Viewpoints: Japan’s approach to history

Viewpoints: Japan’s approach to history
In the week that Korea celebrated independence from Japanese rule, a Japanese teacher and a retired South Korean man gave the BBC News website their perspectives on Japan’s relationship with its own history.

Shoichi Minagi teaches English at a school in Japan’s rural Okayama prefecture. He thinks Japan needs to confront its difficult past.

Where I live in rural Japan, there were no special events to mark the anniversary of our defeat in World War II.

I don’t think Japanese people take the issue of war responsibility very seriously. If anything, we try to evade the subject. I sometimes ask my schoolchildren about the war but they never want to discuss it. Most ordinary Japanese have hardly any idea what they are criticised for.

Our society doesn’t provide much opportunity to think about our past. I grew up in the 1950s in a remote village in a mountainous region, west of Osaka.

The war did not affect our area; life went on as usual, and after defeat nobody really spoke of the war. My mother had a horrible experience during the American air raid in Kobe where she worked as a midwife, but she never refers to the war.

I think Prime Minister Koizumi’s official statement about the war and the Japanese war responsibility sounded too formal and ritualistic, even hollow.

The problem is history. Many Japanese people didn’t understand when the anti-Japanese protests erupted across China and Korea after those controversial history textbooks [which some accuse of glossing over Japan's war crimes] were published.

The government is fully to blame - school textbooks should be free of government censorship. It’s incredibly important to learn good history, to compare the present with the past and learn from it.

But we must also realise that Japan has played a positive role in the world. We were the only Asian nation that stood up to a Western colonial power and defeated it in the Russo-Japanese war. We were the first Asian nation to industrialise.

Nevertheless, the future depends on how Japan and its people understand and cope with their past.

Kim Sae Joong is retired and lives in rural Kangwon-Do, east of Seoul. He says nations that fabricate their history run the risk of losing their history.

I live in a farming area about 100 miles from Seoul. Independence celebrations were very muted here. But I have strong feelings about the Japanese occupation of Korea. It feels a bit like our nation was robbed at gunpoint.

I was three years old when Korea was liberated. But I remember the difficult stories my parents told me about that time. Some of our neighbours were persecuted because the Japanese requisitioned private property and land. Many people we knew lost their land and some lived in starving conditions.

North and South Korea celebrated independence together for the first time. But this seemed to me simply a political gesture. At least some people from the North got a chance to see how their brothers and sisters in the South live. Maybe they will return and tell others.

They have been educated with a different history - the history they are taught is not the history we are taught.

History is a problem for Japan too. The history textbook controversies are unfortunate because the Japanese will lose their true past if they continue to fabricate it. They are trying to erase events out of a sense of patriotism. But patriotism to me is about understanding your past.

Many Japanese prime ministers have made apologies, even the Japanese emperor. But these politicians still visit the Yasukuni shrine, which honours war criminals. How could they pay respect to those people? Apologies make no difference when they continue to act like that.

We don’t want to take revenge on those who persecuted us but every country needs to acknowledge its history.

Life is different for Koreans now. We are an affluent people these days, there is no starvation. Many Japanese visit Korea and enjoy our culture. I’m optimistic that if politicians do not manoeuvre people by visiting shrines, international resentment will fade.

Japan still honors dissenting war-crimes judge

Japan still honors dissenting war-crimes judge
By Norimitsu Onishi
Friday, August 31, 2007

TOKYO: An Indian judge remembered by fewer and fewer of his own countrymen 40 years after his death is still big in Japan.

In recent weeks alone, NHK, the public broadcaster, has devoted 55 minutes of prime time to his life, and a scholar came out with a 309-page book exploring his thinking and its impact on Japan. Capping it all, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, during a recent visit to India, paid tribute to him in a speech to the Indian Parliament in New Delhi and then traveled to Calcutta to meet the judge’s 81-year-old son.

A monument to the judge - erected two years ago at the Yasukuni Shrine, the memorial to Japan’s war dead and a rallying point for Japanese nationalists - provides a clue to his identity: Radhabinod Pal, the only one out of 11 Allied justices who handed down a not-guilty verdict for Japan’s top wartime leaders at the post-World War II International Military Tribunal for the Far East, or the Tokyo trials.

“Justice Pal is highly respected even today by many Japanese for the noble spirit of courage he exhibited during the International Military Tribunal for the Far East,” Abe told the Indian Parliament.

Many of postwar Japan’s nationalist leaders and thinkers have long upheld Pal as a hero, seizing on - and often distorting - his dissenting opinion at the Tokyo trials to argue that Japan did not wage a war of aggression in Asia but one of self-defense and liberation. As nationalist politicians like Abe have gained power in recent years, and as like-minded academics and journalists have pushed forward a revisionist view of Japan’s wartime history, Pal has stepped back into the spotlight, where he remains a touchstone of the culture wars surrounding the Tokyo trials.

Abe, who has cast doubt on the validity of the Tokyo trials in the past, avoided elaborating on his views in the Indian Parliament or during his 20-minute meeting with Pal’s son, Prasanta. But the meeting’s subtext was not lost on some Japanese newspapers, which warned that it would hardly help repair Japan’s poor image among its neighbors.

After the war, conventional war crimes by the Japanese, categorized as Class B and Class C, were handled in local trials throughout Asia.

Twenty-five top leaders were charged with Class A crimes - of waging aggressive wars and committing crimes against peace and humanity, categories created by the Allies after the war - and tried in Tokyo by justices from 11 countries.

