “peackeeping operations”
in Cambodia, Mozambique and East Timor. Now there are troops in
Iraq, confined to peaceable humanitarian activities, but still
deployed in an effort to make the Bush war seem international.
Japan has enriched uranium and could, as some politicians boast,
produce a nuclear weapon overnight. Some suggest that the North
Korean threat would justify this; Japan, they say, should become
“a normal country.”
Like
the U.S., which isn’t hobbled with a constitution that denies
it the right to go to war.
The
U.S., generally perceived in the world as the greatest danger
to world peace, promotes Japan as an excellent candidate for a
permanent position on an expanded United Nations Security Council.
Washington isn’t much concerned with textbooks and war-shrines
but with Japan’s stellar record of support for U.S. positions
in the international body. Japan, indeed has no foreign policy
other than to endorse U.S. foreign policy, usually within a day
or so after receiving instructions. It is, in Nakasone’s
eloquent words, “an unsinkable aircraft carrier” for
the U.S. The islands formed from the limbs of the primordial kami
Izanagi and Izanami lay spread eagerly for the foreign troops
who worship Jesus rather than the Sun Goddess but still bask in
her welcoming warmth.
Their
samurai counterparts meanwhile “to protect the independence
of Japan and to prosper together with Asian neighbors” eye
future deployments to prevent Beijing from forcibly reuniting
the mainland with Taiwan.
The
February meeting in Washington
Between
Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and top Japanese officials was
the most important in many years, and in essence expanded the
military relationship to include actions in defense of Taiwan.
Beijing, which sees Taiwan as a renegade province, understandably
found Japan’s shift provocative. Meanwhile it has rejected
a permanent Japanese seat on the Security Council, preferring
another historical antagonist, India. Territorial disputes with
India remain, but India is not from Beijing’s point of view
refusing to come to terms with the past, teach its youth the unvarnished
truth about that past, and reassure the world there will be no
repeat. Japan rather, supported by its Washington patron, encourages
suspicion and hostility.
I
am personally repulsed by the racist manifestations, the unprincipled
attacks on innocent Japanese and vilification of a culture I much
admire. I feel alarmed at the repercussions in Japan of the images
of Chinese youth, faces contorted in hatred, calling for the killing
of all Japanese. Japanese youth indeed know little about the wartime
era of “their” country, because they haven’t
been taught about it. There are various reasons for this, including
the composition of college entry exams which place little emphasis
on modern historical knowledge, but the primary reason in my view
is the stated desire of the Education Ministry to avoid conveying
to the school kids a negative view of the nation’s past.
Lacking historical knowledge, Japanese youth are reportedly puzzled
at Chinese passions about things that happened a long time ago.
On
the positive side, while they tend to be quite persuaded that
Japanese people are “unique,” Japanese are among the
least nationalistic persons on earth. Japanese in general always
score way down on the “patriotism” scale. But that
combination of historical ignorance (the very thing that other
Asians find frightening in the Japanese) with fear of those expressing
essentialized indiscriminate hatred of all things Japanese might
lead to a general gravitation of the naively ignorant to the nationalistic
right. (The reasoning is, “I hate them for their stupid
hatred of us.”) This is the big contradiction here, and
it stems from the basic failure to distinguish the ordinary Japanese
(product of the karma of military defeat, U.S. alliance, conservative
political rule for five decades, and an educational system which
by discouraging critical thought encourages acceptance of the
status quo) and the Koizumis who indeed deserve whatever challenge
the Chinese masses might serve up.
Japanese
commentators suggest that Beijing, beset by protests against corruption,
oppression of minorities and various economic policies, seeks
to deflect criticism from itself by stoking anti-Japanese sentiment.
It’s certainly true that the party, having long since chucked
anything resembling Marxism-Leninism or Maoism now seeks to unite
the country behind itself on the basis of nationalism. The party’s
Mao isn’t the communist theoretician but the iconized leader
of the anti-Japanese war and the founder of the modern state.
