Stoking the Nationalist Fires

Just when the rhetoric on both sides seemed to be fading, last week the People’s Daily, a Chinese newspaper, ran a lengthy commentary penned by two academics challenging Japan’s sovereign rights to the Ryukyu island chain – not far from Taiwan and home to Okinawa prefecture, the administrative body of the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku islands directly to their east.

The authors, from a prominent state-backed think tank, argued that foreign aggression toward China during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) so weakened the state, that it could not counter Japanese aggression in the broader region.  The two authors argue that now is the time to rethink territorial disputes, “History’s unresolved questions relating to the Ryukyu have reached a time for reconsideration.”

The Japanese, of course, hotly dispute China’s claims to the territory, “There’s no doubt that [Okinawa] belongs to Japan historically and internationally” exclaimed Japanese government spokesman Yoshihide Suga, adding that a reconsideration is “completely out of the question.”

Meanwhile in Osaka, the mayor Toru Hashimoto was rehashing another long-running dispute over the hundreds of thousands of “comfort women” from China, Korea and the Philippines forced to work as sex slaves for the Japanese troops during the second World War.  Hashimoto claims that the use of these “comfort women” was a necessary measure, pinching a sensitive nerve in the Chinese mind.

And on Tuesday, footage emerged showing Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe posing with his thumbs up inside the cockpit of a jet used by the Blue Impulse flying squad.  In the footage, the number 731 is clearly visible on the outside of the jet, a significant number for many Chinese, as Unit 731 of the Imperial  Japanese Army was the covert chemical and biological weapons team based in Harbin that undertook lethal human experimentation on Chinese men, women and children during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and World War II.

Shinzo Abe, whom the Economist calls “a hawk with distorted views of history,” has paid respects to Japan’s war dead (including leading World War II war criminals) at the controversial Yasukuni Shrine. Abe has previously warned China over the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, saying Japan would not concede “one millimeter” of territory. Like his grandfather, the former prime minister Nobusuke Kishi, he is a vocal advocate of rewriting Japan’s postwar pacifistic constitution.

The recent flurry of rhetoric certainly plays to their respective home crowds, but looks insensitive and not very diplomatic on the international stage. Trying to explain territorial losses as the strong conquering the weak is an obvious point – redrawing territorial lines to address these imbalances is an impossibility on a regional scale and would trigger further actions on a global scale. Claiming that using sex slaves was “necessary” is insulting and clearly not an admission of wrong-doing. Associating oneself with the use of chemical and biological weapon experimentation on war prisoners is simply sadistic. The dialogue and rhetoric on both sides needs to move quickly away from playing to the baser instincts of the populace and seek to educate their respective populations on the horrors of war and the use of common-sense approaches to resolving differences.