The Concept of Irony

So the Chinese press is shaking with vitriol about Koizumi’s visit to Yasukuni.

The China-Japan relationship is one particularly fascinating part of life here. It shows, in many ways, how unwilling – or unable – to think millions of people are in this society. For they misunderstand the past, present and the likely future. And they are blind to the crashing irony and hypocrisy which riddles their belief.

I should perhaps begin by saying that Japan’s conduct in the war was a crime against humanity of the gravest degree, lest this blog be overwhelmed by young hotheads who, at the hint of a supposed conciliatory gesture to Japan, will begin to froth at their anonymous mouths. The horrors they committed at Nanjing were overwhelmingly evil, and the bone pits on display at the Nanjing Massacre Museum are a sight I will not forget.

But here’s how the Japan argument plays out with the average, say, Tongji student, who (being at that university) is generally a bright person.

Me: “It was 60 years ago. Why are you still angry?”
Student: “They have not apologized for the war.”
Me: “They have. Numerous times, for example Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama in 1995, or PM Ryutaro Hashimoto in 1997, or Junichiro Koizumi in 2005.”
Student: “Oh… are you sure? I never heard that. Well.. anyway… they do not teach the truth in their history books.”
Me: “The history book to which you agree is indeed offensive.” (Smile of righteous victory begins to play across student’s face; student’s shoulders begin to tense back in patriotic fervor)
Me: “But it is taught in less than one percent of schools.”
Student: “Oh… are you sure? I never heard that.”
Me: “I am. Let me ask you a question. Do you think educators or the government should choose the syllabus in your university?”
Student: “Educators. The government does not know what it best, and I wish at my university the teachers could decide what to teach.”
Me: “Well, in Japan, educators decide what to teach, not the government. The content of the books is not a direct government choice. ”
Student: : “Oh… are you sure? I never heard that.”
Me: “When that book was published, there were large demonstrations against it. 30,000 people marched in the streets to protest it.”
Student: “Oh… are you sure? I never heard that.”
Me: “What do you think would happen if people tried a public demonstration like that here?”
Student giggles.
Me: “Did you know the PRC signed a joint communiqué in 1972 waiving all war reparations, and in 1978 signed a treat of peace and friendship with Japan?”
Student: “Oh… are you sure? I never heard that.”
Me: “Did you know that when the war ended Japan left about US$100 billion of assets in China, which it agreed to leave as reparation?”
Student: : “Oh… are you sure? I never heard that.”
Me: “Did you know Japan is China’s number one aid donor?”
Student: : “Oh… are you sure? I never heard that.”

And so on.

It’s a curious double world, China, where it is fine to hate Japan, de rigueur to puff up with nationalist arrogance and demand ‘Japan face up to history,’ while at the same time wallowing in the grossest ignorance of China’s own recent history. The truth of the matter is that the CPC in general and Mao Zedong in particular have killed far more Chinese people, have hurt China far more profoundly than ever the Japanese did. But that is a truth too far for China, and here people are more comfortable with their simple world view, China good, Japan bad, with their simple surety that Japan is, was and always shall be evil, with their shallow-minded reliance on mathematical tricks to prove this contention – such as, for example, their oft-repeated claim that the Japanese killed 300,000 in the Nanjing Massacre, a figure which a cooler-headed look at history suggests is simply not true.

And it really is an alarming thing to hear students talk about Japan. The anger that comes into their voice, the real passion and hatred… I can understand their grandparents’ anger, for that anger comes from direct experience. But for them, who have never been hurt by Japan, it is astonishing, shocking in its brutal, visceral and unthinking conviction. I have met students in class who have actually wept when talking about Japan. It is absurd; how can they hold such hatred to something that never affected them?

It seems to me China is in love with its suffering; its people clutch the Nanjing massacre and all that to their hearts, they dance and romance their pain. It defines them; it is them. And, mired in their unthinking ignorance, what they do not see is that in so hating Japan they are learning precisely the lessons that the Japanese of that earlier generation learned – the absolute contempt for another race that allows such atrocities to be committed.

