Why do some East Asian nations disagree with Japan on their international histories?

China, North Korea, and South Korea often disagree with Japan over their international histories. The former nations criticize Japan for its falsified view of history and vice versa. That cannot be avoided for a reason.

The Communist Party of China established the People's Republic of China after a lengthy civil war, from 1927 to 1949, with the Nationalist Party. If it stressed the victory to claim the legitimacy of the government, that might arouse bitter emotions among some of its citizens who, or whose ancestors, lost the war. The communist party has to make people remember it defeated the evil army of Japan between the battles with the Chinese Nationalists so that they may justify their government. The present-day Chinese government needs a logical lever that its founders fought against the vicious Japanese army to assert it emerged in history with a good reason. Oppositely the leaders of the Nationalist Party fled to Taiwan and began to rule the island. To legitimate the rule, they utilized a logical lever that they were still fighting communists for sovereignty over mainland China. Although Japan had colonized the island up to 1945, most of the Taiwanese people did not, and do not, bash it. Their government did not need such a premise.

That is almost the same with North and South Koreas. Korea was split into two states after the Second World War, one supported by the U.S.S.R. and the other by the U.S.A. The government of North Korea claimed that Kim Il-sung was qualified to be the leader of the nation because he had been one of the commanders of anti-Japanese guerrillas under Japanese rule until 1945. North Korea went to war against South Korea in 1950, and consequently many families were separated. The government of North Korea could not rely on the outcome of the Korean War to be proud of its legitimacy. In the south Republic of Korea, Rhee Syngman and other leaders stirred up people's anger at Japan which they had experienced while Korea was annexed to Japan. That was one of the ways the leaders calmed people's discontent with their dictatorship.

When Chinese and Korean peoples accuse Japan of its deeds in the first half of the 20th century, the country they have in mind is partly the same as, and partly different from the self-image of Japanese people. I do not deny that many Japanese were evil and vicious to other peoples. They were to some of Japanese, and they must have been worse abroad. I sincerely agree that countless Chinese civilians were murdered or raped by Japanese soldiers in the Nanjing Massacre of 1937-38, which violated international law, and that innumerable Korean people were humiliated under the rule by Japan because they were forced to speak the Japanese language in public and required to rename themselves in Japanese ways. I affirm that a considerable number of young Korean females were exploited as so-called 'comfort women,' or legal prostitutes at brothels to Japanese soldiers. Then why do the facts look different to different sides? Japanese people usually think that those facts belong to the past tragic era when the military interfered in politics, although Chinese and Korean peoples often suppose those are the very reasons why they, or their ancestors, established their present states. The facts lie behind the corner to the Japanese, while they are the fundamental on which Chinese and Korean stand today.

Japanese people stand on a different base. It may sound incredible, for example, that most Japanese do not think their country has a military, although it has the Self-Defense Forces with hundreds of F-15 fighters and tanks. You would have to master abstruse arguments, just like ones in medieval theology, to learn why the Forces are not military. Most Japanese suppose the purpose of the U.S. forces maintaining military bases in Japan is, first of all, to protect the country from third parties, rather than for the foreign government to secure a bridgehead in East Asia. During the occupation of Japan after the Second World War, the U.S.-led Allied Powers executed several high-ranked Japanese politicians, including two former prime ministers, for war crimes. The Allied Powers also made Japan amend the constitution and ban itself from having any military forces. A few years later, however, as communists took powers in China and North Korea, the U.S. freed some of the Japanese suspects who had been arrested under the charge of war crimes and not been executed. The released people were fed with abundant money and remarkable opportunities by the U.S. to reestablish themselves in politics and business, and became double agents. Among them were Shigemitsu Mamoru, who served as Foreign Minister and blocked Prime Minister Hatoyama Ichiro from signing a peace treaty with the U.S.S.R., and Kishi Nobusuke, who extended the pact that enabled the U.S. forces to make use of military bases in Japanese territory when he was Prime Minister. Besides, Japanese leaders set up the Self-Defense Forces without revising the constitution that banned and still bans the country from having a military. According to the government, the substantially armed body is not military because it can resort to force only on the condition similar to self-defense in domestic criminal law. Japanese people do not want to admit some of their famous statesmen were double agents, and that the self-defense force is an alias for the military. Most Japanese people believe that their country has a territorial dispute with Russia, which Foreign Minister Shigemitsu fabricated under pressure from John F. Dulles, as well as that the U.S. Forces are stationed in Japan because Americans are friends of theirs, and that their nation is peaceful because it renounces war.

Every nation has something it would like to avoid facing. I do not criticize ordinary people for not looking squarely at painful facts.

But no matter how abominable facts may be, leaders of a nation must face them. If Abe Shinzo were just a chauvinistic blogger, he would have a right to say what he likes to. However, he was a prime minister of Japan. He appealed to Japanese people to love their 'beautiful' native country. If he were just a grandson of former Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, who offered military bases to the U.S. for his campaign finance, I think he would still have a full right to appeal whatever he likes to. But he is a grandson of Kishi's as well as he was a prime minister. When he argued his country was 'beautiful,' he should have remembered one of his grandfathers was a traitor. People who are on the side to utilize demagogy should never believe it.

What worries me about the disagreement among East Asian nations is that those who criticize one another are the second or third generations of those who manipulated the histories. Until the end of the Second World War, Japanese people were taught that their Emperor was a descendant of God and their country was divine. After the War, however, the Emperor declared he was just a human being, and nothing serious followed the declaration. I would like to tell leaders of the nations wholeheartedly that people will be always all right if you rewrite any biased histories.