It was not clear why the British and U.S. authorities selected Pal, who had served in Calcutta’s high court and strongly sympathized with the anticolonial struggle in India. As an Asian nationalist, he saw things very differently from the other judges.

In colonizing parts of Asia, Japan had merely aped the Western powers, he said. He rejected the charges of crimes against peace and humanity as ex post facto laws and wrote in a long dissent that they were a “sham employment of legal process for the satisfaction of a thirst for revenge.” While he fully acknowledged Japan’s war atrocities - including the Nanjing massacre - he said they were covered in the Class B and C trials.

“I would hold that each and every one of the accused must be found not guilty of each and every one of the charges in the indictment and should be acquitted of all those charges,” Pal wrote of the 25 Japanese defendants, who were found guilty by the rest of the justices.

Pal also described the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States as the worst atrocities of the war, comparable with Nazi crimes.

The U.S. occupation of Japan ended in 1952, after Tokyo signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty and accepted the verdict of the Tokyo trials. But the end of the occupation also lifted a ban on the publication of Pal’s 1,235-page dissent, which Japanese nationalists brandished and began using as the basis of their argument that the Tokyo trials were a sham.

Takeshi Nakajima, an associate professor at the Hokkaido University Public Policy School whose book “Judge Pal” was published in July, said that Japanese critics of the trials selectively chose passages from his dissent.

“Pal was very hard on Japan, though he of course spoke very severely of the United States,” Nakajima said. “All imperialist powers were part of the same gang to him. His attitude was consistent.”

Casting subtleties aside, postwar politicians invited Pal to Japan several times and showered him with honors.

One of his strongest backers was Nobusuke Kishi, a prime minister in the late 1950s who had been a Class A war criminal suspect but was never charged. Kishi is Abe’s grandfather and political role model.

“For us, we were extremely grateful for Judge Pal’s presence - there was no other foreigner who said so clearly that Japan wasn’t the only country that had done wrong,” said Hideaki Kase, chairman of the Japan-India Goodwill Association, an organization founded in part because of Pal’s legacy.

But Kase, who once served as an adviser to Yasuhiro Nakasone, another former prime minister, said that he disagreed with certain parts of Pal’s conclusions, including his acknowledgment of the Nanjing massacre. Describing the massacre as a “complete lie,” Kase said that Pal had fallen victim to “Chinese and Allied propaganda.”

In many ways, Pal seemed to share the mixed feelings that many Indian anticolonialists had of Japan. As an Asian nation competing with the Western powers, Japan inspired admiration, but also consternation for its colonization of Asia, said Sugata Bose, a historian of South Asia at Harvard.

Bose said his great-uncle, Subhash Chandra Bose, the Indian independence movement leader, criticized Japan’s invasion of China but allied himself with Japan against the British.

“It is a complex view from South and Southeast Asia,” Bose said.

“There is some degree of gratitude for the help that the Japanese provided, to the extent that such help was provided. At the same time, there was also grave suspicion of Japan.”

Still, Subhash Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army, a popular armed force formed by Indian anticolonialists, accepted assistance from Japan.

“Judge Pal, as an Indian, would have known all about this,” Bose said. “And it may have indirectly influenced his views.”

Radhabinod Pal not only supported Japan during the Tokyo War Crimes trial because he actually believed in Japan waged war to fight against racism and liberate Asians from colonial rule, but as another way to protest European imperialism in Asia. Pal was so anti-British and possibly anti-European like many of his Indian National Army peers to the point of supporting the other side just because they were non-White. In his later years, he admitted to being a Japanophile during his 1966 visit to Japan and also admitted that he saw Japan’s war as a way to prevail the West.

It seems that the Allies decided to give an Indian judge a position to hear cases in the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal because India at that time was going to become independent, and it would reinforce the existing Asian voices with the soon-to-be independent Filipino judge and Chinese judge. Although Pal decided to write a dissenting view calling the international tribunals a way to express “Victor’s justice” and to spite the European powers, he nonetheless acknowledged Japanese wartime atrocities as well as Allied excesses during the Second World War.

Pal concluded in the Tribunal with regards to atrocities such as the Rape of Nanjing and the Bataan Death March that, “the evidence is still overwhelming that atrocities were perpetrated by the members of the Japanese armed forces against the civilian population of some of the territories occupied by them as also against the prisoners of war.” It’s quite sad that Radhabinod Pal’s pro-Japanese defence in the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal is the basis for contemporary Sino-Indian relations.

Japan’s right wing re-emerges

Japan’s right wing re-emerges
Tolerance and dissent lose out to nationalist radicals’ rise

GEOFFREY YORK

From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail

August 8, 2007 at 5:01 AM EDT

TOKYO — Three months after a shocking arson attack on a leading politician, about 800 nationalists gathered at a rally in Tokyo to give their vocal support to the arsonist.

The rally went almost without mention in the Japanese media. In the growing climate of fear and intimidation, the rising power of the nationalists has become a taboo subject.

The arsonist, a 66-year-old nationalist named Masahiro Horigome, has become a hero to many right-wingers in Japan. After his dramatic attack last summer, he was flooded with letters of support from fellow nationalists.

Although he was given an eight-year jail sentence, he has remained unrepentant and even boastful. “I feel the greatest sense of accomplishment at this point in my life,” he later wrote to a newspaper.

Violent nationalist groups are still a relatively small minority of the political spectrum in Japan, but their influence is far greater than their numbers would warrant.

They have succeeded in silencing many scholars, discouraging debate on sensitive subjects and helping shift the political mainstream toward more radical views.

