Ambiguous Story of Manchukuo Shows Challenge of Throwing Off History’s Weight
![BN-FW628_1205AB_M_20141205014613[1].jpg](https://defence.pk./attachments/bn-fw628_1205ab_m_20141205014613-1-jpg.177620/ "BN-FW628_1205AB_M_20141205014613[1].jpg")
Nobusuke Kishi, left, attends an economic discussion in Changchun in 1938. Asahi Shimbun
CHANGCHUN, China—When this industrial city was the capital of the Japanese kingdom of Manchukuo in the 1930s and ‘40s, it was an urban wonder.
Changchun was the masterpiece of Nobusuke Kishi, the grandfather of Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The chief industrial planner of Manchukuo, Mr. Kishi was a brilliant technocrat who transformed a vast wilderness north of the Great Wall into an industrial behemoth.
That fact, in today’s China, is an embarrassment—a painful one given how Beijing has stressed Japan’s brutal wartime occupation, and reviled the administration of Mr. Kishi’s grandson.
There are many good reasons Mr. Abe’s sweeping electoral victory on Sunday should improve a relationship that has been haunted by bitterly contested views of wartime history.
From Beijing’s point of view, there’s now no avoiding Mr. Abe. Japanese voters have given him a fresh four-year mandate, so waiting him out is no longer a viable option.
That reality was already implied by the grudging handshake President Xi Jinping offered Mr. Abe at an Asia-Pacific meeting last month. His grimace declared that while he may not exactly like the Japanese leader, he’s ready to do business with him.
Japan, meanwhile, is desperately seeking growth drivers and can’t afford to miss out on opportunities next door. Corporate Japan is dismayed by the way tensions have soured the investment environment. There’s broad public support, too, for better economic relations, despite widespread angst over China’s rise.
But can the two neighbors escape the weight of history?
It’s in the interest of both to discredit each other’s version of the past. To rebuild national self-esteem, Mr. Abe’s administration plays down the suffering it inflicted on China and the rest of East Asia during the war. China, to bolster patriotic support for the Communist Party, plays it up.
“History is history and facts are facts,” Chinese President Xi Jinping told a crowd in Beijing this year during a ceremony to mark the anniversary of Japan’s invasion of China in 1937.
But the facts of Manchukuo tell a complex and ambiguous story.
It was set up by the Japanese garrison force in China at the time, the Kwantung Army.
Chinese historians invariably refer to it as a “puppet” kingdom, which it was. The last Manchu emperor of China, Puyi, who had been forced to abdicate in 1911, was given back his throne in Manchukuo, but the Japanese pulled all the strings.
They used Manchukuo as a gigantic laboratory in nation-building.
Mr. Kishi developed Manchukuo’s rich resources at breakneck speed to feed an industrial base from which Japan planned to challenge the U.S. Under Soviet-inspired five-year plans, he groomed automobile, aircraft and chemical industries. Nissan brought its entire operations over. Japanese engineers constructed huge hydroelectric dams and a network of highways.
Changchun was the crowning glory with leafy parks and modern sanitation that didn’t reach Tokyo until well into the 1960s. Monumental civic buildings and broad avenues radiating outward proclaimed the wider ambitions of Imperial Japan to lead an “Asian revival.”
This is how the Japanese right would prefer to remember Japan’s wartime past. China’s historians focus almost exclusively on the horrors of Manchukuo: slave labor, forced prostitution, summary executions and chemical warfare experiments on humans.
After leaving Manchukuo, Mr. Kishi became the wartime minister of munitions and was jailed by occupying U.S. forces after the war. He emerged from prison a Class-A war criminal, but unindicted, and put his skills to work rebuilding his country’s shattered economy. Later, he became prime minister.
To the end of his life, Mr. Kishi insisted that Manchukuo was a noble cause--a “new paradise,” he once called it.
Indeed, Manchukuo lived on as a template for East Asia’s rapid economic transformation.
It had been a training ground for some of the region’s top government leaders, bureaucrats and scientists. Among them was Park Chung-hee, the father of South Korea’s President Park Geun-hye and a Japanese collaborator in Manchukuo—a first lieutenant in the Japanese Imperial army.
The modern East Asia story, says the historian Andrew Levidis, a fellow at Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese studies, is full of “deep shadows and Faustian bargains.” It’s not, he argues, a “singular tale of repression and exploitation.”
Like his grandfather, Mr. Abe wants to lift Japan’s postwar stigma of guilt and revise its U.S.-imposed pacifist constitution. His right-wing associates publicly challenge the idea that what Japan called its “Greater East Asian War” was a war of aggression; they insist Japanese troops were on a mission to liberate Asia from Western imperialists.
An undated photo shows a young Shinzo Abe, center, on the lap of his grandfather, then-Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi. Shinzo Abe Office/Associated Press
Beijing vehemently disagrees. Mr. Abe’s veneration of his grandfather, and his declaration that he is carrying forward Mr. Kishi’s legacy, play into a visceral anti-Japanese hatred in China.
Speaking Saturday at a memorial for victims of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, Mr. Xi said: “All attempts to glorify the war of aggression, no matter how many times they are repeated or how gloriously depicted, are threats to peace and justice amongst man.”
Only a year ago some were comparing Asia’s two largest economies to Germany and Britain on the eve of World War I. A pragmatic decision on both sides to push the reset button would cheer the whole region and the U.S., which has no desire to get in the middle of their fight.
