A number of people have noticed (see for example the translation in an article over at EastSouthWestNorth) that the new edition of the controversial textbook is not the biggest concern. Other textbooks approved this year may be dropping some of their coverage of wartime atrocities. As countless commentators have pointed out (but few news articles do), the controversial “new” textbook’s first edition was adopted by almost no one. And yet, it sold hundreds of thousands of copies in bookstores all over Japan.
Continue reading The Textbook Feedback Loop and Masochistic History
Category: History
Japan’s Apologies to China
In this post I have assembled together as many unique statements including apologies or statements of regret towards China. Please read the introduction to my post on Japan’s apologies to Korea which applies equally here. Briefly, my position is that I think the apology issue is the wrong issue for those concerned with historical revisionism in Japan to spend their energy on. Not only do I think Japan has already apologized, but I believe such national apologies have little or no worth and aren’t worth the hot air they generate. In fact, neither do they satisfy the Asian countries they are directed towards (if and when they ever find out about the statements) but they increasingly inflame otherwise sympathetic Japanese who feel they are forced to engage in constant self-flagellation. This distracts them from the more important historiographical issues at stake on all sides. On the other hand, it is also highly inaccurate to portray the “apology diplomacy” of Japan as a story of repeatedly issuing unambiguous statements of admitted guilt and apology. These statements vary greatly, and were often issued with great reluctance and in the face of opposition from conservative politicians who etertain the most revisionist historical positions.
Note: There is overlap between this and my last posting, simply because some statements referred to all of Asia or at least to both Korea and China.
Let us begin:
Continue reading Japan’s Apologies to China
History Carnival #6
Jonathan Dresner, the leading contributer at our Japan history blog Frog in a Well and one of the stars of Cliopatria has got History Carnival #6 up online. There is a nice wide selection of entries.
In two weeks, we’ll have the next installment hosted by Hugo Holbling at Studi Galileiani. You can send your history related postings for consideration to: hugo AT galilean-library DOT org.
I would be interested in having us keep some statistics on the number of submissions and the actual number of articles chosen for inclusion in the carnival. It might help us measure the growth of this project.
Korean Drama: The Fifth Republic
There is a historical drama to begin soon in Korea. I wish I was in Korea to watch this and that my Korean was good enough to enjoy it:
“The 40 episodes cover the period from the morning of president Park Chung-hee’s assassination to the handover of power from Chun Doo-hwan to Roh Tae-woo.” But the first nine episodes concentrate on the last months of 1979, from Park’s assassination on Oct. 26, 1979 to the Dec. 12 putsch. The 1980 Gwangju Uprising gets four episodes to itself. “We will focus on the New Military Group’s preparations and decision-making process in brutally putting down the uprising.”One or two episodes each will deal with other incidents like various financial scandals, the shooting down of a KAL airliner over Soviet airspace, the Rangoon bombing, occupation by demonstrators of the U.S. Cultural Center in Seoul, sexual torture inflicted on female protestors by police in Bucheon in 1986, Geumgang Dam, the torture and killing of collegian Park Jong-chol in 1987 and the June 29 Declaration of the same year that forced democratic change.
◆ The characters
The “hero” is Chun Doo-hwan, played by Lee Deok-hwa. “His negative side is well known, but he had a charm about him, like a boss who takes money from this person and that person to buy booze for his underlings in order to keep those around him happy,” Lee said. “We will show this as central to his attraction.” Roh Tae-woo (played by Seo In-seok), on the other hand, is depicted as an introverted, calculating fellow. “There is evidence if you look at Chun’s autobiography, where he says whatever he starts, Roh finishes,” Im said.
I would be very interested to see how the drama juggles accuracy, popular impressions of the recent past, and the views of the writers themselves. I’m sure there will be lots of interesting commentary floating around about this. I hope I can live to see the day when China permits the showing of a historical drama giving 4 episodes to Tiananmen in 1989.
Japan’s Apologies to Korea
It has been hard to keep up with all the renewed excitement generated by the anti-Japan protests in China. It has reopened discussion on all the classic issues in Sino-Japanese relations since the early 1980s.