Their growing influence is a symptom of a Japanese political culture that has become less tolerant of dissent on key issues of patriotism, national symbols and wartime history.

Mr. Horigome, a member of a right-wing group in Tokyo, launched his attack last Aug. 15, the anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the day when many Japanese politicians pay homage at the Yasukuni Shrine, where 14 convicted war criminals are among the millions of war dead honoured.

Mr. Horigome planned to attack a business leader who had criticized the prime minister’s visits to the war shrine. He bought a large kitchen knife for the attack. But then he decided that he could not penetrate the business leader’s bodyguards. So he chose another target: Koichi Kato, a senior parliament member who had also criticized the visits.

He travelled to Mr. Kato’s family home and poured eight litres of gasoline inside the house, then ignited it with a lighter. The politician was not at home, but his house and adjoining office were destroyed in the blaze. His 97-year-old mother narrowly escaped death because she had gone out for a walk at the time.

The arsonist tried to commit hara-kiri, the ritual form of suicide favoured by samurai and military men, but botched the job. Police found him bleeding and arrested him.

Japan’s political leaders were largely silent. The prime minister at the time, Junichiro Koizumi, took two weeks to condemn the attack. The current Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, was equally slow to show any disapproval.

An estimated 10,000 people belong to Japan’s hard-line right-wing nationalist groups, and their penchant for violence is increasing, according to Japanese police reports.

The militants have issued death threats and other warnings to politicians and scholars who criticize the governing authorities on nationalist issues. The left-leaning Asahi Shimbun, a major Tokyo newspaper that has criticized the Yasukuni Shrine visits, received death threats in mailed postcards this spring. Another newspaper was attacked last year by a right-wing nationalist who threw a Molotov cocktail at its head office because of its reports on the shrine issue.

Another nationalist severed the tip of his little finger and sent it to the office of a Korean group in Japan because he was unhappy with North Korea’s test-firing of missiles last year.

In April this year, a yakuza gangster shot and killed the left-leaning mayor of Nagasaki. Although the incident was reportedly inspired by a personal grudge, there are close connections between the yakuza (a Japanese organized crime gang) and the right-wing nationalist groups.

Mr. Kato, the victim of the arson attack, is now living with a police guard at his home. He still worries about the risk of an ambush as he enters his home at night. “Every time I go back home, I take special care,” he said in an interview. “The most dangerous point is the final 30 metres, so I change my pace quite often and I zigzag.”

Mr. Kato, one of the most senior members of the governing Liberal Democratic Party, said he is concerned about the growing threat to freedom of speech in Japan. “Ten years ago, I would have said that this is an exaggerated concern,” he said. “But people are less and less willing to talk about nationalist issues or the Yasukuni Shrine. Our society has become more nationalistic, and there is less freedom of speech.”

Five years ago, when he made comments about North Korea that the nationalists disliked, Mr. Kato received a series of letters containing bullets.

More recently, a prominent scholar who frequently appeared on Japanese television was sent a warning by the nationalists because they were unhappy with his comments on the Yasukuni Shrine, Mr. Kato said. “We know your children’s route to school in the morning,” the nationalists warned the scholar. He decided to abandon his television appearances.

There are other troubling signs of intimidation. Last year, the Japan Institute of International Affairs, sponsored by Japan’s Foreign Ministry, posted an online article that criticized the rising nationalism and the official visits to the Yasukuni Shrine. The article was denounced by a prominent right-wing journalist, who demanded an apology. Within 24 hours, the institute’s president complied, shutting down the site and asking for forgiveness.

In another incident, right-wing activists threatened a professor who had dared to suggest that women should not be excluded from succession in Japan’s imperial line. She was obliged to issue a retraction. And this summer, Japan’s defence minister was forced to resign after he provoked a huge uproar by suggesting that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have helped to bring an end to the Second World War.

Historical revisionism is becoming more popular here. A new film denying Japan’s role in the Nanjing massacre, the slaughter of thousands of Chinese civilians by soldiers in Japanese-occupied Nanjing in 1937, is being promoted in Tokyo. There is growing support for the view that the Nanjing massacre was a hoax. More than half of Japan’s cabinet ministers have supported a political forum that calls for reform of Japan’s history textbooks to play down or deny Japan’s wartime atrocities.

Earlier this year, dozens of Japanese parliament members bought a full-page advertisement in The Washington Post to deny that Japan had coerced the so-called “comfort women” to provide sex to Japanese soldiers in China and Korea during the war.

Prime Minister Abe has brought some of these views into the political mainstream. At one point this year, he publicly cast doubt on the evidence that the comfort women were coerced into sexual slavery. Mr. Abe later apologized for his statement, but refused to acknowledge Japan’s responsibility for running the brothels during the 1930s and 1940s.

Within the past 10 months, Mr. Abe has won parliamentary approval for several of the long-standing demands of nationalists. He upgraded the role of Japan’s defence agency, making it a full-fledged ministry for the first time since the Second World War. He passed a law on “patriotic education,” requiring students to sing the national anthem and stand at attention when the national flag is raised. And he took the first steps toward eliminating the pacifist clauses from Japan’s postwar constitution.

As these issues enter the mainstream of government policies, some right-wing groups have become more extreme in an effort to grab the spotlight, Mr. Kato said. “They have become more and more violent,” he said.

One of the biggest problems, Mr. Kato said, is Japan’s failure to make an honest appraisal of its military expansionism from the 1890s to the 1940s. There is no museum in Tokyo that takes a neutral look at Japan’s 20th-century history. The vacuum is filled by a well-financed museum at the Yasukuni Shrine that portrays Japan as an innocent victim and courageous victor.

