A Tale of Two Japans, One Beautiful & One Ugly:
Will the Beautiful Japan Please Stand Up?
James C. Hsiung
(Professor of Politics & International Law,
New York University (NYU))
[This statement was prepared by Professor James C. Hsiung, of New York University,
And is read by ______________, in his absence during the February 19, 2013
demonstrations against Japan in New York.]
The Beautiful Japan at Home vs.
the Ugly Japan Abroad
Japan is a great and beautiful country in its own right. But, overseas,
especially to its Asian neighbors, Japan’s image is tarnished by its past
record of aggression and deceptive practices. And, its jingoistic tradition
dies hard. All of this embodies an ugly Japan.
To most Asian countries, the atrocities committed by the Ugly Japan, in
its World War II aggression, are still vividly in memory. And, to some neighboring
nations (like the Chinese and the Koreans), their memories of the Ugly Japan
go much farther back in history, as will be shown below. The Japanese Government
has been engaged in the rewriting of World War II history, to whitewash Japan’
s past, and to prevent the younger generations at home from knowing the ugly
face of their own country. But, deceiving the younger Japanese, by censoring
school textbooks, will not help Japan’s redemption. Instead, it will only
leave the door open for the same ugliness to repeat itself, a nightmare
for many Asian neighbors. Recent flare-ups over the Diaoyu Island (known
in Japanese as Senkaku), and the militant stance taken by the Ugly Japan,
is just such an example.
The purpose of our protest today is to remind the Japanese government NOT
to repeat history. And, if it does, it will only boomerang on Japan. In
1994, and again in 2005, Japan made an assiduous attempt to bid for a permanent
seat on the U.N. Security Council. You know what? Not a single Asian country
supported Japan’s endeavor as such— if discounting the sole, belated, and
perfunctory lip service of Malaysia.
Hark toThe Beautiful Japan!
To get to the truth of the matter, we should take heed of the honest views
of some courageous Japanese commentators. As a testimony to the Beautiful
Japan, many Japanese academics have, in written attestations, urged on Tokyo
their conclusive view that according to authentic records, China had first
discovered the Diaoyu islands as early as in 1532 A.D. That makes the Chinese
claim far superior to Japan’s. Three of these Japanese academics deserve
special mention: Prof. Kiyoshi Inoue (井上清, of Kyoto University), Prof.
Todayoshi Murata (村田忠禧, of Yokohama University), and Prof. Unryu Suganuma
(管沼云龍, of Obirin University, in Tokyo). The last mentioned, Prof.
Suganuma, was born in China and received his education up to the Ph.D. in
both Japan and the United States (St. Johns, and Syracuse). He wrote a
2007 book in Chinese (中日關系与領土主權, English translation: History of
Sino-Japanese Relations: Sovereignty and Territory). He devoted a whole
chapter to chronicling how Diaoyu islands and the Ryukyus had fared under
Chinese suzerainty since the Ming and Qing dynasties, stretching from the
14th through the early 20th centuries. He wrote a similar but updated chapter
in my edited book, China & Japan at Odds: Deciphering the Perpectual Conflict
(2009).
In a 2004 book of his own, Prof. Murata also noted that the Ming China
(1368-1644) had already delineated Diaoyu islands, in official maps and
annals, as Chinese territories to be defended against Japanese pirates plundering
the China coasts. In an earlier publication, in 1972, Prof. Inoue pointed
out forthrightly that the Diaoyu islands were Chinese, but ǒstolenō by Japan
in 1895 (and renamed Senkaku in Japanese).
Despite these and other voluminous evidences confirming China’s rightful
sovereign title to the island group, the Tokyo government -- representing
the Ugly Japan -- insisted it had ǒdiscoveredō them as ǒterra nulliusō (or,
no man’s land) in the late 19th century. It further claimed that the islands,
after occupation by the Americans at the end of World War II, were ǒreturnedō
to Japan, along with the Ryukyus (known in Japanese as Okinawa), in the
so-called ǒreversionō from the United States in 1972. (We shall not be
sidetracked by the question of the legality of this reversion, as it betrayed
wartime Allied agreement and violated the 1951 San Franciso Peace Treaty,
plus the 1952 bilateral peace treaty signed by Japan and the Republic of
China (Taiwan), that post-war Japan must ǒsurrenderō all the lands and islands
it had taken by force from other rightful owners. ) The simple fact is
that the U.S. Department of State explicitly acknowledged that the American
military had only used Diaoyu island as a site for shooting practices.
