The historical memory
In his remarks at the March 2018 conference, Rana Mitter drew attention to the need to pursue ‘more fruitful analysis’ than simply comparing China as a one-party state to Japan as a parliamentary democracy, by ‘considering the nature of identity and countries’ links to history and their perceptions of themselves and each other’.18 The current and recent generations of East Asian leaders are obviously sensitive to such perceptions. Abe is the son of a foreign minister19 and the grandson of a prime minister, Nobusuke Kishi, whose political legacy, as a member of the Tōjō wartime cabinet and later as a Class A war criminal suspect, is highly controversial. South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, is the child of refugees from North Korea and was an activist against the regime of his predecessor’s father, Park Chung-hee, who served in the Manchukuo Imperial Army during the Pacific War. Park’s daughter, Park Guen-hye, was president from 2013 to 2017, the period of maximum pressure on Korean–Japanese relations. Xi Jinping’s father, Xi Zhongxun, served with the Communist guerrillas in the northwest of China, is said to have given Mao Zedong refuge at the end of the Long March in 1934, fought the Japanese as a member of the Yan’an Soviet until 1945, and was later purged during the Cultural Revolution before being rehabilitated and appointed to the Politburo under Deng Xiaoping.20 The history of East Asia in the 20th century is finely integrated into these politicians’ life experiences. It is unsurprising that the contested history of the relations between these three countries continues to be reflected in their actions and words.
It often seems counter-intuitive, for Western commentators, to think of the continuing arguments over history and the rifts between the Pacific War adversaries as issues of geopolitics rather than morality. In Western Europe, we like to think we have a different historical narrative – Germany’s explicit expiation of guilt for its wartime atrocities, and the rebuilding of peaceful and interdependent economic and political communities under the auspices of the (erstwhile) European Economic Community (EEC), NATO, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, etc., meaning that the moral trajectory of the 1930s and 1940s is relatively uncontested.21 This is not the case in East Asia, and the extent to which the US, as security guarantor, has both shaped the terms of democratization in Japan and South Korea and been required to manage the tensions between historical adversaries since 1945 has complicated the picture.
The Japanese government’s formal position is that the issues relating to the historical residue of its colonial rule of Korea in the first half of the 20th century, and the specific infringements of human rights towards, for example, the so-called ‘comfort women’, coerced into prostitution for the Imperial Army in the 1930s and 1940s, were resolved when relations were normalized in 1965. But the democratic legitimacy of the regime that agreed to that normalization and the terms under which the then South Korean government implemented the agreement are not accepted by today’s generation of Korean politicians.22
In parallel, the unresolved question of the islands in the East China Sea, known to the Japanese as the Senkaku-tō and to China as the Diayoutai, led to a grave deterioration in relations between the two countries in 2012 after the then Japanese government sought to ‘nationalize’ the islands to prevent extreme right-wingers taking possession of them. The issue over territorial rights goes back to the end of the Pacific War, but also involves a disagreement about whether the islands, effectively controlled by Japan since the late 19th century, were deemed to have been covered by the 1943 Cairo Declaration setting out Allied war aims against Japan. As China–Japan relations deteriorated precipitously in 2012 and 2013, the anti-Japanese rhetoric emanating from China reflected not just arcane territorial arguments, but the intense and apparently unresolved historical memory of wartime suffering in the 1930s and 1940s23 (as well, of course, as shifting economic power).24
Countries’ relationships are not solely defined by the rhetoric of their leaders. The economic relations of the major countries in East Asia remain integral to their national interests: around 36 per cent of Japan’s exports go to China, South Korea and Taiwan; and nearly a quarter of Chinese exports go to other markets in northeast Asia. Levels of popular distrust and disapproval may be high, but Chinese tourism in Japan remains buoyant: a survey in 201725 showed that, with nearly 7 and a half million tourists annually, China accounted for 25.6 per cent of all foreign visitors to Japan, a figure that had risen by 680 per cent since 2007. It has been argued that views of Japan among younger Koreans, who care less about the legacy of colonialism than their parents, are more positive: but evidence is conflicting, and the recent upsurge of anti-Japanese feeling over the ‘comfort women’ has transcended the generations.26 Although the relative easing of political tensions between China and Japan in 2018 may to a degree reflect the extent to which the two countries’ economies, and perhaps also their popular cultures, are intertwined, there is much less evidence of any such movement in South Korea–Japan relations.