It’s true too that the state controls the press and the
spin placed on the textbook and Yasukuni stories that shape public
opinion in China. But to treat the storm over Japanese behavior
as an official Chinese contrivance is to downplay the real Japanese
offenses and the degree of resentment they appropriately produce.
Yasukuni
and Arlington
Japan’s
expanding military and aspirations to a greater global war would
naturally concern Beijing even were it not for the provocations
that generate the demonstrations---which some Japanese don’t
even recognize as provocations. They say, “It’s nobody
else’s business what we have in our textbooks,” betraying
the “island-country” mentality which might be harmless
were Japan Fiji but which constitutes dangerous solipsism when
it’s in fact the second largest economy and among the top
military powers. They say, “Shinto religious practices are
our own business. And the officials aren’t worshipping devils
but merely paying respects to patriotic sacrifice, as President
Bush might if he visited Arlington Cemetery.”
Depicting
the criticism as specious, they convey irritation at its expression,
merely confirming the accusation that Japan doesn’t get
it. The way that, say, the Germans do get it. This denial has
to suggest to the Chinese that Japan has not learned its lesson,
and that despite bitter defeat at the hands of the U.S. (with
some help of course from China and others) in 1945 might revert
to a policy of aggression, next time in tandem with the U.S.
To
expand the Yasukuni-Arlington analogy: Japanese critics of Chinese
criticism are not much different from U.S. critics of those who
denounce, or merely accurately describe, the many U.S. wars of
aggression. We have our own textbook problem in this country,
with school boards controlled by the religious right pruning “anti-American”
works from the classroom. The text censors reason much as do their
Japanese counterparts: young people should not be given a negative
view of their country. The limited number of publishers specializing
in school history texts are quite responsive to these censorship
efforts. And talk about invoking heavenly forces in defense of
mundane aggression and in efforts to glorify the perished soldiers!
U.S. administrations have long been good at that, this one better
than most even though Bush hasn’t been visiting many graves
of the heroic dead.
Many
Americans don’t get the fact that the world considers the
U.S. war in Vietnam one big atrocity, and that commemorations
of the sacrifices of those who “served their country”
there might seem like validations of the My Lais of that war.
And Washington, inclined to prettify its own aggressive past,
remains thoroughly aloof from the Sino-Japanese controversies.
It will not protest the Yasukuni visits or the Education Ministry’s
decisions. The government which hushed up Unit 731’s “research”
in order to inherit and study it is in no moral position to lean
on Tokyo to clean up its textbook act or remove its war criminals
from its war shrine.
First
World vs. Third World
Mao
Zedong always spoke about the “contradictions” which
pervade all things and urged people to approach problems by identifying
“the principle and non-principle contradictions in a process.”
The “principle contradiction” here is not between
the Japanese and Chinese peoples, nor two social systems (China
and Japan having their particular, closely inter-related capitalisms),
nor even two governments. Contemporary Maoists declare that the
principle contradiction in the world is between imperialism (principally
U.S. imperialism) and the Third World countries and liberation
movements. China for all its extraordinary growth and mounting
defense capabilities remains a Third World country. The direction
of its development (involving the globalization agenda, foreign-owned
sweatshops, privatization of industry, massive unemployment, the
end of the “iron rice bowl”) is largely determined
by the requirements of foreign capital, including prominently
Japanese capital.
Tokyo,
while concerned about Chinese competition for markets and resources
(it appears likely China will soon surpass Japan as Iran’s
number one customer for petroleum) is not dealing with an equal
when it affronts Chinese sensibilities. It is, as an imperialist
power, arrogantly assured that China’s elite (however indignant
their current rhetoric) will take no action that would threaten
the business ties between the countries. As a key junior partner
to the U.S., under its “nuclear umbrella” and in a
“security” arrangement that now specifically involves
cooperation on Taiwan, it feels under no great pressure to accede
to Chinese demands that history textbooks tell the truth or that
officials avoid honoring war criminals. Its smug rightists will
continue to push their prettified version of the past, strategically
supported by the Ministry of Education and the Yasukuni Shrine
officials. The general public in an affluently insular society
will include a large section glibly and dangerously ill-informed
about the Empire’s past. But there are many objective progressive
Japanese academics challenging the whitewashes, and Japanese who
are well-informed, understanding the principle contradiction and
sensitive to foreigners’ feelings.
