The nationalism question, revisited yet again

Although the comfort women resolution appears to be on hold until after Japan holds Upper House elections next month, the waters have been roiled by a full-page advert in the Washington Post taken out by a bipartisan group of Japanese legislators, as well as journalists and commentators (including Abe confidante Okazaki Hisahiko) laying out "The Facts" on the comfort women issue. (The ad is available here, courtesy of Occidentalism.)

At the same time, a group of legislators led by former LDP member (and postal rebel) Hiranuma Takeo, who also signed the Wapo ad, has protested to China that it should remove photos from war museums that distort the past and defame Japan.

Ampontan has addressed both these acts of "assertiveness," arguing that the comfort women issue reflects worse on Japan's neighbors and the US Congress than on Japan, and that Japan is rightfully standing up to China in demanding changes to China's war museums.

I have written about my unease about the US Congress demanding an apology on this issue from Japan before, but that should not be taken as an endorsement of the position that Japan has apologized enough and we should all start paying attention to China's wrongs, instead of Japan's. As I have written before, Japanese governments may have apologized before, but the contemporary Japanese right — the political and in some cases familial descendants of the figures who led Japan to war — has never apologized for the war. Through various indiscreet comments made by Japanese conservatives, including the current prime minister in his younger days, it is clear that to them the worst thing about the war was that Japan lost. How that is consistent with former Prime Minister Murayama's apology is beyond me. The leaders who apologized before were those who thought that Japan was right to lose the war and were proud of Japan's unique pacifist identity (or were otherwise insincerely repeating what their predecessors had said).

It does not take much effort to see why Chinese, Koreans, and certain sections of the public in Australia and the US might have a problem with a Japanese prime minister who has never properly expressed remorse for Japan's colossal historical crimes and yet at the same time talks about abandoning Article 9 and the postwar regime built around it — abandoning the constitutional provision that has served as a mark of Cain, showing the world (and reminding Japan) of its bloody past.

The question is not a matter of resurgent militarism; as Benedict Anderson, author of Imagined Communities, said in an interview in the July issue of Ronza (my translation), "During the first phase of globalization, in the first half of the twentieth century, Japan's response to globalization was to commence invasions, starting with Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula, and Manchuria, and finally annexing the various countries of Asia. However, this kind of thing will likely not happen again. In theory, one can imagine war between Japan and China. However, now the act of a victorious country's seizing a defeated country is nonsense. Until the Second World War, the two countries had mutual, violent animosity that could be expressed in war, but now that does not apply."

Rather, it is a question of historical justice. Regardless of the questionable legitimacy of the Tokyo trials, regardless of what Japan suffered, regardless of what the other imperial powers did or did not do, Japan committed egregious acts of violence against its neighbors. It is not up to Japan to dictate when the wounds it inflicted upon its neighbors and their citizens have healed. And denying or relativizing Japan's actions only rubs salt into the open wounds of its victims.

Yes, China has historical issues of its own with which to grapple. Mao's crimes were monstrous, and that his visage can still be found all over China is deeply unsettling. But guess what? Mao's crimes were against the Chinese people. The Chinese people will one day have a serious reckoning with their country's history during the twentieth century, but that is a matter for the Chinese. And so with the Koreans. Between Japan, Korea, and China, it seems to me that only one has launched a massive war of aggression against the whole region in the past century — and has the responsibility to show sincere remorse for its crimes and to not make excuses for what happened.

The question of Japan's making a proper account and atoning for its wartime behavior has nothing to do with placating the Chinese and Korean governments, who for reasons of their own will not be placated by Japanese apologies. Nationalism and the attendant historical sensitivities will be a part of the landscape of Northeast Asia for decades to come, because vigorous, rising powers shape their histories to flatter their contemporary aspirations. No bilateral or trilateral panel of historians is going to overcome the urge to present history in a light that flatters oneself and makes one's rivals look bad.

No, Japan's historical reckoning is for its own sake, to clean out its wartime closet once and for all.

So what Ampontan sees as Japan's standing up for itself, I see a country for which pride and the redemption of honor take priority over historical justice — and I see a country that is, as of yet, unfit for the global leadership after which it lusts.

