The Sino-Japanese War: Mythmaking

The Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945 was unparalleled in either country’s history of external conflicts with its enormous scale, brutality, and destructiveness. Both nations emerged from the war tragically traumatized, not only in terms of their human casualties and economic loss inflicted but also with regard to the severe humiliation of national pride they suffered. However, for quite a long time since the end of the war historical interpretation of the war never appeared a political issue between Japan and the communist China. It was the eruption of textbook controversy in summer 1982 that marked the beginning of frequent, acrimonious bilateral disputes surrounding the war history. The “history quarrel” not only poisoned popular feelings of each other country but also exacerbated mutual perception of intention and provoked domestic opposition to accommodative foreign policies.

The emergence of history problem as a prominent source of bilateral tension since the 1980s defies two notions of conventional wisdom. One is the belief that time can heal wounds because the longer time has passed since an trauma took place, the more people tend to forget about the pain. The other is that historical grievances should be diluted by present interactions and communications between the relevant parties.

Japanese conservative intention of historical mythmaking to a large extent coincided with the American strategy of propping up a stable conservative government in Japan in order to first use it to achieve occupation objectives and second ensure that Japan would be an important anti-communist ally in Asia. The interactions and mutual compromises between the Japanese conservatives and American occupation authorities shaped the key parameters of mainstream Japanese war memory. First is the “myth of military clique,” which admitted that the war was an aggression but only blamed a small group of militarists for causing the war while claiming that the rest of the nation, including the emperor, the majority of the conservative ruling class, and ordinary Japanese people, were duped by the militarists and became victims of the war. Second is the Western-centrist approach that accepted Japan’s responsibility for opening hostilities with Western countries and disrupting world peace, but whitewashed its actions of aggression and atrocities in Asian countries. The third is the notion of “sacrifice as hero” that gave the imperial army special honor because they answered the call when the country needed them and have made great sacrifices, or Gisei, for the country.

Taking advantage of some important institutional tools and with the aid of the occupation authorities, Japanese conservative elite managed to instill these myths into the national collective memory. First of all, postwar punishment of individuals bearing war responsibility perpetuated conservative historiography through legal measures. The Tokyo War Crimes Trial conspicuously avoided any reference to the Showa emperor, ascribed war responsibility to Tōjō and a few top army officers, and devoted the bulk of the prosecution time to Japanese “crimes against peace” in the war with Western powers while downplaying Japanese war atrocities that were committed mostly in Asian countries. In the realm of history education, supported by the occupation strategy of “indirect rule,” the Japanese conservative government gradually recovered central control of education content through the textbook certification system and publication of teaching guidelines. As a result, Japanese textbooks in the 1950s and 1960s purveyed “the myth of military clique” and emphasized Japanese victimhood and pacifism, with Japanese historical debts to Asian nations by and large left out.

The Chinese also took part in the historical mythmaking. Chinese communist historiography of the war praised the Chinese Communist Party(CCP) as the sole leader of the “Great Chinese War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression” and accentuated the heroism of the CCP-that they led the army and underground resistance campaigns. The KMT(a nationalist party) was accused of kowtowing to and actively collaborating with the Japanese aggressors in exchange for its own safety and power. The United States was branded as another major threat to the Chinese nation because it sat idle while the Chinese people were suffering and assisted the KMT government to suppress Chinese communism. In the school textbooks published in the 1950s and 1960s, policies of the KMT and CCP were constantly compared and contrasted to drive home the fundamental difference between the traitorous, reactionary KMT and the patriotic, progressive CCP. In the meantime, these textbooks greatly emphasized the importance of anti-Japanese base areas set up by the communist armies and guerrillas. Meanwhile, all textbooks of this period clearly differentiated the roles played by different foreign countries in Chinese war of resistance. They generally mentioned the Soviet military aid and its strike at Japan in August 1945 that accelerate Japan’s surrender, but condemned the U.S. government for giving large quantities of arms and ammunitions to the Japanese military. Besides textbooks, the government built various memorial sites of Chinese revolution, where the anti-Japanese war was not singled out for special commemoration but treated as one part of the hundred year Chinese struggle against foreign imperialism and domestic reactionary forces that ended with the CCP’s ultimate triumph over the KMT in 1949.