|
2 items. Tensions between China and Japan escalate as Japan accuses China of tapping disputed oil reserves: Japanese
reconnaissance aircraft in September detected flames atop a stack on a Chinese
drilling platform -- an indication it is functional and may have started gas or
oil extraction. The platform had been under construction for two years but did
not function while Japan and China wrangled over drilling rights in the area,
about halfway between Shanghai and Okinawa. A second Chinese
drilling platform in the area also appears nearly complete, officials said, and
Japan has detected signs that China's state oil company is close to finishing a
pipeline to the platforms that would connect them to the Chinese mainland.
Twice in the past six weeks, Japanese officials said, they have detected five warships dispatched by China "in
a show of force" near the drilling sites. Beijing has said the ships were merely conducting
"ordinary exercises" in the region. How Japan responds,
analysts said, will signal much about whether the Tokyo government is prepared
to enter a new era of assertiveness to protect its national interests. In the
post-World War II era, Japan has tended to shy away from anything resembling
aggression, choosing to solve disputes through diplomacy instead. Official surveys say
the disputed fields contain an estimated 7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas
and up to 100 billion barrels of oil.
Japan
has suggested that the two sides settle the dispute by agreeing to co-develop energy in the
East China Sea. China
and Japan discussed the proposal in talks earlier this month in Tokyo, but the
two sides strongly disagreed on the areas of cooperation. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/21/AR2005102101933.html Koizumi's visits boost controversial version of history By Robert Marquand, Staff writer
of The Christian Science Monitor,
Oct. 21, 2005 TOKYO - Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's fifth visit to
the Yasukuni shrine this week on a drizzly morning set off angry protests in
Asia. China canceled a visit by the Japanese foreign minister, no small thing.
Yasukuni holds the remains of 14 Class A war criminals hanged after World War
II, and is regarded as symbol of Japan's perceived failure to atone for its
killing sprees in and brutal occupation of Asia 60 years ago. The Shinto shrine, a solemn wooded acre in downtown Tokyo,
private, and filled with purple and yellow chrysanthemums, seems an unlikely
focus for either Asian anger or rising Japanese nationalism. Mr. Koizumi says
the shrine visits are an internal affair and no one else's business. Some of
his advisers feel that if Koizumi keeps visiting, the world will get bored and
forget. Yet a prime reason why that wish may not come true is found
on the grounds of the shrine, a few paces from where Koizumi dropped a coin and
prayed. It is a boxy refurbished museum called the Yushukan, whose self-professed
aim is to "shed a new light on modern Japanese history." In fact, the museum appears to be regularizing an extremist narrative about Japan's 20th-century military
behavior and role in Asia. No mention is made of Japanese soldiers subjugating
Asia and its populations. Rather, the new history portrays Japan as both the
martyr and savior of Asia, the one country willing to drive "the foreign
barbarians," as one panel describes them, from the Orient. The unapologetic nationalism, emperor worship, and military
glorification offer graphic clues about why Asians remain concerned about
"the lessons learned" by Japan after the war, to borrow the phrase
used often in post-Nazi Germany. This week, after Koizumi visited the shrine, thousands of
Japanese paid $10 to visit Yushukan, with its 20 rooms, high-tech displays, and
two theaters. They saw and heard that Japan occupied China and Korea in order
to liberate and protect Asia from Russian Bolshevism and European colonialism.
They were told the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was "forced" by
"a plot" by President Roosevelt. Japanese-led massacres, Korean
comfort women, Chinese sex slaves, or tortured POWs are not mentioned. There
are only Japanese martyr heroes dying in defense of Japan. "Ten years ago that museum contained some expressions
of regret and remorse for the loss of life, both Japanese and foreign,"
says Richard Bitzinger of the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in
Honolulu. "Back then there wasn't an effort to tell a story about the war.
Now, it is revisionist. A whitewash. Major battles where many thousands lost
their lives on both sides are simply called Japanese 'operations' or
'incidents.' " In one, the "Nanjing incident," thought to have
been a slaughter of as many as 100,000 civilians in 1937, the museum text
suggests that only those outside the city who refused to obey were harmed. Once
the Japanese Army cleared up the problem, "residents were once again able
to live their lives in peace." "Nanjing is treated as something very minor, like just
a few instances, sort of a spring-break party for the soldiers that got a
little out of hand," Mr. Bitzinger notes. In one set of panels about the European war, Adolf Hitler
was merely "trying to reclaim the territory lost in World War 1." No
mention is made of other contexts, such as the murder of 6 million Jews. The new history is being implicitly fed to a public that in
Japan never got a very honest account anyway, scholars point out. Textbooks and
public schools rarely describe the causes of war or Japanese behavior.
Moreover, the Japan-is-innocent school is given legitimacy by the country's
wildly popular prime minister when he visits the Yasukuni shrine. "It is
an extreme version of history being viewed daily by the public," says a
foreign diplomat. "When Koizumi goes to the shrine, it sure looks like it
could be an endorsement." At the museum book shop, students and elders walk past
merchandise with titles like "The Alleged Nanjing Massacre," and $90
embossed volumes that glorify kamikaze pilots. A glassed-in lobby sports a
rebuilt Japanese Zero and a replica train engine used in Burma operations that
is strikingly similar to the one that fell in the river in "The Bridge On
the River Kwai." There are bulletpocked 15-mm howitzers used in "the
defensive war of Okinawa." To be sure, modern Japan is so cosmopolitan and diverse, and the general
tenor of its political culture so mild that few experts see anything like a
full-blown resurgent nationalist Japan on the horizon. But the rise of China has worried many Japanese. "Left
alone in a domestic context, Japanese don't buy this kind of ideology,"
notes Professor Yoshihide Soeya of Keio University. "But it comes up due to the concern about China.
Sadly, many Chinese believe the Yasukuni shrine thinking represents
the majority of Japanese. It does not." Still, Japan is at a transitional moment, when
the old regime forged in the 1950s is dead but no new clear direction has
emerged in a defining way. The museum, which dates to the mid-19th century, was set up
to promote what became a powerful notion in the Meiji era (1868-1912) - that
the emperor and the Japanese people were one. "One hundred million
[Japanese] hearts beat as one," the saying went. That concept was seen as
crucial to the intensity and the blind obedience of the military. After the war, emperor worship was forbidden by US
occupiers. A recognition of the collective psychosis it engendered has been
regarded as a lesson of the war. Yet extremism has persisted: the remains of
the 14 Class A war criminals at Yasukuni were put there only in the 1970s, and
only secretly. But on the Yasukuni property, the concept of the emperor as
the spiritual leader is quite strong. One poem on display reads: "We shall
die in the sea/We shall die in the mountain/In whatever way/We shall die beside
the emperor/ Never turning back...." The thesis of a martyred and misunderstood Japan dates to
the end of the war. In 1964 it was articulated by Hayashi Fusao in his "In Affirmation of the Great East
Asian War." By the early 1990s, when some texts began showing up with this
theory, it was still considered slightly nutty. Now it is appearing in a
polished format in the same venue as the prime minister's visits, described as
"private." "In this version of history, Japan has done nothing
wrong," says the foreign diplomat. "That is quite a burden to
bear."
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1021/p01s04-woap.html?s=hns |
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