Although the relative easing of political tensions between China and Japan in 2018 may reflect the extent to which the two countries’ economies, and perhaps also their popular cultures, are intertwined, there is much less evidence of any such movement in South Korea–Japan relations.
The focus of the Japanese government’s attempts to come to terms with history has been the various statements made by prime ministers to mark anniversaries of the end of the Pacific War. In 1995, on the 50th anniversary, Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama issued a statement of apology27 making explicitly clear that national policy had been mistaken, that Japanese rule in East Asia had been ‘colonial’ and that Japan had been ‘aggressive’. All Japanese prime ministers since have endorsed that statement. But when Abe in his second premiership came to make a statement on the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, he wanted to go further, and commissioned a 16-strong advisory panel of academics, former officials and journalists (under the chairmanship of Shinichi Kitaoka, president of the International University of Japan), whose deliberations informed the outcome.28 As this author argued at the time,29 Abe was trying to do two things: he wanted to reassert Japanese acceptance of the need to express ‘deep remorse and heartfelt apology’, while at the same time making the statement in a way that enabled the next generation of Japanese to turn the page of history. This lay behind his setting out the historical context (which invited accusations of revisionism, although he did – for the first time – mention former prisoners of war, and included coy language about ‘women behind the battlefields whose honour and dignity were severely injured’). Moreover, while reiterating the need for Japan ‘to squarely face the history of the past’, he asserted the national and international values of contemporary Japan, in order to establish a basis on which current and future generations of Japanese should not feel eternally obliged to apologize for their parents’ and grandparents’ actions.30
Abe received broad support for the statement within Japan. Predictably, he was criticized by China for tinkering with the Murayama statement, but the actual criticism that he received for tilting towards the revisionist end of the political spectrum was more moderate in tone than the rhetoric at the height of the crisis between the two countries. It fell well short of the sort of anger that had been regularly meted out, for example, towards Japanese politicians visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, where Class A war criminals are commemorated.31 This suggested that the attempt to walk this political tightrope had been successful. This was partly a question of calibrating the terms of the apology. But it was also an attempt to negotiate between Abe’s different political constituencies – the nationalists and revisionists who object to Japan continually having to apologize for its history, and the pragmatists who recognize that an apology is appropriate and that Japan’s relationships with its regional partners, and therefore its ability to pursue an activist foreign policy, depend on its tone. It might be described as an attempt to demonstrate a form of leadership that steers both the internal political and the external historical debates in directions that enable Japan to address the constitutional questions that the current administration thinks important, and that set the terms within which the continuing arguments over history, and Japan’s international profile, will be carried forward.
The attempt worked, as the relative rapprochement between Japan and China throughout 2017 and 2018 demonstrated (although air and sea incursions by China in the seas around the disputed islands in the East China Sea have continued).32 While there are underlying structural issues, it is the broader economic and political context that will determine where the centre of gravity of the continuing argument about history lies at any specific time.33 The temptation must always be to deflect challenges to political leadership by invoking actual or perceived challenges from outside the polity: appeals, explicit or implicit, to nationalism are never far away in any of these countries. This may lie behind Chinese hostility to Japan at a time when China’s economy is slowing and challenges to its domestic political status quo are increasing, especially on social media (even if the leadership is apprehensive about inciting too much open hostility against a foreign enemy, lest those expressing this seek other avenues of complaint and protest nearer home).34
The same syndrome is perceived to occur in democracies such as South Korea and Japan, where recent complaints by the Japanese government over aggressive actions by the South Korean coastguard and navy towards a Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) surveillance aircraft are attributed (by Korean sources) to Prime Minister Abe needing to boost his falling popularity ratings by alleging hostile action by Korean forces.35 A similar critique of ‘displacement anger’ is made by some commentators about anti-Japanese feelings in South Korea – see Robert Kelly’s article, ‘Why South Korea is so obsessed with Japan’, in which he argues that Japan is a ‘useful other’ for South Korea, occupying the place that ‘should really be held by North Korea’, with which the South is in an unresolved conflict over which country most accurately reflects the pure racial identity of Korea.36
It is not inevitable that this type of displacement activity should characterize countries’ relationships. To counter it, there has been an attempt to create a dynamic towards closer partnership, mutualizing areas of policy where closer cooperation makes effective policy formation easier.
