History Today August 2005 | Volume: 55 Issue: 8 | Page 17-19 | Words: 2549 |
Author: Mitter, Rana
Printable version
Remembering the Forgotten War
Looking back on the sixtieth anniversary of the
surrender of Japan, Rana Mitter finds the political
background to the demonstrations in China against
Japanese history textbooks are full of complexities.
The streets of downtown Shanghai are filled with angry
students loudly protesting against Japanese aggression
and demanding that the Chinese government stand up to
the imperialists from across the sea. This is not the spring
of 2005, when anti-Japanese protests in cities across China
shocked observers around the world with their virulence,
but December 9th, 1935, when students took to the streets,
angered by the increasing encroachment of the Japanese
empire into north China.
Seventy years after those demonstrations, it seems that
Chinese anger against Japan is still a factor that can give
rise to popular protest and even threaten governments.
Why should this theatre of war remain a flashpoint? Often, the issue is portrayed in
stark terms. The argument heard on the Chinese side is that, unlike the Germans,
the Japanese have not accepted their war guilt, that Japanese school children do not
learn about their country's brutal wartime past in school, and that there is a rising
right-wing tide in Japan that wants to rehabilitate the war as a noble undertaking.
Before we in the West pass judgement on the inability of Japan and China to come
to terms with the legacy of the Sino-Japanese War sixty years after it ended in 1945,
we should consider just how shamefully little we know about that war. The Japanese
state, which had had a significant empire in Asia from the late nineteenth century,
reacted to economic crisis in the late 1920s with aggression, and encroached onto
Chinese territory throughout the 1930s. It justified its occupation of Manchuria and
the north by claiming it had a special role in liberating China from Western
imperialism, but Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists (Kuomintang) and the Chinese
Communists were united in seeing Japanese occupation as merely the replacement
of one empire with another. China and Japan coexisted uneasily for several years,
until an unplanned clash near Beijing on July 7th, 1937, finally escalated into all-out
war.
Over the next few months the Nationalist government desperately attempted to
defend China's cultural and economic heartland in the east as Japanese troops
poured in from Manchuria, Korea, and by sea. Shanghai was lost by autumn, and the
Chinese capital, Nanjing, was evacuated inland to Chongqing (Chungking). What
was notable in those early months was the sheer savagery of the conflict. It quickly
became a modern ‘total war’, involving civilians and military alike. The Japanese
troops had been encouraged to believe that they would quickly conquer the Chinese,
who were portrayed in propaganda as weak and cowardly. When they found that
many Chinese troops were well trained and fought bravely, the Japanese became
even wilder and more frustrated, laying bloody waste to the areas they conquered.
As the Chinese troops retreated, it was often the civilian population that was on the
end of the Japanese Imperial Army’s anger, as in the notorious Nanjing Massacre
(Rape of Nanking) of December 1937–January 1938, when Japanese troops
murdered huge numbers of Chinese civilians.
The achievement of the Chinese, and particularly of the Nationalist government, in
holding down close to a million Japanese troops in China has been underplayed in
later historical accounts, even though the conflict became a part of the wider world
war after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. In the absence of detailed
figures, estimates of the number of Chinese killed in the war run from 15 to 35
million, comparable to the huge loss of life in the Soviet Union. The number of
refugees within China has been calculated at 80 million. The Communist victory in
1949 has been, rightly, attributed in part to the wide sense of disgust at the
corruption and incompetence of the Nationalist government. But we should also
recognize that the devastation of the Japanese onslaught from 1937 threw the
Nationalists utterly off- course and cut short Chiang Kai-shek’s attempts to build up a
modern state. These attempts had many flaws even before war broke out, but
historians have nonetheless begun to reassess Chiang’s government as a serious
modernizing force. The war cut his project short, and with Chiang Kai-shek’s forced
move to the far west, and the loss of huge amounts of industrial and agricultural
capacity, the Japanese had effectively made the task of reconstruction impossible.
The killings committed by the Japanese – by sword and gun in Nanjing, with bombs
at Chongqing – are the most obvious aspect of that country's crimes against China
during the war. But the destruction of the attempt to build a new state was a more
fundamental disaster. In 1949, with Nationalist credibility destroyed, the Communists
found the mantle of reconstruction fell to them instead.