The U.S., therefore, had only ǒadministrative rights,ō but not sovereignty.
Tokyo’s claim that Japan ǒinheritedō sovereign rights from the United States
does not square with the truth. Much less can it be supported in international
law, as was illustrated in the classic Island of Palmas case (U.S. vs. the
Netherlands, 1928), decided by the Permanent Court of Arbitration.
Japan could NOT possibly have inherited something that the United States
did NOT have.
A Long History of Japan’s Militarism
If other Asian neighbors encountered the fury of the Japanese war machine
only during World War II, the Chinese (and the Koreans) have a much longer
experience coping with the predatory might of the Japanese military. Twice
in the 16th century (1592 and 1597), forces from the Ugly Japan commanded
by Hideyoshi Toyotomi (丰臣秀吉,1593-1615), invaded Korea, a traditional
tributary state in the Chinese empire, in an attempt to challenge China
itself. Again, in 1894, Japan with its newly modernized war machine fought
and defeated China in a dispute over Korea. In a treaty concluded the next
year, China had to cede Korea. After that, Japan annexed Korea and ran roughshod
over its innocent people under a merciless colonial rule that lasted until
1945 -- an experience that continues to rankle the Koreans, in both South
and North Korea, today.
Again, in the twentieth century, Japanese Kwantung Army infiltrated into
Northeast China (known as Manchuria in English, then). And, after the infamous
Mukden Incident of 1931, it extended its reaches to North China. Six years
later, in 1937, the Marco Polo (Lu-Kou-chiao) Bridge Incident brought on
the War of Resistance, which raged on for the next eight years until Japan
met with defeat after the United States joined the Pacific War following
Pearl Harbor. In starting the war, Japan – to quote from an American China
historian (Kenneth Latourette of Yale University) -- ǒdreamed of the expansion
of empire, the expulsion of Western influence from China, and the knitting
of . . . ‘Greater East Asia,’ into a ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’ō under
Japanese hegemony.
Total casualties that China sustained in the Japanese war ran up to 4 million
soldiers and 18 million civilians. In the Rape of Nanking (then the Chinese
national capital) alone, over 300,000 Chinese civilians were massacred by
the Japanese invader, in two fateful weeks of December 1937. Individual
Japanese troops were seized in a craze to see who had killed the most Chinese
at the end of the day. Under the Japanese onslaught in the ensuing eight
years, some 40% of the Chinese population were rendered homeless or became
refugees. Total loss of property was calculated by Harvard professor William
Kirby to be well over 100 billion U.S. dollars (at 1945 prices).
Japanese militarism (or jingoism) had many roots. The samurai legacy from
the Tokugawa era (1603-1867) was canonized in the Meiji period’s call for
creating a ǒrich nation and strong army.ō The Meiji Constitution (1889)
conferred a special status on the military, by granting it the right of direct
access to the Tenno (emperor), following the Prussian example. The Shinto
mythology, furthermore, claimed superiority for Japan as the ǒLand of the
Godsō and hailed the Japanese as the ǒdescendants of the gods.ō Although
these fond beliefs should have receded to the background after the end of
World War II, the post-war period, paradoxically, saw the lingering and
rising influence of a new Japanese Right. Its members embodied a renewed
supra-nationalism, following the abrupt termination of the Tokyo Trials
of Japan’s war criminals because of the early onset of the Cold War in 1947.
(These trials were conducted by the IMTFE, or International Military Tribunal
for the Far East, the counterpart to the Nuremberg Trials for the Nazis
in Germany.)
In an irony of justice, 14 convicted Class I war criminals were later enshrined
in the Yasukuni Shrine for Japan’s war heroes, to the delight of the forces
on the Japanese Right. A spiritual leader of the Right wing, former Governor
of Tokyo Ishihara Shintaro (石原慎太郎), urged his comrades to stand up
to China. A Right-wing website even issued a call for wiping China off the
face of the earth in the year 2015!