The museum gives a patriotic right-wing version of the entire period of Japanese military expansionism. It boasts that Japan achieved “victory after stunning victory” in the “Greater East Asian War” from the 19th century to the 1940s.

The museum never acknowledges that Japan invaded any other Asian country. To explain the Japanese occupation of northeastern China in the early 1930s, the museum blames China for fomenting an “anti-Japanese movement” that obliged Japan to send in its soldiers.

To explain the Japanese takeover of Beijing and Shanghai in 1937, the museum blames China for provoking Japan with various “incidents.”

To explain the widening of Japan’s occupation of China in the late 1930s and 1940s, the museum puts the blame on the “terrorism” of the Chinese Communists and the “prevailing anti-Japanese atmosphere” in China. It gives only a brief mention of the thousands of Chinese killed in the Nanjing massacre in 1937, describing the massacre this way: “The Chinese soldiers disguised in civilian clothes were severely prosecuted.”

The museum also blames the United States for the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Its exhibit on Pearl Harbor is headlined: Japan’s Quest For Avoiding A War.

Sources: the Economist, Far Eastern Economic Review, Kyodo News, japan101.com

Japan is at a crossroads. The entire country does not support this right-wing but they seem to be the ones in power and making all the decisions. From what I have heard from Japanese friends is the same slow shift in their personal thinking on issues to the right. The media and these groups are essentially brainwashing the population into believing their version of history and killing any real discussion. It certainly is a scary road ahead if Japan goes in this direction and it seems like the Americans are engineering a situation that will play off Japan against China in the near future.

What is troubling is the fact that progressive groups seem unwilling to confront or criticize these right-wing groups. In fact they seem to turn a blind eye to their activities or cave in to their demands.

“To explain the widening of Japan’s occupation of China in the late 1930s and 1940s, the museum puts the blame on the “terrorism” of the Chinese Communists and the “prevailing anti-Japanese atmosphere” in China.’ ” - Why does this remind me of Iraq and Afghanistan?

Report: Japan’s late emperor against Yasukuni’s honoring of war criminals

Report: Japan’s late emperor against Yasukuni’s honoring of war criminals

The Associated Press
Saturday, August 4, 2007

TOKYO: Japan’s wartime Emperor Hirohito was against including convicted war criminals at a Tokyo shrine because he worried the move would damage relations with the country’s Asian neighbors, according to new documents published Saturday.

Hirohito also believed that honoring Class-A war criminals at Yasukuni Shrine would change the nature of the shrine as a war memorial, the emperor’s chamberlain was quoted as saying in a recently published book of Hirohito’s poetry, according to the Asahi newspaper. Several other newspapers carried a similar report.

“(The emperor) believes it alters the nature of the enshrined deities, because (Yasukuni) is supposed to honor only the souls of the people who went to war and died for the nation,” Yoshihiro Tokugawa says in the book, compiled by poet Hirohiko Okano, 83.

The book is an anthology of Hirohito’s traditional “waka” poems, including one he wrote for the 41st anniversary of Japan’s World War II defeat in 1986 and which reflected his anxieties over the inclusion of executed war criminals at Yasukuni, Okano says, citing conversations with the late chamberlain.

Hirohito believed “it would leave serious problems for the future with countries engaged in war” with Japan, Okano wrote, according to the Asahi.

Hirohito wrote:

“On this day of the year again

“Sorrow is deep

“Over the matter of the Yasukuni shrine.”

Hirohito, under whose name Japan waged war in the first half of the 21st century, died in 1989.

Hirohito stopped visiting Yasukuni after his eighth visit three years before its 1978 decision to begin honoring the Class-A war criminals including executed war leader Hideki Tojo. Hirohito’s son, Akihito, has never visited Yasukuni.

Visits by Japanese leaders and lawmakers to Yasukuni have long been a source of friction between Japan and its neighbors because the shrine is seen by many as a symbol of Japan’s pre-1945 militarism.

Earlier findings from private memorandums and the diary of a former imperial aide have indicated that Hirohito stopped visiting Yasukuni after expressing his displeasure to including war criminals on the list of some 2.5 million war dead honored there. But details of his views have not previously been known.

Hirohito’s reign continues to be a sensitive issue, and journals and accounts by aides to the emperor are published usually after their death.

Emperor Showa stopped going to Yasukuni because the men who lost his war were enshrined against his wishes and because he realised their enshrinement would change the Yasukuni Shrine into a symbol of Japanese militarism in World War II. The shrine was built in Meiji’s rule to commemorate soldiers who died for Japan regardless of the reason, but this has been perverted with the enshrinement of Tojo Hideki and other lesser minds.

The revisionist museum built just next to the WW2 section of Yasukuni doesn’t help either. If the right-wing nuts really want to restore the Emperor’s place in Japanese society then they would have actually listened to the Emperor’s wishes and views instead of doing something to satisfy their own sentiments. Otherwise, all they are just producing empty rhetoric that does nothing but create futher complications in their country from within and abroad.

If the Emperor feels that right-wing, revisionist attitudes are perverting Japan’s national identity and global reputation, what does this say about the country as a whole?

Why can’t Japanophiles and right-wing Japanese see the big picture instead of just defending or justifying these symbols just because they are made in Japan?

