Pivot to peace
- By Josef Gregory Mahoney
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E-mail Beijing Review, April 4, 2014
To be sure, there are tensions in East Asia and they must be handled very carefully. However, we should not conflate the cause of WWI with today's problems. Furthermore, we should not forget how European powers set in motion many of the problems that Asia is trying to sort through today. And we should not neglect the most important fact that today's disagreements are not rooted in a Chinese attempt to establish the sort of imperial domination practiced by the European powers at that time. With this in mind it is also important to note that it remains farfetched to assume that the desire to push back against American hegemony is tantamount to trying to take America's position as the same. This sort of fear mongering has only served the purpose of justifying the so-called American "pivot" toward Asia in the aftermath of its terrible campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. The unsubstantiated threat of a new but unlikely hegemony is being used to justify and continue an old one.
Without question, many positive outcomes emerged from Germany's defeat in WWII, although it would be a terrible mistake to suggest that these were so thoroughgoing or without serious defects. That said, Germany's defeat and occupation do not compare with Japan's: the former was split into two separate countries and dominated by opposing international forces; the latter was occupied primarily by the United States, which not only crafted the postwar immunity for many of Japan's wartime instigators, it also quickly turned its attention to focusing on new enemies in China and North Korea, and found in Japan a common cause and alliance. This is to say, therefore, that the Japanese defeat was not as thorough or long-lasting at the one experienced in Germany, although the experiences of nuclear war at Hiroshima and Nagasaki tend to obscure this point for many.
The division and occupation of Germany, the relatively thorough accounting of war crimes and the meting out of punishments, the various efforts to come to terms with certain atrocities, like the Holocaust, and so on, can all be counted as important steps that have taken place in Germany and that have few comparable examples in Japan. To make matters worse, some perceive Japan as actually moving in the opposite direction, even today. The continuing practice of Japanese leaders visiting shrines that include the remains of executed war criminals, the charges that Japanese textbooks continue to whitewash Japanese culpability for atrocities, the continuing equivocations over whether Japan forced Korean women to serve as sex slaves, and the denial of responsibility for forced-labor in China and elsewhere continue to be indefensibly provocative for many.
There are those who believe that human progress is impossible and others who believe it is inevitable. A more reasonable position is to hold that progress is possible through sustained, positive efforts, particularly efforts to rectify injustices. It might well be the case the some injustices are so grave that a full rectification is impossible. It might also be the case that those who have been harmed must allow or even help create reasonable openings for justice to occur, and to do so without exploiting the past in ways that do little more than perpetuate old problems or create new ones.
Perhaps wary of the subtext of Chinese President Xi Jinping's recent trip to Europe, Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, has made a special point of visiting Anne Frank's house in Amsterdam, paying homage to her suffering under the Nazis. In part, this visit was a direct response to the vandalism of some 300 copies of Frank's autobiography in Tokyo libraries, but it should also be read in the context of tensions in Asia. Perhaps in the future Abe and other Japanese leaders instead should consider coupling their visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine with visits to memorials honoring those who were harmed by Japanese aggression. Many such memorials exist throughout Asia, and many more, like Iwane Matsu's Kannon, should be built in Japan itself. More fundamentally, a fuller accounting of the past remains vitally necessary.
The author is an associate professor of politics at East China Normal University; research fellow with the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Fudan University; and assistant editor of U.S.-based Journal of Chinese Political Science
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