Japan/China
The roots of this present flare-up between China and Japan may be embedded in the distant past. China started having an influence on Japan over a thousand years ago with Japan playing Europe to China's Ancient Greece. China is the seat of Japanese learning but I think there's still a desire in the Japanese psyche to show that it is no longer China's student but has done better than its teacher ever could. Japan started getting its own back with the invasion of Manchuria in 1931.
Japan knew that China was on its knees, brought there by English traders intent on replacing the recently closed British Empire-market for opium with a nice lucrative Chinese one. When the Chinese started getting concerned that most of their senior military officers were puffing away and that all their silver bullion was being exported to pay for this they gave the British, and French, an ultimatum - get all your opium out or we'll burn it. We didn't, they did and as a result Parliament in London authorised the use of force to ‘protect British interests’. The Chinese were a walkover and we got Hong Kong.
China faired miserably in its engagement with the West whereas Japan was doing rather well in the 1920s but needed natural resources to do better. China, weak, had lots of it so Japan decided to take it. They invaded and remained in a state of war right up until the 2nd nuclear bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. In the process of trying to take over China they committed every war crime possible. The Rape of Nanjing, the use of Chinese civilians in chemical weapon tests and the kidnapping of Chinese women to serve as free vagina for front-line troops are documented.
Following Japan's unconditional surrender in 1945 it concluded peace treaties with various countries. Its one with China came in 1978. Part of that treaty with China was that Chinese citizens would have no private rights to pursue claims against Japan. There are still cases in the highest Japanese courts being brought by Chinese and Korean nationals, people in their 70s plus, who have never been compensated. The Japanese government, supported by the courts, maintains that all claims were settled by the relevant treaties although, to partly answer MBM, many of the crimes that are involved have only came to light following the signing of those treaties. In fact, for years the Japanese government consistently denied the truth of the allegations, right up to their being proved by historians ferreting about in governmental archives. The 20,000 or so women forced to suck Japanese dick had to wait until 1995 before the Japanese owned up. Even then, the government, rather than take responsibility on a governmental level, set up a non-governmental fund to ‘help them out’. Unit 731, the one responsible for chemical weapon tests, was claimed not to have existed at all until a member of the unit unloaded his conscience in the US press in the late 80s, I think it was. See:
http://www.technologyartist.com/unit_731 In fact, documents subsequently released in the US show that the scientists responsible were spared prosecution for war crimes in return for giving all the data from their tests to the US military.
In all this, there is a strong tendency in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (the LDP, neither liberal nor democratic) to deny that Japan did anything wrong during what we call World War II. The women are referred to as ‘comfort women’, and are dismissed as common prostitutes; the Rape of Nanjing simply ‘never happened’ and is merely anti-Japan propaganda. They claim instead that Japan invaded Asia in order to free it from the yoke of Western Colonialism and point to their postwar independence as proof.
What you have to realise about the LDP, and thus the Japanese establishment, is that many of its senior members have direct connections with the pre-war military dictatorship. Yoshio Kodama is a good example.
Kodama was arrested by the US military and tried in the war crimes courts in Tokyo after the war. He was found guilty and classed as a Class A War Criminal but after 2 years in Sugamo prison was inexplicably released. Documents released in the US in around 1995 showed that he’d been on the CIA payroll ever since getting out. The point is that Kodama was a 'Kuromaku', a secret power behind the throne in the LDP. He was also an 'oyabun' (master) and his 'kobun' (pupil) was Yasuhiro Nakasone, Prime Minister from 1982 to 1987. Nakasone's kobun in turn is Ryutaro Hashimoto, Prime Minister from 1996 to 1998. There are many other such direct lines from those who took Japan into war in the 1930's to those who rule Japan today. Junichiro Koizumi is considered by many as the most nationalist of post-war prime ministers. His grandfather was a politician in the pre-war years. Koizumi's in favour of widening Japanese forces’ role abroad to include battle zone stuff, presently outlawed by the Japanese constitution. In itself perhaps not a clear indication of latent imperialism but coupled with his unconstitutional (separation of religion and state clause) visits to Yasakuni shrine, which along with the rest of Japan’s war dead houses the spirits of 20 or so Class A war criminals, it does suggest that Koizumi is a chip off the old block.
The Chinese, on the other side of the Sea of Japan, are very like the Japanese. They don’t own up to their past either. The recent riots were supposed to have been a result of Chinese people’s ire at the Japanese government’s authorisation of new history textbooks that gloss over Japan’s war time conduct, referring, for example, to the Rape of Nanjing as an ‘incident’. However, Chinese textbooks make no mention of the estimated 20 million Chinese who died of starvation as a direct result of the collectivisation of farming during Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’. Nor the thousands who were killed in Tianamen Square or during the ‘Cultural Revolution’, or of the $30 billion Japan has poured into China in grants since the 1978 treaty.
The Japanese for the main part know very little of the events leading up to Japan’s aggression or what went down when that aggression got under way. They don’t learn it at school. Just like the Chinese don’t learn their history at school. And you all know the cliché – those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it. I think they deserve each other. The reconciliation that has happened between European countries in the past 50 years is nowhere on the horizon here, except businessmen from both countries seem to get on fine.
Of course, while it denies having any hand in the ‘spontaneous outrage’ of its citizens there is no doubt that the Chinese leadership has given tacit approval. As polystyle des points out, the Chinese people have a lot to be pissed off about and like Gaultieri of Argentina and his attempt to deflect attention from his failures as leader by taking up the cause of the Malvinas, and Thatcher doing exactly the same in rising to the defense of the UK’s sovereign territory, there’s no doubt that the leadership in China is doing just the same old, same old. As polystyle des says, it’s one thing to turn the tap on but it can become very hard to turn it off again – they are playing a dangerous game.
The Japanese in general are not prone to public disorder and displays of violence as they’ve been watching on TV and are puzzled and frightened by it. They also, of course, know little about what Japan did to China during the war as they are not taught it in school – Japanese history courses in high schools tend to run out of time when it gets to the 20th century and what the Chinese are pissed off about. Japan does have its hotheads in the ‘Uyoku’ or extreme right wing, a bit like the National Front or British Party except they are well financed, have their own militias and are known to be very cosy with both the Yakuza and the LDP.
Japan has actually apologised to China and other Asian countries about the suffering it caused its neighbours on numerous occasions but in the case of China I understand that this has not been reported in the press there and the Chinese people are mostly ignorant of the fact. However, you get the feeling that the apologies are just for form’s sakes, especially when you have the government on the whole refusing to acknowledge specific war crimes and calling them groundless anti-Japanese propaganda. History teachers are instructed by the education ministry to concentrate on the good things, or ‘otherwise young Japanese people will never feel the deep love for their country that they should’. From that you can read loads but the irony is completely lost on those in power in the Land of the Unrepentant War Criminal. You may be interested to know that as with Bush’s support in the US, the LDP’s main support comes from the rural parts of Japan. Indeed, during Japan’s aggression in China and all the way up to the Pacific War the main opposition to the militarists came from those living in the cities while their supporters were mostly rural.
To bibedaldave, the sub-text of all this is the future power balance in the region. Japan looks to be rearming itself and removing the constitutional barriers to strutting abroad, and this with US encouragement as part of its strategy to contain China as it gets rich enough to start strutting ITS stuff and threatening US power everywhere. At least, that’s what it looks like to me. Part of that is to secure oil, as polystyle des points out, as both countries are largely dependant on imported. And that’s why Japan went to war before. It’s lack of oil also made it unable to take over the world as planned.