China marks 70th anniversary of war with Japan

China marks 70th anniversary of war with Japan
Posted on : 2007-07-06 | Author : DPA

News Category : AsiaBeijing - When former Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi visited Beijing’s Lugou Bridge in October 2001, his laying of a wreath and his “heartfelt apology” for Japan’s wartime atrocities in China received a lukewarm response from Chinese leaders. As China marks the 70th anniversary of the July 7, 1937 “Luguou Bridge incident,” which started Japan’s full-scale invasion of China, relations between the two nations remain troubled.

“There are still many problems between China and Japan which are not being solved,” Song Chengyou, a historian at Beijing University, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Song gave the examples of territorial disputes in the East China Sea and Beijing’s objection to Japanese history textbooks that it says sanitize Japan’s wartime atrocities.

“Although experts from the two countries are making joint research on the history textbooks, I do not have high expectations,” Song said.

The dispute over history is a key element in diplomatic relations.

Formal ties have improved since Koizumi’s successor, Shinzo Abe, visited Beijing in October. But many Chinese experts see Abe as a more pragmatic version of his predecessor.

“Abe is contained a lot by the rightists,” sad Liu Jiangyong of the International Relations Institute at Beijing’s Qinghua University, “but he needs to consider the overall image of Japan.”

“Abe does not act as tough as Koizumi but fundamentally they stand for the same points,” Song said.

Abe was heavily criticized for saying in March that there was “no evidence” of Japan’s military forcing thousands of women in East Asia into sexual slavery.

But he has so far refrained from making a public visit as prime minister to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. The shrine honours nearly 2.5 million Japanese who died in wars since the mid-19th century, including 14 class-A war criminals convicted after World War II.

Bilateral ties had been soured by Koizumi’s annual visits to the shrine, and Chinese leaders had refused to meet him since 2001.

Like many ordinary Chinese people, Liu contrasts Japan’s attitude with Germany’s greater willingness to atone unconditionally for its wartime past.

Visits by Japanese leaders to the Yasukuni shrine do “huge harm to Chinese people’s feelings”, Liu told dpa.

It is “unimaginable” that German leaders would pay homage to Nazi war criminals in a similar way, he said.

Foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang on Tuesday said 2007 was a “sensitive year” for bilateral relations because of the 70th anniversaries of the Lugou Bridge battle and the Nanjing massacre.

The Japanese attack on Nationalist guards at the bridge in 1937 “marked the long-premeditated launching of all-out war on China” and the start of the “largest imperialist invasion ever experienced by China”, according to an official history.

It led to a loose alliance between Nationalist and Communist troops in what is now known in China as the War of Resistance Against Japan.

“Lugou Bridge symbolizes the beginning of national disaster, and also the beginning of the awakening of the Chinese,” Song said.

The Japanese forces had seized much of northeastern China in 1931 and placed it under the puppet government of Manchuria, which was led by China’s deposed last emperor, Pu Yi, the following year.

Japan fully occupied Beijing and nearby Tianjin by the end of July 1937, then moved its troops south to attack Shanghai and other major cities.

The year ended with the Nanjing massacre, in which Japanese troops are estimated to have killed up to 300,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians.

The Chinese government this week allowed the first showing of the new Hollywood documentary film “Nanking,” which takes its title from the old Western name for the city.

According to the official publicity for the film, “Nanking” shows how the “Japanese army unleashed murder and rape on a horrifying scale” that left “more than 200,000″ dead in and around Nanjing in December 1937 and January 1938.

Some Japanese historians and politicians claim Chinese and international experts exaggerated the death toll in Nanjing, but Song accuses them of “playing tricks” by questioning the number of victims.

“We all know that there are lots of rightists in Japan now. They do not look back at history properly and try to beautify this history,” Liu said.

Anger over Japan’s alleged failure to admit the full extent of its wartime atrocities in China were one of the reasons behind a series of large-scale anti-Japanese protests in Beijing and other cities in early 2005.

The government has allowed several small-scale, highly controlled protests outside the Japanese embassy since 2005.

One activist who helped to organize recent protests said he expected “simple memorial activities” to be held “mainly at Lugou Bridge” on Saturday, but he did not rule out the possibility of more protests.

Li Hanmei, another expert on international relations from Beijing University, concedes that it might be useful for both governments to maintain the “mild tension” between the two nations.

“Japan is trying to be an international political power and China is a fast-developing economic and political power,” Li said. “There are fundamental conflicts between the two.”

It’s always nice to know Koizumi visited the Lugou Bridge in 2001 with a wreath and a “heartfelt apology” for starting World War II in Asia before taking it all back with his　スーパーハーピー visits to Yasukuni Jinja. There are many who see no offence to visiting Yasukuni since they see it as Japan’s rough equivalent to America’s Arlington Cemetery.

There are some things that need to be clarified with Yasukuni. First it cannot be considered Japan’s “Arlington” because it is a private institution while Arlington Cemetery is maintained by the United States government. Second, while it is true that Yasukuni was originally built by the Imperial government to commemorate all Japanese soldiers who died helping Japan modernise, the shrine has been tainted with the presence of War Criminals and the corruption by the right-wing into a symbol of militarism and nationalism.

It is no coincidence the right-wing revisionist museum, the Yushukan, that justifies World War II and downplays if not denies all war crimes is built just inches away from the Yasukuni Jinja itself. Emperor Showa’s anger at the enshrinement of th 14 men who lost his war (making it difficult to honour the soldiers that died for him) and his decision to no longer visit (it would tarnish his reputation and Japan’s) since then is a good indication of the extent the Yasukuni Shrine has been perverted by the Japanese right-wing.

