China and Japan’s new honeymoon

All this provides an official facade of warming relations between the two countries. Official relations are very warm, but true rapprochement may not come easily. There is mutual distrust that needs not years, but decades to dispel. Anti-Japanese protests have subsided in China since sometimes violent demonstrations were seen in 2005, but the Chinese who suffered atrocities at the hands of the Japanese army cannot so easily let bygones be bygones. Their hatred of the Japanese persists and will erupt into violence if purposely rekindled.

Very severe Japanese criticism of Beijing’s human rights record in Tibet ahead of the Summer Olympics in August, for instance, may trigger a nationalistic outburst that can put an abrupt end to the new official Sino-Japanese honeymoon. The fact is that the prevailing anti-Japanese sentiment has constrained Chinese leaders despite official efforts to convince the public of the benefits of better ties with Japan. The leaders cannot go too far ahead of these popular anti-Japanese feelings. They will be in trouble, if they do.

The Japanese, who subserviently used to learn from China for more than a millennium, have turned that China worship into a disdain for anything Chinese after their rout of China in the war of 1894-95. They acquired Taiwan as a colony and soon began their aggression in China to build its short-lived empire in Great East Asia.

Now that China has emerged as an economic powerhouse, the Japanese look at it as a threat not only to their national security but to their leadership in the regional economy as well. Asia has been Japan’s economic backyard since its emergence after the Korean War and the Japanese hate to see that leadership challenged by an upstart China. Japan certainly sees China as a very important trading partner, but the Japanese feel extremely uneasy about the real possibility that China will take over Japan as the economic power in Asia.

This mutual skepticism may yet irrevocably doom negotiations to settle outstanding issues, including a festering feud over East China Sea gas fields, Japan’s attempts to whitewash the atrocities the Imperial Army committed in wartime China, and its Cabinet ministers making annual pilgrimages to the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, where the war dead are honored.

It is Fukuda who is orchestrating the new warming-up in Sino-Japanese relations to boost his sagging popularity among the Japanese people, which bodes for his earlier-than-scheduled retirement as prime minister. He does not have to call a general election in two years, but it is highly likely that Taro Aso, a rightist former foreign minister, may replace him before the end of this year. Aso may reverse the pro-China trend. There is little doubt that the deep chill in relations between China and Japan while Koizumi was at the helms of the state will return after Fukuda bows out. However, the road to rapprochement isn’t strewn with roses but remains bumpy ahead regardless of who may succeed him.

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