Yet the reality of Japanese brutality in wartime China should not lead us into a
simplistic mistake that nothing has changed in Japan since. Postwar
democratization means that there are many different Japanese understandings of
the war. These include, but are not limited to, extreme right-wing views which deny
that wartime atrocities took place at all. Japan has a lively civil society and a
powerful, nonconformist popular culture.
Since the early 1980s, the revision of Japanese school textbooks on the war has
become a subject of controversy not just in China, but also for South Korea. The
Japanese Education Ministry requires that books used for high-school history
classes are approved before they are used, and the contents of some of those
textbooks have been the source of conflict. Reports of attempts to replace phrases
such as ‘Japan’s aggression in China’ with ‘Japan’s advance into China’ have
understandably created anger in countries that suffered hugely during the era of
Japanese colonialism.
The textbook that sparked the controversy that led to the Chinese street
demonstrations in spring 2005, while approved by the Ministry of Education, is
actually used by just 4 per cent of all schools in Japan. Other texts, which give far
more detail on Japan’s wartime behaviour in China and elsewhere in Asia, are used
much more frequently. One reason for this is the continuing power of Japan’s
teaching unions, which have been strongly left-wing ever since the war. While the
Ministry is generally conservative, those who teach in the schools themselves are
not. For years, the left-wing historian Ienaga Saburo sued the Ministry on successive
occasions to demand the use in schools of a textbook that gave a full account of
Japan’s wartime guilt. Although Ienaga suffered many setbacks in his battle with the
courts before his death in 2002, his overall point was made: by the late 1990s, every
single history textbook approved for use in Japanese high schools mentioned the
Nanjing Massacre, and all but one gave figures for the number of Chinese dead.
Nor is it true that some conspiracy has prevented the Japanese public knowing
about the atrocities committed during the war. Indeed, it is only in recent years that
the English-reading public worldwide has been made aware of the Nanjing
Massacre, largely because Iris Chang’s book on the topic spent weeks on the
international bestseller list. The first investigations into the Massacre were
undertaken, not by Westerners, nor even the Chinese, but by left-wing Japanese
journalists in the 1970s who were determined to uncover a story ignored by a postwar society that had dedicated itself to economic growth and a self-declaredly
pacifist approach to international politics. The journalist Honda Katsuichi caused a
national sensation in 1971 with his serialized Travels in China, an account of
Japanese wartime brutality that drew on interviews with Chinese survivors of
massacres.
Honda’s purpose was to alert the Japanese public to what he felt was a reluctance to
come to terms with the reality of their behaviour in Asia during the war. His work was
fiercely attacked by the right, who argued that the evidence was either fabricated or
exaggerated, and extremists physically attacked writers and organizations
associated with the new historical understanding. Nonetheless, from the 1970s, the
idea that Japan had committed terrible crimes in China became a widely understood
part of public discussion in Japan, neither censored nor hidden from view.
There is, all the same, real substance to the charge that Japan has not come to
terms with its wartime past. Particularly worrying is the recent immense growth in
sales of the comic books of Kobayashi Yoshinori, who portrays in cartoon form
Japan’s wartime experience as a heroic mission to liberate Asia from the yoke of
white imperialism.
Many inside and outside Japan have been disturbed by the repeated visits of various
prime ministers, including the current incumbent, Junichiro Koizumi, to the Yasukuni
shrine, a national memorial where many architects of Japan’s wars in Asia and the
Pacific are buried. Koizumi’s assurance that he is visiting the shrine not to honour
any specific individuals, but rather to honour Japan’s war losses, cuts little ice in
China or Korea. Also, Japan used its American-imposed ‘peace constitution’ in the
post-war era to portray itself not as an aggressive invader before 1945, but rather as
a victim nation, the first and only country to suffer atomic bombing.
While no one would argue with the sentiments that such bombings should never be
allowed to happen again, there is little discussion in many of Japan’s anti-nuclear
peace gardens and institutes as to why the bombings took place in the first place,
and this lack of context makes it seem as if the US air force simply appeared out of a
blue sky to attack a defenceless and innocent nation. Yet Chinese who had lived
through the bacteriological bombing of Chongqing in 1939 were probably not that
sympathetic to the horrific plight of the Japanese A-bomb victims. As late as 2002, I
was told in Chongqing about a local delicacy consisting of a fried egg with chilli
sauce on it – Chongqingers call it ‘Bombing Tokyo’.
