For well over a century, however, following the 1894 war, China ’s relationship with Japan has been far worse than that with any other power. Many Chinese still see that war and the subsequent Treaty of Shimonoseki as the darkest hour in China ’s ‘century of humiliation’. China ’s ignominious defeat and the extremely onerous terms inflicted on China in the peace left a particularly bitter taste. Defeat by what was seen as an inferior nation within the Chinese world order was considered to be a far greater humiliation than losing to the Western barbarians, and served to undermine the prevailing Chinese world-view. This was a case – in the Confucian discourse – of the student beating up the teacher or the younger brother beating up the older brother. [989]
The ignominy visited upon China in the 1894-5 war was compounded and accentuated by Japan’s occupation of north-east China in 1931 and then its full-scale invasion of north-east, east and parts of central China in 1937; the scars these hostilities left have never been healed. To this day, the Nanjing Massacre defines the nature and identity of the Japanese as far as the Chinese are concerned and therefore in large measure their attitude towards Japan. It may have taken place seventy years ago, but it remains an open wound, as present in the relationship between the two countries as if it had happened yesterday. Even the numbers killed – 300,000 in the Chinese interpretation – is still a highly charged issue. [990] Of course, the reason why these questions remain so alive is because the Japanese have failed to apologize properly, or demonstrate any serious sign of confronting their own past, unlike the contrition that the Germans have shown for their behaviour in the Second World War. [991] The Japanese paid dearly for their defeat at the hands of the United States and Europe – with huge casualties, the Tokyo trials, the confiscation of its overseas assets and the American occupation – but they have shown little remorse towards their Asian neighbours for their country’s often barbaric behaviour, which was far worse than anything Japan meted out to the Western powers. The Nanjing Massacre was the worst example, with the mass killing and rape of civilians, but this was repeated on a smaller scale elsewhere in China, while the Japanese occupation of Korea was also marked by considerable cruelty. [992] The numerous apologies that Japan has given have been little more than formulaic, while the courts have refused to compensate the individual victims of crimes committed in Japan ’s name. The grudging attitude towards its Asian neighbours is symptomatic of post-Meiji Japan – respect for the West and contempt for Asia. Nor, for most of the post-war period, has Japan needed to rethink its attitudes. [993] It rapidly re-established itself as the dominant power in the region, in a different league to its poorer neighbours, while the United States, its sponsor and protector, neither required nor desired Japan to apologize to Communist China during the Cold War, given that a new and very different set of priorities now applied.
Fast-forward fifty years, however, and East Asia presents a different picture. Japan no longer constitutes the great exception, a Western level of development surrounded by a sea of backwardness. On the contrary, the first four Asian tigers enjoy a GDP per head not far short of Japan ’s, [994] living standards in the region have risen enormously, and Japan ’s old nemesis, China, has been the subject of a remarkable economic transformation. In short, history has finally caught up with Japan. [995] As a society and culture, Japan has always been at its best when its goals – and the path towards those goals – were set in concrete. But when both the goals and the path need to be adapted to changed circumstances, perhaps even subject to wholesale revision, Japan seems to find the shift inordinately difficult. [996] Rather like France, it tends to fiddle and delay until nothing short of a revolution – or, in Japan ’s case, a restoration – is required. In the face of the transformation of East Asia, and above all China, Japan has been effectively paralysed, unable to change direction, offering little other than more of the same. The ruling Liberal Democrats, who have dominated Japanese politics since 1955, have found lateral thinking virtually impossible. [997] As Chinese East Asian expert Zhu Feng argues: ‘ Japan has been less prepared for the rise of China than any other country. They can’t believe it. They don’t want to believe it. Yet it affects them more than anyone else.’ [998] For the most part, Japan has gone into denial about the rise of China, wishing that somehow it might go away or that it was perhaps a figment of everyone else’s imagination.