Ultimately, the two neighbors’ conflict comes down to whether they can once and for all resolve their fundamentally different readings of history. And it’s deeply personal.
In Japan-China Ties, the Past Is Personal - WSJ
Nobusuke Kishi, left, attends an economic discussion in Changchun in 1938. Asahi Shimbun
CHANGCHUN, China—When this industrial city was the capital of the Japanese kingdom of Manchukuo in the 1930s and ‘40s, it was an urban wonder.
Changchun was the masterpiece of Nobusuke Kishi, the grandfather of Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The chief industrial planner of Manchukuo, Mr. Kishi was a brilliant technocrat who transformed a vast wilderness north of the Great Wall into an industrial behemoth.
That fact, in today’s China, is an embarrassment—a painful one given how Beijing has stressed Japan’s brutal wartime occupation, and reviled the administration of Mr. Kishi’s grandson.
There are many good reasons Mr. Abe’s sweeping electoral victory on Sunday should improve a relationship that has been haunted by bitterly contested views of wartime history.
From Beijing’s point of view, there’s now no avoiding Mr. Abe. Japanese voters have given him a fresh four-year mandate, so waiting him out is no longer a viable option.
That reality was already implied by the grudging handshake President Xi Jinping offered Mr. Abe at an Asia-Pacific meeting last month. His grimace declared that while he may not exactly like the Japanese leader, he’s ready to do business with him.
Japan, meanwhile, is desperately seeking growth drivers and can’t afford to miss out on opportunities next door. Corporate Japan is dismayed by the way tensions have soured the investment environment. There’s broad public support, too, for better economic relations, despite widespread angst over China’s rise.
But can the two neighbors escape the weight of history?
It’s in the interest of both to discredit each other’s version of the past. To rebuild national self-esteem, Mr. Abe’s administration plays down the suffering it inflicted on China and the rest of East Asia during the war. China, to bolster patriotic support for the Communist Party, plays it up.
“History is history and facts are facts,” Chinese President Xi Jinping told a crowd in Beijing this year during a ceremony to mark the anniversary of Japan’s invasion of China in 1937.
But the facts of Manchukuo tell a complex and ambiguous story.
It was set up by the Japanese garrison force in China at the time, the Kwantung Army.
Chinese historians invariably refer to it as a “puppet” kingdom, which it was. The last Manchu emperor of China, Puyi, who had been forced to abdicate in 1911, was given back his throne in Manchukuo, but the Japanese pulled all the strings.
They used Manchukuo as a gigantic laboratory in nation-building.
Mr. Kishi developed Manchukuo’s rich resources at breakneck speed to feed an industrial base from which Japan planned to challenge the U.S. Under Soviet-inspired five-year plans, he groomed automobile, aircraft and chemical industries. Nissan brought its entire operations over. Japanese engineers constructed huge hydroelectric dams and a network of highways.
Changchun was the crowning glory with leafy parks and modern sanitation that didn’t reach Tokyo until well into the 1960s. Monumental civic buildings and broad avenues radiating outward proclaimed the wider ambitions of Imperial Japan to lead an “Asian revival.”
This is how the Japanese right would prefer to remember Japan’s wartime past. China’s historians focus almost exclusively on the horrors of Manchukuo: slave labor, forced prostitution, summary executions and chemical warfare experiments on humans.
After leaving Manchukuo, Mr. Kishi became the wartime minister of munitions and was jailed by occupying U.S. forces after the war. He emerged from prison a Class-A war criminal, but unindicted, and put his skills to work rebuilding his country’s shattered economy. Later, he became prime minister.
To the end of his life, Mr. Kishi insisted that Manchukuo was a noble cause--a “new paradise,” he once called it.
Indeed, Manchukuo lived on as a template for East Asia’s rapid economic transformation.
It had been a training ground for some of the region’s top government leaders, bureaucrats and scientists. Among them was Park Chung-hee, the father of South Korea’s President Park Geun-hye and a Japanese collaborator in Manchukuo—a first lieutenant in the Japanese Imperial army.
The modern East Asia story, says the historian Andrew Levidis, a fellow at Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese studies, is full of “deep shadows and Faustian bargains.” It’s not, he argues, a “singular tale of repression and exploitation.”
Like his grandfather, Mr. Abe wants to lift Japan’s postwar stigma of guilt and revise its U.S.-imposed pacifist constitution. His right-wing associates publicly challenge the idea that what Japan called its “Greater East Asian War” was a war of aggression; they insist Japanese troops were on a mission to liberate Asia from Western imperialists.
An undated photo shows a young Shinzo Abe, center, on the lap of his grandfather, then-Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi. Shinzo Abe Office/Associated Press
Beijing vehemently disagrees. Mr. Abe’s veneration of his grandfather, and his declaration that he is carrying forward Mr. Kishi’s legacy, play into a visceral anti-Japanese hatred in China.
Speaking Saturday at a memorial for victims of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, Mr. Xi said: “All attempts to glorify the war of aggression, no matter how many times they are repeated or how gloriously depicted, are threats to peace and justice amongst man.”
Only a year ago some were comparing Asia’s two largest economies to Germany and Britain on the eve of World War I. A pragmatic decision on both sides to push the reset button would cheer the whole region and the U.S., which has no desire to get in the middle of their fight.
Ultimately, the two neighbors’ conflict comes down to whether they can once and for all resolve their fundamentally different readings of history. And it’s deeply personal.
In Japan-China Ties, the Past Is Personal - WSJ
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