Deception an Adjutant of War in
Japan’s Diplomatic Repertoire
If jingoism is a landmark of Ugly Japan, deception is a weapon at its service.
Only three examples are sufficient to corroborate this point. First, back
in 1931, the Japanese Kwantung Army in China swooped down on Mukden (Shenyang)
in the middle of the night, on September 18, occupying the whole city by
the following morning. It took Changchun on Sept. 19, then Antung and Yingkow
on the 20th, and Kirin (Chilin), on the 21st. The alibi used was that
the Chinese had exploded a section of the Southern Manchurian Railway, built
and guarded by the Japanese Kwantung Army. It was not until the Lytton
Commission, dispatched by the League of Nations, had concluded its on-the-spot
investigation that it was revealed that there had been no explosion. A
train, it found, safely arrived at the Mukden station on schedule at 10:30
p.m., or 30 minutes after the alleged explosion.
Example two: On July 7, 1939, Japanese forces attacked the Marco Polo
(Lu-kou-chiao) Bridge, about 10 miles from Peiping (now renamed Beijing),
precipitating a clash with the Chinese garrison. The Japanese pretext was
that the Chinese side had kidnapped some Japanese soldiers, a charge later
to be found totally untrue. But the hostilities triggered a full-scale response
from a China that was determined to fight for its own survival. The war
stretched out into eight years, instead of the mere eight months that the
Japanese had thought they would need to conquer China.
Example Three: Perhaps reflecting a self-doubt about their own claim to
the Diaoyu (Senkaku) islands, the Japanese Right, led by Ishihara Shintaro,
resorted to a ruse, in which the Japanese government ǒpurchasedō the islands
from an alleged private owner. This deceitful plot was concocted out of
thin air, because none of the isles in the tiny island group is inhabitable.
How would any human being ǒownō an un-inhabitable island? The so-called
private ownership was only alleged (that is, concocted), but never proven.
If there ever was a private owner, that person was SHENG Xuanhuai (盛宣
懷), a 19th century Chinese entrepreneur whose ownership was certified by
an edict from the Empress Dowager Cixi. Sheng had provided the Dowager
herbs collected from the Diaoyu Island, which proved to be effective in
curing an ailment of the imperial matron. The edict was in recognition of
Sheng’s contribution, and the Diaoyu island was awarded to him as an imperial
gift (please see the attachment for the Edict). Sheng’s descendents today
are scattered in Taiwan, mainland China, and the United States.
Concluding Remarks
In its current dispute with China, Tokyo is trying to drag the United States
into the fray. It argued that under the U.S.-Japan alliance treaty, the
United States has an obligation to help Japan fight the Chinese. As if
it were not enough, newly elected Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants to change
Japan’s Constitution, to abolish the war-renouncing Article 9, in order
that Japan can legally go to war with China. To prepare for war, Japanese
warships were patrolling waters surrounding the Diaoyu Islands, to keep
out any and all Chinese vessels. When armed Chinese maritime -surveillance
ships came close to protect Chinese fishing vessels, Japanese warships tried
to provoke them and to create an impression that the Chinese were offensively
belligerent, if not trigger happy. They were looking for a pretext that
would justify a Japanese invocation of the U.S.-Japan alliance treaty, thus
obliging American forces to enter into a joint warfare against China.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is coming to visit the White House. We urge
that President Obama be on guard, and not be misled. Rather than its present
stand of not taking sides in the dispute, the United States should reign
in the Japanese. And, to Prime Minister Abe, we also want to give a piece
of our collective mind: Please stop the drift toward war in your dispute
with China. Only you can stop the drift and reverse the course to peaceful
settlement by negotiation or other means. As Sir Winston Churchill counseled
long ago, ǒJaw, Jaw, is better than War, War.ō
Once again to Prime Minister Abe: Only you can suppress the Ugly Japan,
and bring out the Beautiful Japan, for the whole world to see. Please do
it now.
Attachment: Empress Dowager Cixi’s Edict to Sheng Xuan-huai
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