Islands in the Stream

“What’s in a name?” Juliet asks in the play, “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” What’s in a name? Ah, Juliet, if it was only about flowers? What’s in a name? Why, war, possibly, especially if the name is Senkaku or Diaoyu. Take your pick and you take your sides, the first with Japan, the second with China, the Montagues and the Capulets of the East China Sea.

I wrote about the dispute over these uninhabited islands last November (Alas, Poor Moles). Since then the cold war has risen in temperature by several degrees. “We don’t want to fight but by jingo if we do we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too”, so went the old British music hall challenge. My, oh my, what a world we live in, with jingoism now making a novel appearance on Chinese state media. “Japan”, says the China Daily, “is the real danger and threat to the world.” A military clash, the Global Times, echoes, is now more likely. “We need to prepare for the worst”, its editorial said.

Alarming exaggerations, you might think, but the position is actually quite serious, getting ever more serious since the Japanese government nationalised the islands - previously in private hands - last September. In December Japanese fighters were scrambled after a Chinese patrol plane buzzed the islands. Last month aircraft from both nations played a game of tag over the islands’ air space. According to newspaper reports, Japan is considering firing warning shots in any subsequent aerial dance. A Chinese general has said that this will count as the start of “actual combat.”

How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be concerning ourselves because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing...especially in a spat over a group of rocks. Horrible, fantastic and incredible it may very well be, but if you are American you should be concerned. For one thing, Japan is presently governed by Shinzo Abe of the Liberal Democratic Party. While he is no General Tojo, he is a right-wing nationalist, one who believes that Japan needs to take a ‘tougher line’ with China. For another thing, America is treaty-bound to come to Japan’s aid if the country is attacked. Iraq and Afghanistan were bad enough but a new war in the Pacific – the horror! the horror!

The Chinese, incidentally, are well aware of the wider implications of the dispute. This is a country that, having left communism well behind, has embraced the most militant forms of nationalism. Suppressed and bullied for so many decades, China now wants to assert itself in a new form of manifest destiny. Japan, says the Global Daily, has become the “vanguard of American strategy to contain China.” The implication, the Economist reports, is clear enough – China should be ready to take on the United States.

Returning to my jingo theme, I think there is a game being played out here. The stakes are high and the wrong bid could be potentially catastrophic. China clearly wants to assert itself; for power politics has become the opium of the masses. Asserting itself is one thing; risking a region-wide war quite another. Japan is not only the country’s second biggest trading partner but it’s also one of its biggest investors. War or anything approaching war would potentially cripple the Chinese economy.

Nationalism is a dangerous and unpredictable beast. It’s anything but a paper tiger. A wrong move could lead to the communist oligarchy being devoured, a fact that surely cannot have escaped Beijing. It would be best for all parties to stand back and leave these islands, no matter what they are called, to the moles, their principal inhabitants. No venture, no gain, no loss, no prestige, no pride, no power; nothing. Let’s pray to God, for the sake of the little gentlemen in black, that oil is never discovered in these treacherous waters.

Alas, Poor Moles

Have you heard of the Senkaku islands?  No?  What about the Diaoyu islands, have you heard of those?  Again no?  If you look on a map you might find the one but you are almost certain not to find the other.  It might be better to say that every map tells its own story, Chinese and Japanese maps more so here than others.  In short, it’s the same place, Diaoyu for the Chinese, Senkaku for the Japanese.  Here, for those respective nations, we can safely say an island by any other name would not smell as sweet.

The smell from the East China Sea, where ‘the islands’ are located, is fairly rank at the present.  Both nations claim territorial right to these barren rocks, where only the Diaoyu mole or the Senkaku mole makes a home.  Writing it that way round might even occasion another dispute!  No, I shouldn’t make fun, for the political and diplomatic implications are serious enough, with an Oahu-like potential, a point I’ll make clearer a little later.

Possession, the saying goes, is nine points of the law, and here the Japanese have all nine points.  Or, rather, what the Japanese government has is $30million worth of points, having recently bought the three islands in the chain from their private – Japanese – owners.  There may as well have been an earthquake in the archipelago, for a tsunami of nationalist anger swept across much of China in the aftermath. 

