Loudmouth,
I did not say that Japan did not have any imperialistic policy since 1868. I simply meant to say that she wanted to get out of the emaciating and hopeless war with China that had endured for over four years and that she alone should not be held responsible for the outbreak of the Pacific War; the United States was responcible for it.

Japan was the only country, though Turkey might be an exception, that made a quick transition to a modern industrialised nation-state. Thailand kept independent but was in a precarious situation. Japan owed its successful transformation not to its wickedness; if it was due to anything, it should be counted as its excellence and good luck.

If Japan had been forced to change from a premodern to a modern nation two hundred and fifty years earlier, she would have failed and been colonised by Western imperialism; if she had had to adjust to catch up with a compelx, highly advanced and sophisticated and computorised world as the West is today, the gap for her to fill was so enormous that she would certainly have failed.

Japan had to make the swift transition; she did not have much time for it because the West at that time was completely predatory and felt no hesitation in its colonial policy. To be continued.

Colin Clark was an Australian economist, well-known for his great work. His son, Gregory Clark, lives in Japan. I did not know this until he said it on Japanese TV. Accroding to him, the leaders of Meiji Japan (1868-1912) were very highly appreciated in the West. Almost all of them came from the samurai class of Edo Japan (1603-1868). They relinquished their feudal priviledges and gave themselves up to building a modern nation-state. This is where one deep, cultural difference between Japan and the two Confucianist countries, China and Korea, lay. Some knowledge of Edo Japan is prerequisite for some understanding of modern Japan, for the Edo period had happened to prepare for modern Japan.

A lot of misunderstandings on Japan still linger on, such as that democracy of postwar Japan was introduced by the occupation policy of the United States; the fact was that principles and ideas of democracy, human rights, and equality of men and women were taking root and spreading in prewar Japan.

The West still loves, for keeping its own narcissitic self-image at the expense of true Japan, "...a distorted image of a docile nation manipulated by a few fanatics in uniform...When one realizes how tenuous and frail democracy is elsewhere in the world,...one may conclude by wondering not why democracy failed in Japan, but rather how, despite the undemocratic tradition and the pressures of war, a totalitarin dictatorship did not evolve there...The political values of wartime Japan were part of a wider cultural milieu, in which traditional concepts had already been deeply modified by Western attitudes. Confrontation with the West in a bloody and protracted war created a cultural dilemma which could not be solved (Ben-Amy Shillony, Politics and Culture in Wartime Japan, Oxford University Press, 1981, Preface, vii).

I will be back and say a little about the Korean annexation of 1905, Manchuria of 1931, and etc. later. To be continued.

Hi Michi,

It's all water under the bridge though, isn't it ? The War has been over for more than seventy years. Japan is a totally different place from back then.

Imperialism may have been almost the rule for thousands of years in the past, but probably after the First World War, and certainly the Second, the phenomenon was well out of date. Even the British Empire didn't last as long as much smaller, earlier, empires, the Genoese or Parthian empires, for example.

In fact, the time when the British were fully rampant across Africa - in the 1890s - until the independence of many of those same countries - the 1960s - was barely a single lifetime. By contrast, the Moorish (Berber) invaders ravaged Spain for nearly eight hundred years.

So current attempts by China or Russia - or Turkey - to resurrect the stinking corpses of their old empires and even expand their boundaries, in the context of a multitude of nations which consider themselves their equals, is doomed to fail. But maybe not before they do a hell of a lot of damage.

To get back to topic, it's clear that China doesn't have a shred of legality in its claims on the South China Sea and beyond. It's illegal for any nation to build on shoals and reefs: China, the US, Australia, any nation. Then to compound the offence by claiming it as their national territory, with its own 200-mile EEZ.

By contrast, the islands in dispute between China and South Korea, and China and Japan, are not all shoals and reefs but bona fide islands. They have been under the control, respectively, of South Korea and Japan. The most peaceable approach of all countries concerned would be to respect the status quo. That approach is now very difficult in the South China Sea.

[TBC]

[continued]

My paranoid suspicion is that China won't stop at the limits of the South China Sea: already they have harassed fishermen around Indonesia's Natuna Islands, within cooee of Singapore. Will China stop at Singapore ? Will it claim some ancestral trading dominance in the Malacca Straits ? Beyond ? After all, here's no limit to most imperialisms: in their view, the entire world is theirs.

Cheers,

Joe

Loudmouth,
I just wanted to save you from the darkness and let you see the light, but since you seem to be uninterested and want to remain in the happy ignorance, just a few words more.

Japan wanted to save herself from being carved up by Western imperialism. It was why she fought the war of 1894-95 with Qing China.
She had to stop Czarist Russia's imperialistic advance in the Korean penisula for natinal defense in the war of 1904-05.

The Manchurian Incident of 1931 was nothing but Japan's imperialistic aggression. She had been allowed by the treaty with China to have a few units stationed in the Province of Guandong. The field-grade officers of the Japanese Guandong army secretly planed and prosecuted it as a sort of mutiny. The two cabinets, Wakatsuki and Inukai, did their utmost to bring the officers under discipline and stop it all but failed. (Inukai was murdered by radical officers in 1932. Wakatsuki was born near where I live. He opposed Japan's diplomatic drift toward confrontation with the United States. He was the one who tried to bring Japan to surrender.)

Several shots were fired into the Japanese units near the Marco Polo Bridge on the evening of July 7, 1937. It is presumed that they were fired by Chinese communists who had infiltrated into the Nationalist army. Both Japan and China wanted to contain it; they did what they could to keep it from turing it into a big war; neither wanted to escalate it, but it did and ultimately led to Pearl Harbour.

Thank you.

Hi Michi,

All imperialisms are equal, but some are more equal than others - is that what you are saying ? Japan invaded Taiwan to protect itself against the Russians ? Then Korea, to protect itself against the Russians ? Then Manchuria, to protect itself against the Russians ? Is that it ?

I remember, as a kid, finding all this Japanese English-language money in a little box of my dad's, but the War has been over for more than seventy years now, Michi. All is forgiven. Move on.

Cheers,

Joe