In a series of blog entries (one on apologies to Korea, one on apologies to China, and one on revisionist gaffes by Japanese government officials), I think I want to collect some reference materials that might be useful to interested readers on this issue. I’m very busy with school so I won’t promise to be as thorough as I would like (nor can I say when I’ll finish all three) but would appreciate if others will consider emailing me with more material for inclusion in future updates to these entries. They will thus be in flux without the usual “UPDATE” marker.
These statements vary from blunt apologies to vague and ambiguous statements of regret. Some of them had an interesting aftermath which led people to question their sincerity and actual content. Keep in mind as you read that my own position on this issue is this: I’m frustrated at how pathetically uninformed many of the people who are discussing this issue online and throughout the media are. I think it is ridiculous to claim that Japan has never apologized, nor do I find such apologies particularly useful as such statements of national regret are of limited value to the victims of past aggression and violence. If you want to be angry about “whitewashing” the past, then this is not where your energies should be focused. On the other hand, I am equally frustrated by right-wing (and increasingly mainstream) Japanese commentary which seems to think that the story of apologies is one of repeated clear expressions of admitted responsibility and which fails to see how conflicting messages given by leading government officials, especially among the increasing numbers of conservative bureaucrats and politicians who read the revisionist accounts of Japan’s past war, can create a complete lack of trust among the agitated peoples of Korea and China in the genuine and sincere feelings of regret which are still felt (and when given the chance, expressed) by the majority of people in Japan.
Important: I’m pooling this together from all sorts of sources, many of them online and thus of dubious accuracy (especially since many right-wing sites are compiling these statements for their own rhetorical purposes), let me know when you find mistakes. Also, I don’t really want to deal with the various translations and such for right now so I’m going to just pool them together and we can sort the appropriate translations vs. official translations out over time.
Ok, let us begin:
Continue reading Japan’s Apologies to Korea
曲线救国: Saving the Nation Through Twisted Means
One of the interesting catch phrases during the Sino-Japanese war of 1937-1945 is Quxian jiuguo (曲线救国) or “Saving the nation through twisted means” (In his book The Shanghai Badlands Frederic Wakeman translates it as “Saving the nation in a devious way”, 126). This was the phenomenon of Nationalist military agents or soldiers entering into the collaborationist military or puppet government and secretly continuing to retain contact with Nationalist agents, give them information, or if no contact was maintained, to at least engage in anti-Communist suppression while they served in the puppet government and the occupying forces of the Japanese. Sometimes those who claimed to be doing 曲线救国 were not in fact connected to the Nationalists in any way before they surrendered to or joined the puppet institutions.
When the war was over and many of the puppet officials were tried in the treason (汉奸) trials after the war those with any considerable power would invariably claim that they were trying to save the nation indirectly through their anti-communist activities or by feeding the Nationalists information. We have some evidence to show this kind of contact between the agents of puppet regime of Wang Jingwei or the various puppet military units and the intelligence services of the Nationalists (Juntong) and its ruthless leader Dai Li, but some of those who made this claim (such as Chu Minyi 褚民谊) may have been executed quicker to prevent the embarrassing revelation of ongoing contact and peace negotiation efforts between the Nationalists and the puppet government from getting out. A lot of these claims are far from conclusively proven but serve as great conspiracy material.
I’m now reading 刘熙明’s book on the puppet military or 伪军 and he talks quite a bit about the phenomenon of 曲线救国 for those in the military. He argues that there was a Communist equivalent and says there is reason to believe that the CCP also occasionally tolerated the surrender of some of their units to the Japanese and their conversion into puppet troops as long as they continued to serve them indirectly. For these semi-traitors they used the term 白皮红心 or “white skin and red heart” (Fascist or reactionary on the outside but a Communist at heart). (102)
刘熙明 (Liu Ximing) also listed (103) a wonderful collection of some of the idioms that the Nationalist military and government allegedly used to indicate that surrender to the Japanese while shameful, was still better than to give up the fight against the Communists. Here are a few that he has dug up: 反共第一，抗战第二 First: The fight against Communism, Second: the war of resistance 宁亡与日，勿亡与共 Never lose to the Communists, lose rather to the Japanese 日可以不打，共不可不打 It is acceptable to not attack the Japanese, but unforgivable to not attack the Communists 变匪区为沦陷区 Turn a district plagued by [Communist] bandits into a [Japanese] occupied territory 宁可让给敌人，不可让给匪军 Never give up to the bandit [Communist] forces, it is better to give up to the [Japanese] enemy. 宁投日本人，不投八路军 Never surrender to the [Communist] 8th Army, surrender rather to the Japanese.