Japan relies on more than purchase; it relies on the diplomatic records to prove sovereignty, saying that this goes back to the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5.  I’m no expert on international law but this would seem somewhat dubious grounds upon which to make a stand, in that the Japanese could lay claim to Taiwan by the same aggressive right.  The Chinese can go a several steps deeper; their claim is based on travel records that can be traced right back to the Ming Dynasty. 

Chinese sabres are rattling.  I mentioned Oahu, not just because of Pearl Harbor, not just because that is another island where a war started, but because the United States is an unwilling participant in the whole fuss.  America is obliged by treaty to defend Japanese territorial integrity, and the integrity at this moment includes ‘those islands.’ 

We are not talking World War Two here but we may very well be touching on a regional conflict as intense as that over the Falklands, with a lot less clearer outcome.  Geographically and strategically, given the position of ‘the islands’ close to the mainland, the Chinese are in a strong position. 

So, why the fuss over the kingdom of the mole?  Is it all down to national one-upmanship?  No, follow the money.  Rather, given that they are islands surrounded by sea, the thing you should be following is not greenbacks but black gold – oil, to be exact, something else the conflict shares with the Falklands. 

However, the extent of unresolved national anger in China over past Japanese aggression should not be underestimated.  It is no accident that protests in China took place on 19 September, the anniversary of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931.  On the streets reference was made to the later Rape of Nanking, in which thousands of Chinese civilians were systematically massacred by the Japanese Army.  In the Chinese consciousness this infamous episode comes close to occupying the same place as the Holocaust and, as with the Holocaust, there are deniers, here on the Japanese nationalist fringe. 

China was in Japan’s shadow for decades before the Second World War (actually their war was far longer than the usually accepted dates for this conflict); it was in the shadows for many decades after, a weak giant.  Not any longer.  Chinese economic power has waxed just as Japanese power waned.  With economic prosperity comes political ambition, the Chinese now seeing themselves, and rightly so, as a major regional power. 

The whole question is also complicated by domestic politics in both nations, with the Chinese communist oligarchy playing the nationalist card to deflect attention from internal problems, just as the Japanese government, still under the shadow of the Fukushima disaster, holds a similar card.  In the ensuing international poker it raised the Chinese $30million.  Who holds the winning hand is still to be seen.

I think those unfortunate moles should start looking for another home, though, preferably where there is no trace of oil, of history or of hate.  The Wild Wood might be best.  

Past Present

If I were to chose the point where modern Chinese history began it would not be the overthrow of the Imperial Dynasty and the establishment of the Republic in 1911; no, it would be even more precise than that – it would be 4 May, 1919. 

It was on that day that students demonstrated on the streets of Beijing, protesting against the Treaty of Versailles, specifically the transfer of the German concessions in Shandong Province to Japan, contrary to past promises.  Protest spread across the country, the first spontaneous and populist movement in the country’s history, an upswing of Chinese nationalism far more significant than the events of 1911.

Anger over past grievances, particularly over grievances at the hands of Japan, continues to be an important measure of Chinese national feeling.  The Japanese are also good at remembering past sorrows…at least when it comes to their own.  It's not long since the annual commemoration of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, attended this year by the grandson of President Harry Truman, the man who ordered the attack. 

I’m sure there’s lots of genuine feeling here, a desire that history should be remembered and never be repeated.  I might feel more sympathy but for the fact that I see Hiroshima and Nagasaki used, abused, if you like, as alibis, conveniently wiping out inconvenient memories.  Where is the sorry and wringing of hands, the Chinese might very well, ask, over the Rape of Nanking in 1937, one of the worst atrocities in Japanese imperial history?  That single incident left more dead than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. 

Japanese school texts make fulsome mention of the atomic bombs.  They are a bit more reticent when it comes to other aspects of the the country’s history between 1931 and 1945.  Virtually no mention at all is made of the war, as John Dower highlights in his recently published Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan and the Modern World.  Japanese conservatives are a little less reticent, passing off Imperial Japan’s rampage across Asia as a “holy war” against Western colonialism.

That’s not how the Chinese see it.  They have their own memories of Western colonialism, but Japanese colonialism is much more immediate in the national mind.  The spirit of 4 May 1919 has never really gone away.  It was revived again recently, when thousands of people took to the streets across the country to protest against Japan.  The 19 August Movement, if I can call it that, was triggered by a long-standing dispute between China and Japan over the uninhabited Senkaku or Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. 

