History Issues among Post-industrialization Japan, Korea, and China, 1980–2010
After the Cold War ended, Japan shifted politically to the right mainly for economic and history reasons. This shift deeply provoked strong reactions from Chinese and Korean politicians and publics. As Japanese companies began losing jobs and moving factories to take advantage of cheaper labor and higher profits in countries like Korea, China, and Taiwan, Japan’s economy became more closely connected to these countries. Japan had more unstable service jobs that often could not provide a living wage even for full-time workers. In addition, the democratization of Korea and Taiwan meant that elected politicians there were more willing to publicly discuss wartime grievances rather than focusing solely on economic development as past military governments had done. Along with the death of Emperor Hirohito in 1989, a watershed year, Japan’s wartime history became something that could be investigated and apologized for. These complex, interacting economic, political, and social changes across East Asia brought wartime memories back to the forefront for politicians throughout the region.
Amamiya Karin serves as an insightful example for understanding Japan’s neo-nationalism shift in the 1990s, given her firsthand experience with jobless and ultranationalist subcultures. When Amamiya tried to find a job after high school graduation at age 19, having failed the entrance exam for art college, the manager said: “Even if you work here full-time, you won’t be able to live on that. Is that ok?” (Amamiya, p256). Some of her friends still could not find a full-time job even into their 30s. One friend’s father said, “You know, Dad isn’t going to be healthy forever” (p. 257). These real-life examples showed the desperate situations faced by young people under a bad economic climate, and many could not bear it and suicided. Instading hiring locals, stores were more likely to hire Korean girls since they could pay them less. There were also comments like “Chinese are stealing our jobs,” and a person turned patriotic and anti-immigrant after she lost her job when the factory moved to China (p263). We can see how the economic recession led to right-wing patriotic sentiment. But how exactly did the recession come about and how did it influence politics in Japan?
In the time of ‘post-industrialization’, the service industry has become increasingly centralized in the process after deindustrialization (Toivonen p3). Unemployment rates doubled or more than doubled for all age groups between 1990 and 2003, and employment in manufacturing dropped from 34 percent to less than 28 percent. Jobs became less “life-term” and more “short-term” ( p4, 5). Even nominal “part-time workers” need to work long hours and violations of labor laws are widely tolerated with low pay (p7). The school system offering semi-formal employment contracts between schools and companies, ensuring consistent recruitment of students was not effective after the 1980s. Additionally, the Japanese government has no good activation system that offers welfare to young people and sympathizes with the role of family (p17). Eventually, the new word NEET, “nito” in Japanese, became popular to describe a wider and older range of 760,000 unmotivated unemployed 15 to 34 year old young people in 2003 (p15). The young people were in desperate situations on either the micro (that AMAMIYA personal perspective) or macro level as shown above with statistics. The New God, this high unemployment rate led people to think how to make the country great again. Some of them chose to blame America, and wished normalization could make Japan great again in the 90s.
The history issue can partly be blamed on the U.S. that suppressed the trial regarding the issues of Unit 731 in Harbin, China and the Korean comfort women in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Dower, p12). The first apology attempt was in 1972 by Premier Kakuei Tanaka for the 1937 invasion. This became an enduring memory and part of the delayed peace that has never been fully resolved even today. Since there is no trial to sort out the facts, the history could be easily manipulated.
“From Chen’s socialist/internationalist perspective, it is crucial to distinguish imperialists from ordinary people who also suffer from the ills of imperialism.” (Ching, p41) The War of Resistance was not a war between the governments of Tokyo and Nanjing. Instead, it was a war between Japanese imperialists and the entire Chinese people. From a communist perspective, the suffering normal Japanese should also fight against Japanese imperialists. This clear separation of people and imperialists was reiterated by Premier Zhou Enlai in the 1972 Communiqué normalizing diplomatic relations between Japan and the PRC, representing a delayed peace as defined by John Dower. As Jager said, “Mao downplayed the memory of the war—and Chinese victimization—in order to focus on more positive aspects of China’s past that would serve as a model for building its communist future.” (p14, Jager) In the lecture, Prof. Mizuno said there was already secret trade with Japan, such as fertilizer, due to the urgent need for reconstruction after the civil war and failed policies like the Great Leap Forward. Furthermore, Mao assured Japan that it was the “help” of the Japanese invasion that made the Communist victory possible (p 9, Jager). This implied that the Japanese Empire greatly reduced the war potential of Nationalist China, leading to the later win of the CCP. Thus, the PRC could not glorify the war, as it would have also highlighted the positive aspects of the ROC, which was what Mao did not want to see. Mao needed the ROC to remain depicted as evil in order to justify the civil war from his perspective.