In any event, people generally will remember the bad over the good and Koizumi’s actions to mend fences were easily overshadowed by his visits to Yasukuni. As a Prime Minister who professes to understand sensitive issues in East Asia, its ironic to see him enthusiastic in nearly all of his state visits to Yasukuni. Like Koizumi, Abe’s meetings with Chinese and South Korean leaders were easily undermined by his comments on comfort women and by the remarks from his handpicked Cabinet ministers.

Some claim that Koizumi made a deal with the right-wingers in his party (LDP) to make the visits in return for their support in his domestic reforms, which would explain why so many Japanese love him for his national policies at the expense of increased tensions in the region. Then again, it seems like Koizumi’s brief reign is being undermined by Abe who seems to be restoring much of the politics Koizumi tried to destroy during his rule. Abe’s approval ratings are so low, from his domestic policies rather than his foreign policies as Japanophiles claim, that it looks like the opposition will get swept into power, assuming enough of Abe’s critics actually vote in the coming weeks.

I really wonder how Shinzo-kun will be received if he ever makes a diplomatic tour in China like Wen Jiabao did in Japan earlier this year. Sino-Japanese tensions will remain as Japan tries to find some way to cope with their loss of economic influence in the world due to a rising China, while China will look to find ways to finally assert itself after spending several decades as a weak communist state at America’s benefit.

Japan and China: Schoolchildren’s views

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/6545085.stm

Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has arrived in Japan for a summit that is being hailed as an achievement of some significance.

The two countries have had an uneasy relationship with differences over their war-time past remaining unresolved.

Here Chinese and Japanese schoolchildren discuss what they think about each other and how history books, the media and popular culture have shaped their perceptions.

CHEN YAJING, 15, BEIJING

I have been learning about Japanese history for three years. I think that they should be ashamed that the history they teach is distorted. However, there are a lot of good things about Japan, like Japanese technology and comics, so I am a bit confused whether to like or hate Japan.

I’m a huge fan of Japanese horror movies, they are simply fantastic. Like that movie, The Ring. There was a Japanese and an American version, but they are just not comparable. The Japanese one is so much better.

China isn’t good at making movies, and there definitely are a lot of ways in which China can’t compete with Japan.

I still feel that the Japanese government isn’t right. They shouldn’t be so hypocritical regarding history; they just keep denying the facts. I can never forgive them. No matter how good their comics are, how strong their technology is, this history will not fade away.

I would consider travelling to Japan but it is not somewhere I would dream to go to. It’s so small and crowded, and I’d rather travel to European countries instead.
JUNKI ISHIMURA, 13, TOKYO

I have two Chinese friends at school. They’re both quite rebellious. If the teachers tell them off for something they will say they didn’t do it. We’ve learnt that Japan fought a war with China and colonised parts of the country. Sometimes the Japanese were a bit cruel, forcing places to adopt Japanese names and forcing people to adopt the Japanese language.

But we didn’t really get into the details of what actually happened. I feel my understanding of the war is a bit thin.

At primary school they taught us history, but not about who was right or wrong. The conclusion was that war is bad for humans - that no one wins or loses in a fight.

In middle school we’ve learnt more about trade between the two countries.

The Chinese people seem to hold grudges from the war against the Japanese though. I learnt about this mostly from the news. I feel there is less anti-Japanese sentiment these days.

I totally understand why the Chinese hold grudges but the situation should be improved little by little. Japan and China should have a relationship like the one Japan has with the US.
ZHONG TIANYI, 12, BEIJING

I’ve been learning about Japan for a few years now. What I remember best is how they invaded China. The history book I’m studying now has quite a few chapters about Japan’s invasion and how they started the war.

The dates we should remember are 7 July, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, marking the beginning of Japanese invasion, and 18 September when they took control of some major Chinese cities.

There are also chapters about how they massacred people in Nanjing and how they forced Chinese people to accept Japanese culture and language.

I think the Japanese are bad, they are not loyal to anyone. They used to have a similar cultural system to China, and now they say they have a similar cultural system to the Western world.

I’ve learnt that there are good things about them as well, they are good at learning from others, for example. I like some things about Japan, like technology and comics. I liked the comic book Slam Dunk very much, it was so well executed.
KASUMI KOJIMA, 15, TOKYO

I think China is important for Japan. We are neighbours, lots of Japanese people travel there on holiday and trade between the two countries is becoming more and more important. Neighbouring countries should cooperate and get on with each other. It’s safer.

Japan and China have different cultures. There are problems, of course, and I can understand why the Chinese would not have favourable feelings towards the Japanese.

They should talk more about the issues they have and resolve them one by one. They can’t leave things unresolved.

At school I learnt that Japan went to war with China for money. I think that was really bad. It was Japan who did most of the bad things.

The old textbooks, the ones that generations before me studied from, taught that Japan was a good country and that others were bad. The textbooks have now been changed.

In the old days they presented the wrong facts. For instance they said that North Korea was colonised because it was a bad country. My history teacher told us about this.

It’s now easier to find the right information. But I think the best thing to do is to actually visit the place, perhaps to study there.

Kids my age can get on pretty well with Chinese people. The politicians are thinking about how they can have the upper hand, but the rest of us, we get on fine.
WANG HONGYANG, 14, BEIJING

I’ve been learning about Japanese history for three years. The history I’ve been taught is mainly about how the Japanese bullied us. It’s all horrible, but the Japanese people I know are quite nice. I’ve been to Japan, my uncle and aunt studied there. They tell me that the Japanese people are really kind. So I really couldn’t tie any part of the horrible history to Japanese people.

I really liked Japan, the quality of the things I bought there is so good.

