Insight | China and Japan must be on good terms

Paulo Barbosa

We live in times where tensions in the Asia-Pacific region are rising, particularly between China and Japan. This year marked Macau’s first time at the memorial ceremonies remembering China’s victory in the Sino-Japanese war. CE Chui Sai On, the former CE Edmund Ho, and the head of the Central Government Liaison Office Li Gang attended the local event. Similar functions were held all over the country, demonstrating the importance that Beijing is attributing to the anniversary.
Japan’s attitude toward the crimes it committed during the war (affecting not only China but almost all Southeast Asian countries) isn’t helping. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s decided not to visit the Yasukuni Shrine this year, but recently three Cabinet ministers made what they said were private visits to the place where Japanese class A war criminals are enshrined, which is regarded as a symbol of Japan’s militarism from the 1930s and ’40s. It is the same as if German chancellor Angela Merkel went to pay homage to a cemetery where Nazi leaders are buried.
Japan’s educational system is known to be demanding and children are subject to countless exams. But there is what some deem as “selective amnesia” obnubilating the fact that Japan was responsible for the deaths of millions of civilians (some historians assess the number of civilian casualties to be as high as 20 million) throughout their shameful Asia-Pacific war campaign. During those years, the Japanese army acted with immense brutality. In the former Chinese capital, Nanking (Nanjing), beheading contests were organized (and reported by the Tokyo press), bayonet training with prisoners was common, and a raping of women occurred on a massive scale.
Many people claim that, unlike Germany, Japan has never clearly and sincerely repented for its war crimes (although the official stance is that the country has apologized repeatedly and trodden a pacifist path). War reparations were “close to nothing,” according to Iris Chang. In her controversial essay “The Rape of Nanking,” the late author claimed that “in an era when even the Swiss have pledged billions of dollars to create a fund to replace what was stolen from Jewish bank accounts, many leading officials in Japan continue to believe that their country did nothing that requires compensation or even apologies, and contend that many of the worst misdeeds their government has been accused of perpetrating never happened and that evidence they did happen was fabricated by the Chinese and other Japan bashers.”
In Japan, the Pacific War remains a very sensitive topic. The revisionist view that Japan went to conflict with the intent to protect Asia from Western imperialism is still upheld (and not only by right wing fanatics). Japanese who oppose these revisionist theories can be intimidated. One of the better- known cases involved the former Nagasaki mayor Hitoshi Motoshima, who admitted in an interview that the emperor Hirohito bore responsibility for the war. He was harassed by ultranationalist groups and, two weeks after Hirohito’s death, he was shot by a fanatic and left in critical condition, but survived the assassination attempt.
Shinzo Abe’s intention to reinterpret Japan’s post-
war constitution (largely drafted by US lawyers in the occupation authority) are viewed with concern in Beijing. If the Japanese Diet approves changes, the country could send troops outside to help allies for the first time in 60 years.
Besides the Japanese historical distortions (China has also a great deal of those misrepresentations on its recent history) other issues have been dampening bilateral relations. The dispute over East China Sea islets, which could be solved through diplomatic means, remains unresolved.
As a result of this scenario, a survey jointly conducted by a Japanese NGO and the China Daily shows that 53.4 pct of the mainlanders interviewed think that China could go to war with Japan in the future. Some of them even predict that could happen “within a few years.”
The 1,000 Japanese participants in the opinion poll voiced animosity toward China, with 93 pct of respondents saying that their impression of China was “unfavorable.”
The leaders of these two great nations should go to great lengths in order to reverse deteriorating relations. Abe is calling for a summit with Xi Jinping. Beijing should accept. Dialogue is an essential first step to improve bilateral understanding.