Like the May 4 Movement, the demonstrations appear to have been quite spontaneous in nature, sparked off by micro-blogging sites.  There clearly had to be some kind of official sanction – the Communist Party is not averse to occasional expressions of the vox populi – but the authorities are concerned least matters get out of control.  Nationalism in China is a dangerous tiger, ridden at some peril. 

Now directed against Japan, the anger could just as easily turn inwards as the economy begins to show serious signs of slowing down.  It’s particularly sensitive as the Communist Party heads towards its eighteenth national Congress in October, when a major change in the present leadership is expected. 

For China and Japan the past is not a foreign country; it’s part of a naturalised present.  They do things much the same as they have always done.  

Cruel Necessity

This is a piece I wrote on the anniversary of VJ Day- Victory over Japan Day – posted on another site. I’m adding it here for Quiet_Man.

It’s VJ Day today, the sixty-fifth anniversary of Japan’s formal surrender on 15 August 1945, more generally the final end of the Second World War. It was a sudden stop to a conflict that may have gone on well into 1946, perhaps even longer, at an incalculable human cost. This was prevented, thankfully, by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which brought and fanatics in the Japanese government rapidly to some sense of reality.

Thankfully, did I really write that; am I truly thankful for such a terrible event, the curtain raiser to the atomic age? Yes, I am, and I offer no apology whatsoever for my frankness. What I will say is that the atomic bombings were the last act in a dreadful tragedy, one that I personally wish had never happened. But it did. Even God can’t change the past.

The great and terrible paradox is that Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved more lives than were lost. I do hate this kind of calculus, this calculus of mortality, balancing the dead against the probable dead. But it still has to be done. My grandfather served in the East during the war in the Fourteenth Army under Bill Slim. He was one of the first to enter Singapore after the Japanese surrender; one of the first to see the liberation of Changi Prisoner of War Camp, the liberation of men who would not have survived if the war had gone on many weeks longer.

There were so many other men, so many other camps right across the lands still held by the Japanese, so many other men who would have died. But it wasn’t just men. There were women and children, too, held in internment camps where conditions were not much better.

Perhaps the greatest paradox of all is that the atomic bombings saved the Japanese themselves, saved them from the last ditch lunatics who were willing to contemplate the extermination of a whole nation. After the war Kido Koichi, a high Japanese official, estimated that the surrender may have saved as many as twenty million Japanese lives. I would urge those who think this an exaggeration to look at the details of the Battle of Saipan, where the wretched Emperor Hirohito, the one major war criminal to escape retribution, sent out a message to the civilian population ordering them to commit suicide, afraid that people may be favourably impressed by their treatment at the hands of the Americans.

The above thoughts were really brought on by the fact that this year, for the very first time, the United States sent a representative to the annual commemoration of the Hiroshima bombing. On Obama’s initiative John Roos, the ambassador to Japan, laid a commemorative wreath, the closest the country has ever offered to a formal apology for the attack. This is just another empty gesture by PPP, the Peace Prize President, a gesture rightfully condemned by Gene Tibbets, the son of Paul Tibbets, the pilot who dropped ‘Little Boy’ from Enola Gay on August 6, 1945. It was an attempt, Mr Tibbets put it, to rewrite history.

There is one other thing I have to say about rewriting history, or perhaps forgetting history might be better. The Japanese are very good when it comes to remembering their own suffering, remembering events like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They are not so good when it comes to remembering the suffering they inflicted on others, the suffering their militaristic regime inflicted right across Asia and the Pacific. Earlier this year I saw City of Life and Death and John Rabe, two movies which drew my attention to the Rape of Nanking, the greatest war crime of the twentieth century prior to the Holocaust.

Nanking, now Nanjing, was capital of China when it was occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army in 1937. Thereafter they began the wholesale massacre and rape of tens of thousands of civilians, a crime still denied today in Japan. John Rabe, a German businessman and member of the Nazi Party then living in the city, was so horrified by events that he was instrumental in building his own Schindler’s Arc. It comes as something of a shock in John Rabe to see Chinese civilians sheltering under a huge Swastika flag in the grounds of his factory, a banner of salvation, not something one normally associates with that symbol. So, yes, when I look over the whole history, the hypocrisy, dissimulation and self-pity of the Japanese disgusts me.