He doesn’t say if any of these were widespread, indeed it is possible that some of these are fabrications created by Communist propaganda. Though Liu Ximing is a scholar working out of Taiwan, at least some of his footnotes (104) for these lines are from mainland China sources (for example Shandong provincial party archives and Jiangsu Wenshi ziliao).
Learning from a Quisling in the Netherlands
I was just skimming through the excellent Nazi Rule and Dutch Collaboration: The Netherlands under German Occupation, 1940-45 by Gerhard Hirschfeld and found an interesting discussion about German policy towards the native fascist movements after the occupation of the Netherlands. (266-8)
Apparently, the Germans concluded that the Quisling coup d’etat just before Norway’s capitulation actually increased Norwegian military opposition to German troops. Having “learnt a lesson” from the Quisling debacle, Hitler’s instructions to Seyss-Inquart in the Netherlands included no orders to include local fascist NSB party inclusion in the occupied government and he apparently had no interest in native fascist movements in the Netherlands. Thus for some time in the early stages at least, it was an uphill battle for the Dutch fascists (and in some ways this mirrored the Norwegian case) to carve out a position of power in the new occupied environment, which they eventually did.
As for a comparison of military enlistment, it looks like in total, between 22,000 and 25,000 Dutchmen volunteered for the various formations of the Waffen-SS (around 40% were NSB members), which if I remember correctly is more than the about 15,000 volunteers for German units in the much less populated Norway. (288) Fortunately, a German plan to conscript 300,000 Dutch troops was eventually dismissed by Hitler who did not want to depend too much on the NSB leader Mussert. (303-4)
Related Posts:
Tale of a Norwegian Soldier
Primary Materials on Norway During WWII
Nobi: Rescuing the Nation from Slavery
One of the interesting aspects of pre-modern Korean history is the existence of a huge number of slaves, perhaps averaging 30% or perhaps 40% of the population for the Chosŏn dynasty. As I read about this for my class and we had our discussion of it today, I found that there seems to be considerable resistance in Korean historiography and amongst many Koreans towards using the “S” word with all its negative connotations.
Called nobi 노비(奴婢), slaves in Korea were owned as property by the elite Yangban class and could be bought, sold, given away as gifts, and left to one’s descendants. These slaves were either public slaves who served in the royal court or other arms of the state’s bureaucracy at the central and local level, or were privately owned slaves that worked in the household or worked the fields. They were frequently beaten or flogged, and the killing of slaves, while legally prohibited as early as 1444 during the rule of Sejong, rarely went punished. Slavery was largely hereditary, though the laws determining the status of the offspring of mixed marriages with non-slaves changed throughout the period.
The institution of slavery in Korea has a very long history and there are a number of unusual and interesting features of it. Slaves, for example, could own property for which they were taxed, though this appears to have been uncommon. They were given base names which often had the suffix “kae” which apparently implied a tool of some kind. The slaves were not prohibited from marrying commoners though their offspring could then often be enslaved. Marriage with the Yangban was banned, but this ban was sometimes ignored and slave women were sometimes taken on as secondary wives or concubines of the elite.
Ironically, because the institution of slavery was such an important part of elite life in the Chosŏn period, we apparently have more historical records in which slaves are mentioned than there is available information about non-slave commoner class, who were of less consequence to the Yangban who depended so much on their household and farm slaves to get by.