Japanese courts have tended to dismiss attempts by elderly Chinese survivors of
war crimes to claim compensation, on the technical grounds that agreements made
in the 1950s officially ended all Chinese wartime reparation claims on Japan. There
is an uncomfortable legalism about this argument.
An obvious question can also be asked about the textbook controversy: if it is true
that the problematic textbooks are so little used in schools, why approve them at all?
The answer is that there is still a domestic right-wing constituency that makes the
continuing availability of such books an ideological touchstone. Convinced that there
is a left-wing conspiracy in schools, the extreme right seeks assurance from its MPs
that they will hold the line on some public presence for the version of history that
champions the idea that Japan’s wartime role was a liberating and noble one.
The position of most mainstream right-wing Japanese politicians is not to glorify the
war, but rather to wish it would go away. As the war fades into the past, there is
certainly a more self-confident air among many Japanese politicians and voters who
feel that the country needs to move on from the long post-war (sengo) period, and
find a new, more assertive role in the region and the world. But for most Japanese,
there is little desire to use the country’s wartime record as the basis for their new
strength in the region: instead, they wish to be seen as a peaceful, economically
powerful state with an unfortunate past that is just that – past.
Just as clearly, as China’s own rise in the region becomes daily more apparent, the
Chinese have no intention of letting the Japanese portray themselves in that light.
The most recent blow-up over textbooks took place just at the moment when Japan
was making the case that it should take a permanent seat on the UN Security
Council. China made sure that memories of the past would help to scupper Japan’s
hopes for the future.
Yet China’s own role in the textbook arguments is hardly straightforward. One of the
reasons why China’s wartime contribution was not appreciated more in the West was
the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, which turned China from ally to
ideological enemy. But Cold War boundaries worked both ways, and in the new
People’s Republic of China many areas of discussion about the war were simply offlimits. Any account of Chiang Kai-shek, by then heading a Nationalist government in
Taiwan, had to paint him as a traitor and demon; no mention could be made of the
fact that the Nationalists had played a significant part in the defeat of Japan. On the
other hand, the People’s Republic saw little benefit in anti-Japanese propaganda.
The Japanese were hardly going to invade again, and there seemed to be mileage in
trying to detach them from the Cold War embrace of the United States. Therefore,
there was relatively little discussion of Japanese wartime behaviour in China from
the 1940s to the 1970s.
In the 1980s, however, global and regional politics shifted. Chiang and Mao were
both dead, and the leaders of the People’s Republic now wanted to tempt Taiwan
into reunification. Official propaganda now stressed the unity, rather than the
divisions, between the Communist mainland and Nationalist Taiwan and made much
of their shared resistance against the Japanese. There was less need to appease
Japan; instead, it was felt that reminding Japan of its wartime record (and
encouraging the odd popular demonstration against that record in the streets of
Chinese cities) was a good way to soften up the Japanese government into giving
loans and investment to China at preferential rates, as well as distracting the
population from the decline in Marxist ideology at home.
Museums of the Nanjing Massacre and of the wider war against Japan were
established in the 1980s in China, but these were openly declared to be ‘sites for
encouraging patriotic education’, not coolly objective institutions for historical
explanation. The historical line had changed, but the use of history to serve
contemporary politics had not. Neither China nor Japan are monolithic societies.
Japan’s responses are much more varied than those in China where discussion is
still restricted, yet it is too simplistic to argue that the Chinese government is simply
manipulating Chinese popular feeling in the dispute about wartime history.
In 2005 the government found it politically useful to give permission for antiJapanese demonstrations but was alarmed to discover that the young urban
population was in fact more genuinely hostile to Japan than it had anticipated. So the
authorities abruptly banned a big anti-Japanese demonstration, organized via
websites, which was supposed to fill Tian’anmen Square. Not only would the
associations of Tian’anmen Square have been problematic for the Communist Party,
but memories of the student protests that took place on December 9th, 1935, may
have also been in their minds. For while the students of seventy years ago were
protesting against Japan, just a few years later they were protesting against their
own government of Chiang Kai-shek; and soon after that, Chiang was forced to flee
to Taiwan, never to return. The Communist Party has no intention of letting that
lesson from history come back into popular memory. Yet if it fails to maintain a
strong economy, and if public pressure boils over, it is hard to know whether the
Party can continue to control the ways in which popular opinion reacts to the past.

Rana Mitter is lecturer in Chinese history and politics at Oxford
University, and author ofA Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the
Modern World (2004).