However, after Mao’s death, the post-communist era began. In 1982, Japan changed their textbook, and Prime Minister Nakasone’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine in 1985 for the 40th anniversary of WWII triggered large protests from the PRC (p10, Jager). This was not an isolated case, as the whole of Chinese society started to treat this history seriously. As Jager said, one reason is that after Chinese economic reform in 1978, China got rid of their communist policies in economics. This led many people to question “are we still communist countries?”. Thus, there was a need for a new foreign attraction which was based on war memories. There were significantly more books, movies, and three massive museums about: the 1937 Nanjing massacre, the 1937 Marco Polo bridge incident, and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. (p10) In the chapter “Japanese Devils,” Jager depicted more on the dislikeness towards the Japanese using the Chinese term “鬼子” (Japanese devils) in Chinese popular culture.
Another important reason is the shift related to Taiwan after the civil war. After being defeated, the ROC moved to Taiwan and took control of all economic and political power. One obvious incident was the 228 incident where the KMT killed most of the local elites from the Japanese occupation period, which became part of the collective memory in current Taiwan. Before Taiwan’s democratization, KMT claimed China as a lost land of the Republic of China, clearly standing for the “One China” policy in the Three Communiqués. There is only one China in the world, vaguely implying it could be either the ROC or PRC. However, after democratization in the 90s, in 1996 the first democratically-elected president Li Deng-hui became the first one to publicly state that unification is no longer a goal for Taiwan (Jagor, p25). This greatly annoyed the PRC, which claimed multiple times that the PRC would never give up the right to use military force if Taiwan declares independence.
The War of Resistance provided justification for One China. Since both the CCP and KMT fought side-by-side, Arif Dirlik believed in the 80s started focusing on collaboration with them, which addressed “One China” - that it’s just two parties, not two countries. The war memory is something that can form the nationalism of China as a collective memory of humiliation. And this can help unity after the 1989 Tiananmen Square event, reinforcing that China definitely cannot split again or even democratize without becoming weak again.
Clearly, there is another party involved in the war memory issue - Korea. During the Cold War, North Korea was highly supported by the Soviet Union and had a similar GDP to South Korea. The 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and South Korea brought $300 million in reparations for South Korean industrialization, starting the “Miracle on the Han River” (lecture). After the Cold War ended, there was no more threat from “a shell of a nation” and trapped countries needing help. Initiated by South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, the Sunshine Policy, along with rising pan-Korean nationalism in South Korea, has driven a search for national reunification and a reevaluation of the North Korean threat. This nationalism reflects a desire for normalization between the two Koreas and a shift away from confrontation (p43-44, Jager). The Korean war memory also includes the unresolved question of the U.S. role in Korea’s division. As the No Gun Ri massacre of civilians became public, anti-American sentiment grew sharply. The issue of “comfort women” reemerged in the early 1990s as Korean women victimized by Japan’s systematic wartime sexual slavery began speaking out and filing lawsuits. Due to mounting pressure from complaints by Asian countries in the 1990s after the “liberal world” won the Cold War, apologies became an unavoidable solution for Japan. In 1993, the New Party took control of the Diet in Japan, followed by the Renewal Party forming a coalition government led by socialist Murayama Tomiichi in 1994, which began issuing apologies to various countries. As Prof. Mizuro said in his lecture, most funds went to the Philippines with few Koreans accepting compensation due to community disapproval and risk of losing other Korean benefits. However, Japan’s apologies were “forgotten” after 1996 as textbooks were rewritten reflecting a neoconservative view that wartime Japan liberated Asia from Western imperialism (p3-4, Takenaka), which triggered protests in Korea.
In the new century, one well-known protest in China was in 2005, the year of the 60th anniversary of Japanese defeat in the War of Resistance. Former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro visited Yasukuni Shrine every year during his term. The protest was nationwide lasting for 3 days and stopped by Beijing due to economic worries. After this Japanese Devil was put into the flash movie “Kill Them Together”, that makes no difference with Japanese people and “guizi”, as a symbol of consumerism and nationalism in cyberspace (pp 49). The issue of war memories between South Korea and Japan is temporarily officially settled, repeating similar stories from last century。
War memories of the Japanese post-war generation are different from those of its neighbors. The younger ones never experienced the war, so history is mainly from Victim’s History, written by the survivors from the air raids and occupation of Americans. The people became the victims of their own government from a generic war (p11, Takenaka). Also, the generation of Amamiya’s age in the 1990s didn’t share any profit from the post-war prosperity. They simply think the Americans and Article 9 blocked their happiness and learned from reading cheap populist magazines, since she cannot afford the price of a real book (p259, Amamiya).
Dower said “Denunciation versus denial of Japanese war crimes has become a multi-directional and almost ritualistic cycle.”(p15) The article mainly focused on China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan, examining the reasons behind the rise of Japanese right-wing sentiment after the 1980s and its connections to economic factors. It also discussed how wartime memories were utilized by multiple parties in these countries, mainly China, as a political tool to serve different agendas.