There’s no denying the weight of bitterness of Japanese aggression against humanity during preliminaries and final explosion of The Great Pacific War. Just as Nazi bestiality still haunts Europe, there is living memory for Japanese excesses in Asia. That’s particularly true in China [as it is in Korea, occupied and exploited for 50 years] and among Overseas Chinese.
Unfortunately, there has never been the kind of personally dramatized reconciliation of a DeGaulle and an Adenauer [although at one point, it seemed possible between Japan’s Nobusuke Kishi and South Korea’s Park Chung Hee], setting a pattern for a continent.
But just as in Germany’s case, for more than half a century a wide spectrum of Japanese have tried to atone for their sins.
The sons of the fathers have made dozens of public and private apologies, both from Japan and during official and private visits abroad. Although Chiang Kai-shek, Chinese resistance leader, refused reparations looking instead toward collaboration, Tokyo has put some $30 billion into Beijing’s aid kitty and more billions into Southeast Asian government and private coffers. Japanese investment and technology transfers have been critical to the China export boom, just as they were to economic takeoffs in Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Malaysia.
Internationally, Tokyo pays the largest tab at the UN after the U.S.; almost a quarter of operations. Diplomatically, it has played a prominent role in the campaign to halt proliferation of weapons of mass destruction [although like Western Europe now facing a test in Iran]. Increasingly, it supports worldwide Washington’s diplomatic initiatives for progress and stability.
As in postwar Germany, miniscule if loud radical nationalists have popped up in a free society. Occasionally history textbooks have whitewashed past misdeeds. Revelations about wartime torture of prisoners, germ warfare experimentation, and old, unmitigated horrors such as the Nanking massacre have resurfaced — as they have in Germany and from Stalin’s Soviet Union.
But that atonement has not been seen as sufficient by a Chinese Communist regime is not only ludicrous but disingenuous. Beijing’s judgment, voiced daily by official media, ill behooves the bloodiest regime in history. Chinese by the tens of millions died from this regime’s man-made famines, countless hundreds of thousands in monstrous “campaigns” such as “land reform”, “anti-rightist”, “one child’, etc., etc. It continues to stifle legitimate political opposition. Beijing’s monopoly Communist Party has yet to apologize, much less atone, for massacring its own students and workers at Tien An Mien, fittingly the center of its world.
Beijing has made visits of Japanese officials to Yasukuni Shrine a popular anti-Japanese mantra. The issue is, at best, convoluted. Yasukuni is an historic monument to Japanese dead in all its wars. It was hijacked by militarists as a part of State Shinto, official religion of their dastardly regime. When the U.S. Occupation “privatized” Shinto, Japan’s indigenous all pervasive cultural umbrella, Yasukuni fell into limbo – a national monument but still a religious shrine. Then, deplorably, some of its priests refurbished a museum celebrating militarism. War criminals, convicted by an international court, were enshrined along with other war dead.
“Yasukuni” has become touchstone for those who fear “a revival of Japanese militarism”. And Beijing has used it as subterfuge to gain advantage in negotiating other issues [for example, continuation of “aid”] and in propaganda feints with other Asian and, particularly, Western opinion. Last year Beijing marshaled anti-Japanese riots, until their ferocity forced Communist apparatchiks — always fearful of any unorchestrated public opinion – lashed its students back into their cage. Not the least of its maneuvers was Beijing’s adroit campaign blocking Security Council reform with an enlarged role for Japan, whose UN voice like Germany’s, is less than its international heft in the 21st century.
Circumstantial evidence suggests Beijing believes it has overplayed its hand [just as it did with Taiwan]. Chinese leaders appear to want to use advent of a new Japanese prime minister to at least tone down the rhetoric. Incongruously, the likeliest candidate to replace maverick Junichiro Koizumi, is Shinzo Abe, scion of a line of Japanese nationalist politicians, some collaborators with the militarists.
But Abe, as any other contemporary Japanese leader, would likely continue recent escalating efforts to reclaim Japan’s world role as a “normal” country. Decades of hiding behind America’s nuclear shield is rapidly being replaced with abandonment of U.S. Occupation — dictated radical pacifism for a NATO-style alliance with Washington. [Relatively unnoticed extensive collaboration of Japan’s naval forces with the U.S. fleet in the Indian Ocean, a case in point.]
After North Korea in 1989 flew unannounced a missile over Japan into the Pacific in contravention of treaty obligations, no Japanese government has much choice. And, as Japan officially notes, China’s mushrooming, highly camouflaged armaments program against an unidentified enemy adds to that incentive.
The ball, one might say, is now in Beijing’s court. How China deals with the new Japanese prime minister will be a test, not only for Beijing but for the peace and stability of the region and the world.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net),
is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent
for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.
