Japan's war past sparks Chinese rage
To Japanese exchange students in central China it was just a silly skit. But their Chinese classmates took offense - and took their anger to the streets for two days in the city of Xian, sparking riots and mob attacks on Japanese students and restaurants, a very rare outburst.
The incident raises an old but persistent popular animosity between Asia's main giants as well as the reticence by Japan to confront the roots of Chinese feelings.
Indeed, armed with new rationales about its wartime actions, and with a budding nationalist vernacular, Japan may be further than ever from closing the gap with China over World War II grievances that remain alive more than 50 years later, analysts say.
The little-reported drama began on Oct. 30 at Northwest University when the exchange students, in a fraternity-style joke, wore red bras over T-shirts and a cup over their crotches while dancing to hip-hop music. At this point the facts become blurry, but offense was taken.
An ill wind rapidly gusted into a major storm in Chinese student Internet groups and in Xian, where about 50 Chinese, backed by a thousand angry onlookers, entered a foreigners' dormitory the next day, knocked on doors asking for student nationality, then beat up two Japanese, one a female. On Nov. 1, several thousand Chinese flooded the main avenue of the city, challenging local police over their protection of 42 Japanese students who were removed to a hotel; Japanese restaurants were trashed, and an apology demanded for the skit.
While many registered disappointment at their students, Japanese in Tokyo were shocked by the Chinese virulence.
From Day 1, and as passions flared, Japanese media were under pressure to explain the Chinese anger in Xian. Many causes were given by Tokyo media and TV talk shows: A bad economy in Xian. "Cultural differences." A recent scandal involving 240 Japanese businessmen and 500 prostitutes in Zhuhai. Anger at the Chinese government that was directed through the Japanese. Chinese pique at Japan's effort to make North Korean kidnap victims an international issue.
"The Skit Incident Proves the Effect of Anti-Japanese Education," blared Shincho Weekly, a popular Tokyo magazine with more than a million circulation. "This overreaction [is due] to the consistent anti-Japanese education in China since the end of World War II," the article quoted a Chinese journalist as saying.
All these factors were present, but the one cause that did not make headlines or talk shows in Japan was the issue that Chinese students themselves consistently described as the No. 1 reason for unhappiness: Japanese unwillingness to own up to the past. Many Chinese believe that Japanese do not see the war as wrong, but as a mistake - a distinction quite different in their moral calculus.
Rao Zhishan, a student on a an Internet group, put out a seven-point manifesto on why Chinese students were upset, starting with "Japan's efforts to erase history," and moving to Japan's lack of internal education about the war, compared with that undertaken by Germany.
Animosity between China and Japan is as complicated as the histories between the sides. The Chinese government does use the anti-Japanese war, as it is called, as a propaganda tool to unify the country, experts acknowledge, and as leverage against Japan. Yet Japan's inability to admit wrongdoing gives Beijing the stick it wields, they add. For younger Chinese, it is not the war itself, but a feeling that Japan has never shown proper remorse, that festers.
In the wake of the Xian incident, for example, China Youth Daily this week published an online survey of 1,827 students showing that 83 percent felt negatively about Japanese "reluctance" to admit to war crimes in China. The issue was Japan's refusal to use the term "compensation" - in payment to the victims of mustard-gas canisters unearthed in Heilongjiang Province this summer. The canisters were buried by departing Japanese troops in 1945; one Chinese was killed and nearly a dozen harmed when they were dug up.
"It is too late in Japan to really confront the issues," argues Gerald Curtis of Columbia University. "You had to do that right after the war. This is a generation [in Japan] that no longer feels responsibility."
Yet inside China, it seems, it is not too late to raisethe war issue.
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