It is not inevitable that this type of displacement activity should characterize countries’ relationships in this way. To counter it, there has been an attempt to create a dynamic towards closer partnership, mutualizing areas of policy where closer cooperation makes effective policy formation easier. This was taken forward in a series of intermittent trilateral summits between China, South Korea and Japan from 2008. These have been part of the diplomatic toolbox over the past decade, even in the wake of serious rifts between the countries over territorial and other issues. After various interruptions, the summit process resumed in 2018, with a meeting in Tokyo in May. Unsurprisingly, the strongest evidence of commitment to joint working was in the economic field, with agreement to accelerate negotiations on free trade between the three countries. The summit also agreed on the need to push for faster progress on a high-quality Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP); the importance of resisting protectionism; and a statement on the protection of intellectual property rights, to which China was prepared to put its name. Moreover, in the margins, where bilateral meetings took place, there were Japan/China agreements on defence communication mechanisms in the East China Sea, and a public-sector/private-sector council on the implications of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
But the shifting patterns of leadership and legitimacy already described mean that the agreements to build closer relationships are always at the mercy of wider political and economic pressures, as well as – in the cases of Japan and South Korea – the autonomy of other institutions, such as South Korea’s constitutional court. The Japan/South Korea mood music in Tokyo in May 2018 was reasonably positive. This did not, however, prevent the links between the two countries taking a downturn later in the year, as a consequence of lawsuits against Japanese companies over wartime slave labour and a resurgence of anger over the ‘comfort women’ issue. (At time of writing, there is evidence of the beginning of a move back towards more civil relations, with a speech by the South Korean prime minister, Lee Nak-yon, expressing eagerness to see an improvement in relations between the two countries – but we have been here before.)37
The overture, if that is what it proves to be, appears to be a result of active US diplomacy, although pressure for an improvement in bilateral relations has been constant in recent years without great effect.38 The competition between different forms of governance, the contested view of history, the tendency to manage internal tensions by playing up external ones – all these factors are managed or exacerbated in accordance with the US’s willingness both to play a role as guarantor of regional security and to set a coherent strategic approach to East Asian policy. Both objectives have been called into question under the Trump administration.
18 Chatham House (2018), ‘Governance, Leadership and Legitimacy in East Asia’, Meeting Summary, https://www.chathamhouse.org/event/governance-leadership-and-legitimacy-east-asia (accessed 27 Jun. 2019).
19 Shintaro Abe, foreign minister during the prime ministership of Yasuhiro Nakasone (1982–86).
20 Song, Y. (ed) (2014), Biographical Dictionary of the People’s Republic of China, Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland and Company, p. 335.
21 Although there are pressures in the other direction. As a number of commentators have pointed out, in addition to a nostalgic imperialism, which lies behind some older conservative voters’ preference for Brexit, is a tendency to reinterpret the history of the Second World War so that it becomes a conflict won by Britain alone, rather than in alliance firstly with the British empire, from 1941 with the US, and eventually and definitively with the Soviet Union. More sinisterly, there are the efforts of elements in Alternative für Deutschland to question Germany’s expression of guilt for the Holocaust; Poland’s attempts to enact a law making it illegal to suggest that there had been any Polish complicity in Nazi crimes in the 1940s; and the remarks of the Italian president of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani of Forza Italia, that Mussolini and the pre-war Fascist government had done positive as well as negative things etc.