China, multinational empire

I have to disagree respectfully with Zen Pundit, who, in a post riffing off a post by Tom Barnett, argues, "Historically, China has taken a similar [to Europe] ethnocentric view of citizenship ( it is rare though not impossible, for a foreigner not of Chinese ancestry to become a citizen of China); Beijing's ability to change this and welcome Indians, Americans, Japanese, Koreans and Latins as future 'Chinese' will in part, determine China's future role in world affairs."

This simplifies an extraordinarily complex question in Chinese history.

At times, of course, Chinese citizenship has been roughly equivalent with (Han) Chinese ethnicity. This was, of course, a considerable factor in the revolution that overthrew the Qing Dynasty, as the Manchurian Qing became viewed as foreigners oppressing increasingly nationalistic Han Chinese. But, of course, for the first couple of centuries of Qing rule, their non-Han ethnicity was not problematic whatsoever.

More currently, consider that contemporary China is home to fifty-five official ethic minorities, aside from the Han, comprising approximately ten percent of China's population. While the disenchanted Uighurs of Xinjiang often receive the most attention — as they allow journalists to combine the "rise of China" angle with a "global Islam" angle — Chinese ethnic minorities enjoy, for the most part, a comfortable existence within China.

So to return to Zen Pundit's original point, China may have no problem whatsoever accommodating new ethnic minorities, seeing as how it has had little problem accommodating its existing minorities. Look at the growing population of (South) Koreans in China, especially in the northeast, with a population reportedly approaching one million.

China's history problems

On my recent trip to China — discussed here — I had a distinct sense of twenty-first century China being a country alienated from its past. Its modern past, the decades following the declaration of the "New China" following the CCP's victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, is passed over in the public space, but for the ubiquitous visage of Mao Zedong (including the massive portrait overlooking Tiananmen Square that was recently vandalized and replaced).

The vacuum of the modern past seems to be filled, instead, with the hollowed-out and commercialized vestiges of the imperial past, the heirlooms of China's ancient civilization that the CCP has "naturally" inherited. Tourist sites like the Forbidden City and Summer Palace are undoubtedly major moneymakers for the PRC, but they — and the past they represent — seem more like curiosities of a decadent past than a source of meaning for a China that is wholly uncertain about its identity.

Indeed, in looking for how the CCP views the past, I was struck, if not surprised, by the party's efforts to cultivate an air of inevitability about its rule when visiting the museum of the Chinese Communist Party at the site of the first party congress in Shanghai; the party is presented as delivering China from its foreign enemies, the heir of earlier attempts to expel foreigners and overturn the weak rulers who had failed to defend China. Like all communists, the CCP views history simply as something to justify its hold on power, not as a force that can help the Chinese people think about who they are, what they value, and how they should relate to other countries.

With this in mind, it is worth looking at two articles linked to by the China Digital Times today. Each article in turn addresses a different aspect of the PRC's history problem.

The first, by Henry Zhao in the New Left Review, looks at a debate between two Francophone Sinologists on the relevance of Confucianism as a means of looking at the revival of classical learning within China. (For more on this phenomenon, and Yu Dan, the biggest beneficiary of the revival thus far, check out this article on Danwei.) In reviewing of Swiss Sinologist Jean-François Billeter's Contre François Jullien, Zhao gives a succinct overview of Confucian thought, and its treatment in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and he is clearly sympathetic to Billeter, who has argued that Confucianism cannot be separated from the political system it undergirded for millennia.

This is an important reminder as Confucianism sweeps China again — both for the Chinese people and for the CCP. While it is understandable that Chinese are interested in reclaiming an important part of their past that had been vilified under Mao, to re-embrace the past uncritically is no virtue either. The party, meanwhile, is surely cognizant that Confucianism, while giving absolute power to rulers and demanding obedience for the ruled, also included provisions for dynastic change when rulers failed to fulfill their duties properly. In any case, there is no question that the Confucius vogue is a product of the vacuum at the heart of Chinese identity.

A second article, by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of history at California-Irvine, calls attention to Shanghai's changing interpretation of its past as host to a foreign enclave. While I was indeed impressed by how pre-1949 history was presented in Shanghai in a relatively favorable light, the relegation of the early decades of communist rule — noted by Wasserstrom — to "Old Shanghai" (perhaps even "Old China") should by no means be viewed as a welcome change.

In any other words, Japan is hardly alone in having problems searching for a usable past — and it is hardly the worst offender in the region, seeing as how the party that rendered China's recent history "unusable" still sits, however uneasily, upon the Dragon Throne.