I want my soul back

In Potsdam, the capital of Brandenburg and the heart of old Prussia, there is a shrine, sacred to the memory of all those who fell for the fatherland. It’s the final refuge for their spirits, their souls. It’s also a celebration of militarism, a celebration of German martial achievements, without qualification. Among the millions of names you will even find those of Hitler, Goring and all those hanged at Nuremberg. Outside, in the main grounds, the guard marches up and down, dressed in Second World War uniform, including the old-fashioned coal scuttle helmet. Yes, they are there, goose-stepping up and down, a comfort to Germany’s nationalist right.

This is outrageous, don’t you agree, how could such a thing be allowed in the heart of the new Europe? It’s simply not possible. Forgive me; I’ve been misleading you; there is no such shrine, which would indeed be an outrage to the memory of all those who suffered and died last century at the hands of the Nazis. But the thing is there truly is such a place or something very like, though it’s not in Germany – it’s in Japan.

On August 6 every year the Japanese gather at Hiroshima to bewail their fate as ‘victims’. On every other day they can go to the Yasukuni Shrine, situated in the Chiyoda district of the capital, to celebrate the spirit of men who carried aggressive warfare across Asia, including former Prime Minister Tojo and all those hanged after the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. And the guard does march up and down under the flag of the Rising Sun.

Though never particularly generous in life to those who served with them – by force – the Japanese are generous in death; for the souls who have been ‘annexed’ include those of 21,000 Taiwanese and 28,000 Koreans, once colonial subjects of the Japanese Empire. They are there in this militarist Shinto paradise whether they like it or not.

Kim Hee Jong does not like it. Kim Hee Jong hates it so much that he has begun a court action in Tokyo to reclaim his soul. What? But how can the dead possibly do such a thing? The thing is he’s not dead, though he was mistakenly reported missing in action during the war. In 2006 he found out to his shame that his name was enrolled at Yasukuni;

I was so angry that I wanted to set fire to the shrine. The war deprived me of a chance to receive an education. That shrine means nothing to me.

As The Times reported on Saturday, Mr Kim is now involved in one of most unusual legal battles in history, a battle over the ownership of his own soul, not claimed by the Devil, though it may as well have been. He is one of eleven plaintiffs, though unique in that the others are the children of the dead. The Yasukuni authorities are resisting the action, claiming that once a soul has been enshrined it cannot be extracted, anymore than a drop of water can be removed from a pool.

This includes Mr Kim, who clearly enjoys the singular distinction of a man whose soul has effectively been stolen and placed in a kind of hell. The court case opens in November.

The Good Nazi

I recently saw City of Life and Death, a Chinese-language movie about the infamous Nanking Massacre of December 1937, an incident in the second Sino-Japanese War. One of the people featured was John Rabe, the German businessman instrumental in setting up the Nanking Safety Zone, a haven for civilians recognised by the Japanese authorities, thereby saving thousands of lives.

I love serendipity, the chance discovery of things I did not know, and I knew next to nothing about this war or the career of John Rabe, rather a pity because in a way he was a much more significant figure in the history of humanitarian causes than Oscar Schindler. Like Schindler, Rabe was a member of the Nazi Party, though he was clearly a man without a Nazi heart, if that makes sense.

Although he features in City of Life and Death he takes on a much more central role in John Rabe, a biopic directed by Florian Gallenberger, starring Ulrich Tukur as Rabe. It was premiered last year at the fifty-ninth Berlin Film Festival, where it won awards for best film, best actor, best production design and best costume design. Tukur also won the best actor prize at the Bavarian Film Awards later that year.

The honours were well-deserved, for his performance is measured, thoughtful and assured. The movie itself, though, has a much more ‘mainstream’ feel, not nearly as powerful, in my estimation, as City of Life and Death, far more emotionally intense in every way.

But even so John Rabe has some sublime moments. There is a scene where the Japanese Air Force is bombing the Siemens factory where Rabe is the manager. The yard is full of Chinese civilians. In a gamble Rabe unfurls a huge Nazi flag and gets everyone to shelter beneath it, hoping the pilots will recognise the symbol of a friendly power. The bombing stops at once. I never, ever thought I would see a swastika as a symbol of salvation!