And the irony of it, the irony! So on the front page of yesterday’s China Daily there’s a photo of Japanese people, in Japan, protesting about Koizumi’s visit to the shrine. Japanese people protest, and the government will at least listen. Chinese people protest, and what happens? The government sends in the fucking tanks. People here are too busy hating Japan to see that it is the freedoms Japanese people have that they should be clamoring for instead.

But of course this is precisely why the CPC encourages hatred of Japan. In doing so, it can take the minds of the people off internal problems and focus them on external ones. The way that the CPC uses the appalling cruelty of wartime Japan to bolster its grip on power shows the most breathtakingly arrogant cynicism, the most profound contempt for the suffering of the Chinese people of the time. But most people here are blind to this. Nor, having the haziest understanding of democracy, do they see that Koizumi has to go to the shrine to show he is not being bossed around by other Asian nations. Not that that means Japan is militaristic – indeed, in the year that I worked there I found the people to be remarkably peaceful, though at that time I did not specifically look into their feelings about China.

And textbooks, let’s talk about teaching truth in schools, shall we? The Cultural Revolution, for example, that decade long period of lunacy in which thug scumbag Mao said, “Destroy the old and the new will take care of itself,” a period in which tens of thousands were murdered. In Chinese school textbooks (and I have checked) it gets two paragraphs, and, in the teacher’s guide, the instructions say “The teacher need not linger on this topic.” These same textbooks lie that the Great Famine was a natural disaster, and that Mao was ‘70% right 30% wrong,’ that the CPC did fighting against the Japanese in the war (whereas in fact the Guomindang did all the fighting after the CPC refused to join their ‘United Front’ against Japan).

And irony upon irony… In the features section of yesterday’s Shanghai Daily there’s a piece about “My grandfather Mao Zedong” in which his granddaughter has the gall, the absurdity to claim:-

“He was a son, husband and father firstly, a statesman secondly.”

There is nothing about this statement that is true.

Mao let both his father and mother die alone, though he had the chance to be with both as they died. He regularly abandoned wives and children, and for his whole life his sole center of concern was himself. And this woman, this granddaughter, even admits she never met Mao (who clearly did not give a fuck about her) yet has the unparalleled gall to claim he was a family man!

Or let’s talk about how Mao ran the Jiangxi Red Army base between 1931 and 1935. During his rule, the population dropped by 20%. Seven hundred thousand people died from non-natural causes. Half of these deaths were from people executed as ‘class enemies’ or from slave labor. In the case of the ‘class enemies’ Mao and his cronies thought up tortures every bit as brutal as the Japanese. For example, a wire would be run through the penis and the ear, and then plucked like a violin-string by the torturer; or a red-hot gun-barrel would be inserted in the anus.

And are people here clamoring for this truth to be faced up to? Or do they rather put Mao on the banknotes, his portrait in Tiananmen Square, his murderer’s face on a million busts and million statues? One of the greatest murderers of the 20^th century but he’s a hero here.

Now the lies told in China do not make the lies told in Japan any less serious. They are no excuse not to be critical of Japan. But aside from a few wishy-washy generalities such as the bogus percentage above, local people (save for a tiny minority who see that to know their history is the true way to love their country), mostly live in total ignorance of the last half century’s terrors. Yes, some anger at Japan is justified, but nothing like the passionate hatred that soaks this society. And what is worse? To be hurt by an enemy (as in the case of Japan and China) or be hurt by a friend (as in the case of the CPC wallowing in the blood of its own people). attacking

“That’s all in the past” students will tell me, and so it is. “We know all this” they will say (only they do not; they but know it in the most general, vague terms) “But what is the point of talking about it?” Why, then, are Japan’s atrocities not in the past? Ah, the double standards of this society.

I am a man who knows something about double standards. So back to that next time.