Japan on late-night TV in China

By Jason Lim

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Shinzo Abe supposedly said the following when asked by a fellow lawmaker about his views on the 1995 Murayama Statement that apologized for Japanese colonial behavior: “The definition of what constitutes an 'invasion' has yet to be established in academia or in the international community. Things that happened between nations will look different depending on which side you view them from."

Translated into more mundane language, Abe basically said, “It depends.” Needless to say, this response created a firestorm of public and diplomatic controversy, with even the Washington Post getting into the act with an editorial decrying Abe’s inability to face the past.

Rightly so. The above reply was such a cheeky, slippery response wholly unworthy of the real suffering of the Korean teenage girls raped by Japanese Imperial soldiers, Chinese prisoners of war experimented on in the Harbin 731 labs in Manchuria, or hundreds of thousands of ordinary people brutalized in Nanking.

It’s not that I am not sympathetic to Japan. As Joe Nye, my former professor at Harvard Kennedy School, once told me somewhat tersely, “Today’s Japan is not the same Japan of World War II.” True. Today’s Japan is a vibrant, democratic country with the world’s third-largest economy, despite the gloom and doom that many have been predicting for its future. Further, contrary to popular belief, Japan has apologized again and again ― by different leaders, in different formats, in different venues, on different occasions, and about different abuses ― for the atrocities it caused in the past.

The problem is that Japan’s leaders have a unique way of torpedoing the sincerity of any such apology. How can Japan expect other Asian people to take its apologies seriously when its leaders say such things as Abe? Or when it doesn’t crack down on history textbooks that whitewash Japan’s role in Asia in the first half of the 20th Century? Or pays highly visible, collective homage to a shrine that houses convicted war criminals? Or becomes jingoistically belligerent over meaningless islands that are only significant in that they are symbols of Japanese aggression and Korean/Chinese humiliation? Or worst of all, denies that the Rape of Nanking ever happened and says the “comfort women” were money-hungry prostitutes?

Granted, the Japanese leadership is fully within their rights in wanting to return to a “normal” nation status and reaffirm a sense of pride in their heritage. But they could choose their historical points of pride more judiciously and celebrate them more strategically. Their current crass actions speak more loudly than words, and Asian people are hearing them all too well.

But enough of Japan. Enough waiting for Japan to do something, because time has already passed them by. They don’t singularly control this narrative anymore. Every day, it matters less and less what Japanese leaders do or don’t on this topic. The Chinese are already doing it.

My father-in-law, who has lived in Shanghai for the last ten years, recently told me something very worrisome about late night Chinese TV: “Whenever I can’t sleep and channel surf late at night, I always manage to hit on a channel that’s showing how the Japanese committed atrocities against the Chinese during World War II. I always wince at how brutal and cruel the pictures are and wonder what continued exposure to such videos is doing to the Chinese children?”

This is a good question. But it’s a rhetorical question. We already know what it’s doing to the Chinese children. It’s planting a deep-seated hatred of everything Japanese. The rising power and status of the Chinese are dangerously tinged with a vengeful attitude towards past Japanese misdeeds. This much has become obvious as the world has seen in the recent anti-Japan riots.

A more salient question is to ask what is the Japanese leaders’ purposeful blindness to its recent history doing to Japanese children. Unfortunately, this is also a rhetorical question. It’s raising a whole generation of Japanese children who are taught an intentionally skewed historical narrative and confounded by the apparent irrational hatred that the Chinese and Koreans have towards them (even though they were the “true victims” of World War II through the nuclear bombs).

So, we are raising a whole generation of children who will meet at the crossroads of ignorance and hatred. At the intersection of rage and reactionary nationalism. Both with increasing militancy and the resources to back up their assertions.

I am no Nostradamus, or even a two-bit soothsayer, but I am fairly confident in predicting this does not bode well for the peaceful future of Northeast Asia. It’s as if the current leaders are building up an explosive powder keg of lethal karma and igniting the fuse in their children. All in the name of national pride.

Just keep in mind that when this keg goes boom, it will more likely than not be a nuclear boom. What matters national pride then?

Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C., based expert on innovation, engagement and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006. He can be reached at jasonlim@msn.com, facebook/jasonlim2000 and @jasonlim2012.