It’s a reasonably enjoyable, uplifting movie, very much in Hollywood style, about a good Nazi or, rather, a good man, a man with a well developed sense of duty and morality. I saw it online at Watch-Movies.net. There is just one thing. There are no English subtitles, though a good bit of the dialogue among the international community is in English. The rest is in German, including the extracts from Rabe’s Diaries, upon which the movie is based, Mandarin and Japanese. My German is good; my Mandarin and Japanese non-existent! Still, there is very little Chinese dialogue and as the Japanese are almost always shouting it’s reasonably easy to guess what is going on.

The Good Man of Nanking; an Eastern Schindler

Watching City of Life and Death has drawn to my attention the life and career of John Rabe, a German businessman and member of the Nazi Party, who did his best to protect Chinese civilians during the Nanking Massacre. He was instrumental in setting up the Nanking Safety Zone helped to save thousands from the indiscriminate slaughter by the Japanese Army, in what must count as one of the most loathsome acts in that country’s history. Rabe’s conduct enjoys the same moral and practical significance as that of Oscar Schindler in Europe.

Rabe, who had worked in China for many years, explained his reasons for setting up the Safety Zone in simple ethical terms;

…there is a question of morality here…I cannot bring myself for now to betray the trust these people have put in me, and it is touching to see how they believe in me.

While the occupation underway, Rabe effectively used his status as a citizen of a power friendly to Japan, as well as his membership of the Nazi Party, to delay the killings sufficiently to allow thousands of refugees to escape to the Safety Zone, established in embassy district and the city’s university. The Japanese had previously agreed not to attack these areas on the understanding that they were free of Chinese troops. By his actions he is estimated to have saved the lives of up to 250,000 civilians, which makes his achievement if anything more startling than that of Schindler.

On his return to Germany in February 1938 he took with him a large number of documents detailing the things he had witnessed. He also wrote to Hitler asking him to exert his influence to stop the Japanese indulging in any future actions of this kind. His letter was never delivered. Instead he was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo, only released after the intervention of Siemens, the company he worked for. Although he was allowed to keep the evidence he had accumulated he was forbidden from lecturing or writing on the subject.

Rabe died in January 1950. Prior to this the poverty and hunger of his family among the chaos of post-war Germany was ameliorated by the Chinese government, which sent him monthly food and money parcels in thanks for his actions. In 1997, sixty years after the Massacre, his tombstone was moved from Berlin to Nanking, where it was installed in a place of honour at the massacre memorial site.

Death in the City

City of Life and Death, directed by Lu Chuan, is a remarkable and powerful piece of film-making. It deals with what is perhaps one of the most emotive subjects in Chinese history – the Rape of Nanking.

In December 1937 Nanking, then capital of China, fell to the Japanese, following the outbreak earlier that year of the Sino-Japanese war. In the following weeks the Japanese murdered thousands of prisoners of war and civilians, as well as raping thousands of women, sometimes to death.

The exact number of people caught up in this atrocity has never been established with any precision, though the Chinese authorities estimate it at 300,000, not that much greater than the 260,000 given by the International Military Tribunal of the Far East. In Japan, where the episode is bound up in issues of national pride, the figures have been revised sharply downwards.

Clearly numbers are important, though just as important, if not more so, is an understanding that something dreadful happened in this city not excused by quibbling over figures. The only logical position would to reject the history altogether, as indeed have some on Japan's nationalist fringes, their version of Holocaust denial.

In part the movie offers a kind of perspective on the events, that of Kadokawa, a young sergeant in the Imperial Japanese Army, who is both caught up in the violence and bewildered by it, an altogether admirable performance by Hideo Naikaizumi. It does not in any sense detract from the horror; if anything it heightens it, that these crimes are our crimes, not those of monsters or aliens.

But it’s on this point that the movie has proved most controversial. Shortly after it was released in China in April of last year many were shocked enough by the humanised depiction of a Japanese soldier that calls went out to have it deleted from the history of Chinese cinema. Lu even received a number of death threats on his official blog.

Although City of Life and Death continued to have the support of the authorities, it was not included in the official list of films celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, or the Chinese version of the British Academy Awards. Even so this stark and honest movie has been praised outside China, recently winning the prize for best movie at the Asian Film Awards. Whether it is ever screened in Japan remains open to question.