*
* *
Some
years ago I was recruited to comment on Iris Chang’s The
Rape of Nanking when the late journalist and best-selling author
spoke at an academic conference. Reading the book before the event
I was put off by her assertion that the Nanjing Massacre had been
“ignored,” and was the “hidden holocaust”
of World War II. I myself had in fact been including it in my
modern Japan history surveys while Chang was still in college,
noting that around 200,000 had been slaughtered by Japanese troops.
But I found that her account of the massacre beginning in December
1937 was generally accurate. Some had questioned various details
of her narrative, and I myself found some obvious historical errors,
but I did not in my presentation dwell upon those. Rather I questioned
whether she should have attempted to explain the massacre in specifically
cultural terms, as she had done (the samurai heritage, the Shinto
religion); whether she should have repeatedly referred to “the
Japanese” (as opposed to “the Japanese military”
or “the Japanese government”) as the problem; and
whether she should have depicted Japan---in the abstract---as
in a state of denial about the massacre. There had in fact been
numerous articles and monographs by Japanese scholars honestly
relating many of the facts that appeared in her own work, which
she, not proficient in Japanese, had not read nor adequately acknowledged.
At the time (1997) I was concerned that this work by a Chinese-American
would exacerbate anti-Japanese feeling in the U.S., subject perhaps
then more than now to waves of trade friction-related Japan-bashing,
and that such bashing could only hurt all those of East Asian
background in the U.S. negatively. Then, I was taking the part
of Japanese against what I felt was an unfair ethnic-based attack.
Reacting to the Chinese demonstrations (or at least to the racist
slogans and actions mentioned above) I again lament the irrational
targeting of all Japanese. But recently I reread Chang’s
book (which I assign every year to my modern Japanese history
survey class) with somewhat more sympathy for her point of view.
I’m inclined to urge every Japanese angered or frightened
by the images on NHK of the anti-Chinese protests in China to
read that book, and reflect on how the behavior described there
might reflect upon the Japanese nation, and consider what might
be done to end the current provocations. Unfortunately there is
no Japanese translation. A Tokyo publisher (Kashiwa shobo) was
eager to produce one, but found certain errors of fact and misidentification
of some photos. As I understand it, negotiations broke down when
Chang refused to make any changes or allow the published text
to be accompanied by a critical commentary.
Was
the aborted Japanese translation just another instance of the
putative Japanese allergy to the historical truth? I don’t
think so. Chang’s major contribution in her book was to
use the diaries of John Rabe, a German official in Nanjing. Rabe,
described by one scholar as “the good man of Nanjing”
was the top Nazi in the city when the Japanese troops overran
it. Chang while evoking Nazi evil in describing the Nanjing Massacre
(“the hidden holocaust of World War II”) depicted
this particular Nazi as a fine man attracted to the National Socialists’
“socialism” rather than their racism. In any case
Rabe used his diplomatic credentials to save maybe 250,000 Chinese
from the Germans’ Japanese wartime allies. His diary was
published in Japanese in 1997 (by the prestigious publisher Kodansha),
the same year it appeared in German, and a year before it appeared
in English. A second Japanese translation appeared in 1998. An
enormous amount of material in Japanese describes and condemns
Japanese wartime atrocities. But there’s also much revisionism
and the brand of shameless denial one finds in the Yasukuni literature.
Unfortunately those in power in Japan seem more inclined to promote
the latter, and thus to provoke the sort of indignation we’ve
been seeing on the streets of Chinese and Korean cities.
Gary
Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and
Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of
Servants, Shophands and Laborers in the Cities of Tokugawa
Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality
in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan:
Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor
to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan
and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.
He
can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu