AS WITH THE SOUTH CHINA SEA, THE LIGHTNING ROD OF MISTRUST in East Asia lies in remote, disputed islands. There are eight of them. Three barely break the surface; the others are inhospitable clumps of rock where no one lives and nothing useful grows. The best use the Americans could find for them at the end of the Second World War was as a place for bombing practice. The closest landfall is the northern coast of Taiwan and the Japanese tourist island of Ishigaki, both a hundred miles away. China’s nearest coastline is more than two hundred miles away. In Chinese, they are known as the Diaoyu Islands and in Japanese as the Senkaku, meaning “sharp pavilions,” and for many years most of the islands had been in private hands, bought and sold between families. China claimed them, but since last century had been too busy with its civil war and with India, Korea, Taiwan and Tibet, to care much or do anything about them.
That ended in 2012 when the hawkish governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, offered to buy the islands from the Kurihara family, which had owned them since the 1970s. Ishihara, a populist politician who never shied away from provoking China, was feeding on a growing nationalist sentiment that was winning support in many parts of Japanese society. Later in the year, the same patriotic mood brought Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to power. Memories of Chinese and Japanese commercial success were eclipsed by long-standing regional rivalry. Ishihara used the disputed islands precisely to show up divisions in the Sino-Japanese relationship.
The Japanese government stepped in and purchased the islands itself, paying $20 million. China reacted angrily, setting off a chain of events that turned the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands into another global flashpoint. It brings to mind an image of two well-heeled billionaires fighting over a cigarette butt in a trash can. The thought that these desolate blots of maritime nothingness could be the cause of such disagreement between two of the world’s biggest economies beggars belief. Yet, that is what has happened because, even while riding the crest of a wave of wealth, an uneasiness deep inside each country has refreshed old hostilities that have yet to be dealt with.
Japan’s announcement that it was taking ownership of the islands prompted protests in China. Claiming the anger was spontaneous, Beijing called for calm while doing little to stop the spread of riots. The protests lasted through September 2012, with crowds breaching a security cordon at the Japanese embassy in Beijing and trashing and burning factories owned by Honda, Panasonic, Toyota, and other Japanese companies.
“Return our islands! Japanese devils get out!” was a chant of the rioters. One placard read, “For the respect of the motherland, we must go to war with Japan.”
In public, Japan tried to play down the schism, but a senior official told me without nuance, “China has exploited the goodwill of the Japanese people. It needs Japan as an enemy because they have exchanged communism for nationalism.”
The uncovering of that fault line in 2012 threw a spotlight on others. Cracks appeared; first one, then another, as in an earth tremor. They tangled and then merged into a question about the future of Asia: What would the rise of China hold, and how should Asia and the United States, its protector, deal with it? The economic relationship between the two countries was entwined and strong. What reason on Earth would there be to damage it? Yet, if Beijing were willing to risk its economic relationship with Japan over these islands, what else was it prepared to do and from where was it drawing its confidence?
Thirty-four years earlier, in 1978, China’s new reformist leader Deng Xiaoping had traveled to Japan to sign the Sino-Japanese Treaty of Peace and Friendship. It was a brave, pragmatic move. China had neither forgiven nor forgotten Japan’s invasion, including its 1937 massacre of up to three hundred thousand Chinese in the old capital of Nanjing. There was no love lost between China—indeed, the whole of East Asia—and Japan. But Deng needed Japan’s trade and money. He visited the global giant Panasonic and asked if it would help in China’s modernization. Panasonic said it would, and began building factories there. Other Japanese companies followed; today twenty thousand Japanese companies have factories in China, employing ten million workers.83
“Deng came to us and pleaded for Japanese companies to invest in his country,” the Japanese official told me, showing a photograph of the Panasonic factory when it was first built and another of it in ruins. “In the spirit of friendship, we did that and this is what we get in return.” After the riots, Japanese investment fell by more than 40 percent.
The economic relationship between China and Japan was—and still is—entwined and strong. There is no pragmatic reason to damage it. It is another fault line that has been bandaged up for the past half century or so, and it needs to be healed or bandaged again until a cure can be found.
Japan’s population is 128 million, against China’s 1.4 billion. Japan’s economy in 2016 was $4.41 trillion against China’s $11.3 trillion. On a map Japan looks like a thin, curved crooked finger of an archipelago, slightly bigger than the Philippines but smaller than Indonesia. It could fit into China many times over. But, unlike much of the region, Japan has never submitted to the concept that all power emanates from Beijing, that China is a big country and all others are small countries, or that it needs to journey there with gifts, humility, and tributes in order to survive. China and Japan have swapped ideas and cultural practices, but Japan has always seen itself as at least equal to, if not better than, China and this is a challenge that East Asia has yet to resolve.
Japan was the first Asian country to develop the strengths and economy of the West. It was also the first and only country to suffer a nuclear attack. “We were destroyed because we were too strong,” a Japanese diplomat told me. “We could not control our strength. China was defeated because it was too weak. But always, China thinks it is a big country and that it lies at the center of the world. Everyone else is on the periphery of its power. The Chinese system runs down from a high pinnacle, which makes it inward looking and intolerant. The leaders are secluded from the real world. China is now where we were in the 1930s. Then look what happened. China’s strength may end up destroying it. Everyone thinks China is too big to fail. That is what we thought in Japan in the 1930s. But believe me, China is not too big to fail, and when it does, everything will burn down.”
THE HIROSHIMA PEACE Memorial Museum is built on the site where the world’s first nuclear bomb exploded at 8:15 a.m. on April 6, 1945. Its purpose is not to expose the United States for inflicting such horror on the city. Nor does it explain why Japan deserved such a horrific attack. The museum’s mission statement is to “continuously appeal for the elimination of nuclear armaments and the realization of permanent world peace.” The exhibits do not pull any punches with their graphic displays that include the shriveled, torn, and blackened uniforms of schoolgirls killed in the blast.
“Nobuko Shoda (then 14) was a second-year student at Yamanaka Girls High school, attached to Hiroshima Women’s Higher School of Education,” reads one inscription. “She suffered burns over her entire body …. Her face and both legs swelled up and the skin on her hands peeled off …. She passed away on 10 August.” With it is Nobuko’s torn and singed school uniform and a note saying she was twelve hundred meters from the center of the explosion.
“The blast also threw people across distances of several meters,” the museum tells us. “Countless shards of glass penetrated the victims’ bodies. Even today, fragments of glass are discovered and removed from atomic bomb survivors who complain of bodily pains.”
What actually happened is relayed in a chillingly measured manner: “The surrounding air expanded enormously, creating a tremendous blast. The blast pressure was immense, 19 tons per square meter as far away as 500 meters from the hypocenter. Nearly all buildings were crushed; people were lifted and thrown through the air.”
Japan’s defeat after the destruction of Hiroshima and, three days later, Nagasaki led to occupation by the United States for seven years and resulted in the creation of Japan’s democratic system and a pacifist constitution, which banned the nation from going to war again or even keeping a defense force that had “war potential.”
But that changed in December 2012 when in the wake of the islands dispute and China’s anti-Japanese riots, the forthright and telegenic Abe became the Liberal Democratic Party’s prime minister for the second time in a landslide election win. Abe’s reputation was as a right-wing hawk, and his platform was for economic reform and increased nationalism. As Japan’s war crimes and colonial record were once again being put in a hostile spotlight, Abe fought back. He questioned whether women in occupied territories were forced to have sex with Japanese troops during the Second World War, promoting a furious reaction in China, South Korea, and elsewhere. He visited the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, which commemorates Japan’s war dead—including those accused of war crimes. He refused to offer his own apology for Japan’s war record, instead saying, “We must not let our children, grandchildren, and even further generations to come, who have nothing to do with that war, be predestined to apologize.” When pressed, he only reaffirmed his support for previous official apologies, saying his country had inflicted “immeasurable damage and suffering.”84
Relations that had been difficult with China got even worse and once again focused on the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. In December 2013, Beijing declared an Air Defense Identification Zone around the islands, requiring all aircraft crew to report when they entered it. Such zones are not new, and there were several already across East Asia, put in place after the Second World War. But China’s was introduced without consultation or notice and overlapped with zones run by Japan and South Korea. At the same time, Chinese warships repeatedly entered the contested area around the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. One even locked its missiles system onto a Japanese vessel, a move from China that could have quickly upped the stakes.85
Japan’s only outside military protection came from its 1952 security treaty with the United States; thus, by threatening Japan with a ship-to-ship missile, Beijing sent a direct message directly to the Pentagon. Drawing America into even a skirmish with China was a dangerous move. Abe’s view was that Japan needed the wherewithal to handle China itself, but to achieve that he would have to amend the country’s pacifist constitution. He led a parliamentary coalition, which meant horse-trading with the New Komeito Party, his Buddhist-based, pacifist-minded coalition partner. In July 2014, after much bargaining, Abe succeeded in winning cabinet approval for constitutional changes. Japan would be able to engage in “collective self-defense” and come to the aid of an ally under attack. Japanese troops could also serve overseas, although only in peacekeeping operations.
“The global situation surrounding Japan is becoming ever more difficult,” Abe explained. “Being fully prepared is effective in discouraging any attempt to wage a war on Japan. The cabinet decision today will further lessen the chance of Japan being engaged in war. That is my conviction.”86
The United States and Western allies supported the changes. Beijing reacted harshly. The government news agency, Xinhua, accused Abe of “leading his country down a dangerous path. … No matter how Abe glosses over it, he is dallying with the specter of war through a cheap scam.”87
Then, amid the hostile rhetoric, in November 2014 Prime Minister Abe flew to Beijing for a regional conference and met China’s president Xi Jinping. The discussion between the two leaders took place behind closed doors. Japanese officials painted a picture of a bland, formal discussion lasting thirty minutes, but the photographs afterward told all: an awkward handshake; unsmiling, dour expressions; and a reluctance, almost an inability, to look each other in the eye. Images of this frozen relationship were beamed around the world, and a week later Abe called a snap election, won easily, and consolidated his grip on power.
Three years later, however, Abe and Xi adopted a more pragmatic and mature approach toward each other as if accepting that that the region’s key democratic and autocratic governments could not operate fruitfully if they are stayed at loggerheads with each other. At the November 2017 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in Danang, Vietnam, they hailed a ‘fresh start’ Abe said that stable relations were in the interests of both countries. Xi corroborated by stating that China and Japan ‘must take constructive steps to appropriately manage and control disputes.’
Much impetus came from the joint recognition by China and Japan of the regional unease created by the unpredictable Trump administration. Japan was suspicious of Trump’s excessive praise of Xi and what he stood for. China realized that if it were to expand its influence securely, it should start looking at Japan not as a rival, but an ally. How that might work could never be sealed in a warmed handshake on the sidelines of a regional summit, but there was soon a cooling of tensions around the disputed Senkaku-Diaoyu island.
Shortly after the summit the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative published photographs showing a marked contrast between Chinese fishing boats testing the contested waters around the islands. A year earlier, in August 2016, days after China’s annual fishing ban ended, up to 300 Chinese fishing boats accompanied by sixteen Coast Guard vessels worked near the Senkaku-Diaoyu islands and many repeatedly entered the twelve-nautical mile sovereign maritime territory there, causing stand-offs with the Japanese Coast Guard. In 2017, however, in the lead up to the summit and the announcement of the ‘fresh start’, the Chinese fishing boats stayed away, and did not test Japan’s claimed sovereign waters.
“With China holding the 19th Party Congress and Japan organizing a snap election in late October, an incident around the Senkakus could have introduced unwelcome and difficult to control dynamics at a politically sensitive time for both countries,” concluded AMTI report. “Instead, Beijing and Tokyo seemed intent on advancing a tentative rapprochement.”
A not unconnected element is that Japan and ten other Pacific governments began to push ahead with the Trans-Pacific Partnership from which the US had withdrawn and signed a deal in March 2018. The Obama-administration had put long hours into negotiating a rules-based trading system aimed at achieving much more for the region than simply transactional trade. The plan was to eliminate tariffs on ninety-five per cent of goods covering half a billion people, but China was not included.
American analysts on Asia created a spectrum of scenarios on how things might unfold, bearing in mind that the Trump presidency is finite and the Sino-Japanese relationship stretches back for centuries. James Manicom in his 2014 book Bridging Troubled Waters: China, Japan, and Maritime Order in the East China Sea argued that while the relationship was difficult, it had a good track record in sensible management. China needed a stable region to push its own economic growth. Japan’s military treaty with the United States remained a powerful deterrent.
Scott Warren Harold of the Rand Center for Asia Policy, writing almost two years later, believed that economics may not be the most important factor in China’s mind: “Chinese policymakers are likely to ask themselves three questions: Do we need to fight? If we fight, can we win? And third, what will the costs be? Disturbingly, none of the answers to these questions are currently trending in a positive direction. … Moreover, the two countries’ economic links are trending downwards, suggesting a potential further erosion of the economic constraints on war.”88
Lyle J. Goldstein of the US Naval War College went a step further in describing the East China Sea as “the most dangerous place on the entire planet.” The trigger could be a “bumping incident” between rival vessels as happened routinely in the South China Sea. “In such circumstances, the steps from gun fire to exchanging volleys of anti-ship missiles between the fleets, to theater wide attacks on major bases, to all out global war could be all too abrupt.”89
His colleague, James Kelly, a former US carrier group commander and now a Naval College dean, was concerned about the risk of miscalculation. The Chinese, Japanese and US navies were all operating in the same theater. “When you get the mix of all those things going on, you have to walk the dog pretty carefully when you’re a mariner out at sea, particularly when you’re the captain of the big guns out there,” Kelly told me. “If the leaders of the forces are in close proximity to each other and if they’re not talking to each other bridge to bridge by whatever means necessary, you could have something go on that’s not going to make people happy.”
The Sino-Japanese tension revived a sense throughout East Asia that although Japan had apologized time and again, its expressions of regret were not enough. The difference with how Germany had behaved was subtle and almost impossible to quantify. It was as if German politicians regularly visited the graves of Nazi war criminals in order to bolster their poll ratings. In Asia there was a sentiment that Japan did not yet understand how brutal its colonization had been, nor what it needed to do to move on. As the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands were the symbol of the current Sino-Japanese power play, so the war heroes in the Yasukuni Shrine were that of Japan’s failure to understand its past.
AN EQUIVALENT IN China to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is the Massacre Memorial Hall in Nanjing, which pays tribute to victims of the Japanese slaughter that took place in the city in December 1937. Unlike the nuclear attack, the brutality was personal, with at least twenty thousand women raped, killing competitions among Japanese soldiers against Chinese prisoners, buildings burned, homes looted, bodies left unburied, and more than three hundred thousand killed. All of this is meticulously chronicled in halls specially lit to maximize the impact of the exhibits. One enlarged photograph shows a procession of Japanese imperial troops on horseback, with crowds by the side of the road. Another is of an old man about to be beheaded, and another shows corpses strewn about the landscape. They are images of conquest and cruelty. Outside are sculptures of civilians fleeing, tranquil water features, and, at the exit, a portrait of President Xi Jinping, who led an anniversary commemoration there in December 2014 just as Abe was being reelected. “History will not be altered as time changes,” Xi told the crowd. “And facts will not disappear because of any chicanery or denials.”90
These deepening, competing sentiments underpin a realization that while East Asia had seemed united through trade, it had so far failed to create a collective sense of a future or drawn up a system of common values. Europe achieved a sense of a future after the 1945 defeat of Germany and again when absorbing the countries of Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe after 1991. Yet, even in Europe, nationalist sentiment is rising again. As in Asia, economic integration is proving not to be enough. With no mechanism in place to take things further, old enemies were falling back on bad history. This was Japan’s Sun Goddess pitted against China’s Mandate of Heaven. Historically, Japan had outpaced China in its development, much as China was now outpacing India. Part of Japan’s success had been in its subtler and results-oriented way of dealing with the encroaching West in the nineteenth century, with the result that Japan had been the first Asian country to become a modern industrialized society.
“Beijing has sought to convince the world that Japan is reassuming its militaristic past,” says Richard Javad Heydarian of Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. “Any sober analysis, however, would suggest that the real bone of contention is an emerging Chinese-Japanese contest for regional leadership.”
In at least three earlier contests between the two, the winner had been Japan.
For centuries, Chinese and Japanese traveled freely between their countries, but they lived in near isolation from the wider world outside Asia. Japan’s initial taste of foreign interference came in the 1550s, when Portuguese Jesuit missionaries’ enthusiasm to convert people to Catholicism led to insurrection. They were expelled in 1639 and Christian converts were executed. Only the Dutch, who avoided evangelism, were allowed to set up a trading post in Nagasaki and from that Japan was able to glimpse Western modernization in the form of books and scientific inventions.
The early nineteenth century brought an insistence from the West that both China and Japan open up for trade. Both countries were against a foreign presence, with China confining traders to its southern port of Canton, and Japan allowing only the Dutch their one post. In 1825, as the European threat widened, and European and American vessels kept encroaching in Japanese waters, Japan issued a command to “expel foreigners at all costs.”
The change came in 1842, with Britain’s victory against China in the First Opium War. Japan took note of British brutality and how better guns, bigger ships, more sophisticated technology, and disciplined soldiers had defeated China. Twelve years later, an American naval commander, Commodore Matthew Perry, led a flotilla of ships to Japan and, under threat of military action, insisted Japan open its ports for American whalers to resupply. Japan quickly complied, prompting Perry to expand his brief and insist that Japanese ports open for American trade. In March 1854 Perry signed the Kanagawa Treaty, which ended Japan’s isolation and allocated a handful of ports for international trade.
The treaty sparked a civil war between those who supported the existing militaristic system of shogunates that had controlled Japan pretty much from the end of the twelfth century and those who wanted reform. By now, Britain and France were hovering behind America to get a slice of Japanese trade and took different sides in the conflict. Britain armed the reformists, while France supported forces loyal to the shogunate. Fighting continued on and off for fifteen years, but by 1869 shogunate rule ended and Japan began the era of the Meiji Restoration.
The direct translation of Meiji is “enlightened,” and the Meiji Era was one of modernization during which Japan tried to take the best of the West, its advanced technology and thinking, while retaining its own Asian way of life. During the same period, Beijing’s lingering feudal system tried to resist Western infiltration, but was unable to defeat it. In the 1850s the British took the Second Opium War deep inside the country, humiliating China by marching into Beijing, destroying the summer palace, and taking control of large coastal areas for Western powers that acted as a colonizing, occupying force.
Japan, on the other hand, after signing the Kanagawa Treaty with the United States in 1854, went on to embrace all the West had to offer. Restaurants with chandeliers and orchestras offered European cuisine and fine wines. Men wore Sherlock Holmes capes, had western haircuts, and danced the waltz and quadrille at the Rokumeikan, the Hall of the Baying Stag, in central Tokyo where they ate French food prepared by French chefs and played billiards. The first motor cars, barely seen even in the West, appeared on Tokyo’s streets. Japan lapped up science, engineering, politics, and lifestyles. It acted not as if it had been forced into accepting Western doctrines but as if it had actively adopted the concepts of international law, trade, learning, and even political debate, convinced that by cooperating with Western powers it would become stronger itself.
Foreign visitors experienced impeccable politeness, order, and efficiency, while Japan acquired muscle and knowledge. Its own businessmen set up operations throughout East Asia. The first test came in 1894, forty years after the Kanagawa Treaty, when China and Japan were vying for influence in Korea, traditionally a Chinese vassal state. Their armies fought. Japan won, seizing from China its historical sway over Korea and taking the mantle of the dominant regional power.
Japan did not stop with Korea. Nor had it finished with China. Its Western-inspired military colonized Taiwan, swiftly and brutally putting down any Chinese resistance, in what was later to become an official policy of the Southern Expansion Doctrine (Nanshin-ron). Japan’s view that Southeast Asia and the western Pacific lay in its sphere of national interest was its equivalent of the Monroe Doctrine, also borrowed from the United States. It also planned the Northern Expansion Doctrine (Hokushin-ron), which, although only on the drawing board at the time, brought Japan into head-to-head conflict with another European power, Russia. Having won on the Korean Peninsula, Japan now eyed northeast China, referred to as Manchuria, where Russia kept its warships at the all-weather Port Arthur.
In a style that would be repeated at Pearl Harbor thirty-seven years later, Japan carried out a lightning preemptive strike on Port Arthur and put it under siege. It fought a stream of battles with Russia, which surrendered in September 1905 with a peace agreement brokered by the United States; for that, President Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize. Japan’s decisive defeat of a European country stunned the international defense community and catapulted Japan from a regional to a world power. But inside Japan there was a sense of having been cheated, that even now it was not being treated as an equal but as an inferior Asian power, and that the United States in its intervention, had denied Japan the legitimate spoils of war.
China’s president, Sun Yat-sen, sounded a note of warning even then. In a speech in Japan in 1924, he praised Japan’s victory over Russia as a defeat of the West by the East. “We regarded the Japanese victory as our own victory. It was indeed a happy event,” he said, adding, “Now the question remains whether Japan will be the hawk of the Western civilization of the rule of Might, or the tower of strength of the Orient. This is the choice which lies before the people of Japan.”91
At the time Japan was colonizing Korea, where it conducted a program of deliberate cruelty. Thousands died as Japan suppressed uprisings. Hundreds of thousands were sent to labor camps, and women were forced into sex as “comfort women,” which remains a point of anger in the Japanese-Korean relationship today. Japanese occupiers tried to eradicate the Korean language and cultural identity, smashing artifacts and destroying historical buildings. Korea gave the world a glimpse of what was to come from Japan. By then European powers were becoming embroiled in their own power struggles. When the First World War broke out, Britain and France were only too appreciative of Japan joining them in moving against German interests in Asia.
It was at this time that the United States realized that in helping to industrialize Japan it might have created the makings of a modern, capable enemy that could cause trouble. At the Naval War College, on Roosevelt’s instruction, military analysts began formulating a road map to use against a rising Asian power that threatened US interests. It was called War Plan Orange.