22 And this question is now additionally complicated by the lawsuits against Japanese industrial firms accused in the South Korean courts of using Korean slave labour during the Pacific War.
23 Chinese views of Japan and Japanese views of China were measured by a BBC World Service poll in July 2017. This was at a point when the bilateral political relationship was beginning to recover after several years of chilly stand-off. However, although positive Chinese views of Japan had increased substantially from the previous poll, they still accounted for only 22 per cent of respondents (compared with a positive view of Japan, on average, of 55 per cent among the other Asian countries surveyed). Moreover, negative Chinese views of Japan were the highest for any country surveyed, at 75 per cent. BBC World Service Poll (2017), ‘Sharp Drop in World Views of US, UK: Global Poll’, 4 July 2017, https://globescan.com/images/images/pressreleases/bbc2017_country_ratings/BBC2017_Country_Ratings_Poll.pdf (accessed 24 Jun. 2019). Japanese views of China were not recorded in this poll, but a Pew Research report recorded a 78 per cent ‘unfavourable’ view of China in Japan, against 17 per cent ‘favourable’. Pew Research Center (2018), ‘Countries’ views of Japan, Abe; Japanese views of China’, https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2018/11/12/countries-views-of-japan-abe-japanese-views-of-china/ (accessed 24 Jun. 2019).
24 China overtook Japan to become the second-largest economy in dollar terms in 2010, with GDP of $5.8 trillion compared with $5.474 trillion for Japan. BBC News (2011), ‘China overtakes Japan as world’s second-biggest economy’, 14 February 2011, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-12427321 (accessed 24 Jun. 2019).
25 Tani, S. (2018), ‘Where are all the tourists in Japan coming from?’, Nikkei Asian Review, 17 January 2018.
26 Noland, M. (2014), ‘South Korean Attitudes Towards China and Japan: Complex Issues of Identity Refracted Through Geopolitics’, Peterson Institute for International Economics, 23 September 2014, https://piie.com/blogs/north-korea-witness-transformation/south-korean-attitudes-toward-china-and-japan-complex (accessed 24 Jun. 2019). Noland argues, on the basis of TNS Korea polling, that South Korean attitudes towards these countries are as much functions of attitudes towards the US, and that therefore ‘younger, better-educated South Koreans have a more cosmopolitan view, seeing Japan in the context of a liberal, US-led order in which both Japan and South Korea have benefited greatly, and put less weight on the past’. This does not feel like a description of the relationship in 2019.
27 The relevant paragraph of the full text read: ‘During a certain period in the not too distant past, Japan, following a mistaken national policy, advanced along the road to war, only to ensnare the Japanese people in a fateful crisis, and, through its colonial rule and aggression, caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations. In the hope that no such mistake be made in the future, I regard, in a spirit of humility, these irrefutable facts of history, and express here once again my feelings of deep remorse and state my heartfelt apology. Allow me also to express my feelings of profound mourning for all victims, both at home and abroad, of that history.’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan (1995), ‘Statement by Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama “On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the war’s end”’, 15 August 1995, https://www.mofa.go.jp/announce/press/pm/murayama/9508.html (accessed 24 Jun 2019).
28 Reynolds, I. (2015), ‘Abe’s War Statement Not as ‘Right-Wing’ as Adviser Feared’, Bloomberg, 19 August 2015, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-19/abe-s-war-statement-not-as-right-wing-as-adviser-feared (accessed 24 Jun. 2019). Kitaoka was quoted after the statement as saying that it had been ‘less right-wing than he had feared’.
29 Warren, D. (2015), ‘Abe Navigates History in Anniversary Speech’, Chatham House Expert Comment, 19 August 2015, https://www.chathamhouse.org/expert/comment/abe-navigates-history-anniversary-speech (accessed 27 Jun. 2019).