People treated me nicely, but I do think there is some discrimination against the Chinese. After all, we are behind them in terms of development. And because of their distorted history text books, young Japanese don’t favour us Chinese. They think we’re just nagging them about the history.

The history can never change, we can’t adore everything about Japan blindly, and we have to keep our moral integrity. I think we can forgive them for what they did if they treat us with the right attitude. If they keep denying everything and not showing sincerity, then there’s nothing we can talk about anymore.

I love Japanese comics. They are the best. No one else in the world could beat Japan. China’s comics are just so far behind and the Chinese have prejudices about people who like comics - people would think you are not serious about your studies.

So there you have it: Chinese students know they may be brainwashed and are actually aware of the strengths and problems of Japan contrary to Japanese nationalists, particularly 2channers, and Japanophiles’ claims that Chinese kids are all brainwashed fascists and racists because they know the ugly side of that country. On the other hand, the Japanese students are aware of some unpleasant transgressions that went on in World War 2 but are completely in the dark over the details and are more than eager to be good company to their regional neighbours contrary to some assertions that Japanese youth are becoming increasingly right-wing.

What some of these rough accounts actually highlight is the strong love-hate relationship that Chinese of the future may have towards their Japanese counterparts. On one hand, they are aware of the past problems and the Japanese government’s inability to truly come to terms with them and their asshole politicians such as Abe Shinzo. At the same time, they appreciate the finer points of Japanese popular culture, which is actually the same “soft power” that is winning them misguided fanboys called Japanophiles.

It appears that the government’s defiant and irritating behaviour has made it difficult for Japan’s neighbours to accept them with open arms despite the generally pleasant company there like any other country and the unique products and services that are popular among youths. It’s also counterproductive to see critics of China exaggerate the anti-Japanese sentiment by simply dismissing all those who are critical of some part of Japan or its culture as racist against Japanese or Chinese people all being victims of “Orwellian” brainwashing.

On the other end of the region, the accounts by the Japanese students reaffirm suspicions that the general populace is generally ignorant of the root causes for current regional tensions. Although they are aware of the harmful effects of war, it doesn’t seem clear that they understand the causes of the war and the exact details that are causing so much hostility to their country but a few are aware the government has played their part in increasing tensions. Then again, the students also were eager to be friends and work towards a better future with a few pointing out they have interesting Chinese friends. So it looks like critics were partly right by pointing out the general ignorance of the Japanese people’s understanding of their regional history, while anti-Chinese sentiment in response to anti-Japanese sentiment seems to be cooling off.

Conversely, everything I could be saying could be just wishful thinking on my part since these are just teenagers giving their views based on their relatively limited experiences in the world. However, it would be wise to point out that some of these kids will be the future generations that will possibly play a role in East Asian affairs in the following decades in their own way. Let’s all keep keep wishing for Abe to stay the course and not do anything stupid until his successor is in power.

Wen Urges Japan’s Leader to Avoid Shrine

Wen Urges Japan’s Leader to Avoid Shrine
Wednesday April 4, 2007 9:16 PM

AP Photo TOK805

By CARL FREIRE

Associated Press Writer

TOKYO (AP) - China’s premier urged his Japanese counterpart not to visit a Tokyo war shrine at the center of tensions over Japan’s past military aggression in Asia, a news report said Wednesday.

Speaking to Japanese media in Beijing ahead of a three-day visit to Japan next week, Wen Jiabao said that “individual Japanese leaders have visited (the shrine) numerous times and hurt the feelings of the Chinese people,” Kyodo News agency reported.

“I hope this will never happen again,” the agency quoted Wen as saying.

Yasukuni Shrine, which honors the country’s 2.5 million war dead, is a diplomatic flash point between Japan and its neighbors China and South Korea, who see the shrine as a symbol of Japan’s militaristic past.

Tokyo-Beijing ties soured under Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, who repeatedly visited the shrine despite China’s protests. Relations have improved since Abe took office last September, and he has not since visited the shrine.

Abe has refused to make clear whether he plans to visit the shrine and has said he will not confirm afterward whether he’s gone. On Wednesday, he repeated that policy of ambiguity.

“My position on the Yasukuni issue is as stated before,” Abe said.

Wen, who last month described his coming trip as “an ice-thawing journey,” said that China places great importance on its ties with Japan, and that he hopes Abe will visit China by the year’s end, Kyodo reported.

Abe visited Beijing shortly after he took office in September, and said last week he is considering returning to China.

Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki said the possibility of the visit would be discussed when Wen comes to Japan.

He is traveling there Wednesday, and is slated to hold a summit meeting with Abe and make a speech in Parliament. His visit marks the first such trip by a Chinese premier in eight years, according to China’s Foreign Ministry.

It seems that the CCP government is so eager to restore bilateral ties to the point where it is giving the Japanese Prime Minister fair warning to not do anything stupid before such a high level visit.  After all, China needs direct Japanese investment to help fuel their economic growth by creating jobs, infrastructure and partnerships for this local business to flourish while at the same time providing Japan with a significant market that is currently contributing to Japan’s rise out of their decade-long recession.  As my friend noted, Japan and China are interdependent for better or worse it is like a very bad gay marriage done out of convenience.  Both partners in the arrangement have strong, independent personalities with different approaches to a common problem.

Fortunately, Abe is smart enough to officially please his party and the Chinese government by not giving a direct answer to the Yasukuni visits just like he did in regards to the Comfort Women controversy.  It gives me the impression that the Chinese leadership believe Shinzo-kun is a feasible partner they can work with, but needs to be given friendly reminders to keep him from doing anything stupid similar to how the Americans and opposition give George Bush helpful reminders of the extent he is fucking up their country.  At the same time, Shinzo-kun really should not do anything remotely stupid since the Chinese have done all they can to downplay the controversy stemming from his views on Comfort Women among their countrymen and within their party.  In the end, money talks but stupidity can create tremendous problems.

