[Translated from Le Figaro (Paris)]

International

Asia

JAPANESE HISTORY TEXT ANGERS KOREANS AND CHINESE
By Jean-Jacques Mével

** Sixty years after the collapse of the Japanese empire, the region's old nationalist wounds are reopening **

Le Figaro (Paris)
April 7, 2005

http://www.lefigaro.fr/international/20050407.FIG0037.html

The Japenese, the Chinese, and the Koreans are having trouble ridding themselves of their ghosts. Sixty years after the collapse of the Japanese empire, the embers of a lingering past are heating up one more, stirred by nationalisms on all sides.

It's the memory of Japanese crimes that is angering Beijing and Seoul anew. Tokyo provided the spark by authorizing, on Tuesday, the publication of a textbook that hides the troublesome chapters of imperial history. Written for secondary school students, the work manages to depict the annexation of Korea (1905) as well as the military occupation of China (beginning in 1931) without ever using the word "invasion."

What's worse, the authors close their eyes on the two exactions that catalyze anti-Japanese sentiment in the region. They call the Nanking massacre an "incident," though it cost the lives of some 300,000 Chinese soldiers, refugees, and raped women in 1937 and 1938. Iris Chang, an American author, has called it a "forgotten Holocaust." The text also ignores the ordeal of the "comfort women," thousands of Korean women reduced to the role of sexual slaves in the bordellos of the imperial army.

This rewriting of History is causing the climate between the archipelago and its neighbors, already tense on account of maritime disputes, to change for the worse. Yesterday Seoul summoned the Japanese ambassador for a protest. Beijing did the same thing in the morning, in order to signal its "indignation." The China Daily, the English-language daily of the Chinese Communist Party, blames Tokyo for refusing to "confront its past," a curious criticism from a communist regime that refuses to acknowledge the phenomenal human cost of Maoism.

Unlike Germany, Japan has never recognized its errors in a way that satisfied the people it conquered. But for all that, there's no prospect of South Korea and the People's Republic of China opening a common front because of the short memory of a minority of Japanese revisionists.

In Seoul, the affair is being treated as a vicissitude. It's giving Roh Moo-hyun, a president who's down in the polls, an occasion to remonstrate against Japan, a rival democracy, but an ally. Seen from Beijing, on the contrary, another step has been taken in an anti-Japanese progression of which the dictatorship does not seem to be completely in control. Nationalism is the regime's fallback ideology. But the Chinese, worked up by years of propaganda, today are agitating much more than their government would like.

Launched before the textbook affair, a petition hostile to Japan's entry into the U.N. Security Council has obtained almost 25 million signatures in the People's Republic, via the Internet. Nothing like this has ever been seen before. "The people, too, can make their voice heard," says Liang Chunyuan, initiator of the text and a young official at Sina.com, one of the great Chinese internet portals.

The regime is apparently playing no role in the spectacular success of this campaign. "We have neither sought nor obtained a green light from the authorities," says Liang Chunyuan. "We have not been forbidden to act, either." His text diverges markedly from the official line. Beijing certainly thinks it hasty to open a debate on the enlargement of the Security Council desired by Kofi Annan. Chinese diplomacy has been careful to avoid expressing publicly its hostility to Tokyo's candidacy.

Other signs show that public opinion is stiffening, especially among young people. Yesterday some Internet users demanded that President Hu Jintao's team take a harder line toward Tokyo by recalling its ambassador, even by "imposing an embargo" on the archipelago. A group of distributors is calling for a "boycott" of the Japanese beer Asahi and of Sumitomo insurance policies. Shop windows showing Japanese products were broken on Sunday in Chengdu, in Szechuan province.

It is not certain that these excesses are approved by the Chinese leadership. In its confidential instructions to the media, censors are being careful: if the repeated criticism of Japan's militarist past is useful to the regime's propaganda, questioning the flourishing trade with the archipelago is forbidden. China, Japan's leading economic partner, has too much to lose there.

Faced with this spectacular anti-Japanese movement, the authorities are afraid above all of losing control of the situation. They will prefer, no doubt, to get on the moving train, hoping to slow down the popular movement that they themselves put on the rails.

--
Translated by Mark K. Jensen
Associate Professor of French
Department of Languages and Literatures
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, WA 98447-0003
Phone: 253-535-7219
Home page: http://www.plu.edu/~jensenmk/
E-mail: jensenmk@plu.edu