JAPANESE WORDS AN ECHO FROM THE PAST

By Daryl Guppy 

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There is a thread running through Asia. In Singapore it sits as a vacant square on the edge of bustling China Town, a quiet acknowledgement of the sook ching massacres. In Malaysia it’s more often found in literature seeking to balance cooperation with obligation. In Korea it’s found in the decades long struggle to overcome the shame of forced  sexual slavery. Through the sweep of the Indonesian archipelago, it   is an unspoken history, deliberately suppressed to leave death march ghosts undisturbed. 

 For some foreign visitors it’s a journey of remembrance, an ancestral  homage aimed at reconciliation or an attempt at comprehension at infamous bridges across Thai rivers.

For all in Asia, these are the, at times not-so-gentle reminders, of Imperial Japan’s rape of Asia.   

In China the truths of the Nanjing massacre, the atrocities of the Manchu Detachment Unit 731  and the exact language of the policy aggression and subjectation persist in memory. 

For the Western powers even the memory of the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Japan remained buried in history, barely acknowledged and with no evidence of lessons learned. With casual indifference, they assume that Asia, like themselves,  have forgotten or forgiven.

Words have the power of remembrance. Germany no longer speaks of the concept of lebensraum- living space -  that underpinned its attacks in Eastern Europe because Europe would be appalled at the memory and implied intent.

Japan’s Prime Minister Takaichi has revived the Japanese equivalent of ‘lebensraum’  with  her recent use of the term "survival-threatening situations" in relation to Taiwan. It was the exact policy philosophical language that justified Japan’s attacks on Manchuria, China, and then the broader Asian region.  

China’s response is robust because it recognises the historical resonance. Survival-threatening situations is the policy term justifying Japan’s  casus belli or  cause of war.   Its most recent resurrection  cannot be dismissed as a casual mistake. It marks a warning of policy shift.

China's response bewilders the US and its western allies because they dismiss the influence of history that they have not written for themselves.

The shivers of genuine history rippled most uncomfortably in China but they did not pass unnoticed elsewhere in the region. South Korea fell victim to the same policy language.

The difference in Asian and European perception of Takaichi's  statement is rooted in different experiences of  war against Japan.

For America, the battle of the Pacific is largely about the protection and ultimate extension of  US interests in the Philippines and the scattered islands of the  Pacific. For the European colonial powers the Far Eastern  theatre was  about the reclamation of empire and the protection of European supremacy and trade. 

It is remembered in Asia, but not in the West, that in restoring of these colonial orders they quickly recruited and rearmed the recently defeated Japanese enemy as militia enforcers of the European return.

The contemporary Western interlocuters in Asia fail to understand the depths of the reservoir of antipathy towards a militarised Japan. There is an unalterable geography at play that has nothing to do with island  chains so central to US strategic thinking.  China is central to Asia. It is a cultural foundation weaving historical threads through every political interaction of Asia. It is the weft and weave of the Far East, including Japan.

But  China has not aspired to military domination of the entity of Asia and the Far East. Only when under the control of the  a non-Han led Yuan dynasty  did the political entity extend across the plains of central Asia.

Japan is the only Asian nation to attempt to impose military domination on the entire region. It was an aggression so unusual, so unique, in the history of  Asia that it cannot be conveniently forgotten. The brutality, still unacknowledged by Japan, adds to the persistence of memory.

Western nations under-estimate the depth of remembrance, of fear and of trepidation that drives the response to the remilitarisation of Japan. This sets an approach to the region that diverges from the commercial cooperation that developed following the 1945 defeat.

The western idea that Asia will happily accept a militarily resurgent Japan is a  deeply flawed idea rooted in a  poor understanding of lived regional history. 

Western thinking is that Japan is a bulwark against China. For many in Asia, the feeling is that China is a bulwark against Japan’s resurgent military ambitions. 

In their eagerness to halt China's progress, the West is happy to believe that the policy of  "survival-threatening situations" contains only benign intentions because Japan’s militarisation serves their own purposes of China containment.

 The deepest and growing fear in Asia is that the West’s poor understanding of Asia will bring war to the region. The blood red thread running through Asia is neither frayed nor broken.  ”