Straight Talking: Francis Fukuyama

Francis Fukuyama

March 26, 2007 8:30 AM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/francis_fukuyama/2007/03/the_trouble_with_japanese_nati.html

Barely half a year into his premiership, Japan’s Shinzo Abe is provoking anger across Asia and mixed feelings in his country’s key ally, the United States. But will the Bush administration use its influence to nudge Abe away from inflammatory behaviour?

Abe’s predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, was a mold-breaking leader, reviving Japan’s economy, reforming the postal savings system, and smashing the long-ruling Liberal Democratic party’s faction system. But Koizumi also legitimised a new Japanese nationalism, antagonising China and South Korea by his annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine. If anything, Abe is even more committed to building an assertive and unapologetic Japan.

Anyone who believes that the Yasukuni controversy is an obscure historical matter that Chinese and Koreans use to badger Japan for political advantage has probably never spent much time there. The problem is not the 12 Class-A war criminals interred at the shrine; the real problem is the Yushukan military museum next door.

Walking past the Mitsubishi Zero, tanks, and machine guns on display in the museum, one finds a history of the Pacific war that restores “the Truth of Modern Japanese History.” It follows the nationalist narrative: Japan, a victim of the European colonial powers, sought only to protect the rest of Asia from them. Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea, for example, is described as a “partnership”; one looks in vain for any account of the victims of Japanese militarism in Nanjing or Manila.

One might be able to defend the museum as one viewpoint among many in a pluralist democracy. But there is no other museum in Japan that gives an alternative view of Japan’s 20th century history. Successive Japanese governments have hidden behind the Yushukan museum’s operation by a private religious organisation to deny responsibility for the views expressed there.

That is an unconvincing stance. In fact, unlike Germany, Japan has never come to terms with its own responsibility for the Pacific war. Although socialist prime minister Tomiichi Murayama officially apologized to China in 1995 for the war, Japan has never had a genuine internal debate over its degree of responsibility, and has never made a determined effort to propagate an alternative account to that of Yushukan.

My exposure to the Japanese right came in the early 1990’s, when I was on a couple of panels in Japan with Watanabe Soichi, who was selected by my Japanese publisher (unbeknownst to me) to translate my book The End of History and the Last Man into Japanese. Watanabe, a professor at Sophia University, was a collaborator of Shintaro Ishihara, the nationalist politician who wrote The Japan That Can Say No and is now the governor of Tokyo.

In the course of a couple of encounters, I heard him explain in front of large public audiences how the people of Manchuria had tears in their eyes when the occupying Kwantung Army left China, so grateful were they to Japan. According to Watanabe, the Pacific war boiled down to race, as the US was determined to keep a non-white people down. Watanabe is thus the equivalent of a Holocaust denier, but, unlike his German counterparts, he easily draws large and sympathetic audiences. (I am regularly sent books by Japanese writers that “explain” how the Nanjing Massacre was a big fraud.)

Moreover, there have been several disturbing recent incidents in which physical intimidation has been used by nationalists against critics of Koizumi’s Yasukuni visits, such as the firebombing of former prime ministerial candidate Kato Koichi’s home. (On the other hand, the publisher of the normally conservative Yomiuri Shimbun attacked Koizumi’s Yasukuni visits and published a fascinating series of articles on responsibility for the war.)

This leaves the US in a difficult position. A number of American strategists are eager to ring China with a Nato-like defensive barrier, building outward from the US-Japan security treaty. Since the final days of the cold war, the US has been pushing Japan to rearm, and has officially supported a proposed revision of Article 9 of the postwar constitution, which bans Japan from having a military or waging war.

But America should be careful about what it wishes for. The legitimacy of the entire American military position in the far east is built around the US exercising Japan’s sovereign function of self-defence. Japan’s unilateral revision of Article 9, viewed against the backdrop of its new nationalism, would isolate Japan from virtually the whole of Asia.

Revising Article 9 has long been part of Abe’s agenda, but whether he pushes ahead with it will depend in large part on the kind of advice he gets from close friends in the US. President Bush was unwilling to say anything about Japan’s new nationalism to his “good friend Junichiro” out of gratitude for Japanese support in Iraq. Now that Japan has withdrawn its small contingent of troops, perhaps Bush will speak plainly to Abe.

Why right-wing Japanese nationalism is a danger in East Asia. Originally promoted by Koizumi as a way to shore up support from the right-wing factions of the LDP and from voters to push through his domestic reforms, right-wing nationalism has become a growing problem as Japan attempts to exert more influence on the world stage alongside their Chinese and Korean neighbours and from increasing American pressure to rearm to function as their regional policeman in Asia.

It’s also interesting to note how the Americans are reluctant to strongly criticise Abe or Koizumi on their nationalist actions in the past and it would not be surprising if Bush votes down HR 121 when it reaches his desk in the Oval Office. After all, Bush needs all the support he needs in his Mid-East adventures and another partner to contain a rising China and the problematic North Korea.

In any event, I really need to visit that Yushukan museum when I get a chance to vacation in East Asia just to finally understand what the fuss is all about and to form my true views instead of listening to second-hand accounts from pundits and politicians. Besides, it will give me a Taiwanese view of World War II on top of conventional right-wing Japanese thoughts.