30 Ibid.
31 Abe had become the first prime minister since Jun’ichiro Koizumi to visit the shrine in 2013. Koizumi had promised to visit the shrine annually when he campaigned to become prime minister in 2001, and the pledge assured him nationalist support. An opinion poll in the conservative Sankei Shimbun newspaper indicated that 53 per cent of Japanese disapproved of Abe’s visit, because of its impact on relations with other countries.
32 ‘By the end of 2012, Japan Coast Guard reported that Chinese coast guard ships had intruded into Senkaku territorial waters 68 times … the campaign continued, with 188 vessels penetrating the territorial sea in 2013, 88 in 2014, 86 in 2015, and 121 in 2016. Since mid-2014, on average, Chinese government vessels have penetrated the territorial seas seven to nine times a month and have carried out 70 to 90 incursions in the contiguous zone.’ RAND Corporation (2018), China’s Military Activities in the East China Sea: Implications for Japan’s Self-Defense Force, Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR2500/RR2574/RAND_RR2574.pdf (accessed 27 Jun. 2019).
33 The most striking example of this is the reported statement by Mao Zedong to the then Japanese prime minister, Kakuei Tanaka, in 1972, when Tanaka apologized for Japanese actions during the war, and Mao told him that there was no need: ‘You destroyed the Kuomintang, you helped us to come to power.’ See, for example, BBC News (2014), ‘China and Japan: Seven decades of bitterness’, 13 February 2014, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25411700 (accessed 27 Jun. 2019). The Chinese line at the time is understandable, given Chinese interest in maintaining Japan as a counterbalance against Soviet power in the East Asian region. The alleged statement by Mao is now disputed by some Chinese spokespeople, but China did not press for reparations from Japan at that time.
34 ‘Nationalist opinion is a powerful driver of China’s Japan policy [and] the demands of nationalist legitimation appear to pressurise the elite to respond to popular nationalism.’ See Gries, P., Steiger, D. and Wang, T. (2016), ‘Popular Nationalism and China’s Japan Policy: the Diaoyu Islands protests, 2012–2013’, Journal of Contemporary China, 25 (98): pp. 264–76, doi: 10.1080/10670564.2015.1075714 (accessed 27 Jun. 2019). Rana Mitter, at the 2018 conference, quoted the example of President Xi highlighting the contribution of nationalist army veterans in the commemorations of the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Chatham House (2018), ‘Governance, Leadership and Legitimacy in East Asia’. Kerry Brown also notes ‘the almost obsessive reference to this trope of national regeneration. It is the centrally orientating idea of the Xi era and it manifests itself in the status that China’s economy has not attained for the country’. See Brown, K. (2018), ‘Chinese Nationalism: The Dog That Barks in the Night’, The Diplomat, 16 November 2018, https://thediplomat.com/2018/11/chinese-nationalism-the-dog-that-barks-in-the-night/ (accessed 27 Jun. 2019).
35 Japan claims that a radar lock from a South Korean Class-1 destroyer targeted a JMSDF P-1 surveillance aircraft, which would constitute a hostile act; South Korea denies this and accuses the Japanese aircraft of flying ‘dangerously low’. See Yoon, S. (2015), ‘Japan and Korea’s Unnecessary Squabble’, The Diplomat, 12 January 2019, https://thediplomat.com/2019/01/japan-and-south-koreas-unnecessary-squabble/ (accessed 27 Jun. 2019).
36 Kelly, R. (2015), ‘Why South Korea is so obsessed with Japan’, The Intepreter, Lowy Institute, 4 June 2015, https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/why-south-korea-so-obsessed-japan (accessed 27 Jun. 2019).
37 Japan Times (2019), ‘South Korean Prime Minister says he’s keen to improve ties with Japan’, 31 March 2019, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/03/31/national/politics-diplomacy/south-korean-prime-minister-says-hes-keen-improve-ties-japan/#.XRTIuqB7ncs (accessed 27 Jun. 2019).
38 The press report cited refers to an editorial in the South Korean daily newspaper JoongAng Ilbo, citing a speech by the US ambassador to South Korea critical of the continued deterioration of bilateral Japanese/Korean relations.