While there appears to be some disagreement on this (see my next posting), some scholars argue that there was a fairly strong drop in the slave population before legal prohibition. I read two texts on slavery in Korea for my Chosŏn history class this week: James B. Palais’s chapter 6 in Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions: Yu Kyŏngwŏn and the Late Chosŏn Dynasty (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996) and Rhee, Rhee Young-hoon and Donghyu Yang’s “Korean Nobi in American Mirror [sic]: Yi Dynasty Coerced Labor in Comparison to Savery in the Antebellum Southern United States” which is downloadable online in PDF format (As the title reveals, the English in this paper is kinda shaky in places). Palais argues that for reasons not yet really known, there was a drop in the 18th century. Rhee and Yang note a significant drop in slave prices in Korea as early as 1690. While the “emancipation” of the government or “official” slaves happened in the apparently oft-mentioned year of 1801 under the rule of King Sunjo, private slavery continued until hereditary slavery was banned in 1886 and the whole institution was legally banned in 1894 in the kabo reforms. Apparently cases of slaves still serving in that capacity exist through the colonial period as well.
It seems that the reasons for decline are not well known. Palais (and Rhee and Yang) and Martina Deuchler emphasize the rise of more efficient hired labor practices as land became scarce and lots smaller. Palais also emphasizes the 1) increasing number of runaways and the decline in their recapture and 2) the spread in influence of Neo-Confucian scholars such as Yu Kyŏngwŏn who argued against slavery on the basis of ancient Confucian texts and proposed its gradual fading out. In what is perhaps the article’s most bizarre moment, Rhee and Yang also believe that the eventual prohibition on official slaves in 1801 shows its end was “political” rather than “moral” and represents a Korean “Declaration of Human Rights, only ten-odd years late [sic] than the French equivalent, the principle of liberty, equality and fraternity is sought for in the great cause of royal regime [sic].” (33)
What I found most interesting about my reading on this and especially the Rhee/Yang article and the discussion that resulted from our readings in class, surrounds the main thesis of the Rhee/Yang essay: “it is inappropriate to call nobi of Chosŏn slaves.” (37)
Continue reading Nobi: Rescuing the Nation from Slavery
The Presence of Qian Jinbao
When I arrived at Harvard this fall, there was one PhD student in particular that I very much looked forward to meeting. I had found mention in various places of a student at Harvard who was studying Sino-Japanese wartime relations named Qian Jinbao who had previously worked at the Nanjing historical archives that many a Chinese history student will pay a visit to in search of materials. I had heard that he knew everything there was to know about the sources available for the study of the war and especially about research in Chinese archives.
I met him briefly after I arrived at a Reischauer Institute party and immediately drowned him in questions that revealed my complete ignorance and 1st year PhD student naiveté. He gave me lots of useful pointers on what materials I might find in the archives and in the Harvard-Yenching library related to the collaborator regimes of China and 漢奸 (traitors) of the Sino-Japanese war. I got his contact info and vowed to be better prepared for future meetings. I knew then that I would come to collect steep debts of gratitude to scholars like him who had years of familiarity with these materials and who had read incredibly deeply in areas that I had only scratched the surface of.
Jinbao Qian died of a heart attack only a few weeks after I met him. Harvard has a web page dedicated to him and held a memorial service in his honor. It is a tragic loss, not only for his family and friends but for the entire subfield of the history of the Sino-Japanese war.
Today I had the first reminder since his death of his continued “presence” here at Harvard and for me personally the presence of a mentor I wish I could have had for the rest of my life as a student and career as a historian.
This afternoon, I went to the library to check out an obscure book on Chinese political and military ranks, positions, and organizational charts from the Republican period (中華民國時期軍政職官誌) in order to gather some info on the “puppet” armies of occupied China. I was surprised to find that the library even had the multi-volume work. I had seen the book cited in an 1995 Academia Historica essay out of Taiwan by a Liu Feng-han who had written about the puppet forces. When I found the book, which had never been checked out, I opened it to find on the inside cover, “Gift of Qian Jinbao”
I suspect that this will not be the last time I come upon a tag like that, especially if this book represents the fate of Jinbao’s personal collection of Chinese history books after his death. It looks like I’ll still be racking up those debts to him after all. I only wish I could have got to know him.
Jai: MEALAC Crisis
While the completion of his PhD thesis continues to elude him, my friend Jai has found some time to write about the current crisis at Columbia University’s MEALAC department (Middle East and South Asia) in the Columbia Spectator. Here is an article at The Nation to get you caught up on the crisis if you are interested. For views more hostile to MEALAC on this issue, you can the read the articles in The Sun and basically anything Robert KC Johnson has ever written about it over at Cliopatria.