Dmitry Kosyrev
To explain what happened again between China and Japan, it is enough to imagine: some German corporation is setting a presentation in Russia of its next novelty for June 22. I am afraid that even the indisputable Russian respect for German quality would crack here.
Our two Asian neighbors have their own “June 22nd”. This is July 7, 1937, “the incident at the Marco Polo Bridge in Beijing.” The Chinese public (and with it many people in Asia and around the world) believes that World War II began with that Japanese provocation, and certainly the great war between Japan and China, which led to the occupation of key regions of China and enormous disasters. And on this day, last summer, the Japanese corporation Sony decided to present its own new product in Beijing – and it also chose the time, ten in the morning.
Chinese Internet patriots were the first to turn this story into a scandal, but then the authorities also intervened, Sony (its local branch) was just fined 150 thousand dollars for violating the advertising law, which specifically prohibits such things.
The corporation, however, apologized at the earliest point of the scandal and canceled the ceremony, but it did not help, the Chinese noticed that it was hardly an accident. Previously, the same company already presented its new products to the public on July 7 (last year), and even worse – on December 13, two years ago. And December 13 is another very black date, when in 1937 the Japanese who seized the capital, Nanjing, staged a savage massacre of the civilian population there. With the slogan of that December presentation, the Japanese corporation did this: “Do not compromise.”
It is difficult to say what these stories mean – stupidity (that is, oversight, ignorance of dates) or partisan provocation of some stubborn samurai. But first of all, they tell us that relati-ons between our two neighbors, and at the national level, not the governmental level, remain abnormal.
And this is actually an extremely important conversation: why do some peoples and nations treat each other normally, even if they have repeatedly fought before, while others do not? What is this mysterious thing – historical memory and is it the only thing? Moreover, this conversation is just beginning today, because before the whole world thought: we will en-ter the right bloc or alliance with a common ideology, change the propaganda theses, write the right textbooks – and everything will be fine. But it doesn’t work.
In the case of Japan and China, there are two reasons for dislike, in addition to the peculiarities of national characters. The first is that we are faced with a rare case when, in fact, both sides lost the war. In the history of the USSR with Germany, one side is the obvious winner, who, after a long pause, can afford generosity and tranquility, which we have been observing in relations with this nation for more than a decade. On the part of China, no generosity can be traced, because he won that war only in alliance with o-ther great powers. Includ-ing the USSR, which defea-ted the millionth Kwantung Army on Chinese soil in the late summer of 1945. But before that, the feat of the Chinese people was that they still held on, tying the levers of the Japanese military machine, to the last shreds of their territory in anticipation of the help that eventually came. That is, the atrocities of the Japan-ese on Chinese soil were avenged only thanks to ex-ternal assistance. Some ac-counts, apparently, were n-ot settled in the required ri-tual way, and on both sides.
At the same time, the American-Japanese accounts, from the point of view of the Japanese, are in order: we struck, we were struck (albeit nuclear), the case is closed.
And this is where the second reason for Japanese acceptance of the United States and dislike for China begins. It is that the Japa-nese people still cannot get rid of the complex of the v-anquished – not with China, but with America. It is a matter of honor and good upbringing to behave like the vanquished. And now something is changing, and we are reading about a very serious event for the Japanese nation. For the first time, albeit not in government programs, but only in the documents of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, a clause was included on the need to increase military spending to two percent of GDP. Earlier, since 1976, it was one percent. And two percent is the same figure that the United States in recent years, under any administrations, has been imposing on its allies: if you want security, pay for it yourself, we will not have enough for everyone.
This means that sooner or later the entire system of existence of the western group of states (which so far includes geographically eastern Japan) will change. If their dependence on America is to decrease, what does that mean? That one can get rid of the complex of a defeated nation – and they themselves will begin to figure out who is a threat to them, and who is not so much? And this is a great shaking of the foundations.
In any case, we are not talking about Japan’s transformation into an independent military power, which does not need any alliances. Its military spending today, or rather tomorrow, next fiscal year, is $ 49 billion, which is almost two orders of magnitude less than that of the United States with its $ 800 billion. However, over the past 26 years, US military spending has roughly tripled (Japanese in absolute terms – doubled). And the Chinese – 14 times, according to Japanese estimates, with which China will not necessarily agree.
But at the same time, it will be possible to talk about some kind of American-Chinese strategic parity only closer to the conditional year 2050, if by that time the United States, or the PRC, or the whole world does not collapse and collapse. In the meantime, the point of Beijing’s war effort is to drive the American war machine out of Asia, or at least prevent it from doing anything there.
But this “crowding out” means that Japan will remain face to face (across the straits) with the new superpower, and then it will be necessary to decide how to deal with the former superpower. Which implies a total reboot of the meaning of the nation’s existence among other peoples.
In the meantime, the Japanese people regard the situation in a paradoxical, but absolutely Japanese way. On the one hand, 60.1% of the respondents believe that these two percent are not needed – military spending should be kept at the current level. But, on the other hand, the attitude of the Japanese towards China in general is deteriorating as its influence in the world grows, and already 86% of the Japanese have a generally bad attitude towards their great neighbor.
That is, the Chinese, who constantly remind the Japanese of the last war, are unpleasant people for them, but there is no need to fight them.
